SLADE 2.0 (a.k.a Children Are The Future)

My six year-old son and I play a game he calls “Voices.”

It’s called Voices because I do different voices of different characters, and it developed from when I would play with him with his stuffed animals. I gave each animal a different personality and they, along with my son (as himself), would get involved in various adventures.

One day, when my son was four and we were driving somewhere, he asked if we could play and make up a story with the animals and describe what happens. This game evolved into incorporating superheroes and soon the animals were teaming up with the Avengers and other heroes either to fight a supervillain, or sometimes something more ordinary such as going to the trampoline park.

Voices usually starts with my son and his BFF (his stuffed giraffe) getting a call that the Avengers need help and they have to defeat a supervillain. Or they’re planning a surprise party for someone. Or they discover something’s missing and they have to solve the mystery of what happened. Or whatever.

My son comes up with the opening premise and directs the course of the story. I come up with characters and provide plot twists. I also do all the voices except for my son, who plays himself and the Hulk.

He plays the Hulk because that’s his favorite superhero. Anyway…

Yesterday, we were driving somewhere and he asked to play Voices. I hadn’t had any sleep the night before and I was exhausted, but also hyper-focused on the road. I didn’t think I could give it a 100% so I suggested we play later. I also suggested that he could make up a story on his own if he wanted and maybe entertain me with a tale. Instead of doing the voices and acting it out, he could just describe what happens.

He dived right in and began the story the way we usually do: He and the giraffe get a call that there’s an emergency. The Red Skull and Hydra agents are attacking. The Avengers need help. My son and the giraffe rush off to help. As is usually the case, they easily beat the bad guys. Then the story took an unexpected turn. There was an evil, future version of himself he had to fight. 

That’s new, I thought. Wonder what made him come up with that concept.

Side note: I know a lot of his plot ideas come from something he saw on television or read in a book. Sometimes when he’s playing with his toys, I hear him say something I recognize as dialogue from a movie or TV show. And a lot of his plot ideas for when we’re playing Voices (or playing with his action figures) are similar to something he’s seen or read.

But the time traveling, older version of himself he was forced to fight… That was new. I couldn’t link it to anything he’d seen recently.

Okay, so maybe it was an amalgamation of various things. There were certainly enough time traveling bits in the Avengers stories I read to him. And my son is a huge fan of TEEN TITANS GO. They use that plotline often enough.

He defeated his older self, and then the story took another unexpected turn. He ends up getting married to a friend he’s known since preschool. (He’s currently in Kindergarten, so his point of reference on this doesn’t go back very far.) They have a baby. The baby grows up and leaves home. In the meantime, he and his wife are running a bed-and-breakfast.

Okay, he described it as “a hotel,” but in the description he gave, it was most certainly a bed-and-breakfast. It’s just that, he’s six and doesn’t really understand the difference between a hotel, motel, bed-and-breakfast, Airbnb, etc.

Moving on…

He and his wife run their “hotel,” but shortly after their child grows up and moves out, his wife tells him she’s leaving. “Look,” she says, “I know I said I’d stay with you. But I never meant that I’d stay with you forever.”

She leaves and in my son’s words, he thinks, “I guess that’s it. I’m alone.” And he rides away on a motorcycle.

That was the end of the story my six year-old came up with. 

Two thoughts on this:

1. I find the ending to be incredibly poignant and realistic for something a six year-old would make up. I would have expected the typical Hollywood-ish happy ending, but with a kid twist. A genie grants him a million wishes. He finds a ring that turns vegetables into chocolate ice cream. That kind of thing. But no. He came up with a downbeat ending. Which brings me to:

2. The ending he had is the kind of ending I would have come up with if I were writing a story about a supervillain-battling kid with a talking giraffe as a sidekick. The kid grows up, essentially loses everything, and rides off into obscurity.

I was amazed that he came up with an ending that was both adult and also similar to my own writing sensibility. I wondered if he would grow up to be a writer like me (but hopefully better). Or maybe he’d go into a field where he could actually make money.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, kids are the future. Read stories to them and encourage them to make up their own. Nurture their minds. They will amaze us when we least expect it.