[Cliche Device] The Dead Parents.

Think Harry Potter. Think Hunger Games. Think fully every YA shit-show novel adapted to movies with the Cinderella leads and their other bullshit.

Assuming that introducing unseen hardship to a character's PERCEIVED backstory is going to increase empathy or characterization is a think-trap. Don't get caught in this Disney Channel cliche (although that deals more with divorce).

Find me a fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, apocalyptic, space marine, cyber-punk, mega-corp, or really any type of manuscript with a set of normal parents and I'll show you a duck with a top hat.

By now I'm sure you're all thinking: Holy shit, Glitch is right. Why does every author choose to kill the parents?

I'll tell you the three main reasons:

1) Weak backstory.
2) Inability or unwillingness to write proper characters that would exist in any real world scenario.
3) "Woe is my character!" or "My character is a strong, self-raised, well rounded, person."

That isn't to say these are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, it is usually these layers of thinking that are used as the justification. "Well, I don't really have a backstory...well I don't really wanna write the parents either...well it would make him or her stronger if they were just...dead. Yep. They're dead. Dead parents."  

When I was first starting out as a writer, I never wrote parents. I loved dead parents. It made my characters unique and dynamic! Similar to the "my character was ALMOST raped" scene, dead parents in most of the manuscripts and novels I see published are just another badge of honor or pointless additive to make you empathize. It's trite. It's forced. Stop doing it.

Killing the parents in prologue is even worse. Fantasy authors are specifically trite about it. We get it. They don't have parents. Either leave it at that, or just write the god damn parents in. The three reasons for people usually writing dead parents are the same three ways you can solve the issue.