The Lion King: Simba has a son?

Ah, the Lion King, a childhood favourite of mine. Sucked finding out about the whole Kimba the White Lion thing, though... (Though they have different story lines and the show is more about nature conservation). Recently Disney announced that there is going to be a spin off Lion king series called The Lion Guard that takes place after the sequel and follows Simba and Nala's son Kion as a main character, but what you may not know is that Simba's son is not really a recent additional character.

Simba has a had a son for a very long time.

So here's what we've got from the Lion king franchise; at the end of the movie Simba and Nala have a cub that they allow an elderly baboon to hold dangerously over the edge of pride rock (as is tradition) and in the sequel we see it is their daughter Kiara. The first movie didn't specify what gender the cub was supposed to be, the books however did. That's right, in the book version of the movie (or at least the one I owned) the cub at the end is reffered to as a prince. When I say the books mention Simba having a son, I don't just mean the book versions of the film, there was also a spin off book series.

 

Here's a picture of Kopa from one of the books.

This spin off seires was called The Lion King: Six new adventures and was only released in the US, but you can find and read them online. The son of Simba and Nala was called Kopa and was a central character in some of the stories (including one about rapping vultures...). The stories also focused around events that happened when some of the characters were younger, this included Mufasa and Scar. They even tell us how Scar actually got his scar; he was originally named Taka (which means Scar in Swahili anyway) and he only took the name Scar after he was scarred by a buffalo in a failed attempt to injure/murder Mufasa out of jealousy... so basically, Scar's plan to kill his brother sparked from much earlier than we thought. I guess you could say he took the name as a reminder of his actions and he felt guilty about it, but that's the thing about prequel stories, we know he's gonna grow up to become a murderer... which makes that story somewhat darker.

Anyway, back to Kopa.

We know the sequel followed the same kind of Shakespeare-esque thing that the original did, but this time instead of taking influence from Hamlet it took influence from Romeo and Juliet. They clearly wanted a female protagonist otherwise they could have just used Kopa, they would just need to switch some of the characters around. Instead of being about Kiara and Kovu it would be about Kopa and Vitani... Did they think the love angle was too feminine for a male protagonist? I doubt it, because male protagonists fall in love all the time. It happened in the first movie, there was a whole song about love! It was about if you could feel it? Tonight? Remember? ...Guys?

Anyway, because a lot of fans know about Kopa, it means they've come up with their own ideas of what happened rather than him just being forgotten about. Some just don't care because it's fictional lion canon. Others have created the likes of fan fiction and fan art depicting that Kopa simply ran away or that he and Vitani did meet and fall in love and Zira ended up killing him before/during the events of the sequel... Some of the fan art is very violent.

Here's Kopa, I mean Kion.

So, going with the existance of the books, technically Simba did have a son long ago, but rather than assuming something terrible happened to him, one of the writers of the six new adventures stated that there is no reason that the events in the books couldn't have happened after the events in the sequel, which leads us back to The Lion Guard. Should we just say Disney forgot about Kopa? Should we assume that something terrible really did happen? Will he make an appearance? Or are Kopa and Kion the same cub and there was just a name change? Why not just keep the name Kopa seeing as they'd already set it up? Oh well. The show will include cameos from other characters like Kiara and Kovu and includes some new characters as Kion's friends. They aim for the show to have themes about nature conservation, kind of like Kimba the White Lio-... 

Wait. 

....

NO DISNEY, NOT AGAIN!!! DON'T DO THIS TO US!

*Sigh* 

Anyway, having grown up with the Lion king, it will be interesting to see what they do...