So, about this motivation...

I'm writing (gonna write) a thing. The viewpoint character gets rolled up in some political intrigue (of the shitty cover-the-high-up-fella's-reputation-kind) which threatens to uproot him from the place he's settled. He's been on the move all his life and has finally found some place he calls home, and he's very fucked off about it.

To prevent his uprooting, he resorts to murder.

Does that sound believable? Should I make him seem slightly crazy for this, or is this understandable?

If you show that he has something important to lose by giving up his new home, for instance a family, then yes, I'd buy it.

He stands to be returned into government control (it's a futuristic thing - he was cloned in a tube to have regenerative powers) and "disposed", along with most of his friends who got the same thing. He was discharged into civilian life when it turned out current technology couldn't give him all the "features" he needed, but the world shits on clones and so does the government, so he had to do everything himself.

And now some drunk chick fell into the ocean after getting her drink on at the nightclub he runs, so he has to murder a few people to keep himself from being "disposed".

Do you "buy" that?

Are these the same character and the same situation as before?

Your second post didn't make this more understandable.

If I'm reading right, this guy's a clone who could die if he's sent back to the government. Being moved would send him back to the government. If that's what's going on, then yes, that's a good motivation— murdering others to save his own skin works. It won't make him sympathetic—you need a huge, altruistic motivation to make murder acceptable—but believable? Sure.

If he murders people just because he doesn't like moving, that's less realistic... although it could be really funny if done right.

Correction: It takes extreme altruism to make murdering named characters excusable. No one cares if he starts picking off Mooks, though.

Ahem. What Measure Is a Mook? (along with Nominal Importance and all other tropes of that nature) are some of the few tropes on here that get me genuinely angry.

I actually just skimmed most of the thread, so I have no idea what I would think of this guy in particular, but that kind of generalization deserved an objection, because it's not true.

Sympathy, I think, will come from the fact that he is quietly terrified of being uprooted from the place he has managed to settle in. It's less about the risk of being killed and more about the fact that he has literally had nothing all his life, and now that he's finally got something (the nightclub/drug running operation he runs with a few partners/friends) he stands to lose it over some frivolous political thing.

Also, the above reaction to WhatMeasureIsAMook has got me thinkin'. Hmm.

(Double Also X2 Combo: It's not so much the act of being "moved" that will get him killed. Bottom line is that this political reputation cover-up business will include having the witnesses of the girl's death killed so they can't step to the media. He's a witness. Ergo, they plan to kill him so he doesn't talk, which he doesn't plan on doing anyway, but he's a clone so he's going to get killed anyway.

In this story, clones are less than human, really. It's a mindset that was drilled into the populace to keep them from raising eyebrows over the fact that they're literally being made just to get killed in wars.)

edited 24th Aug '11 10:24:57 PM by MisterAlways