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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47916
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47916
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

A love interest is not the only reason to risk life and limb. IRL there are many stories of people risking life and limb to save children, sometimes losing their life. In psychology there is a real phenomenon, primarily involving young adults in their teens or twenties, of taking insane risks to save a child they don't even know. Daniel Goleman documents some of this as "Amygdala Hijack", e.g. IRL a soldier in his early twenties visited (for entertainment) a tall bridge over a flooding river, while watching the river below with trees and debris rushing past at high speed, he saw a five year old in the water, and without realizing he was doing it vaulted the rail and dove about thirty feet into that churn, fully clothed, found the child and brought her safely to shore. After the fact he said he couldn't remember making any decision, one instant he saw the child, the next thing he remembers is hitting the water.

A young teen girl, waiting for a bus, ran into traffic moving at speed to snatch a three year old (that wandered off the opposite sidewalk) out of the way of a truck. She also couldn't remember making a decision, she saw the child and the next thing she remembered was holding the kid in the air in the middle of traffic.

There is nothing wrong with giving your hero a love interest, the issue is whether the love interest could just be replaced by something else, like a kid in danger.

The best love interests (and kids in danger) are actually critical to the hero's success, they aren't just there to be rescued, and the hero would not succeed without them. Otherwise, they truly are not important to the plot, they could be replaced by something else the hero would devote their life to, like art, or "the truth", or "democracy" or their Religion, all real-life things people have taken risks to preserve. The Founding Fathers literally risked their lives to realize the USA, not out of a particular love interest, but to escape subjugation. Many slaves risked and lost their lives for freedom, not just for a girl back home.

True Love is complementary and synergistic; the two lovers are emotionally better together than the sum of what they would be alone.

If you have a love interest, this is what you need to portray, that the love is not one-sided, and the hero will lose an important part of himself if he fails, his life will be diminished NOT just because he lost her, or she couldn't please him any more, but because of the ways in which she provided the strength where he was weak, the intelligence where he was dumb, the understanding when he was confused, the humor when he was dour. She has to be a real person with her own strengths and weaknesses, complementary to his weaknesses and strengths. They need to mate in more than a physical sense.

Then it won't be a cliché, he isn't losing just a pretty sperm receptacle he can replace with a phone call and a few hundred dollars.

Original score: 25