To quickly summarize, my story has two leads: The Heroine, a young woman whose magical abilities, while useful in many ways, cause her to swiftly be forgotten by everyone she interacts with shortly after she leaves. She lives in a small Idaho town and spends most of her time serving as its secret guardian angel, protecting it against various supernatural threats using stealth and cunning. The Hero, an apparent magical research experiment the Heroine rescues from a lab early into the story. He is completely feral, has no understanding of English or any other language, and seems to have no memories whatsoever prior to the experiments that made him what he is. However, he seems to have developed a superhumanly perfect memory of his life beyond that point, and seems to be the only person on earth capable of retaining memories of the Heroine. The bulk of the story revolves around the Heroine's efforts, after finding the Hero, to keep him out of trouble while continuing to protect her hometown from supernatural threats, with the Hero's occasional assistance and/or complications. And somewhere in the story, I plan to have a sequence that goes as follows: One of the Heroine's favorite townsfolk to people-watch is a young man she knows only as Gazebo Boy, because he always sits at the park gazebo every Saturday to draw in his sketchbook. Every Saturday for the last several years, the Heroine has never failed to show up to watch him draw, watching him as an unseen ghost over his shoulder. However, one Friday night, during the course of her efforts to protect the town from the threat du jour, the Heroine finds Gazebo Boy standing over a bridge overlooking a waterfall at the edge of town, clearly contemplating jumping off. She's desperate to keep this from happening, but knows that anything she does will be forgotten as soon as she leaves, so she hurriedly writes an encouraging message to him on a piece of paper, then tosses it to him from behind as a paper airplane before quickly escaping to resolve urgent business. ...Unfortunately, the following afternoon she heads to the park as usual... and for the first time in nearly half a decade, Gazebo Boy doesn't show. Her note didn't work. Gazebo Boy is gone. This is a critical part of the Heroine's character arc in the first book, and I believe it serves several purposes: 1: It serves to emphasize just how isolating the Heroine's "condition" is on her and how debilitating it is on her ability to live a normal life. 2: It creates a moment of sheer powerlessness for her as, for the first time ever, she suffers a catastrophic failure to protect someone important to her. However, I'm of two minds as to exactly where to place this in the story, and there are two schools of thought in my head: 1: Place it early on, just before the Heroine finds the Hero, to drive home just how big a deal it is that she's found someone who can remember her, and why this normally pragmatic and kinda cowardly character is willing to put herself into so much direct danger to keep him around and keep him safe. 2: Place it later on, after the Heroine has already been with the Hero for a while, to give Gazebo Boy more time to become cemented as a regular fixture of the Heroine's life, and the Heroine more time to establish a track record of success on her adventures, and thus amplify both the impact of Gazebo Boy's death and how powerless it makes the Heroine feel. I was wondering if anyone here had some feedback as to which of these schools of thought has the better idea here, or if there's some third or fourth or fifth option I'm not considering.
I think that I would probably put it in the middle of the story. I agree with your strategy of building up the character before disposing of him with impact. To do that you turn the event into a moral crisis. The moral crisis always forces the MC to confront her basic nature. So you'll have to make sure that at the beginning of the story, the MC believes that she would never interfere. Her backstory forces this. You shape the plot with events that cause her to question that belief, and then at the moral crisis, she acts. The moral crisis works best when it's a disaster, which is what you seem to have with the guy dying, and so that's why I think the event should go in the middle of the story. Maybe it should change her relationship with the hero? The moral crisis should impact the MC like nothing else. It forces her to the conclusion. So you'll have to make sure that the fallout from her action is felt all the way to the end. That's why I think it should change her approach with the hero. There was something wrong she was doing with him, and the result of your Gazebo Boy dying affects all that follows. That shifts the plot around, I'm sure. You want to shape what leads up the moral crisis so that it hits hard and then follow through with its results. Logically, the MC would keep interfering from that point on (now with greater success, but always with the worry of her failure.) Maybe the hero notices her decision and responds in a similar fashion at the climax, and so in that respect her initial failure leads to final victory.
