I need help killing people

now that i have your attention, i am writhing a fan fic. and i need some advice

one of the mail character is a 12 year old orphan boy. i need to come up with a good story on how his parents died. they have to be murdered somehow by the indirect actions of evil people

also i would like a good description of a furret that i could use to introduce the character

Best thread title since "Pokemon, in the bedroom?"

That out of the way...

kcander90 said:

one of the mail character is a 12 year old orphan boy. i need to come up with a good story on how his parents died. they have to be murdered somehow by the indirect actions of evil people

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You may want to be aware of the fact that tragic pasts in which the parents died from the actions of the villain or otherwise evil team/people that may or may not even show up in the story often ends up as cliche, Mary Sueish, or generally awkward and forced, no matter how you do it. What I mean is if you're trying to create a character with a past like Batman's, your character may end up becoming one of those perfect characters we call Mary Sue... or otherwise heavily predictable.

In literature (and media in general), it always seems that both parents die in a car accident or as a result of someone else's actions (murder, accident, what have you). If you want to kill someone off, you may want to go for something different either way, just to avoid the "well, we've seen this before" factor.

Not to mention it's often a convenient plot point to get a character involved (or otherwise evolve into a goody-two-shoes, crime fighting character) if his or her parents were killed off by the villain or other evil character. Personally, I just think this kind of thing is fairly unbelievable, given the fact that very rarely does things fall into place just perfectly like this.

But if you really want to go through with this, then my advice is to think about who killed them first. If it's just a street thug, it's going to be violent, with weaponry. The middleman (working people below executives such as CEO and the government) will probably kill with vehicles, actual weaponry, poisons, explosives, et cetera, but most likely, it's probably going to be an accident. (One creative method I've seen is someone being killed by someone else's body being thrown off a building.) However, if they're evil, then the accident is going to be that the parents are going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that's true for any of these scenarios.

Executives go about it extremely indirectly. They may employ thugs to go out and take care of something for them, which may end up being death by the middleman. Alternatively, they may starve the parents by forcing them out of a job if they're business executives, although you may want to be creative about how the kid survived. If they're government, you may be looking at military combat on the streets, government-induced famine, or time in a concentration camp-like facility, among other possibilities. Because of the indirectness of the method of death by executive, I personally would recommend going with death by street urchin or death by middleman because it's far too difficult to explain how the kid survived while the adults died.

also i would like a good description of a furret that i could use to introduce the character

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Stare at the images in this link for awhile and write every detail you see. We really can't write a description for you for two reasons:

1. We don't know the context.
2. You're the author of this fic, not us.

Jax Malcolm said:

. We really can't write a description for you for two reasons:

1. We don't know the context.
2. You're the author of this fic, not us.

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Thanks for the picks they will help. i though of the car accident but that is too popular for doing someone in. and the thug in the alley is to batman-ish. so it helped a little i guess. anyone eles have something to add to help me

is a house burning down overly used?

Honestly, I don't believe that the way you kill someone off matters in the slightest, as long as you don't have it ridiculously over-the-top and cliched. I mean, I've got a relative who died via car crash, and trust me, you don't go "Aw, what a cliche way to die." If you have the emotion in the scene, and you have the realism, you can make just about any death short of getting mauled by penguins a great death scene. In my experience, you want your writing to be as lifelike as possible, and sometimes people don't die the most epic deaths. Like I said before, as long as you include genuine emotion in the scene, it doesn't matter (most of the time) how they die.

Barkovitch said:

Honestly, I don't believe that the way you kill someone off matters in the slightest, as long as you don't have it ridiculously over-the-top and cliched. I mean, I've got a relative who died via car crash, and trust me, you don't go "Aw, what a cliche way to die."

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There's a difference between when it happens in real life and when it happens in fiction. While I agree that a death in real life, even by something as "common" as a car accident, shouldn't be lessened, the fact of the matter is that in fiction, if an untimely death occurs, nine times out of ten, it's probably going to be:

1. Murder.
2. Car accident.
3. Illness.

The problem with going down these routes is because they've been done before, your audience may find it harder to feel the emotions because they've seen those particular scenes be described the exact same way hundreds of times in other fanfics. As in, sure, you can have a car accident, but good luck trying to pull off the emotion because chances are, your audience has probably already read a scene exactly like that in another work.

If this were real life, then the shock of it should be enough because not everyone witnesses a fatal car accident in real life. In fiction, these aren't real people, and your audience realizes that. So, you have to work to get your audience to care either way.

Yeah, death is not easy to pull off as you don't want them to be cliche. As for a house burning down thing, it's been overused somewhat. However, if you think you can make a good scene out of it, go for it.

I've read Jax's comments and I think I could give you a good example of murder by executives. There's this one movie called "Michael Clayton," in which one of the companies had a huge lawsuit about how their product killled many people. When one of the lawyers who was at first supporting them suddenly decides to go against them, one of the executives hired a couple of people to murder him.

Lastly, as what Jax said, look at the pics and describe the Furret as best as you can. This is your fic, not ours. I actually know one person who keeps asking for descriptions of Pokemon but won't give credit. ^^;

Well, good luck with your fic!