I watched an episode of BOTP the other day, while feeding my baby. Watching Anderson interacting with the team...His personality... mmmm He adopted (I think that could be a fandom idea, not truly canon.) 5 kids... as a single dad...boss. Did he wake up one morning hearing Mark and Jason arguing, Tiny trying to intervene and Princess rewiring the tech in the house and hearing a few gasps as an alarm goes off... She's still learning at the tender age of ten. Keyop crying over his breakfast being wrong. It's chaos and its not even 7am... did he lay in bed with a migraine wondering... "Why did I do it???... Why can't they co-operate and not bicker like my employees on the base. They don't get logic..." He comes across as an ordered career kinda guy, not the type who'd be raising kids without a lotta help. But it would make a few funny stories of his early efforts to become more of a father and balancing being their future boss at the same time. Then he had an idea... Nanny Zark came into being... scary...

Originally posted by Ebonyswanne Then he had an idea... Nanny Zark came into being... scary...

Jane Lebak's AU BotP did touch on some of the kids earlier years with him in flashbacks. Sometimes good, sometimes bad and sometimes, just as you describe Ebony, 'What have I gotten myself into?" But Zark...I wonder if George Lucas ever thought about suing for Zark's similarity to R2D2? There was one great scene when Jason used the 'F' word and the Chief gave them a lecture about the fact the 'F' word can be a verb, noun, adjective and something else...darn. Got to go back and find it. He then told Jason he (the Chief) could does worse than make him wash his mouth out with soap - force feed him language skills. But could Anderson really allow himself to get too close to them when they were going to be warriors and possibly die or become severely handicapped in the course of the war?

I love Jane Lebak's fics about the team in its early years! Julie has a fic about Anderson on Father's Day, and there are some interesting fics by Pintail about the interaction between Jason and Anderson. But perhaps my most favourite one is GGO's "A week in the life of..." -- as you say, Ebony, what WAS he thinking???

I agree, Jane's fan fics are the best! I found them... wow, I think when my oldest was a baby (we used to email each other about shows our kids were watching) and printed them all out so I could read them over and over again. I love how she portrays Anderson.

The idea that Anderson adopted the team and acted as a father figure to them (plural) is fanon, not canon. It's certainly in the spirit of BotP, a kind of collective in-joke, like Anderson's name, the baseball player Joe Galactor and the whale calf Nambu, but it isn't canon. The closest canon comes to the in loco parentis status of Anderson in relation to the team is his admission in The Sky is Falling that Mark's father "left his four-year-old son to me," which sort of equates Mark with the Wembley-ware vase that Grandma left to Aunt Nora in her will, rather than saying something like, "He nominated me as Mark's legal guardian," a phrase that children would recognise from the permission slips we all got at school for excursions and stuff. So, no, all that stuff about Anderson fitting the "A Father to His Men" trope isn't canon, it's just something that happens in the warped imagination of some fanfic writers. In my case it's a combination of a nod to the production staff's BotP/Gatchaman in-joke thing and (more importantly) a way of attempting to humanise and soften Anderson's character. Let's face it, he's an adult who sends a small boy into combat on a regular basis, which on my planet would be a violation of a whole ream of laws, rules, regulations and UN resolutions on child soldiers. Given that on-screen, the vision of Anderson is the vision of Nambu, who does show the odd flash of concern and emotion over the team, it's difficult to write Anderson as an uncaring bastard, so rather than reinvent the wheel, some writers cheat a little and simply transplant Nambu's emotional motivation to Anderson. If only I could transplant hibiscus cuttings as easily.

And when Nambu sent the team out, he always said, "I pray for your success." In BotP, Anderson never said anything even remotely close. I find Catherine's AU has about the best canon representation of Anderson.

GGW-- I figured it had to more fandom than canon about him actually adopting the team. I see it more as a fostering situation, guardianship. Besides IF they were adopted they whole thing of Mark/Princess or Jason/Princess or Jason/Mark would be incest if they were dating... not going there in that context yew!!! Yep it is considered that even if the kids aren't biological. Even in Gatch it's more a fandom thing. But its easy to forget when it's often used in fanfic. Nothing against anyone who does use it in stories BTW. I hadn't really gotten into origins series. Read a few but haven't written any. It is an area for imagination in stories because its widely unknown backstory. You get to make it up! Yippeee... Anderson doesn't strike me as nurturing father, more a stoic authoritative figure. "Do as you are told, follow the rules," approach. What about the idea they didn't have a "parent"figure?? More mentors and teachers, a few softer nurturing personalities in there. They were home schooled for sure. Secret identities, the skills they learned-- Not for general schooling. Its possible, a friend of mine was raised in boys homes in NSW by nuns. Up to 20 kids in a room from the age of 5yrs old.

Yes, it's possible, and it has been done in the past, with all the attendant horror stories. We may speculate that perhaps some bright spark in Galaxy Security or whatever agency was responsible for the formation of the G-Force team decided that the children would be raised in an institutional manner. Perhaps that same bright spark decided that they wouldn't bother with trying to form bonds in loco parentis on an emotional level in order to force the kids to bond with each other. With careful conditioning to ensure the team were inclined to obey orders and work within boundaries, you could, in theory, produce a G-Force team with no emotional bonds to parent figures. As to the mental and emotional health of people raised in such a manner, look at it this way: the adults responsible would have every reason to be worried if the team felt betrayed in any way, since their first loyalty would be to each other rather than the command structure. Yeah, you'd want to be nice to those kids as they were growing up.

Yeah some bright spark had the idea to enlist a bunch a smart kids to do their extreme work for them. They didn't take into account those kids will ahhh... be kids not just brains. Mark-- learned survival was to model commanders he observed on the base. Jason-- Being a smartass got him what he wanted, and scary growls kept things in line for him. Princess-- Being sweet and girly served its purpose at times with adults, and keeping the boys in check she worked day and night on good comebacks, especially for Jason. Tiny--- food... just keep it coming. Keyop-- what the hell?? He was actually a lab error, that turned out to be a child. So make use of him and put in G-Force. Speech therapy. no one really gave that much thought. A bunch of career scientists, who barely saw their extended family, no idea what to do with kids. They understood chemistry and complex mathematical problems, but basics in kids therapy?? They figured raising them should be logical, smart engineered kids will simply know what to do, co-operate, and be easy to manipulate... THEY WERE WRONG!! Jason set out to make sure they understood exactly what they created.

There were a couple of fics I read a long time ago that had a larger group of kids created in the lab. The lead was a boy named Chris, vice Mark. Chris and Jason were best friends and became more. Some of the kids died because of genetic errors. Princess was the only girl to survive. At one point they did rebel and took off into a forest and hid, taking out the military units sent in to find and retrieve them. It's the only one I can remember where the whole team/group rebelled against the adults. Maybe Phoenix Rising?

Originally posted by Becky Rock There were a couple of fics I read a long time ago that had a larger group of kids created in the lab. The lead was a boy named Chris, vice Mark. Chris and Jason were best friends and became more. Some of the kids died because of genetic errors. Princess was the only girl to survive. At one point they did rebel and took off into a forest and hid, taking out the military units sent in to find and retrieve them. It's the only one I can remember where the whole team/group rebelled against the adults. Maybe Phoenix Rising?

Sounds like a dark, but interesting plotline. Some of those stories start out good, and don't end up finished. Was it completed? Because when I was only a reader I started to check the dates and if it was completed, or if the author was still in the fandom writing it. Drove me nuts that stories would remain incomplete forever, especially if I liked it and wanted to know how it was going to end. I make a note not to do that. The beginning of the BOTP series states that they are all orphans. Mark and Princess seem to be the only ones who recall parents. I don't remember Jason talking about his parents, nor Tiny. Keyop was the idea of the early days of IVF-- Test tube baby. I'm wondering how much they'll change in the new series of BOTP. Will be interesting to watch... of course will get it for the kids!! They liked Gatchaman.

If it was completed, it wasn't posted. I can't really say much about that since I have several posted fics that aren't completed for variety of reasons. The Chris character's bird code was Phoenix. Mark was his second. The fics had Chris having severe problems with his implant and they were able to repair it. It also started showing Jason having problems. The last fic posted did include the first attack and it was vastly different than the series. At that time, their command ship wasn't finished yet and wasn't named. I thought Chris was going to die in the next fic and that would lead them to calling the ship Phoenix in his honor.

I did some searching online and found there were 4 fics called Phoenix Rising -1,2,3,4 and were written by Imajiru, I found the references in a site called Fanlore, but none of the links to the fics work. Their description describes what I remember. I couldn't find them anywhere else.