Many movies, books, plays, etc. provide their main characters with these very elaborate and traumatic backstories to attempt to make them more relatable. This is because trauma provides a quick, emotional justification for a character’s complexity without the author/creator having to think very hard about it. The overuse of it and the character’s trauma being the sole source of character depth isn’t deep writing; it’s a lazy cliche.
Whether it be being abandoned by your mother at a young age (Meet the Robinsons) or being born into poverty and suffering from emotional and physical abuse (The Joker), there are many more ways that trauma is roped into a character’s background to make them more empathetic or “real”. Due to this, many people don’t realize the repetitiveness of this tactic.
The most common way that it is used is to justify a character’s actions, specifically villains. In the Incredibles movie, the main villain is Syndrome, whose real name is Buddy Pine. His backstory is that his favorite superhero rejected him when asking to be his sidekick. This backstory is meant to make us, the audience, empathize with Syndrome and make his actions seem more justifiable rather than just being a villain for the fun of it.
The movie Joker also uses trauma to give the Joker a very sad and even disturbing backstory to make us sympathize with him. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using trauma as a way to give these characters complexity; it’s the way that the audience interprets it. Sometimes these backstories are seen as a way to justify the villain’s actions, why they murder people, etc.
A Nightmare on Elm Street does this, giving Freddy Krueger the backstory as being a school groundskeeper who was wrongly accused of being a predator and was then burned in a boiler room by angry parents who believed the rumor. This can only be interpreted as a way to justify why Freddy Kruger became a deranged killer, which is wrong, and being a killer shouldn’t be able to be justified.
While these backgrounds can make characters seem more real, it’s overall a very overused trope and is a lazy way to get readers/the audience to feel sympathy or empathy towards a character. It’s time to be more creative in our artworks and use other ways to make characters in depth and seem like real people.
