542 – Major Characters With Kids

The Mythcreant Podcast

This week is all about the trials and tribulations of giving kids to your important characters. Or at least it will be, once we finish venting our spleen about the final scene of a certain popular TV show. Writers, please: sons are not spiritual clones of their fathers. It’s weird when a story acts like a guy didn’t really die because he has a male heir to carry on his line. Also: Baby Yoda is pretty cool.

Show Notes

• Warbreaker
• Andor’s Kid
• Temiri Blagg
• Gulp Shitto
• Grogu
• Reactor Andor Article
• Ellie
• Atreus
• Naomi Wildman
• Newt Babies
• Molly O’Brien
• Dark Shadows
• Elora Danan

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Emma G. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…

Chris: Chris.

Oren: And…

Bunny: Bunny.

Oren: Alright, terrible news everyone. The male hero of my story is going to die. It’s very tragic, yet poignant and badass, but so tragic.

Bunny: Nooo.

Oren: And it’s obvious, only one thing to do, right? Is to reveal that his love interest was pregnant the whole time and in the epilogue she has his son. Obviously it’s a son, shut up. My hero has begotten an heir.

Chris: This is what hope is, Oren. It’s just, you need hope.

Bunny: Life goes on.

Oren: This is hope.

Chris: You know, and hope is babies, specifically male babies.

Oren: Only male babies. Babies whose gender is not mentioned in the story but we will make a point of making sure everyone knows that it was a boy baby.

Bunny: And then we can name the baby after the dead hero, which is never weird; a widow naming a child after the dead husband.

Oren: Yeah, a son is basically just the clone of their father. That’s just how it works. It’s logic.

Bunny: That’s what people mean when they say family resemblance.

Chris: Oh dear.

Bunny: I hate nothing more than when a female character has sex for the sole purpose of being a baby canister.

Oren: That’s a fun way to describe it.

Bunny: Like that’s their only role in the story, or like the only reason they had sex is like, oh, this is the outcome.

Chris: It reminds me of Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker, which I have ranted on slightly over the years. One of the things that made me so uncomfortable about that book is they had one of the viewpoint characters who was supposed to be one of the main characters, made a big point about how her religious significance was to be “the vessel”. She was gonna marry this God king and have the next God king or whatever, and it’s just like, this is really uncomfortable.

Bunny: Do you really wanna go there, Brando? Is this something you feel like you have a lot to say about?

Oren: Brando. Brando, why?

Bunny: Brando, no. No, Brando.

Oren: No, Brando.

Chris: I’m pretty sure it’s because he had recently finished The Wheel of Time and he got Robert Jordan cooties.

Oren: It does spread. Like, I have worked with authors who had recently read The Wheel of Time, or The Wheel of Time was their favorite, and I’m like, yeah, I can tell. There are signs.

Bunny: You’re not keeping your cards close to your chest here.

Oren: Next to your bosoms, your sheer fabric covered bosoms is where the cards are. That’s my first clue. Granted, that’s hardly only Wheel of Time, but it is notable.

Bunny: I was just re-listening to the 372 podcast episode on Armada, which is a terrible Ernest Cline book, and it does this exact thing where the premise is that the main character’s dad and mom have been separated and she thought he was dead and then they finally get back together and it’s very emotional, and they have the sex…

Oren: Oh, “the sex”, very nice.

Bunny: The sex, yes, which the main character notes, which is weird. Like, he sees the dad post-sex and is like ‘Ah, they’ve been banging’. It’s extremely weird. But this one bang was enough to get him a baby brother, named after the father, and the father dies. Dies heroically. So, it’s literally exactly this.

Chris: Yeah, the trope, I’ve seen it before too. I’ve seen it previously and it is obviously like, ‘male babies is hope’.

Oren: Yeah. That example is funny because it at least has the slight twist of he already has a son.

Chris: Yeah, true.

Oren: Now he gets another one.

Chris: Look, once the child reaches two years of age, they are no longer hope. Okay? Hope has to be very small.

Bunny: Once they start having a personality and the personality is not the father’s personality, then uh, you gotta rewind the clock a bit and pop another one out.

Oren: Okay. So, spoilers for Andor, ’cause you know, we’ve been dancing around this for a while. The thing that got me about that was not even that it was sexist – ’cause it is – but it was just so trite.

Chris: Mm-hmm. For a show that has such high realism, or tries to establish that super-realistic atmosphere and doesn’t have that kind of, yeah, it’s just definitely theme-breaking.

Oren: Like, Andor is not perfect, right? I’ve critiqued Andor before, but, Andor at least felt like it was devoted to doing its own thing.

Bunny: Wait, explain.

Oren: Oh, I guess you haven’t seen it.

Bunny: No.

Oren: Okay, well, spoilers again because the main character of Andor, Andor, he dies in Rogue One, right? And Andor is technically a prequel. So, the end of Andor is this implication that Rogue One‘s about to start and Andor is gonna die, and then the final shot is of Andor’s girlfriend, Bix, who we haven’t seen for who knows how long.

Chris: She’s supposed to be another rebel, but she just disappears from the show, right? The second season does not, yeah…

Oren: Yeah, she just vanishes and we see her in like the final shot and she has a baby who thankfully the show’s creator was kind enough to let us know is Andor’s son, and it’s so bad. It’s for a bunch of reasons. There was nothing to indicate she wanted a child and every indication that she wanted to keep being a rebel, which apparently she didn’t do.

Chris: But also, she decides to leave after this quote unquote “force healer” who Andor thinks is a fraud, maybe, senses that Andor is special and has some role to play and then she just decides, ‘Oh, because you’re special and you have some role to play, I need to ditch you so that you stay in the rebellion instead of leaving with me’ or something.

Oren: It’s convoluted as all heck, but it’s like if Andor suddenly pulled an “I am your father” reveal, right? It’s just not something you expect to see in this show.

Chris: It’s not like other Star Wars properties where Star Wars generally is lower realism, where we’ve got a lot of heroism with lots of magic, we’ve got all the force powers and the lightsabers, which, you know, not realistic weapons, but they’re cool and they’re colorful. And things are very flashy and there’s lots of aliens and the aliens are a bit hokey but we love them. But Andor has a very different atmosphere that Gilroy purposely made it different from other Star Wars, where it is much grittier, has very few aliens in it, much more subdued, doesn’t really have Jedi or anything like that. Except for the ship that dual-wields lightsabers, that is a little odd.

Oren: Yeah, but we only ever saw that once, and I guess he must have blown it up off-screen or something, ’cause that ship never came back.

Chris: So, it’s just, again, that it doesn’t really match the tone of rest of Star Wars, it’s much grittier and has its own way of doing things.

Bunny: Is the kid named Andor?

Oren: We don’t know. The kid is unnamed, as far as we know. I am desperately hoping we will never see this kid again. I hope this kid goes the way of Broom Kid.

Chris: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of: Broom Kid.

Oren: Broom Kid does have a name, but it’s something silly and I’m not gonna look it up, but it was, you know, a lot of theories about Broom Kid and then they never went anywhere. We never saw Broom Kid again and I’m just really hoping this baby is the same way. I would love to never hear about this baby in any other Star Wars property.

Chris: And again, just in case somebody has not heard Broom Kid discourse, this is a boy that has a really random appearance in Last Jedi and the camera focuses on him for basically no reason. And I think probably the director was setting up a future main character or something but everybody hated him because he’s random and doesn’t belong there.

Oren: All right, I lied, I did look up his name. His name is Temiri Blog.

Bunny: Blog?

Chris: Blog.

Oren: Temiri Blog.

Chris: Is he from the expanded universe?

Oren: I don’t know. He’s just a thing. He’s just Broom Kid, okay?

Bunny: Does he have a blog?

Oren: Maybe it’s Blagg. It’s B-L-A-G-G.

Chris: That does sound like a Star Wars name.

Oren: It does. There’s barely a joke of a meme of random side characters in Star Wars called Gulp Shito, and we are almost there with this character’s name.

Chris: Oh. I feel like we should probably transition to another character who actually has a kid. Like, let’s maybe talk about Mando.

Oren: Oh, we were gonna talk, yeah this podcast was supposed to be about characters with kids. Wow, it’s been 10 minutes.

Chris: It was.

Oren: Oh, no.

Chris: Yep. Oh no, we had something to get off our chest about Andor, okay?

Oren: You just stop trying after 11 years of podcasting. You have your notes and everything and you…

Chris: Look, if we were gonna drive you away, listeners, you would probably be gone already.

Bunny: Look, this is tangentially related. This is about issues with kids and now a specific kid that people have issues with.

Oren: Well, we have issues with. Nobody else seems to care, except for there was one article on Reactor that pointed out just how absolute garbage this Andor scene is and I appreciate that article. But it’s really weird how there’s been almost no discussion of it. I think because people are just kind of in shock that it happened? It was so brief, it was like, what? What is that? Did you really?

Chris: I think it would be easy to just edit that out of your mind, you know, just edit that out of your image of the end of Andor.

Oren: Yeah. I mean, you literally could just clip that out and nothing would change. You don’t need it for hope. The hopeful part is that the rebellion is starting. That’s the hope. That’s what actually makes it feel like a hopeful ending.

Bunny: But what if there was a child?

Oren: Okay.

Chris: Okay.

Bunny: Speaking of children.

Oren: Yeah okay, so we’ve got a little bit of podcast left. We should talk about other characters ‘cause the idea of this episode was supposed to be when you would give your major characters kids and whether you should or not. And we’ll just say that was 10 minutes of explaining a situation where you shouldn’t.

Bunny: Yeah, there you go. We started with a negative example. Now, we give more examples.

Chris: So, as I was gonna say. Mando. Definitely positive example. Although, I think one thing that is worth pointing out is that Grogu slash Baby Yoda in The Mandalorian is not really a full character. He plays a role that’s more similar to what an animal companion would play, where he’s kind of a semi-character. And also the droids, right, kind of fit that same semi-character mold where they don’t talk and they’re very loyal. Right. And so they kind of like tag along and be cute and occasionally do something useful.

Oren: Yeah. And for a while it’s extremely unclear whether Grogu can even understand language and you know, what mental level is he exactly? They say he’s fifty, he acts more like he’s three or something. Is he, who knows? He’s very inconsistent about that. Grogu’s big problem is that he has this arc of going to train with the Jedi, and then that means he’s not in the show anymore. So they’re like, no, actually you’re not gonna do that, you’re coming back. So that whole arc was meaningless.

Bunny: People like him too much. I feel like adult characters having kids is kind of the flip side of the kid characters having parents problem and the adults having kids dilemma is a lot easier to solve because if you don’t want there to be kids, you can just say they don’t have kids. Whereas, if a kid doesn’t have parents, you kind of have to explain that away.

Chris: Look, they’re an orphan. Don’t ask me about it.

Bunny: Yeah. They’re all orphans.

Oren: I am not taking questions at this time.

Bunny: Just, no, no parents, don’t worry about it. It’s probably fine. Let’s get back to the tea shop.

Oren: But Baby Yoda also raises an interesting point when you’re looking at giving your main character a kid, the obvious problem is that if your main character is doing dangerous adventures, probably not responsible to bring a child onto those.

Bunny: THE child, Oren.

Oren: But also, not great if your protagonist just hecks off and leaves their partner to raise the child on their own. Right? We don’t really look kindly on characters who do that. Fathers used to be able to get away with it more. Now there’s, you know, a little more awareness that that’s not good parenting. And Baby Yoda has an interesting solution to this, which is that in the beginning of the show, he’s being hunted so Mando has to carry him around, otherwise he’d just be in too much danger. And then by the time they solve that problem, we’ve kind of gotten used to the idea that Baby Yoda is basically invincible and we don’t have to worry about him too much.

Chris: I mean, it helps that they gave Baby Yoda powers.

Oren: Yes, he does have many, many powers.

Chris: In fact, he’s so powerful that they have to establish that after he uses his powers, then he is like conked out.

Oren: Yeah, he has to take a little nappy nap.

Chris: He has a daily ability.

Bunny: He needs a long rest.

Chris: But not, uh, what are the other ones called?

Oren: He is not an encounter or an at will ability. He can only use it once a day.

Bunny: I mean, escort quests are a pretty common way that kids are used just because, for whatever reason, they have to be taken into danger and your adult character is the one to shepherd them through that. Mandalorian being that, I think Last of Us is also that, and Terminator 2 as well, in which case, you know, you’re running away from something rather than towards it.

Chris: I think a lot of times in those stories, the child character or the young character is there to be like the heart of the more parental character. Certainly with Mando, he’s a mysterious guy, and again, he is fashioned after Boba Fett. I know they decided to make an actual Boba Fett but he’s more Boba Fett-ish than Boba Fett is – the new Boba Fett is – honestly.

Oren: That was so weird.

Chris: And again, mysterious, wearing a helmet, who is this guy? Right? It’s hard to get emotion out of him and that is why they added the Baby Yoda so that you could see him having a tender relationship and add a little more heart to the story. And I think a lot of times in these other situations, certainly Last of Us, you know, that’s kind of the purpose in adding that child character that the adult can look after.

Oren: Yeah. Ellie also provides a lot of snark. Which, uh, Baby Yoda is less good at. The escort quest is a tried and true method for explaining why your kid is in the dangerous adventure. It does have some limits. Notably, escort quests tend to have end points, and what if your story keeps going after that? You might not be able to justify it as easily again, Baby Yoda does it by being invincible. And by the end of the point where the escort request doesn’t really make sense, he’s kind of developed a little bit more of more like a teenager’s level of intellect and he is got so many powers that it’s like, all right, he is probably fine, he can come with us. Plus he is got a cool little chainmail shirt that he can wear, right? So he’ll be fine, but other characters are gonna have a little bit more trouble. So, you might wanna consider if the escort request is best option. Because there are some other premises that might work better.

Bunny: I mean, sometimes the answer is just that the kid is very capable. Usually that’s not when the kid is a baby. But certainly if your child is like a tween or a teen, it starts making more sense that they can fend for themselves. Like I’m pretty sure that’s the dynamic in God of War, right?

Oren: Right, and you, oh man, I love Dad of Boy. That game is so funny to me because I’ve only played the one where Kratos has a son. I have never played the series before then, and it just feels so natural. It’s hard to imagine what this game series was like before Atreus was here. Who was Kratos even talking to if he doesn’t get to say “boy” all the time? Boy, boy, boy. It’s like 90% of the dialogue and it’s beautiful. But yeah, I mean you can just have the kid grow up, right? Over the course of this quest. Either literally or figuratively. And then that can provide more of an explanation.

Chris: I think about Star Trek, where when we had Next Generation, the idea is that we had families on board and so there’s some kids, but they get in so many dangerous situations, that it feels really irresponsible that they have kids on board. Whereas, at least with Voyager, they didn’t mean to be away long-term, and so kids might just happen. And so it was a lot easier to justify why they might have kids on board.

Bunny: And it’s easier to take care of reptiles than human babies.

Oren: Voyager took a little while to get kids, ’cause first we had Naomi Wildman’s 18-month pregnancy. And then a little bit later we got the Borg children and Wildman aged up between seasons, which was very polite of her. So that she could be a precocious tween instead of like five.

Chris: Again, it is funny, but every single time you ever have a TV show where somebody has a baby and it’s a speculative fiction show, it’s like, all right, how long until some magic or time shenanigans makes this baby an adult? But with Naomi Wildman, we didn’t do that explicitly, we were just like, oh, in the background, we’re just gonna sneakily, maybe it’s a fast-growing species.

Oren: Mm-hmm. And, Deep Space Nine had a sort of alternate version of that where they did turn Molly into an adult, but only for an episode, she turned back. For the most part, O’Brien and Keiko’s kids are the ages they should be. I mean, it helps that Keiko is already a side character so when we don’t see the kids, we can assume they’re with Keiko.

Chris: And it’s funny that Naomi’s mother was also not on the main cast. It’s like we decided to add a kid to Voyager, but to somebody who’s not actually an important character.

Oren: Right. And the invisible mom, she’s just never there for the back half of the show.

Chris: I’m wondering if they thought that they would have to include Naomi too often if the parent was a major character.

Oren: Yeah, that’s possible. I honestly think it’s just because Voyager’s writers never really prioritized their secondary cast, and I think they liked the idea of Naomi because she gave Seven something to do. They really liked that interplay, and I think that’s probably as far as it went. The Deep Space Nine compared to Voyager is an interesting comparison of two premises that generally work pretty well if you want your characters to have kids. ‘Cause with Deep Space Nine, they are in like a stationary location and so problems come to them sometimes, but they’re not actively taking their kids into danger and when they know a problem is coming, they always have some dialogue about how we’ve evacuated the children and civilians to Bajor. So, when the latest hostile alien tries to blow up the ship, we’re not putting those kids in danger. Whereas Voyager is more of like a, well we don’t really have any other choice because of unusual circumstances, everyone on the ship has to be there at all times. We can’t just let the kids off every time there’s a problem.

Chris: And certainly if you have something like a survival story, pretty easy to justify why there are kids there, right? The aliens attack, I’m at home with the kids, now I gotta get them to safety.

Oren: That’s like a variation on the escort quest, right?

Chris: Pretty simple.

Oren: There’s also an option that I don’t see as much, but I think works pretty well, is when you have characters who kind of travel around but have a home base that they return to at the end of each mission. So, they leave their base in the morning and they go have an adventure and then they come back and then they pick their kid up from school and they’re like, ‘Hey, how was school?’ And then the kid is like, ‘What did you do at work?’ And they’re like, ‘I fought a monster’. Or whatever, right. Or they pretend they didn’t fight a monster. And it’s very comical.

Bunny: Yeah, screwball family comedies. Maybe if we expand our view outside of just speculative fiction, probably the most common genre of parent kid stories. I can’t think of a screwball comedy that’s specifically fantasy.

Oren: Uh, I guess you could argue The Good Place.

Bunny: Uh, do they have kids?

Oren: No, they don’t. But like, I mean, I could think of some fantasy comedies, right? Maybe not the kind you’re thinking of.

Chris: Again, we’re still watching Dark Shadows, the original 1960s soap opera.

Oren: For some reason.

Chris: And there’s like one – I like watching it – and they have one child character and you know, they have to figure out what to do with him, right? With all of these plots. And if you’re not familiar with Dark Shadows, it’s like somebody decided they wanted to make The House of Usher: the soap opera where you have this creepy mansion full of secrets. You’ve got some ghosts and the supernatural element is pretty slow building, but the further you get into the show, the more supernatural things there are. But they have this kid named David and they’re like, okay, what do we do with him all the time?

Oren: We make him real annoying.

Chris: But in the beginning, they decided to make him surprisingly murderous? So, he basically makes trouble, right? He makes trouble for the other characters and that’s how he’s relevant to the plot. And of course, the problem with that is that you don’t like him anymore. And then they shift to a plot where now he’s in trouble and we need to save him.

Oren: Oh no, don’t take David. Please. I definitely don’t hate every moment he’s on screen.

Chris: And again, the person who is supposed to be the main character anyway, when she first arrives, it’s gonna be like the governess, right? And so that’s why they make him such a troublemaker, is to try to make things hard for the main character. They go a little too far with it.

Oren: The best part about watching Dark Shadows is trying to place odds on whether the writers will feel obligated to actually tie up any given storyline or whether they will just get bored and it will just kind of disappear. Because you know, both can happen, right? It’s like a soap opera, so there are really long-running stories and sometimes they get tied up and then sometimes they just don’t. And you know, don’t talk about them anymore. It’s so funny to watch characters who were introduced for storylines that got dropped and are for some reason still in the show. It’s like, why are you still here, Burke? No one’s interested in your legal drama from five seasons ago, but you’re still in the show, I don’t know why, we’ve moved on.

Bunny: It does seem like there are sub-tiers. No, tiers makes it sound like a hierarchy, although maybe it is a hierarchy, argue about it in the comments. Of types of child characters. There’s like the essentially animal companion or even Burden characters like Baby Yoda or Elora in Willow, who are there mostly to be carted around, like Elora doesn’t do anything, she’s basically Burden.

Oren: She makes gurgling sounds. How dare you.

Bunny: She makes, yeah, she gurgles, that’s true. She adds to the soundtrack. And then you have Moppets who are like precocious children, who are like toddlers to elementary schoolers.

Oren: Baby Yoda goes through that phase, too.

Bunny: True. I mean, I’m sure Baby Yoda will transition entirely from Burden to Moppets, to Tween to Teen to Adult. And we will see him in his final form someday.

Oren: In the upcoming movie he’s gonna have human length legs. And he’s gonna walk around. It’s gonna be weird.

Chris: Oh no.

Bunny: Yeah, he’ll have to decide whether or not to shave them. But then, yes, then there’s like the snarky tween or the snarky teen or the older teen. This is like Joy from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, who has legitimate gripes and the story is about them having a conflict with their parent rather than their parent shepherding them places.

Oren: Because once they get old enough, it’s not like the expectation that the parent will help their kid goes away, but it changes, right? There’s a different expectation for how you parent, even a young or middle teenager compared to someone who’s turned 18 or is 19 or 20. Right? It’s just the dynamic is kind of different.

Bunny: Right. And then I think by the time your child is like 20, I mean you can still have parent/kid stories there, but they fall less into this category. It’s mostly two adults now who probably bicker more than your average pair.

Oren: You don’t need to have the same special considerations if it’s an adult child. Right. An adult child? Whatever.

Bunny: Yeah, they can fight the dragon.

Oren: There’s not a great gender-neutral term for a child that works in that context. You can say an adult son or an adult daughter, and that makes sense. I would like another word, but there isn’t one. That’s English’s fault.

Bunny: My baby has become very long. And has facial hair. Long baby.

Oren: All right. We’ve talked a lot about the various premises under which children make sense. I do think the other thing that’s important to talk about now that we’ve only got a couple minutes left because of our Andor detour, would be like, think about what role the child character is going to play. Right? Because if you just stick a child character in there and you don’t have any idea for them, they can get kind of annoying pretty quickly. You don’t want them to just be constantly the reason the protagonist can’t do anything, even though it’s tempting to use them as a hindrance. Audiences will begin to resent them if that’s all they do. So, you know, Chris mentioned being the heart, or maybe that was Bunny, one of you mentioned it.

Chris: That was me.

Bunny: Cite your sources, Oren.

Oren: That is one option. I’m also kind of a fan of a kid-as-apprentice storyline, where you have to show them the ropes, whatever job it is. Again, that works pretty well in stories where your characters don’t have great support systems, so you have to learn dangerous work on the job.

Bunny: That’s kind of, inheritance dramas fall into that category. Like Game of Thrones is like, you know, technically they’re apprenticing to be, you know, murdering.

Oren: They’re apprenticed to be, you know, leader of the grimdarkest house that was ever the grimdarkest.

Bunny: Yeah. They’re learning how to have a tragic backstory.

Oren: And that’s also, you know, your Kratos and your Atreus characters right there. And I think that one has a lot of potential. Or, if you have a really big cast, if you’re doing the literary equivalent of Deep Space Nine, you don’t have to be as focused, there might just be some kids around. That’s harder to do in a book, but it’s possible. So now that we’ve finished with the detour from our Andor detour, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. Naturally, all of us will soon have an heir to pass on the podcast to when we heroically die. That’s definitely gonna happen.

Chris: And if you enjoyed our rambling, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

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