Heroes, Fathers, and Mothers

Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head
The greatest epic hero in the galaxy!

   
     In a recent blog post by E. C. Ambrose, Kylo Ren and the Question of Parental Succession, she discusses how fictional children cannot become heroes in their own right until their parents are gone and they have nobody to rely on but themselves.  I found this to be an interesting premise and it got me to thinking about the heroes in my own books.  It also made me wonder if the same thing applies to female heroes -- are their heroic capabilities suppressed by their dependence on their fathers, or their mothers, perhaps?  And what about male heroes and their mothers?  

     I'm a big fan of Xena: Warrior Princess, so that character immediately came to my mind.  She never knew her father, as I recall, but her mother certainly played a big part in her development.  Xena engaged in much evil activity before she became a hero, and that might have had something to do with her father, whom her mother killed in order to protect her daughter. Furthermore, her father might have been Ares -- a problematic possibility, since Ares is Xena's love interest.  But aren't most Greek-style heroes fathered by a god?  So the situation can get quite complicated.

      Now to my own books.

     In my signature novel, the 2-part Termite Queen, I have a heroine and a hero.  Kaitrin Oliva has a close relationship with her mother and doesn't know who her father is because she is the product of artificial insemination from a sperm bank.  I don't think her relationship with her parents has anything to do with the strength of her character -- she was born to do great things, and her mother nurtured her in that direction.  She had a step-father, but he is dead by the time our story starts.

     Griffen Gwidian, our "hero" (or anti-hero, a term I'm sure would suit some of my critics better) is another kettle of fish altogether.  The loss of his parents did nothing to make him a hero -- in fact, it prevented him from reaching his heroic potential.  It took a lot of experience to drive him in the direction of heroism.  And that's all I can say without spoiling the plot.

     
     However, I don't feel The Termite Queen is a good example, because it isn't fantasy; it's realistic science fiction with a literary feel.  So what about my termite series, The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head?  We definitely have Greek-style heroes here!  Ki'shto'ba and a few other heroes are said to be offspring of the King (read Zeus) of the Shshi's Mother Goddess.

     Termites don't have parents in the traditional sense.  They all have Mothers, of course, whom they revere their whole lives, and they have male progenitors, but they are expected to live lives apart from their "parents."  In some cultures the Mother has more than one King, so the offspring may not even know who their father is.  Is'a'pai'a (the Jason character) lives the early part of its life not even knowing which home fortress engendered it, so in a sense Is'a'pai'a is an orphan.  But once Is'a'pai'a discovers the story of its past and its destiny, it is catapulted into full-fledged hero status (a Champion, as the Shshi call it).

     Now to two of my other books (actually WIPs, since neither has been published yet).  Robbin Nikalishin in The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars is a hero for the modern world -- eager to perform heroic deeds and capable of great things but often totally inadequate in dealing with his problems and tormented by events in his life that he can't wrap his mind around.   His father, whom his mother divorced when he was eight, was a poor example of a man.  Robbie never saw him again and he always rejects his father as a role model.  It is Robbie's mother who has the greatest influence over him, and even after she is gone, he is tormented by things he can't understand.  Perhaps the concept does apply that a hero never reaches his potential until he is orphaned, because ultimately Robbie gets his act together, overcomes his inadequacies, and achieves one of the greatest heroic acts in modern life -- making first contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life.

       And finally the WIP I'm working on right now:  Children of the Music.  This piece is much more in the traditional fantasy mold, laid in a constructed world where two branches of humanity come together in a disastrous confrontation.  One of the peoples could be considered traditionally heroic -- a barbaric horse-people composed of clans of male warriors and their retainers and women, some of whom are Priestesses and Seeresses of their sacred tree.  The other people are meek, peaceable shepherds and farmers who don't even have a word for "murder" and for whom Music represents all that is Sacred.
     I made Nebet an orphan.  He is the seven-year-old boy who plays such an important role in the first section of the book,   He isn't a hero except as a symbol, but still I find it interesting that I used the orphan aspect.  (Actually, I had a prosaic ulterior motive, which was to keep Nebet a little separate from the rest of his family so he could get left behind at the end.)  Daborno, Chieftain of the invading Clan of horse-people, is also an orphan, but his father remains Daborno's own hero, someone to be emulated.  Unfortunately, Daborno never completely rises to the challenge of becoming a hero in his own right.
       Interestingly enough, the second part of Children of the Music (laid 285 years later) opens with the death of the father of Horbet and Ondrach.  It is the orphaned younger brother Ondrach who must rise to a semi-heroic status, making decisions and confronting dilemmas that are not natural for his pacific people.  He would have never done what he did -- rebel against his people's way of life -- if he hadn't lost his father.  And in an interesting parallel the Chieftain Cumiso and his own younger brother Sembal have also just lost their father when the section opens.  Cumiso is not much of a hero in anybody's book, I fear, but again it's his younger, scholarly-minded brother who achieves a status much closer to heroism.
     

The Madness of Ki'shto'ba
Huge-Head
(alternate cover for v.3)

     After considering all these points, I think I have to conclude that I never write about heroes  in the traditional sense of somebody like Superman, who goes about the world doing good, fighting on the side of the right, performing superhuman feats, and gaining glory.  I suppose that's why Xena appeals to me -- all heroes should have their dark side.  I'm more interested in those dark twistings and turnings that go on in the human mind.  Ki'shto'ba is the closest to a traditional hero that I've ever written and even the Huge-Head has feet (or claws) of clay, sinking into madness at one point and committing murder just like its counterpart in my Greek sources, namely, Hercules.
       I'm going to conclude with a quotation  from a later part of The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars, where Capt. Robbin Nikalishin, who is suffering from PTSD after a space disaster where he lost a third of his crew, is giving a speech on the occasion of being awarded Earth's highest honor, the Crimson Ivy medal.

     “Now, I’m no philosopher, gentlemen and ladies, and I’m no expert at formulating philosophical definitions.  But it seems to me we ought to take a few minutes to contemplate what makes a human being a hero.  And it seems to me that a hero is somebody who reacts with courage in an impossible situation so that a positive outcome is produced. ...
      “But there’s a downside to any definition of a hero – it has a corollary, so to speak.  It’s not enough that a hero win – a hero inevitably has to lose something.  He has to lose something and react nobly in the face of that loss." ... 

     Robbie elaborates at length as to why he himself isn't a true hero, but I think I've said enough for my purposes.  By Robbie's definition Griffen Gwidian is a hero, and so is Kaitrin Oliva.  My Champions in the Ki'shto'ba series are heroes, and so is the small boy Nebet and his grandfather Leys, and so is Ondrach the Siritoch shepherd.  And certainly Robbin Nikalishin and certain other characters in MWFB fit that definition. as well.
      So it seems I do write about heroes after all.