Characters: Light Master

Hello! Mimi's Diary is back.

Christmas is coming and December is dark. I'm starting to wonder if December isn't just my least favourite month. Don't get me wrong, I like Christmas, but it is a massive production and with everything being so dark and cold, I just don't feel up to it.

Anyway, on to my next diary discussion! I was talking to my editor and spitballing for ideas, and he said I could do something on basically any character. Or, if I didn't have enough to say about a character, I could do two characters. Like, say, Prime and Light Master because surely I don't have a bunch to say about the two of them.

I took that as a challenge, so here is an entire blog post all about everyone's favourite pain in the butt preteen superhero!

Ah, Tanner. Honestly, he was one of the initial characters I came up with. It just felt like I needed an obnoxious child to run around with the heroes as a junior sidekick. And then, as things developed, he became more and more...like he currently is.

Realistically, though, kids are not developed enough at that age to make good decisions. I think about what I was like at thirteen and it boggles my mind that in some times and places in human history that was almost an adult.

I decided not to make him a super mature kid - he'd be about as mature as I expect a thirteen-year-old to be. With a major superpower. Seriously, shooting raygun blasts out of your hands is high-powered by Arx standards. Let's look at the others I came up with near the beginning of the story - Achilles (no visible damage capabilities), Jumper (again, no visible damaging abilities - the worst we get is when he dents the floor from a really high fall), Lightning (super speed, with all the damage that can cause ), Bruce (healer), Cleo (a different type of terrifyingly OP), and Olivia (perhaps the scariest of the bunch). Only Tanner had a Miracle that would cause actual physical damage.

Okay, Olivia was a close second on that count, but Tanner still remained the most offensively based of the group. His delusions of grandeur are as bad, if not worse, than Achilles' and he has few inhibitions. Several kids shows are based on the "chosen child who must save the world and the adults don't understand their calling" trope, and Tanner thinks he's in one of those.

We know, however, that Purple Miracle Giver is pretty indiscriminate. They choose no heroes, and no villains. Everyone has equal opportunity for Miracles. Unless you really subscribe to Achilles' spiel about two Miracle Givers (though at this point we've seen three distinct ones...)

With one of the side stories (Dreams of Heroes) I went and explored Tanner a bit more, and we ended up with an awkward kid who desperately wanted to be something special. He loved superheroes and when he became one, his brain just...ran with it and spun out of control.

"Nobody gets me except Achilles. I am chosen to save Arx Nubibus."

I mean, I think a lot of kids would get caught up in that. Even more so when they're a bit of an outcast.

When I was contemplating Tanner for this blog post, I realized that he gives me a lot of vibes similar to Buddy from The Incredibles. We spend more time with him as Syndrome, but he starts as the sort of over-eager sidekick character that Tanner is. They both want nothing more than to prove themselves a capable superhero, and neither seems to exhibit very good judgement, presumably because they're kids. For Buddy, his poor judgement moment comes in the confrontation with Bomb Voyage where he manages to almost get himself killed trying to prove himself and poor Mr. Incredible has to let Voyage go to get the bomb off the kid's cape. For Tanner, we have a lot more data to draw from. Every time he shows up in a super fight, he seems to lessen my opinion of him if that was even possible. Most recently, he and Achilles did far more damage to unpowered people than they should have. Whoops.

Now, in Buddy's case, the superhero he attached himself to was a responsible (if gruff) adult who wasn't going to let him put himself in danger. Mr. Incredible even puts himself in obvious harm's way to try and keep this kid from getting hurt.

Contrast that with Tanner, whose chosen super-role-model is happy to affirm and enable him. The plot has been kind enough so far to keep Tanner out of the hospital, but he and Achilles just build off of each other and sometimes I'm not sure either of them qualify as adults.

I see Tanner and Buddy as interesting sibling characters now. Buddy, after being rejected, becomes a supervillain to prove his specialness. Tanner, being accepted, ends up helping to corrupt the superhero team he's on. I see the main difference in their arcs being the difference between Achilles and Incredible. While both are immature young men, one manages to be enough of a responsible adult to keep the kid out of trouble.

The idea of what happens when you give superpowers to a kid has been explored in other media as well, in different ways. I guess Tanner is my experiment with the trope. Though I initially planned to put him in with the rest of the Underwing Team (when he was less insufferable) as time passed, I thought it made much more sense for him to stick with Achilles. They're two peas in a pod!

Well, I think I successfully completed my editor's challenge. Can't write a full blog post on Light Master, bah. I feel like he's got so much to unpack with his character, but I'll leave it there for now.

I'll see you next year for a new Mimi's Diary entry!