* glass smash *
Is there any plot device more versatile than amnesia?
I don't think so.
Want to turn a good guy bad? Amnesia!
Want to turn a bad guy good? Amnesia!
Wanna make a character's backstory mysterious? Amnesia!
Wanna obfuscate the true stakes and premise of the story by purposely hiding information from your audience?
Amnesia!
Wanna spice up a romantic subplot with some cheap drama? You better believe it's time for some amnesia!
Woo!
It's amazing how easy it is to write some drama and mystery into your story
when you just physically remove the knowledge and personal development from your character's brains.
Now, amnesia as a trope is kind of rife with abuse and can be tricky to handle for a number of reasons.
We'll get to the problems this trope struggles with later,
but first, let's get a bit of a sense of what we're dealing with here.
At its core, the amnesia trope is very simple.
A character loses some or all of their memory.
How and why this happens, how complete the amnesia is,
and the impact it has on the characters can all vary wildly from story to story.
For example, some stories use amnesia as their premise
a character wakes up with no memory of who they are or what they want.
These stories often turn this into a mystery, where the protagonist tries to find out who they are and what happened to them to take their memory away.
In some cases, they might learn that the person they used to be was a total jerk and this can freak 'em out.
But most stories use amnesia on a smaller scale by giving it to characters the audience is already familiar with,
removing their memory of events the audience witnessed or otherwise knows about.
It's surprisingly common for a hero to get total amnesia and end up working with the villains for a while,
or for a villain to have the reverse happen.
In that case, it often borders on the 'in another life, we could have been friends' thing,
if the amnesiac villain has a really good dynamic with the heroes.
Sadly, these basically never last, and the villain will go back their old villain-y ways once their memory comes back.
One secondary characteristic of these temporary amnesia plots,
is the amnesiac will either forget all of their cool abilities or skills, rendering them uncharacteristically helpless,
or they won't forget them, but they won't realize they have them until something provokes them,
and they bust out a skill they didn't know they had.
In the first case, the character might get stuck in a situation they could easily fix if they remember they had powers,
while in the second case, the character is likely to surprise themselves with how hyper-competent they are in a moment of stress.
Whenever a Batman-like hyper-competent badass gets amnesia,
it's a 50/50 shot if they remember they can do basically anything or not,
if they don't, they'll usually get kicked around for a while before remembering they know how to kick back,
and if they do, they'll just be cartoonishly competent at everything with no idea why or how.
But fictional amnesia doesn't have to be total,
sometimes characters just lose specific memories like a chunk of time.
Sometimes instead of being an amnesia thing,
this missing time trope is actually meant to signal if the characters are in a dreamlike unreality,
and skipping around without remembering how you got from point A to point B is pretty common in dreams.
It also might be a sign that you're being possessed by something and whenever it hijacks your brain,
you don't remember what it does.
In either case, it's usually a bad sign.
But sometimes the character just gets bonked on the head and forgets a week of their life,
and this is almost always used when that week included some kind of important character development,
like an advancement in a romantic subplot,
and this is pretty much just used for cheap drama,
so character A forgets their relationship upgrade with character B and character B gets to feel bad about it.
But not all amnesia is an accident. Sometimes it's deliberate and that usually comes in two flavors:
self-inflicted or villainous scheme.
Villains love wiping people's memories because it makes it easier for them to be villains without anyone knowing.
Sometimes they'll wipe a hero's memory and give them some narrative that puts them on the same side.
Sometimes if they can get away with it, they'll wipe everyone's memory so they can control the narrative completely.
As with most villainous schemes,
this one rarely works forever and the hero will end up snapping out of it without too much trouble.
This one also kind of overlaps with brainwashing or mind-control, which I've talked about in more detail elsewhere.
The more interesting case is self-inflicted amnesia,
where a character deliberately removes some or all of their own memories, either as part of a greater plan or as some kind of heroic sacrifice.
Sometimes the premise of a story or episode will be that a character wakes up without knowing where they are or what's happening
and will gradually piece together that they're the ones removed their own memories for whatever reason.
Sometimes a character has to remove their own memories so they can go perfectly undercover with no chance of giving themselves away,
and sometimes the only way to fix the plot is to sacrifice your memories.
The sacrifice can be temporary or permanent, but it's frequently temporary because it would be a downer ending otherwise.
This one's often on par with the drama levels of a full-on heroic sacrifice,
because you could argue that your memories are what make you who you are -
sacrificing them is almost more devastating than sacrificing your life,
and one recurring theme in many amnesia plots is amnesia inner conflict,
where an amnesiac character in the process of regaining their memory struggles with their restored memories as they clash with who they are now.
This is very common in cases where the amnesiac character had a very complicated life before losing their memory,
maybe one that sent them down some pretty dark paths or otherwise changed them from the clean slate the amnesia gave them
It's especially common with amnesiac former villains,
who, without the memory of their formative experiences that directed them into villainy, are actually pretty nice people.
But it doesn't need to be so dramatic -
anyone whose life experience has made them into a complex person is likely to be somewhat overwhelmed
or otherwise unsettled by that version of themselves when they're blanked out into a clean slate.
Amnesia as a trope sees a lot more use than just these examples,
and there's also a hefty bit of overlap between them.
Most of them can be combined without any issue,
and there's a lot of really fun, well-written stories that leverage amnesia for drama, heroism, character development - all that good stuff.
But amnesia is not typically a very well-liked trope.
Now a lot of tropes are kind of maligned just because people are sick of them 'cause they're so overused.
There's maybe nothing inherently wrong with the trope,
it's just become a cliche and people get tired of seeing it over and over.
And on the flip side, some tropes are generally disliked
because they have inherently problematic elements that carry unpleasant or toxic implications.
The amnesia plot is in an awkward middle ground here, because while it's not really inherently bad,
there are a few facets of it that make it hard to do well,
and as a result the market's kind of oversaturated with bad amnesia plots and people are kind of getting sick of those.
I'd say the biggest problem with the amnesia trope is that it's well, kind of divorced from reality in a way not many tropes are.
And I don't mean that like it's a fantastically unreal thing,
I mean amnesia is a real thing, but the fictional representation has basically nothing to do with how it actually works.
And this means that when you pull out the amnesia plot,
your audience has no idea what to expect, because it's pretty much guaranteed you won't actually be playing by the rules.
And since there's a lot of pent-up frustration at the amnesia plot overall, your audience has been trained to anticipate the worst.
I don't want to get too far into the real-world neurology here,
but the short of IRL amnesia is that it typically comes in two flavors: retrograde and anterograde.
Retrograde amnesia is the loss or inaccessibility of some long-term stored memory,
while anterograde amnesia damages the brain's ability to form long-term memories going forward.
Retrograde amnesiacs will lose memory before the event that caused it,
while anterograde amnesiacs will stop forming memories after.
Some sedatives and other drugs can cause temporary bouts of amnesia,
and things like alcohol abuse or serious physical trauma can result in blackouts,
which are essentially short bouts of anterograde amnesia where your brain's not saving any data to the hard drive.
Some cases of psychological trauma results in repressing memories that essentially cause small cases of retrograde amnesia,
but in most cases, amnesia is caused by brain damage, and, possibly most importantly,
there's no way to reverse it!
Sometimes with therapy and lots of work, a retrograde amnesiac can work their way back to a memory they've lost access to
but it doesn't all come rushing back, and memories lost to anterograde amnesia are just never saved to long term memory storage.
There's no way to get back what isn't there.
And of course, brain damage does lots of other bad things, and can cause stuff like seizures, or loss of language skill, or other unfun consequences.
Real-world amnesia is messy, tragic and basically unfixable.
And while this version sees some use in fiction, it's very rare for an author to actually get into the really unpleasant parts of it.
Fictional amnesia is almost always retrograde, it's usually extremely precise and clean in what it makes the person forget,
and most importantly, it's almost always reversible.
A fictional amnesiac can forget a specific interval of their life, or more egregiously, something as specific as a single person,
and even the ones who forget everything will almost always still remember how to talk, use their social skills,
and sometimes even do things like drive or operate heavy machinery.
Rather than losing track of when and where they are or the circumstances immediately before and after some kind of traumatic injury,
the amnesiac is more likely to have a single chunk of their memory neatly removed.
Now this sometimes involves fictional causes, like magic, or superpowers, or whatever, which is fine because that's completely fiction
and we don't necessarily expect that to work in a way that we recognise,
but sometimes the writer has it caused by trauma or brain damage, while still being totally fixable with zero side effects.
Fictional amnesia is optimized for drama without unsexy negative long-term consequences or roadblocks to restoring the status quo.
There's almost nothing in common between how real-life amnesia works and how fictional amnesia works.
Now there is obviously nothing wrong with tropes being unrealistic.
Fantasy and sci-fi is my bread and butter and I've gone on the record talking about how much I love the power of friendship,
but the trouble with amnesia is, it's a real set of medical conditions, that's treated more like a magical ruleless plot device
that can be caused or cured in any number of ways, and as a result, the audience has no idea what to expect.
And while surprising your audience is often a fun and good thing to do, in this case, it's not actually a good thing.
I feel like I'm maybe not explaining this very well, so let's, let's take another example.
For contrast, let's say your fictional character gets stabbed and starts bleeding.
Your audience is likely to assume that this character is hurt, and that barring some kind of personal healing factor,
they're probably going to need medical attention to keep them from bleeding out, or getting an infection, or whatever.
More medically-minded members of the audience might even gauge that the injuries should really be a lot worse than the story is treating it,
maybe requiring surgery or immediate attention depending on where it happened.
For example, getting stabbed in the stomach is not something you're supposed to walk off.
At minimum, the stabbee is gonna want to get it cleaned and bandaged,
and after the action is over, they're gonna want to take some time to heal,
and the audience basically knows enough to expect that these things will probably happen.
This is based on the audience already knowing from basic real-world context that being stabbed sucks,
and thus knows to expect a specific range of treatments.
But if the trope of getting stabbed was treated like the trope of getting amnesia,
our audience would be left floundering, unsure of what to expect.
The stab wound could have any impact between leaving a mark and nothing else,
to putting the character in the hospital for weeks and permanently weakening and debilitating them,
and the process to treat it could range from literally just kissing it better
to living with the wound for several weeks before suddenly getting better on your own,
to stabbing them again in the exact same place to reverse the damage.
Whenever someone cures someone's fictional amnesia by hitting them on the head, it makes my head hurt.
Anyway, the point is, while being unrealistic isn't a bad thing,
in this case it means that when you hit your audience with the amnesia plot
they don't know if they're getting into a goofy one-shot episode with the solution to the amnesia is hitting them in the head with a pan,
or an agonizing multi-arc plotline where the character's memory loss is just dragged on and on with no satisfying conclusion because it's never fixed.
Fictional amnesia can be silly or tragic, quick and easy or long and drawn-out,
and sometimes the solution is kissed by the forgotten love interest, and sometimes it's hitting them in the head, and sometimes there is no solution.
The problem is, the amnesia plot has no parameters, no limits, no rules, and most tropes and story elements do have those things.
If a character walks off being stabbed, we want to know why.
A writer can say the amnesia was caused by a bad shrimp dinner and cured by a visit to a mall Santa and the audience just has to deal with that.
And if this amnesia plot is being leveraged for cheap drama, like the bad shrimp dinner makes them forget their beloved spouse
and also think they're an undercover mafioso, then the audience will become painfully aware that the writer is just screwing with them for cheap drama points.
The amnesia plot lets the writer do whatever they want, however they want,
and because the trope is so internally inconsistent, the audience has no way of knowing what exactly will make it stop.
As a general rule, anything that makes the audience aware of the hand of the author is going to break their immersion in the story,
and as a second general rule, nobody likes being emotionally manipulated, least of all by an author.
Make your audience feel things, sure, but don't be cheap about it.
Now this is all just how and why the amnesia plot can easily be misused or abused.
It's basically an authorial diabolis ex machina,
where at any time, for any reason, you can randomly screw with your characters and your audience by smacking someone with amnesia.
Who's gonna tell you you're doing it wrong? It's fiction.
Sure, someone might complain if you stab a character and then act like nothing happened, or if the way to fix it is to stab them again,
but amnesia is already so divorced from its own reality that the disbelief has already been suspended.
Like I said at the beginning, it's a very versatile tool,
but if you use it to screw with your audience for cheap drama for however long you like,
and then hit the off button with some random memory-restoring plot device when you feel like you're through,
the audience is gonna notice, and they're not gonna like it.
Now amnesia is, again, not an inherently bad trope,
it's just been used poorly in the past and a lot of people now dread the amnesia plot because it's burned them before,
but there's a pretty easy way to help solve that one core problem right off the bat -
by telling your audience what to expect.
Frequently, once a character is struck with amnesia, a helpful doctor will diagnose the issue
and then tell the audience something like, their memory will likely come back on its own within a month,
or maybe some sort of deeply emotional shock will help them remember,
or you should try jogging their memory by telling them stories of their own life,
or even their memories shouldn't recover, so don't expect it to, but if you want to hope for the best, you still can.
This clues the audience in on what the rules are in this story, and while they're still cliche, they're not manipulative.
Sure, we all know a deeply emotional shock to restore their memories is 9 times out of 10 going to be a very dramatic kiss from a forgotten love interest,
but it's not made ineffective just because we're expecting it.
It tells us you're not trying to exploit the flexibility of the trope to screw with us, but that you've set rules and you intend to abide by them.
It gives the audience expectations and that's very important -
you can't play with or subvert expectations unless the audience has expectations in the first place,
and in the case of the amnesia plot, most people these days just expect to be disappointed.
Now if this sounds kind of vague, and a bit judgmental, that's because it is...
Fundamentally, art of any kind is about communicating something to your audience - emotionally, narratively, etcetera.
And trying to draw a distinction between writing something that effectively impacts your audience and emotionally manipulating your audience isn't easy.
Sometimes a piece of writing feels like a quality experience you're immersed in, where you're invested because it made you invested,
and sometimes it feels like the writer is standing behind a curtain, tossing rude notes at you and congratulating themselves when you get upset.
I guess it's a difference in focus - writing a quality narrative will have an emotional impact on the audience, but the emotional impact isn't the point of the narrative,
whereas writing something that's just dramatic to provoke a reaction from your audience will feel more empty.
Amnesia plots are easy to use for provoking an emotional response, but can also play a deeper role in the development of characters or dynamics.
If you're just using one because it's easy and it'll make things dramatic, that's emotionally manipulative writing and it's... not great,
but the trope still has a lot of potential and can be used for a lot of interesting stuff.
So... yeah.
Subtitler: In lieu of a Red song, go listen to 20% Amnesia by Elvis Costello.
It's pretty good.