The Academy and its students - how come their parents are prepared to abandon them? by Aliasse

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The Academy and its students - how come their parents are prepared to abandon them?

POSTED BY: ALIASSE
UPDATED: Saturday, April 25, 2009 22:07
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Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:01 AM

And again: I'm a really long-time lurker and now fic poster but I've never much read, contributed to or posted discussion threads, so I hope this is how you do it. Also, sorry if I'm going over ground that's really well covered.

This is a big one for me, and as I've said elsewhere, maybe the most problematical part of the canon in terms of plausibility.

I've got lots of ideas on this subject for the series of fics I'm developing and am really interested to know what other people think.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:36 AM

AGENTROUKA

I know that most people here do not agree with this, but my interpretation is a tremendous naivety, coupled with an unwillingness to rock the boat.

It's not that the Tams don't love their children. They just expect a very high standard of adult, rational behavior and independence from them. They are busy, disconnected people, who aren't paying much attention.

It's perhaps neglectful parenting, but I see no maliciousness or intentional abandonment.

Even when Gabriel Tam threatens to abandon Simon after he was arrested in the blackout zone (or whatever it's called), I think he was making a desperate appeal to his son's rational side. "Look what you're making me do", a kind of attemot at tough love, probably.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:43 AM

DEFIANT2THELAST

Maybe you should have put these all in one thread...

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 1:18 AM

KWICKO

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

I take it you never knew anyone who went to boarding school or military school... It's what parents who are too "busy" to raise their kids do. Or they do it when they think the kids are "unruly" or "troubled"...

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 2:27 AM

ALIASSE

Yes, I get that there are always parents who want to offload their kids, in this verse or Joss's. But what about holidays? There would be holidays wouldn't there? Perhaps I'm thinking about it in too much detail - because of wanting to provide an explanation for this in a fic - but even 'busy' or 'distracted' parents would expect and dare I say it want to see their kids in the holidays.

How would it work? 'Here we are, an elite Alliance Academy, we're so excited by your kid that we'll admit them for free and do x, y and z with them. But you'll never see them again. Because they don't have holidays. And you can't come to visit them yourselves. Or call them. And they can't call you. And if you ever do get to see them again at some unspecified point in the future, you might notice a few changes.'

The Academy couldn't allow contact because otherwise the parents, no matter how busy or distracted, would realise that something bad was happening. And maybe the Tams would be okay with a lot of this. But what about the others?

Simon says that River lets him know that 'they're hurting US'. We know she's not the only one, from the pilot and from the River Tam Sessions. How many parents would allow a River-type scenario to develop? And they couldn't all be the same kind of people so it couldn't always be for the same kind of reason.

Are we supposed to believe that parents wouldn't think something was odd if they didn't see their kids for three years - as with River? That's a long time.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 3:13 AM

BRIGLAD

What's to say that if any of the other parents raised a ruckus, they didn't just disappear.

Also, some of the other students might not be core kids but from the border worlds where the travel time home for a holiday break might be too long, not to mention the family being too poor to afford the expense anyway.

Smart kids with psychic potential don't always come from rich families.

My $0.02

Brian

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 6:13 AM

CLIOSMUSE

You know, in the original shooting script for Safe, it's strongly implied that the Tams are under duress:

SIMON
Dad! Forget my record! River is in
trouble!

GABRIEL
_River isn't here_!

Simon looks like he's been slapped across the face. Stunned.

GABRIEL (cont'd)
We are. And we have to be very
careful what we do. This is a
government school, Simon. People in
our position... it's important that
we show support for this government.

SIMON
You're talking about politics? This
is about your daughter!

GABRIEL
This is about our _lives_.

So it seems a bit Fox Muldery, right? (If the reference isn't clear, Samantha was kidnapped and her parents were complicit mostly in order to keep Fox safe from the big bad shadow government.) I'm not sure if Joss would have changed it because he didn't think their knowing actually worked – a big shadow agency that intimidates even the wealthiest and most influential people is maybe a less believable than one that operates more discreetly – or if he just didn't want their knowledge to come across this overtly.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 8:00 AM

ALIASSE

Quote:
Originally posted by Briglad:
What's to say that if any of the other parents raised a ruckus, they didn't just disappear.

Also, some of the other students might not be core kids but from the border worlds where the travel time home for a holiday break might be too long, not to mention the family being too poor to afford the expense anyway.

Smart kids with psychic potential don't always come from rich families.

My $0.02

I really agree with all of this - these are just the kind of scenarios I was imagining. Evil isn't planned wholesale - it happens in increments, and I think the Academy would have started out differently than we see it by River's time. But once whoever runs it sees when can be done, I can imagine them scouring the Verse in all sorts of different ways looking for students.

Edit - sorry this doesn't look right, not sure how to reply with quote.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 8:05 AM

ALIASSE

I haven't seen that shooting script for Safe (I haven't started digging that deep, yet - I rely on fandom for my info I'm afraid). Interesting though, and reiterates what Briglad said about families disappearing if they protest. Do you remember the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina? I was even thinking of having something like that in the series somewhere - a group of mothers whose children have disappeared to the Academy.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 11:06 AM

CLIOSMUSE

Incidentally, all the shooting scripts are online. Try here:

http://www.browncoats.com/index.php?ContentID=42e6e09c477ce

Both shooting scripts and adapted transcripts of every episode. Good for getting lines right in fanfic flashbacks!

EDIT: Just tried that site, actually, and the shooting script links didn't work. They're here though:

http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/firefly/

An annoying popup ad will... well, pop up, but it disappears after ten seconds or so.

EDIT #2: That line about killing Niska that we've been talking about? I just looked, and it's not in the shooting script for War Stories. Added later. Hmm.

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 4:21 PM

GILLIANROSE

Didn't the River Tam Sessions allude to River asking, once she was at the Academy, to advance to another level of study, and that was when things started to go very badly for her? I don't want to rewatch, it was really dark, but that is my recollection. What if the Academy (or network of Academies) as a whole was a legitimate educational institution, but there were "eyes on the inside" looking for students with the necessary qualities. And we might be talking about a handful of children out of many billions of people. Maybe once a candidate is selected, there is some kind of psychological control over them such that when they do go home, they are less and less connected with their families. I can see the "handlers" of the students calibrating every communication so that the child is more and more alienated. He or she stops coming home, the messages the family receives are full of frustration and rejection of the family, until finally the child - maybe a young adult by now - cuts ties. Maybe River was the exception in the program in that she actually reached out for help. The other commenters have offered very plausible scenarios as well - a combination of flawed judgement, political pressure, sinister events. This question is wide open...and we don't know that boarding school isn't the norm for families like the Tams. Maybe Simon's school just happened to be located close to his parents' home.

The Tams could also have felt terribly over their heads, for years, trying to raise a child like River. A child who by virtue of her intellectual gifts might be one in a billion. A child who devours every challenge a parent puts in front of her to try to hold her interest. She is, in her way, a special needs child, as different from the normal population as a child with a severe handicap. Can you imagine raising a child who is nothing like anyone you have ever met? Then along comes the Academy, the experts, who know how to give their daughter what she needs. I can envision a story in which the Tams are persuaded of all kinds of things, including infrequent visits and communication.

As I said before, the question of how the Academy students were separated from their families is wide open. I hope this has been helpful :)

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Saturday, April 25, 2009 10:07 PM

ALIASSE

Quote:
Originally posted by GillianRose:
What if the Academy (or network of Academies) as a whole was a legitimate educational institution, but there were "eyes on the inside" looking for students with the necessary qualities.

B]

Yes, I think this would be part of how they scouted for candidates, and that the legitimate part of the Academy wouldn't be aware of what was going on, helping it to maintain its reputation. Or there might be individuals among the staff who were aware and were part of the underground that Simon mentions in the pilot. I'm also thinking the recruiters would take a special interest in the Verse's most vulnerable children - those in homes, care and so on, because they'd have no-one to look out for them at all. In fact this idea made me think of your 'Orphan Train' story. Scary to think how they could exploit that situation.

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