Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones

And before you try and finish that line, no, chains and whips do not excite me. Ask someone who's read Fifty Shades of Grey if you wanna know more about that. (Raven quote) Ya nasty.

No, no, this writing gripe is about the overabundance of certain character flaws, namely in a character's family. More specifically, abused characters. Because, apparently, almost everyone who's anyone in popular YA literature gets beat behind closed doors at their home.

Is anyone else noticing this?

Tobias from Divergent, Peeta from The Hunger Games, you can infer many more characters that aren't specifically stated to be knocked around. And half the time, the abuse they're receiving doesn't make any sense.

Case in point: Tobias. Trying not to spoil anything for those who haven't read (if you haven't, I recommend it), Tobias' father 'does it for his own good'. But abuse is a selfish action, believing that someone else has wronged the abuser and must be punished for it. So would an Abnegation man beat his son, when he so prudently swore that his life would be one of selflessness? And what would a beating achieve? Pain is a selfish thing; is it selfless to inflict that upon another? It doesn't make sense to me. Does it characterize Tobias, yes, but it doesn't really serve a purpose other than a sort of guilt trip for us to like him more. I didn't need the guilt trip, Tobias is my favorite character.

Not to mention that there are so many other ways to give a character a bad home life or bad childhood without requiring belts, small rooms, bruises, or cuts. Not everyone has a nuclear family: mom, dad, children. There are stepparents, stepsiblings, half-siblings, love children, single parents, no parents, negligent parents. Perhaps even, like in Harry Potter, guardian relatives. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents. These combinations don't appear often in popular literature to pose a problem, except perhaps for the cliche 'evil stepmother'.

I mean, Collins (of The Artist) has no parents, but has three older brothers. They've taken care of her as her parents, but now that she's older, her independence is causing a rift between her and her oldest brother and father figure, Rowe. Brigham (also TA) has a nuclear family, but with the amount of people in it, he's stressed by having to work long hours to feed them all.

You don't need to have an abusive parent or sibling to have family tension, it can come from even the most wholesome-looking group of relatives. So please, dear readers, by all means, take a look at the character's family the next time you read, or the next time you write. There are opportunities for tension everywhere, there doesn't need to be hurt and pain in every character's past. Can we resolve to find a more realistic form of characterization? Where we don't have to beat the living crap out of our characters to show that their lives are as flawed as ours are? I'd appreciate it, and I'm sure our characters would, too.

Band-aids and Neosporin,
Brie