: Re: How should I handle amnesia-based plot threads? (interesting vs cliché) I'm writing for an amnesiac protagonist, in spite of the fact that I feel amnesia in fiction is usually a bad cliché

@Holmes449

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I thought both The Bourne Identity and the beginning of the TV Series Blindspot did a decent job with amnesiac MCs.

In both cases, the MC was obviously worried about their lack of memory, but also not much interested in the "hero" route at all, they didn't know how they got their skills (in Blindspot I think she didn't know she had skills until she was attacked), which were good guys and which were bad. They did not know which side they were on, or if they were good guys or bad guys.

The lack of knowledge about their own ideology, the failure to know anybody including loved ones, basically removes their motivation to be a hero; though I think you could include a natural inclination toward altruism: I will stop to help a complete stranger in distress. So write as if everybody is a complete stranger to the amnesiac, and not one of them is fully trusted.

Amnesiac stories done right get driven by outside actors, attacks by enemies that know who they are (and perhaps fear them), or actors that believe the amnesiac knows a secret (which they have forgotten but their former self does know), or people that believe if anybody finds the amnesiac then they (the attacker) will be in trouble. Or somebody comes to the hero for help and finds an amnesiac, so they help the hero, that doesn't know or trust them. You find the amnesiac reacting by muscle memory (which is not lost) and instincts and their own base inclinations.

As for recovering memory, I'd avoid "convenient" recovery; I would expect a real amnesiac to first recover the memories most important to them, the ones that (IRL) have a lot of physical associations, actual neural pathways laid down in their brain. The people they live with, interact with, love, hate, etc. The things they know and use every day, the pathways and places they know and use every day. Think of these as similar to muscle-memory and instinct. Along with traumatic memories (which burn in fast), They would be recalled first, and probably the most recent non-traumatic memories would be recalled very late, or more realistically not at all (because short-term memory since the last sleep period, or even in the last week, can be lost forever IRL amnesia. e.g. many people in car accidents have "last memories" 20 or 30 minutes before the accident, and may recall one or two traumatic images right after the accident, but zero in-between.)

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