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!