One Hundred Fantasy Clichés That Really Need To Rest In Peace

#46: Children are Annoying Secondary Characters

  Fantasy treats children in one of two ways.  The first way is making them into the central characters of the novel.  This variant of the rule can be found in some of the most iconic fantasy series out there.  They include the Harry Potter series, the Sailor Moon manga series (the main characters are fourteen), the Fairy Tale manga series, and the Lord of the Rings series.  What follows is the second variant of the trope, which is the main focus of this editorial today.  That variant is when the adult characters are the central focus of the story.  In those stories, most children are treated as secondary characters with almost no impact to the plot.  Worse, these children are created to be annoying, so the audience has a hard time liking them.  This trope has been overly prevalent in fantasy novels of this kind for too long and quite honestly by now it is getting old.

  Creating children to be secondary characters with no purpose except to annoy the audience is just as bad as making a character bland.  By making the child annoying, you are not putting true effort into creating at least one character.  That one character could foil what was otherwise a strong plot.  If you annoy the audience, how are they going to find any interest in reading the material? 

  Additionally, adding a child to an otherwise all adult cast creates diversity.  The child could help create more realism to the situation, when the adults either have to protect them from harm or let the character achieve a huge milestone that helps out everyone.  The child could even have huge plot significance, possibly with the character having a connection to strong supernatural abilities or containing a maturity almost the same as the central adult characters.  There are a lot of possibilities to go with when adding a younger character to the cast.  Using them as a tool for annoyance does not have to be one of them.

  Now I want you to compare these two versions of a popular child character from both the original comic and TV series based on the material.  This character is none other than Carl Grimes from The Walking Dead.  Starting with the popular TV series, in the first few seasons this character had almost no role in the plot.  He was a secondary character at best, with his only role being motivation for Rick to survive the zombie outbreak.  When Carl does do something, 99% of the time it handicaps the group in some way.  As a result, until recent seasons a majority of the audience found Carl annoying and went as far as to wish for the writers to kill him off.  Following the TV series version of the character is the original comics.  Carl there is still motivation for Rick to survive the zombie outbreak, but he has a much bigger role than the TV version of the character.  Multiple times in the series, the character has actually helped the group survive in the darkest of times.  Carl even in the first edition of the comic ended up saving Rick's life when he pulled the trigger to the gun that killed the now insane Shane.  The character has complexity early on, a close relationship to his childhood friend Sophia (who does not die), strong feelings about the situation going on around him, and maturity few children have even in real life.  Both versions of the character do grow up to become stronger teenage characters and are by that moment well liked by the audience.  However, complexity wise, the comic version stands out as being both a strong character before and after getting a few years older.  This version of Carl Grimes proves that having a strong child character with an adult cast can work.

  Any character of any age can play a strong part in the plot.  It all depends on how you present them as a character to the audience.  Do you want an annoying secondary character or a strong primary character all the way through?  The answer should not be a hard one to answer.