The story behind Caged Warrior
It all began as a short script sent to a contest.
It was NYCMidnight’s annual short screenplay challenge. You get a genre, a location, and an object.
I suppose my genre was fantasy and mountains the location, and I am certain that the object was a grandmother.
In fantasy and most other genres, grandmothers are old and wise or old and lost their marbles. My idea was to have an unexpected grandmother. I made my old woman a warrior, still active in her trade. She was agile and had stamina, even if she was no longer as strong as she used to be.
And with her, she had her eleven-year-old orphaned grandson.
The short script showed her dilemma to be incapable of taking care of him because of her lifestyle. He wants to stay with her, living a safe life. She can not train him as a warrior, and he needs an education in a trade to support himself as adult. She can never offer him the life he used to have when his parents were alive.
And the kid bogs her down.
I named her Avia, since it means grandmother in Latin and was a short word, easy to read and say aloud.
That short script might have been good enough to get further into the contest. It was well-received by the judges. But the thing with that contest was that you had to write two scripts before the selection was made. For my second assignment, I got the genre comedy, location a kitchen, and the object was a water bottle.
Comedy is not my cup of tea.
I can have some dry chilly humor sometimes, but to write something funny including a water bottle in a kitchen did not work. The comments I got were simply “where’s the fun?” And I could say the same. That script flunked with every right. It was horrible.
But my short script about Avia grew in my head. What would happen if you have a warrior who is used to doing things her own way, who has been free to follow her own choices her whole life, and suddenly get a child to take care of.
To be a grandmother she had to have a child herself. What kind of relationship did she have with the father, if she was free to be a warrior then as well?
What did it mean to be a warrior?
What I knew for sure was that the responsibility for her grandson made her feel caged, the one thing she feared in life.
She loved her grandson but was incapable of settling down as a farmer, caring for him.
It was not without that my mind went to the many men through history leaving the kids to their wives to deal with. And many stories about single men getting a child to care for in the middle of doing other things in life. There has also been a few stories about women not wanting children suddenly getting them when a sister dies for example.
All of these stories end with the adult settling in to care for the child.
It is what we want. A happy child with a future and an adult who loves them and cares for them.
I did not want that with my story.
I am a happy parent, but why must every story tell that everyone is suited for parenthood, deep down? There are lousy parents out there. And people who chose not to become parents and feel happy with that choice.
Avia wants him to get a good education somewhere, but since he does not want to leave her, it is just as controversial as being forced to marry someone, to force a profession on the child.
Even though it might seem like it, Caged Warrior is not a dark fantasy.
There is hope in the respect that different people have different needs and Avia loves his grandson.
