Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: eacortes on November 23, 2009, 05:12:37 AM
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I cant help but ask what you guys thought of some of the goriest moments in the series, i had to reconsider if it truly was a childrens series. One such moment was in #53 when Cassie (fortunately a projection by Erick) is chewed up by a Taxxon and I quote: (...spilled entrailes all over the deck...bloodcurdlin g cries...). Narly
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I tended to just skim through those places and not really let the scenes sink in. I have a weak stomach...
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I think that it was necessary to describe some of the battle details just for realism's sake. How are you going to get across your message that war is horrible if you don't actually describe the horrible bit? If it wasn't a children's series I would've expected a bit more graphic detail actually.
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None of the violence in the series bothered me, it would have seemed unrealistic without it. KA was always about showing the harsh reality of war.
I think that it was necessary to describe some of the battle details just for realism's sake. How are you going to get across your message that war is horrible if you don't actually describe the horrible bit? If it wasn't a children's series I would've expected a bit more graphic detail actually.
I agree. In recent years I've sometimes wished that the series had been aimed at an older audience to make it more real.
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I tended to skim over it too, though I understand why she would describe that stuff. You can't have a realistic war series if you don't go into the ugly descriptions of battle.
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Really? I always felt like they could have embellished it a bit more; half the fun was the morphing, the other half was using the morph.
But I'm a sucker for tooth and nail so...
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I can't remember which book it was, but they were fighting in the opening chapter, and in the aftermath of the battle, Jake was basically walking around in his Tiger morph with his guts hanging out. That is the one scene that always sticks out to me when I think of the violence in Animorphs. The shark battle that left Marco's dolphin body nearly torn in half is also another one.
Even though this was a lot more graphic and violent than what you would expect from a kids series, I don't think it was too explicit or over the top. They were fighting a war, and literally did so tooth and nail. It was bound to get messy. The series wouldn't have been the same had K.A skimmed over the brutalities of their battles. In fact, I'd probably feel that there wasn't enough of it in there had this been a YA series, but I'm content with the amount that did make it into the books, especially for the target audience that they were sold to.
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It didn't seem to bother me much. Not sure why. It makes you see in your mind exactly what is happening in the scene.
There are plenty of violent gory scenes in the series. and well if you are into the story you expect them to be gory. I had to sometimes go back and re read sections to understand them better. But other than that it didnlt bother me at all. I.t just made teh story more real
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Rachel eating through her own tail was a little much. That is probably one of the most intense sequences throughout the whole series. Actually pretty much all of the solution is that way. Did that win an award? The thing to remember is that the morphs can cure you of any physical injury. That is K.A.'s loop hole that make's everything okay.
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I thought the loop hole was the thing that made everything so violent in the first place
you'd never see someone beating an enemy with their own severed arm in any other kid's series. Yeah, the technology allowed them to do that, but the technology didn't cure the psychological effects. And more than bloodshed and dismemberment and disembowelment, I think that's what made the series dark.
Even if the series was overly violent, at least it was appropriately honest.
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Nah, I don't think the gore and violence in Animorphs was too much. If anything, it was not enough.
For one thing, I did that "kill-counting" project for a while (to tally up how many kills each Animorph committed), and one thing I learned from that is that K.A. seems to like to weasel her way out of explicitly saying that someone died. So many times, it's really ambiguous whether someone actually got killed or not, and it makes it really frustrating to try to count kills. Anyway, I'm just bringing it up because I think the series would have been darker if they'd paid some more attention to each kill, and I think that would have made it better.
But, yanno, considering it was war and all, yeah, there's gonna be violence and gore. And I think the books even left a lot of detail out. A noteworthy example is in #3, when Tobias says something to the effect of "I won't say what happened next. That will be my own personal nightmare." Of course, that does have the effect of making the reader's imagination come up with what happened, which may almost be worse. :-X
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I think it was plenty, and I'm not really worried about giving all those warriors their five seconds to illustrate that they died, and how exactly they died, and what their names were, and all that. I actually think she was pushing the bar as it was, and much farther would have forced her to give it a higher rating.
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I'm not saying that she should give names and backstories and such of every random extra that died. Just that she shouldn't have been so afraid of the word 'kill.' Loads of people died in Animorphs. That should have been a much bigger deal than it was, that's all I'm saying.
And maybe it would have earned the books a higher rating, but . . . so? They would have been better books for it, and if the publishers can't deal with that, then poo on them! :P
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maybe it was less the author and more the first person narration...I can't picture anyone besides Rachel maybe being comfortable saying "I killed like eight Hork-Bajir that night." And from what I remember, one of the most brutally-written scenes was the mean Rachel one where she ran over a bunch of Hork-Bajir in #32
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I personally believe it should of been described to even more detail. War is horrible and frighting. A life changing experience and I think it needs to be written about in a deep descriptive way.
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maybe it was less the author and more the first person narration...I can't picture anyone besides Rachel maybe being comfortable saying "I killed like eight Hork-Bajir that night." And from what I remember, one of the most brutally-written scenes was the mean Rachel one where she ran over a bunch of Hork-Bajir in #32
Okay, so this is true. Yeah, the Animorphs probably just didn't want to think about all the lives they were taking, so I can see why they'd leave it out.
However, you could argue the same thing about the gore and violence, which they left in.
And, just a side-note, if you read that scene from book #32, even then it doesn't actually say that she killed anything. You could assume that the Horks she ran over probably would have died, but would a car impact really kill a Hork-Bajir? It's a bit iffy, I think.
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yeah but she was on a ROLL so she's not going to lean down and check for heartbeats just so she can tally her kill count.
That might be another reason. It's easy to say "I ripped out a Hork-Bajir's throat and he was still when he fell to the ground" but could any of them say beyond a reasonable doubt that "I killed him"? Life has a tendency to want to keep on living, especially well-built shock troops like Hork-Bajir. I mean, Ax might be the exception because when you cut off somebody's head there's really no way they're coming back from that.
idk. It's probably a combination of all these things. That's one of the biggest gripes about summer movies too, is violence is never drawn out to its obvious conclusion. Legolas can shoot an Orc off of the highest cliff in Moria but once he falls, he's forgotten about. I think the good thing about Animorphs is that though we don't know whether they died, those deaths were never really forgotten about. They still had nightmares, and not just about almost getting killed, but about the killing (or at least gruesome fighting) they had to do.
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I can't remember which book it was, but they were fighting in the opening chapter, and in the aftermath of the battle, Jake was basically walking around in his Tiger morph with his guts hanging out. That is the one scene that always sticks out to me when I think of the violence in Animorphs. The shark battle that left Marco's dolphin body nearly torn in half is also another one.
Even though this was a lot more graphic and violent than what you would expect from a kids series, I don't think it was too explicit or over the top. They were fighting a war, and literally did so tooth and nail. It was bound to get messy. The series wouldn't have been the same had K.A skimmed over the brutalities of their battles. In fact, I'd probably feel that there wasn't enough of it in there had this been a YA series, but I'm content with the amount that did make it into the books, especially for the target audience that they were sold to.
speaking of violent moments that stuck out in my mind was one in the seventh book (I think) where Marco was using one arm to continue fighting controllers and the other to hold his stomach together.
As to the OP no in fact I kinda think it hit a sweet spot in terms of violence. Sometimes it went very graphic and other times it just let you imagine how bad it was which in my mind will always be way worse. They were graphic about the Taxons though lol considering how many times they spoke about their entrails being all over the place it was kinda great.
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Rachel eating through her own tail was a little much. That is probably one of the most intense sequences throughout the whole series. Actually pretty much all of the solution is that way. Did that win an award? The thing to remember is that the morphs can cure you of any physical injury. That is K.A.'s loop hole that make's everything okay.
the last bit about rachel with a glass shard in her hand and david in the other begging to kill him tops that in my mind.
gore and violence are not really over the top in my opinion. there is a LOT but it doesn't overwhelm the series and really, only enchants it's main theme and mood.
that war is hell, paranoia,that you are living with a secret mission, never know if you survive the next day.
that is the series's strong point and what drew me in as a child.
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I think that the violence and the reader both evolved and matured with the series.
Early on in the series KA used a lot of cop outs, such as Tobias' line where he won't describe the violence because it will be "his own personal nightmare". There are a few violent scenes, specifically in #4 when Marco is attacked by a shark, but violence that pertains to actual Yeerk vs. Animorph battle is limited. It's actually a bit more like you would see in a kids tv series (Teen Titans comes to mind) where the bad guys either fall by the wayside or one of the two sides ends up running away.
As the series progressed, so did the amount of violence that KA was comfortable detailing. Let me emphasize that the level of violence probably didn't increase, just the amount that was given detail. I think probably books 1-6 were pretty blase on the violence count. #7, for me, is the first one that sticks out as having a really gruesome battle, when Rachel fought that battle on the tower in her Grizzly morph and lost an arm. Still, the grizzly has conveniently weak eyes, so not too much could be actually described in a visual sense.
The violence sort of hit its stride with the coming of the David trilogy. Rachel biting her tail off was definitely an intense moment. You also have David hitting Ax with a baseball bat so hard that part of his beak falls off, and the whole Jake-gushing-blood-out-of-his-neck thing.
Progress further into the series and you have Ax posing as a torturer, many many throats being ripped out, a few dozen (or hundred?) Taxxons exploding their gooey entrails and so on and so forth. In my mind this kind of culminates in what I think is Megamorphs 4, Back to Before, when Jake faces the dying Controller who keeps saying "I'm cold." and begging for a chance at life. Jake, knowing the Yeerk and the human will die, turns and walks away.
Flash forward even further and you have the massacre of tens of thousands of Yeerks in the final battle and, of course, Rachel's death and the deaths of the auxilaries. All in all it ends on a much bloodier note than it began.
Taking all of that into consideration, lets now look at the reader. The series started in 1996 and it has a reading level of 5th grade. That means that the goal audience was about 9-12 years of age (on a side note, I was actually in 5th grade when I started reading them and I was ten). The question then is, can a 9 year old handle the level of violence portrayed in, oh, say, book 32? Maybe not if they just picked it up out of the blue, or after the latest Babysitter's Club mystery. BUT, after the 9 year old has read the first few books, which introduce the reader to the violence slowly, he/she becomes desensitized to the fact that people die and it can be, and in the Ani's case is, bloody.
I also think that its important to mention that KA's message would not translate well if it were a non-violent book series. Also of note, AppleGrant are kind of notorious for violence and the generally weird. Remnants has a scene in which a character is split almost in half by a gigantic knife, Everworld has the main character's walk over a road of humans buried up to the neck in the fourth book, and GONE practically has a lynching scene. They aren't afraid to 'go there'.
So, that was the long answer. The short answer?
No, it was not too explicit. The violence was necessary to effectively convey the message that Applegate was trying to portray. Additionally she approached it in a way that allowed for the audience to become accustomed to the violence over time and, therefore, not traumatized by it. In fact, the violence allowed for enough 'realism' to make a science fiction children's series realistic and even believable, and kept the readers hooked and waiting for more.
/endnovel
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I think that the violence and the reader both evolved and matured with the series.
Early on in the series KA used a lot of cop outs, such as Tobias' line where he won't describe the violence because it will be "his own personal nightmare". There are a few violent scenes, specifically in #4 when Marco is attacked by a shark, but violence that pertains to actual Yeerk vs. Animorph battle is limited. It's actually a bit more like you would see in a kids tv series (Teen Titans comes to mind) where the bad guys either fall by the wayside or one of the two sides ends up running away.
As the series progressed, so did the amount of violence that KA was comfortable detailing. Let me emphasize that the level of violence probably didn't increase, just the amount that was given detail. I think probably books 1-6 were pretty blase on the violence count. #7, for me, is the first one that sticks out as having a really gruesome battle, when Rachel fought that battle on the tower in her Grizzly morph and lost an arm. Still, the grizzly has conveniently weak eyes, so not too much could be actually described in a visual sense.
The violence sort of hit its stride with the coming of the David trilogy. Rachel biting her tail off was definitely an intense moment. You also have David hitting Ax with a baseball bat so hard that part of his beak falls off, and the whole Jake-gushing-blood-out-of-his-neck thing.
Progress further into the series and you have Ax posing as a torturer, many many throats being ripped out, a few dozen (or hundred?) Taxxons exploding their gooey entrails and so on and so forth. In my mind this kind of culminates in what I think is Megamorphs 4, Back to Before, when Jake faces the dying Controller who keeps saying "I'm cold." and begging for a chance at life. Jake, knowing the Yeerk and the human will die, turns and walks away.
Flash forward even further and you have the massacre of tens of thousands of Yeerks in the final battle and, of course, Rachel's death and the deaths of the auxilaries. All in all it ends on a much bloodier note than it began.
Taking all of that into consideration, lets now look at the reader. The series started in 1996 and it has a reading level of 5th grade. That means that the goal audience was about 9-12 years of age (on a side note, I was actually in 5th grade when I started reading them and I was ten). The question then is, can a 9 year old handle the level of violence portrayed in, oh, say, book 32? Maybe not if they just picked it up out of the blue, or after the latest Babysitter's Club mystery. BUT, after the 9 year old has read the first few books, which introduce the reader to the violence slowly, he/she becomes desensitized to the fact that people die and it can be, and in the Ani's case is, bloody.
I also think that its important to mention that KA's message would not translate well if it were a non-violent book series. Also of note, AppleGrant are kind of notorious for violence and the generally weird. Remnants has a scene in which a character is split almost in half by a gigantic knife, Everworld has the main character's walk over a road of humans buried up to the neck in the fourth book, and GONE practically has a lynching scene. They aren't afraid to 'go there'.
So, that was the long answer. The short answer?
No, it was not too explicit. The violence was necessary to effectively convey the message that Applegate was trying to portray. Additionally she approached it in a way that allowed for the audience to become accustomed to the violence over time and, therefore, not traumatized by it. In fact, the violence allowed for enough 'realism' to make a science fiction children's series realistic and even believable, and kept the readers hooked and waiting for more.
/endnovel
here's another train of thought. maybe the showing more and more illustrate gore show chase the increasing desperation that the anis face.
also show's the crass difference between idealistic "we will beat them" and the cold hard reality of what those words actually mean and the costs.
also another point worth pointing out is the mood of "beware he hunts monsters, lest he become one"
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Progress further into the series and you have Ax posing as a torturer
Good points all around. But when did Ax pose as a torturer?
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#31
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here's another train of thought. maybe the showing more and more illustrate gore show chase the increasing desperation that the anis face.
also show's the crass difference between idealistic "we will beat them" and the cold hard reality of what those words actually mean and the costs.
also another point worth pointing out is the mood of "beware he hunts monsters, lest he become one"
That's very true. I remember in book 17 Tobias says something along the lines of "We have to win" and Rachel notes that no matter who you are or what your reasons, those four words are the first four steps on the path to hell.
By showing as much violence as they did they managed to bring up quite a few moral issues that may have otherwise been avoided. I do like the contrast between the Animorphs in the beginning when they're all "yay, lets beat the Yeerks!" - except Marco - and in the end when you see just how war-torn their goal has made them. That couldn't occur without a large amount of violence, and I don't think the reader would appreciate it as well without the violence being described.
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I agree with terenia. she could have also been doing it to ease us into things. I mean she didn't want to scare the kids away, but later when they were older and more used to the kind of stuf she showed, she went a bit further with it. That was smart thinking, I believe.
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I kinda liked it, but i think its because i watch too much NCIS tee hee my fav. character is rachel, but thats because shes cool, i share her name and hair, and she loves battle!
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(glares at overtly insensitive comment)
The reason they had gore was to show the harsh realties of war and the fact that probably after book 6 applegate realised that there was going to be blood (or maybe she just used her first six books to draw in the audience). They have gore in the animorphs because they are fighting with blunt physical force and there is alot of teeth. However, she has almost no human gore in the series, plenty of Hork-Bajir, taxxon (who are basically walking bags of guts), and animal gore. However, the gore in her series is understandable sometimes I get so sick of gore displayed in movies (like Saw whatever sequel they have now) video games (like mortal combat) that are just gore for the sake of gore :P >:( . I admire her intellect to keep things sane. It was more gory then most kid books (even alex Rider where he gets at shot continually) but it had to be.
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The way the Animorphs always heal after made it less violent in my mind... I think Everworld and Remnants were more "gore"...
And I think it's useful when you want to depict the war. Do as some writer for kids who say "he dies" and don't say more... the character dies, it's sad, but... you don't see it like a true death. You don't that it may have been violent or hurtful for the person, you don't imagine what the other characters can see and what they would think...
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if as someone said it is not that series get more violent towards the end (except for the violent final book) but detailed description increases.
However someone else said that the increasing violence is symbolic of the slide away from 'black and white/we must win idealism towards 'grey/war is hell message...
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I still think Rachel is the coolest
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I think Rachel is actually the best symbol of how the violence intensifies over time. You can see a mini-version of it within herself and her own personal destruction that takes place throughout the series.
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Another thing to notice is the concept of the acceptable target.
Shoot and kill an alien, and your movie can still pull a PG rating, a PG-13 at the worst if there are worse things as well. Shoot and kill a human, and you have a PG-13 at the very least.
Look at old comic books. Nazis are acceptable targets - in fact, after the World War II, the best times of comic books collapsed due to a shortage of acceptable targets with meaning. Video games - Why do you think we kill zombies and aliens? Because killing humans can be too brutal for the tastes of some.
If you look and any given instance of detailed descriptions of gore and violence in the series, it will almost never be directed at a human - and if it is, it will focus more on the emotional aspect than the physical aspect. The violence happens to the Ani's when they are in morph, or to Hork-Bajir or Taxxons - humans are merely stunned by Ax's tail blade or just knocked out. While the Animorphs attribute it to an unwillingness to kill humans, it's also simply because if you talked about a human's guts spilling out, it's no longer in the intended age group. By the end of the series, humans and Hork-Bajir are on the same moral level for them, but they still refuse to kill humans, even ones that pose immanent threats - dracons, etc.
One of the most important depictions of violence against humans was in MM3, when Jake is shot. The most detail given is "I saw the hole. It was centered in Jake's forehead." And later, when Ax decides to kill Hessians, no explicit details are given. He says what he will do, and the chapter ends with him drawing back his tail, and a "FWAPP" sound. Violence towards humans is almost completely vague or not detailed, even though it can be completely undoubted that a human was killed. Regardless, human death is still relatively taboo when compared to the generous detail given to the deaths of Hork-Bajir or Taxxons, or the Ani's themselves while in morph.
That's pretty much how the series maintained its intended age group - it primarily used so called acceptable targets. Even in real life outside of media we have this concept. Boil a live lobster, and you're a chef, boil a live kitten and you face animal cruelty charges. Our society is very fickle and inconsistent in what it accepts and what is considers wrong - borderline hypocrisy.
PS: I do not condone or in anyway support the boiling of kittens, while I have boiled lobsters myself - After all, I am a part of this society and am susceptible to its practices and ideals.
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I could swear that, maybe not right in the action but sometime after, one of them described the back of Jake's head being blown off, because I remember thinking "an inefficient gun in the Revolutionary War has the power to do something like that?" I don't know whether it's possible or not, but I remembered having doubt.
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What measure is a nonhuman, and what measure is a noncute. Part of the reason people are horrified at a live kitten boiling, but not a live lobster boiling is that kittens are cute. Yes that's probably a big reason why she could have such brutal depictions and still be in the proper demographic. A lot of people like to separate Humans from the rest of life, so when you kill a Human the ratings go up higher than when you kill a giant space bug or a zombie.
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Another thing: you don't eat kittens ;)
If it's to eat, and if you don't do useless torture, it's acceptable to me. If it's kill for fun or for fur... or if you torture an animal a long time, if you hurt it only for a little part and leave it still alive, or if you kill protected animals... that kind of things isn't acceptable to me.
But I also like games where you kill Humans ^^ If you knew how many cops I killed (for fun) or burned in their car (still for fun)... but this is games, isn't it ;)
Anyway, it's true that they don't say when people die, except in the end (when the new Ani are killed one by one, with the military... but I'm not sure about the people in the Yeerk Pool). Little by little, the censor disappears...
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And so gradually the bar is lowered (like theodore Dalrymple essay on DH lawrence: if Lady Chatterlery is permitted than everything is permitted)
Has anyone seen Julie and Julia (Mery Streep as Julia Child) where Amy Adams is such a coward that she can't bring herself to stab the lobster so she boils it alive! I lost so much respect for Julie (the real person that Amy Adams played): to save her own squeamishness she boiled some poor lobster alive!
Animals should be killed humanely and not be endengered weather for food or fur (especially pest animals such as foxes, rabbits and cats).
Nothing is more contemptous then someone (or organisations such as PETA) that would consider violence against an animal as bad as that against a human.
Torturing a kitten is evil
but not as evil as torturing a human (although a small part of me would cheerfully have a child murderer burned, but would be more revolted to someone who did the same to a puppy)
Killing a kitten, fox, rabbit or cane toad is good
executing a serial killer is a duty
Slaughtering a cow, chicken or pig is for food
doing the same to a human is pure evil.
We must discriminate between humans and animals, the sentient and the non sentient.
In animorphs we must remember: each species for his own (different species does not equal different nationalities)
and complete sentience (humans and andalites) retarded sentience (hork-bajir) enemy sentience (yeerks and taxxons).
How did I get so off topic?
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Applegate really did a good job of exploring animals psychies (spelled wrong) and exploring the ethics of sentience and science. For example in "the evperiement" she explores the nature of free will and its role in sentinence.
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Question for Dino:
Out of curiosity, in the kill-counting project, did you consider hosts and Yeerks to be two separate kills? I'd be interested in seeing who had the most and fewest kills, and whether the characters maintain those positions over the course of the series (discounting the outlying spikes in which Yeerk Pools were flushed or otherwise attacked).
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Question for Dino:
Out of curiosity, in the kill-counting project, did you consider hosts and Yeerks to be two separate kills? I'd be interested in seeing who had the most and fewest kills, and whether the characters maintain those positions over the course of the series (discounting the outlying spikes in which Yeerk Pools were flushed or otherwise attacked).
Yes, killing a controller is counted as two kills.
I need to post in that project again . . . it's been a while since anyone has been working on that, and I've read and taken notes for several more books since the last time I posted. I think I may be the only one who's even still working on it at all, so we would welcome any new help.
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I remember someone mentioning that Tobias probably wound up killing considerably more hosts than Yeerks because he would slash out there eyes. So the host may be put down for being blind, while the Yeerk would just go to another host. Somethin for him to angst aout if he ever thought about it.
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One of the most chilling and memorable moments on the subject of gore and killing, for me, was the scene in Megamorphs #4 when Jake confronts a dying human-Controller who had been crying out for help. Even though the killing wounds were caused by a Hork-Bajir, Jake recognizes that his own tiger mauling has clawed up this 20-year-old guy's head, so that his ears are mangled. I think he was described as being so pale his skin was white and sweaty, like a white candle. The Yeerk can't even get out of the kid's head, and just basically sits there asking for a blanket because he's cold, scared and in pain, and he and his host are going to most certainly die.
And Jake forces himself to walk away.
Of course, Jake himself was missing one of his tiger legs. It'd almost be funny if it wasn't so damn serious :o
I think that's what K.A. was going for most of the time, even if things were cleverly worded to avoid graphic descriptions--but still, especially with alien kills, there was an awful lot of blood spilling and throats being ripped out with teeth. The Animorphs did try not to kill humans as much as they could help it, although it became harder to avoid as time went on. Cassie got a piece of Hork-Bajir flesh lodged in her human teeth in #19, that was another small but memorable (and gross) moment that I think highlights the tiny things that made their battles so nightmare-inducing.
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No, I don`t think any gore or violence in animorphs went over the line. But, KA seemed to try to avoid the word`kill`.
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No, I don`t think any gore or violence in animorphs went over the line. But, KA seemed to try to avoid the word`kill`.
Yeah that was probably a bit of habit for her, at first I think she wanted to keep it simple but then she realised that their was going to be blood.
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Maybe it was because I first read the series when I was 14, but I always thought she could put more in to it. I could always think: ooh, spilled guts. But I never really cared or felt in the way that books are supposed to, you know? It never pulled out any emotional: OMG, GUTS! YUCK! from me.
It was just stated in the book, but it never felt like it was happening, you know? Like when you read about a certain gory scene, you're supposed to think wow, how painful. Or at least, that's how it was for me. If something was described well-enough, I'd actually start thinking about what I would do if it happened to me. And how it would feel to me and whatnot. But for Animorphs: I felt really disconnected from the book with the gory stuff I just read over the sentence and went on.
But then again, maybe I'm over thinking this. :P
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Gore and violence??? WHA???
I mean, yeah, I guess that some of the stuff talked about was gross, or disturbing... but no more so to me than the idea of an alien slug controlling my body...
To me, the line is drawn between gore and violence just for the sake of gore and violence... and gore an violence for the sake of being real and making an accurate point...
SAW, Friday 13th, etc... unacceptable levels of gore and violence (because it's there just because...)
Saving Private Ryan... more accurate... (possibly just as stomach-churning, but at least there's a reason for it...)
In Animorphs, I thought that a good job was done of describing just how bad it was for the Animorphs at times... What they went through... what they were forced to make others go through... It's all part of making the story real for us...