Why Can't the Adults Handle It?

September 11, 2020

In many stories that focus around children or teenagers, it suddenly falls to them to save the world. In Harry Potter, Animorphs, and Wings of Fire teenagers suddenly find themselves responsible for the fate of the world. That leaves the question any responsible adult would ask: Where are the adults? Why aren’t they taking care of this? Why is it down to children or teenagers to save the world? I’m going to look at a few different approaches, but one I’m going to intentionally skip is that the adults are too incompetent to do it.

In Harry Potter, Harry is “the chosen one”. This is a cheap trick to explain away this problem. A prophecy claims someone has to change the world. No choice. No adults allowed. Otherwise, there’s no reason this person is doing this alone. As with all cheap tricks, they’re overused, because they’re easy. Fate says it has to be this way, so there’s no need to explain what qualifies – or forces – them to do the job. Further, the adults in Harry Potter are mostly absent from the main conflicts. A prophecy said that Harry has to defeat Voldemort, and everyone’s so afraid of him, that for the most part, they don’t try. I’m oversimplifying this, but the point is that Harry Potter takes a bad approach to this, and there are far better ways to do this.

The series Wings of Fire plays with this a little. There’s still a prophecy, but the main characters decide that if people are all expecting them to save the world, then they’ll do it their own way. They are in the unique position of being the only dragons (all the characters are dragons) that know about members of other tribes. In the midst of a war pushing two decades, this puts them in a unique position to save the world. But the adults outside of the war want to help them and keep them safe.

This is similar to the approach in Animorphs. The series follows a group of teenagers that were chosen to fight an alien invasion by virtue of being in the right place at the right time. They met another alien that told them about the invasion, making them the only humans who know about it. In this sense, they are “the chosen ones”, but chosen not by fate or destiny, but by another fighter in the war. Like in Wings of Fire, there’s no one they can trust to help them. Once their parents find out about the war, they offer their support, showing that they care about what happens to the main characters.

In Girl in Red, Hermione was the one that had to be involved in their war, despite protests from everyone from her parents to Dumbledore. As in Animorphs, she was chosen by another combatant (Rose) to fight an enemy only they understood, because it was too dangerous to reveal anything about said enemy. But this didn’t stop her parents from worrying, nor from the adults trying to help. It wasn’t that fate said it had to be this way, it was something about her and the people she knew. When children in particular read books about other people their age saving the world, they like to imagine that they can too. I think it’s better to teach them that there’s something special about them that they could use to save the world, rather than to teach them that one person is chosen for this for no reason. It’s also important that they know they can go to adults for help, even when they think they can’t.

When writing about younger characters tackling grownup problems, at the very least, the grownups should be protesting. If not, finding other ways to show that they care can go a long way, not only to develop the characters and their families and friends, but to improve the quality of your story. If you’re going to have children or teenagers saving the world, it should be because there’s something special about them, not because the adults are incompetent.

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