Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Fishkiller25 on August 25, 2011, 05:59:22 AM
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While Grace simply saw the ending as bad writing, I saw it as something more.
Post-Modernism.
She purposefully made the series the way it is. Making Jake the boringly nondescript leader, yet focusing on him far too much. Making Rachel, the "Rebellious princess"(groan, another one?) She's the girl the author wishes she was. smart, pretty, perfect in every way. Even Marco, AKA captain sarcasm, spontaneously fails at humour whenever trying to make a comeback to her hurtful insults!
She wanted us to hate these characters.
She wanted us to want them to die.
It makes it that much worse than they do.
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"Rachel's a mary sue and must die!" shouted the reader.
She does.
"Jake is just some boring leader guy. Lame!" shouted another one.
His perfect life crumbles around him, he makes failure after failure, and slowly loses his mind.
"It would be illogical for Marco to be harmfully affected by the events of this series." said a more rational fan.
Marco ends up a life that is bittersweetly shallow.
"Cassie is another mary sue, this one focusing on purity rather than perfection. She's boringly static, never grows out of her treehugger phase, and just gets in the way of the other characters. Unlike the others, We'd actually be okay if she died. Possibly by jumping under a bulldozer to save rat."
Sadly, she doesn't die. she leaves jake for a hotter guy, and quits the animorphs, despite initially joining it to save the world.
"Ax is funny." said a large group of kids who like ax.
Ax lives. Well, nobody wanted HIM to die, did they?
"Tobias is my favourite character. even with his life sucking so much, he still helps the people who almost got him killed many times.
With Rachel dead, he loses his mind, despite having a mother, friends, and starting to get a decent life.
"ZOMFG david iz so meen! :(" Shouted the worst kind of fan. the kind of fan that ignores plotlines, and just fantasises about the hero and the rival in bed. the kind that somehow doesn't understand the tragic story his life took when he met the animorphs.
He gets trapped in rat form by Cassie. All part of a "master plan" that was absolutely God-Awful. the plan goes "get your best friend that you love like a sister, force her to trick someone she may like, sacrifice her last shred of sanity hearing the tortured anguished screams of a kid in a rat, and rather than have tobias eat him, leave it on an island where he will life out the rest of his life in misery."
"Wait, he'll be killed anyway. Countless animals eat rats." said the rational fan who also sees the problem with this plan. "Besides, this is too dark a plan for queen treehugger. Even if it wasn't too dark, and you are finally getting some much-needed character development, the plan is still fundamentally absurd! why not just kill him?"
"Eeek! I can't kill him! that would be mean!" shouted cassie.
"And yet damning him to eternal misery and fear somehow isn't?!"
"uh... look behind you! A pretty tree!"
She runs off, leaving the rational fan even more confused than he was before.
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Something tells me that Applegate spent more time laughing at the readers than she did telling a story.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
One last note: Some of you have called her nonsense at the book store an overeaction. I've known her for three and a half years, and that would barely score a 4 on a 1-10 scale of her overreactions.
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Doubtful.
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when did anyone claim rachel was a mary sue? ive heard that claim leveled at cassie but never rachel.
also, i think the point KAA was making was that these were real people, with real flaws, and not just flat perfect hero type characters that most books (and especially most childrens books) have.
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As much fun as it would be to deconstruct the series with the perspective that it is post-modern, there are a few inherent flaws with following it as an assumption:
1. The series is incredibly long; typically works of post-modern art will strive to maximize the satiric impact with minimal volume of actual media. We could use Tarantino's "Grindhouse" as an example: he compresses two densely-active pieces of post-modern film into the length of a single feature film. When his work runs longer in "Kill Bill", he breaks it into two separate movies and treats them as effectively different pieces of work, setting them against each other as mutual mockeries between spaghetti western and kung fu films.
For a social satirist to make a story with three distinct multi-book arcs (beginning, David, and ending) and a whole mess of episodes (mostly ghost-written episodes...) separating the arcs, it creates a breakdown in the structure of the satire. The episodes take attention away from the arcs, and the characters themselves lose (or gain) qualities that the author herself didn't actually give them, making Jake potentially a more personable and pathetic character to the audience, and really drawing out the Mary-Sueness of Cassie while making Rachel look significantly more broken and frightened over the course of several books (enough flaws to cancel Mary-Sue status at least temporarily).
We aren't aware of any post-modern body of work, in any medium, that maintains a consecutive story line for such a long duration. Part of what makes post-modernism so biting is the fact that it really heavily exaggerates just a couple details while leaving the 'background' as flat as possible... like painting elaborate Roman columns on the side of a Wal-Mart, to imply that big box stores are the new temple/agora.
If you did that to every Wal-Mart, or if you genuinely tried to make a given Wal-Mart look completely like a Roman temple inside and out, it stops being Post-Modernism and becomes either [awkward] Roman revivalism or a case of genre-wide eccentricity and eclecticism. You lose out on the social commentary by making it either ridiculous or universal.
2. If you wanted to say that only the three KA-written arcs counted as post-modernism, then we're left with the question, why did KA turn over her social commentary to the hands for ghostwriters who obviously took the story seriously for its own sake? Surrendering creative control on a parody is asking for it to go bad, fast.
3. Not sure how far you got into the series, but Ax's alive/dead status is questionable, and "Ram the Blade Ship" implies pretty strongly that Marco dies, which might be considered an awfully adverse effect on his wellbeing. Jake's mental and emotional breakdown is realistic: his entire family is dead. Tobias' isolation and breakdown began from book 3; if he didn't stick with the Animorphs from there on out, what possible human interaction COULD he have? Rachel's death simply sealed his fate as permanent outcast and depression case, since she was his strongest human connection.
Basically, none of the characters' final positions within the story was entirely unrealistic, even if The One was something of an a$$-pull Diabolus ex Machina. Cassie getting out of the fight as soon as Earth is stable? Earth's stability was the only reason she stayed in the fight once Ax joined in book 8.
Very little of what happens in the books is audience wish-fulfillment or author-insertion, as far as we can tell. Likewise, very little of what happens is outright slapping the audience in the face. For the largest part of the series, it's "this is a war. Crazy stuff happens, and bad things happen to most people, and choices are difficult. Coming-of-age and ****e... secret dystopia, extended metaphors for religion and death, plus some literal death. Yup, that's about all the topics a long YA series needs, so... here, have some sci-fi to go with that!" The writing seems to deliberately be as realistic as it can without a) ending the series too early, b) ticking off the censors and the audience's parents, and c) churning out another cloyingly happy ending to the final arc, even though most of the individual episodes end with nearly-cloying endings.
We're trying to find post-modern qualities in all this, but the most we're finding is black humour and roughly four instances of narrator unreliability (when Jake and/or Cassie were taken to different time frames; any Sario Rips). Willing suspension of disbelief is never disturbed, and there's no clear attempts at pastiche or minimalism, sooo... just by our standards for what classifies as PM, Animorphs is not.
Interesting topic, though. ^_^
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Wait a second, when pray tell did you hear that AX never died. I'm pretty sure he's dead in a pretty full sense considering he was absorbed by a higher being. And Cassie wasn't the one that trapped David, it was Rache.
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Trapping him was Cassie's plan, NBA. Rachel was the person Cassie picked to do the trapping.
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What about the ax living thing?
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To quote ourselves, Ax's alive/dead status is questionable. Assimilated does not automatically mean dead, it just means definitively not alive-as-we-knew-him-conventionally.
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His body still exists, though we don't know if his mind still does. Or if he's conscious if he's still in any way the same or able to be rehabilitated. We just don't have anything to go on aside from his body still being functional.
On another note, I've never heard of Rachel being called a Sue. I don't think she'd even work as an anti-Sue.
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I pretty much consider him to be dead. Really doubt that theirs any part of him left except for a bit of concious mind inside the one
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Regardless how you perceive it, he's just never definitively stated to be dead, so there's no reason we can't legitimately call his alive/dead status 'unknown'. Speculating on how much is left is probably suited to another topic. :P
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I pretty much consider him to be dead. Really doubt that theirs any part of him left except for a bit of concious mind inside the one
it could be as reversable as "assimilation" by a yeerk.
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That isnt really assimilation so much as......body snatching
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That isnt really assimilation so much as......body snatching
tomato tomahto. axs body was there talking to them but someone elses mind was controlling it.
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I thought he kind of absorbed ax and was able to take his form?
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The point is, no one is completely sure of Ax's state. He could be dead, he could be alive, and ramming the blade ship could have destroyed what may have been left of him. No one will likely ever know.
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And now we're exquisitely off-topic.
Anybody else have anything to say regarding the nature of this series as post-modern or not?
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Not really. Sorry. I don't know exactly what KA really wanted, even though I have read the leeter to the fans because what she talked about didn't make sense.
I suppose you can interpret however you want. Personally I just think something got lost and she made a crappy ending for a series she probably didn't care about anymore.
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i feel this is an interesting take. i really like the abstract schools of thought, even if i don't entirely understand them all.
the thing i think we all need to remember is that, no matter how genius or creative an author is, it's all imaginary. much of what they write is drawn upon their personal experiences and experiences others have had. but imo, what makes this story really great is its uniqueness as compared to other books i've read (granted, i've probably not read as many as most of the people here).
people long envision what it would be like to fight in a war, so the reactions to a war can be somewhat predicted because there are so many people out there that actually have fought in war.
people also imagine aliens. there are so many interpretations about what it would be like to interact with them, including ones where people claim their interactions are real.
people imagine what it would be like to be an animal. the research of animal behavior provides a lot of insight on what their mind might actually be like.
but how often do you find kids in a covert war? most kids that are put into war are not given any options. they are sucked into a reality that they cannot handle and they are often brainwashed and become humanitarian tragedies. but even these kids, if they are ever taken out and rehabilitated after their horrific experiences aren't exactly comparable to what happened in the series. (imo they are worse because they are real)
her characterizations were, imo, what she considered logical for the types of people she placed into the situations. there was nothing direct for her to draw on. maybe if some kids with identical personalities as described at the start had to go through this, with no emotional support except what they could offer each other, the story would have ended differently. i think most likely they wouldn't have lasted. but, that's the joy of a fictional story.
maybe she really was laughing at us. that's art. the series is her work of art and the great thing about art is it can be interpreted in any way we wish. we all have our own interpretations of the characters as well. some of us agree on what could have gone differently, some of us would rather not change things. even i have written my thoughts on each character (linky in siggy). if she was laughing at us, so be it. it doesn't matter anyway. it is what it is. so says the existentialists (which i am not, but i like some of what they have to say)
that last note: are you saying that she has done very extreme things in terms of over reacting? i wish to understand
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Sorry, bro. No offence, but I'm going to call BS on this one.
While Grace simply saw the ending as bad writing, I saw it as something more.
Post-Modernism.
She purposefully made the series the way it is. Making Jake the boringly nondescript leader, yet focusing on him far too much. Making Rachel, the "Rebellious princess"(groan, another one?) She's the girl the author wishes she was. smart, pretty, perfect in every way. Even Marco, AKA captain sarcasm, spontaneously fails at humour whenever trying to make a comeback to her hurtful insults!
She wanted us to hate these characters.
She wanted us to want them to die.
It makes it that much worse than they do.
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Right off the bat, I get the impression that Jake, Rachel and Marco are your least favourite characters. Calling Jake a boring leader is rather extreme and undeserved. The kid had to grow up at thirteen! He made choices--yea, a lot of them were bad ones, too-- that men much older than him never had to make: life or death. He had to live with the knowledge that ANY ONE of his friends could die the next day, and it would be all his fault. I don't hate Jake for that. Hell, I respect him.
"Rachel's a mary sue and must die!" shouted the reader. She does.
I'm sorry, do you know what a Mary-Sue is? Yea, I get it, it's unrealistic for a girl to be pretty, smart and independant. But you're forgetting about her darker nature. I don't recall a single instance where Rachel had intercourse with every and all characters. Her only relationship in terms of romance was with Tobias, through and through. So what if K.A wishes she could be like Rachel. She also admitted that Marco was written similarly to her own husband, and said she had more in common with Cassie. Applegate isn't the first, nor the last, author to create characters from past/personal experiences. Don't chastise her for that.
His perfect life crumbles around him, he makes failure after failure, and slowly loses his mind.
Calling Jake a boring leader is rather extreme and undeserved. The kid had to grow up at thirteen! He made choices--yea, a lot of them were bad ones, too-- that men much older than him never had to make: life or death. He had to live with the knowledge that ANY ONE of his friends could die the next day, and it would be all his fault. I don't hate Jake for that. Hell, I respect him. Could YOU ask your cousin to kill your brother for you? Could YOU condemn a whole bunch of disabled children to death? Could you subject your most loyal and tormented friends [Tobias] to torture, knowing it would kill him?
"It would be illogical for Marco to be harmfully affected by the events of this series." said a more rational fan.
Marco ends up a life that is bittersweetly shallow.
I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that. If you read number 54, you'd know that Marco was just as willing to go on the Blade Ship Fiasco as Jake was. Why? Because he REALIZED that his shallow and materialistic life wasn't going to heal all the pain of war. In the Andalite Chronicles, there's a bit where Alloran's speaking with Elfangor, Chapman, and Loren about war. He says that few soldiers really ever come home from war. THAT, in my opinion, is what K.A. had in store for Marco. She starts out by giving him a tough life (which you seemed to forget in your convuluted spiel), rewarding him with a life of luxury, and having him come to a realization (personal growth, perhaps?) that stuff won't fill the large void in his life.
"Cassie is another mary sue, this one focusing on purity rather than perfection. She's boringly static, never grows out of her treehugger phase, and just gets in the way of the other characters. Unlike the others, We'd actually be okay if she died. Possibly by jumping under a bulldozer to save rat."
Sadly, she doesn't die. she leaves jake for a hotter guy, and quits the animorphs, despite initially joining it to save the world.
Um...Did you read the Departure? Or the Ultimate? Or the David Trilogy? In which she makes decisions that are very "un-Cassie like?" Cassie's aware that her morals get in the way of the war--in fact, that's all we ever get in her narrations. And, yea, she is EXTREMELY annoying. I'll admit, her books (with the exception of a few) are my least favourites. But I doubt she deserves to die. Of all the characters in the book, Cassie had no business being in the war. THAT was her purpose. Showing us what it was like for a kind person to be thrown into a war. Many of these soldiers were seen in WW1 and WWII: patriotic, kind boys playing hero. Boys who eventually just wanted to go home.
"Ax is funny." said a large group of kids who like ax.
Ax lives. Well, nobody wanted HIM to die, did they?
"Tobias is my favourite character. even with his life sucking so much, he still helps the people who almost got him killed many times.
With Rachel dead, he loses his mind, despite having a mother, friends, and starting to get a decent life.
What would he talk about with this mother? How they went flying that one time? How she kinda/sorta saved his life? How she bailed on him (though, for good enough reasons, I'll admit) and seemed to care more for her own dog? As nice as Loren is. And as much as Tobias would have liked to have a family, everyone got to the point where it was just plain fact that Tobias wasn't going to live out his childhood fantasy of being reunited with his parents. His mother has NO memory of him or his father. The most they could ever be, as Tobias stated, was friends.
"ZOMFG david iz so meen! :(" Shouted the worst kind of fan. the kind of fan that ignores plotlines, and just fantasises about the hero and the rival in bed. the kind that somehow doesn't understand the tragic story his life took when he met the animorphs
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................... ................... ........Huh?
He gets trapped in rat form by Cassie. All part of a "master plan" that was absolutely God-Awful. the plan goes "get your best friend that you love like a sister, force her to trick someone she may like, sacrifice her last shred of sanity hearing the tortured anguished screams of a kid in a rat, and rather than have tobias eat him, leave it on an island where he will life out the rest of his life in misery."
"Wait, he'll be killed anyway. Countless animals eat rats." said the rational fan who also sees the problem with this plan. "Besides, this is too dark a plan for queen treehugger. Even if it wasn't too dark, and you are finally getting some much-needed character development, the plan is still fundamentally absurd! why not just kill him?"
"Eeek! I can't kill him! that would be mean!" shouted cassie.
"And yet damning him to eternal misery and fear somehow isn't?!"
"uh... look behind you! A pretty tree!"
She runs off, leaving the rational fan even more confused than he was before.
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This can be discussed and refuted in the many David threads on RAF.
Something tells me that Applegate spent more time laughing at the readers than she did telling a story.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
One last note: Some of you have called her nonsense at the book store an overeaction. I've known her for three and a half years, and that would barely score a 4 on a 1-10 scale of her overreactions.
Listen, man. I give you kudos for your take on post-modernism, and I respect your opinion and views. I apologize if this post appeared hostile--it wasn't my intention.
Unfortunately, I disagree with you. Animorphs, in my opinion, was a serious war story that tried to convey a serious message to kids; with the added twist of making soldiers out of children.
Honestly, I think this thread was made just because you happened to be friends with Grace.
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i don't think you needed to delete it. as an open forum, aren't supposed to express our opinions and reactions?
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Actually, Fishkiller25 made me delete it. he said even though it's a forum, there's no need for the kind of language I used.
(I was angry, ok?)