Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Coal Kropotkin on February 21, 2009, 06:52:27 PM
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i was just wondering, if anyone else was disappointed by KA's depiction of intelligence in dolphins?
she made them child like, and while i liked that aspect, i just felt they should have been... smarter...
anyone feel the same?
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I believe it's been said that the morph-mind is usually just the basic instincts, so it made sense to me that the playfulness of the dolphin is played up and the intelligence is played down.
My answer is thus sort of a cross between "didn't notice" and "was not [bothered]", but I actually answered the latter.
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By the way... Who says you can't be intelligent just because you are child like?
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What do you want, them setting up little underwater chem laboratories or something?
Dolphins are smart. Smart for animals. They still basically have the same personalities as Jake's friggin' dog.
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I know some very intelligent people who still act like toddlers half the time, that's just the way they are. Your personality isn't the same thing as your intelligence. Personally I rather liked how KA described the Dolphins.
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I believe it's been said that the morph-mind is usually just the basic instincts, so it made sense to me that the playfulness of the dolphin is played up and the intelligence is played down.
My answer is thus sort of a cross between "didn't notice" and "was not [bothered]", but I actually answered the latter.
okay that i understand.
and no i did not wan underwater chem labs, but even the animorphs were wary of morphing them because they expected much more intelligence.
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This isn't Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
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Cassie was the only one wary about morphing them. I think the dolphin morphs were fine.
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This isn't Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
haha! beautiful! lol!
okay fine then jeeze! i'm the only one, okay! lol
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To be honest Applegates interpretation of animal minds was mainly based on basic knowledge in many cases. Plus I don't think they had as much information on animal psyche as we do now.
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I really didn't think that any more description into dolphin intelligence was necessary beyond a basic "dolphins are smart" speech from Cassie. People are generally more entertained by their playfulness than their intelligence, which was why I think she spent much more time on that.
To be honest Applegates interpretation of animal minds was mainly based on basic knowledge in many cases.
All too true. For the "fun" creatures like dogs, birds, and dolphins, she seemed to put a little more effort into researching the behaviour and psyche. However, I was severely disappointed when they morphed sharks, and it seemed that all of her information came straight from "Jaws". Sharks are mindless, man-eating machines? Please.
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To be fair, she didn't say or even imply "man eating," just intensely focused and having strong instinctual reactions to prey stimuli. Even though (fairly recent) research has shown that sharks have problem solving skills and even play, that does not change the fact that sharks do not teach their young to hunt (unlike felids, canids, and apes, for example), and thus have a fairly high degree of instinct at their disposal.
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K.A.'s Dolphins were pretty much what a kid's book needed to be.
fun, playful, etc.
however, real-life dolphins can become(and sometimes, are) nasty little ****ers socially. they hunt, they compete for mates (have seen a case where two male dolphins isolated a bunch a females to their cove so that they would only mate with them and male dolphins occasionally kill younger ones) and they have trials of dominance like every other social species on this planet.
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I liked her dolphins alright, But I can see what you're getting at.
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The Pemalites were playful little guys, and they invented the Chee. So I think KA did fine.
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Dolphins are so much more aggressive than K.A. or most people ever gave them credit for. Dolphins are great animals, I personally like them a lot, if I had to be stuck as a sea animal and it couldn't be an Orca (also a kind of dolphin as a guesstimated 86% of the world knows) it'd be a bottlenose. The thing is I voted "yes" because K.A. just emphasized the sweet instincts, there's more to an animal than one or two basic functions.
Sure dolphins are playful but like any animal they have to survive, I was disappointed that the dolphins' basic instincts were so soft. Until they detected sharks they just wanted to fool around, no thoughts of hunting or establishing dominance, unlike the birds of prey or wolves respectively. It's kind of like K.A. either didn't know, or more likely didn't want to admit that dolphins aren't just cheerful little sea mamals who punch footballs or whistle for tidbits (Hitchhiker's Guide refrences are fun!) but are actually some of nature's more adorable killers.
Of course for a kid's book it sort of works to keep it simple and innocent. Who wants to think that good old Flipper is just as likely to bite your hand off as he is to rescue you from drowning in the ocean?
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How come you can dive with wild dolphins and they still want to play then?
And I believe all animals can be aggressive if you try to hurt their children...
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You're warned to be careful swimming with dolphins. I never said they were man eaters . . . I mean apart from Flipper biting hands, but I never said he'd eat them. :P
And you're right, all animals have an aggressive side and that's whether their children are involved or not. But you might be surprised at how aggressive dolphins can be. Dolphins kill. They're predators, but they're also prey so they kill to eat, they kill to survive. They kill sharks, they kill other dolphins, it's nature. Fact is dolphins have attacked humans without their young being involved, have attacked humans without having any young. It's presumed that the humans did something to upset the animal which is probably true, the problem is when you teach kids that these are fun loving animals who wouldn't hurt a fly unless that fly is somehow also a shark, you're teaching them the wrong thing.
I'm not trying to say that they're monsters, because they're not. They're really, really cool animals, I'm just surprised and disappointed that K.A. made it sound like all they wanted to do was jump through hula hoops while their bodies wasted away from lack of actually hunting for and eating fish.
They should have had at least some urge to hunt as pretty much every other predator they morphed did. They didn't need to be psycho like the wolf spider but show us something, like the owl cataloging every prey item it flies over. Kids have a right to know that dolphins are predators and need to be approached with caution so if K.A.'s going for "if it ain't cute they won't conserve it" approach it's just wrong because usually all it takes is for someone to be attacked by a dolphin for people to be in a sudden uproar about the poor things. People need to be aware of the risk involved with dolphins, not just go into the water expecting them to want to play with you, I wouldn't have minded a bit more emphasis on the fact that they could be dangerous sea critters.
Heck, even I kind of wanted to go swimming with dolphins after book 4.
The poor sharks on the other hand are portrayed as evil, mindless killing machines that just couldn't wait to eat their own buddy the instant he showed weakness, like really strong ocean bound taxxons.
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I know some very intelligent people who still act like toddlers half the time, that's just the way they are. Your personality isn't the same thing as your intelligence. Personally I rather liked how KA described the Dolphins.
:ditto:
i think she did a perfect job.
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i never exactly noticed it, i just read the book and didn't think second thoughts
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I didn't give it a lot of thought either.
But thinking back, I kinda like it, probably because it reminds me of myself. I have no problem being adult and serious at work and in public, but I feel a lot more childlike and playful inside and when I'm on my own.
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Oh my God, so I'm not the only one who thought that! When they morphed humans, didn't they got the human's memories? The same should be true with dolphins. Being child-like is really insulting their intelligence. They make communities, they can be psychotic, they save humans, they can even build things (or so I've heard) and they even COMMUNICATE in more than just the basic way some animals do, with their own LANGUAGE. Come on, if THAT isn't sentience, then what is?
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When they morphed humans, didn't they got the human's memories?
nope.