Is your MC a killer?

[hots_towel]

So this is a question that's been irking me for a while. maybe im thinking about it too much, but its still really putting me in a corner for my story. If your story doesn't have much action sequences in it, this thread probably won't apply to you. The question is: how do you justify your character's killing?

now lets be honest. action sequences where no one dies comes can come off as a bit childish. Those old cartoons come to mind where the hero just knocks every "bad guy" unconscious and calls it a day. there are never any on screen deaths. However, it comes off a unbelievable, or poorly thought out, if a more average character starts throwing bullets and sword swipes everywhere in the name of justice and all that.

i suppose its more believable if said MC was already a murderer, or has a martial profession, but how many of us that want action sequences can say that our MC was one of those already. likely, most of us are taking joe schmoe or something and throwing him into a fight for his life. Can you really just cop that out by throwing in a chapter where MC has PTSD? or some Zedd to Richard speech to the effect of "killing is wrong and I dont like it, but its ok if im killing bad guys." I feel like that is too much of the cake and eating it too cliche. "I get to kill, but i also get to remain likable and justified because im doing it to bad guys."

 

[Terry Greer]

I always liked Dexter's approach to murder - because he had a 'code' of practice instilled by his adoptive father. That put a moral boundary on what killing Dexter could do without transgression.

It's no different in many ways to rules of war - and it's pretty obvious when those rules are ignored.

Good drama can come out of a character with a code like this who is forced to re-evaluate that code and their morality.
This can also work the other way (which seems to be what you're after) and suck an initially moral character into developing their own code for killing - again Debs in Dexter (at least in the TV series) is a good example of this as her psychological trauma at this is superbly handled.
Alternatively you can have a moral character who does balk at killing - but who is perfectly ok with maiming.

 

[WeilderOfTheMonkeyBlade]

My MC is a merc, and he does a lot of killing. He kills men and women- because several cultures allow women to fight, and it irks me when you have a bad-ass warrior i.e Rand al Thor, who refuses to kill women, even though lots of them want to kill him.

I'm writing him as a likable b*****d, so he has got some stuff going for him, and I really like him, but he isn't a nice person. He knows this though; he doesn't do it out of any sense of righteousness- he often laments the pain and suffering he is bringing, and sees war as a pointless waste of time and life.

He is such a nasty person because*cliche alert* the neighboring lord burnt his families hall when he was egiht, and stole his lands. He saw his parents and retainers burn, killed his first person that night; an injured warrior, and he is working as a merc to get enough gold to hire some Vorandsheckt, elite mercs so he can take back his lands. Thats the justification given. But if you want to make you character a murder, DO IT.

I really get annoyed when you have an author who puts something gritty or "controversial", then gets scared and tries to justify it. There is no need. Let your characters make tough decisions and face the consequences.

 

[Mythopoet]

The question is: how do you justify your character's killing?

I don't. Unless it's an act of self defense or defense of another (this includes general actions by soldiers in war) you shouldn't justify it. The character should have to live with the consequences of their actions.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I don't necessarily look at it as a matter of right or wrong, but about how that character would handle that situation. Some of my characters are professional soldiers or monster hunters or the like, so they're typically casual about killing things that are trying to kill them. Most aren't, so their response to being attacked is more about running and hiding than fighting. Maybe they eventually work up to killing the occasional monster or BBEG, but they're probably never mopping the floor with the palace guard. (And even the soldiers may be reluctant to fight at times--just because you can kill enemy soldiers doesn't mean you'll take it well if you have to defend yourself against brainwashed civvies.)

 

[Trick]

I just wrote my MC's first kill last night. He is currently an accomplished thief and is put in a situation where it's kill or be killed. With a little luck, he survives and his two aggressors don't but the mere act of pulling a knife from the chest of one man he killed, and the sound it makes, not to mention that he is covered in their blood, overwhelms him and he vomits. Since he watched his father beaten to death at a young age he has grown cold around death but he is definitely not the murderous type. He has a personality disorder though and this first kill sends him into a spiral and he eventually goes from thief to assassin.

I don't think any of this needs to be justified since the reader will have read the scene where his dad dies, another scene where he witnesses accidental death and has little reaction and then he kills for the first time out of necessity. All these events numb him but he is still heavily affected by them and they all change him.

I guess my question to the OP is, do you think all deaths need justification or is understandable reaction good enough? If a 'good' character kills without reason, I can understand your point but for some characters, killing is just another part of the story.

 

[ScipioSmith]

My MC is a murderer and a gladiator, but he's also very invested in himself as a Hero, so he justifies it to himself with the logic that, so long as his enemies are all armed and (theoretically) able to kill him, then all is fair under the eyes of heaven. He also takes a very fatalistic attitude to it, he wouldn't be able to kill the people he does if it wasn't their fate.

I suppose, what some other respondents have said is right: as long as the reaction is appropriate to your character, and so long as your character is interesting, then it doesn't really matter if they can find a way to keep their conscience squeaky clean or not (considering what some heroes get away with without the reading public batting an eyelid I might even hazard to say that the readership might not need you to justify it). As long as there is some reaction, no reaction at all will make the character look like a cold-eyed sociopath, then you needn't worry so much about it being the right one.

 

[Caged Maiden]

I think there are several steps to taking someone's life. For example, a weapon in one's hand. I will talk about what I do in my novel in a moment, but for now, I'd like to talk about who is most likely to kill. Me, in my real life, am probably not likely to kill a person. In fact, when my mouse trap caught a mouse and crushed its scapula, I woke my husband to kill the darn little rodent (okay, I was pregnant and sort of emotional at the time, but I felt so bad for it all mangled and needing to be put out of its misery). He didn't even (being a squeamish sort) do it by hand, he threw a cinder block on the mouse and trap in a bag and just threw the bloody bag out in the trash. Now, I had to put down my dog last year and I even have a thread about that here: http://mythicscribes.com/forums/writing-questions/7420-tear-jerker.html

Okay, so one thing to think about is who the character is. Does he know how to use a weapon, have one at hand? Is he backed into a corner? Does a calamity or natural disaster occur whereby he's not the one to deal the actual death blow (something like holding someone underwater or pushing a bookcase on them, or holding closed a door to a room with a fire)? Does he have a gun or a sword, or magic perhaps?

Those things all make for different feelings of "responsibility" for a death. I've been in a few scary situations in my life and I can honestly say, when your fight or flight kicks in, you're thinking much less about moral ramifications and much more about surviving. While I'm most likely to flee, I'll fight if I have no other choice and bet your butt, if I feel in danger, I'm going to throw everything I have. If there's a weapon available, I'd probably use it.

Now, calculated killing is another matter. There are probably reasons certain people prefer certain methods. Poison, hiring a professional, getting drunk and taking a disagreement to a knife fight or picking up a fireplace poker on a whim during a fistfight. Some people kill for emotional reasons (cheating spouse), others for beliefs or judgement of sorts.


In my novels, each character who kills has different reasons. In my WIP with the most "killers" I have several characters who kill people. One is a young woman who is assaulted in the night. Her servant runs the assailant through with a pitchfork. He handles it badly, saying, "I never thought I might kill a man." He did it because he was scared and loved his masters and didn't know what else to do. He stabbed the guy in the back and felt like a coward, but he was just a young man, no fighting skills.

In the same work, two of my MCs are killers. One is a swordsman and works as an assassin, freelance. He is in prison at the start of the novel, waiting to hang for attempted murder, where a priest he meant to even the score with, knew he was coming and got the jump on him. Later in the book, after being freed, the character gets into a sword fight and doesn't kill any of his opponents, just wounds them. He might have killed them if guards hadn't broken up the fight, but with odds of six on one, he wasn't able to deal a serious wound before the fight ended.

The other MC, a forty-three year old woman, is not a killer at heart. She does what needs to be done, but she's mourning the death of her young son several years earlier and when she goes to kill another priest, she finds him already dead, brutalized in a terrible way. She finds the priest's killer still in the house and he goes after her. Her friend rushes to her aid and kills the man, but she's visibly shaken up, both from the chase that almost cost her her life and seeing the dead priest so broken. Which brings me to my next character...

The mercenary who saved the woman doesn't like to kill. He just happens to be good at it. He signed on as a mercenary, drawing a blade against his own people, to escape an occupied land. As a child he learned to fight (the son of a nobleman) and as a teenager, joining the mercenaries was the only way to remain free. Now, at twenty-six, he's emotionally damaged and feels a coward for his role in the war. He puts all his energy into helping the MCs enact political reform, to ensure no one can reignite the war.

In the same work, my antagonist burns a dozen priests at the stake and I view that scene through another MC, who is disgusted and sickened by the event. In the beginning of the book, when you meet him, the antagonist asks him to kill their betrayer, to avenge his dead friend. The MC refuses, saying, "I'm a lawman, not an assassin. I'm going to use the law to blah blah, I'm not killing anyone." And I don't think anywhere in the book, he kills at all. He does threaten do kill someone, even puts a knife to a man's neck, but desperation drove that action.

Okay, so yeah, this is a book with a lot of death in it. One of the reasons is it's sort of a cross between "Borgias" and "Assassin's Creed II". It's just that sort of world. SUre, there are pleasant parts of the city and region, peaceful places where everyone lives a normal life. But my story is about the other side, where criminals and rebels seek to even out the power by bringing down corrupt leaders. Their goal? not to kill the baddies, but to expose them and have the laws changed so corruption can't run rampant. So while there is a bit of death, the goal of the novel is to avoid it. All my MCs have the same goal and when the woman goes rogue, to kill the antagonist late int he book, her mercenary friend intercepts her and talks her out of it, because if she kills him, their work is wasted.

Thanks for starting this thread, it's a fun one and something we've debated before, but this is a little different, in that it's not about humanity and humaneness as a whole, but about how individual characters deal with killing, death, loss, etc.

I think death is uncommon in our world, but in our history, that wasn't the case. It's fine to portray a world less "safe" than ours is now (and I'm speaking of my world. I know there are people today who live with violence and death surrounding them and my heart goes out to them), but to portray it in a realistic way makes the story dramatic and grave, whereas to cheapen the impact of death and killing, simply gives the reader a callous, grim feel about the work.

I'm not saying it isn't effective. I haven't read Game of Thrones but I know there's lots of death in it. I just tend to write death in a way that it hopefully has emotional impact, rather than being merely a fact of life.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

...how do you justify your character's killing?

I don't worry about justifying anything unless the character's psyche requires it. If, for example, a character had a difficult time coping with being the cause of death, then I might be inclined to create some personality mechanism to deal with that conflict. That being said, a character's self-destruction might be more appropriate.

Conversely, if a character is nonchalant toward death, so be it. It doesn't need justified. They can still be an MC.

 

[ALB2012]

Mine kills, when he needs to do so. His best friend is an assassin so there is that. My world is pretty dark and I don't hold back on the violence, it is PART of that world.

 

[Queshire]

My latest story idea is still developing but at present my MC was trained with the expectation that she would fight and kill monsters. Her first kill will hit her pretty hard, but she's a soldier and will muscle through it.

 

[ThinkerX]

Hmmm...several MC's from several chains of stories, each with their own approach.

Lysander, a wizard, cast a spell that prompted several thousand barbarians to kill themselves and each other. He didn't feel like living afterwards, but did anyhow.

Hock-Nar, a hobgoblin warrior and monk, has no compunctions against killing, but has a rigid sense of honor and ethics of a sort that keep him from committing indiscriminate murder.

Hock-Nar's human companion Toki, a mage and petty thief...is not a killer at heart. He prefers running or hiding to killing, and if forced to kill...has psychological issues.

I've a number of knights and professional soldiers who have little, if any issues with killing, which they cope with or not in different ways. Sir Benedict took up religion, Casein has a sort of 'party now' attitude, and for Titus Maximus, well, its necessary for the family's honor.

 

[ACSmyth]

I deliberately made my MC come from a people who don't use weapons. I wanted to see how he'd manage in a fantasy environment, because let's face it, some fantasy stories are quite brutal.

He ended up in a kill or be killed situation, and yes, he killed. It haunts him. He now knows he's capable of it, which scares him a little (OK, a lot), and that has changed how he views himself. I don't think he could ever get used to it. If anything, he's more determined not to get into that situation again, because he knows how it torments him.