Mothers As Main Characters in Fantasy & SciFi: Aimee Eden in “Sweet Tooth”

Aimee Eden

Last week, I celebrated Mother’s Day with a refeatured post on Mothers As Main Characters in Fantasy & SciFi.

I also mentioned that I could think of very few characters in SFF where “being a mother is central, not peripheral, to her [the character’s] part in the story.”

In the meantime, I’ve caught up with Sweet Tooth Season 2 on Netflix, and it struck me that Aimee Eden has to qualify as one of the great mothers of SFF.

A quick review of t’interwebs suggests she may not be a character in the original graphic novel series (Vertigo, published by DC), but she certainly rocks the Netflix show.

Most of you will know the Sweet Tooth story: of a post-apocalyptic world where the human population has been decimated by a pandemic (“the Sick.”) All children are now born hybrid, part human, part animal — think centaur or faun.

Aimee’s hybrid foster kids

Aimee is one of the main characters in Seasons 1 and 2. She is not a birth mother, but has fostered a group of hybrid children, whom she has rescued from abandonment and protected from the Last Men, a group bent on their extermination.

Eventually, the Last Men track the kids down and capture them, but Aimee is unswerving in her determination to get them back. The one thing that’s clear throughout is Aimee’s love for and dedication to her kids.

The Last Men capture Gus

When forced to flee their home, she reassures the children that, “This is just bricks and concrete. Home is wherever we’re all together.”

Aimee & Wendy, her first foster kid

And when Aimee eventually contracts the Sick, she refuses a potential medication that has been generated by using one of her kids, Roy, as a guinea pig. He was, she tells another character, an eight year old boy who loved soccer and she would rather die herself than benefit from a medication he was murdered to create.