Discussion The best age for a protagonist to start at.

I'm developing a novel where years will go by. My idea is to start at age 10 like pokemon since I want a optimistic and pure protagonist who will slowly mature, who ends his journey in his early to mid 20's. What do you think?

 

The novel starts with him at 10 years old and ends with him in his mid 20's? Or you mean just the journey ends?

 

Depends, 10 if you want him/her to experience a harsh life since early life.

 

write as long as . . . . his not like ash . . . who is a immortal . . . and no pokemon theme please.

 

You might be better off studying the stages of brain development depending on what type of story you want.

It might provide ideas for your character development.

 

Kind of depends on what type of novel you want to really write and also personal preference. If this is more of a slice of life then the younger the better since you can progress easier and it gets more in depth. If its an action series with fighting you could do a short interaction at 10 showing innocence but personal preference I would prefer them to be 12-14 before being forced into a fight.

 

Logic dictates before turning 12-14 mc shouldn't be able to actually do anything him/herself (other than staying cooped up in a room full of books (torture chamber). That is if you're aiming for at least 'believable if you really try' level.

EDIT:
before 12-14 kids are pretty much, you throw things at them and they either sink in or bounce off. only once they're past that will they have some deeper(or more complex) thoughts.

 

I like those kind of stories.
But in those kind of stories, the character development is extremely important since you have not just a MC growing by the event he lives but his mental age too (and body but that's less important obviously).
So it's an important point that you should be careful about

 

The coming of age for most people in the world is around 16. prime time is 16 to 20 for hero to adventure if you are looking to grow a protagonist. If you want a veteran, then it can be much greater

 

For an normal MC then yea probably around 10 is where they should "train"? since idk the theme to the novel idk whether its like cultivation or magic or w/e. then after the self training they go out at like 15-16 or something of sort. Ofc this should all go to shit if the MC is reincarnated and can still remember while being just born, so he can do secret training from young and then big reveal later on?

 

tbh I like the stories where the MC starts as a wee little child - sometimes baby (tbh again, i think the only one that i've read that had a "realistic" kind of baby and also have parents who have "realistic" reactions to said baby was Re:Gentle Heart over at royal road, to bad he didnt update it )

Anyways, aside from that, i think best age is 16. I don't know why but i feel like that's the age where the most developments can be written about

 

reincarnators usually have gloomy past, which OP pointed out would preferably be not the main theme

 

What , donnowanna make a millions years old MC ?
The bad thing about too young MC is that they are limited too much and most of what they do is fucked up
(There is a novel sofia something where a 1year old mc goes through royal court , met the king and shit in order to become the fourth court wizard ... it's because he can do magic and killed some bad dudes , that's an extreme case but if you simply use a teenager , while writing the love interests and shit will come by themselves)

 

What genre and tropes/tags will you be using?

 

that one has different mental age tho.

 

I like it when the story starts from birth.

 

Felicia from Felicia's Second Life started at 10 years old. I was accused of being a pedophile. If you wish to write a protagonist who is young and mature or able to do stuff that adults usually do, be prepared for the pedophobes to come out of the woodwork. If you're thin-skinned like me, you will absolutely lose motivation to write ever again. But then again, you're not me, so maybe you can weather it a little.

p/s: Felicia is also going to die in her mid 20s, that's why I started her early. But my story was reported to Amazon twice for pedophilia when there's no sex at all and despite Amazon having already explicitly cleared the story before I published it there.

 

It's more fun when it starts before birth

 

just make sure you don't end with a mess like Close Combat Mage....

 

I have the amazon tab opened since a few days ago
Should I ?