Tags
Battle Royale, book, books, fiction, hunger games, If I Stay, Lord of the Rings, LOTR, quotes
“Guilt and bribery are the glue that have held parents and teenagers together for generations. Don’t fight tradition.”
–If I Stay (Movie)
If you’re a frequent reader, you know of my vendetta against passive characters. Things just happen to them, they aren’t driven to act. It’s a little ironic that I work in marketing for an incentive card company. We research what motivates employees to be more productive and how to incent consumers to perform an action. Maybe that has bled into my writing and reading because I love paying attention to the different incentives used to motivate characters.
In Battle Royale, the threat of death motivates students to kill one another, similar to The Hunger Games. Fear can be a strong motivator and so can love. In If I Stay, Mia has several reasons to stop fighting and pass into the afterlife. Her body is in shambles after a car accident that killed both her parents. If her younger brother hadn’t survived, the book would have been over faster than if Elrond just tackled Isildur.
After hearing this quote, I tried to think of characters motivated by guilt or bribery. Somehow, I’m drawing a blank. Help me out by leaving a comment.
-Eliabeth