Post #2644358

2026-05-05 16:52 UTC

From comments I feel like the mention of elderly protagonists sucked all the air out of the room even though I was talking about a pretty specific technical aspect of older protagonists in worldbuilding, rather than fictional representation of older people in general? :blobcat_think: Maybe it's understandable given that elderly protagonists are something of a rarity especially in genre lit spaces; I did in fact mention that aspect in an earlier draft of the op but cut that part out because it was already too long. In the earlier draft I mentioned "The Day Before the Revolution" by Ursula K. Le Guin https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-day-before-the-revolution and "Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200" by R.S.A Garcia https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/tantie-merle-and-the-farmhand-4200/ as the few other examples I know of, both of them superb science fiction short stories with older female protagonists where the viewpoint characters' knowledge of how the world used to be serves to ease readers into aspects of the world. * Sorry for the double edit, inserted the wrong link the first time xD h/t @otfrom@functional.cafe !

Replies (2)

@ljwrites@writeout.ink 2026-05-05 17:19

And I'm sure there's some overlap in this effect between immortals (vampires, elves, um... robots?) and elderly mortals, but I'm not the biggest fan of immortal protagonists personally so I wouldn't know and it just seems to me it's not the same effect though there might be similarities. The poignancy an elderly mortal protagonist is not just the time they've lived but the fact that their time is drawing to an end: The world they knew, the good, bad, and everything in between, will die with them and the people who knew it along with them are gone or going fast. Decline in faculties and health also means that the elderly mortal's ability to learn this changed world and move in it will be increasingly limited, though it's certainly there. And so the death of the elder reflects the death of the world they knew. Whether that's more or less emotionally resonant than being immortal and an eternal mausoleum of long-lost worlds is a matter of taste and the individual works involved, but the effect just seems different to me.

Open ##2644359
@otfrom@functional.cafe 2026-05-05 20:01

@ljwrites@writeout.ink https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-day-before-the-revolution

Open ##2644382