This is one of the points where the game industry has left Hollywood in the dust. Game writers understand how emotionally evocative children can be, and they’re generally not afraid to treat child-characters the same way they’d treat adults.
Without getting too much into spoiler territory, The Last of Us is pretty brutal in this regard. I’ve seen people put down the controller and cry. I think the crown probably goes to The Secret World, though, which has a nightmarish assortment of ways to play the child card.
One particular story has you searching for two missing children. You talk to their little friends in a camp, who are afraid they got lost in the woods. No, it turns out they were kidnapped by an evil megacorp that wanted to experiment on them. So you trace the goons, only to find them dead. The kids escaped and are lost again, but they were implanted with tracking chips. You trace them through some horrible places then find…the chips. In a large pool of blood. To quote the game directly, “Trudging through the Transylvanian snow, they knew something would save them, just like in the stories. But alas, sweetling. These fairy tales are like the old kind. They all end in blood and the deep, deep dark.” Later on, you see the lab they were being taken to and could be forgiven for thinking they were probably better off getting eaten. For your Fridge Horror needs, it’s clear after reading the experimental records that some of the monsters you end up killing in the lab were children who had been experimented on.
There’s also a little boy who sits alone in a playground in the middle of the most haunted, monster-infested district of Tokyo. (He’s alone because he scares the shit out of the monsters.) Then there’s the doomsday cult with cheerful anime characters on the walls, the underground clubhouse full of infected kids, and the little girls who have left a number of fans with a phobia of parking garages…
Try to kill an annoying kid in Fallout 3-4. Can’t. Try to kill an annoying adult. Maybe can’t if they’re marked critical to the game, but probably can. Years earlier there were plenty of games that didn’t shy away from letting you do so (including the Fallout series), these days they’re too afraid the ESRB will give them and AO, and or that on a slow news day Nancy Grace will discover their “child massacre simulator”. Ever wonder why there aren’t any kids in GTA games? Even ones where you can find playground equipment?
I remember one of the Mothra movies where maybe 20% of the movie shows whole city blocks crumbling like a stack of playing cards. But they bothered to include a classic collapsing-bridge-with-a-helpless-human-somehow-stuck-in-the-middle (this time a baby in a bassinet.) The baby lived (at least at the end of that one scene.)
There are mods that can fix that. Skyrim, too. Just sayin’…
That said, in non-modded Fallout 3, there’s a surprisingly effective scene where a house robot reads the bedtime poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” to a child – who’s been a skeleton for 200 years.
I don’t want to watch any kids dying. I gave up on WALKING DEAD for a while when
it seemed that baby Judith had been eaten by walkers.
but at least that was offscreen. And
when, in the 2016 midseason premiere, the annoying little boy was eaten alive, though he was really annoying and brought about his own death and his mother’s with his stubborn whining
I had to turn away.
But, again, that’s my issue. I wouldn’t call for a boycott of a movie or TV show depicting suchg a thing; I just won’t watch it. But I’m not unique in this.
Did the Ultraman movie get cancelled? I’m pretty sure it didn’t get released.