: Re: How to trick the reader into thinking they're following a redshirt instead of the protagonist? I'm currently planning a "magical girl" story, and I thought of an interesting way to start it,

@Bethany377

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What is a redshirt?

A character who seems along for the ride, is capable at their job, but who isn't the primary character in the story. When element X gets introduced, the red shirt is offed to show how dangerous element X is. The red shirt is therefor not a primary part of the scene. To be a true redshirt you must be a secondary character in the story.

I'm not sure you're subverting the trope you think you are

You're subverting dead anime mom. Not red shirt. So think about anime moms. What are they doing, why do you like them. It's not just anime moms (there's anime dads who die too).

Subverting the Anime Parent dies trope setup

You need an anime hero. You need to follow them around. You need to introduce them to a family. That family has either a dark past or works in a dark place, but is oblivious (as far as the reader can tell) to that darkness. Your hero character is not or appears to be from the reader's point of view about to learn just how dark that setting really is.

The Subversion

The hero dies or is about to. The anime parent it turns out only made it to parentage because they'd figured this all out already. You're going to have trouble with the hand off because your reader will already be invested in your hero. So, it's probably worth killing the hero outright. Plus more pain for the childrens.

The trick here is that if the anime parent exhibits unearned awesome you're going to lose your audience. So, you need to figure out how that parent takes their role one step farther. They aren't just competent at parenting, they're also obviously competent at dealing with agent X. You just didn't realize it until agent X showed up.

The subversion has to be sudden, but inevitable.

I think this can be done. Telling you exactly how to do it would be wrong. Honestly, the hero dying could be your act 2 corpse. This entire thing could be a pretty good story. One that looks like a hero story, then a horror story until its a hero story again.

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