(This was inspired by this very awesome Cracked podcast. Listen to it! It’s the best podcast around. )

Why are there so many orphans amongst our popular protagonists?

Harry Potter? Orphan. Conan the Barbarian? Orphan. Luke Skywalker? Orphan. The three most popular superheroes in the world… Batman, Superman and Spider-man? All orphans.

In fact, Spider-Man is an orphan one and a half times over (lost both parents then Uncle Ben) and Luke Skywalker is a full fledged double orphan (both parents then aunt and uncle… and then Obi-wan!).

Even spookier are the undeclared orphans, where were are never told that a character is an orphan, but their parents are never seen or even mentioned, even in situations where you would think they would show up.

This is especially prevalent in kids-oriented media. A lot of children’s entertainment seems to take place in a world where children’s lives neither include nor require adults, let alone actual parents.

And don’t even get me started on the bizarre world of Duckburg, where Uncle Scrooge can be Donald’s uncle and Donald can be Huey, Louis, and Dewey’s uncle without any apparent need for any actual parents to be involved.

So what’s the deal? Why do we have so many orphans, declared and undeclared, in our media? What is so appealing about the orphan character that it becomes so commonplace that you barely even notice it any more? What’s killing fictional parents?

As usual, I have a number of theories, any of which and/or any combination of which may form a full explanation.

The murderer of all these fictional parents is, of course, their writer(s), so we have to start from the writer’s perspective in order to get a grip on the issue. What does the writer get from having his protagonist(s) be orphaned?

First of all, having your character be an orphan is an instant, easy way to generate sympathy. Loss of one’s parents is one of the most primal childhood fears and it does not go away when we become adults. Therefore, making a character an orphan is an instant road into people’s hearts because in one word – orphan – you establish that this person has had one of the worst possible things happen to them.

The literary furniture we still have in the collective subconscious of the English speaking world of the Dickensian orphan has, over the years, become part of this.

Another advantage of orphaning your protagonist is that it simplifies things enormously. It is way easier to write for a character when you don’t have to take into account complicated things like multi-axis family relationships.

But this is not mere laziness on the point of the writers. It is actually a solution to a very difficult moral conflict.

See, the classic hero’s journey requires that the hero leave home and travel far, far away. They have to put themselves in danger and risk all. They have to leave behind all they know in order to do What’s Right.

This would all be extremely irresponsible if you have living parents and an extended family who are all relying on you to do your part for the family unit. It makes for a far cleaner narrative arc, without complicated moral questions about family and duty, if your main character has, through no fault of their own, been severed from all primary family responsibility.

Witness Spider-Man’s issues with being a superhero while also looking after his Aunt May.

Another reason to kill off your protagonist’s parents is that it forces your hero or heroine to be independent, and one of the deepest messages of modern, individualist culture is that the only acceptable hero is the one who is the most individual. That means our heroes cannot have any help or guidance from anybody, as that would diminish their individuality.

I mean really, would you be able to respect a protagonist who is part of a huge extended family, including two living parents, and everything they do is with enormous help from a gigantic support network, of which they are only a small part?

How would we decide who was the winner and who was the loser then?

The only acceptable form of assistance is from the mentor character, and even that is bent towards individualist aims, because the mentor is never allowed to provide anything like literal, direct, physical help.

Instead, they provide deep but vague wisdom that serves mostly to aid the hero in their journey of self-discovery. This effectively turns the mentor into an individualist net gain, as their advice makes the hero even more of an individual.

Clearly, any kind of permanent, strong connection to living parents and relatives would suggest that our hero actually needs somebody, and we are far, far too addicted to the simple and satisfying tale of the rugged individualist hero who does it all themselves to willingly accept such a complication.

A darker potential reason for the plethora of orphans is that, for whatever reason, a lot of us have a lot of both latent and blatant hostility towards our parents, writers included (especially?). By orphaning one’s main character, a writer might be acting out that hostility in a morally acceptable way by creating a world where their parents are already dead.

As you can see, there are a lot of different reasons why a writer, especially a lazy one, would orphan their protagonist. It satisfies so many of the demands of both the writer and the audience, both of whom, of course, are products of the selfsame highly individualistic culture as the rest of us.

At this point, the truly original and independent thing to do is create media in which people are fully dependent on one another and freely admit it. The radical move is to pierce the illusion of autonomy by showing just how thin and phony it is, and how much of what we believe about ourselves is based upon this lie.

Who knows, I might be the one to do it.

Meanwhile…. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.