My Favorite Fictional Moms of 2018

[forestofglory]

As fun 2018 wrap up I wanted to talk about my favorite fictional moms that I encountered in 2018. As many Most of these are from 2018 media but not all of them.

The mom in “Flow” by Marissa Lingen
This story was one of the standouts of 2018 short fiction for me and one of the reasons was the main character’s relationship with her mom. It starts out quite with the mom playing less prominent role than the dad. However by the end of the story the main character and the reader come to appreciate the mother and the caretalking she does.

Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl in Steven Universe
I love that there are so many moms in Steven Universe! These three are Steven’s adoptive moms also magical gems who go on adventures with Steven. I love that they are shown having very different parenting styles, and sometimes making mistakes but still get to be shown as good parents.

Ekaterin in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga
So Bujold has several characters who are moms but I want to focus on Ekaterin because she’s the main character of The Flowers of Vashnoi, a novella that came out this year. I love Bujold’s other moms but they get most of recognition as awesome mom characters where Ekaterin doesn’t get talked about as much. Despite this Ekaterin is the mom we see interacting with her children during their childhood the most. I really loved Ekaterin’s relationship with her son Nikki. Sadly for me Nikki doesn’t feature much the new novella but it was still nice to see a story about someone being a parent to small children and having an adventure.

Tessa and Isabel in Record of a Space Born Few by Becky Chambers
This book had multiple viewpoint characters and two of them were moms! Tessa is the mother of young children and the one we see struggling with practical parenting choices. But I also really liked Isabel who’s an archivist and grandmother (and married to another woman, incidentally.)

Dr. Mensah form the Murderbot Novellas by Martha Wells.
Ok maybe this strange one because it's barely mentioned that Dr Mensah, the human leader from the 1st novella who Murderbot forms a relationship with, is a parent, but that’s exactly what I liked about how she’s written -- being a mom is something she does but it doesn’t take up her whole life and it doesn’t stop her from having adventures.

Queen Angela in She Ra and the Princesses of Power
I’m always pleased these days to see a mom character in fiction, so I was excited to meet queen Angella even when in her first scene it's clear that her relationship with her daughter Princess Glimmer can be rocky. It's nice to see Angela and Glimer work on their issues over the course of the first season. Also I love that Angela is so fierce and protective. And she has awesome looking wings!

I still have bunch of mom books that people recommended to me to check out as well. Plus I’ve got In the Vanishers’ Palace by Aliette de Bodard, which is a dark f/f retelling of beauty and the beast where the beast is dragon with teenage children, in my ereader waiting for me. And I just started Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma which has mom as viewpoint character -- so far I’m really loving it.

Did you consume any media with great moms in 2018? I’d love to hear about it!

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

The moms in Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night were both great! Layla's family was my favorite thing about that novella :)

Let's see, what other moms did I get in 2018? I still need to read the Ekaterin novella (it's been sitting on my Kindle since the day it was released, but I think I'm subconsciously saving it). I caught up on Saga, and I really do like both Alana and Klara as mothers, and I also finished the Broken Earth books, so Essun is definitely on this list, though none of those characters are new-to-me mothers; ditto Elastigirl from Incredibles 2. They were far too complicated to be called "great", but I definitely found the mothers in Frances Hardinge's A Skinful of Shadows, The Lie Tree, JY Yang's Black Tides of Heaven. But a mother I did actually think was a great mother, as well as interesting in her own right, was Terry Gordon from Ellen Klages' Gordon Family Saga. And I really enjoyed the mother/adult children relationships on Grace and Frankie, which I watched the first 1.5 seasons of this year.

[forestofglory]

Hmm.. I think meant great characters who are moms, rather than characters who are great at being moms. But its not very clear.

Thanks for all the recs! Terry Gordon is indeed awesome! I'm still sad there isn't a third book in the series where they are all back in Berkeley.

[hamsterwoman]

I think meant great characters who are moms, rather than characters who are great at being moms.

That's definitely how I took it, I just wanted to draw the distinction in my own list, because some of those interesting mother characters are definitely not great mothers :)

I'm still sad there isn't a third book in the series where they are all back in Berkeley.

It wasn't quite what I wanted from the third book in the series -- I wanted to see what Dewey and Suze were like as young adults! -- but Out of Left Field was a really interesting third installment anyway. And I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to enjoy a book with a protagonist whose driving passion was baseball :P (Also, it was definitely nice to see 50s Bay Area, finally.)

[forestofglory]

Wait there's a third book? How did I not know this! *rushes off to buy a copy*

[hamsterwoman]

It was just published this year, I think (and skips forward in time by about ten years). It's actually the reason I discovered the trilogy at all -- a f-lister read the third book and was reminded of how much she liked the series as a whole and rec'd it to me :)

I hope you enjoy it!