Got bored, and I found myself thinking of all the ways my characters are totally screwed or how their past is just messed up. And since we, as the writers of the stories our characters exist in, are basically God to them, then that means we're being evil to them. How are the ways you all have been evil to your characters? I'll start; I've got a military amputee named Samantha Addam. An explosive went off in front of her, taking her right arm, right eye, left leg, the pinky and ring fingers of he left hand, and everything from the knee down on her right leg. It's all been replaced with cybernetic prosthetics wired into her nervous system, but she has PTSD from the explosion and the year and a half of surgery and therapy that followed. Y'all's turn
My first novel has an MC that gets beat down by life over and over. It's actually one of the most important themes in the book (How much pain can you take and keep on living). I'll sample the most significant moments: -(Backstory) As a kid, his mother was murdered by his town's ruler. -(Backstory) As a soldier, he left his family, and his wife died in an accident (He later finds out his daughter killed her unintentionally) while he was out there fighting the war, so he feels pretty bad about leaving them. -As a marquis, at the start of the novel, his town gets completely trashed by an undead horde. Basically everyone he knows dies, including his son and best friend. He's turned into an undead skeleton for the rest of the book, and from that moment he loses any sense of smell, taste and touch. He starts feeling detached from life as a result of lacking those senses (I.E: He can't feel hugging his daughter). -A woman he has good chemistry with rejects him when she realizes he's undead. No hope of finding a partner from that point onward. -The one thing he thinks he can do for his nation gets taken away from him, because his king tells him that him being an undead would hurt the war they're getting ready for, as it would take away support from the other noble houses. -Mid-way throught the novel, his surrogate son gets killed by a bunch of drunk soldiers. -When he's about to do justice with the necromancer who ruined his life, turns out the man has lost his mind, so he doesn't even know who the MC is, making him question the point of his own life, as he thought killing the necromancer was the will of the gods. Despite all that, and even with him dying, it actually ends on a bittersweet and hopeful tone.
TNT: a man of duty and honor finally stands within reach of his well-deserved retirement, only to have it torn away by a global catastrophe. The reins of the shattered world are dumped in his lap. The decisions of the life or death of millions are now his alone. He spends two lifetimes in this perpetual hell, wishing only for death. His AI servant-overlord finally grants his wish, only to become an Eternal. He is preserved for eternity with all the memories of a suffering world, not just his own. TC: a phallophobic lout is cursed to a life of sexual misadventure. He finds his sanctuary in a tuple with three girls, and despairs as they are torn from him, one then two at a time. Then he sends the last away, honoring a promise to the others. All he wants is a family, yet his fate is to become a modern-day Abraham. Truly, the gods are malign.
Had a sluglike alien female harrassing a human amabassador to her planet because she was attracted to him. Then had her fellow native slugs force him to marry her. Had another find himself alone on an alien-administered mining colony and finally wind up working on one of their manure-processing and transport ships. Had three astronauts lured into a trap where each was pulled in an devoured by an enormous tentacled mind entrancing creatire that had been concealed underground.
Lets see now... Marckus has been: Kinda sorta survived being burned over 80% of his body (pre story beginnings). Shot in the lung straight through and survived (thanks to the Martian Colonials) Been show with body armor on over various part of his body, though the worst in the side of the upper ribcage. Been in a few bare hand fights with and without body armor, and once got his face pounded while almost completely defenseless, save for cuffed hands by a really pissed female Grey. Forced to watch 3 women (Martian Colonial, Centurian, and Uldivarion) flayed alive as a form of psychological torture (They are all POWs). Had multiple molars removed, his left eye cut out, and his fingertips stripped down to the bone, and whipped with a braided cable, because the Confederation really wants to hurt him for going turn coat and try and get anything valuable from him. Graxis: Taking some good wallops. Shot in the forearm, upper thigh, and had a hole ripped through his lower left side by a large caliber sniper rifle. Been stabbed through the end of his tail. Corlixia: Taken a knife to the face. Been beaten in basic, by both hand to hand, and a bit worse with a wooden practice sword. Thrown violently onto metal grate catwalk, nearly choking on the eye that she sucked out of the skull of a Confederation Lieutenant. Shot in the upper right chest, but the bullet stopped at the rib (carbon nano-tubes infused with cobalt make up her skeleton), had the bullet removed with fingers and a combat knife, before having the offending shooter drug back so she could beat him Pretty every thing else that torments Corlixia is that she can't escape her tendency to use her adept skill of getting information out of people. None too pleasant even when all you have is some crude instruments to work with. Though much more haunting are the faces of the past, of those she has brutalized. to death with the spiked guard of her issued trench knife.
My characters are in a genre that has next-to-zero presence in written media, in a story that's positive, optimistic, and ultimately gives good people happy endings when the most prominent "popular" works in the genre nowadays are all about gleeful sadistic suffering of the (female) characters. Now that's evil.
Mike's died from electrocution and been sent to Hell and back, and will have to commit suicide to get into Hell a second time. Sandy was stillborn and can only view the world through mirrors her sister has looked in to. Kurt works for Topf & Sohn. The Conductor is part of the machinery of slavery and murder that is Santa's Workshop, but he'd be dead if he hadn't betrayed everyone else. Becka is a toddler who's being abused by her mom's boyfriend. She comes out okay though (the boyfriend not so much). Emi meets the wrong guy on a train, as do several others. The MC seems to have Korsakov's, or something similar, and probably murdered his girl for cheating on him.
Where to begin.... I did so many mean things to my character that test readers suggested adding a nice moment. Bleak bleak bleak.
My main dude has a lot in common with me, history-wise (though his CV is slimmed down a bit so as to avoid accusations of Mary Sue-ism and I haven't yet been involved in the actual End Of The World As We Know It) just because I prefer to know whereof I write. He's not a happy chappy but he's functional. He has the grief and guilt of a lot of dead people on his shoulders. He's taken more than a few beatings, burns and a bullet in his time, but none of that really bothers him. I've had him lose a very close friend and have to kill several people in the pursuit of his duties over the course of the story, as well as the antagonist putting his family in danger. Basically, I do the things to him that I'm terrified of happening to me. He's got a long way to go yet, but he's going to have a happy ending. Well, as close to happy as a burned-out old wreck like him can get, anyway.
Oh, shit, I totally forgot.... The First Child not only has humanity living in and on her, humanity is a part of her. Can't be much meaner to a character than that.
I've got a Dinotopia fanfic (and yes, I am that guy who goes nuts when the documentary narrator mispronounces the name of the dinosaur) where the Utah Raptor MC was born in a cage and made to murder his siblings within hours of his hatching for no reason other than he hatched a couple days earlier than his siblings did. From there he was raised inside an underground dino fighting ring (basically that world's equivalent of dog fighting). If he didn't kill his opponent, he didn't eat. he had no pack, no positive relationships whatsoever, and if he could not fight again within hours of getting his *ss kicked, he'd be beaten into unconsciousness and he wouldn't be fed. He earns the moniker Occisor, which means "Killer" in latin, after he developed a gory winning streak that made other "trainers" crap themselves a bit if his name was even thought of within twenty feet of their dinos. So after a few years this battle scarred murderer of saurians who was raised on beatings and the corpses of his siblings and foes, gets *rescued*. I say rescued, but from his perspective it was more like a kidnapping. Again. The enforcers of Dinotopia eventually find this ring, attempt to free the dinos only to find that these creatures know only death and destruction and have no idea what good intentions are, and can't tell a hand reaching to unlock the door from a hand holding a club about to beat your brains in, do not even know language, and so as soon as gthe gates are opened it's a bloodbath until some raptors can get in and take down some "evil"dinos. Killer is in the back, his cage wasn't opened because plot armor, he's half dead from starvation because of how long it took the enforcers to get back there without being slaughtered, three enforcers get wrecked by the "best" fighter in the ring before homeboy finally gets subdued. It's agreed that he's beyond rehabilitation and there's no point in trying to save him, but girl enforcer flips because she was actually making enough progress to have a conversation with Occisor, and somehow convinces them to let her try and teach Killer not to kill everything in sight. The moment he does something to hurt her, and then they they can kill him. So his fate depends entirely on this girl's ability to control a psychotic murder machine of a dinosaur.
There are a lot of little things that happen to my characters that are bad but I wouldn't call it evil. It just goes with the the flow of the story. ( I guess it is pretty bad for them though haha) A prince gets part of his Kingdom destroyed by a great evil Oh I forgot I killed two of my characters parents in a fire Though nothing is graphically described, everything is just implied and hinted at, the most evil I have inflicted on one of my main characters is a teengage boy who is suffering with behavioral problems, confusion about his sexual orientation and those kind of things due to verbal/sexual abuse (at the hands of another main character) turned consensual, turned to sex addiction. That leads him to make all of the decicions he does in life and he unwantedly ends up pulling a loved one into his dark world he created for himself. I feel horrible for doing that to him but it really is a big part of the sub plot that makes the story what it is.
