Seren's Squad Spotlight: Agent Olive · 2:30am Nov 4th, 2022
"Why. Why am I on a site that hosts ponefics, Seren. Take that stuff to Fanfiction if that's not dying off. Stop burdening pone fans with this shi-"
My mind says "write your Solar and Lunar fanfic", but my hands say "nah, write this instead for your Odd Squad crossover fanfics because it's gonna be relevant, y'know?"
So, here we are. The first out of thirteen Odd Squad-related blog posts detailing each of the main characters, how they act in the show, and how I write them in fanfics. This one will focus on one of my favorite characters, a character who still has snark like Twilight and still shares the "why is everyone around me a complete bumbling idiot" sentiment that she had in the first episode and grew out of right quickly, which is really a pity. At least Olive had friends and stuck with it, Twi. But I'm glad you've improved.
Let's dive into the history and legacy of one Agent Olive.
And I'm gonna give a note here that says: SPOILERS. As much as I'd like to avoid them like the plague, to really dive deep into her character, we're gonna need to go Twilight-Zone deep.
If you tell a child to stop throwing a tantrum, some will give small lil' manipulative smiles.
Olive, on the other hand, partakes in none of that bull.
When I first saw teasers for Odd Squad, I didn't think Olive was anything overly special. Sure, she was a live-action character and not a cartoon human being, and maybe it was because her personality can't really be determined from just a few minutes or so of teaser clips, but I mostly just shrugged her off as a main character of little importance. (This was after I had read a couple articles about the show before it premiered, by the way. The show premise looked cool, the characters looked solid, but Olive just didn't click with me. I blame the tainting of PBS on my brain and their desaturation of their cartoon characters' personalities so you just have fun watching them without looking too deep into them.)
But then the show premiered.
I watched the first episode.
And I thought to myself, "By God, this girl is really something, huh?"
As I poured through more articles about the show, I quickly learned that Olive, as a character, was designed to paint girls in a more positive light, since...y'know, sexism was a thing back in 2014 and still is a thing today. Which, okay, sure, I can buy all of that since this is PBS we're talking about. They're no stranger to stuff like combating sexism and racism. But even so, being a girl doesn't define Olive as a character -- she has more personality than that.
A personality that one doesn't really expect to find in a PBS Kids show from the post-2013 reboot era. If anything, shows under the My Little Pony franchise (from G4 and G5) would have characters like this. [Insert any other kids' cartoon here] would have characters like this. But on PBS Kids? The crapsaccharine preschool network/block that can't grasp their demographic growing up and still watching them and their shows? Nahhh.
Personality
"You're all going to hell. Goodbye!"
If you asked me to give three words to describe this girl, I would immediately shoot you down and tell you there is no way I could even possibly do that. 40 episodes and you want me to describe her in three words? I'd need a whole essay just to explain her to you.
But lucky for you, dear reader, this is not a whole essay. Not unless you want it to be.
Olive is about as cartoony as one can expect from a live-action character. She whips out an absolutely absurd range of face expressions across the entire season. That's part of what drew me to her, actually -- the fact that the show's creators pushed so hard for the show to be live-action, against the network's wishes, to keep that realism and relatability aspect of it (because kids can't relate to cartoon characters with this show's premise! it is beyond the scope of their abilities! right? ...right?), only for Dalila Bela to come walking on the scene, cracking her knuckles and saying that sure, she can fulfill Linda Simensky's desires to make Odd Squad a cartoon, and all she needs is her face. No, it's not enough they have CGI animation to fill the quota, she said. Let's go beyond the quota.
...
Okay, she probably didn't really say that, but you shush. I can dream.
In addition to her cartoonish expressions, though, the main keystones of Olive's personality are that she is serious and stern. She's like Pinkamena before she witnessed the Sonic Rainboom, only if she didn't witness the Sonic Rainboom and grew up like her sisters. Particularly Limestone.
It makes for a great contrast with her partner Otto, who is more silly and fun like a kid his age should be. He didn't have to go through a massacre of his coworkers and he doesn't have a diagnosis-but-not-officially of trauma, so he grew up a happy and healthy kiddo. Or maybe he did, and we don't know...the season never really reveals his origins in-depth, which was a serious missed opportunity if you ask me. But I'm just assuming and making an ass out of myself. Anyway, I digress. The contrast between the two is what endears them to me, and to a lot of other people too. It's a common contrast in media, but Olive and Otto do it wonderfully. A lot of people view the pair as a sort of brother-and-sister duo, and I fully support that. Blood ties they may not have, but they make a great sibling pair. However, there are times when the dynamic is taken one step further and shows Olive being a sort of mother to Otto here and there, such as when she takes away his free cup of odd and sour lemonade or when she scolds him for drawing somewhere he shouldn't draw, which is simultaneously adorable and sad. I like to think it also ties into the trauma she received, which I will go a little into depth with later on.
Olive's personality also establishes her as a great number-two among the cast. Oprah may be in charge of Odd Squad, but when it comes to who is the supreme ruler of the season and gets the most attention from the writers (to...crazy excessive degrees), Olive wins that contest hands-free. All the backstory, a lot of the focus, and at least one contractual appearance in every episode that is most definitely not a coincidence. Checks almost all the boxes.
And of course, let's not forget her leadership qualities. Olive wanting to be promoted to the Management department (where all the Odd Squad Directors are) isn't really established as a dream for her until the second-to-last episode of the season, but even before then, she displays a sense of leadership that other agents don't really have. This makes her an easy standout and makes her a sane voice of reason in an organization whose employees can be eccentric in more ways than one.
Her PTSD
If you don't believe me on this, watch her body language in this scene and then get back to me. It's very telltale.
Season 1's story arc primarily focuses on Olive's relationship with her former partner, Todd, which...let's be honest, was not pleasant in every sense of the word. It's made quite clear throughout the season that she is suffering from some sort of PTSD, being sensitive to sounds and screaming at the sight of pie (or someone tormenting her with it), and the aim with the season is to help Olive move past her trauma as best she can. Whether it's an accurate portrayal of trauma and PTSD is something I cannot personally attest to. But what I do know is that for a show on PBS Kids, dealing with trauma is a bit of an unexplored area for them. (Sesame Street aside. For simplicity's sake, let's leave that show completely out of the discussion.)
It's helpful to note that Todd, as a character, is directly based on The Clown Prince of Crime himself, so things like verbally abusing his partner and trying to wipe out a good chunk of Toronto's children with pie isn't too out of the norm for him. He is crazy, in more ways than one, and is perhaps one of the most messed-up characters in the entire franchise, seated perfectly next to Oona and all the hell she inflicts on Season 2 characters. Unlike Olive and Otto, his dynamic with Olive is misfitting at best and absolutely horrific at worst -- he is the smart one of the duo and takes the lead on cases while Olive is nothing more than a mere drag-along, a chain-and-ball to his prodigal knowledge.
...Oh. Snap. I'm rambling. Okay, back to it.
Olive's trauma has shaped her as a character, and it definitely shows. Audiences are introduced to her as the serious and stuck-up one who probably is that way by the will of the writers' hands, but they don't really think, "Was she made to be that way?" And the answer is yes. It's a hard yes all around the board. She was forced to mature into a child that has more reason and rationale than a lot of adults in real life, which...well, like I said, I can't say for sure if it's something many trauma or PTSD victims go through, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were.
It's lucky for us, then, that she manages to try and get past her trauma after Todd (or, I'm sorry, Odd Todd) is defeated. By Season 2, she's become less wary of pastries (which isn't something she was known to be afraid of before -- she's afraid of pies, but we're supposed to guess that extends to any and all pastry treats too) and is working her way up the ladder beginning with tarts. It's a good ending in a work, to see a character move past their trauma and perhaps confront what caused the trauma or PTSD head-on. I'm glad that Olive could get that conclusion she so deserved.
How I Write Her in My Stories
She's multi-lingual. One of her many known languages just so happens to be Snark.
The aim with most, if not all, of my Odd Squad crossover stories is not just to educate readers on what Odd Squad actually is (which can be hard to do since it's one of the most niche things to ever niche in the history of nicheness), but to bring out sides of characters' personalities that are either suppressed by the glorious hands of PBS Kids S&P, or are there but are never elaborated upon (Oscar's traumatic experience with timetastrophes, for instance, would make a good fanfic idea if he teamed up with Doctor Whooves). In the case of Olive, however, I tend to tweak her personality just a bit to my liking depending on the story.
As an example of the former: Olive's mentality of "I live in a world full of idiotic people and I hate it every day I'm alive." Many a face expression she puts out is in response to the absolute sheer stupidity of either clients, just plain old adults in general (who are, and I cannot elaborate this any more, the most stupid lil' things I have ever seen in a preschool show, and that is so painfully accurate outside of the teevee it hurts), or her co-workers. The problem is -- and this is subjective opinion of mine -- that mentality is mostly there for fanservice and not because it ties into her in any way. "Hey parents, look at this child! Look at how much she hates stupidity! You hate stupidity too, don'tcha?! You hate the stupidity of your kids sometimes, right?!" is pretty much the name of the game.
But I don't make fanfics for parents. I make them for everyone who wants to read them. That's the difference.
So I bring out Olive's harsh criticism towards stupidity, and all the snark that comes with it, about as much as I can.
For How to Interrogate a Unicorn in particular, I decided to take a more twisted approach. It didn't really go the way I had planned it to, but I ultimately decided to throw Olive's "I never did like girl things" stereotype-busting completely in the path of the bus. Combine that with the "agents eating unicorns" theory and you have a sheer recipe for disaster. Immediately after I hit the "Publish" button, I knew that the story was probably going to need a retelling or a sequel of sorts, perhaps more horror-oriented (which I had been planning on doing for Halloween, but I got lazy).
In Odd We Trust was a similar case, only expanded to all ponykind and not just unicorns. Olive is stubborn and doesn't want to accept the Mane Six with names not even remotely beginning with the letter O in her precinct because names beginning with the letter O are automatically bad, and there is a fitting case in point in Todd. I had written her with a clear goal in mind -- she would start out with hostility against the Mane Six, working against them instead of trying to befriend them, but eventually realize the error of her ways with the help of her partner and come to befriend them, even appreciating Twilight for stopping the person who had harmed her, not just for Equestria's sake, but for Odd Squad's sake as well. How well that was executed...well, I'm not going to shove words down your throats and up the lane. Form your own opinions on that.
In The Adventures of Peaches and Mandy, Olive is the adoptive mother of the titular Agent Mandy. For this story, I took Olive's maternal instincts that were often displayed with Otto in the actual show and applied it to her caring for Mandy, broadening it so it became just as prominent as the cold aspects of her personality. She is still stony-faced in nature and still hardheaded, but she is also very sweet and supportive of Mandy and always tries to give her the best advice she can. In addition, I gave her a more darker aspect to motherhood: being a "smother", as it's called. She loves Mandy, but she feels like she has to keep her out of trouble by being a bit of a helicopter parent. Mandy's airheaded and ditzy, but kindhearted and you-won't-like-me-when-I'm-not-happy nature lends itself well to landing her in peril, which Olive, as a mother, is trying to avoid. As a result, she often forgets that Mandy is around the same age as her (11 years old, and before you ask how that's possible when Olive is 12, I'll slap the old Tim McKeon handwave card down and cry "time travel" and then ask "have you learned nothing?") and can most certainly handle her own in spite of her personality and her perceived idiocy. The chapter/episode "Cat Conversion Fever" focuses on this in-depth (or at least as in-depth as it can get with two concurring plots), as Mandy receives a message that she will soon find out her true origins beyond being adopted and Olive has to cope with the possibility of her finding her real parents and them taking her away. She doesn't want anything bad to happen to Mandy like it did with her, and that means keeping her by her side at all times and not letting her go back to adults that haven't bothered to look for her.
I've read many an Odd Squad fanfic over the years, which all had different takes on Olive and her personality, but kept a lot of constants as well. A lot of these fanfics have shaped my writing of her, as well as the "what if she was put into this situation" of it all. She's just really fun to write for me. And that is certainly not bias. Mm-mm. Noooo. Not in the slightest.
Conclusion
So popular, even random reporters have to ask the new characters if they'll shape their personalities to be exactly like hers!
Olive is by far one of my most favorite characters in Odd Squad, even if she was created for the sole purpose (or, well, one of them, anyway) of calming down all the sexists. She's badass, can and will wreck your shizz up, has lived through trauma of a tragic degree, and at the end of it all, gets a happy conclusion. It's very little wonder why she is one of the more popular characters in the franchise. Dalila Bela plays her wonderfully, and I can't not give huge props to her for her performances.
If ever Odd Squad gets revived as a fully-animated feature, then I, personally, want her to come back in full force. Maybe not with Dalila Bela as a VA, but just as a character in general. She is one half of a unique, heartwarming and sibling-like whole that ties the whole season together and gives the show a good stepping stone for future seasons.
Now, as for her pilot incarnation from the "Everytown, America" that is New York State...
...that will be another story for a different post, where I dive into the pilot as a whole and rehash my followup from a good 5 or so years ago. I'd like to rewatch it again and see what I can spot this time around.
Thanks for reading. All hail Agent Olive. Don't mess with her if you value your life.
And remember, Rule #2 of dealing with Karens if Rule #1 fails: intimidation.
