Heroes! Paragons of virtue, stalwart, brave
and true! And more often than not, more than a little lacking in the sense department.
See, heroes usually serve as the audience's inroad into the narrative world, so it benefits
the writer to make the hero inexperienced and naive so they can ask questions about
the world and plot that the audience also needs answers to. And when your hero is inexperienced
and naive, it's only reasonable that they'd need a guiding figure to help them figure
out those tricky first steps along the hero's journey! That's right, they need a MENTOR!
And lucky for them, mentors are in ample supply! Fiction has mentors for DAYS to give our errant
heroes all the guidance they could ever need, until they die three chapters later. Whoops.
So mentors come in a lot of flavors, but they mostly fall into these five categories. Category
one are the CLASSIC MENTORS. Wise, friendly and helpful, just a little cryptic but that's
okay. This mentor serves a key role in the hero's journey, as they exist to guide the
hero INTO the journey. They're usually old, benevolent, wise, kind, maybe just a little
cheeky on occasion, and most importantly, very easy for the hero to get attached to.
That way, when they inevitably die right after the hero's journey begins, the hero gets all
upset. And yeah, these mentors basically ALWAYS die. This is because they know too much, and
their wisdom would make it too easy for the hero to figure out the early steps of their
journey. Killing them off early forces the hero to navigate the tumultuous early stages
of their story without their guidance. However, these mentors don't have to STAY dead - sometimes
they'll turn up again as ghosts or shiny upgraded versions of themselves, but only after the
hero's progressed enough that they don't desperately need their guidance anymore. Basically, these
mentors dip out right when it's most inconvenient, take an extended vacation while the hero runs
around freaking out and getting into trouble, then saunter back into the storyline at their
leisure when the hero no longer needs their help.
A step down the friendliness ladder is the SCARY MENTOR, a mentor figure who's mean,
terrifying and ridiculously skilled. These guys don't guide the hero into the story - usually
the hero seeks them out for training partway through their arc because they're the best
of the best. And don't expect the scary mentor to WANT them for a student - usually they'll
try and scare the hero off or otherwise dissuade them, and will only accept them as a student
after some kind of proving-themself thing. Scary mentors don't do positive reinforcement;
usually their teaching method is, at its nicest, "sink or swim". This is not to say they don't
genuinely care about their students - only that they won't readily express it. Scary
teachers can be reasonable, or they can be genuinely malicious. It can be hard to tell
which is which, but a good way to gauge it is to see how they treat characters they AREN'T
training. Sometimes scary teachers are only scary to their students as part of the teacher-student
dynamic, and are totally nice to anyone else, but if they're a dick to everybody, they're
probably more on the malicious end of things. This mentor is less likely to die than other
variants, but if they ever start acting uncharacteristically nice towards the hero or telling them how
proud of them they are, watch out. In a smilar vein to the scary mentor is the
RELUCTANT MENTOR, who doesn't necessarily have the ludicrous skill or badassery of the
scary mentor but has ALL the crankiness. Reluctant mentors really, REALLY don't wanna be mentors.
They're cranky and disillusioned, they don't like the hero or want to help them, sometimes
they don't feel like they SHOULD be a mentor. The hero WILL eventually win them over, but
it won't be easy. This is usually because the mentor has a personal reason to want to
avoid getting attached to a student - sometimes a former student of theirs turned evil and
they took it, like, REALLY personally, but sometimes they're just kinda steeped in general
self-loathing. Unusually for mentors, reluctant mentors actually have a CHARACTER ARC. The
wide-eyed protagonist they're mentoring will usually gradually soften their jaded worldview
and over time they'll become their student's greatest advocate and protector. Unfortunately,
it's not TOO uncommon for reluctant mentors to subsequently heroically sacrifice themselves
for their student, so they're not IMMUNE to the mentor death curse, but it happens less
often than with the classic mentors. On the other end of the seriousness spectrum
is the WACKY TRICKSTER MENTOR, a mentor who doesn't like making their true intentions
fully obvious and guides or trains the hero in weird or confusing ways. In fact, some
wacky trickster mentors outright pretend NOT to be the mentor just to screw with the hero
even more. Wacky mentors give their students bizarre or inobvious tasks, never explain
why, and generally give their student the runaround. One very common way for this to
manifest is the trickster mentor telling the hero to do their basic household chores - about
70% of the time, this is actually sneaky training, but sometimes it's just chores. The hero usually
finds this frustrating, but the mentor's training and guidance ALWAYS end up being useful, and
while some of their shenanigans might just be personal eccentricity, most of it is genuinely
helpful, and the hero'll eventually appreciate the trickster mentor's odd methods. While
these mentors don't USUALLY die, they're not immune to the mentor death curse either. It
doesn't usually serve the plot - it just happens sometimes. Being a mentor is hazardous.
And the final category of mentor is the EVIL MENTOR. Yup, some mentors aren't actually
good. Evil mentors have a lot of range for what they're good at teaching - some of them
are all about teaching their students to defy authority and be true to themselves, but some
are more interested in grooming evil minions, and will teach them some badass fighting skills
and also to never question their authority. Evil mentors come in two flavors - secretly
evil, and blatantly evil. Secretly evil mentors are usually great mentors who genuinely like
their student and are often the most supportive figure in their life. This is so that, when
they inevitably reveal their evilness, the twist hurts like crazy, because our hero loses
trust in the only figure who really supported them. Secretly evil mentors also usually deliberately
hide their evilness from their student, and are very unlikely to try and convert them
to their side - they're more likely to want them to be better than they are, and will
frequently support their heroic attempts to oppose them. Secretly evil mentors stand a
strong chance of dying post-reveal, usually after a moment of heroism or reconciliation
- again, for the feels. Meanwhile, blatantly evil mentors are a whole different beast,
because they make little to no attempt to conceal their evil - their student usually
just doesn't realize exactly HOW evil they are for a while, but that's just because they're
trusting or unobservant or have no frame of reference, and when they figure out the depths
of their villainy, they usually bounce and start opposing said villainy. Blatantly evil
mentors are much more likely to try and convince the hero to join them, and the hero's arc
is more likely to center on unlearning whatever villainous stuff they picked up from the mentor
before leaving. Blatantly evil mentors are VERY likely to die eventually, since they're
both villains AND mentors, two of the deadliest career paths in fiction.
So that's the general breakdown of mentor variants. But there's a core quality all mentors
share that creates a problem for writers: since mentors are guiding or teaching the
hero, this means they must either be more knowledgeable or more capable than the hero.
So… why is the mentor just GUIDING the hero, instead of handling the plot themselves? Why
do we need the hero at all? This isn't a HARD question to answer, but
it does need to be addressed. And most commonly, it's answered in one of these five ways.
Option 1: The hero's the chosen one. The mentor's got all the knowledge or skill the hero needs,
but the hero still has to be the one to handle the situation because they're The Chosen One.
Sorry, nothing we can do. Best of luck, though! Option 2: The mentor is fragile. Mentors are
often pretty old, and even without that, they can have debilitating illnesses or injuries
from their time as a younger badass hero. They would've been able to handle the plot
if they were in their prime, but unfortunately they're not strong enough anymore, so all
they can do is pass on what they know to more capable hands.
Option 3: The mentor legit doesn't care. Sure, the hero is deeply invested in the plot, but
the mentor's got their own stuff going on. They're cool with helping the hero out, but
they don't really care enough to handle this stuff on their own. And that's fair. When
you're that badass, you can pick and choose what you're personally invested in. This is
more common with scary or reluctant mentors than the other variants, and also this variant
is very likely to show up a climactic moment where our heroes are in trouble for a Big
Damn Heroes rescue if the protagonists get in over their head - cuz they don't care about
the plot, but they DO care about the hero. This is also a very easy way for them to die.
Option 4: The mentor is evil, and is either causing the problem directly or has no interest
in fixing it. Yeah, obviously evil mentors aren't likely to be super invested in helping
the hero oppose the other villains. The hero has to take their powers and training and
repurpose them for good instead. Option 5: The mentor is dead. Yup, the easiest
way to solve this problem is to just kill the mentor before they can fix anything. Oh
noooo, what a tragedyyyy, not the mentor figure! Dead?? Who could have FORESEEN this?!?
On that note, we should really talk about why mentors die so much.
See, main characters don't actually usually die that often. I've talked about this in
the trope talk on character deaths - but basically, killing a character permanently cuts off all
future potential for that character. I mean, duh, right? But that's a major loss. A dead
character can't grow, can't develop, can't have interesting dynamics with other characters.
It sacrifices all future character potential for one big emotional gut-punch. This is why
so many character deaths are actually FAKEOUT deaths where the character comes back eventually,
and also why you can usually tell the fakeout deaths from the real ones by how much potential
is lost and how many unresolved plot threads would be left dangling by the death. Heroes
don't usually die. Lancers don't usually die. Comic relief characters don't usually die.
Love interests die sometimes, but that's usually just to make the character who liked them
feel bad - and designated love interests usually don't have much character potential beyond
"future happy ending for another character", so it's not much of a loss narratively speaking.
But mentors die like it's going out of style! The only deadlier professions in fiction are
"night watchman in a government facility", "street tough in a biker bar" and "mom". Mentors
die a lot, and I'll tell you why. First off, the obvious: it hurts. Mentors
matter to the hero, so by extension they should matter to the audience. If you can't KILL
the hero, you can still HURT them, and killing the mentor will hurt the hero and thus the
audience. Of course, this is only as effective as the audience's relation to the hero. Some
mentor deaths are VERY painful because the hero is well-written and their emotional response
resonates with the audience. Others… not so much.
Next up? It's easy. The mentor's arc is almost always centered on the hero. Other characters
usually have arcs of their own - vendettas, macguffins, romantic subplots, etcetera. But
the mentor is mostly just there because the hero needs a teacher. So in a sense, they're
EASIER to kill off, because their loss only affects the hero's character arc - they don't
usually have an arc of their own, and in the rare cases where they DO, they can still totally
die after FULFILLING that arc. A reluctant mentor who learns to value themselves and
their students has no remaining potential to lose, so killing them becomes easy and
narratively efficient. For the record, this is also why parents and love interests die
so easily - if they aren't a character in their own right, killing them costs nothing
of value and gives the hero that sweet sweet aaaaangst. In short, mentors are easier to
kill than other supporting characters with their own arcs and motives, and they also
strongly impact the hero because they helped and supported them, so they feel the loss
more strongly. Between these two factors, and the fact that
mentors run the risk of making the plot too easy to resolve, it's no surprise that mentors
die so frequently. It's easy, it's painful, and it keeps the hero's journey from being
too simple. Even if the mentor is a character in their own right, once their arc is satisfactorily
resolved, there's nothing keeping them out of the danger zone.
And on top of that, what ELSE are you gonna do with a mentor in the long run? The fact
is, heroes typically outgrow their mentors. They learn all they have to teach, and whether
or not the hero recognizes this, the mentor usually notices. When this happens, the mentor
loses their only solid anchor in the narrative - that the hero is depending on their guidance.
Once the hero outgrows that, the mentor is kinda cut loose. Maybe they have an arc of
their own, but more commonly the mentor either goes off and retires, or - well, dies. This
is a major weakness of all characters whose arc is entirely dependent on another character
- they lose all narrative value when their link with that character stops being relevant.
But at the same time, not all characters need to stand on their own. Sometimes the point
of the character really IS just how they interact with the hero. Just because mentor deaths
are easy doesn't mean they're ineffective or bad.
Lemme take a minute to talk a little about Into The Spiderverse, and there WILL be spoilers,
so skip ahead if you don't wanna hear 'em. Into the spiderverse BOMBARDS Miles with mentor
figures, because the main theme of the movie is summed up pretty succinctly with the Great
Expectations motif. Everyone's got expectations for Miles. His dad wants him to get a sterling
education and apply himself academically; Classic Spidey wants him to follow in his
footsteps and basically just dumps the "power and responsibility" thing on him - Miles has
the power so he HAS to take on the responsibility. Peter B. Parker is a classic reluctant mentor
who just wants Miles to figure himself out but is really bad at actually mentoring him;
the other spider-peeps are all trying to pull Miles in the direction of THEIR personal brand
of spidermanning. And of course, there's Uncle Aaron, who's not really dumping anything on
Miles but is encouraging him to be himself and express himself artistically in defiance
of authority and all that jazz. Now because spiderverse is Oops All Mentors,
it's REALLY not clear who's actually gonna DIE. Spider-Man Classic bites it pretty quick,
fitting the Classic Mentor Obi-Wan archetype - he's just there to pull Miles into the hero's
journey before kicking the bucket at the most inconvenient possible time. Then the movie
puts most of the focus on Peter B., the chronically depressed Reluctant Mentor Spider-Man who's
running on pure power and responsibility because he's systematically lost everything else he
has to live for. Along with all the other spider-peeps, Peter B. is more than willing
to step up to the self-sacrifice plate and stay behind to activate the collider, even
though this'll mean literally disintegrating. Peter B's got death flags for days - but he
survives, and ends the movie in a much better place than he started, because he's actually
secretly NOT a mentor. He doesn't teach Miles much of anything - instead, Miles teaches
HIM to regain hope in his future and a love of the people in his life. I've seen a few
people put forward that Miles didn't need Peter B. as a father figure - Peter B. needed
Miles as a son figure. Miles is the catalyst in Peter B's personal character arc, which
is why it's much more meaningful for him to SURVIVE the movie and pick up the pieces of
his life back home than it would be for him to heroically sacrifice himself.
The rest of the spider-peeps aren't as attached to Miles, except for Spider-Gwen, and she
also turns out not to much of a mentor because she and Miles are more like peers - she knows
more than him, but she's really not interested in teaching him. Again, Miles is a catalyst
for HER character arc. She closed herself off after the death of her dimension's Peter
Parker, and Miles is the one who gets her to open back up again and start reconsidering
the benefits of friendship. Miles needed a mentor, but Peter B. needed a kid and Gwen
needed a friend, so neither of them really got any mentoring done.
And the other spider-peeps don't really get that PERSONAL connection with Miles - they
like him all right, but none of them really think they have the time to get his personal
arc sorted out while they figure out how to not die in the next 24 hours.
But then we get the Davises - Jefferson and Aaron. Miles's dad is stern and puts a lot
of pressure on Miles - he only wants what's best for him, but it produces a lot of tension
between them. And then once Miles gets his powers, that tension only grows - now Miles
can't be fully honest with him, and avoids him more and more. Jefferson knows something's
wrong, but doesn't know how to talk to him about it, because their dynamic is more…
constant pressure than anything else. Miles is a pretty chill kid; Jefferson is a very
straight-laced guy. Jefferson embarrasses Miles in public, Miles acts out while unsupervised.
Miles does something, Jefferson criticizes. Jefferson does something, Miles is embarrassed
or resigned. It's a stable dynamic, but it's not a great one. Jefferson's also set up for
a character arc - he and Miles need to find a way to communicate. And as we've established,
mentors are usually safe until their character arcs are resolved, so he's in the clear for
most of the movie. And then… there's Aaron. Friendly, supportive,
suave, cool. The chill rebel in contrast with Jefferson's straight-laced cop. By far the
character Miles is most comfortable around, the reason Aaron doesn't seem like a likely
choice for the mentor death curse is because he doesn't initially seem like a mentor, at
least not compared to all the other options running around. The movie misdirects us. It
introduces him early as a casual part of the inciting incident - Miles indirectly gets
bitten by the spider because of him. And then he vanishes out of the story cuz he gets a
business call. Miles spends so much time looking for someone to teach him how to be spider-man
that we don't notice that there are OTHER mentors at play in this movie. And while Miles
is busy juggling half a dozen spider-people and dodging his dad, the true mentor figure
is playing out his own arc - Aaron is moonlighting as The Prowler, directly opposing Miles and
the gang without realizing who he's dealing with. Yup, Aaron is a surprise Evil Mentor
of the secretly evil variety. Miles absolutely freaks out when he learns this, and Aaron
freaks out when Miles reveals his identity. But when he refuses to hurt him - because
despite his villainy, he could never hurt Miles - Kingpin kills him. And in hindsight,
it really shouldn't have been a surprise that Spider-Man's origin involves his uncle getting
shot. Whoops. Aaron's death is a catalyst for Miles and
Jefferson's dynamic arc - his death compels Jefferson to open up and reach out to Miles
in a way he didn't seem comfortable with earlier, and admit that he just wants what's best for
Miles, and whatever Miles chooses to do, he knows he'll do great. This in turn provides
Miles with the pep he needs to sort out his powers and come into his own as Spider-Man.
Aaron is the only mentor figure with no expectations for Miles. Jefferson's character arc involves
letting go of his expectations for Miles. And when Miles becomes his OWN kind of spider-man,
the other spider-peeps DROP their expectations of him, because the only way they know how
to teach him was teaching him to be like THEM, and instead, he ended up like… HIM. And
that's FINE. Every other mentor has an arc of their own - but unfortunately for Aaron,
he was a good mentor right from the start. He just wanted Miles to be himself. That was
the whole point. And when he dies, he just reaffirms that. He wanted Miles to look up
to him, he let him down by being a supervillain - and getting himself killed because of it
- but he believes Miles is the best of all of them, he just needs to keep going. Aaron
is the only character in the story whose death narratively outweighs his character potential.
By dying, he produces a TON of angst and hurts the audience, illuminates the tragedy of the
dangerous and immoral lifestyle he chose, serves as a superhero origin for Miles, and
motivates Jefferson to mend the rift with his son, which in turn motivates Miles into
getting over his self-doubt and gaining control of his powers. Any other character death would've
been cheap - Aaron's character really earns it. …Lucky him.
So the point is - Spiderverse is really good, go watch it. Mentors come in lots of flavors
but are sometimes a little too narratively anchored to the protagonist, which can weaken
their character on their own. Mentors die because it's easy, but that doesn't mean killing
off mentors is BAD WRITING - it's much more important that you CHOOSE your mentor deaths
for maximum effectiveness, because a dead mentor can be a cheap gutpunch or it can be
the biggest tragedy in the narrative. But also, killing mentors that'd be more interesting
ALIVE is probably not a good idea. So… choose your dead mentors wisely.
…So… yeah!
