#this is very fully baked but limited by my ability as a writer

[hallothere]

I broke down and wrote the essay. No, I did not and will not proofread it. I don’t waaaannaaaa

There’s Only One Winner For Isengard

In a perfect world, in a world with no meta requirements that could bend to the will of the player, we would roll up to Isengard level-capped, no debuffs, with one quest-marker on hand: Ruin Saruman’s day. But this is a pre-written sequence of events in which we are only along for the ride. We, the player, and a Ranger are shipped off to Isengard with only one conceivable goal: survive. On a meta level we know what Saruman is capable of. At level 70 or 80-something at best, even we are aware that we are no match for a wizard with a canon fate. Not to mention our Ranger companion! The Grey Company has been through enough (though we don’t know the half of it yet) and we are reasonably distraught at the possibilities.

This is why we, the player character, will lose the game of Isengard.

Beyond the meta rules of the game, where quest objectives are whatever the devs wanted them to be (looking at you, Mordrambor) the player character can not defeat Saruman in any way that’s meaningful. And (again on a meta level) in order for us to get to experience the action at Helm’s Deep and Rohan at large, we have to get out of Isengard. We’d get bored of waiting for Theoden and Co. We’d hurl insults or slap fish at Saruman and realistically incur wrath. Honestly, with the set of circumstances presented to us, who could survive imprisonment in Nan Curunir?

Only one of the Company ever could: Lothrandir of Suri Kyla. 

To begin with, none of the Rangers we have any real information on could have done it. Anyone who’s spent time in Angmar is at a disadvantage due to the prevailing dread (game mechanic or otherwise) that can be manipulated by Saruman. Any Ranger that has a major traumatic past is at a disadvantage (sorry Mincham) because if nothing else, Saruman has proven to be a master of illusion. Even Halbarad for all his leadership ability has a pretty exploitable weakness: eventually Saruman can crack the code with a vision of Aragorn’s demise, the one end Halbarad must fear above all others. Or what bond could more easily be exploited than that of a leader and his men? Lheu Brenin’s in the gang now after all. All Saruman would have to do was send for a few more incentives. 

But Lothrandir comes built with a few key advantages that make him the only Grey Company Ranger qualified to come out of this battle of wills on top. His specific strengths, mindset, and personality traits combined with the circumstances that the game sets up going into Isengard make him the clear choice of Rangers- if a Ranger you must have- to stay behind in Nan Curunir. 

Lothrandir wins because he changes the game. From ‘go’ our co-prisoner does something that either puzzles the player character or sends them into an anxious fit. Lothrandir declares himself fearless and sprints recklessly into the ring. Any way you figure it, this seems like a poorly calculated move. He doesn’t stop to survey the enemy. He doesn’t gather intel. Heck, he doesn’t even bide his time to see if he’ll be killed before he even reaches the dungeons. Lothrandir sprints right in without so much as a thought or a plan. Saruman doesn’t know it yet, but from that moment on Lothrandir has him on the back foot. 

Consider for a moment Saruman’s MO. He’s a wizard, and he uses a great deal of magic, sure, but time and time again we are reminded of the power of his voice and his words. He calls down a storm on Caradhras (in the movies for darn sure), he via-Wormtongue whispers poison into the ears of King Theoden. He doesn’t lead with any kind of grandiose display when trying to sway Gandalf. No, he leads with a persuasive argument. Later on, he nearly talks Theoden back around, after failing to wipe out all of Rohan. After killing the man’s son for goodness sakes. He nearly talks himself out of that one!

But Lothrandir has already changed this from a game of wits to a game of wills. There will be no vying for favor, or biding time, or compliance, or even giving Saruman a chance to ‘talk it over friendly’ first. He’s already spitting on the shoes of everyone he sees. The accomplishment in this is twofold, and it makes a major impact on the rest of his time in Nan Curunir. 

Firstly, by establishing a new game, Lothrandir sets Saruman up for a whole lot of assumptions. He does not display any signs of diplomatic ability, wisdom, or even common sense. He very intentionally projects an attitude of reckless disobedience. In the player’s own eyes, it seems as if he ‘doesn’t know any better’. This gives Saruman a clear path to take regarding Lothrandir. He assumes you can’t reason the typical way with someone who has shown zero inclination for listening. The player character demonstrates that the Grey Company (or least their associates) are capable of compliance. For all intents and purposes, this Lothrandir doesn’t appear to be. He’s contrary, fool-hardy, and evidently dumb enough to dive in headfirst and get himself killed. You beat that kind of guy into submission… don’t you?

But Lothrandir has changed the rules of the game. Saruman is no longer fighting with his best weapon, but with a tool to be found in any old villain’s arsenal. When he took the approach of reasoning with the player character and disregarding Lothrandir, he set the victor’s foundation on our snow-pilgrim’s greatest strength. 

Secondly, by establishing a new game, Lothrandir makes this a battle of physical endurance. Unbeknownst to Saruman, this is the one thing that makes him stand out from the rest of the Grey Company. He has walked through the frozen north lands and the fiery south lands and come out unscathed. He has mastered the unarmed combat style of the Lossoth by joining in mid-winter wrestling matches in a place that took down many Elves, Angmarim, and notably one King of Arthedain! Lothrandir has conceivably spent his entire life training for this matchup. Any endurance he has built up, any fighting he can do without access to a weapon, all are assets to the kind of game he just made Saruman play. Lothrandir is uniquely built to survive any physical torment Isengard can throw at him, or at least, better equipped than any of the others. 

To say Lothrandir is the best choice, we also have to rule out the others. Corunir was thwarted by the Rammas Deluon and for all he learned from that, it’s a weak spot in his proverbial armor. Golodir too, resisted a fair degree of torture (palantiri based, even!) in Carn Dum, but it won’t be hard for Saruman to suss that one out and make our old man’s life a living nightmare. Even Radanir, serious and seemingly unattached to any social bonds now that his good pal Elweleth has gone sailing, would be a poor choice. He is too serious, (for lack of a better term) too genre-savvy, and even if he is spitting blood and delivering a witty one-liner, that’s Saruman’s foot in the door! ‘I’ll never betray my friends and kin, you kaleidoscope hack’? You’ve just told him your weakness, Radanir! No, he can’t keep his mouth shut to save his (or Saerdan’s) life. Radanir is the wrong choice too.

We don’t know a significant amount about the others (except Ranger death would move Calenglad to tears, we can’t put him through this) in order to pinpoint their fatal flaws in the Isengard encounter. But, the game puts us in the incredible position of having seen Lothrandir’s Achilles’ heel and letting us take that disadvantage away. 

Lothrandir of Suri Kyla is uniquely equipped to survive any physical encounter that Saruman throws his way. Now, who’s to say the wizard won’t change his tune and go back to his old tricks? In an incredible twist of fate, we are. The game sets us, the player, up to play Saruman’s game from the get-go. We keep our pixelated head down, try and fly below the radar, and express just enough concern over the fate of our fool-hardy pal to get Saruman to cement his estimation of Lothrandir as a pawn in the game in stone. By making ourselves the better target for the words of a wily wizard, Saruman decides that the best way to deal with the spare prisoner is by playing right into his hands. As we all know, the player character escapes. While that might seem bad for someone who Saruman has earmarked for corporal punishment only, it covers Lothrandir’s one weakness. 

Aside from being the only significant unarmed fighter, Lothrandir is also never painted as a loner. He spends his time in Suri Kyla, hanging out with the Lossoth and sharing their campfires. In the new questline in Forochel, he jumps at the chance to make a new Dunedain friend and takes to King Arvedui like a duck to water. They’re instant best pals. It’s minutes before Lothrandir is telling him Aragorn’s life story and pledging to go with him on a buddy adventure to seek peace for a regretful shade. And if that’s not enough canon for you, Lothrandir bears the brunt of the Falcon clan aggression on the way to Isengard. He does it for you, his friend and companion in suffering. It’s a bit meta, but we have to assume in the internal universe he knows you a little. You’ve run your merry adventures to a degree where, were this not a video game, Lothrandir would at least consider you an ally if not a friend outright. 

He exposes his weakness unwittingly to the Falcon clan, but he leaves it at the gates of Isengard in an extremely well-timed move. By sprinting through the gates without a care as to what’s going on with you or anyone else, Lothrandir establishes an emotional distance between you both in the eyes of any onlookers. Whatever affection you have for him, it doesn’t seem reciprocated. This isn’t a major weakness for Saruman to exploit, then. You’re not one of his kinsmen. If he did want to pursue that line, he could always send to Tur Morva for one, right?

This is where the game comes back in to shift the tide in Lothrandir’s favor. We escape. We play the game, we nearly lose the game, and had we not been given an out the power scaling makes it difficult to conceive of an outcome where we the player can win Isengard. Sure, we’ve been released from prisons before (Delossad to name one) but this is the climax of Dunland. We make a daring escape, and move south towards the Gap of Rohan and all sorts of bad times. 

Back in Nan Curunir, Lothrandir is getting the daylights beat out of him, and taking a victory lap. He’s cemented his position as ‘the prisoner we’ll break with violence’. The uruks have seen him insubordinate and disorderly. In the Lothrandir interlude, there’s not only the canon (stated outright!) reality of past and present torture. There’s also zero hesitation in Lothrandir taking that one on the chin. There are no other objectives on his mind than making the next few minutes as miserable as possible for everyone around. He has no other goals. And he doesn’t need them. Nobody is surprised that Lothrandir is signing his death warrant within nanoseconds of being presented an offer to comply. He spits on the offer. He tips over the slop bucket. He beats bloody any orc (and gameplay purposes aside there are very few that dare come forward) that actually tries to kill him for it outright. 

He’s built up a non-rapport with Gun Ain. She talks about killing him and he doesn’t say anything. They’re all playing his game and he’s winning. In the conversation with Saruman, we’re not given the opportunity to watch Lothrandir ‘resist’ in the same fashion the player character did. We don’t need to. Saruman has bigger and better things to worry about- killing a prince, wiping out a nation- than one Ranger who he’s just going to order well-flayed again. By setting himself up as the punching bag, Lothrandir has managed to fly beneath Saruman’s priority threshold. He’s been relegated to the responsibility of Gun Ain, and still with somewhat protected status because they haven’t wormed anything useful out of him yet.

All of these moves have culminated to an impasse. Saruman is not winning points in the game like he expected. One ‘meathead Ranger’ has managed to resist all the torments of Isengard, and he’s gained nothing from this. The other prisoner escaped, word had doubtless reached him that the Tur Morva Thirty-Odd are free and raring to be a thorn in his side again. He has no external leverage to apply on Lothrandir and it’s become increasingly obvious that our Ranger friend is not engaging like the player did. But still, Saruman has his pride. It’s his downfall in the end, and it’s his downfall in his fight against the one Ranger who’s already beating him. Lothrandir can’t be killed outright because Saruman hasn’t won yet. And with that guarantee of protection, Lothrandir can coast all the way to the conquest of Isengard. 

He can keep playing the game and stalling for time. It’s morbid, but what better way to waste someone’s time and energy than convincing them slow, drawn-out torture is the way to go? A little extreme, Lothrandir, but it’s still his game to lose. He wastes Saruman’s time. If he is eventually rescued, total victory. If he’s killed in the end, he definitely didn’t give the wizard the satisfaction, so a less resounding victory but one in the win column nonetheless. 

With a little help from our usually Ranger-cidal devs, Lothrandir reprograms Saruman’s game of chess to a boxing match. He takes out all his disadvantages, gets Isengard to attack from a point of... if not weakness then at least neutral ability, and then devotes his every waking breath to violent disobedience.

Sure, you could have taken any of the Grey Company with you to Isengard. Lheu Brenin could have swapped out for Braigar or Amlan or Mithrendan or Culang- but only one of these guys has the brute strength, commitment, and sheer audacity to pull it off. 

You take Lothrandir to Orthanc. There’s a different prisoner of Nan Curunir when he leaves.

[dendrite-blues]

The Pace Gremlin

My writing pace is something of a personal gremlin.

Most days it doesn't bother me. I'm proud of the work I do. I put deep thought into every line.

When I hand it off I have zero anxiety about the feedback, because no one could ever pick it apart as thoroughly as I have.

I beta for opinions, not quality. To have someone else check my character's logic (they have a tendency to make snap decisions without explaining themselves adequately) and to find my infamous typos. By the time others read it, my prose is already at my current personal best. If it wasn't, I would still be writing it.

But when something brings me down emotionally, the pace gremlin is always right behind. Vulnerability has a pheromone that insecurity can't resist. It smells your self doubt and comes running.

I'm sure everyone has their own personal wounds. I'm sure lots of people struggle with the "I'm not creative" demon, the "I never finish anything" demon, the "someone else already did it better" demon. All valid. But not what I struggle with in writing. (Art is different but that's another post.)

The trouble with the pace gremlin is, everybody has a magic trick to "fix" slowness. I've read them all. Good advice, if speed is beneficial to you. I'm sure some people feel very good about a fat word count, and for them such advice is probably a life saver. A few common points in these advice posts:

1) Stop procrastinating. Make a schedule and stick to it. Write everyday.

I'm sure this works if you happen to have fully developed ideas on a schedule. I don't. I need time to gather my thoughts. I burnout, I get stuck, I mope because I'm a bit melodramatic about being stuck. But if you do have endless ideas and energy that never end up on the page, it's solid advice.

2) Stop editing while you write. Force yourself to write without stopping. Time yourself. Don't ever stop to research. Don't ever stop, period, until you've reached your word count.

Because a word count is the end all be all, right? Never mind prose, diction, attempts at originality and style.

People love to blog about this point because there are so many apps to cure it. It makes for good top ten lists, which always get more hits than actual content.

Advise blogs will tell you to turn your monitor off so you can't see what you wrote. They will tell you to put a coin under your backspace so you can't even press it. They will recommend you apps that track your output, apps that mimic typewriters, apps that block your internet usage, apps that punish you for failing. (shudder)

I don't see how any of this promotes quality writing, personally. I don't agree that all writing is good writing. I think of you input half baked crap you get out half baked crap. Who cares if you cover it in buttercream, it's still got raw eggs in it.

I don't buy that it's a bad thing to stop and rearrange the structure of a sentence, to find the exact right word, to question if there's a better way to reveal this plot point. I don't think word counts should be the goal.

3) Let go of perfectionism, "all first drafts are shitty."

Again, I understand that this is important advice for people who are paralyzed by self doubt. The compulsion to rewrite continuously and never progess is strong for some. But there's a difference between finessing and fixating. This advise shouldn't be taken as gospel.

Perfectionism is not an addiction, and it's not something I can quit. It is ingrained in how I evaluate myself. In preschool I arranged my Legos by color. I was literally born this way. Its not going away now.

If I make crap, I feel like a crappy writer. Which makes me hate the crap I made, which discourages me from writing more. Rushing to write crap is the fastest way to sabotage myself, I have learned. (Painfully.)

If someone is genuinely struggling with perfectionism, this is THE WORST advise you could possibly give them. Perfectionists need to feel confident in what they do. They need to produce good results. No, the first draft is never going to be perfect. But it can be good. It can even be great. And the feeling of writing something great can fuel my motivation for weeks.

Which is not to say that it's okay to indulge in endless editing loops. There's a limit. But it's also not okay for me to "write crap and fix it in revision."

I can't polish an paragraph if the paragraph is incoherent, if it has no unique qualities, if its just a meandering line of words I regurgitated to meet a quota. When I come back to edit I will just delete it and rewrite... In which case I'm actually spending more time than if I just wrote it slowly to begin with.

Which brings me to my real point:

There's nothing wrong with slow.

When people talk about slow, all of these other accusations are automatically made. Because it must be that there is something wrong, we are capable of zooming if only we weren't stunted by some hidden inefficiency that prevents us from joining the fast fiction master race.

Nonsense. I'm not slow because I edit too much, or because I don't know what my story is about, or because I lack discipline. I am capable, if given something to copy, of typing 60 words per minute. But I can't think at 60 words per minute.

(In fact, according to my sprinting stats, I think at about 10 words per minute...14 if I'm rushing. Please, hold your applause. Haha)

I'm a slow writer...because I'm a slow thinker. I don't "waste" time spinning my wheels on stuff that doesn't matter. I don't need an app to trick me into being productive. I just need time to think.

When I don't give that to myself... When the pace gremlin catches me unable to defend my insecurities...I make crap. I feel crappy. I convince myself I am the problem and I would already be published if only I let myself write "crappy drafts." If I wasn't held back by my toxic "perfectionism."

Enough. I'll always be slow. Its not a condition, it's the way my brain works. As far as I know, there's no cure for being a tortoise.

And that's fine. In my right mind I am proud of my pace. I take pride in considering every word in every line. I care about craft.

I find drafting sentences at a snail's pace satisfying. It's deliberate. It has gravitas. It's laced with complexities I hope others will detect and appreciate. And when I place my pages in stranger's hands, I know I have raised them with the ability to defend themselves. I have no fear.

I know I will still feel bad about it at some point. That's the nature of creative life. But now I have a post to remind myself why slow is okay. And I guess if anyone else had the same problems, then this post is here for you too. Don't get discouraged. Do it your way and make stories with meaning.

[writtenbyhappynerds]

FF102: Unit 9, The End’s the Best Part

Hello. This is the last chapter of Fanfiction 102. Our final page, and our last piece. We wanted to end on a fitting note. As such, our final unit is on something the Editor and I find very important: endings.

          In the writing process, and in my writing process, endings are written as soon as possible. It’s okay if you start a story and don’t know how it ends, but you need to quickly figure out what the ending of the story is because it becomes an invaluable tool for you as a writer. With an ending, you have a goal to work towards and a final destination for your characters to reach. They have a purpose, and a point and any conflicts along the way or trials and tribulations can contribute or lead to this ending. As soon as you know what the ending is, it is much easier to refine and polish your work. Again, the ending doesn’t have to be written right away. It doesn’t have to be an executed and created piece that will be incorporated later. For our current in-progress fanfics, What Do We Owe and Ashes to Ashes, the Editor and I know exactly how Ashes to Ashes is going to end. We didn’t know until around chapter 8, but we now know how Cicely Godith’s story will come to a close. For What Do We Owe, the ending is still more abstract. We have ideas, and we’ve focused down our ideas on what means the most to our characters, but it isn’t a fully fleshed-out concept that can be copied and pasted onto the last chapter. It’s a footnote. A goal in the back of our minds to work towards.

          In many fanfictions, we see the first half of a piece be well-thought-out. You can see the care and time an author put into one story and one plot point. However, you can also see the difference between a well-thought-out first half, and a poorly executed second half. It always looks like the author had a clear vision of the first half of the story, but once they got there they didn’t know where to go. As such, the fanfic putters out in the second half and falls to the wayside. Even if you have to follow the traditional 3-arc storyboard, do it. Everyone hates on outlines when they’re literally the most helpful thing in the world. Even if you change the inside or fix the details, having an outline lets you keep your whole life together. Attached to this chapter is one of my own 3-act outlines. It is for a story that has not been written, and an idea that I had that I didn’t want to forget. Because of this outline, I have more to reference than a few half-baked scenes. I can leave this story alone for the next 2 weeks or the next 2 years, and still, come back and figure out exactly where I was and where I wanted to go.

There are many modern examples of writers who thought about their endings first, and writers who didn’t. The difference is dramatic, and when you write the ending themes and motifs can easily reveal themselves. For example, you can’t foreshadow if you don’t know where you’re going. If your ending is done, you can start dropping hints in a way that makes sense and contributes to a plot and leads your readers down a rabbit hole to a grand conclusion. Game of Thrones is a great example of a TV show that did not write their ending first. As such, their grand twists and turns and revelations felt rushed and cheap because we never got to see the descent into madness that was meant to portray the turn of the tides. Had they written their ending earlier, they could have started that arc when Khal Drogo died and called his death the straw that broke the camel’s back. On the flipside, Percy Jackson and the Olympians had the final book ready by the end of the first. Rick Riordan was able to add all these twists and turns and tribulations in Percy’s story that led to Luke being the child of the prophecy. That led to Hestia being the last olympian. That led to Rachel Dare being the new oracle. By being sure of the final destination the road to get there was much more meaningful. It had a greater purpose.

          Now. This is not to say that your ending can’t change. The first ending you write for a story absolutely can change, and it doesn’t have to be the only ending you stick with. The goal of writing it down as quickly as possible is just to make the process of creating the story better for you as a writer. For some stories, the ending is easier than others. If you are writing a romance story the traditional ending is the OC marrying the love interest, settling down, and having 2.5 kids because that’s the goal for most romance stories- a quiet end with contentment and joy. However, if you’re writing romance as the subplot (as you should be) then you need a better ending than that. If you have a romance subplot but the actual main plot of the story is about a group of thieves, maybe the story ends in Las Vegas with a big bank heist. By writing down that heist first you know that your characters have to prepare themselves for that final fight and that ending story. If you look at games like Persona 5, the first thing you do in that game is to fight the final boss, then you’re captured by police and have to work as a character from the very beginning up to that fight. You know what is expected of you, and you can grind your stats accordingly.

          The last thing we can offer you as advice, and I suppose as commentary, is that we see a lot of authors add filler chapters of fluff because they’re insecure about the length of their work. They’re worried that if the fanfic is shorter and more plot-driven that it’s bad because many popular works have 300-some pages. The idea that something is bad if it’s shorter is absolutely not true. It is completely okay to cut fanfic short. God, I WISH someone had told me that when I was writing Psycho-Pass fanfic because it would have saved me so much time and so many conversations of “Maybe we add a fluff chapter here to pad the length.” If it doesn’t matter to you as the writer, it’s not going to matter to the reader. You the author are the first critic and the first reader. If you don’t care, no one else will. Emotional execution and driving the plot and creating moments in writing where you feel something is one of the ways where you know you can call yourself a good writer. If you can get people to feel exactly what you want them to at any given time, you can call yourself a good writer. But that takes work. Some emotions are handed to you. Some take time. I had the opportunity to sit down with an author and talk to him about this and he told me: I got humor for free. I could always make people laugh with my writing. But making people think, making people sad… those are things I had to work for. We as readers crave stories like that. We want stories that make us feel or think or question, but as a writer, there is a learning curve. Other people will tell you you’re a good writer long before you start to believe it, but once you can get that kind of control over your craft, you’ll believe it too.

          So now, this is our ending. If you want to be a writer, there are a few things you need. You need ego, and not jerky ‘I’m the best’ ego, you need to be able to be talked about in a negative way. You need to believe that you can write and get better at it because there are always moments of doubt, and believing in yourself actually matters because once Imposter-Syndrome, that feeling that someone will come along and say “we found out you can’t actually do this so it’s time to give it up.” Once that’s there it never goes away. You have to believe in yourself. You need to engage in self-criticism without collapsing entirely. You should be able to look at your stuff and be strong enough as a person to see that what you’ve created is not a reflection of who you are as a person. While you need an ego to write without fear, you need humility to know that no matter how much you write you can always learn more. Since the Editor and I started picking our works back up again, I’ve tried to do something different that I haven’t done in each piece. Whether it’s whimsical and romantic and sad or hard-hitting and collaborative. If you think that you’ve hit the limit on what you can master you limit your own ability for growth. So, you need an ego to write, humility to learn, and you need a mirror of imposter syndrome, which is that someone who doesn’t know anything about writing can still say something useful. Sometimes the Editor has no clue what I’m writing about. She doesn’t know the fandom or the genre, but she wants our works to be good, and even when she doesn't know what the fanfiction is about her advice is no less invaluable.

          We started the Fanfiction 101/102 courses because we saw an increase in errors and misfires in fanfiction writing. Instead of staying annoyed, we wanted to be the change we saw in the world and wanted to share with others what we have seen fail and triumph. What we have loved and what’s overdone. If you’ve made it through both 101 and 102 I hope you’ve taken away something worthwhile, and something that has improved your writing. Thank you for spending time with us.

          While this is our final chapter, we probably will have an epilogue with a second round of our favorite fanfics. That’ll be posted sometime next week because the Editor has 50,000 fanfics to sort through and apparently asking her to pick favorites is like asking her to pick a favorite child. For now, this is the end. If you ever want a critic or notes or anything of the sort, feel free to reach out. We’re always around.

Xoxo, Gossip Girl.

[recentanimenews]

What the "School Babysitters" Anime Gets Right About Child Development

What the "School Babysitters" Anime Gets Right About Child Development

By Caitlin Moore

  Kids in fiction are hard to get right. Most adults aren’t used to them or know much about them, so they seem like these strange little balls of irrationality. The natural humor of little humans trying to figure out the world can be tough to nail down, so writers often resort to overly-precocious smart-alecks. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that, if you spend enough time around them, small children are actually pretty easy to understand. While they are all individuals, they develop in predictable patterns of what they are and aren’t capable of at different ages.

    With all that in mind, I was pretty nervous about School Babysitters. As a toddler teacher, I spend 40+ hours a week around one- and two-year-olds and poorly-written children irk me like nothing else. Luckily, the first episode charmed me with believable, developmentally appropriate depictions of toddlers. Their personalities felt familiar as broad personality types, and the barely-controlled chaos of the room reflected a reality I’ve lived many, many times.

  I’ve pegged the children of the Babysitting Club as around two-and-a-half, except Midori, who’s clearly under a year old. Although they’re drawn as very small in proportion to the teens and adults in the series, their physical, verbal, and cognitive abilities fit that age range.

    One of the defining features of the toddler years is big emotions that they don’t fully understand or know how to deal with. Tantrums abound as kids get overwhelmed by their own feelings and their relationships with others. When Taka refuses to leave with his brother in the first episode or bursts into tears because he misinterpreted Hayato’s statement that he doesn’t like or hate him, he’s not just being a brat. He doesn’t understand that Hayato’s a stoic person who struggles to express his affection clearly, only that he’s cold to him. Taka doesn’t get that the daycare is closing and everyone needs to go home; the way he sees it, he’s having a good time and doesn’t see a reason to stop.

  Kazuma also struggles with his own big feelings, particularly his anxiety. He appears to be constantly on the verge of tears, with his big watery eyes and wobbly mouth, and his more boisterous twin brother offers him support when he falls down and cries. When their father, Kousuke, comes to visit, Kazuma just runs away and cries, refusing to play with him. Kousuke worries that it’s because he’s not around enough and Kazuma doesn’t recognize him, which is actually a pretty fair guess. Toddlers have a natural fear of strangers until around two years old, and Kazuma certainly isn’t the only one to show it; when Ryuichi first enters the classroom, the kids’ first reaction is to run away and hide behind Usaida, the nearest familiar adult. It happens as children learn to divide the world between the known and the unknown, the predictable and unpredictable - and there’s little as unpredictable as new people.

    It turns out that Kazuma wasn’t afraid because he didn’t recognize his father, but rather because he thought his father was the kidnapper he played in the last movie they watched of him. Toddlers are still figuring out the divide between reality and fantasy, and Kazuma didn’t understand that the bad guy he saw on the screen was only a fantasy, while the reality was actually his loving father. That trouble finding the dividing line comes up again in the fifth episode, when Kirin decides to try out being a witch. She and Taka fight over whether their Sentai show or witches is real, demonstrating an oft-misunderstood part of child development. It’s not that children don’t understand that there’s no difference between fantasy and reality. They start playing pretend around eighteen months, imitating the things they see the adults in their life do, and their dramatic play only gets more elaborate from there. It’s that they don’t always know what is real and what isn’t. Faced with denial that witches are real, Kirin decides to prove it by flying on a broomstick herself and, when taking off from the ground doesn’t work, she decides to try starting by jumping from a high place. If you accept  the premise that witches exist, Kirin’s logic is sound - the only problem is that she hasn’t grasped that flying on broomsticks is reality, not fantasy, even as she understands that Sentai is fantasy.

  When Kirin decides to jump off the stairwell, she’s not just putting herself in danger; she’s actually showing beginning problem-solving and persistence. Problem-solving and critical thinking are some of the most difficult skills to teach, but they’re also some of the most important. Toddlers can identify a problem and try different solutions; it’s up to their caregivers to help them find the right one without out and out giving them the answer. This deepens their understanding of not just understanding what works, but also why. It’s the difference between rote memorization and genuine critical thinking.

  When Kotaro makes honey lemon for Ryuichi, he has trouble squeezing juice out of the lemon with one hand. Instead of giving up, he demonstrates problem-solving by using two hands and succeeds, then persists long enough to squeeze out enough to cover the bottom of the cup, as instructed by the Chairwoman. His fine motor skills - the ability to make precise, controlled motions with the fingers and hands - aren’t yet developed enough to juice a lemon one-handed.

    Fine motor skills haven’t really been featured much in School Babysitters so far. The things they’re useful for - drawing and manipulating small objects - aren’t particularly exciting to watch, although the ending theme makes particularly cute use of it. However, a quite a bit of large motor (or gross motor if you’re nasty) development gets featured. The kids are always running or, in Taka’s case, climbing around. They’re a little clumsy and fall down pretty frequently, which is all accurate to the age. If they wanted a little more realism, they could have shown Ryuichi and Usaida constantly pulling them off the bookshelf.

  However, the character that shows the most gross motor development, as is expected, is Midori. In the first episode, she falls over from a sitting position and starts crying, unable to get back up. A few episodes later, after a few months have passed as shown by Ryuichi starting high school, she gets up and crawls off when he turns away while changing her diaper. Infants’ motor skills develop rapidly, and just a couple months can mean the difference between being unable to get around by themselves and actively exploring the environment. They can also move much, much faster than their caregivers expect at inconvenient times… just as Ryuichi discovers.

  Ryuichi and Usaida don’t always keep as close an eye on the kids as they should, because once those little legs get going, two-year-olds can move fast. Their natural curiosity can lead them to forget or ignore even well-established boundaries, such as when they follow Ryuichi out of the classroom or take off during their tour of the school’s clubs. They naturally end up in a classroom where the students are baking cookies, because small children love sweets - even when parents avoid sugar, most will clear the fruit from their plate first. Inomata’s frustration with the way they end up running amok may make her seem overly stiff, but I sympathize. After all, a high school is no place for unsupervised toddlers, with their curiosity and inexperience with life giving them a knack for getting into trouble. It’s not that she hates them, she just doesn’t know how to deal with them in a place they shouldn’t be.

    Inomata isn’t naturally good with kids or nurturing just because she’s a girl - the moment she connects with them most strongly comes from their side when she comes to visit their club. At first the children are just as apprehensive of her as she is of them, but when she breaks down crying, they cry along with her. Toddlers naturally lack empathy - their ability to understand other people as individuals with their own feelings is limited just developmentally. They don’t cry because they feel sorry for Inomata. However, young childrens are masters of reading body language; infants can read nonverbal cues from the moment of birth, and lose their instincts for it as they grow up. The children are taking their emotional cues from her - when she’s uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable. When she cries, they get sad and cry as well.

  As Ryuichi learns throughout the series, managing a group of toddlers can be a lot of work and a huge energy drain. These tiny human beings can leave adults so exhausted, my colleagues and I often refer to them as “energy vampires”. It requires constant physical, emotional, and intellectual labor to keep them safe and happy; I can’t imagine going to school and then caring for so many children all evening for free like Ryuichi does. But it’s a far more fulfilling, rewarding job than any other one I’ve ever held, and I’m glad School Babysitters is here to show it for what it is.

    Watch School Babysitters now on Crunchyroll!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com