I am in my 40s, have two university degrees in political science and business management. Not married, no children but I have a friend with 4 kids with whom I talk on the phone daily and I live family life vicariously through him.

I prefer stories with characters that are strong and empowered, no matter their gender or age, I have had my fill of weak willed ninnies and wusses who always apologize for how they were born, what they are and what they do in life to stay alive and afloat. Hero-figures like spiderman make me cringe because of Parker's woe-be-me attitude to life and his incessant babyish whining about having a hard life when he is a bloody genius at many sciences, athletic and good looking to boot. WTF? Batman is barely better, he has skills and brains, money from family fortune, but enough psychoses to keep an asylum in business all by himself. People like the Jedi don't count as they are a militarized cult whose only real interest is it's own power and influence, doing good is merely an accessory to achieving the goal.

There are few figures of "heroes" or "do-gooders" out there that are stable mentally or not completely asinine in how ridiculously ashamed of their capacities and afraid of using them they all are. You practically have to go back to the Star Trek or StarGate series to see people unfettered by shame and ludicrous self-imposed mental blocks use their capacities to full. In many ways, Samantha Carter and Rodney MacKay are more dignified role models than anything Star Wars ever gave us and SeaQuest had pitiful few redeeming qualities, all of which centred around either Lucas or Darwin.

Author's explanations

Disclaimer: I do not own SeaQuest, Star Wars, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

My anger and sorrow at SeaQuest, Star Wars and George Lucas's entire body of work

In one simple phrase: enslavement of children is morally and lawfully acceptable or even desirable if it is carried out by a church or national army.

This is the most damning parity between the two series; a child born very intelligent but alone and forsaken gets forcibly taken by a large organization that actually makes the laws of the country or confederation and even if it is illegal to enslave children, no one will stop them.

Don't bother asking for help or assistance, everyone is either paid to keep the slave in place or kowtow before the altar of the religious dogma that justifies kidnappings and bondage. Politos are bribed or intimidated, police look away and parents, when they exist, are uninterested, powerless to stop events or take payments to sell their child.

Added to this, is the constant infantilisation of the main protagonist as well as the constant reduction of mental, physical and social capacities by cheap-trick deus ex machinae from the authors of the series. No matter how intelligent or gifted, the young person becomes a bent puppet with twisted strings in the hands of the so-called caregivers due to a careful pruning of social skills, technical abilities and later towards adolescence, contacts with people outside the control groups's own structure.

This creates a pantheon of teenagers and young adults who are no more than idiot savants with the moral fibre of liquid latex and the self-worth and capacity for self awareness of a wet dishmop. Meaning, they become as pliable and unresisting to suggestion or orders from the hierarchy just like this small, benign item that anyone can pick up, use, abuse, manipulate and then throw to the trash without repercussions.

It all sickens me to see depravity on this scale and GL made billions selling this principle to the peoples of the Earth for more than 30 years and virtually no one ever complains or tells out loud the ugly truth about the whole damned thing.

Slavery is not lawful, it is not morally righteous and enslaving children under the pretense that the enslaver will be kinder or take better care of the child than the birth parents is not a beautiful gesture, a great goodness nor some culturally defensible version of good, clean family life.