"I had it all, and now I have nothing."

The Necromancer's Lair
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Do you have a character that had a pretty good life then due to some circumstance they lost that good life and now have nothing? Pretty much, your character has to adapt to this newfound life that they never thought they would have in a million years.

This character could be rich, famous, or had a simple life that drastically changed due to some unfortunate reason that they couldn’t really do much about.

Do you have a character like that? What is their new life that they were forced into?

My Turn:

In my story Red Reign: Monster in White, I have my MC Nixora (yes, she was meant to be used in the House of Naivin, but I changed that I am allowed to change my mind.) She was a royal princess of a war-torn country who lived a somewhat glamorous life due to being royalty. That all ended when the Knighthood Federation came and destroyed her nation, by performing a Total Cleansing. She thought they came to help but instead they came to destroy. To make matters worse she caused even more destruction and bloodshed when she piloted a mysterious mech that she discovered while trying to escape from the Knights who wanted to kill her. Now, her nation is a Shadowland, and she is no longer royalty. Right at the moment, she is forced to work with an organization who wants to use her to achieve a certain goal. So, she is upset and bitter over losing everyone and everything she even cared about along with the life that she never thought she would lose in an instant.

So, Nixora have mostly everything to having absolutely nothing and the poor girl is becoming miserable over it.

What about you guys? Do you have any characters similar to my Nixora or are you are getting to that point?

Lend me your thoughts.

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My antagonist, Nattaleah, lived a very comfortable life before it was all taken away from her. She wasn’t quite royalty, but her parent’s owned land and servants and things like that. They were well off, especially for the time period. But then her adoptive brother, the MC, Errol, stole all her family’s wealth that he could take with him and burned their home and land down to the ground before running away. She went from living a life of luxury to having absolutely nothing in one day.

For years she was forced to work as a servant to another family that was like how hers used to be, them flaunting that in her face. Eventually she got into dark magic and extended her lifespan well beyond what it should be capable of and earned back a lot of the wealth she lost. But she’s still bitter towards Errol and wants revenge. He’s a faerie and still alive in modern times as well, so she’s dedicated her life and magic to hunting him down and killing him.

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I get the feeling in due time, my character Nixora will become an antagonist or something close to in over the progression of the story.

Same with Nixora. LOL!

Nixora yearns for revenge too after losing her kingdom to the Knighthood Federation’s purging. If she has to be used as a tool for the organization that she is currently with to get what they want, so be it.

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Geldrid, as you know has had loss in his life, but more than I have told here before…

It began with the death of his childhood friend who he could not save, and he tortured himself daily for his failings. Yet, life indeed goes on. And in time he found love. A young farmhand from the South Fife. In time he frequented her township and a fondness between them grew. After some time they had become a couple, as he spoke of his undying love for her, and his restless heart would calm within the gaze of her eyes. She indeed did feel the same for he, and they removed far from the township to the edge of the Great Woodland of Mund. In those quiet times they had children, and prospered in all they did together…

But life has its cruel ways, and as Geldrid remained youthful in his long seasons, his wife grew old and in time passed from the world. This grieved him deeply, and in time he wandered far into the lands of Arillion without purpose…

In his long wanderings he found no peace of heart, and returned to his homestead. It was there that he was met with his third grief. For he found three graves not one, he had wandered long, and without knowledge of time. Before him lay the graves of his children…

So overcome with grief of his wife’s death, he become sick of mind, and wandered in darkness for too many seasons without heart. This parted his ways with his children, and he grieved further for the time he wasted…

SD

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That is such a pretty name :blush: It’s like Natalie but prettier. No shade to any Natalies out there.

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I would guess it would eat at her from the inside. I had a character like that and you really need to be careful not to turn them into a completely bitter person or there will be nothing left for the reader to cheer them on for.

They still need to capture hearts somehow.

Jack is a charismatic jerk loved and hated by many. But as long as people pay him and give him fame, nothing else matters. He also does good deeds selflessly but always makes a point to say how it was all for a selfish reason even if it clearly wasn’t.

He is later dubbed as the “strangest kindest person”. It comes from his inability to be vulnerable. No way can he be nice without getting something in return. Nice is weak.

When he loses everything and all the people around him, that’s when he shows his vulnerability to the audience for the first time. I’m hoping people can’t help but cheer him on. He then finally admits his regrets and wants to do something to fix it.

Then just when you think he’s finally willing to be genuinely selfless, he adds a selfish reason to it and it’s clearly a stretch :stuck_out_tongue: Jack is going to be a jerk in the end. You cannot un-jerk Jack.

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She is miserable but more so upset over losing everything that she once own. It doesn’t help that people in the organization that she joined aren’t being kind to her neither. They don’t tolerate spoiled and sheltered little princesses. Nixora will grow out of that eventually and toughen up more as the story progresses, I am certain of it. I just have to get there. LOL!

I’ll do my best so that she can capture my heart and the hearts of future readers.

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There’s more than one way to do this. You don’t have to give them fame and fortune, but if you strip away their sense of who they are, you get to taste an insecurity that is deeper than a few coins and shinies. I like doing this to characters, but the two that delve into this are Rachael from Begging is for Losers and a young half-dwarf in the 3rd In the Game of the Gods–neither of which I’ve finished.

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“I had it all, and now I have nothing.”

This is literally me after eating cake :flushed: .

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LOL!

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Interesting. I will accept this way too!

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Part of it is that it’s hard for me to get into stripping riches from a person to poor. Now, insecurity as an economic crash comes, yeah, I get that better than this one person losing everything while everyone else is still static.

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Hmm…you are giving me a bit of an idea for my second novel.
Where my character loses their sense of self and ends up with nothing sound great.

Care to dive more into losing insecurity as a character? Pretty please.
:blush:

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No problem.

Think of it as a level of foils and labels.

While Rachael doesn’t explain it as being California Valley Girl on the surface, while being an unwanted child who is told to fear the wolves all the time (and some of it there is a legit reason for), but she’s half indigenous South-American werewolf, herself, had her physical appearance altered as a very young child, and so:

Foils:
She doesn’t look like she’s used to. Im not planning on ever directly addressing racism or classic too overtly, but yes, her change in looks is an in-pack fight or two.

Labels:
She was grumbling about her mate being a primitive (instinctual beast), they have had fights over it, and what she uncovers about herself is that her first time using plumbing was when she was 10 years old. So, the person who comes from a more primitive background is herself. This kind of is a place where she realizes she’s what she’s been designating others as being.

And that can be done far more subtly, where someone realizes that the things they hate in others is what they themselves do but excuse in themselves–as is normal of humans.

But there’s points where she’s guessing what her before the change would have done, what her before her past was brought back would do, and the woman who carries both parts not being like either being does a 3rd thing, and she’s doing her best to rationalize through it all.

For ItGotG, that character thinks she’s a full-dwarf. These dwarves I treat as not horribly short, but definitely twice as wide, so they have kind of a Maui build–male or female…except this one. The premise of this world is that most sentient species find their origin in Elves (space-faring species that had their genetics packed with other beings’ DNA to create new races on their new world. Fixing mistakes in the code can be done by going back to the source (Elves), so she makes a contract with an available one, and finds out some way or other that she’s not a “mistake”, but a half-breed, and sets off to find the other half of herself, which would be closer to a Seraphim, technically making their personal deity more like her grandfather. she wasn’t supposed to be born, and her mother was created fully adult. So the “mistakes” are her not fully expressing her other half.

Her god/grandfather analog wants to keep her like her mother’s people, but as she’s not wholly his property, he makes a wager with this descendant that she has to win back the Elf in the contract to remain free without the things the Elf knows of as her.

So for her, it’s not that she finds new things about herself that she’s forgotten, but that as each new thing is “like my old partner”, it’s taken from her, until he figures it out. So, she can’t forge armor in front of him, she can’t cuss like she used to, she can’t reference shared memories, and again, she looks like her mom instead of almost dwarven.

It’s a point for an argument when he finds out.

So this is two different ways to deal with it. One is more contemplative, and the other is more action. Both are pretty difficult.

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In a series I’m working on, the MC is just your normal teen wizard, taking on commissions to take care of some magical problems and anomalies. Unfortunately, the governing-body of their magical kingdom, if you will, is corrupt or should I say lazy. When an old, presumably dead, dark wizard resurfaced, killing and taking souls to regain life, the MC was caught in the crossfire. Well, it wasn’t much of a war. The government was doing something to take care of the threat, but they’re doing it in a slowest pace possible, under the guise of “we don’t want to cause panic”. MC, of course, trusts their government cause he works for them. The MC was only pushed to action when his friends fell victim to the dark wizard. Since then, his normal life turned around and turned for the worst.

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I have character named Tamzi, who in life was just an average Mesopotamian/Babylonian-era (haven’t decided yet) guy. After his death, he arrives in a seemingly empty afterlife. Other ghosts start appearing in the afterlife after his arrival, but he becomes their unanimous leader. He has a kingdom built, which he becomes king of and he rules peacefully and fairly for centuries. He even falls in love and marries his ghost wife, Nanaya.

He’d eventually meet his best friend, a recently deceased knight named Blackburne who’d just arrived in the afterlife. Tamzi shows him the ropes and soon Blackburne becomes his trusted second-in-command. Eventually, it comes to light that Blackburne’s been hiding some secrets from Tamzi. Namely, that Blackburne’s been keeping his own son imprisoned because of reasons. This revelation ends with the murder of Blackburne’s son. A murder of one ends up being a murder of thousands when Blackburne ends up destroying the kingdom and everyone in it in a fit of panic and rage.

Only Tamzi and Blackburne were left alive, though scarred (in Tamzi’s case, he’s blinded). Their memories kinda get scrambled and mixed up with each other, but that’s a whole other thing. Tamzi’s memories are especially messed up. He can’t remember his fallen empire, or his murdered wife, or that he used to be king. He can’t even remember his own name, and so gets dubbed “Crow” by others.

Blackburne goes on to rebuild another city of ghosts, which he becomes king of. As for Crow, after some bad PR thanks to Blackburne, he gets branded as this afterlife’s “devil” of sorts, and lives as a blind hermit all alone in the desert, hunted and hated by all, in the centuries since.

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Born of some majority religious group, participates in the active oppression of another group due to insecurity over personal strength, murders some sickly child in the presence of another, regrets it; learns that said group’s belief of their god being born among them actually happened and he managed to unfortunately cause said god to actively seek revenge; active reversal of oppression situation against majority religious group, cue rising inability to defend himself from violence and onset of stronger depressive symptoms; final major incident and eventual self-inflicted loss of life.

Miss you best boii. :pray:

And then di Acroina went and did the same exact damn thing because these people never learn.

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