A to Z Challenge Day 13: Magus (the Lost Wizard)

If there was a game in my childhood that rivaled the obsessive qualities that Final Fantasy III instilled in me, that game is Chrono Trigger. Like it’s counterpart, I spent hours upon hours on this game, trying to find every item and get every one of the alternate endings (back in the days when we couldn’t cheat by looking it up on the internet). In fact, the first couple of times I rented the game I didn’t even realize that there was any more to the game than the Millennial Fair bit at the beginning. I was having so much fun with the little fair mini-games that I actually rented the game twice before I discovered that there was more game…a lot more!

I loved all of the characters in Chrono Trigger, but Magus was definitely one of my favorites. For one thing, he was an excellent addition to a party since he could use all four types of magic. For another, I simply loved his back-story. (SPOILER ALERT!) See, Magus’ real name was Janus, and as a child he was an inhabitant of the magical kingdom of Zeal. He had the misfortune to have a power-mad queen mother who decided to build a magical palace that would call forth the dread destructive creature, Lavos. She hoped to obtain its power for herself, but instead it destroyed her kingdom and warped time and space, creating a number of worm holes. One such wormhole sucked in poor Janus and sent him hurtling through time to the middle ages (many years in the future for him). He was “adopted” by monsters and eventually became their ruler, a magical villain who tormented the nearby kingdom of Guardia. Eventually Chrono and his friends take on Magus, only to discover that he has been trying to summon Lavos again, in hopes of destroying the horrid creature who decimated his life. Ironically he (along with the others) is then hurled back to the time of the kingdom of Zeal where he gets to watch the entire terrible thing happen all over again, unable to stop it, and eventually joins Chrono’s party in hopes of taking part in saving the world from Lavos’ eventual destruction.

It always struck me as this wonderful, terribly sad story. When we first meet Magus he’s a bad guy, no doubts about it, but as the story progresses we learn that he only became that way because his life and everyone he knew was taken away from him, and when it becomes clear that there’s no way he can ever change that, he decides to devote himself to ensuring that Lavos is stopped, one way or the other. Isn’t that just a great story? I always thought so, and it definitely added to the joy that was Chrono Trigger. 🙂

What does this say about me?

When writing, there is an inherent need to torment your characters in one way or another. Even in children’s books there has to be some kind of conflict, something that makes the character upset or uncomfortable. Otherwise you don’t really have a story…you’re just writing about someone with a perfectly normal and happy life. And sorry, that’s just boring. Whether it’s in books, movies, video games, or other forms of media, people want conflict because that’s what makes it interesting, and when dealing with conflict, what you’re really doing is tormenting your character.

Just think about Harry Potter. How interesting would Harry’s character have been if he had been raised by a kind and loving aunt and uncle who gave him everything he ever wanted, rather than the cruel and unusual Dursleys who made him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs? Would you have been able to root for him as thoroughly if he’d been a natural talent, learning every spell right away and becoming a master wizard with no effort at all, rather than being the kind of student you can relate to…one who struggles through some classes and is constantly dealing with piles of homework he has no time to finish? Would the books have been as enjoyable if Harry had been able to defeat Voldemort thoroughly and with little effort, constantly saving everyone, rather than having to struggle to survive and regularly deal with death all around him?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you are ridiculously easy to please and I’m not sure I’d want to read a book written by you.

So we’ve established that there needs to be conflict, and that the usual way to create conflict is to torment your characters. Here’s the thing though…I believe that the level of torment you inflict on your characters says something about you. What it says, I’m not entirely sure. All I know for sure is that I torture the ever-living hell out of my characters. A zombie story is obviously going to obtain all manner of horror, but the characters in my other stories deal with some pretty awful stuff as well. In the fantasy I’ve had on hold for a while now my main character starts the story downtrodden and depressed. She then goes on to get kidnapped, stabbed, tortured, emotionally beaten up on multiple occasions, psychologically tortured, and even more. I put this poor girl through the ringer and back again a dozen times, throwing more and more at her to the point where any real person in real life would have simply gone insane.

What the hell does that say about me? 😛