A few weeks back on Twitter, in the great quiet of year’s end, the writerly discourse turned to the demographics of fantasy protagonists. Most of them are in their early 20s, same for science fiction, and at least a few of us would like to see some older protagonists, in the fullness or twilight of life, so they can share in the grand imaginative adventures, too.
I pointed out, at the time, part of the problem is structural. “It’s easier,” I said, “to write Luke Skywalker leaving the farm than Uncle Owen.” Indeed, a few dead parents, a bildungsroman call, and your youthful protagonist is out on the road to adventure (whether the hyperlanes outward or some imaginative quest inward). It’s harder to disentangle a middle-aged protagonist from their mortgage, their children, their established career, their set habits. The usual ways of ‘freeing’ such characters from their bonds, like fridging, are generally considered hack and in bad taste.
Twitter, of course, moved on to the next sexy Discourse like a throwaway line in a Barenaked Ladies song. But I kept thinking about it, and brought it up to a few of my slower-paced communities, and we discussed the elders’ equivalents of the bildungsroman and the Call to Adventure – ways to get our older protagonists out on the way to their own fantasies and science fictions. This list is by no means comprehensive, but a few ideas to get us all started.
Ebenezer Scrooge
An older person has a lot more time to get stuck in their ways than a young person does. Indeed, part of the appeal of a younger protagonist is seeing what ways they’ll get started on, what habits and ideals they’ll choose. The appeal of an Ebenezer Scrooge is watching them change their ways, usually for the better, before it’s too late. The Ghost of Christmas-Yet-To-Come must loom large here, the ultimate ‘too late’ to change before, for our putative Scrooge to realize what looms just before them. Whether your Scrooge is visited by three literal ghosts or not, they’re stuck in their ways and must be dislodged from them, forced to mend the habits and attitudes that have served them so well for so long and now trap them. Before it’s too late.
James Bond
This is the man (or woman, or enby) who spent A Bad War, and has no place in the peace that has settled since. They were probably on the winning side, but they never won the peace. Theirs is a thousand yard stare, an affected disaffection, and a host of terrible coping strategies. The literary James Bond is a fragile creature, an object of some pity to the people around him, a man a bit out of his time. His quest is to come to terms with what he’s seen and done in the horrors of the war (whatever war, however metaphorical, it was), whether that’s clinically aided by a therapist’s office, or tying up loose ends, or coming to a (quasi-)religious epiphany that yes, he can live with it,
…but that’s not his real work, now, is it? His real work is coming to grips with the peace, the world made in the shadow of the old war, where poppies grow and children play where the horrors were. The world here now and the world to come, born of the world he knew and can’t reconcile. That is the master-work, the relationship to his anima to the war’s relationship to his shadow.
My friend Michael Martin noted a variation, the Jason Bourne, an older figure who’s been carrying on a personal vendetta so long the world has moved on without them and trying to settle it long after settling it was of any good to anyone.
Martin Bishop (Michael Martin)
This is pretty much every role Robert Redford played after 1980, but I single out Martin Bishop of Sneakers. He is the mentor to a new generation, but this is his story, tying up the loose ends he left behind from his youth. He needs to resolve them, or fail to do so, while handing the reins to the next generation. This is Indiana Jones in Crystal Skull, however ineptly that story was handled: reconciling to Marion, finishing Oxley’s work as Oxley has long descended into madness, inducting his son into the ways of archaeology, coming to terms with the fact that his father and his friends are gone, and he will soon follow. It’s every damn thing a Martin Bishop has to cope with, all at once. Pick one, or at most, two of those, and let your own Obi-Wan tell his story and go into his own double-sunset.
Jake and Elwood Blues
We all remember this one from every heist caper from 1980 to Ocean’s 13.
He needs to come out of retirement for One Last Job, and, usually in the course of it, Get The Band Back Together.
This elder’s adventuring career is long behind them, but their current reduced circumstances or beaten-down moral compass demands they come do just one more before they fade into a comfortable, yet irrelevant, retirement. Whether it’s putting down the last of the old evil (or its attempted imitators, because the kids Don’t Understand), boosting the biggest score of their career, or putting on one last show to save the orphanage where they grew up, this is the last job, and meeting (or recruiting) the people they lost contact with, left behind, who changed in the years since, is a key component, facing our elder with how different the world has become without them.
John Perry
“On his 75th birthday, John Perry did two things. First, he visited his wife’s grave. Then, he joined the army.”
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
Their partner is gone. For some, their career. But a huge part of their life, something that gave them meaning and cadre and comfort, is gone. Like the Scrooge, they must change. Unlike Scrooge, the change has come upon them, and now they must wrestle with a life already changed, rather than drift toward a certain fate.
I personally don’t much care if they find a new love, or come to terms with the pain of widowhood, or go join the army. Let them find something. Let them grow meaning back from the tender place where there used to be someone, something. Let them grow and change into something new.
The examples I’ve given are men, mainly white. That’s because the archetypes and examples I know are from another age, an age dominated by men, mainly white. I hope with some applicability, better writers than myself can use them as a springboard for stories about their own identities, or about Others than themselves. There is no reason for Scrooge to be Episcopal or Bond to be male, or for their stories to follow well-trodden Campbellian paths.
I offer these as ideas and places to start, a list intentionally incomplete, a page left half-written, for others to finish and to build on.
Now then, let me get back to my submissions to Gargantua, where somehow all these figures have sprung up at once…
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