612 – Writing Child Heroes

There are plenty of reasons to write stories about children, the most prominent being that children want to see themselves represented in fiction. However, child protagonists come with a unique set of challenges, especially when tasked with solving high-stakes problems that would normally fall to adults. This week, we talk about ways to set your child heroes up for success, as well as tips for maintaining believability and getting those pesky grown-ups out of the way. ## Show Notes - The Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Star Trek: Prodigy - Skeleton Crew - The Difference Between Relatable and Mediocre Heroes - Your Story Needs Tension, Not Violence - A Deadly Education - Animorphs - Seven Ways a Humble Hero Can Make a Difference - Cheap Depictions of Bullying - Sophie’s World - Five Ways to Handle Parents Without Killing Them - Publishing Rodeo - Print Run - Steven Universe - Hindrance Characters - Hilda - Are You Depicting Abuse? - Seven Types of Adult Antagonists for Young Heroes - Character Agency ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Maddie.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. **Chris:** Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.  **Oren:** And I’m Oren.  **Chris:** You know, the world is a dangerous place with fascism and AI that poisons people’s minds and global criminals. You know who I think would be the best person to deal with all of this?  **Oren:** I can only imagine.  **Chris:** I think a child is the perfect person to take care of all of our problems for us. **Oren:** Their childlike wonderment would see a path through these intractable problems that we all haven’t figured out how to deal with. That’s logic. That happens all the time.  **Chris:** Maybe we just need somebody who will *believe* in a solution.  **Oren:** Maybe the real solution was the friends we made along the way. **Chris:** That’s it. We’ve cracked it. So this time we’re gonna talk about depicting child heroes and child protagonists, which comes with its own trickiness and liability that you have to work around to make your story feel believable. First of all, why child heroes? I guess we could take this from two directions. Why are they the hero in the story, which is pretty important. Also, we could talk about why we write about children.  I think one thing that I find interesting is that it used to be that age brackets felt like they were a little more flexible in what the age of the protagonist was. So if we go back to *The Enchanted Forest Chronicles*, for instance, which most people read when they were preteens maybe, or pretty young, the protagonist is 16, but that is not a YA book, does not feel like it was written for an older teenage crowd. It was basically one of the books that people read when they first start reading novels on their own at like, 10 or 12. But these days, generally, traditional publishers anyway, always want the protagonist to be the same age as the audience. So whenever we write for our kids, and I know lots of writers who want to write for their children, we usually end up with a child protagonist, which in many ways is good. Kids do like that.  **Oren:** I’ve heard so many different claims about how publishers view age of protagonist in relation to age of reader, but at least in my own experience with YA being the one I know the best, it’s pretty rare for a YA character to be significantly older and even rarer to be significantly younger than the main demographic readership of the book. And I haven’t read a lot of middle grade recently, although the ones that I’ve *edited* have generally had protagonists about the same age as their target reader.  **Chris:** I do think kids are more interested in protagonists that are slightly older than slightly younger. To a child, another kid who’s two years younger than them is like a baby. **Oren:** At least that matches my experience where when you’re a kid, you desperately want to be older because then you’ll be more mature and you’ll be able to do more stuff, and the idea of being younger is an anathema. Why would you want that? You can do less things when you’re younger.  **Chris:** Or they feel like if you suggest something for them that has a younger protagonist, that you are suggesting they are that young, feel like they’re being talked down to. Then we have our child heroes, and of course the first question is why is this person, why is this protagonist the one to be solving these problems? **Oren:** Well, ’cause the author wanted them to. That’s actually what it says in the story. We’ve solved that problem already. That was pretty easy.  **Chris:** \[Chuckles] This isn’t a huge problem for every story. Some stories do have a scope that’s appropriately small, where it makes sense generally for a person to solve their own problems. And we can talk later about, how do we keep their parents from intervening to help them? But if it’s a survival story, for instance, with a kid, it’s not hard to understand, “Why is this kid doing this?” That’s the tactic that both *Star Wars* and *Star Trek* took recently with their shows. *Prodigy* had a group of kids that were in kind of, like, a slave mining camp. **Oren:** It was great. Fun times.  **Chris:** Right. And of course, they get free, and then they find their own ship and take off with it, and there’s just no adults. *Star Wars*, they were not in a slave mining camp, but they still randomly find a ship that takes them out, and then they have to figure out how to get back. And so, since we’re not trying to save the world, that certainly makes it easier to figure out why this kid is the one doing it. **Oren:** *Skeleton Crew* was such a funny show conceptually. It was the closest we’re ever gonna get, probably, to *Star Wars* portal fantasy. The scenes in the kids’ starting planet look so much like a modern American suburb, or at least an idealized TV one, that you could be forgiven for thinking that this was set in the real world. It’s amazing how much they wanted this to be portal fantasy, and someone decided they couldn’t *actually* do portal fantasy, so they just had to make it look like that as much as possible.  **Chris:** \[Chuckles] I think that goes back to the idea that the protagonist always has to be a perfect relatable stand-in for the target reader. And I’m not gonna say that doesn’t give it a boost often. I think that people are capable of empathizing with characters that are different from them too. But it felt like with that show, they really wanted that fact where the kids are like, “Oh, *I* get to go to *Star Wars*. I get to explore the *Star Wars* universe.” And so they felt they needed to make the “weird suburban *Star Wars* looks like middle America environment.” **Oren:** Yeah the suburbia planet. Every planet in *Star Wars* has one environment, and this one was suburbs.  **Chris:** That is funny. Obviously, we can have smaller scope yet with something that’s lower stakes if they’re dealing with personal relationships, for instance. Okay, that’s not too hard. But then, of course, the larger the scope of the story gets and the higher the stakes, if it has societal importance, if it’s like the world is ending, then we start needing to get more and more robust reasons for why the child protagonist is the one to do it instead of all of the other people. **Oren:** At a certain point, you are going to have to hope that your readers like the story enough to ignore the logical issues. Once your story reaches a certain level of scale, there really is no explanation that will make kids solving this make sense in most cases. There might be some very niche scenarios where there is, but for the most part if you *try* at that point, you’re gonna end up with the *Deadly Education* problem, where your story requires ever more complicated world-building explanations to try to address an inherently illogical situation. If you’re writing *Animorphs*, you basically have to hope people like *Animorphs*, and that their desire to watch the kids have cool animal morphing adventures will cancel out the fact that obviously these kids should tell somebody, and they have many options to do so.  **Chris:** That definitely helps. Again, if people enjoy the premise, they’re much less likely to call it unrealistic. They’ll give it some grace. So that definitely can factor in. It’s big enough you basically need to have a child that is like a chosen one that has very special unique powers that no one else in the universe has, or in some cases strong societal importance. Like the child ruler, the king or queen or other monarch died, and there’s kind of a reason why this person is of very unique, special importance. **Oren:** *Animorphs* does have reasons, it’s just that they are entirely inadequate if you are in the mood to question them. And the story just kind of hopes that you’re not in that mood. It’s like, “Well, these kids are the ones with the special powers, and they can’t trust anybody ’cause anyone could be a Yeerk, and they don’t want their parents to be in danger.” They have these different explanations, and those all fall apart on even minimal examination. But if you like *Animorphs* and you’re having fun, why ask those questions? It has a fairly simple, straightforward explanation. We’re not spending 20 chapters trying to build a Rube Goldberg machine to explain why the kids can’t tell their parents, which would not be really useful and would be really boring to read anyway. **Chris:** Let’s talk more about getting adults out of the way. I think that kids not telling parents is something that’s just gonna have to happen. I do think that we should probably watch out for situations that are a little too close to real life, ’cause we have to think about what are kids gonna take away from this, and I personally, one of my biggest pet peeves is the numerous scenes of bullying in stories where there is no thought or consideration taken to the fact that adults have a responsibility to create a safe environment for kids. **Oren:** But Chris, if you tell on your bully, you’re a tattletale, and that’s actually worse than being a bully.  **Chris:** \[Chuckles] Noo. No.  **Oren:** I’m going to law school now, so I know these things.  **Chris:** Oh, no.  **Oren:** \[Chuckles] **Chris:** Doesn’t going to law school come with some kind of disclaimer? Don’t you have to be like, “Just so you know, people, I’m not a lawyer. I’m a law student, and I’m legally required to tell you that.” Don’t you have to say that?  **Oren:** If anything, I think lawyers are famous for *not* qualifying their statements. They just make really bold pronouncements and leave immediately without specifying. That’s what I’m learning at law school.  **Chris:** I’ve met somebody who is relatively knowledgeable about law but not a lawyer. They always immediately spout disclaimers. \[Chuckles] **Oren:** Lawyers also do that. They just do it slightly differently. They’ll be like, “Yeah, maybe, but that’s not my area of law, so I can’t really comment.” Or if it is their area of law, they’ll be like, “Maybe, but I’m not familiar with the specifics of that case.” So they also do it. Turns out that it’s impossible to actually know anything. Socrates had it right the whole time.  **Chris:** I’m gonna have to talk about *Sophie’s World*, actually. Getting into things like kids should be telling their parents, number one is bullying. If you’re gonna do bullying in a story, please use thought and consideration, and don’t use it as a quick, thoughtless plot device because that’s a real thing, and schools and parents and adults absolutely should be stopping it. It should not be the kid’s responsibility to stop it. And we don’t wanna teach our kids that they should not go and tell on their bullies, ’cause they should. They absolutely should. So I’m reading *Sophie’s World*, which is a philosophy textbook disguised as a novel, basically.  **Oren:** Oh, that sounds great. I wanna do that. I want people to read my philosophy and think it’s a novel.  **Chris:** I feel like it’s made way too many people think that this is gonna work out for them, and I don’t think it’s gonna work out for most people. But this author is pretty good at explaining philosophy in understandable ways, although… Let’s not go into my criticisms, other than the story ones. 14-year-old Sophie in this book has a secret philosophy teacher who sends her messages and doesn’t want her to see him or really know who he is. And then Sophie decides not to tell her mother about this. Pretty sure her father signed her up for this philosophy correspondence course, so it’s not like it doesn’t come with any parental approval, but her father is away at his job. He’s not with her right now, and she’s hiding this course from her mother.  I feel like this is a nightmare parental scenario because this philosophy teacher is absolutely leading her astray when it comes to many things, teaching her to hate people who aren’t interested in philosophy and that they’re lesser and their minds are small. Teaches her to hate teachers. There was no self-awareness that this is in fact a philosophy teacher. And I don’t know, maybe the author’s strategy is whatever philosopher that he’s covering, he just goes with whatever their ideas are without questioning them and just presents them as the right answer. Maybe that’s just how he teaches.  **Oren:** At least his idea of what their ideas are. Lot of debates about what exactly these ancient philosophers meant.  **Chris:** But this poor mom, her daughter comes up and insults her for not liking philosophy and for being small-minded, and it’s like, this teacher is not having good influence on your kid. And she’s like, “You’ve been weird lately. What’s happening?” And Sophie pretends that this teacher is her boyfriend.  **Oren:** Oh. \[Laughs]  **Chris:** Her boyfriend, she says, is her age, but it’s to explain why she’s really into philosophy now, instead of just telling her mother that she’s taking a philosophy course, which I don’t see why her mom would *normally* object to. She’s like, “My boyfriend’s really into philosophy and so I’m really into philosophy now, too.” **Oren:** What a great scenario for a parent to find out, to have their kid come and tell them, “Yeah, so I’m dating someone, and they’ve been telling me all these things that have completely changed my personality and also made our relationship more hostile.” That’s great. That’s so much better than knowing it’s a weird adult guy in a correspondence course. **Chris:** \[Laughs] And her mother’s starting to wonder if she’s on drugs.  **Oren:** I don’t know, man. That seems like a bad situation.  **Chris:** I think with something like *Animorphs* where it’s like, “Well, there’s aliens taking over the Earth.” I’m a little bit less worried actually about us teaching lids not to tell their parents about that. **Oren:** No, that’s too fantastical. It doesn’t really seem like it’s gonna map onto anything that kids will actually encounter.  **Chris:** But in some cases you can just tell the parents. In this case, there’s just no reason. I think *Sophie’s World* doesn’t have much in the way of conflict, so maybe the author’s trying to create more conflict with her mother by not having her tell the mother. But that comes off as very forced. Conflicts generally shouldn’t require characters to not communicate for no reason. That’s something we want to avoid.  **Oren:** Maybe the mom is supposed to be conservative or small-minded and anti-intellectual or whatever. That could happen. That’s not impossible. You’d wanna communicate that more clearly. **Chris:** Right now she doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this mother. \[Laughs] Other than Sophie’s at home by herself a lot, which is a problem for kids for sure.  **Oren:** I’m just throwing darts at wall here, but it could be that in the author’s mind, this mom is a parallel for small-minded conservative parents, but the author doesn’t wanna actually put that in the book ’cause it would be too much of a downer. So it’s kept the parallel without the thing that made the parallel work. I’ve seen a lot of editing clients do that, where they’re like, “This character is a parallel for evil far-right politicians,” but they’re not actually. In the story, they are not that thing, and so people reacting to them as if they were doesn’t make sense. **Chris:** That would be easier for me to accept if the narrator just didn’t outright say that most adults are too small and trivial-minded because they don’t care about philosophy.  **Oren:** \[Laughs] **Chris:** He doesn’t say, “Care about philosophy.” But it’s like, “Oh, they don’t believe in the wonder of the world, and they’re not asking the big, important questions.” Which is of course philosophical questions. So it’s just, they’re not interested in philosophy. **Oren:** That does sound like an attempt to channel every child’s belief that the adults around them are all stupid.  **Chris:** And maybe that’s attractive. Let’s be fair. That could be attractive to kids, but did kids read *Sophie’s World*? \[Laughs] **Oren:** I have no idea. Did kids read *Sophie’s World*? Did it sell well, and was it actually being read?  **Chris:** It’s a classic.  **Oren:** But so is *The Grapes of Wrath*. I don’t think many kids are reading that.  **Chris:** I don’t know how many kids have philosophy classes. I don’t think I had philosophy classes until, like, high school.  **Oren:** I didn’t have philosophy classes *in* high school. Man, all these television shows where kids are taking advanced subjects in high school. I was doing, like, American literature. Where are y’all learning philosophy in high school?  **Chris:** I had a really big high school. We had like 2,000 students, and so that enabled a larger diversity of courses. I took biotech class in high school. **Oren:** My school didn’t have anything like that.  **Chris:** ‘Cause that’s the advantage of a big high school. Let’s move on a little bit, talk about how to get rid of adults.  **Oren:** Well, they obviously have to die. That’s the *only* way. Parents gotta be dead.  **Chris:** A certain person who *could* be another host on this podcast other than myself actually wrote a really nice blog post about how to keep parents out of the way without killing them. **Oren:** That’s actually… Calling me a certain person who could also be a host is a great lead-in for the *new* podcast I’m gonna start, called “The Other One”, which is gonna be me and Scott from *Publishing Rodeo* and Erik from *Print Run*, where it’s gonna be us, and we’re gonna be talking about the trials and tribulations of being on a spec fic-focused podcast with a very smart woman who knows way more than we do, and that’s gonna be our thing. We’re gonna talk about that.  **Chris:** \[Laughs] Be careful. What if I want one of them to be on my podcast someday, not that they would, and they’re like, “I don’t know. That one time, one time Oren insulted me right on your podcast?”  **Oren:** \[Laughs] Look, I’m inviting them to be the prestigious hosts of “The Other One”, so I don’t know what they could possibly complain about. **Chris:** Okay. In this blog post, which is by Oren, by the way, even though he’s pretending to be ignorant about it. **Chris, Oren:** \[Chuckle] **Chris:** So obviously options, and this is one thing that *Sophie’s World* uses, her father is off on a work trip, so he’s just not there. If your story takes place in a short period of time, they can just be gone for, like, the weekend, depending on how old the kid is. But even if you have a babysitter, irresponsible babysitter, there’s more options with a babysitter than with two loving parents.  We talked about whether or not they tell the parents, and sometimes we just can’t avoid kids being weirdly secretive. Sometimes we can do the whole magic can’t be seen by adults thing, so they’re aware for magical reasons. And that makes it a little bit more robust. There are some stories where adults are fully aware of what the kids are doing, but it’s important and it requires magic powers, and the adults don’t have those magic powers.  **Oren:** That can work.  **Chris:** It can work. Sometimes it’s a problem because even, if it’s too obviously dangerous, sometimes it’s still like, “No, parent, you should still not let your kid try to do this because your kid could die.” And no loving parent would allow that. **Oren:** It certainly feels like it works better with teenagers than with 12 and below. It’s probably not great parenting for teenagers either, but it at least feels reasonable that if your teenager has superpowers and needs to save the world, okay, you let him do that. But no matter how many powers your 10-year-old has, no, you keep him safe. **Chris:** How old is Steven Universe in that cartoon?  **Oren:** Steven is an age, presumably.  **Chris:** \[Laughs] **Oren:** I assumed he was 11. I actually don’t know.  **Chris:** ‘Cause as an example, he does have other adults in his life who do have powers.  **Oren:** That’s true.  **Chris:** But he still gets involved in dangerous things.  **Oren:** Brief search is suggesting that he’s 12 at the start of the show. That seems about right.  **Chris:** And one thing to watch out for, if we do get a situation the parents do know and it doesn’t seem reasonable for them to allow it, we don’t want a situation where the parents are actually telling the protagonist *not* to be a hero or involved in the plot. That just never ends well, and the reason is because the parents are almost certainly right, but the story needs them to be *wrong*, and you can’t really square that circle. All you’re doing is calling attention to the conceit.  So for instance, *Hilda* had this problem where Hilda was sneaking off and going on her adventures, and then we had a whole plot line where her mother was getting upset for her doing that, and did we ever get another season? Do we ever know where that went? **Oren:** I think that was eventually resolved, but we stopped watching after a while. Honestly, I started to lose interest in Hilda after it made the baffling decision to move her in from the really cool wilderness into the *town* in the first episode. I’m still confused by that. Trolberg is just inherently a less interesting place than the wilderness she was in before. **Chris:** That was an interesting aspect of *Hilda* where when the show opened, you’re like, “Oh, these cool woods. Now we’re moving to the city.” Why would you do that?  **Oren:** That’s not where I want to be.  **Chris:** And it’s all about her saying goodbye to her woods home, but it makes it look *really* cool. It’s like, “Do you wanna go back to the woods?” **Oren:** In general, I give stories permission usually to do *one* instance of the parents interfering and not wanting the kids to go out and do something cool, and that’s it. If you do it more than once, it gets really old really fast. And again, it tends to work best with *teen* characters because then we can cast the parent as being maybe a *little* overprotective, but it’s gonna be weirder with younger kids. **Chris:** Parents as antagonists can be a really good one.  **Oren:** Big Mythcreant’s favorite around here.  **Chris:** Just like we like antagonistic mentors. It’s a great way to do things. However, I will say that, content notice here, I’m gonna talk about abuse for a bit, which is a thing that’s kind of important, I think, when we’re covering child protagonists. We have seen too many manuscripts that have included child abuse. Generally, the writer is not *aware* that they are depicting something that looks like child abuse.  And I’m not saying that there should be no stories for kids that feature abuse. I think that sometimes stories can be good ways of introducing kids to dark topics, that they may need to know about. But certainly this is something to be handled very carefully and not something that is just a quick plot device that we don’t wanna think about.  So when you have an antagonistic parent, mentor, that kind of thing, we want them ideally doing bad things to other people or a bad effect on the world. It’s harder if they are actively mean to the protagonist, because they have power over the protagonist and the protagonist is just a child, and that can quickly start to look like a child abuse situation. I have actually a list of ways to try to make antagonistic adults that are not abusive that we can kind of link to in the show notes. But when the adult gets super manipulative, that’s when it starts to look more like abuse. There’s other things to watch out for, like neglect is abuse, so kids need to have all of their basic needs met. Another thing to be aware of, and this is not always abuse, sometimes it just happens because the family has limited resources, but it’s not good for kids to take on responsibilities that are not age-appropriate. That includes being a parent to a younger sibling or giving their parents emotional support or taking care of their parents. That’s called parentification and it messes kids up, and sometimes it just happens because the family just doesn’t have any resources, and the kid ends up filling in. Other times it can be a result of abusive neglect or something like that.  Again, that’s something to be aware of so that when you’re depicting your kid, and if you want a *responsible* kid, and you want them in a sympathetic position, and you want them doing extra things, you know what you’re depicting. Instead of, for instance, having a scene where your kid is casually doing a bunch of emotional labor for their parents, or their parents are like, “You can’t do that because we’ll be so upset.” Which is a kind of a way of demanding emotional labor and also it’s a little bit manipulative, and that’s not kind of the interactions that we wanna normalize for people or normalize for kids because that’s not what a healthy parent-child relationship looks like. **Oren:** This is all with the understanding that if you are deliberately trying to show an abusive relationship, that is doable. It just requires precautions and extra understanding, and we want you to not be doing that by accident.  **Chris:** If you have a parent that insults their child, that’s gonna look like verbal abuse. A harsh statement is something like, “You never clean your room,” which could be harsh but fair, but if they tell the kid, “You’re a failure,” that’s just a personal attack. So if we have a parent doing that kind of thing, that’s not gonna look like a healthy relationship. Or physical abuse like locking a kid in a closet for a prolonged period of time, that’s physical abuse even if it does not involve hitting. People end up with this stuff in their story for a variety of reasons, but we just wanna look at those interactions and make sure that we’re not taking on sensitive topics that we’re not prepared for.  One last thing that I thought might be nice to cover is character arcs for kids. Kids, like adults, can have any number of character arcs, but there’s a couple that I’ve seen out there that are a little harder to handle in the context of a story.  One is having a kid that’s immature. It’s natural to have a kid grow more mature and adult-like over the course of a story, but this is a specific character arc where we notice how immature they are at the beginning of the story. A lot of times that’s a little bit broad for a character arc. We want something that is a little bit more specific, like the kid’s not taking on responsibilities, for instance. Whereas if they’re just immature in every way, that can just make them annoying without really giving us a clear trajectory for them to improve on.  **Oren:** It can end up feeling more like the passage of time than a satisfying emotional arc. People get more mature as they get older, usually, but you want to be a little more focused than that in most cases. **Chris:** The other thing, and this is something that we always have to watch for for any child protagonist, is making sure they have enough agency, which is why we’re talking about getting rid of adults. We still want our kid in the driver’s seat and making decisions and choices that matter, that drive the story forward. We don’t want them to kind of just sit around while the adults make all the decisions for them and do everything for them.  I see this a lot when writers are thinking about themselves as a younger person and being like, “Oh, I should’ve been more this,” or, “I should’ve been more that,” and then they project that onto their protagonist, and sometimes I feel like they’re being a little harsh on their younger self. So a kid that’s really passive and needs to learn how to have stronger opinions and be more proactive, that’s a little bit hard to do in a story, because we do need them to have agency, and they can be relatable, but you usually want some level of personality for them. That might be a time when it’s good to narrow it down so that they’re passive in a specific way, in a specific circumstance, but not all the time. **Oren:** You generally don’t want a story where the protagonist’s problem is that they won’t do anything, ’cause you kind of need them to do things, so it needs to be a little more specific than that. Well, with that, I think we have completed our “bildungsroman.” There’s a weird German word for the character arc that you go through as you come of age. I always called it a coming-of-age story, but we have finished doing that.  **Chris:** I just mispronounce it as “Buildings Roman.”  **Oren:** Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of cool buildings that are Roman that I wanted to visit as a kid.  **Chris:** Yeah, Roman buildings, we finished it.  **Oren:** So we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.  **Chris:** If you would like us to save the world so your child doesn’t have to, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.  **Oren:** And before we go, I want to 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.