It seems like animation is really prone to having shitty kid characters. How do you write a smart kid character without them being a Wesley Crusher? What are some /co/ examples that you think are good smart kid characters?
>>84323349
>Wussley Crusher
>>84323349
On a normal naval vessel they'd have passed that kid round like currency.
>>84323349
Dexter. That's pretty much it. Everything else has the smart kids either A) constantly use overly verbose scientific terms for no good reason and/or B) pull a ton of stupid sub-MacGyver-level shit out of their ass and call it "science".
>>84323349
I can't think of a cartoon that has a kid Gary Stu. Most cartoons with children have a cast of children so is not hard to balance it out.
Genius Kid characters only work when everyone of importance is a kid. If the show portrays all the adults as incompetent (Except maybe a few who are competent but too senile, brittle, lazy they'd rather send kids do things) it's perfectly fine. Audience can just accept that it's this kind of show.
But if leads are competent adults and there's just one kid tackled on, that's going to be stupid.
>>84323349
>>84323349
Aang. Figured out how to beat the Fire Lord without breaking his no murder oath and everything
>>84323748
You mean have new unforeshadowed power handed to him by a completely new character?
>>84323726
>But if leads are competent adults and there's just one kid tackled on, that's going to be stupid.
So, Steven Universe?
>>84323761
It was a logical step back. In order to bend elements, you had to bend your own mana. The alignment you had to which element is what decided what you could bend. Being the avatar able to connect with the spirit world with his spiritual powers wasn't a far reach to make him bend people's spirits
>>84323761
Every character was a new character the first time you saw them. Boom boom man was totally new and so was his ability but you fags don't bitch abut him being an asspull
>>84323349
>How do you write a smart kid character without them being a Wesley Crusher?
I think Jake and Rom from DS9 are good examples: You make them normal people, with normal desires.
The problem with Wesley, and similar characters, if that they're an adult's perfect concept of a kid. And a character who's ennui comes from not overachieving enough, and not pleasing his parents and authority figures enough is just not very compelling.
It's telling that Wesley was upstaged by similar characters in his own fucking show, because they actually had to write them as human beings. It also helps that many of them had a genuine connection with Picard, the big father figure on the show.
In short, Wesley is a unique kind of fuck-up, and that's because Roddenberry basically wrote him as halfway between a self-insert Mary Sue, and a role model for a generation he was, by that point, out of touch with.
>>84324101
Steven isn't the smart one, he's the heart of the team
>>84324377
He's basically been pushed more and more to be the leader of the group moreso than the conscience of the group.
>>84324101
>Steven Universe
>Competent adults
Actually since you bring it up, SU has a decent example of a good child character in Steven. The gems are a heavily dysfunctional group of aliens held together by their love of Steven, and his compassion and desire for everyone to get along in the face of their interpersonal conflicts is thematically interesting. I think it's best portrayed by episodes like Barn Mates, where Steven wants everyone to get along, but two characters have bad blood. That episode where Lars and Sadie get trapped on an island with Steven is somewhat similar, Steven's diehard optimism helps them make the best of a bad situation.
It boils down to any decently written character being a set of core values and traits that either oppose or further the narrative and the various problems it throws in the faces of the characters. Children can't be the exception.
>>84323673
Yeah they'll pass you around like..... uh, like currency, like you said.
>>84324258
None of them was about internal moral conflict. Also all of them were outgrowth of the four basic powers already established.
>>84325047
isnt spirit bending at its core though since its the spirits that control the elements. Fish god proved that early one
>>84325223
If Aang went and strangled the sun, that'd make sense. He didn't.
How can you deny that it's completely new addition to lore, last minute tackled on because writers, or censors or whoever else couldn't tell kids the truth that sometimes there's no third option.
>>84323349
I've been rewatching Season 1 of TNG and I've been thinking about what went right and went wrong with each character.
For Wesley what went wrong the hardest was not that he was a super genius but how he behaved.
For example, in Farpoint he's a little shit in front of his mother when she meets Riker.
In the next episode he takes over Main Engineering, lets some guy remove most of the Isolinear chips and disable warp drive, and refuses to give Picard control back over engineering or let anyone else in until the ship's about to get destroyed and even then he saves the day by destroying another vessel they were supposed to salvage. Sure he was intoxicated along with most of the crew, but come on. Enough is enough.
Oh yeah, and he also spliced together Picard's voice clips so he could pretend that the Captain is ordering him around.
I think where Wesley went wrong from the beginning was that he had no positive personality attributes to endear him to the audience.
Had Wesley been a super genius but humble and somewhat shy or at least oblivious that most people don't think like him and mostly ignored or overlooked by the crew instead of him shoving it everyone's face and people picking up on just how smart he was eventually, that would have been better.
Had Picard and the crew been harder on the boy and him struggle with the duties and responsibilities of being an acting-ensign and his intelligence having its limits from the start and not waiting until First Flight then the character wouldn't be nearly as bad.
Unfortunately that would have required more nuance and complexity of character than early Star Trek TNG was capable of.
At least that's my take on the character.
I always go for the Shane Black method, where the kid is in equal danger as the adults. Let them be part of the story, not pushed off to the side to be protected while still claiming that they're "just as good" as the adults.
>>84324258
>Every character was a new character the first time you saw them.
But not the second time, or the third, or the fourth. Bumi was a well-established character when he came to help the heroes in the finale. The lion turtle was a new character who showed up at the end to give the hero a new power which also came out of nowhere and served as a simple solution to a problem he'd struggled with the whole series.
Combustion Man, on the other hand, was an "arc villain". That's something different.
>>84325223
>isnt spirit bending at its core though since its the spirits that control the elements.
That's how they justified it, but it doesn't solve the problem that Aang's new spiritbending power was not previously something that could be done with any of his other spirit-related powers. It's said to be an extension of them, but it's not a logical extension of what we'd already seen.
If the whole "spiritbending can take away other people's powers" had been mentioned half a season in advance, and Aang struggled with whether he'd be able to learn/do it, then it wouldn't be out of nowhere. But it wasn't. It was just something he could do when he needed to avoid a moral dilemma, which was justified with an on-the-spot flashback.
>>84326054
>The solution was to make Wesley a young Broccoli
Interesting
>>84323349
>TFW you've been on a Joe 90 kick lately
>main kid character is smart because of borderline, if not outright brainwashing procedure that gives him the "knowledge and experience" of various professionals
>Without certain macguffin, kid is just an ordinary 9 year old boy
>certain episodes like "Talkdown" and "Double Agent" show the flaws of said procedure so it is not infalliable.
I'll never understand the level of hatred toward Westley. I found him a little boring, that's it.
>>84326054
>In the next episode he takes over Main Engineering, lets some guy remove most of the Isolinear chips and disable warp drive, and refuses to give Picard control back over engineering or let anyone else in until the ship's about to get destroyed and even then he saves the day by destroying another vessel they were supposed to salvage. Sure he was intoxicated along with most of the crew, but come on. Enough is enough.
What was it, Cracked that made fun of the cliche of
>Intoxication/being high turns everyone into an insane monster
?
>>84328059
How does that help?
>>84323673
The Enterprise seems to have taken a more liberal view of having families on board, so it's less of a problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuK-GCRM7XA
>>84326054
Personally, I liked how every moment he was on screen with Picard it looked like Jean Luc was actively fighting the urge to murder him.
>>84329989
>the episode where they all go to the sex-planet and they're forced to bring Wesley along
God that was hilarious.
>>84326054
and then he got abducted by space indians
