X-Men, Animorphs, Digimon, Avatar the Last Airbender, Naruto, Fire Emblem, Batman Family, quiet a few JRPGs....
What's interesting about Animorphs is that it actually showed how being turned into a child soldier fucks a kid up.
Animorphs slaps for this reason among many yeah. Its incredible how much genuinely thoughtful stuff is packed into these short little pop novels for kids lmao.
Earth Federation Forces most moral army in the galaxy...using child soldiers to win world war 3.
Me sowing: "Oh sweet, now I'm going to train and mentor the special Gundam boy, but I'll just not suck at it."
Me reaping: "Oh god, oh fuck, my psychic child soldier is in a coma now. Gonna dip out for a while."
In all fairness to Digimon, it was a computer program recruiting child soldiers and no one designed the program.
This was originally true of my works because of the JRPG/Shonen inspiration but I ended up aging up a lot of my characters that were like 16/17 to 19-20, though there's still a few explicitly kid members of the party.
Yeah my story is multigenerational (ive sort of mentioned this before to you I think?) so it tells the character's stories until they die (actually, even past that point, since an afterlife is involved, lmao sorry my story's scope is way to massive to deal with) and then a new generation takes over and such. I'll definitly have to think about including themes of war trauma, especially for the characters who are not grown when the story starts. Also a lot of the main characters have been training for war since early adolescence (and one grew up in a prison camp) even if they are young adults when the story starts, so I'll have to deal with that theme as well and the fallout that has on their psyches. Interesting to think about. Thats why I like talking about it. Brings up new themes I realize Ive underbaked. Which just ads more to the scope lmao but there it is.
I was thinking of doing POV chapters too but I'm not sure that works in Kinetic novel form because I want the charachter on scene, though I could have only one charachter expressing inner thoughts per chapter and just bounce around as necessary? Not a new character per chapter though no.
The other problem is some key characters have secrets lol. Which I'm not sure how to handle. Like it would seem kinda suspicious to have those characters never have POVs, or have their story be told through the eye of a bodyguard or something when other characters are not.
I think I'm probably still going to do something POV-esque because I do want SOMEONE giving personal perspective on events and I dont know that I want it to just be a handful of them. I guess i'll just have to be careful with the scope of WHO is getting POVs so its not so broad that its really suspicious when a particular character isn't.
looks at your profile pic
But my child soldier family is different!
