This came up: a necromancer for an MC

[2WayParadox]

How would you go about writing a necromancer MC? I don't have the time to go into it right now, but I am certain to do so later.

There is ofcourse the 'he does stuff with dead stuff'-problem to overcome.

 

[Ireth]

One of my WIPs has a necromancer as a major supporting character. I get around the "he does stuff with dead stuff" idea by having him morally opposed to that sort of thing, so he focuses on healing the living. (In this setting, "Necromancy" is a blanket term for the aforesaid "stuff with dead stuff" and what would also be called "biomancy".)

The villains, on the other hand, are necromancers who have embraced the possibilities of manipulating the dead, both in spirit as well as body. They're after the MC because of a botched ritual that ended with the soul of the MC's twin sister trapped in the MC's mind after she was killed by one of the necromancers (though neither she nor the MC know that yet). The villains want to use the sister's soul to reanimate the killer's dead niece.

 

[Tom]

I think having a necromancer character is a great opportunity for writing all those thorny ethical snags and moral struggles that go along with that sort of thing. There's also a lot of potential to explore gray morality, and the affects of the conscience. Maybe your necromancer self-justifies what he's doing--"Well, raising the dead is wrong, but I'm doing it for x good reason."

 

[Jabrosky]

I never got why necromancy was considered an inherently evil or "dark"* art. It's what one does with the magic that counts. A necromancer could just as easily bring others' loved ones back to life as a public service.

But since there have been dead loved ones ever since the emotion of love first evolved*, and lifeforms all die sooner or later, such necromancers would need limitations or special conditions on whom they could bring back. Maybe they're limited to people who died within the last few generations, or those whose physical remains they can recover (in that latter case, would fossils count?).

* And as an aside, I actually think it's possible that love as an emotion is way older than Homo sapiens, or even primates. ~90% of extant bird species are socially monogamous, so assuming their pair-bonding has an emotional underpinning analogous to love, their ancestors probably evolved it millions of years before ours descended from the trees. Maybe they even inherited it from their common ancestor with certain other theropods, but currently that would be pure speculation on my part.

 

[wordwalker]

Actually, been done, by two friends of mine:

• Ace Antonio Hall's Sylva Slasher --raise the zombies and take them down again
• Nat Russo's Necromancer Awakening --a world where necromancers are priests helping the dead atone

 

[2WayParadox]

I think having a necromancer character is a great opportunity for writing all those thorny ethical snags and moral struggles that go along with that sort of thing. There's also a lot of potential to explore gray morality, and the affects of the conscience. Maybe your necromancer self-justifies what he's doing--"Well, raising the dead is wrong, but I'm doing it for x good reason."

See, I don't think a necromancer would consider what he's doing is wrong. He'll recognize that others think so, but he'll just keep on trucking along outside of their notice.

 

[Hainted]

Johannes Cabal, Necromancer is a book series I'd recommend to people who want to use a necromancer MC. The tv show Pushing Daisies also revolved around a necromancer.

Honestly though Necromancy is one of those magic schools that's unfairly maligned due to it's negative portrayal. Necromancers in my world are valuable members of society. The ability to summon and communicate with the dead is used to solve crimes, settle will disputes, questions of title passage, and in some places a ready source of cheap manual labor(though never the food industry since that one incident).

 

[2WayParadox]

All those interpretations of necromancy are so benign and limited. I want a full-blown, archmage level necromancer. In the little story I read, necromancers were killed off as soon as they were discovered to be necromancers, because they simply outclassed the other available magic by too much.

But then there's the eternal issue: how do you make a powerful MC interesting? I really don't want to do a coming of age story that starts off with someone blindly stumbling through the storyline based on sheer luck and the accidental alignment of his emotions.

 

[Fyle]

How would you go about writing a necromancer MC? I don't have the time to go into it right now, but I am certain to do so later.

There is ofcourse the 'he does stuff with dead stuff'-problem to overcome.

One of my MCs is a necromancer... been working on the book for over a year.

I take the angle that he feelings misunderstood, he is not evil but most folk see it as "evil" or "strange"