#tw orphan

[raincoatducklingart]

Katie who's your favorite person?

[bridoesotherjunk]

Happy birthday Rock Lee!!!

what better way to celebrate than by writing something sad?

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[writingquestionsanswered]

I do apologize for asking this because you probably been asked this question. So I’m writing about an uncle who’s raising his orphaned niece . I know this is a nephewism trope. I want the girl to be an orphan but I don’t want to write an orphan just for kicks my reason because I was raised by relatives and I don’t have a good relationship with my parents so how can I have a good reason to orphan the niece without doing it for the sake of it again sorry if this has been asked

Writing a Plot-Relevant Orphan

Any time you want to avoid doing something "for the sake of it" in writing a story, that means you need to find a plot-relevant reason for the thing happening. The thing needs to have some other relevance to the story besides the thing that it is... orphaning or killing a character, for example.

If you're writing a story that's exploring what it is to be an orphan, or if being an orphan is a major part of the character's internal conflict or kicks off the inciting incident, then you don't necessarily need a plot-relevant reason for why they were orphaned. In real life, there are a wide variety of reasons why people are orphaned, and those reasons rarely have broader meaning in the person's life beyond them being orphans.

However, if your story isn't expressly about being an orphan, and being an orphan is there either for convenience or to explain how the character became who they are, then it's a good idea to make sure the thing that led them to be orphaned is related to the plot in some way. For example, if your character also happens to be a fairy changeling (a fairy child swapped out for a human child, or sometimes in fiction, being raised as a human child in order to hide them from a threat to the fairies,) who is being raised by an unrelated human posing as their uncle in order to keep them safe, and you want their fairy parents to have died in some way, you would want that death to be somehow related to the external conflict of your story. Like, if there's an evil fairy who threatened the fairy kingdom and that's why your character was sent to the human world for protection, then you would want the parents' deaths to be related to that conflict. Maybe they died when the evil fairy took over the kingdom. Or maybe they sacrificed themselves to make sure the evil fairy couldn't track down their child.

So, look at the external conflict of your story... the problem that your character has to solve/the goal your character is pursuing. Is there some way to tie the parents' deaths to that conflict? Or some way to kick off that conflict as a result of how the parents died? That would be your way to make it plot-relevant.

I hope that helps!

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[ihatecoconut]

Heat

He let the child curl their tiny hand around his fingers as the blaze in front of them reflected in his eyes. He had been far too late this time. There was nobody else to save- whoever had hidden the child hadn’t come back for them, and it was obvious by the blaze that there wasn’t anybody left alive in the town.

The child giggled as he flexed his fingers slightly, grabbing onto them and wiggling their hand around, she wasn’t old enough to understand the destruction that had been wrought on their home and they didn’t understand that whoever had loved them enough to abandon them in the forest would never be seen again. He was a little grateful that the child was so young, any older and he would have been dealing with the nightmares of someone who was alone in the world and didn’t trust him- those were the hardest because waking the child didn’t change the reality they were living in. The fire was big enough now that he could feel its warmth, close enough that he considered shedding a layer, but there was no point, nobody else would find them, he might as well leave.

When he stood up, the child protested slightly at the change in position, scrunching up her little face in a way that made him smile despite the circumstances, she was adorable and innocent and everything he had forgotten existed in the world. Maybe this experience would be good for him.

They walked away from what had once been the little girl’s home, the heat of the fire dulling on his back as they went further. The child yawned and pushed her head into his chest. She wasn’t going to grow up with any real parents, but he would find her something in his mismatched village of runaways. She’d fit right in.

Based on the prompt in bold by @givethispromptatry

[kysvkii]

❋ HEADCANON 001 — SUKI’S CHILDHOOD 

On some level, suki could relate to most of the members on team avatar. Her childhood wasn’t all rainbows and sunshines. maybe it was but she doesn’t remember a life before the kyoshi warriors. 

Suki lived on kyoshi island all her life but not in the same village where she resides currently. It was one closer to the kyoshi island port because her parents were fishermen. They fished in the morning and sold the fish they had caught in the afternoon. She had an older brother as well who she thinks shes close with? Again, doesnt remember. When she was five, her parents died in a freak fishing accident caused by the unagi, leaving both her and her brother orphan. Her older brother was taken in by some relatives from a different village but they couldn’t take in suki. Correction, they didnt want suki. They only wanted a son and thought of suki as extra baggage. Thankfully, Oyaji,  who was her mother’s brother, adopted her. He was a village leader and a devoted follower of avatar kyoshi. He was a patron of the kyoshi warriors in his village as well. She grew up watching the kyoshi warriors and instantly knew she wanted to be one. At the age of 8 she started training to be one and eventually grew the ranks of becoming it’s leader.

As she grew up, she’s forgotten what her parents looked like or what her childhood was like. Maybe because it was buried and repressed by her own trauma of losing them at such an early age and being told she was not wanted. The kyoshi warriors made her feel like she belonged, like she had a place in this world, like she was worth something. Oyaji made her feel loved. That’s why she will forever be grateful for them hence in return, fiercely protecting the village and striving to be the best leader of the kyoshi warriors. 

 Suki sees Oyaji as her father, the kyoshi warriors as her sisters, and now team avatar as her family now too. Suki doesn’t know where her brother is or how he looks like now. Last she heard the relative that took him in moved but she didnt feel the need to look for them, still hurt by the fact that they practically left her for dead. She doesn’t like talking about her past and focuses on the future, not wanting to dwell on what has been but what could be. but also, why would she talk about something that almost doesn’t exist in her mind ? 

[acutemushroom]

I've been orphaned from my father at 12 and one of the things that hit me the hardest is not being able to hear him tell me important things. Not forgetting his face or his voice, though that do terrify me; not being able to hear him tell me that he loves me or that he is proud of me anymore.

I know objectively that he does and he is. And family member reaffirm it. But it just doesn't hit the same spot. The young tween in me, this little girl who begged her comatose father to not die that she still needed him; she need to hear these affirmations from her papa himself.

But she'll never be able to. I'll never be able to. And that might be one of the things I'll never be able to completely make peace with.

[mariesoliver]

Sometimes i'll read a passage in a book where the characters get threatened/injured and then their family saves them or wants to comfort them afterwards and it really makes me feel so small and lonely istg. I'm used to not not having parents and no solid family foundation so i can function and feel happy very often but sometimes when i see just how much i am missing... how much easier life could have been... it feels like part of my soul caves in

[theobaileypp-archived]

pov. motherland. μάνα

Theo doesn’t believe in God. And yet, here he is, waiting in church for an act of faith. This particular church isn’t grand or impressive like the ones he’s seen across the world before—churches carved in pure gold, churches tall enough to make your neck hurt, but the ceiling is painted in blue, constellations in bright gold, and he can’t stop looking up, nervously rubbing his fingers together. He often wonders if he would have been different had he grown up under normal circumstances—if the orphanage he’d grown up in didn’t believe so much in penitence, if the Baileys hadn’t been so syncretic and secular. 

He’d never looked for any sort of faith, even though the poetry of it never went unnoticed for him. In the devotion of the faithful, the prayer of those in pain. He was, after all, a man of words and those said with such honesty fascinated him.

Now, he’s in the third row, on the hard wooden bench, and waits. Waits, staring at the starry ceiling, until slow, deliberate steps echoes through the church and a veiled sister, a nun, sits next to him. Theo can’t find the words in him, “You called for me.” She says, in Greek, sounding heartbreakingly unimpressed. He’s dreamed of this moment many times in the past, a moment he thought had been stolen from him, and so he didn’t know how to proceed. He nodded, not able to look in her eyes—eyes he’s dreamed of his entire life. “Do you know who I am?” She makes a sound with the back of her throat. She knows. He hadn’t been looking for her, he had never looked for her.

He’d been arranging his documentation, his resident visa, when bureaucracy drove him back to his motherland, to the island he was born in, the pastoral community so ill equipped to deal with dangerously premature babies that he’d only spent a few hours of life there before being taken to Athens. He’d never actually returned to his birthplace, even if he visited Greece fairly often. Now, the ferry took him to the island through the clear blue water, to a stunning place secret to tourists, where fishermen yell around in angry, dialect-heavy Greek. It doesn’t feel like home, and the fact that it’s on top of a rocky mountain doesn’t make it very easy on him—another reason why he likes Athens better, because accessibility there is at least an afterthought whereas here it’s not a concept at all. The climb, the endless stairs, are hard on him, and he makes the decision to spend the night, just so he’ll manage to rest. Theo didn’t know then what he knows now.

Theo didn’t know a lot of things.

He didn’t know, for example, that he never knew his mother’s name not because no one knew it, because she’d died in childbirth, but because that’s what you do when you hand a child over for adoption.

hand him over for adoption.

he also didn’t know that as an adult, he could ask for the information to be disclosed. 

Theo wants to ask her why, but the words don’t come out. Why? He knew why. Because you could fit in the palm of my hand. Because I didn’t think you would make it --- they said that if you did... He wouldn’t talk or walk or think. He knew the drill. His knuckles were white. He wanted to tell her that none of it should have mattered, because it didn’t matter to his parents, his odd, loving true parents, Richard and Jasmine Bailey. He wanted to ask her if she regretted it now that he was six feet tall and not attached to any machines, now that he spoke twelve languages and had all academia glory one could dream of. Instead, without him even asking, “I was young and alone”, she says. 

“Me too.” Theo answers.

They don’t say anything else. He can’t say anything else. Theo wishes he could stand up fast and simply leave, show her how wrong she’d been, how he could have been worth it, but it doesn’t have quite the same impact when your limitations are as visible, when it takes so long for him to even manage past her in the asile and his graphite crutches resonates against the centuries-old stone floor as his tired, cramping legs carry him out of the church. He doesn’t make it very far. He sits on the stone bench under an old, twisted olive tree and buries his face in his hands as his chest clenches even tighter and his heart races and he finds it difficult to breathe, until he hears someone coaching him through it in his mother tongue, with a calm, steady voice.

She brushes his back. “You know where to find me, son.” It feels unclear whether she means son in the biblical or biological sense, and he supposes it doesn’t matter. Before she leaves, he looks at her. Theo has been right his entire life. They do have the same eyes.