Hmm I reckon Colin Morgan enjoys these background roles and obscure shows actually. If there's one thing that comes across in interviews with him it's that he loves the acting but not the spotlight and even if it's the smallest role he always puts so much heart in it !
Do you ever think about how the Little Nightmares Kids are on a time limit?
Like when they hit adulthood (so either 18 or 20), it’s over for them. Whatever protection that they have from this world and it’s corrupting affects will be gone.
If they’re lucky they’ll end up retaining enough of an identity to retain some sort of personality and become something like the teacher or the doctor, but this may be considered a fate worse than death, as they still lose everything that they once had and become the same aggressive monsters that they’ve spent their entire lives avoiding. They loose their humanity with age and in its place gain a constant irresistible urge to harm and kill any child they encounter.
If they’re unlucky, they’ll end up as something like a viewer, permanently bound to whatever addicting force permeates the nearly area. Mindless and barely able to comprehend anything but what they’re ensnared by. A fate far, FAR worse than death.
Maybe that’s why we never see any teenagers. When a fate worse than death is inevitable like that, there’s only one solution that comes to mind.
Headcanons under the cut.
We see that some adults DO seem to be able to resist these urges, but they all have reasons for being able to do so.
The Janitor, the Hunter aren’t actually resisting these urges as much as you think. They aren’t killing children IMMEDIATELY, but they are still killing them. They just have some ulterior motives that come first, and then they kill the child later.
The Janitor watches over children in the Maw, but he’s also the one that kills them and sends them to the kitchen and will kill any child he finds trying to escape.
Plus he’s also kept in check by the Lady, an extremely powerful adult that, when you look at how she treats her other employees like the Craftsman and Butler, may have been the one responsible for Roger’s blindness. Blinding him either to prevent him from escaping, to prevent him from harming as many children, or as punishment for something (possibly for seeing something that he wasn’t supposed to see).
The Hunter doesn’t kill Six immediately, but that’s because he wants to either taxidermy or cook and eat her later, locking Six in his cabin and waiting until she’s the right size to properly taxidermy/cook Hansel and Gretel style. He’s still going to kill her, but he needs to wait a bit first because his own goals come just a bit before his killing urges.
The Lady, the Broadcaster, the Ferryman and the North Wind are all Lords. They hold dominion over entire sections of this world and are some of the most powerful adults in existence. The retaining of some humanity and control over themselves seems to come with that.
And children can’t just become lords with age or luck. The existing lords have something that no current child has: They most likely became lords (and gained their powers) though the Eye.
The Lady gained her powers though a deal with the Eye and later sought out and took over the Maw with them to guarantee a steady supply of souls to consume (and also because the Broadcaster took over the Pale City where she originally lived).
The Broadcaster gained his powers and his tower though the Eye and sought out Mono and created the loop to power it.
The Ferryman definitely gained SOMETHING from a deal with the Eye given how he’s able to tango with entities like the North Wind and the Lady, and his powers were either that something or came with that something.
The North Wind was most likely directly created by the Eye and came into existence whenever it was that the world went to shit.
The Butler not only has his hands bound (preventing him from escaping and making it harder for him to bring harm to the Pretender), but is also fully aware of what happens if he angers his boss. The Craftsman in the attic serves as a constant reminder. The Lady, like mentioned before, is one of the most powerful adults in the world and the Butler refuses to harm the Pretender because he may as well be signing his own death warrant by doing so. Plus, the Butler has done this at least four times before and at most five times before. He has practice with keeping his child killing urges in check and is aware that harming this specific child means death for him.
The Thin Man recognizes Six and Mono and despite recognizing Six, doesn’t kill her. Instead of killing Six, the Thin Man locks her in the signal tower with a copy of her music box. He doesn’t care about the fact that Six is being distorted by the signal, but he also doesn’t want to kill her despite everything she did to him. He also seems to recognize Mono and may have been attempting to speak to him through the transmission, only for the two of them to cause disruptive interference and cancel each other out. His awareness and ability to resist his urge to kill can be attributed to what exactly he is.
The Thin Man isn’t the lord of the Pale City, that title goes to the Broadcaster, but he is a major part of the transmission, with the signal tower twisting his natural signal powers into the eldritch transmission that chokes the airwaves of the Pale City. The transmission surrounds and permeates the Thin Man, as he is a key part of it. Basically, the transmission constantly running around and through the Thin Man gives him a bit more awareness and humanity than the typical adult. Like some sort of pseudo-lord. The (somewhat) retained humanity of a lord (along with a few childhood memories) with none of the other benefits.
But even those that retain some of their humanity and/or know how to fight their urges are still aggressive child hunters. That urge is still there and strong, the adult just knows how to fight it for a bit for their own benefit. And they really don’t see anything wrong with harming a child. Nothing wrong with it at all. To them, it’s just a fact of life. Adults feel the urge to kill and see no reason to ignore it.
These are the same people that would turn their own children out on the streets for being queer and we’re are expecting them to care about the victims of the Epstein files? Children have always been an acceptable sacrifice to the status quo, it’s just blatant now.
hanging out with Rob while he's studying sounds like it would be boring and terrible but actually I have been thinking some serious thinks today and it felt hella good
