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Offing the leader/mentor

It seems to be a common thing, especially in fantasy that for the protagonist to flourish, or to make things more pessimistic, the mentor/leader figure must come to an untimely demise. In my experience this can happen for a variety of reasons, for the protag to survive, or come into his/her own, to give more drive to the story and increase the impending danger, or simply as a sort of payment in exchange for the good guys winning. Sometimes of course they come back again (Gandalf, Obi-wan Kenobi, Aslan, etc), but the damage is usually done.

Obviously it can be a very powerful tool, Gandalf's death allowed the fellowship to break and go their own way, Dumbledore's death was a huge blow and left Harry largely without guidance, often its an oppertunity for the protagonist to take over and fulfill the legacy. Anyway, what are your thoughts on the whole death of leaders/mentors business? Do you think its becoming too predictable?

Also another question. If my mentor was alive at the end of the story do you think some readers would in a way be disappointed (even if the good side had paid dearly for their victory)? I'm just wondering if some people would consider his blood a necersarry sacrifice for victory. I would still have him out of the way for quite a while (in the Hobbit for instance Gandalf has to leave them for most of the book, then in the Fellowship he gets captured), so I was just wondering what your thoughts were. Another thought I had was for the mentor to die at the end from illness.
 

JCFarnham

Auror
I guess you could say it's become rather predictable, but a relationship like the mentor/pupil one is by nature one where the student uses the mentor as their crutch when they mess up. At some point in that relationship the mentor has to say "enough is enough" so the student can grow into their own person. Its a must almost, but I doesn't have to be. In fiction this is often achieved by killing the mentor off and leads in most case to bassass rampage. It works. It plays to the rule of cool. Why get rid of it?

The predicatability of this relationship is something I'm playing on in my new wip. I have a girl whose grandmother has died, an older man on whom she dotes in a platonic way and who acts as the mentor. She is much worse off with the mentor figure as she refuses to try anything new, to grow, and finds it detrimentally difficult to be without him. Instead of killing him off I'm sending him away of his own accord.

It not a new twist, but at least it's something.**

There's still plenty more good reasons to play on this trope than bad (in my opinion). It's such an archetype that its frighteningly easy to twist. You don't have to play it straight. You could even lampshade it for a bit of humour.

Not killing off your mentor isn't a problem. However, if they are significantly better equipped to solve the main conflict of the book then they need to plausibly gotten rid of. This isn't a problem so much if the student has already surpassed the mentor and the challenge faced is something far worse than the mentor could deal with (like an illness?).

**I don't yet know where I'm going with this pair or story as I'm trying out a new method of writing. Namely only outline a scene ahead of where you are. I call it "Writing like you were reading." Bit more unpredicatable, but to a confessed plotter like me, it's surprisingly liberating.
 
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I guess you could say it's become rather predictable, but a relationship like the mentor/pupil one is by nature one where the student uses the mentor as their crutch when they mess up. At some point in that relationship the mentor has to say "enough is enough" so the student can grow into their own person. Its a must almost, but I doesn't have to be. In fiction this is often achieved by killing the mentor off and leads in most case to bassass rampage. It works. It plays to the rule of cool. Why get rid of it?

The predicatability of this relationship is something I'm playing on in my new wip. I have a girl whose grandmother has died, an older man on whom she dotes in a platonic way and who acts as the mentor. She is much worse off with the mentor figure as she refuses to try anything new, to grow, and finds it detrimentally difficult to be without him. Instead of killing him off I'm sending him away of his own accord.

It not a new twist, but at least it's something.**

There's still plenty more good reasons to play on this trope than bad (in my opinion). It's such an archetype that its frighteningly easy to twist. You don't have to play it straight. You could even lampshade it for a bit of humour.

Not killing off your mentor isn't a problem. However, if they are significantly better equipped to solve the main conflict of the book then they need to plausibly gotten rid of. This isn't a problem so much if the student has already surpassed the mentor and the challenge faced is something far worse than the mentor could deal with (like an illness?).

**I don't yet know where I'm going with this pair or story as I'm trying out a new method of writing. Namely only outline a scene ahead of where you are. I call it "Writing like you were reading." Bit more unpredicatable, but to a confessed plotter like me, it's surprisingly liberating.

Helpful answer, thanks.
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
My vampire protagonist and his mentor have an interesting (hopefully) relationship. When they meet, the mentor is blinded and traumatized, leading the protagonist to care for him for quite a while during the healing process, both physical and mental. The protagonist becomes a seeing-eye guide to the mentor, as the blindness is permanent due to the fact that he no longer has any eyes: they were burned from their sockets. Then, as he slowly adjusts to being blind and uses his other senses more to compensate and thus get around better, the mentor teaches the protagonist about what it means to be a vampire -- about their unique bodily functions, how to feed on animals such as deer, sheep or cattle without killing them, the nature of corruption due to drinking human blood, etc. Their relationship will also take on shades of romance, which will complicate things later on. The mentor actually survives until the climax, during which he sacrifices himself to protect the protagonist (and as a result, he is redeemed and comes back soon after as a human, something neither of them foresaw). That has a huge impact on their relationship as well, understandably, particularly the romance.
 

Sheilawisz

Queen of Titania
Moderator
That thing about the mentor/wise character that helps to guide the protagonist is indeed a classic part of Fantasy, but unlike other cliches, I am not against it in particular and, in my opinion, the fact that the wise character usually dies at some point can be useful for the story.

The Mage princess that is the protagonist of my first Fantasy series actually has two wise mentors: The first is the best friend of her dead mother, and the second is a young military leader of the rival city that eventually becomes one of her best friends. Her mother's friend killed herself in battle in the final novel, and this helped the princess to move forward and take a very important decision by herself.

Her other wise mentor/friend never died, and she took an important role later in the story =)

It's not necessary for the wise mentors to die, different approaches can be taken and you can do many different and useful things with this kind of characters...
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Loss of the mentor is part of the classic heroes journey. Losing the mentor doesn't have to always mean death and can take on different forms but it's part of that story archetype, so it's been around forever and it works.

It speaks on many levels. The hero no longer has a safety net. The hero has to take up the torch and go on. The hero must persevere despite great loss. ETC.
 
In my novel the main character actually ends up making enemies with his mentor. I thought it would be a cool twist! I think that the death of a mentor-type character is good because it's not like someone who just died "willy-nilly." It was an important character who made significant contributions to the plot.
 
I think the mentor only needs to die if you rely, explicitly or otherwise, on the concept of power levels. If the mentor starts out as "mighty," and the villain starts out as "mighty," you need to kill off the mentor so the mentor won't kill off the villain before the protagonist can become "mighty" enough to do so himself. On the other hand, if your universe allows for a lower-powered character to defeat a higher-powered character through strategizing and preying on weaknesses, or if the conflicts of your story are against an abstract force rather than a physical villain, then just giving your mentor a weakness or two will allow him to stick around without becoming a deus ex machina.

For reference, the best book I've ever read that doesn't kill off the mentor is The Last Book in the Universe (the novel, not the short story, the latter of which does kill off the mentor.)

P.S. This is a bit off-topic, but as a dedicated Socialist, the concept of a singular hero rings false to me. I wouldn't even be alive today without all the benefits brought to me from living in an organized society, so my protagonists tend to build societies in miniature, compensating for each others' weaknesses. A mentor character fits into that dynamic quite well.
 
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I wonder if the trope namer, Mentor from the Odyssey, died in that story. I'll have to look it up.

As for myself, my only motivation for fighting evil is that some old guy taught me stuff and died. The problem is that the hero only reacts to the villain. The hero has zero personal investment in the plot, so somebody has to die. Since the Mentor has zero character traits other than teaching, once the teaching is over he must die.

Most stories have passive heroes. Their only character trait is that they disagree with the villain. It just isn't strong writing.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
...I actually prefer to have the mentor turn out to be the main villain.

This would just be a different form of the mentor dying. ;)

On a side note, mentors can take many forms and you'd be surprised at how many stories have them. In real life we all have mentors, whether they be our parents, a friend, or some guy at a bus stop that gives us a good piece of advice.
 
I think it's a basic enough trope that it's in no danger of becoming overused or passé. It's easy to point at really blindingly obvious examples of it happening (e.g. Eragon), but for the most part it's a valuable trope because it bears a strong resemblance to something we all (well, most of us) go through in real life: the loss of a parent, who are, ideally, our mentors early in life.

Most of our lives don't resemble epic adventure narratives, but still, we have all (well, most of us) had the experience of losing the guidance of someone older and wiser. That's not likely to ever change.
 

Aosto

Sage
In my current wip the mentor turns out to be a vilan. Not the main antagonist, but a antagonist overall. My mc has a struggle between killing him or not. Driving forces lead him to not, but my mc moves on. I don't kill off the mentor just yet and he will make an appearance in the second novel.
 
What if, say for instance, in my first fantasy book, I have two protagonists in love who share the same mentor. Instead of killing off my mentor as she cannot die, I am toying with the idea of killing off the lesser of the two protagonists. How can I go about this without upsetting the readers?
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
What if, say for instance, in my first fantasy book, I have two protagonists in love who share the same mentor. Instead of killing off my mentor as she cannot die, I am toying with the idea of killing off the lesser of the two protagonists. How can I go about this without upsetting the readers?

Nothing wrong with upsetting the reader. If they care about the protagonist, then they should be upset when he/she dies. If they aren't, you've failed to create an emotional connection between the reader and the character. You want them to care about the character; that makes the death all the more powerful.
 
What if, say for instance, in my first fantasy book, I have two protagonists in love who share the same mentor. Instead of killing off my mentor as she cannot die, I am toying with the idea of killing off the lesser of the two protagonists. How can I go about this without upsetting the readers?

That could lead into quite a lengthy discussion so you might want to create a new thread for it.
 
Nothing wrong with upsetting the reader. If they care about the protagonist, then they should be upset when he/she dies. If they aren't, you've failed to create an emotional connection between the reader and the character. You want them to care about the character; that makes the death all the more powerful.

Thank you for this...I was mostly afraid that, if I did this, since this character is so endearing, and so real, that I would alienate or thusly put the reader off from further reading anymore of the series, though I think I am getting ahead of myself there a bit I think. lol.
 
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