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Do you have any thoughts on making characters like Kim Possible more realistic for stories aside from aging her up? While still keeping the spirit of her, that is.

You can't make Kim Possible realistic because the superspy genre runs on implausibility, the superspy aspect of her persona only works in the genre's unrealistic space. If you try to run a superspy in a realistic world, you either get a dissociative psychopath or Jason Bourne (from the books, not the films) who is still pretty close to being a psychopath rather than your regular spy. To write a “realistic” Kim Possible, you'd end up with your run of the mill, hyper competitive, adrenaline junkie cheerleader without any superpowers or supergadgets and a school board that's not particularly thrilled with her antics. We're talking Buffy levels of burn down the high school. (Buffy did burn down a high school.)

The imporant thing to understand about Kim Possible if you want to deconstruct her character and pul her out of the genre where she currently works is that Kim isn't a character aged up. She's a character aged down and reformatted for a tween to teen audience. If I aged Kim Possible up, I'd have Get Smart's Ninety-Nine or a member of the original Charlie's Angels (take your pick) or a non-powered variant of Shego. Her contemporaries are the girls from Totally Spies, which are also a Charlie's Angels riff, and arguably even more insane than Kim is. To fully grasp Kim Possible as a character you want to write rather than a piece of media you consume is you have to understand her archetype and where all the pieces of her character come from. Those pieces are derived by material that proceeded her in the superspy genre.

This is what author's call a Lit Review.

When you find a character you like and want to use, instead of trying to copy what you see you go deeper into deconstruction. Deconstruction is just a fancy word that means you break everything down to it's base components and take it apart to understand how it works and functions as a whole so you can rebuild it in your own image. In the case of Kim Possible, a simple deconstruction isn't enough because she isn't a character, she's genre loci. (It fun play on genius loci, it means she's a personification of the genre rather than a person or place. She is by nature a formalistic entity, which means she only exists as part of the formula. That's why you're having difficulty writing her as a “realistic” character. Formalistic entities do not function in the real world.)

To understand Kim Possible as a character, you have to understand Kim Possible as a formula. Worse, you have to study two different genres because she's fusion of two different formulas that are both equally unrealistic. Fortunately, the superspy and the superhero genre have enough cross-bleed that you only need one. You'll have to do a comprehensive review of both the superspy genre and the teen dramedy genre (Saved by the Bell, 90210, Boy Meets World, Sweet Valley High,you know, the John Waters version of high school. If you've been consuming mainly CW dramas like the current iteration of Riverdale you have the wrong era and will have to start all over.) For a comprehensive lit review, you have to go all the way back to the beginning with the original James Bond and watch them in sequence, then watch Get Smart (by the time you get here, you'll have the same degree of contempt for Bond as Mel Brooks so that works in your favor), pay special attention to Ninety-Nine the original avatar of the female superspy, and then watch Charlie's Angels, the original TV show not the movies. By this point, you'll understand all the pieces that went into Kim's creation and then you'll be able to independently pull them out keep what you want.

If that sounds like a lot of work, you're right. Picking one isn't enough because she has pieces of all of them, and they're all influenced by their predecessor. Ninety-Nine is a direct reaction to the treatment of women in James Bond, and Charlie's Angels are an adaptation of Ninety-Nine as James Bond. A lot of female superspies are direct references to James Bond (whether they want to be or not) and Kim Possible is no exception. The show is full of James Bond injokes and many of her villains are direct references to Bond villains. The old Sean Connery Bond villains. (Much as it's in the name, you don't need either the original Mission Impossible or the film remakes. If you want to watch the Peter Graves era for an even more comprehensive experience, go right ahead.)

You don't understand Bond? You don't understand Kim.

Teenagers don't make for good spies in a realistic world. They're not emotionally mature enough to do the job. That's not an insult. When you're a teenager, your brain is still maturing, you're halfway to being an adult, but you're still growing into yourself and a lot of what you're experiencing you're experiencing for the first time. Experiences that feel like the end of the world to a teenager, are just Tuesday to an adult. You don't feel emotions the same at sixteen and twenty-five, or sixteen and thirty-five, part of that is experience and part of it is the intensity of our emotions decays over time. Adults are also better at hiding what emotions they do feel. These are all reasons why adults seem so unfeeling to teenagers.

Worse, for the realistic Kim, she comes from a stable home environment. She's got loving parents, appreciative, supportive friends, and lives a happy, well-adjusted life even without saving the world. She doesn't have the cynicism, suspicious nature, mercurial adaptable behaviors, and survival instincts that broken homes and abusive environments train in young. In the real world, evil passes itself off as good. There's no colorful costumes or villainous laughs or soundtrack to point out who you can't trust. The friendliest, nicest people are often the first to stab you in the back. Appearances deceive and ingrained biases cloud perception. Spies are not well-adjusted people or emotionally healthy. It's a lot easier to talk someone off a cliff if you are also on a cliff. The point of a spy is that they're a bad person. The superspy genre is an escape from the realities of being a spy and it was originally written by a former spy.

The kid from the broken home learns early that people behave differently in different environments, and they need to be wary until they determine if the person they think they can trust is someone they can actually trust. Often the most well-intentioned people make bad situations worse trying to resolve conflicts they've chosen not to understand. At the same time, people wear masks and not all secrets are nefarious. To be able to determine the difference between someone acting supiciously (hiding a secret) and someone who is actually nefarious takes practice. This is even a common subplot in teen mystery dramas for teenagers (and adults) to be misled by their own prejudices and their inability to tell the difference between types of suspicious behavior. There's the secrets that don't matter and the ones that'll get you killed and they can be the same secrets. Understanding the faceted nature of people, fully analyzing their personalities so you can predict their moves without being a fully mature person with your own experiences to draw from? That's hard. It's a difficult ask for adults who are professionals.

You can't keep Kim's optomism and turn her into a traditional spy. The traditional spy needs to both be able to see the worst in someone and then use that dark nature against them. They collect secrets and vulnerabilities so they can turn the average person into an asset later. They can't do everything themselves, they need to be comfortable with using people and with the part where using those same people will get them killed. There's elements here that do mimick high school, but it's a much more dangerous game with much higher stakes and a lot less room for error. A teenager this manipulative this young is either a narcisscist or a sociopath, and even then they won't have refined their manipulation to the point they can carry it off like an adult. (If you hav e a difficult time comprehending this concept, you are stilll a child. Enjoy it while you can.)

You also can't really do Kim Possible in the CW mold while keeping her Kim Possible. The same problems as the spy to superspy genre apply. The Vampire Diaries approach to teenagers is antithetical to the John Waters high school. Someone's going to have to be the cynic, half the cast are lovable assholes, evil will prevail over good on a regular basis, and everyone in the CW's world will be varying shades of gray with dark secrets. CW teenage dramas are gritty (and not particularly realistic either, even if they are entertaining.) You can't put James Bond and Frank Miller's Sin City in the same place and play them both straight. Superman's ideals and morals don't function properly in The Boys universe. That optomistic view of humanity isn't supported. If you want optomism in your narrative, you need to fight for it.

An optomistic character can succeed in a cynical world and keep their optomism while making tragic mistakes, but they need to be supported by the author and story's structure. A careful balance has to be maintained between hope and darkness, and it is very easy to go past a character's point of no return. It's easy to become cynical, it's easy to embrace nihilism especially in the face of tragedy. Kim Possible is not a character designed around the idea of moral fortitude. She's not a character who has to fight for her beliefs in a dark world. She doesn't have articulated morals or a philosophical outlook, she just does what she thinks is right. A character doing what they think is right in a cynical story sets the stage for events to fall apart in a tragic ending.

The question is, do you want a realistic version of Kim Possible or do you want a version that you feel is going to be more serious, and literary, and will be accepted? As much as it's currently in vogue, cynicsm and nihilism aren't automatically better or more mature storytelling.

Kim Possible is accepted. Kim Possible being unrealistic is not a failure of the material. She's supposed to be a teenage comedy pastiche of the superspy genre. She works because she embraces both genres in all their corny cheesiness wholeheartedly and without irony. Even when Kim Possible is at its most tongue and cheek, Kim herself is never the joke. The mirror between Kim and Shego is intentional. It's good practice to have your villain be a jaded, cynical, dark version of your protagonist (with better comedic timing.) Shego is cynical so Kim can be optomistic.

Kim's ideals and morals are designed for a more hopeful world than the one we live in and that's fine. James Bond is one of the most iconic film heroes of all time. Get Smart and Charlie's Angels are both beloved to this day. Kim Possible and Totally Spies were successful media properties. A market exists for teenage superspies. While Harriet the Spy is probably the closest to a “realistic” Kim Possible you're going to get, I think you're looking for something else, something more adrenaline filled, something exciting, and that's okay.

You don't need realism. You need a world that feels plausible enough your audience will embrace it. That's just good worldbuilding and understanding your genre. You don't need to be the next Game of Thrones, you don't need to be (the new) Casino Royale. Don't be embarassed by the silliness, don't be worried if the story is serious enough, skip off into the sunset with your catchy theme song and naked mole rat. Tell the story you want, the story that you love.

And do your reading (and watching) because the more you understand, the better you write. If you can't take Kim Possible at her worst (Roger Moore) you don't deserve her at her best.

-Michi

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