You ever notice there’s a lot of books about kids that really…shouldn’t be?
Within the subgenres of children’s and young adult literature, it’s fairly common to see the heroes of the stories to be around the same age as the intended audience. The result is that you have a bunch of preteens and teenagers saving the world, and while the stories resulting from these are often amusing, entertaining, and sometimes even heartfelt, it often makes me scratch my head and wonder where the grown-ups in the setting have all gone.
There are justifications and aversions, of course. In Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians it’s mentioned that most powerful demigods are found easily by monsters and don’t actually survive into adulthood, so obviously there wouldn’t be a bunch of adult demigods around to help our heroes. Harry Potter has our lead be a hero marked by Voldemort himself from infancy, and he’s the one the plot centers around. He’s only just learned he’s a wizard, and he’s becoming more embroiled in the Wizarding World as he gets older, so of course he has to deal with this himself. It’s also helpful to the credulity of the story that there quite a few things that adult characters do, but much of it is off-page or unknown to Harry as it’s happening. In Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books, Tiffany’s the only witch for miles around, and since she’s often running on a clock she has to deal with the problems before the other witches have time to arrive.
Authors don’t always include a justification though. Hopping back up to Rick Riordan, the sequel to Percy Jackson and the Olympian books is a series titled Heroes of Olympus. It introduces another camp/home for demigods, one more Roman-flavored than Greek, called ‘Camp Jupiter.’ Unlike Camp Half-Blood though, Camp Jupiter is in an isolated valley with a small city (called New Rome) attached, with its own government, stores and even a college, all heavily inspired by Roman culture. And we see that demigods often live to adulthood here, as some of the campers we see are ‘legacies’ rather than demigods; descendants of deities rather than actual sons and daughters. Different families have different levels of influence in New Rome, and some have enough prestige to put their children in esteemed positions in Camp Jupiter.
And yet all the soldiers in Camp Jupiter…are teenagers. A designated amount of years of service in the legion is required by all citizens, and for whatever reason the New Romans decided it’d be best if they were served when their citizens are thirteen years old. They’re a full army and everything, with cohorts, praetors, siege weapons, and even a battle elephant they’ve named Hannibal. Their preferred metal for weapons, Imperial Gold, is liable to explode if broken. But the praetors they’ve got are both fifteen years old. They’re all child soldiers. The senate is also made up of teenagers, who decide to send child soldiers on quests or to war. If there are any adults in government or military positions, the reader is never introduced to them. They certainly didn’t stop their kids from marching across the country to go to war.
Moving away from Riordan, Apep’s sporking of Mortal Instruments makes it clear that there’s something odd going on there too. Cassandra Clare tries to excuse it by making it so that the kids are the only ones who really know what’s going on, but the only way that can work at all is by making all of the Shadowhunter adults completely bloody useless and terrible at their jobs. Yeah, I understand that Jace and Clary have a personal connection to Valentine and all, but shouldn’t there be someone at least supervising the heroes from the NYC Institute? Someone who isn’t Hodge, a former member of Valentine’s terrorist cult thing? A ordinary amount of regular adult staff members in the Institute of New York City, one of the most important cities in the world, would have made it much harder for Hodge to turn traitor (again).
[Though if we’re going to be fair here, the show somewhat rectifies it by having all the characters be at least eighteen, and the Institute is filled with other Shadowhunters going around doing stuff.]
Very rarely is this ever lampshaded, except for to point out that the heroes are apparently doing things much better than the adults. But…why? Really, why?
So many protagonists, especially young adult protagonists, are orphans1, seemingly just so that their parents won’t be around to mind them going on adventures. But that doesn’t exactly excuse the lack of any adult supervision in activities that are dangerous or world-threatening.
Few stories seem to want to discuss this problem. The webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court is a notable aversion. The story has our main characters Antimony and Kat often go off and do their own adventures, but there are times that they’re called out by others (Jones, and more recently Red) on not involving the authorities or even trusted adult confidants in their problems. There are sometimes justifications given (the authorities being very corrupt and power-hungry), but whether or not they’re any good is left up to the reader to decide. In any case, there are times in which the leads do get the adult authorities involved, and are reminded that for their experience and knowledge, they’re still kids.
And I think that’s the kind of a reasonable compromise that writers should at least aspire to get to. I’m not against kid heroes, or teenagers risking their lives to save the world or whatever. Those are all fine. But if I’m reading a book or watching a movie and I stop and ask myself, “Wait, why are the adults in this world perfectly alright putting the world’s lives in the hands of these kids?” than that takes me out of the story and question its believability. Yeah, I know these protagonists and as a reader of fiction I’m fairly confident that they’ll stop the baddies, but the people in the story don’t know that.
If you’re going to have kid heroes, make sure there’s a justification for them doing their thing, and a reasonable amount of adult supervision given the situation. And no, saying, “The adults are all useless” is not a good explanation. If the story only works under the condition that “Some people are stupid” then it’s not a good story.
Ask yourself, “Does it actually make any sense for the characters in this story to be kids?” And think it through. If you can’t imagine a reason why it’s plausible that the fate of the world is on these kids’ shoulders, then age them up. You don’t even have to change the target audience! Your story can still be aimed at the same age group if you get the tone right. The notion that people won’t read about characters who are not the same age as them is just silly.
If the narrative allows me to poke holes in it like, “Why are the adults relying on child soldiers to do their jobs?” then it falls apart. We can do better than that.
1 Or orphans by plot standards—parents can be kidnapped, captured, coma’d or otherwise incapacitated so that they can’t object to their children risking their lives.
The Smith of Lie on 15 October 2017, 03:31 said:
In the world of fiction even if adults are not useless and take active part in saving the world, irresponsible attitude towards involving kids is still standard. The most egregious example I can think of is probably Batman and steady progression of new Robins, including Dick Grayson age 12.
But I’ll play a Devil’s Advocate here for a bit. I didn’t read the books, only the sporking so I might have it all wrong, but Mortal Instruments seemed to be a case of kids acting on their own and against the adults wishes rather than adults sending kids into the thick of things as a first line. It does not excuse incompetence of Shadowhunters, but it at least stays within confines of Hanlon’s Razor.
And that Camp Jupiter thing? Now that sounds positively ridiculous…
Juracan on 16 October 2017, 12:30 said:
The Batman and Robin example can work in some versions of Batman, but you’re right in that in most cases, especially that try to amp up the darkness of the setting, it’s really out of place. The TV show Young Justice, for instance, as much as I love it, has Dick Grayson beginning his training for becoming Robin at age nine. I don’t know if that necessarily means he was fighting crime at that time, but he’s still really young when he starts.
It’s true that the adults don’t send the kids into it, but they’re also really, really incompetent, as Apep goes to lengths to show. They don’t want these kids to get involved, but they only provide them with the bare minimum of adult supervision, if even that.
Mortal Instruments isn’t a case of “Making the Kids Do It”, but it is a case of “The Kids Have to Do It Because the Adults Are All Useless.”
It is. And no one in-series ever seems to question it, lacking some of Riordan’s earlier self-awareness.
Apep on 21 October 2017, 18:41 said:
Even then, that only applies to the first book. After that, it’s, “The Kids Have to Do It Because They Don’t Trust/ Refuse to Cooperate With the Adults.” You can see it in City of Ashes, with how everyone’s so opposed to the Inquisitor after she’s mean to Jace.
City of Glass is a bit better, if only because the authorities are shown to be corrupt/ evil. Unless they’re former members of Valentine’s terrorist cult, which just confuses things further.
Speaking of which, I’m taking notes for chapter 18 right now. Two more chapters, plus an epilogue, and I’ll be done with this book until I get to the actual sporking.
Juracan on 24 October 2017, 19:24 said:
I suppose that I was running on the assumption that the Inquisitor was also incompetent, though that’s not actually true now that I remember your sporks. We’re meant to think so by Clare because she’s blinded by the death of her own son and is, as you mentioned, mean to Jace.
Good man! I’m looking forward to it.
Apep on 24 October 2017, 20:27 said:
Just got through chapter 19 today. My god, the sheer amount of time and energy devoted to teen soap opera crap is disturbing. Like, some of you guys might be dead in a few hours – why are you so damn concerned about Clary and Jace being allowed to bang? (sorry, spoilers, not that I think anyone cares about that)
Juracan on 25 October 2017, 13:28 said:
I don’t know if I’d even consider that spoiler territory, considering the previous books had that as a major subplot too.
Yeah. I’ve met former fans of the series who said that they dropped it because they were tired of the character drama taking time away from the world and plot. I get that fans go crazy for character relationships and drama, but if it’s given equal amount of weight to the fate of the world, maybe you should scale it back a bit, yeah? There are more important things than who’s making out.
TMary on 15 November 2017, 07:29 said:
Again, great article, and something I think every author writing about kids for kids should think about. :) It got me looking back on my first attempts at writing, while I was a kid, and realizing that actually, I usually did a reasonably good job at justifying my kid heroes, all things considered. True, I did often go the Conveniently An Orphan route, but still XD
I think one thing you left out, though, or didn’t touch on much (I noticed it particularly at the end), was the existence of adults that the kids can turn to. That, to me, can help balance a good deal of the unreality of kids being heroes, if done well (otherwise, it just looks like the adults are being lazy and irresponsible). In Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, the kids always found themselves with an adult travelling companion fairly early on in the story. Artemis Fowl is himself a genius (who never tells anyone anything, has adventures with people who don’t want to be talked about anyway, and, in the early books at least, had parents who were not equipped to deal with the situation), and besides himself, he has a martial-arts expert of a bodyguard, an elven police officer, a centaur computer geek, and a kleptomaniac dwarf to help him. Ash Ketchum…well, he had Brock, at least, and Officer Jenny, and Professor Oak, and his mom, and really, no one ever expected him to save the world a hundred zillion times, that just ended up happening.
It also got me thinking about this one book my brother and sister and I are sporking, which we’d actually like to post here once we’re done with it. It has your typical kid heroes trying to solve a mystery and save Biltmore Estate (AKA the world, as far as they’re concerned >.<), and while there are some good reasons for them not to involve any adults, there’s also a lot of good reasons why they should, and the only real reason I can see that they shouldn’t is that the adults are all even dumber than the kids, and that’s really saying something. It’s really made me dislike the Adults Are Useless trope; not that I was ever a huge fan of it in the first place, but this book just killed it for me.
So yeah, again, great article :) It’s definitely something to think about, and it’s always really important to remember, I think, that just because you’re writing fiction for children and teenagers doesn’t mean you have a free pass to wave away reality. Yeah, sure, when you’re a kid you’re not going to pay much attention to something that doesn’t make sense, but the best books for young people are the ones that still make sense to them, even when they come back to reread them decades later, right?
Gray Falcon on 16 November 2017, 10:27 said:
One of the more bizarre justifications came from Assassination Classroom, where a group of ordinary junior high students are the only ones who can kill a nine-foot tentacled monster who can fly at Mach 20. Said monster is their teacher. And a good one at that.
Anyone baffled by this premise, let me point out this is a manga. It may not have been the weirdest pitch the editor heard that week.
On a more serious not, we have Avatar, the Last Airbender, where most of the adults are either out fighting a hopeless war or dead. Rather grim for a Nickelodeon show.
Juracan on 17 November 2017, 17:44 said:
You’re right. I guess I didn’t really consider that because A) it’s becoming less common, at least as far as I can see, and B) there’s nothing actually wrong with it so I didn’t feel the need to bring it up. It’s still an oversight on my part though, and for that I apologize.
POST! POST TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT! We really do need more stuff on the site, because I feel like it’s mostly Apep doing all the heavy-lifting/writing here and that’s just unfair to him.
Avatar is in a class of its own, my friend. I think it works in Avatar because from the very first episode it’s lampshaded that these kids shouldn’t have to deal with it, but do it anyway because the world is just that horrible.