Moms

Today is Mother's Day... Or maybe it was Mother's Day.  Mostly Mother's Day is a Hallmark Holliday where people buy flowers and candy and cards for their moms and think nothing else of it.  It's actually a pretty lame holiday in that respect.  Worse, the woman who invented the holiday spent the rest of her life trying to get rid of it.  That's pretty depressing, huh?


But, with the holiday coming up, I realized something... there aren't that many moms in fiction.  I mean, they're there, but they're hardly main characters.  Heck, Disney hates moms so much; it kills them.  When Disney does sequels where the main characters are older, I'm pretty sure Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea is the closest of those sequels to having the mom as a main character and she has to play second fiddle to her daughter the whole time.


Horror has a lot of moms, but not fantasy.  Horror has expecting mothers, new mothers, mothers of young children (between one and five), older children (five and older).  Horror loves mothers.  It loves to scare the bejesus out of them.  Then again, parents have a lot of adult fears that last quite a while and can affect anyone with the ability to empathize.


So, if you aren't a sociopath, you'll watch a horror movie about a mom and get scared with her.


YEAY!


However, fantasy and scifi, from what I've seen, isn't big on moms.  Mom's aren't allowed to go off on a trip to fantasyland unless they put themselves into some sort of groundhog day loop where they don't really leave the children the whole time or something stupid like that.


Fantasyland doesn't mind fathers, you'll find.  Mom has to stay home with the baby, but Dad's having trouble with being a father and Mom's just sooo unreasonable now that she's pregnant and moody, dying, whatever.  So Dad gets to go off to fantasyland and have his fun while mom stays behind pregnant with five children, and probably grouchy.  And of course, the grouchiness is completely uncalled for.  Obviously the woman is an utter shrew.

Insert. Eyeroll. Here.

So why doesn't Scifi/Fantasy have any love for moms?  It likes everyone else.  It really does.  It occasionally likes pregnant girls... because they're giving birth to The Chosen One.  It liked moms enough to have them be part of the cast of characters of the Dune Franchise.  However, I won't say that fantasy or scifi likes moms until I see at least five books about mom's going on an adventure in fantsyland and will they ever get back or a mom who goes on a science fiction adventure or something related.


I mean, the conflict of the story would be quite interesting.  And I have one question for you:  Why the bloody hell can't mom's be main characters in science fiction and fantasy?