I will tell you the horrible truth. Nobody actually cares if people get killed. Not even if it happens for no real reason and in a horrible and painful way. And your case is actually much better than that.

So what do people really care about or what do you actually need to worry about and assure them about?

Could it happen to me?

In your case the answer is clearly no. It is time travel and to a mythical past at that. I understand the current consensus is that this event did not actually happen and does not make much sense if taken literally and actually refers to politics of when it was actually written.

Make that detachment clear to readers from the beginning. Make clear that it is "once upon a time". Make clear that it is mythical.

This is actually kind of convenient as you probably want to show some magic and wonders anyway. It is not like being swished back in time is everyday occurrence or like Moses is some ordinary dude. Or like you are trying to tell a story of some everyday occurrences.

Play it up and make the separation from the reality and world the reader is in clear. Realistically if you want the main characters to be somewhat realistic you can have them outright discuss this. I would if I was transported to the Biblical times. Or any times, really. Time travel is kind of... rare to my personal experience.

Could it happen to one of the handful of people I actually care about?

Same as above really. Only real issue that makes this worth noting separately is that that most authors nowadays want to make the reader relate to the protagonists and care about what happens to them.

Other answers have already touched on the canonical solution to this. Horrible things happen to only monsters and villains you are happy to see get what they deserve. Even if the heroes forgot to wear their invulnerable plot armor (do something obviously dumb that marks them as acceptable target) what happens to them is invariably heroic not horrible. Even Boromir dies like a hero.

In fact Boromir is fairly obvious how to kill your characters example. He makes a clearly bad error that has been properly foreshadowed and that directly leads to his death scene. He understands his error and genuinely repents. He dies a heroic death complete with Sean Bean. Can't die better than that.

In your case since you suggest the characters are sent back in time for a reason by God (?) you can just play up the "go there, do your task, go back home" aspect of it. The characters really might have literal plot armor. The omnipotent God, in this case unusually not just the author, has use for these characters and they cannot be harmed.

Although Gods plans might include some or even all of the characters getting killed in the past. But, well, that is why I mentioned Boromir. And I think other answers had an example you can use to do this. Which is why I was thinking of LoTR when looking for an example...

Am I supposed to act like I care?

Your target audience is old enough that some of them will care about "being bad". And even with the less morally developed ones you need to worry about parents and other adults who definitely worry to excess about bad examples to their children.

So you need to somehow assure the readers that what happens is actually okay. If you targeted the story exclusively to religious audiences this would be trivial but since you make no mention of this I'll assume you need some actual justifications.

You can play up the "inside a story that is already written" angle. The protagonists try to change it. Try to avoid the bad things but they cannot. And it turns out that this is fine.

Sometimes bad things will happen and we cannot avoid them. We just need to deal with it, move on, and learn from the experience. This is valuable life lesson and if you play it up upfront you can totally fool most adults into thinking that teaching valuable life lessons to their kids is fine. Nobody ever notices that you can actually teach stuff without mass murder.

You must, and this relates to your overall plot, which I have no idea about, make this all somehow relevant and meaningful. Educational to parental audiences. Doing this while keeping the story readable by the actual target audience can be a challenge. But if you pull it off you can get away with using "examples" that objectively are pretty horrible.

Especially when somebody else who died millennia ago is actually responsible for you using them. You want to make that clear too. The kids will probably know who Moses is and discuss this.

You might want to do lots of that discussion thing anyway. Having the kids discuss things, learn from it, and grow up because of what happens is a good supplement to actual plot in making it all seem educational to parents. And the actual target audience will get to know the characters better if you avoid being too preachy about it.

EXTRA

This answer is actually fairly generic. You can apply parts of it to many "my story has things that upset the audience" issues. Basically you just detach it from direct contact to the readers and their normal reality and then fool them into thinking you had a legitimate reason for including the upsetting thing in the story and it was somehow useful and good thing to have. Variations due to target audience and genre.

---

(0)

Login to post a comment!