Just a little curious

[Blumenkranz]

The short answer is "because tragic stories are edgy, and edgy is cool".


The long answer is, amateur writers will gravitate towards tragic backstories because of several reasons. For example, expanding on the short answer, tragic stories tend to be shocking. Amateur writers often feel the need to "show off" to the rest of the community by making special snowflake characters with shocking and twisted backgrounds, something they feel will make them stand out over the rest of characters. This is also the reason why there are a lot of overpowered characters out there, because some amateur roleplayers love to take the protagonist spot and outperform other characters with lame generic and flashy powers.


Having a nice family, getting a degree, a decent paying job... you would essentially be an average person with a comfortable life with no shocking events on it. Being the child of a single mom, not having enough money to get to college, passing the rest of your days as a wage slave... darker, but still an average person with a mediocre life. However, killing both of your abusing parents, dropping high school and becoming a murderhobo? Oh well, now THAT's edgy, cool and unique! I mean, how many friends like that? None (I seriously hope you have none)? Yeah, thought so.


Truth is, nobody wants to ever make a bland character, unless the point of the character is being so bland it becomes interesting. However, other ways of making your character different from the rest is either making a unique non-edgy backstory, or demonstrating your uniqueness with your playstyle. Of course, these require a bit more of imagination or skill, respectively.


Other reason is it may be some sort of freeform minmaxing. Players tend to be more forgiving to characters with tragic pasts (yes, even the edgiest and murder-happy characters). Say, your character is some sort of human god, with a genius' intellect, all of the knowledge in the world, an expert in a thousand different martial arts (including some self-crafted ones), an incredible fit and athletic body and reality bending powers? Clearly, it must be some sort of Mary Sue, but... oh wait, your character has had a tragic past, so it's okay. You spent all your "freeform stat points" in your skills, so now you have to "cope" with a tragic backstory that will only bring all of the other player characters' attention to you. Clearly, this weight on your shoulders will compensate your absurdly overpowered abilities.


Finally, going along the lines of the first reason, I must add sad backstories are easy to write. When writing your character's biography, you tend to highlight only the most important points of its life, which often tend to be one (the plot hook or personal mission) or two, fluffed up to make them take more space than they should so it doesn't look like your biography is too short and risk getting the CS rejected.


With overtly tragic characters, you can simply write a list of all the bad shit that has happened to them (parents got murdered, so its actually the last of a kind, spent all its life in an orphanage or in the cold streets, had to rob or even murder to survive, recently lost its lover to the same person who murdered its parents, turns out it was its brother and had to murder him, etc) and with very little fluff you can build their whole life in a few short, concise and shocking sentences. That or simply expand to infinity that stream of events. Thing is, sad events are important events, and therefore a sad life will make a dense backstory that isn't disgustingly perfect. Since it isn't hard to imagine bad things and just connect them however, I assume that's the reason novice roleplayers prefer writing special snowflake tragic characters.


That or simply because shadows, blood and katanas are cool, of course.

 

[Sleipnir]

I'll admit to having a dark brooder and honestly, he's one of my favorites.


Now, let's talk about why, though, because I didn't make him that way for the sake of it. His history(creation, not biography) is why:


I went to Michigan on vacation last summer! Yeah! I saw lighthouses and water and pretty little teapots, and it was great.


Now let's talk about those lighthouses some more. If you've ever seen one in person, especially the oldest ones, you have to admit that while they're pretty, they really look like they should all have ghost stories attached. So when I got home I looked into that. It inspired me to create a character for short stories, and I wanted him to be a lighthouse ghost. A poltergeist of sorts, even though he isn't really conventional in that sense.


So naturally he was a very flat character. He was supposed to be. How did he get there? Well, since a poltergeist only exists based on powerful negative emotion, I had to put him through major bullcrap. His father died, his sister died, he planned on killing the guy responsible for about a year, then the dude killed him first. So he was this majorly angry, aggressive character who would attack just about anything that moves and still is aggressive and physical toward his 'friends'. Not a good guy, I know.


However, he developed. Oops.


Seriously, the kid wasn't intended to be someone I used so much. It just happened.


So now I'm using him in a roleplay he's "native to," and honestly, pardon my french - he's a huge jackass. Everyone knows it. Everyone treats him like he is. So much so that he's spent the last arc of the roleplay locked in a cell so he doesn't kill another main character and I've not used him. HOWEVER, his dark, brooding past of murdering innocents who trespass into his lighthouse and stewing on his sister's death do not define him. I like to think that's what makes him different. He doesn't talk or cry about it -- it makes him angry, but if he confides in you about exactly what happened some hundred years ago, you're very lucky and likely one of the things that makes him change.


Now, is this character growing due to Defrosting Ice King being an easy development move? Maybe. Probably. But maybe because he isn't necessarily bad because of his past; maybe he's been made better by it and he just hasn't found it yet.


He doesn't know it but he's a "Finding Myself" character, not a Defrosting one. He was actually an accident, and I've gone out to say that up until his father died, his life was great! He just... Got really unlucky at the end. He would have grown up pretty normal if he hadn't died at 17 and spent the last hundred years as an already-moody 17-year-old boy with nothing else to think about.


I think it's probably so common because people like pity. I dunno. Maybe because it's an easy backstory. Quite possibly, it's because they have teenage characters they don't want to have needing to answer to a guardian of some kind -- heck, I'm guilty of that one. I've killed off/removed family before just so my character would be suitably alone, and thus able to run off on whatever adventure, no strings attached. That might be a huge part of it.

 

[Yuel]

Someone who lost everything in life will value happy things even more.

 

[CTF]

Oftentimes the use of tragedy is a more effective (not to mention the easiest) way of developing a character only because we find ourselves relating to that aspect the most.


Though one of the biggest problems that many are guilty of committing is the overuse (or poor execution) of tragedy that it simply becomes a bit far-fetched to a point where


we can't really invest on the character anymore. In other words, we couldn't care less about their pity parties . (see Dark-Induced Audience Apathy)


And to be honest, almost everything you can come up about a character has a trope. Originality has long been dead and much of the things are just a reiteration of past works.

 

[myvalentina]

And to be honest, almost everything you can come up about a character has a trope. Originality has long been dead and much of the things are just a reiteration of past works.

I think I want to expand on this. Someone else also talked about the idea of just the popularity of the brooding character right now, and it has become a staple of many movies and tv shows recently so if you're in any way tuned in to popular culture it's going to be at the forefront of your mind.


And like anything popular there are going to be thousands of iterations (some good and some bad and everything in between). And with the constant iteration some things just become part of the trope and they become shorthand which allows you to convey things more easily. You can't start with a fully fleshed out character and the point of most rps is to explore the character in certain scenarios, but if you want to give a quick overview of the character you need that shorthand.


Other people have gone into how it can go wrong if it's in inexperienced hands, (but I mean you have to start somewhere) but I think as writers you have all these gears and cogs you can work with when building a character but when it comes time to have the character interact with other characters or the story you have to sometimes use the shorthand and tropes to give the other person, or the readers, an idea of what the character is going to be like, right? And once you've established the character then you can work from the tropes to create something different (or not). So the tropes of the broody character are just important to get the character started, and a tool to help facilitate a story.