When you're building a character for a story, the
number one rule of thumb you'll generally hear is that they need to be immediately identifiable
in some way, which means something about them needs to be unique to them among the rest
of the characters. Artists will talk about silhouettes or avoiding same face syndrome,
writers will talk about speech patterns or accents to make it clear who's saying what in
the dialogue. And of course the bane of every character designer's existence is hearing
"Oh hey, that looks just like this other character from this much more well-known thing!"
It's an odd little fallacy that afflicts artists of all stripes - this idea that a work of art must
justify its existence by being entirely unique, whether that's an individual character or an
entire world or story concept. Total uniqueness is an understandable unreachable star for a
creator to pursue, but it's not… like… how stories work. I mean, this is a series where
we talk about tropes. Tropes are recurring patterns in storytelling that appear over and over
again, frequently unintentionally on the part of the writer - most people don't set out to build a
story out of a bunch of pieces of other stories, and yet almost every story can be broken down into
elements that aren't unique to that story. And that is a completely fine and neutral thing. The
pursuit of originality at all costs can actually pressure writers to shy away from legitimately
good writing decisions in the name of surprising their audience with something they've never seen
before. Sometimes a part of storytelling happens a lot because it works, and sometimes you've
never seen something before - because it doesn't. But while it's not healthy to obsess over making
your story totally distinct from every other story in the world, there is a legitimate benefit to
making sure that elements of your own story don't repeat too often. Within the context of your own
work, it can be very helpful to make sure that individual characters don't share too much in
common with each other, or specific plot beats don't repeat too exactly. It's less important
that your character doesn't look like anybody else's character and more important that all your
characters don't look the same as each other. And this goes far beyond the visual design
and cuts right to the core of characterization itself. The more distinct your characters are
from each other, the more perspectives they'll have on the story they're in; the more different
decisions they'll make at key points in the plot; the more things they can disagree on. And the more
unique a character is in the context of the story, the more unique their arc can be from anybody
else's. A character that is unique among their friends and allies gives the writer a completely
different angle on the story they're all sharing. And if you take this concept to its logical
conclusion, attempting to create the most unique and individual character in an
already diverse cast, you find a class of characters known as the Last Of Their Kind.
The Last Of Their Kind are characters who, for one reason or another, are completely unique
by virtue of the fact that everyone else like them is gone. In the real world, the last member of a
soon-to-be-extinct species is called an Endling, which is just way too poignant to leave out
of this conversation. An endling, the last of their kind, is the only one like them in the
entire story, meaning everything that defines the people they come from becomes entirely unique to
them. Culture, appearance, language, superpowers, homeland, special artifacts, bloodline techniques
- they don't need to share them with anybody, because there is nobody like them.
…Right? Oh c'mon, don't do this. This should
be the easiest thing in the world to define. This trope is exactly what it says
on the box. It's five words, a simple fact, The Last Of Their Kind. There is only one of
them. That is the name of the trope! Right?? Well, as much as my love of dictionary definitions
wish it weren't true, this trope almost never actually adheres to the letter of the definition,
at least not for long. A lot of characters are introduced as the last or only one of their kind,
and then in a sequel or a later installment or a reboot it'll turn out that actually there were
a few more kickin' around in hiding or otherwise obscured from the plot, and our former "last
of their kind" protagonist becomes "one of a bunch". The main reason this is so common is very
simple: if a main character is defined entirely by being the last of something, the primary conflict
for their arc will most likely be centered around exploring that. Them being separated from their
origins and isolated with nobody else like them anywhere can easily provide tension, tragedy,
angst, mystery - and the incredibly obvious personal motivation of finding out more about
themselves and their people. That can take a lot of different forms, but one of them is finding
more people like them. Many "last of their kind"s were separated from their people at a very young
age and don't know anything about their origins when they start off, and the ones who become
the last of their kind when they're older will probably be more determined to find other remnants
of the world they knew. So while some characters who are the Last Of Their Kind will actually stay
that way through to the end, the longer a story about these guys goes on, the more likely it is
that it'll turn out that they're not actually the last, because one of the juiciest ways to
explore a character's mysterious origin is to introduce more characters who share that origin.
This is a huge problem in longform comics, which are already notorious for continuity snarls.
For instance, Superman debuted in 1938 with the origin story that he was the last son of Krypton,
the sole survivor of a total planetary apocalypse saved by his scientist parents Moses-style
in an intergalactic basket in the bullrushes. He was the only Kryptonian on Earth, and his
powerset - even though it drifted and changed over the years - came from his unique alien
physiology and how it was affected by Earth's gravity and yellow sun. And as far as I can
tell from my cursory research on the subject, Superman was the only surviving Kryptonian for 20
real years, until 1958, when the bottle city of Kandor was introduced - a Kryptonian city that was
shrunken and abducted en masse by Brainiac before the planet exploded. Its permanent shrunken state
handily prevented it from doing much to undercut Superman's Last Son Of Krypton thing, since it's
not like a city's worth of supermen popped out of the woodwork to make things complicated on earth
- but one year later Supergirl was introduced, Superman's cousin who also survived the planet
going boom, and then in 1961 we started getting kryptonian bad guys like General Zod. At this
point, Superman is only the Last Son of Krypton because it makes for a killer subtitle -
it hasn't been factually true in decades. Something similar happened in Dragon Ball,
where for the first several arcs of the manga it was never indicated that Goku was the
last of anything, he was just weird - a super strong kid with a monkey tail. In a world
with triclopses, ageless psychic toddlers, shapeshifting pig-men and talking animals, a weird
kid with a tail didn't really raise any eyebrows until the Saiyan Saga hit and it turned out Goku
was an alien, one of only four survivors of the destruction of their home planet - soon to be two
survivors, followed by a brief stint as the last remaining Saiyan when Vegeta winds up dead for
a few extra-long minutes during the final battle with Frieza. Noncanon and semi-canon movies
like piling on more surviving saiyans because it's an easy formula for a villain of the week
and as long as they die at the end it doesn't really do much to the Earth-based status quo.
So… what are we even… talking about here? We're trying to define a trope, and we've just
cut ourselves off at the knees by saying the only definition that makes sense doesn't
even apply to most of the iconic examples. What is the point of a character who's the
last of their kind if it turns out they're not even the last of their kind? How does
that define the character in any meaningful way? They're just A Character at that point!
Well, we can sort of finagle this. A character who is the last or only one of their kind only
needs to believe this about themselves for a solid chunk of the story for this trope to manifest in
the plot. A character who thinks they're the last, or has been told they're the last and refuses to
believe it, has access to exactly the same space of characterization and subplots as a character
who really is the last of their kind. They're isolated; alone; they may hold themselves
responsible for singlehandedly carrying on the legacy of their people, or they may know
absolutely nothing about their people or even themselves. They might not have any context
for who they are or where they came from, and uncovering that might be their primary motivation.
Characters who are really the last of their kind can do this readily, but characters who only think
or wonder if they're the last of their kind can be racked with just as much uncertainty and angst
- maybe more, because they don't know for sure. Sometimes these characters spend the bulk of
their personal arc searching for others like them or trying to uncover their past, and in
these contexts it makes sense that as part of their happy ending they'd run into more of
their people, and get the answers they've been seeking all along. By definition, this means
they aren't really the last of their kind, but that doesn't really matter, because the entire
point of the story still hinges on that question: are they really the last, and if not,
will they be able to find the others? One series that builds this up pretty organically
is the Kung Fu Panda trilogy. In the first movie, Po is the only panda we see, but this is never
really addressed as anything too noteworthy - his dad is a goose and he's a bit of a fish out of
water but mostly he's just characterized as a kung fu fanboy in a world of actual badasses. Most
of the Furious Five are also the only animals of their specific species that we see in the movie -
Tigress is the only tiger, Mantis is the only bug, Viper is the only snake, etcetera. In fact,
the only animals that we really see more than one of are basically the background extras - pig
and bunny villagers and rhino prison guards. The fact that Po's the only panda doesn't stand
out as weird. Then the sequel dives really heavily into this question of where Po came
from, how he got adopted by a goose and where his biological parents factored into all this.
The story eventually unpacks that the reason Po is the only panda we've ever seen is that the
villain of Kung Fu Panda 2 did a full-on panda genocide to try and avert a prophecy of doom, and
Po only survived because his mother sacrificed herself to save him. The emotional arc of Kung Fu
Panda 2 is centered on Po unpacking his repressed memories and coming to terms with who he is, which
he does in the burned-out remains of what was once his home. In the first movie, Po is just the only
panda - in the sequel, Po is the last panda. Until the very last scene of the movie when we get a
glimpse of a hidden panda village and Po's father, which becomes the plot of Kung Fu Panda 3 -
confirming once and for all that Po is not the last panda. But the fact that he's got surviving
family and a community by the end of 3 doesn't invalidate his "last of his kind" revelation in 2.
In fact, it kinda does this interesting thing, where there are a few points in Kung Fu Panda 3
where there are things that come naturally to the pandas of the hidden village that Po hears about
and is like "oh, that makes perfect sense and it never occurred to me because I wasn't raised in
a community of people that were like me!" There's something kinda profound about the fact that Po
was raised entirely separate from anybody else like him, and there's this strong arc in the first
movie especially that Po kind of always feels like he's doing something wrong, and i-if you're in
the audience and you're, like, neurodivergent, or in other ways part of a community of people who
mostly don't really think like you, you can sort of end up feeling like - oh, there's something
to his experience of being the last/only one of people like him, in this supportive community -
at least after the first movie - of people who do like and care about him, but don't really know
what his, like, needs are, and what things he would naturally be good at. Like in the first
movie, Master Shifu has to do a lot of work to figure out how to properly train Po, because
Po is not like anybody else he's ever taught, and in the first movie it's because Po is a big
goofy panda kung-fu fanboy who hasn't actually been training from, like, day 1, but in the
second movie it kind of becomes clear that, like, oh, Po is actually separated from his environment
because he IS different from everybody around him, and in the third movie we get a glimpse of people
like him, who like rolling around and eating food and, uh, appreciate the fact that he's big
and squishy. So there is a very interesting microcosm of the arc a character who is the last
of their kind can go through, just in this trilogy of movies - with Po experiencing alienation and
isolation being the only one of his kind but not really recognizing that, and then Po experiencing
the delayed tragedy of understanding why and how he became separated from his people, and then Po
experiencing this strange feeling of understanding and belonging for the first time in his life when
he rejoins his family at the end of 3 - without losing his found family that he gained over
the last two movies who do understand him in a different way than the people of his home village
who don't do martial arts can't really understand. None of that was scripted, apparently I just had
a lot of thoughts about Kung Fu Panda! *laughter* Okay, back on script. Ahem!
One of the most egregious examples of this kind of writing shenaniganery is probably The Last
Unicorn. The protagonist and title character of the story starts off by hearing a pair of hunters
saying that there are no other unicorns left, followed by a gorgeous musical number about
how "the last unicorn" is beautiful and alone at the end of everything, and the first thing the
unicorn does when the movie really gets going is say "well that's not right, there's absolutely
no way I'm the last unicorn" and sets out into the world to find out what happened to the
others and she turns out to be 100% correct, and at the end of the story all the other
unicorns are released from their imprisonment in the ocean and sent back out into the world.
In no way, shape or form is she the last unicorn, she at no point believes she's the last unicorn,
she doesn't even spend some of the movie AS a unicorn - but it makes a great title and a bangin
musical number and it would've been much less poignant to call it "the last unicorn in this
zipcode." "The temporarily isolated unicorn." "This town ain't big enough for two unicorns."
But there's a good reason this keeps happening. From a character arc standpoint, there is no
difference between a character who is a true endling and a character who only thinks they
are. They have the same internal struggles, the same questions of identity. It's
just a matter of what they find at the end of that part of their journey.
There's another reason that characters who are the last of their kind frequently don't
stay that way for long: if a character's primary strength in the narrative is how unique they are,
and how they have abilities that nobody else does, one of the simplest ways to provide an absolute
gut-drop of an antagonist is to pit them against somebody who has those exact same abilities.
Maybe somebody who has those abilities and training in how to actually use them to their
full potential. When a character has been defined by being completely unlike anyone else in the
story, one of the scariest things they can be faced with is a level playing field. And it's
always a fun "oh shit" moment when a character who's had an absolute superlative advantage
in some specific ability, like just being better than all their allies at raw strength
or weapons training or magic talent, turns out to be average at best by the standards of their
people and gets absolutely stomped at their one thing by someone who's legitimately impressive
by the standards of their greater community. And this can be impactful even if the surprise
villainous other character doesn't herald a dramatic expansion of the cast with Just Kidding
Not The Last After All. Sometimes it's more impactful if it's just the two of them, and one
of the only two survivors is evil. This applies even in stories where there wasn't ever a larger
community that got whittled down - like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data is introduced as
an entirely unique type of android, an existence that quietly puts him through profound alienation
as nobody else in the universe works quite like he does. Then it turns out he has a brother, Lore -
an identical android and the only other thing in the universe like him, ignoring the various other
Soong-type androids that eventually get shaken out of the canon. But Lore is evil, or at least racked
with profound daddy issues, and what makes this difficult is that Lore is the only other person
in the universe that understands Data, and he uses this understanding to manipulate him. It's
hard when your only choices are "total isolation" or "enable a guy who keeps murdering people."
This appears to be a weirdly common thing in sci fi, because they did the exact same thing
in Doctor Who. Doctor Who, back in the day, introduced the Time Lords as the species of
alien that The Doctor was one of. They were super-advanced masters of time that The Doctor
didn't really get along with, having stolen his time machine and ran away from all their rules
and regulations. One recurring renegade time lord was the villainous The Master, a flamboyant
schemer that seems to have been one of the most fun things about classic Doctor Who. I haven't
watched as much of it as I probably could have, because I got into it when Doctor Who came back
with the new series, starting with the Ninth Doctor, and after a little bit of foreshadowing
and teasing and hints of some kind of great war, he explained that he was the last Time Lord,
and it became clear that something terrible had happened offscreen - a Time War, seemingly
waged outside of normal spacetime in a manner so cataclysmic that it destroyed the Time Lords
and the Daleks utterly, which is convenient because when it comes to tragic backstories, time
travelers kind of have an automatic "nuh uh" if they just wanna time travel back to before
everything exploded for a little pre-trauma vacation time. The Time War was so catastrophic
that it kind of unmade the Time Lords in such a profound way that there didn't seem to be any
going back - until they did go back in a later season after I stopped watching? Eh. Continuity.
Anyway, this resulted in a deeply traumatized Doctor as the only survivor on the Time Lord side,
the very last of his people - except just kidding, of course The Master is also there. And this
is played for ALL the drama you could want, including - eventually - The Master actively
choosing not to use his get-out-of-death-free card so he can die in The Doctor's arms just to spite
his constant attempts to make him stop murdering quite so much. Obviously that didn't last either,
The Master is too popular to let die, but at this point that's not even a blip on the radar. For
some stories, continuity is the only true enemy. This specific flavor of antagonist - another
survivor of our hero's nearly-extinct group, but so evil that they really test our hero's
patience and/or moral code - can also play into a different and profound character
arc. Intrinsic in this kind of story, where a character separated from their people of
origin struggles to find their place in the world, is a very fundamental question: are their people
the place they come from, or are they the people who love them now? A character who is the last of
their kind usually doesn't go through the story alone. In order to highlight their unique traits,
they'll contrast with other main characters who are very different from them. In this contrast,
there is frequently conflict; misunderstandings or miscommunications, things that come naturally
to the others that don't click with the loner or vice versa. Part of what likely drives them to
seek others like themselves is that feeling of alienation that comes with being surrounded by
people who like them, but on some level will never quite understand them. But if they find people
who are like them and can understand them - and despite those similarities, they then don't get
along - it can raise some uncomfortable questions about belonging and being understood and whether
this character is doomed to be, on some level, alone forever. This opens up a very interesting
space of character conflict, where the character who formerly believed they were the last of their
kind might need to decide whether they're willing to compromise their principles in order to stop
being the "last of their kind" and be with people who are like them, or if they can't accept their
people at all and instead need to choose to remain a stranger in a strange land separate from
the people they have the most in common with, often people they've been searching for for
the entire series, but together with the people they've slowly grown closer to whose principles
they actually agree with. A real "found family" versus "biological family" kinda conflict - and
this is a conflict that really can't fully play out unless the "last of their kind" is presented
with the option of reuniting with their people, which basically means they can't actually stay
as the last of their kind for the whole run of the plot. You can't do this specific brand
of angst with a character who's truly the last of their kind. They need both options
in order to fully explore where they stand. But while these are very interesting angles to
explore, not every character who's the Last Of Their Kind goes through these arcs. Some of them
are well and truly isolated for the entire run of their story. Sometimes, "last" really does
mean "last." And these characters really let the tragedy of this trope show. Because, for all
I've said that the character arcs start the same whether or not the character is truly the last
of their kind, they diverge very strongly when the character receives confirmation that there
aren't any others. Some characters know this for a fact from the very beginning, and have time
to grieve or come to terms with it - but other characters learn over the course of the story
that there isn't anyone like them out there. When they receive absolute proof that they're alone in
the universe, it changes their place in it - and, more importantly, this can either rip away
their core motivation, or it can replace it with something new. Whatever happens, it can't
leave them unchanged, because it represents a profound loss of hope. This character
is no longer searching for their people, because they know unquestioningly that that search
is pointless. The world may be big and full of potential and wonderful, interesting people, but
none of them are the people they want to find. A character who is the last has a lot
of decisions to make. They represent the totality of their people. If there's some
kind of responsibility those people shared, it's now totally on them to keep it going.
And if there's some principle they valued, the endling needs to decide how to uphold it.
And I think I've been commendably patient in waiting this long to bring up The Last Airbender.
Look, I gotta! It's central to the entire plot! It's literally in the name!! I promise I've
watched other shows than just this one!!! Now, of course, Avatar: The Last Airbender is
exactly what it says on the box. Aang is the last of the Air Nomads - a fact he categorically does
not believe for the first couple episodes. Sure, he got frozen in an iceberg for a little while,
but when he ran away there were tons of Air Nomads and the threat of war was just a distant fire on
the horizon, nothing more than a reason for the Air Nomad elders to rip away Aang's childhood as
quickly as possible to get The Avatar ready for war. Everyone keeps telling him that nobody's seen
an airbender in a full hundred years, but that doesn't prove anything. There could be tons of
explanations. Maybe they're all just hiding. Aang is twelve years old, and from his perspective he's
only been gone a few days. Even if intellectually he might know that something is probably wrong,
emotionally he cannot possibly have processed that at this point. So they kick off the third
episode of the show with Aang excitedly telling Katara he can't wait to show her his home, the
Southern Air Temple. Katara's more cautious about the whole thing, in large part because Aang is so
enthusiastic and happy. It doesn't really seem to have occurred to him that things could have really
gotten bad. So she keeps trying to prepare him for the worst, but he keeps justifying why there's
definitely nothing to worry about, there's no way the firebenders could've even reached the
temple, sure he's heard that the Fire Nation has killed a lot of people, but it's not really
REAL to him yet. Aang has a brief flash of ennui when they reach the Air Temple and he notices how
there's nobody around - no people, no animals, etc etc - but Sokka quickly distracts him, and
his sunny attitude bounces back immediately. But there's this feeling of dread that hangs
over the episode, especially on a rewatch. The Air Temple is perfectly preserved - it's just
deserted and lifeless compared to Aang's vibrant flashbacks. It doesn't look particularly burned
or scarred or damaged, and any signs of war are pretty easily concealed - but it's completely
empty. Katara and Sokka learn very early that firebenders made it up there after all, and if
the airbenders were in any fit state after that, they probably would've cleaned up a little bit.
Aang is happy and enthusiastic and laughing, and Sokka and Katara are trying to spare him from
the pain of revelation that they know is coming. They can't protect him from the horror - the
horror has already happened. Every bit of comic relief and whimsy just feels like setup for the
moment it all comes crashing down, and when that inevitably happens, Aang is so overwhelmed with
horror and grief that he immediately loses himself to the Avatar State. Sokka and Katara manage to
bring him back out of it, and by the end of the episode he's cheerful and laughing again, but
it's clearly a little bit of an act this time, and he remains consistently very protective of
the last remnants of Air Nomad culture, and very, very upset when they're threatened - both by
antagonists, like the bad guys that kidnap Appa, and by other good guys, like the inventors
with flying machines that set up shop in the abandoned Northern Air Temple - that one's extra
cruel because it briefly gives Aang false hope that some airbenders did survive, and Aang's
not too happy seeing his sacred temple stuffed full of machinery. And in the final conflict
of the show, Aang struggles to find a way to defeat Firelord Ozai while upholding the central
Air Nomad tenet of pacifism - a decision he gets flack for from every other main character who
would be immediately down to kill the dude that commands and represents the regime burning
their homes and killing their loved ones, but it's a decision that carries a lot of meaning
when it comes from Aang. Previous Air Nomad avatars could sacrifice their personal, spiritual
well-being to maintain balance in the world because there were other Air Nomads who could keep
their practices alive. In search of the avatar, Sozin slaughtered the Air Nomads in a conflict
so quick and casual it's relegated to one line in his autobiography. The Air Nomads were gentle
pacifists who practiced spiritual cultivation and valued joy and who everyone indicates were pretty
easy to kill, and if the fire nation's war had succeeded in taking all of those things away
from Aang, they would have entirely succeeded in wiping out the Air Nomads in every way that
mattered. Aang, the Last Airbender, had to find a way to defeat Ozai that didn't sacrifice the last
remnants of the people and the culture he solely represented. So instead of just killing Ozai
with a big anime attack and tacitly proving that the Fire Nation's "might makes right" motto was
objectively correct, which would incidentally also imply that the other airbenders died because they
were too wimpy to fight back, not because pacifism is a strength all on its own and them getting
killed was a bad thing that happened to them, not a thing that they were at fault for - Aang
opens himself up in horrible vulnerability that could absolutely unmake him if his spirit falters,
and in an act of pacifism that could have easily killed him, he utterly strips away Ozai's power
without abandoning the principles of the people that Ozai and his ancestors derided as weak. Aang
is the Avatar, and he is also the last Airbender, and in the ultimate moral victory of
the show, he proves that he can be both. So… yeah?
