This MC is a well skilled young soldier during ww2, who saves this young woman who was held prisoner by the nazis, in which she was discovered to have supernatural abilities. She joins the MC's allied team, which she then gives the MC supernatural powers, resulting in him becoming some sort of super soldier, given a longer life span, but used by the government for decades in each major war for secret ops, up until the near future? Is it better if I focus on him as the main character who was in each conflict over the decades, trapped by the government as a war weapon? Or better I have it that he had a child with the supernatural woman in ww2, which then results in the focus on that child, then that child's offspring and so on in every new decades of wars, until it reaches the near future, which would be the focus on the latest MC offspring?
I do like the super soldier from ww2, as I'm still having trouble picturing what his latest descendant would be like in the near future if he did have one. And I'm not sure how plausible it would be if this soldier lived through each new decade/generation healthy and barely aging
You already have supernatural powers in this setting, no? How much further of a stretch would that be?
It probably wouldn't be a problem. But would it be more plausible if this soldier had supernatural offsprings each new generation, until it reached up to the latest offspring descendant, which would be the main character? Or just stick with the soldier being in each new generation and leave out the offsprings?
The woman who gave him these powers who he saved during ww2 would be in some way as powerful as a demi-goddess. So maybe the same can be applied here? The other issue is, would it be too much if this soldier fell in love with her, then created a huge offspring together, resulting in many offsprings fighting in each new decade of war, until it reached the latest offspring, which would be the main character?
The path here is either Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or Captain America. So, which one do you happen to like more? Seems fine to me.
I guess if I have a choice between the former or latter, the latter being like a mix between Captain America/Wolverine/Highlander, where he becomes semi-immortal and more superhuman after he rescued the young woman during ww2. She then joins him in the war, ending the nazi regime and is declared as an American hero. Then it moves on to the cold war era conflicts of that time, to Russia, Vietnam, South America, Afghanistan, Angola, to Desert Storm, etc(the 60s-80s-early 90s), where he is being used for his amazing skills, gifts and secret missions, which become questionable on whether there are any good guys left at this point. It then heads through the modern war conflicts, where he now faces multiple groups of enemies and near future, where he now has to fight those who forced him into war and discover more immortal or longer lifespan beings like him and figure out why he became so special. The former would start out with the American hero soldier in ww2, who saves the young woman with powers from the nazis, she joins the fight with him, they fall in love and have a son, born in 1941. The son inherits the powers. Their son then goes in a secret mission to Vietnam in 1963 to stop the Soviets, the son meets a Vietnamese woman with special powers, they have twin boy and girl born the same year. Then their boy twin goes to Afghanistan in 1983-85 and the twin girl goes to Nicaragua in 1983-85. The boy twin meets a female sniper who's fighting the Soviets, boy twin has a son with the female sniper. The girl twin meets a Nicaraguan rebel soldier and have a son together. The boy twin and female snipers son goes to Nepal in the 2010s and meets a Nepalese woman with powers, which they have a daughter. The twin girl and Nicaraguan soldier's son goes to Syria or Egypt in the 2010s and meets a supernatural woman, having their son. Then the Nepalese woman's daughter goes to Greece near future having a daughter, the FMC and the Egyptian/Syrian woman's son goes to Italy or turkey near future and has a son MC. Which is better, the former or latter?
@SilentWaves55 This type of trope trips itself up in many ways from the point of view of its writer. Traits of a young soldier during WW2 will seem out of touch or completely wrong from a modern point of view. From gay rights to BLM to attitudes towards females. The solider needs to change with the passing of time. This is a real issue to make any character believable. READ Joe Haldeman, The Forever War to give you a real idea of understanding of time and social change. The 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula watch and see a character unaffected by the passing of time and change with technology advancement. And this is the key to your story... Does the MC cement his beliefs knowing full well the passage of time adds little to his philosophy or change in attitude? By using an offspring gives you an out to update and modernizes the story’s beliefs which is a cop out. As we age our attitudes and belief systems change. On this type of trope normally they don’t make them convincing as stories or characters. Just my thoughts… MartinM
He's semi-immortal so he's had a long lifespan and keeps up with the times. Think Wolverine and even Captain America. More like Wolverine, since he lived through each decade. So you're saying neither the long lifespan soldier or the soldier's offsprings can work?
Well, it depends a bit on what you're going for. The thing about having an 105-ish year-old super soldier who is still in his mental and physical prime is that not only does he have nearly a century of fighting experience but he's also had several decades to consider how he feels about the politics and policies of the government he's supposed to fight for, as well as his own role in all of that. Like, you can't just tell this guy that "it's your duty" because he's older than you are and may have spent the last twenty years thinking of a perfect retort to that argument. Best case scenario: You end up with a John Carter type of guy - this ancient, tempered warrior who completely identifies as such and doesn't really desire anything other than putting his fighting skills to use for a good cause. Which is great, until he decides that your cause isn't the right one. If you end up betraying his (by now likely somewhat old-fashioned) ideals, he may very well turn on you. Worst case scenario: The most dangerous person on the planet is now thoroughly disillusioned with whatever ideological propaganda you've been feeding him, embittered from constant pain and loss, and possibly near-suicidal from living a hard life for far too long and having nothing left to lose. He's come to resent the establishment who keeps forcing him to fight in their wars for much longer than he signed up for and has perhaps decided that it would be better if he called the shots on account of seniority. Having his descendants form a sort of super-soldier dynasty would probably be safer, as younger people are more likely to do what they're told with the right conditioning, but it would also make for a more depressing story. So, what do you want the end result to be?
Not really. Captain America survived from WW2 early adulthood to the "same" age at the end of the 20th century not because he was genetically altered to not age, but because he was frozen in a state of suspended animation for more than 50 years. Once he was thawed out, he aged.
According to canon, the super-soldier serum stops him from aging (in the comics, not the movie universe). The serum was what allowed him to survive being frozen.
@SilentWaves55 Apologies was on the wrong side of a bottle red. I wasn’t saying neither idea could work just highlighting (badly) the pitfalls. @Fervidor does a great description. Wolverine I like that idea of him living through decades and centuries playing a part in many conflicts. But once Wolverine starts on his journey his view of the world doesn’t change and that’s the pitfall. I want to see him as a character be changed somehow with each conflict from the experience. He grows... Again, sorry the first post I blame a Saint-Joseph French red MartinM
I worry when novels set out with a basis in comics or movies. Wolverine and Captain America come from a visual medium where most of the descriptive heavy-lifting is done by the pictures. So an attitude to the modern world might be shown in a grimace, or a hand raised to the brow. But a more insidious problem is that they're serialised and made accessible to very young readers - I mean in terms of their story-structures not the levels of sex and gore. These characters might be too thinly-conceived to write a novel about. A challenge of novels that comics are exempt from is the need to spend 10s of 1000s of words describing characters' inner worlds. Now, there will have been Wolverine novels, but they're spin-offs under the wings of an existing franchise, and they wouldn't have been published otherwise. If the OP is writing a comic, that's useful to say at the start. See what looks best. If the ww2 soldier is more interesting to draw, or his series is going to run for 70 years, make him ageless and keep the story centred on him. But if the artist gets bored of 300 panels of him (e.g. because no claws, or easy-to-draw spandex costume) maybe go for variety and change who the MC is in each generation. In a comic, the OP's problem isn't necessarily a writing problem, because unless we're already famous the creative process is led more by the visuals.
But wouldn't he have kept up with the times the way Captain America and Wolverine did? So this would turn him into a bad guy? If this is a better path, than perhaps I'll choose this? It could be sad, but maybe I should just give each new MC descendant a small part? They're young, do their missions, have a child with a girl(and some cases a child with a guy, depending if some descendants are male or female), they either disappear, tossed aside or hide in the shadows? Until it reaches the latest descendants, being the main MC's of the story? Does that sound better than the 100+ year old veteran soldier?
No need to apologize. You just gave good reasons why there could be issues with it. Which idea though would have less issues? If I go with the soldier living through each new decade, would it make sense he changes into more of an anti-hero? Or should I judt go with the descendants? I was thinking of making this one into a comic or graphic novel. I wouldn't have a problem getting bored creating over 300 panels of him, but rather which choice would be more intriguing and interesting? Should I go the Wolverine ageless route, plus with his political views changed, where he's basically becoming more of an anti-hero mercenary, doing this for what he's good at and doesn't care about politics or reasons either way? Or go more the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure/Assassins Creed route, with each new descendant, fighting in each new decade conflict, maybe having a shorter lifespan? Or thry dissappear, tossed to the side, once their offspring is born to fight in the next major war, not truly knowing or mature enough to know what they are fighting for, until it reaches the latest descendant who would be the MC?
Jimmy Corrigan had four generations of the same family - and that won an Eisner Award even though it had a really dumb superpower and was mostly drawn with a ruler. So I'd go with that.
Do you mean he had a family that he descended off of multiple offsprings for four generations? Because I think it goes back to the great grandfather? Sorry, I'm not familiar with the series.
iirc yes it tells the stories of the great grandfather, the grandfather, the father, and the title character... but in parallel. iirc it changes generation from chapter-to-chapter, but there are a few pages where the four storylines are all shown one-above-the-other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Corrigan,_the_Smartest_Kid_on_Earth I haven't looked at it again for 20 years because I remember the gut-punch. How it did it is starting to get a bit hazy though
Ah now I see though in my case, my story has generations that goes beyond four. Is that still a problem? And I'm not sure which would be a more plausible way to have the family generation go. Let me know if this is a good family generation story in terms of great grandparents, future offsprings, etc? A 19yo US ww2 soldier meets an 18yo Jewish woman and their son is born in 1942. Their 22yo son then goes on a secret mission to Vietnam in 1963 and meets 20yo French/Vietnamese woman, which they have twins that same year. Twin A is a boy and twin B is a girl. Twin A goes to a mission in Soviet/Afghanistan at 22yo, meets a 21yo Lithuanian woman and they have a son in 1985, son A Twin B goes to Nicaragua at 22yo, meets a 22yo Nicaraguan man and they have a daughter in 1985, daughter B Son A goes to Syria or Egypt, sometime in the late 2010s, meets a woman there and they have a son together. Let's call their child, son AJ Daughter B goes to Cyprus or Middle East in the late 2010s and meets a man there and has daughter BQ Now Son AJ and daughter BQ either have twins of their own having both FMC and MC born? Or son AJ and daughter BQ are the FMC and MC? What do you think? It's very confusing, I know
I'm not the best person to ask as I have a bugbear around the way writers keep telling the stories of people who didn't exist in WW2 and passing over the stories of the millions of people who did exist Sensitivity: something to perhaps be wary of is the stereotype that American men and their patrilineal descendants (since they are so martial and soldierly and whatnot) are automatically accepted by the females of any other society And none of this background clutter contributes anything to character development. The fantasy-trap can distract from character in historical fiction just as much as in a superhero story. Nobody cares about the genealogies of fictional people, or the perspectives of fiction authors on world history or politics. Novels are character-led, and I'd suggest a critical test is to ask does the 19yo soldier in 1942 interact meaningfully with the MC+FMC 80 years later? If not, cut him out. By 'interacting meaningfully', I mean is there conflict between them that reveals their characters? They don't have to speak to each other - their choices can bring them into conflict. But if one is only of historical interest to the other, then that's probably wasting words that will need to be spent on revealing the MC. From the earlier posts, I guess another way of looking at this would be that it's a way of inserting the character into the defining war of their generation. But that's not something Captain America does for its own sake, it's an awkward side effect of the series ludicrously over-running and having to be repeatedly rebooted for new generations of 8-year-olds. And it's been earned (somehow, bizarrely) by the character's story being told at first in the context of and within the timescales of a normal human life. And if structurally it doesn't matter to the OP if the character is a single character or a succession of five different ones, that suggests to me that the characterization is going to be indistinct. Son A can't be a means of inserting 19yo US into Syria - that's a single character written badly. What development or growth will this character go through in Syria that couldn't have been written for them, somehow, in WW2. Is this story really a polemic? Is the character really a vector for drawing comparisons between WW2 and Vietnam and Syria? If so, I'd always urge to shelve polemical. If we want to be taken seriously on such topics we can read and write, so it's open to us to go back to university and become history professors. So the question: "1 character who lives through 5 generations, or 5 characters who live through 1 generation?" to me implies a craft problem. People have used either model - as a counterpoint to Jimmy Corrigan, Anne Rice springs to mind with her vampires staying psychologically stuck in whatever era they came from - but I don't think it's common to see it as an open question. 1-through-5 is a structure we might use to tell a certain story, or a 5-through-1 structure might make it easier to tell another story. But it's as a means to a end: the end of telling the story we want to tell.
