Broken Homes

I used to watch a lot of anime. I liked some of the bigger name series where the main characters are superpowered and keep getting stronger every time they face a new foe. During this time, I noticed that every character came from a broken home. Some of them had no family at all. Some lived with a grandparent or two. Some lived with one parent. Some only had a sibling (usually a younger one that needs to be taken care of). There were a lot of variations, but no matter what, they never had two living parents who lived together.

The thought occurred to me that maybe a broken family is needed to create a hero. If the character had a happy home life, there would be no impetus to venture out. After that thought, I looked in the background and noticed that every normal character, every villager that the heroes meet along their quest, they all have regular families. They are happy with what they have and the only thing they want is whatever bad guys are harassing them to be taken care of. Maybe that is why they are villagers and not adventurers.

This idea of the broken home is intriguing to me. It implies that the only characters that do interesting things are those with problems. And that is a pretty common theory of storytelling. The main character has a problem that is addressed, Otherwise, it is boring. But how does this work in other cultures?

I think about American stories. In America, independence and freedom are common and quite strong beliefs, so we tend to see characters who are already on their own. We never meet a hero's family. He is who he is and the experiences that shaped him were personal experiences, not time spent with or without his family. Perhaps, though, that says more than we realize. Maybe the fact that we never see a hero's family means that the hero didn't have enough of a family to matter.

Occasionally, we do see a hero who had a good family while growing up, but still became a hero. That means that something else happened that made the person unhappy. The adventuring comes to rectify some problem. Ultimately, just like the theory says, an interesting story shows characters with problems who must address those problems. Having a broken family is not a necessity, but it is a good way to create such problems in a character. One that many people can understand (even those who have not experienced it personally.