Mentorship is one of the most classic dynamics observed in fantasy stories and often plays a grand role in the shaping of a main character’s life, personality, and growth. Mentors serve as an important part of things like the hero’s quest and are often parental figures for the main characters as well. Creating a powerful mentorship dynamic is something that is important to know how to do in any genre, but in fantasy, there may be certain expectations that differ from other genres. That’s why for today’s post, I’ll be discussing how you can create a meaningful and proper mentorship relationship in a fantasy story.
Why Mentorships Matter in Fantasy
The idea of a mentorship relationship is more than just about guidance and advice or training. Mentors often serve emotional roles for characters and help them try to figure out their place in the world and who they are as a person. Fantasy stories often involve high stakes and intense emotional arcs and a mentor sort of serves as a bridge between the high stakes world and the regular main character.
Mentors are also often teachers, parental figures, guides, and more. Mentorship also provides great narrative potential and mentors can also serve as great guides for readers regarding the history of the world and general world building information. It also allows you to explore the lore of your world in a way that won’t feel like info-dumping on the reader.
Mentor Archetypes in Fantasy
There are many different archetypes that go under the mentor archetype within the fantasy genre as a whole. Each mentor serves their purpose in the story but may specialize more in a certain field over another. Below is a list of common mentor archetypes that you may encounter in the fantasy genre.
1. The Wise Sage
The “wise sage” is often a character like a wizard or a scholar and represents the world of ancient knowledge and wisdom. The wise sage typically provides guidance for the protagonist and teaches them about morality and philosophy in the world. They may provide magic guidance as well, which is why it’s important to know what sort of magic system exists in your world before you start writing.
2. The Warrior Mentor
The warrior mentor archetype is often someone who has been through years of war and battle, learning more than just combat, but also learning about the importance of loyalty, duty, honor, resilience, and sacrifice. The warrior mentor typically has a painful past and has learned many things throughout his years. For the main character, this mentor provides more than just combat training, but also lessons in life and more.
3. The Flawed Mentor
The flawed mentor is an interesting archetype that may have a morally gray compass or they may have issues from their past they have not yet resolved. This may lead to conflict between the main character and the mentor, creating tension and casting shadows on if their judgment is sound or not. This provides an interesting way to show how both the main character and the mentor grow and change over the course of the story and resolve their past problems.
4. The Reluctant Guide
The reluctant guide is a mentor that often may come across as a “lone wolf.” This character may not want to teach the character or want to involve themselves in the situation but there are some circumstances that force them to become a mentor. They may also become more of a parental figure as the story progresses and they may seem detached, but deep down they care a lot more than they let on. These characters can be really interesting, because the story shows how they progress and change and open up over time.
How to Create the Bond Between Mentor and Mentee
1. Establish Shared Goals and Conflicting Perspectives
For a mentor and the mentee, the relationship often indicates shared goals and motivations that allow for both characters to grow throughout the story and work together on something that they both agree on or understand. However, the mentor and the person they are mentoring need not agree with them on everything. In fact, this would be in great conflict to the point of having a mentor, which is to allow the character being mentored to grow and change. There will be resistance and conflict, and this makes for an interesting story, so you should focus on also creating conflict in your book.
2. Give the Mentor More than Skills
A mentor’s guidance goes beyond just skills, techniques, combat, etc… The mentor also should have influence on the mentee’s worldviews, morals, values, identity, concepts, etc… In fantasy, oftentimes a character will face major challenges that will make them question who they are or what they believe. The mentor is there as a sort of guide through such moral dilemmas or may have provided advice and ideas beforehand that allow the mentee to reason through the difficulties in life.
3. Vulnerability is Important
Another important part of building the proper mentorship relationship is to provide moments of vulnerability and difficulty. The mentor and mentee can have moments where they rely on each other or reveal their hidden fears and doubts in life. The mentor and mentee can become closer and you could possibly set up a romance, but that’s not necessary. I think romance is a good relationship to include in fantasy and I’ve talked about how to create romantic subplots in stories, but if you want to focus only on the mentorship as a person who provides advice and growth for the character, then check out my post about non-romantic relationships in fantasy.
4. Introduce Challenges and Possible Sacrifice
The two characters should be different and developed differently, and they should be written in a way that makes it clear that they are not the same person. This is why it is important to work on developing your characters and their backstories. Knowing this, it’s important to show the difference between the characters and to create conflict over goals and methods. There could also be conflict where the mentee becomes better than the mentor or exceeds the mentor in certain things, which could present a moment for different reactions. Additionally, you can include sacrifice on someone’s end and this could help really show the relationship between the characters and how it has grown overtime.
Conclusion
Mentorship relationships in fantasy are really engaging and can be interesting and change the way a story progresses. It could be the core of the story or an element in the story, such as in the hero’s quest, but the idea is that a mentorship relationship needs to be developed properly so that the reader can find it engaging and interesting.
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