Over this past summer, I lived my childhood dream of seeing the sequel to The Incredibles. It took FOURTEEN YEARS but it finally happened. From the original movie, Edna Mode and Jack Jack Jack were my two favorite characters because of their quirkiness and quintessential roles they played in the film. Edna was the older, seemingly crazy character that obviously knew more than she was letting on and Jack Jack was the youngest character, full of potential and coming into his own.
So you’re probably wondering at this point why I am talking about The Incredibles and what it has to do with our class. Well, in The Incredibles it is the children that hold the greatest strengths of the team. Violet is incredibly shy, which makes sense because she can become invisible and generate force fields, but also very loyal to her family, Dash is basically the opposite – outgoing, active, but also a classic thirteen-year-old boy, a touch arrogant- and then there’s Jack Jack. Jack Jack was assumed to be powerless, much like a Squib in the Harry Potter universe. But then we learn that Jack-Jack basically has infinite potential for power growth, he was just a late bloomer.
“So what’s the connection, Heather?”
I’m glad you asked that. Essun has three children of her own along with all the other children that Jemisin discusses in the trilogy, but I’ll stick to Essun’s children for the purposes of this blog post. We don’t really get to know Essun’s sons, Uche and Corundum, very much as they die at incredibly young ages and Nassun we only know as a pre-teen young teenager in the second and third books of the trilogy. Regardless of their ages, we know that they are each incredibly powerful. Nassun’s powers grow leaps and bounds after she goes to Found Moon and arguably becomes more powerful than her mother. Uche was able to sess out a diamond in his father’s pocket and quell shakes on command. Coru was arguably the most powerful of Essun’s children.
Essun, Syenite at the time, laments to Alabaster that he is not letting her practice her orogeny because he is quelling all the shakes. Alabaster comes back to say that he hasn’t quelled any shakes and then Essun realizes that Coru has quelled everything in reachable distance. I’m pretty sure Coru would have been able to sess the “magic” silver that connected everything too. He had the potential for unlimited growth in his orogenic powers. Which is why he is like Jack Jack from the Incredibles.