BW Media Spotlight

Some people just really hate kid characters, even among those who don’t hate kids in real life. Mostly it’s the kid haters, though.

There’s this idea from a rather vocal group that kids don’t belong in stories, even when the stories are made for kids. They tell you “kids want to be the adults, not the kids, and they want to see the adults do the cool things, not kids.” Yeah, that’s bogus. You can have both. You don’t have to be part of the false “representation” movement to want to see kids like yourself doing cool things. It’s why so many shows star teenagers, the next level for kids. The adults will usually get to do all the fun stuff because they’re older and more experienced, but you can have kids be cool in your stories, too.

The problem is so many writers don’t know how to write kids, or they have a goal for kids in their stories that don’t quite work the way they’re written. Now some I can defend. Scott Trakker is hated by a friend of mine in the Morning Nonsense “best chat” but when he’s written well he can add to the story. The trick is knowing when he can help and when it’s best he doesn’t. I don’t hate Scott, though most recent versions of MASK have tossed him out entirely while giving his dad a new paint job. There are some stories that he shouldn’t have been in, but I can go story by story and find ones where he actually adds to the plot and makes it interesting, freshening up the MASK vs VENOM stories. That might be fun someday.

Instead I want to focus on two really good kid characters, two of my favorites in fact. And these aren’t the little kid “Disney/Nick Junior” variety. These are the regular Saturday morning and syndicated shows for older kids not quite pre-teen yet. I’ll go over why they work and why I like them. Between those two, however, I’m going to show you a counterpoint with two really bad characters that show why some people hate kid characters in shows not about kids. I’m not so naive that I don’t realize how it can be done wrong. I just want to show how it can be done right. Going back and forth will make it fun. I also want to say that the fact that both of the good choices were girls and the bad choices were bad isn’t me turning “woke”. It’s me choosing a particular age group and finding the two best examples of both based on memory or recent viewings. These are old shows and they didn’t do that nonsense back then. The only boy option that came to memory were Jonny Quest and Hadji, and that’s stacking the deck.

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