the old genre of "sweet-natured orphan who never gives up no matter what and eventually gets adopted by Daddy Warbucks or something,"
I hated those stories, as a kid. Hated, hated, hated. They were so patently false, plus they totally knocked me out of the ballpark as any kind of potential wish-fulfillment. For one, I wasn't an orphan anyway, and I didn't want my parents dead, either (the one time, in grade school, that my mother ever discussed with me and my sister what would happen to us if anything happened to our parents, the eventual tentative conclusion was that we'd probably live with cousins... and that was a fate worse than death. (Ugh! We had all boy-cousins, so our aunts and uncles always kept us at a puzzled distance, and neither my sister nor myself saw living with them as anything pleasant, because we didn't 'get' them anymore than they 'got' us.) Plus, my family wasn't dirt-poor, either, and all the orphans were dirt-poor before being adopted by some really rich guy... apparently really rich guys only like dirt-poor abandoned kids, not middle-class kids from the exurbs.
I think the abusive parent being written as "no one likes the person" stereotype is because it's easier to write, and clearer (in that you don't have to work so hard to get the reader's loyalties to lie solely with the victim) -- much harder to write abusers like they really are, as con artists. That's what they are, really: con artists who take from the victim while fooling everyone else (as well as the victim) into thinking the victim deserves this, even so far as to present themselves as the helpless victim. They're manipulators of the first degree, and that can be a really difficult thing to write/portray, because it can split the audience loyalties -- someone out there, after all, is going to fall for the portrayal just like everyone does in the real world. A lazy writer won't take that chance, and that's part of my point for posting this, that I'd appreciate a few less lazy writers in the world.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:41 pm (UTC)I hated those stories, as a kid. Hated, hated, hated. They were so patently false, plus they totally knocked me out of the ballpark as any kind of potential wish-fulfillment. For one, I wasn't an orphan anyway, and I didn't want my parents dead, either (the one time, in grade school, that my mother ever discussed with me and my sister what would happen to us if anything happened to our parents, the eventual tentative conclusion was that we'd probably live with cousins... and that was a fate worse than death. (Ugh! We had all boy-cousins, so our aunts and uncles always kept us at a puzzled distance, and neither my sister nor myself saw living with them as anything pleasant, because we didn't 'get' them anymore than they 'got' us.) Plus, my family wasn't dirt-poor, either, and all the orphans were dirt-poor before being adopted by some really rich guy... apparently really rich guys only like dirt-poor abandoned kids, not middle-class kids from the exurbs.
I think the abusive parent being written as "no one likes the person" stereotype is because it's easier to write, and clearer (in that you don't have to work so hard to get the reader's loyalties to lie solely with the victim) -- much harder to write abusers like they really are, as con artists. That's what they are, really: con artists who take from the victim while fooling everyone else (as well as the victim) into thinking the victim deserves this, even so far as to present themselves as the helpless victim. They're manipulators of the first degree, and that can be a really difficult thing to write/portray, because it can split the audience loyalties -- someone out there, after all, is going to fall for the portrayal just like everyone does in the real world. A lazy writer won't take that chance, and that's part of my point for posting this, that I'd appreciate a few less lazy writers in the world.