You’re watching your favorite action series. The male hero is kicking ass left and right. Their on-again-off-again fling has been off-again for some time, and just after he’s secured the future of the universe (yet again), she returns. What a surprise it is to see her! She came back, and she still cares for him. What’s more, she’s had his child, a spunky little preschooler with the hero’s blazing blue eyes. How can you not fall in love with this kid? A glistening teardrop falls from your eye for the joy your hero must feel.
I’m a writer, and I love a good plot gut-punch now and again. But this one has been showing up a lot in the movies I watch and the books I read, and it is disappointing. I’m a feminist and I want my emotional connections to be whole, slow, and less twisty. Instead, the male writers like to skip the boring woman and child stuff and splice together a half-brained emotional jerk. A lazy shortcut to forge bonds that should have taken years, diapers, birthday parties, scraped knees, and sleepless nights to build. Not simply the contribution of semen.
The Surprise Legacy
I’m calling this trope Surprise Legacy. It’s the plot twist, usually at the end of a show, that introduces the hero’s child, usually unknown to him and/or the audience. The child is nearly always past infancy, so the hero does not suddenly feel overwhelmed with responsibility. He can just experience the joy of fatherhood, or the heir can simply pick up a legacy where their dead father left off (for the story’s sake).
Since this trope is usually pulled on male heroes (seeing that women already know if they’ve had a child or not), I refer to the hero here as “he.” This isn’t always the case, but it is certainly the most representative of this trope.
The twist usually brings unexpected joy to the male figure, a character introduction for the next film, or a cheap shot for an emotional tug at the audience.
This happened in the season finale of Marvel’s She-Hulk. Him-Hulk returns home from space in time for the happy concluding scene, bringing a surprise with him. “This is my son, Skaar.” He steps aside to reveal another hulk-like figure, a bit smaller and less confident-looking than Hulk.
Talk about an awkward introduction. Why did Hulk return at that moment, everyone already around the table? Why did he just now announce he has a son? Who and where is Skaar’s mother?
Presumably, she is an unnamed character on an alien planet, not worth introducing to the audience, even though she, presumably, did most to all of the work raising Skaar. It’s the same with all these “next generation” stories. We want them to have family, happiness, and an inheritor. But we don’t want to see them do the work.
In the newest Avatar movie, The Way of Water, two characters who presumably died in the first installment magically have children of their own. The movie does a lazy explanation (or none at all — I’m still not entirely sure), throwing in kids who have connections to familiar, (presumably) dead characters to lean on. Not only did we not see parenting, pregnancy, childbirth, or a plausible glance at the opposite sex from these characters, but they seemed unaware that they had children in the first movie.
Of course, this is a typical legacy trope/trick to make the audience familiar with the new characters. Sigourney Weaver’s character died, so we somehow have her magical child appear out of nowhere. Was her character, Grace, even aware that she birthed a child? Somehow I think this is the case, though it makes no sense whatsoever.
Even one of my favorite sci-fi novel trilogies, Red Rising, pulls a similar stunt at the end of the third book. After he is separated from his lover (and, the outside world, really) for nearly a year, Darrow finds himself needing to save the world again. He doesn’t spend much time with his partner, Mustang, in this third book, but at the end, they are reunited, and *guess what* she had his child while he was away.
This twist is meant to be a touching, joyful moment for the main character, but I couldn’t help but feel a wave of disgust. Darrow gets to be the savior, in the thick of the action, living his destiny, and he is basically gifted a child already past infancy. Think about all the time, stress, and hardship that baby-momma Mustang had to endure being a single mother, caring for a whole-ass human, which is a full-time job on its own. This isn’t to mention her high-profile work with some sort of space barons.
The problem with the legacy trope is that it devalues the work of motherhood and the trials of raising a child. Sure, everyone wants to be in the thick of the action, slinging guns, swinging scythes, Hulk-smashing…but we pay so much attention to the plot of the action that we devalue the “boring” hardships of real life.
How Surprise Legacy reinforces toxic masculinity
Stories could show and emulate the ways our heroes can be tender, giving, and self-sacrificing in the most un-exciting, yet most important, way. The message we send is this: If you are the protagonist, you do not dredge through the unglamorous moments. You do not show your soft side, trembling under the weight of responsibility, nourishing a fragile life.
Instead, we dismiss these struggles as unimportant. An unworthy part of the story. And in a toxic-masculine society, it further enforces notions that men cannot be tender and giving. How many times have celebrities posted photos of themselves showing affection to a child, and the internet throwing a tantrum? Say they are “too close?” Take these recent photos of Tom Brady, who is one of the last people who would need to prove his masculinity to anyone, given his success in the most masculine sport of America.
These are images of a father showing affection to his child. But many people labeled them as “disturbing” or “wrong.”
It is a perversion of our natural instincts to suppress our love, but it is constantly reinforced that to show love, instead, is perverted or weak. Another example is a photo of Daniel Craig carrying his child, which was labeled by Piers Morgan as “emasculating,” as though showing anything more than indifference is womanly.
Make no mistake, the aversion has everything to do with sexism. Tenderness and love are considered female traits, and masculinity likes to set itself as far away from feminity as possible. What could be worse than being a woman? Especially a woman with a weak helpless baby.
Where are all the dads?
I issue a challenge to you. Name one movie that involves the realities of pregnancy and raising an infant that isn’t a comedy. Even better, name one in the action film genre. It’s easy to laugh at these struggles. It’s much harder to reconcile their reality with the male hero of the story.
One of the few action movies that actually confronts fatherhood is Ant-Man. Paul Rudd’s character, Scott Lang, made a few mistakes that he wants to right. His motivation is his daughter. He wants to be a bigger part of her life, for her mother to trust him and give joint custody. There are some truly touching moments between Scott and his daughter in the first two movies. Though his daughter, Cassie, is not an infant, she’s young enough that Scott plays, physically and imaginatively, to truly engage with and nurture her. He is driven by his need to be a family man, and to be the sort of dad his daughter can depend on.
But Ant-Man is an extreme minority. Marvel, especially, has a repeated history of surprise legacy. Wakanda Forever, the most recent Marvel film, also included a legacy plot twist. This one is trickier because Chadwick Boseman’s death was unexpected and there was no way to give T’Challa the blessing of fatherhood beforehand. But they still felt the need to reward him with a child post-mortem. The problem with this is that it dismisses Nakia, the child’s mother, and her extraordinary efforts in raising him, and brings us in right in time to see a fully-formed, mostly-self-sustaining child. She is no longer breastfeeding, not exhausted from being woken up in the middle of the night, nor struggling to find balance as a working mother. Everything is peaceful and perfect. No one wants to see (or show) the messiness that a young child brings. Let’s skip over that and show the good parts. The feel-good moment.
Take the latest 007 film, No Time To Die. Bond finds out his former lover had a child after he left her (for her safety, of course). When they are reunited years later, he asks his lover, Madeleine, if her daughter, Mathilde, is his. She denies it, though the audience already knows what’s coming. Sure enough, near the climax, when things get dangerous (and Bond is already harboring fatherly feelings toward Mathilde), Madeleine acknowledges he is the father. This makes it all the harder to say goodbye when 007 knows he will not survive the coming explosion, and the audience weeps for all that he has lost as an almost-father and potential husband.
Bond undergoes the typical masculine hero curse of not being able to settle down because his espionage life follows him everywhere. Instead of a potential new 007 (Mathilde is quite young still), Surprise Legacy provides the emotional pull of Bond’s longing to be a father and the idea that he lives on through his child. But while the twist is bittersweet for Bond, the burden of raising a child alone falls on Madeleine, and after his death, to again take care of her alone. In a sense, she was right when she says Mathilde is not Bond’s child. She hasn’t known him or been nurtured by him. Even if it was against his knowledge and will, he was an absent father. He was never burdened by the “emasculating” work of child-rearing, and never will be. It’s a convenient plot twist that undermines the women’s sacrifices and retains the hero’s hard-exterior masculinity.
Why we need parents, young kids in action stories
Action movies and stories are especially influential in our society, which champions masculinity. These films embody the kind of physical action toxic masculinity demands. Though, generally, action movies have improved significantly in the last decade, cultural hallmarks of our fascination continue to influence generations to come. We want to be like our heroes. And when our heroes never show vulnerability as a parent, it can reinforce our culture that put masculinity on a pedestal and dismisses familial responsibility.
Regardless of method or reasoning, the legacy trope is an unearned narrative cheat code. We want to feel closer to a character, and one way to do that is to experience their children, their legacy. Suddenly, the main characters become that much more important because they hold ground on more generations than one. Not only that, but in franchises like Marvel, their children offer someone familiar in place of their hero. Who is more worthy of stepping into a hero’s shoes than their own flesh and blood?
This is not to say this trope is always a bad idea, but it is certainly not a feminist one. Showing the struggles of birthing and raising children is not an exciting prospect, but one that adds texture and depth to a story. And the more we empathize with the characters we love and the children they raise, the more respect we will have for the struggles they face. And the more we’ll wonder what was so ‘heroic’ about the men being absent from doing the hard work all along.
