Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: poparena on February 07, 2012, 02:59:41 PM
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Psychogeography - The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
Psychochronography - The study of a time period through a specific singular object.
What follows is a series of short, irregularly updated essays concerning the time period in which the Animorphs book series was published, focusing on the emotional, artistic and political landscape of which the series was a part of. I plan to do one essay per book. As always, discussion and debate is encouraged. :)
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#1 - You don't know anything about reality, Jake (#1 The Invasion)
It's June 1996. "Tha Crossroads" by Bone Thugs-N-Harmony take #1 of the billboards for the entire month, a tribute song to the passing of rapper Eazy-E to AIDS. Eazy-E is best known as one of the founding members of N.W.A. along with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, and is still considered one of the pioneers of gangsta rap, a genre of music known of its use of crime and drug iconography. Supporters of the genre call it a documentation of inner-city life, while detractors claim it as both promoting certain criminal behaviors as well as stereotyping African American youth as uncultured and unintelligent. While the genre originated as far back as the 1980s, it was 1996 when it arguably hit its final high mark with the arrival of Jay-Z, Tupac releasing the first rap double album, and Snoop Dogg being acquitted for first-degree murder.
Regardless of your taste in gangsta rap as a musical genre, it found an important place in 90s American culture as one of the few things to paint a negative critical image on, well, 90s American culture. The 1990s, now more than ever, felt like a safe decade, a comfortable decade. I often think of the 90s as the tropical vacation resort of decades, pleasant and a tad artificial. Vietnam and Watergate were becoming distant memories (Richard Nixon had passed away in 1994). The Cold War was over. The economy was good. The only major military action in that decade, Operation Desert Storm, is considered one of the quickest and cleanest wars in history. President Clinton was the Democrat's answer to Ronald Reagan, a goofy celebrity president who played saxophone on Arsenio Hall.
It was in this landscape and Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant released Animorphs, a science fiction young adult series about a group of teenagers who discover a secret invasion of mind-controlling aliens. Animorphs is a lot of things, a mixing pot of various cultural, political and ethical ideas that I feel can only be accurately strained in the context of the 1990s. This is why I haven't actually read any of the updated reprints (though I have purchased all of them in support of Applegate), because I feel something in lost in translating the story for a 21st century audience. Yeerks don't work in a world where the word "terrorist" is constantly being thrown around to label boogeymen, while massive protests are toppling governments. The Yeerks as a concept can only really function in a complacent, unsuspecting world.
Complacent is the key word here. It's no coincidence that the series opens in a mall of all places, a symbol of American consumerism. It's also no coincidence that 3.5 of the main characters are white, and all but one live comfortably. Jake and Rachel are white and live in upper-middle class families. Jake's father is a pediatrician, his mother a writer and his brother a high school heartthrob and basketball legend. Rachel's mother is a lawyer and her father is a news anchor. Cassie's family live what has to be an expensive piece of real estate and are living their dreams of helping animals. Marco, who is half-white, has fallen on hard times at the beginning of the series, but before the supposed death of his mother, his life was also extremely comfortable, to the point where yacht trips were a regular occurrence.
The only Animorph that doesn't fit into this mold is Tobias, and that is perhaps the reason he is the most accepting of the situation. He never had the idyllic 90s lifestyle that the rest of the Animorphs enjoy and is more capable of divorcing himself from it. And it is that lifestyle that the Yeerks are invading. In just the first book, we discover that the Yeerks have their fingers in schools, police and community projects such as the Sharing. The first book is largely about the Animorphs struggle against this realization, that these smiling white cornerstones of American life are secretly corrupt. This is often the subject of gangsta rap. N.W.A.'s "**** Da Police" presents a fantasy trial in which rappers prosecute police officers for discriminatory behavior, calling them out on their privileged status in the community. Meanwhile, the moment in which the Animorphs realize that things are serious is when they discover that a local police officer is a Controller, one of the Yeerks who have infiltrated their society and dwell in their secret base under the city ("**** the police, coming straight from the underground").
This series is not just about the Animorphs Vs. the Yeerks, but about the Animorphs Vs. the 90s. In order to save the world, the Animorphs must remove themselves from what the world currently is, because it's that world that the Yeerks have already conquered before the book series even begins.
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Awesome read. <3 nwa.
I would like more content but the short and sweet aspect isn't something to complain about. I thought it was quite interesting and an excellent analysis. I love the 90s myself and spent the first 10 years of my life in it but I think your nostalgia is showing. :P
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Well, "short and sweet" is kind of a necessity, I got over sixty of these to write. :P
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Yeah I understand that. I thought about it more while getting ready to make dinner. Maybe longer isn't really the right word. I'm to be helpful but maybe I should just stick to being a fan.
Is there nothing more to say about book one? How about societies opinion on aliens, secret societies, on genetics. Stuff like that? Am I helping or hurting lol.
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All of that will be covered eventually. :)
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:thumbsup:
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I don't really have too much to add, a lot of interesting parallels have been pointed out. I definitely agree that the series, to be properly analyzed, has to be analyzed in the mindset of the time period it was written in. I wouldn't say so much that they have to remove themselves from what the world currently is, more that they have to wake up and realize that it isn't the world they think it is.
I think the urban culture/corruption analogy fits. This book is the first picture of what it is like to fight the corruption in the system, and having to do so without the help of the law. Definitely more of a wake up call for people who have lived a rather idyllic lifestyle such as the standard "American Dream." I'm curious to see how the other essays turn out.
Probably not very helpful. Good essay anyway.
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Many people who read this series as it was being published can identify with this time period. Most of us were still children at the time. We lived in a world with dial-up internet, box television sets, and cell phones the size of bricks.
Re-reading the series today, I notice how much things have changed. Broadband/the internet, flat-screens, and cell phones etc. Cell phone cameras alone could seriously impede a covert invasion. Add social networking and high traffic image forums and suddenly one picture could be disseminated to the public in as much time as it would take to upload from your phone.
Remember in #42 "The Journey" when the Animorphs freak out over one guy with a disposable camera and how they had to get it back before he could get it developed? That type of situation would rarely occur nowadays (who carries a disposable camera when you have a cellphone?) and could be handled so much easier. If the same situation were to occur today, it would turn into "get that cell phone back before he gives the picture to the whole world!" The guy could have sent the picture to anyone before he even got home.
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#2 - It's hard not to stare when you think of what is squeezed inside that skull (#2 The Visitor)
It's still June 1996. The theaters have been packed with summer action movies with films like Twister, Mission: Impossible, Eraser and music video director Michael Bay's second foray into braindead action filmmaking with The Rock. This is all leading up to the biggest film of the year, which we'll talk about in the next entry. In real news, while the biggest scandal going on in the White House was the discovery that the Clintons may have made participated in some not-so-legal real estate investments back in the 70s, the Provisional Irish Republican Army are at the tail end of their struggle to separate Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom with armed robberies and explosives that will result in the formation of the Criminal Assets Bureau, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia are bombed by Hezbollah Al-Hejaz for housing foreign military personal which results in strained relations with Iran, and a fireworks factory in China explodes, killing 36 people.
So it is not to say that the entire world was calm and complacent during the time, merely the United States. While land mines were killing Chechen separatist leaders, Congress was debating Internet decency laws. That said, news media always needs a villain, and in the first half of 1996, they had three big ones: Ted Kaczynski, Martin Bryant and the Montana Freemen. While all of them were very different in their crimes, they all supported an image of being mentally deranged. Eccentric at best, crazy at worst. First, and most famously, we have Kaczynski, most popularly known as the Unabomber, an anarchist extremist who sent out mail bombs between 1978 to 1995, mostly to convince media outlets to publish his manifesto. A recluse who lived in a cabin for over twenty years without electricity or water, his mug shot after his arrest in 1996 that of a bearded mountain man, it was easy to pin the "crazy" label on him.
Meanwhile in Australia, 28-year old Martin Bryant gunned down 35 tourists at the historic Port Arthur prison colony, one of the deadliest shootings perpetrated with a single individual. It was also easy to label him as crazy, a wandering beach bum who had inherited a fortune from an older woman whom he was possibly having sexual relations with. To this date, Bryany's motivation for the attack are unclear, he once claimed it was connected to the Dunblane school massacre earlier that year, in which a man named Thomas Hamilton had walked into a Scottish primary school and killed sixteen children, one teacher and himself.
In a less deadly but no less crazy situation, June saw the end of an 81-day standoff between the FBI and the Montana Freemen, a Christian Patriot movement that declared themselves separated from the United States and constructed their own governing system and currency. This was a third in a line of government sieges against various militia and religious extremist groups, the first being against the Weaver family in at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 (three deaths) and the second being against the Branch Davidians protestant sect outside Waco, Texas in 1993 (eighty-four dead). To say the least, the US government had no interest in repeating those bloody affairs, and after nearly three months of long-range negotiations the Montana Freemen, who lived in RVs and flew an American flag upside down, finally surrendered.
What all these people had in common was that they were various insanities were easy to identify and they were almost completely indefensible (not that people didn't try, especially in the Unabomber's case). These were the kind of people we all thought about when we saw the silhouette on the Neighborhood Watch signs, the kind of people we thought about whenever America's Most Wanted would come on the screen. Okay, maybe not always to the extreme of these individuals, but in a time before 9/11 made people scared that any brown-skinned man could be a terrorist and Dateline made people scared that any adult male could be a pedophile, it seemed as though the people who wish to inflict serious criminal harm on someone was easier to identify. There's one such individual in the second Animorphs book, a man who approaches Rachel with clear intent of assaulting and potentially raping her. Rachel knows this, we know this, it's very obvious.
And this man is not a Controller.
The Yeerks have no use for obvious creeps and crazy people. They would never infest Kaczynski, Bryant, the Freemen or anyone else who would bring attention to themselves through such extreme behavior. At this point in the series, the two people we know for sure are Controllers are Tom, Jake's upstanding brother, high school basketball star and spokesperson for the Sharing, and Vice Principle Chapman. One of the central scenes in this second book is the attempted rape followed immediately by Rachel being forced to accept a ride from Chapman, and it's Chapman that Rachel stresses about. In an idea that would be repackaged in The Matrix three years later, the Yeerk invasion forces the Animorphs into a position of not being able to trust anyone, not just the obvious "bad people." It is not that, with the Yeerks, anyone is an enemy. It's that everyone is an enemy.
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Have you thought about including the links to these posts in the description sections of your opinionated reviews? These would make excellent companion pieces to your video reviews and maybe introduce more people to RAF.
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As a nerd who loves essays on pop culture I fully approve of this.
Edit: Fun fact, this is the 7th result for the term psychocronography on google, though 4 of the results between are all for entries on the same Doctor Who blog.
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Edit: Fun fact, this is the 7th result for the term psychocronography on google, though 4 of the results between are all for entries on the same Doctor Who blog.
The guy who writes for that blog is the one who came up with the term, and is partly my inspiration for doing this project. :)
#3 - There's an elephant stomping over the convertibles! (#3 The Encounter)
It's August 1996. At this point, Animorphs was being printed every other month, hence the two-month gap. Tupac and Toni Braxton danced around the top of the billboard charts in July before giving way to a monstrous blight on popular music known simply as "Macarena." Oh my god, this annoying prattle of a song was everywhere! It took the top of the charts from August all the way to the end of October, partly due to it becoming the official song of the 1996 Democratic Convention. The music video was awful, two middle-aged Spanish guys sing into a mic while a bunch of girls in disturbing cotton-candy colors go on about how you can't have them. At this same time, the Spice Girls were building up steam in the United Kingdom, and it's no wonder why kids like me threw themselves into the arms of Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Korn. Yes, I'm blaming the Macarena for my horrible taste in music when I was in junior high.
In real news, the 1996 Summer Olympics begin and end in Atlanta, Georgia, which was interrupted halfway through by a terrorist bombing that resulted in one death. Security guard Richard Jewell, who had saved dozens of lives by discovering the bomb and moving people away from the blast area, is falsely accused by the media for the bombing. Boris Yeltsin is reelected as President of Russia, Prince Charles and Princess Diana are divorced, and Bob Dole is nominated for President of the United States. In science-fiction inspiring news, the Galileo space probe indicates there may be water on one of Jupiter's moons, NASA announces that a Mars-originating meteorite contains evidence of primitive life-forms, and the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, is born.
In personal news, August 15th was my birthday, in which two major interconnected things happened: I went and saw Independence Day, and I got the first Animorphs book as a present.
Independence Day, which became the highest grossing film of that year, is pretty much the antithesis of Animorphs. Giant spaceships hover down and just blast the **** out of American monuments, to which the President responds by getting in a fighter jet and personally shooting the mofos down. It's a huge, crass in-your-face affair, delivering destruction porn in a way that only a pre-9/11 film could, with no sense of weight or casualty despite entire cities getting wiped from the map. The aliens have no sense of strategy, they nuke cities while mostly ignoring military bases, then wait around like they have nothing to do. Even Visser Three would question these methods. In many ways, this film feels like wish fulfillment for the uber-patriotic, World War II-loving American citizen who wants another righteous war to make them feel good about themselves after Korea and Vietnam tarnished that image and the 90s left them feeling as though America was limp and ineffective.
Because there's no way to read Independence Day as anything but an AMERICA-****-YA kind of film, even if it had another title. The alien invasion is said to be global, but we get only the quickest of glances of how the rest of the planet is handling the situation. All we see the aliens attack are the White House, the Empire State Building and U.S. Bank Tower, symbols of the three most prominent American cities. When we fade into New York City, the Statue of Liberty toppled to one side. This is not an attack on the human race, but an attack on American iconography. In the end, the President teams up with a bunch of grizzled American citizens, Jewish scientists and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at Area 51 to launch a counterattack on the Fourth of July.
In July, the film was promoted on the cover of Time Magazine with the line "Sci-Fi Makes a Comeback." Was science fiction ever gone? One could turn on the TV and find Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Babylon 5, The X-Files, Mystery Science Theater 3000, seaQuest DSV, Sliders, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Dexter's Laboratory, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Biker Mice from Mars and the very brief return of Doctor Who. One could go to the movie theaters and see 12 Monkeys, Escape from LA, Phenomenon, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Star Trek: First Contact and Mars Attacks! There was an entire cable station called "The Sci-Fi Channel." And in the Young Adult section of the local libraries and book stores, a book series called Animorphs was becoming very popular very fast.
So of course science fiction wasn't making a comeback, it was still ever present. What Time Magazine meant by "Sci-Fi" was a return to bigger and louder B-movies from the 50s and 60s, a time when robots fought Aztec mummies, green slime monsters attack space bases and a giant preying mantis goes on a rampage. Films of which Independence Day is basically a modern update of. Science fiction didn't return, big ugly monsters breaking things returned. Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, which came out the same year, is a tribute to these kind of films while always winking at the camera. Independence Day plays it straight.
Animorphs draws inspiration from old school science fiction like this as well, among many other sources. It's clear that at least Michael Grant is a big science fiction fan, and the series is constantly making sci-fi references. The thing is, though, Animorphs draws from the intellectual side of this era, not the "things go boom" side. While Independence Day seeks inspiration from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and... ok, well, War of the Worlds, but all the wrong parts from it... Animorphs draws from The Day the Earth Stood Still (an alien arrives to Earth to give its people a warning), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (aliens take over peoples bodies), and The Thing From Another World (an isolated group deal with an alien threat). Much like the Animorphs is a part of its time, these films were a part of theirs, playing on people's Cold War fears and their paranoia that anyone could be a damn dirty communist. They were also far more subtle and intelligent than any of the B-grade schlock that was coming out. Animorphs and Independence Day may have come from a common ancestry, but their family trees split very far apart.
Case in point, in the third Animorphs book, there is a giant spaceship not too dissimilar from the ones seen in Independence Day. However, instead of positioning itself over a major landmark and blowing it to hell, it was merely a cargo vessel shipping things from point A to point B. Instead of letting the populace gawk at it for hours, it kept itself cloaked and hidden. A giant fortress in the sky, and the people below didn't even know it was there. And despite the grandeur of this, it was not the focus of the book, instead focusing almost entirely on the inner torments of Tobias and developing his character and giving it dimension. While things did end in a huge explosion, this was not the conclusion to a story, but a mere step in a larger story.
It was still a fun birthday.
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Well, happy belated birthday at anyrate. I should have known you were an August baby. You and my youngest brother have a lot in common.
I like the focus on the contrasts between Independence Day and Animorphs. I love both, inspite of what the critics say about Roland Emmerich, ID4 was a kickass movie full of, as you say, stuff blowing up.
Another interesting contrast is that, although posessing an alien weapon that gave them advantage, the Animorphs were still just minors who were very limited in what they could and couldn't do. Everything they did was either in secret or in complete defiance of a system that puts restrictions on teens for their "own good".
In Independance Day, almost everyone was an adult capable of making their own decisions. No one was forced to do anything and everyone had a choice to either rise (hooker escaping the fire while everyone else panicked, drunken crop duster quitting drinking and deciding to sacrifice himself to blow the alien spacecraft to pieces) or fall. (the President's advisor being a closed minded and decidedly not-Jewish prick)
You could easily say that the aliens gave them no choice. But everyone has a choice and you can always choose to do nothing.
The Anis always had to choose. Each book, each mission, Jake put the vote to them. Either you're in or you're out. And for the Anis, the right choice was never as black and white as "if I don't get out of this car I'm going to burn and die." It was more like, "If I don't go along on this mission, some innocent kid will wind up a tool in an alien invasion. I won't be able to sleep tonight and my parents will ground me if they catch me, plus I'll have to miss a class and to do extra work to make up for the test I blew because I couldn't study last night. Because I was busy saving a handful of people who may or may not even be grateful to me for this fact. 'Scuse me a moment, stress vomit."
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Wow this has been a good read so far. Really reminding me of the way the 90's were. I wish we could go back to those days.
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Loved chapter two and three.
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#4 - Lost in images from a mind larger and older and so utterly strange (#4 The Message)
It's October 1996. "Macarena" keeps a death grip on pop music, the summer movie season had come to an end and people were now turning to films like The First Wives Club and Sleepers. Beast Wars debuts on television, reinventing the Transformers franchise into something that isn't obvious thirty-minute toy commercials. In real news, the US launches Operation Desert Strike, a series of cruise missile strikes against Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein starting genocidal campaign against the Kurds. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning all nuclear explosions for any reason, is signed in the United Nations, which nobody ever actually follows. And finally, the O.J. Simpson trial begins.
Back in August, a three-year old boy had climbed the wall of a gorilla encampment at the Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois and fell more than eighteen feet to the hard concrete floor below, knocking himself unconscious. At this, one the female gorillas named Binti Jua walked over, cradled the boy like her own infant, and carefully carried him to one of the service entrances. The incident became a brief media sensation, and people began to debate the nature of the animal's act. Was it some kind of training, or a shining example of altruism in the animal kingdom? No doubt, K.A. Applegate was watching the incident and thought to herself two things: "I'm gonna do that in one of my books, only have it be a crocodile pit! Yeah!" and "What exactly was the gorilla thinking?"
So far we've discussed the alien invasion side of Animorphs, so it's time we touched upon the morphing aspect. One of the key motivations for K.A. Applegate in the creation of Animorphs was the idea of getting inside an animal's head and seeing through its eyes. Applegate credited this as an interest in existential phenomenology, the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. In the case of Animorphs, the act of morphing produces a completely new structure, the processing of human thoughts and memories through the brain chemistry of an animal. For the first three books, this followed along a steady concept. The Animorphs would morph an animal, struggle against its instrincts, be it the playfulness of a dog or predatory instincts of a hawk or the ongoing fear of a shrew, and eventually win out. But then comes book four, and everything changes.
In this book, the Animorphs morph dolphins and encounter a humpback whale, finding they are able to communicate with it in a way that is at least partly telepathic, as it is able to project images into their minds with an unsettling amount of clarity. Regardless on one's opinion on the communicativeness of "whale songs," this act clearly goes beyond basic animal instincts into a realm far deeper and mythic, and brings the series to a point where it straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy. Now, this aspect of sea mammals communicating with each other through mythic means has its roots in some of the more marketable aspects of New Age, a hard-to-pin-down spiritual movement that began in the 1960s and continues to this day with rising and falling popularity. New Age is a very difficult thing to define, as it draws from so many things that people participate in it pick and choose from, many of them contradictory: atheism, monotheism, pantheism, virtually every popular religion, philosophy, self-help, Gaia theory, astronomy, astrology, quantum physics, environmentalism, etc. Two of the biggest marketable images of the New Age movement would prove to be very important to the mythology of Animorphs: dolphins and crystals (dreams about alien forests in a bubble on the bottom of the ocean wouldn't be too far fetched for New Age).
I suppose if you were to define the core concept of New Age, it would be the seeking of unity between the mind, body and soul. In Nevill Drury's 2004 book "The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self," he positioned the movement as "a worldview that includes both science and spirituality." This could be seen as the mission statement of morphing itself, as with each morph, the Animorphs must obtain a unity between their new bodies and their consciousness. It is both an act of advanced scientific technology and an act of the spirit. This reflects on the merging of science fiction and fantasy that the series itself participates in. Science fiction can be seen as being about man and his relationship with his tools, while fantasy can be seen as man and his relationship with concepts. Morphing, the central concept of the entire series, is both a tool AND a concept at the same time, and this walking the line gives the characters access to a new avenue to view the world. An avenue that includes magic talking whales.
This all leads up something I plan to cover in greater detail as this series goes on: the Animorphs journey towards enlightenment. That word carries a lot of baggage, all of which I plan to unpack.
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^God tier post as usual.
I want to believe that you remember all of that stuff and that you didn't have to research anything about the time this book was released.
Enlightenment? I feel it was more like disillusionment. The Animorphs had a "whatever works" (true neutral) mentality toward the end of the series. Now I shall wait patiently for you to get to the book where you finally explain what you meant by enlightenment.
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#5 - Which just goes to show you why you should never get involved in other people's problems (#5 The Predator)
It's December 1996. "Macarena" finally jumps off the top of the charts, making way for BLACKstreet and Dr. Dre's "No Diggity" in November and Toni Braxton's "Un-Break My Heart" in December. I completely forgot to mention in my last entry the death of rapper Tupac Shakur, who was killed in a drive-by shooting. This was just shortly before the release of what would be his final album, "The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory," in which Tupac had planned to change his stage name from 2Pac to Makaveli. The album, which is probably best to be taken tongue-in-cheek, portrays Tupac as the victim of an Illuminati-style organization within the rap scene consisting of all the artists Tupac had managed to piss off throughout his career. The parallels between Tupac's death and the content of the album continues to inspire conspiracy theorists. Meanwhile in the movie theaters, people went to see Romeo + Juliet, Space Jam, Star Trek: First Contact, the live action 101 Dalmations movie and Beavie and Butt-head do America. In the video game scene, "Tomb Raider" and "Diablo" are released.
In real news, Bill Clinton wins a second term in office, the biggest work protest in South Korean history begins, and six-year old beauty pageant contestant JonBenét Ramsey is murdered, a case which remains unsolved. Carl Sagan passes away. There will be an entry on Sagan and his influence on Animorphs, but not today. No, today we talk about the Power Rangers.
1996 marked the fourth season of Power Rangers, and marked the beginning of a tradition of regularly changing cast members, powers, enemies and titles every year. "Mighty Morphin' Power Ranges" transformed into "Power Rangers Zeo" and took a form that was arguably the closest the show would ever be to Animorphs, though that's not actually saying a lot. Whereas "Mighty Morphin'" was equal parts science fiction and fantasy, "Zeo" diminished the more magical elements of the show to focus on the sci-fi elements. The Power Rangers swapped out their dinosaur-themed "technology from another time" suits and weapons for a more modernized set-up, and the villains changed from dark sorcerers invading the Earth with gangs of golems to an entire robotic empire. The show was often proud of showing off the might of the invading fleets, always ready for attack but never actually doing it. In many ways, it was showing us what many readers imagined the Yeerk forces hovering in orbit might look like.
This is not to say that the fantasy elements were completely removed. The original series villains remained as secondary characters, and the new powers the Rangers possessed originated from crystals, tying it to New Age mysticism just like many of the elements of Animorphs. And really, the entire series premise from the beginning mirrors Animorphs in a lot of ways: five teenagers given powers by a mysterious alien to fight off invading forces, having to hide their identities while saving the world. However, this is not to imply that K.A. Applegate took any actual inspiration from Power Rangers. The show is not mentioned once throughout the series, and I have yet to come across an interview where Applegate brings it up. It's easy to believe Katherine and Michael, not yet parents, ignored the series completely. No, Animorphs is not so much influenced by Power Rangers so much as cut from the same cloth: children adventure stories.
That is to say, genre stories in which one or more of the protagonists are replaced with children or young adults. This goes way back and is usually reflective of the popular genres of the time. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" puts young Jim Hawkins in the place of other high-seas heroes like Robinson Crusoe or Emilio Roccanera. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" saw Mark Twain dumping his young protagonists into a dangerous crime drama. The 1920s saw the premiere of "The Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew" as a teenage answer to mystery serials (Sherlock Holmes was only forty-years old at the time). Marvel Comics made a name for itself doing this, presenting the first teenage superheroes (not counting mascot sidekicks like Bucky or Robin) with Spider-Man and the original X-Men. Even the Ninja Turtles are teenage, it's right there in the name! The popularity for this kind of thing is obvious, as young readers would have an easier time relating to these main characters and therefor could imagine themselves having these adventures.
Not that I had any trouble imagining I was Indiana Jones or James Bond when I was a kid, but the appeal of imagining oneself as a young hero versus an adult hero is that one does not have to fundamentally change who they are when imagining themselves having an adventure. For example, one kid pretends he's a young Encyclopedia Brown-esque child detective while another kid pretends he's Sherlock Holmes. While the first kid's imagination might emphasize aspects like intelligence and skill, they are still basically playing themselves, while the second kid is playing someone who is completely NOT themselves. Both have fun, but the first kid would probably find his fun a bit more empowering. Power Rangers plays to this kind of imagination like a pro, emphasizing that anyone with any skill set can become a Power Ranger, be they athletic or nerdy.
Animorphs, on the other hands, uses this same approach, but almost as if it were a trap. Anyone can gain morphing powers, be they athletic or nerdy. Who doesn't want the ability to turn into animals and fly around as a hawk or swim about as a dolphin? It's a good hook that many young readers grabbed onto early, but as this series progressed, this fantasy was gradually perverted, revealing itself as a candy apple with razor blades inside. Book five is the more perverse yet, the Yeerks raising Marco's mother from the grave as a military zombie. Kids who came into the series wanting to turn into elephants and kicking alien butt, only for the series to reveal that the morphing powers were more of a curse than a gift, and that the aliens were so, well, alien that not even death is sacred to them. The Animorphs are completely incapable against them, they only survive this book thanks to bickering inner politics, their morphs only helpful in hiding their identities. In this book, our heroes, the people whom the readers imagine themselves as being, are in constant retreat. No battle, no taking a stand, nothing to make you feel better about yourself in the end.
This is not Power Rangers, kids.
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One thing that stands out about Power Rangers was the watered down approach to danger or a life threatening situation.
A villain never said, "Kill them" or "bring me their heads". It was always, "destroy them". Because of course children can't grapple with the idea of someone wanting them dead, even though schools have guest speakers teach them about such things throughout their lives. And there are more than a few places in the world where children are familiar with the concept of someone wanting them, or not caring one way or the other if they die.
The Animorphs came face to face with people who wanted them dead, or thought they were nothing but weak little things to be used and tossed aside (the rapist from The Visitor) pretty much every single day.
Also, never once do the Power Rangers try to negotiate with villains or try to play for the lesser of two evils. Putting aside that choosing lesser evil is still evil, sometimes we have to make compromises to take care of ourselves and our loved ones.
I remember one of Rita's monsters being willfull and disobedient. It had a very specific obsession with a certain type of egg, that Rita used to rein him in. I remember being ten years old and thinking "Wait a minute. He has no personal politics and if they can build weapons and other crap from the so called morphing grid, surely Zordon could create those very eggs and use this monster as a potential ally."
But no. It was all black and white and with the short sightedness of teenagers, the Power Rangers vanquished this monster. Because in Power Rangers there was a very clear distinction between good and evil. If you were a human being and in control of a massive ancient robot, you were the good guy. If you were a monster made from clay and having no real concept beyond what your creator was forcing you to do, you were the bad guy.
In Animorphs, they freed two Hork-Bajir. They negotiated with Aftran and gambled with the idea of a peace movement that would help to slow down the Yeerks. They even allied with Visser Three on a number of occasions when the alternative was death at the hands of a much lesser enemy.
And lets not forgot, David wasn't Tommy. He didn't turn around suddenly and there he was, a good guy that would use his powers for good against the enemy.
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Oh hell yes. This is solid gold. Please continue.
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Awesome posts once again.
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This rocks. I could read these all day. More please, so i can do just that. :)
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I love this series, takes me back to my middle school days.
Except I was totally a fan of the Macarena. :XD:
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I love this series, takes me back to my middle school days.
Except I was totally a fan of the Macarena. :XD:
Heeeeeey Macarena.
I liked the song too. XD I will admit.
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#6 - Reveling in a fantasy of promotions and power (#6 The Capture)
It's February 1997. Toni Braxton sat on top of the charts until the last week of February, giving way to... well, we'll talk about them next time. Daft Punk releases their debut album "Homework" while Ben and Jerry's releases a new flavor of ice cream named after the band Phish. February kicks off the Star Wars rereleases with an updated version of Episode IV: A New Hope, complete with Han Solo talking to a really ****ty CGI Jabba the Hutt. Television adopts a rating system, just in time for the premiere of "King of the Hill." "Final Fantasy VII" is released for the Playstation, the first in the popular RPG video game series to use 3D graphics.
In real news, Gene McKinney, the only African-American to reach the rank of Sergeant Major of the Army, resigns after nearly 60,000 calls to a Army hotline accused him of sexual misconduct. NASA sends astronauts up to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Divorce becomes legal in the Republic of Ireland. In North Hollywood, two bank robbers wearing kevlar body armor and armed with AKMs are killed in a shootout that resulted in seventeen injured police officers. This eventually results in select police officers being armed with semi-automatic weapons.
The big event, however, was the inauguration and the beginning of the second term of President Bill Clinton. Then came the sixth book in the Animorphs series, the first to focus on the Yeerks trying to acquire a person of high political standings, in this case a governer who is running in a Presidental election. While I won't pretend to know all the behind-the-scenes details, to me this makes it seem like Animorphs was meant to be a monthly series from the start, not the "every other month" thing they did for the first seven books. Had it been a monthly series, this book would have fallen on November 1996, at the time of the election, giving this book a more "ripped from the headlines" feel, intergrating it to real-life events. One could imagine the advice children who would have read the book would have given their parents: "Be sure to vote Clinton, Mommy. Bob Dole has an alien in his head."
What's funny is, had the Yeerks been succesful in infesting the nameless govener, they would have still lost the election. It would seem that the Yeerks have a problem dealing with American politics (and to a lesser extent, world politics) throughout the series, every attempt to invade that system ending in failure, and not always because of the Animorphs. They hit Hewlett Aldershot the Third with a car and he slips into a coma. They attempt to invade a micro-United Nations peace conferance, only to get shut down by random elephants and rhinos. They try to start a war between the United States and China, and lay the success of that plan on one Controller who bends under threat.
The Yeerks have already successfully invaded Earth culture, have already intergrated themselves in education and entertainment, and seem to pervert even basic laws of nature, such as death. And yet somehow, they can't seem to figure out government. Why is that? Let's consider the Yeerk's own governing system. Their highest governing body is the Council of Thirteen, a group of mysterious robe-wearing Yeerks who keep a level of control by keeping everyone in constant mystery. Not all the members are identified, and no one outside of the council know who among the thirteen is the true Yeerk Emperor. The center of Yeerk government is essentially a cult, an Illuminati-style body of influental people, the only difference being that the Council makes no secret of their presence, opting instead to just cloud the details.
Then there's the Visser and Sub-Visser system, which we see created in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles by one Yeerk simply proclaiming himself into a position of power, and everything kind of falling into place haphazardly. The Yeerk military body is in many ways a parody of the Andalite military body and their system of "Princes." Their military forces have a similiar immature quality to them. Their ships have almost toy-like designs, based off of bugs and manta rays and spiders and battle axes, and they all have similiar toy-like names. Bug Fighter. Blade Ship. The only Visser we ever really meet with any kind of professional attitude is Visser One. Visser Three acts like an immature child, throwing lethal fits when he doesn't get exactly what he wants.
This seems to give way to the core of the Yeerk's nature: Yeerks are inherently conceptual creatures instead of structural ones. In their natural state, they are balls of ideas bouncing around in large pools, like neurons clicking against and triggering each other. They are full of ideas but, as blind, deaf and weak, they are at the mercy of external forces, the lapping of the pools, natural predators, the weather, and so on. Structured thought would have been difficult in such an environment, and the forming of organizations beyond the most simple of tribal would have been unlikely. Before they began their invasion of space, the only Yeerk form of government was drenched in old mystic symbolism, a hold over of ancient rituals. The Council of Thirteen might even have theological origins and never had any real political power.
Therefor, as conceptual creatures, Yeerks have no problem understanding human ideals and culture, but they lack the maturity of thought to easily infiltrate a structured system like a world government. Prior to their invasion of Earth, the Yeerks had never tried to take over a statist society. The Gedds were monkeys, the Hork-Bajir were barely tribal and the Taxxons were intelligent but prone to anarchy. Humans, on the other hand, define themselves with structure, from government to family units (and when you think about it, the Yeerks seem to have a problem invading families as well. I don't recall the Yeerks ever managing to take control of an entire family). We are naturally drawn to patterns and systems, and are more willing to submit to structured government than fend for ourselves. Structure like this is a shell that the Yeerks simply have a hard time cracking.
(There's also a matter of time. Yeerks have had centuries to develop ideas, but only thirty years to develop governing systems.)
Yeerks essentially remain in a constant conceptual state, they are almost literally an invasion of ideas. How fitting that their physical form should be small bits of grey matter. Yeerks are ideas given organic bodies, ever-changing, merging and multiplying, seeking vessels from which they can properly express those ideas. It harkens back to a bit of classic science fiction filmmaking, the kind of thing Michael Grant would be in to: 1958's Fiend Without a Face, a story where experiments in telekinesis result in the creation of living monsters made of pure thought. Monsters who first attack with an invisible invasion before finally taking on a physical appearance, that of living brain matter. It eventually turns out, much as it does for the Yeerks, that once these thought monsters contest humans, specially an American airbase, in the physical realm, they get their asses handed to them. They are out of their depth.
While the Animorphs did what they could, perhaps an even bigger reason the Yeerk invasion of Earth was slowed down was because the Yeerks simply bit off a little more than they could chew.
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Before they began their invasion of space, the only Yeerk form of government was drenched in old mystic symbolism, a hold over of ancient rituals. The Council of Thirteen might even have theological origins and never had any real political power.
This ties in with my own theories about why the Yeerks, or at least the one Yeerk we could see through the eyes of Jake, seem to see Crayak right before they die. Before the Andalites came, I have to wonder if a part of Yeerk culture didn't involve some kind of basic religion involving Crayak.
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I think that the idea of yeerks not being able to break into the upper government of the US lends itself to a parallel between the US government and the citizen's understanding of the government. In the complacent culture of the 1990s, there was a lot more trust in the government.
When the Yeerks took over their hosts, their hosts believed they knew how the government worked and how other people/systems worked. But the reality was, like the council of 13, there is a lot of mystery and behind-the-scenes that the citizens were just generally unaware of. Unlike the Yeerks who knew, up front, that the council of 13 was mysterious and hidden, a lot of humans in general had no idea. Thus, when the yeerks went up against the government, they were foiled at every turn because they really had no clue about what was really going on. Similar to the situation with Chapman and Aldershot. Any medical professional (well, I would hope common sense) could tell Visser 3 that if you hit a host with a car hard enough to hospitalize them, the probability of them being a useless host is high. But with the non-medical knowledge of Chapman's host and the fear Visser 3 instilled against anyone speaking up against his plans (even with common sense), it was like they were playing monopoly against a real estate agent when they didn't even know the rules.
I agree with the idea, in a big way, the Yeerks are nothing but brain matter, creatures that can only know what their host knows, and when their host knows nothing about the world around them (like Visser 3 trying to take over Earth with nothing but an Andalite's knowledge) they are pretty much certain to fail. Which was, ultimately, why Visser 1 was the biggest threat of any of them, because she (it? do yeerks have a gender?) actually tried to understand humans, and the power games that got her thrown out was a huge part of the reason why the yeerks failed.
Looking forward to your next segment.
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I would say that anyone who stood up to Visser 3's plans especially with common sense was doomed to dismemberment. This segment was very interesting. I never even noticed how much of a failure the Yeerk's were with Human government. This is why I love all your Animorphs related stuff pop. Your insights into the series are totally unparalleled.
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#7 - Inside your head. Inside this planet. Inside the fabric of space and time (#7 The Stranger)
It's April 1997. March harbors in the American debut of the British pop band known as the Spice Girls with their single "Wannabe," which actually went over better in the States than in the UK, and signaled a change between the soulful R&B and rap dominated chart scene to a more glitzy artificial pop scene, though not without a fight, as April was owned by Puff Daddy, Mase and "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down." The Notorious B.I.G. is shot dead. In theaters, the two Star Wars sequels gets re-released, Jim Carry hits it big with Liar Liar. Other releases include Jungle 2 Jungle, Cats Don't Dance, Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, Chasing Amy, Anaconda, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and Volcano. DVD is launched in the United States. Toonami begins on Cartoon Network, and Ellen DeGeneres comes out of the closet, both in real life and in her sitcom "Ellen." "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" comes out on the Playstation and becomes one of my favorite games of all time.
In real news, President Clinton bans funding for human cloning, the Heaven's Gate cult commits mass suicide, and the Algerian towns of Thalit, Haouch Khemisti and Omaria are massacred by guerrillas. The first space burial happens while the early days of stem cell research produce the first artificial human chromosomes.
Four months prior, Carl Sagan passed away. Two months after, Contact, a film adaption of Sagan's 1985 science fiction novel, would hit theaters. An astronomer, cosmologist and science popularizer, Carl Sagan was a key figure in making scientific ideas accessable to the common man. His methods of doing this were largely through poetic works. Sagan was as much a man of words as he was a man of science. To date, no one has claimed his title as world's most successful science orator (It is that reason why he is so easy to put into those Symphony of Science music videos you see on Youtube, his poetic flair translates easy to music).
Sagan's most famous work was "Cosmos," a thirteen-part miniseries that first aired in 1980 (Katherine Applegate would have been twenty-four at the time). Each hour long episode explored different aspects of cosmology, from the cellular level to the edges of the universe, with Sagan presenting as a kind nth-dimensional tour guide. "Cosmos" never fell into the Discovery Channel/talking heads/boring CGI stuff we're so used to with our educational cable today. Instead, Sagan transcended him image from that of a science poet and attaining a level of omnipotence within the television medium. Within the domain of television, as long as an episode of "Cosmos" is playing, Sagan's image is that of cosmic authorship, controlling the medium completely to deliver his message.
Just take the very first episode, "The Shores of the Cosmis Ocean." In it, Sagan leads his audience in a journey through the cosmos, both the factual universe and the realms of ideas, in a starcraft literally made of imagination, unhampered by the limitations of space and time. He takes them on a tour from the far edge of infinity inwards back towards Earth, then back in time to walk through the Library of Alexandria, and finally presenting us with a calender covering all of history, from the Big Bang to now, all the while making it clear where we as a species stand among this grand vastness. Sagan, or at least Sagan's TV image, controls the narrative with absolute power, but he is never preachy, never condescending. He leads his audience to enlightenment with a soft voice and steady hand.
And there's that word again. Enlightenment. I used it earlier to describe the Animorphs personal journey in a previous essay, and people naturally pointed out that, if the Animorphs are becoming more enlightened, then how come they end up so miserable? It's true that enlightenment is often a term used to imply a better state of mind, but it is not entirely synonymous with this. To become more aware of ones surroundings is also to become more aware of its horrors, to become aware of how small you are in grand scheme of things. This is the most essential concept in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote stories about horrifying beings that could scratch their ass and destroy the Earth in the process, and the process of trying to understand this driving people mad. It's a concept adopted by occult author Kenneth Grant, who postulated that when one expanded ones mind into more mystic areas was not a source of wonder, but of terror.
And with the introduction of the Ellimist, the Animorphs find themselves taking a leap into the deep end of the pool of Lovecraftian implications. The situation changes overnight from that of mere alien invasion of something far more cosmic and primal, of space and the endless spaces between spaces (as hinted with the introduction of the Crayak in the last book, witnessed by Jake while in a state between life and death). Their enlightenment to these situations has an almost immediate emotional effect on the Animorphs, and will only get worse the deeper into the Ellimist/Crayak plot they go.
What's interesting here is how similar the Ellimist and Carl Sagan's TV image operate. The Ellimist isn't quite as honest as Sagan, but manipulates and leads his audience in exactly the same way, showing them the beauty of the world and its place in the cosmos in a magical tour, then leading them through time towards a possible future, then producing fractured dream images to lead the Animorphs like a trail of bread crumbs. Like Sagan, the Ellimist has complete authorship over his domain (but which only hints at his true role in the narrative, which we'll touch on when we get to the Andalite Chronicles).
The Ellimist even places responsibility of the human race on the Animorphs in a similar fashion as Sagan does in many of his works, including the opening of "Cosmos," where he says, "For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young and curious and brave. It shows much promise." It is the same kind of sentimentality for the human race the Ellimist expresses, only now he's given the Animorphs a fake ballot to determine its fate.
Sagan's enlightenment and the Ellimist's enlightenment may lead to two different ends, but they both start in the same place, in the same idea of godlike authorship of a medium. They are, basically, both made of star stuff.
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Another excellent chapter!
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, "For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young and curious and brave. It shows much promise."
If I live long enough to actually see our species completely annihilate itself I'm going to find somewhere to etch this phrase into stone. Preferably near a balloon shop where I will spend my remaining moments filling up 99 red balloons with helium, but that's another matter entirely.
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#8 - It feels weird to just sit around and relax (Megamorphs #1 The Andalite's Gift)
It's May 1997. The death of the Notorious B.I.G. brings his single "Hypnotize" to number one. It falls three weeks later to another death blow to the popular rap scene, "MMMBop" by Hanson. I actually have a begrudging respect for the self-made Hanson, but they could not be any further from Biggie Smalls if they tried. The Spice Girls announce the production of their movie Spiceworld... at the Cannes Film Festival of all places. The May box office starts with some film nobody remembers called Breakdown before giving way to the excellent pop-sci-fi stylings of The Fifth Element. That's #1 for two weeks until Speilberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park debuts. Austin Power also debuts, causing large swaths of unfunny people to say "Oh, behave!" because there is no God.
In real news, Tony Blair wins the UK general election by a landslide, bringing the Labour Party back in power. IBM's Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov in a game of chess, the first time a computer has beaten a World champion. The Russian-Chechen Peace Treaty is signed, and the United States acknowledges the existence of the Secret War in Laos. Kelly Flinn, the first female bomber pilot, accepts a general discharge after getting caught doing it with a married soccer coach.
The summer months encroach. Kids are let out of school, the beaches and theme parks open, reruns play on television, forcing people outside to go to concerts and the big loud movies that play at the time. Through centuries of cultural evolution, we've established a clockwork system that ceases to be three-or-so months out of the middle of the year, the Metropolis-style mechanical motions of public education and the work sector giving way to a kind of structed anarchy, or at least the illusion of such (the British idea of mandatory holidays is kind of a joke, really). And with the summer, Animorphs throws its structure aside for its first big event book.
Whereas the previous seven books have been filled with paranoia and suspense, thoughts and themes, spying and retreating and pain, Megamorphs #1 is about the Animorphs fighting a Big Ol' Monster. The book is defined by its action beats, several chase things building up to a finale where the Animorphs kill the Big Ol' Monster with a whale. In terms of set pieces, Animorphs had never been this extravagant. A house gets torn to shreds. A crazy woman traps Rachel in a burning shack. Low flying Bug Fighters, police officers and an amnesiac Rachel in elephant morph explode through a suburb while Jake in tiger morph gets chased through the woods. Marco and Ax get trapped on the Blade Ship.
This is the Animorphs equivalent of big summer blockbusters like Independance Day, which we talked about before. Despite my tearing apart of that film, I do not hate simple action movies, just dumb ones, and Megamorphs #1 fits very soundly on the "simple" side of things. But it is more than just a summer book in that it's big and loud, it is actually the most summer-esque in its setting, despite taking place while school is still going on. Summer is a time for letting one's hair down, to relax and ignore, at least in part, the opressive systems around you. Rachel goes to gymnastics camp. Marco and Ax crash a pool party. Cassie goes to the mall. These are all summer-type events, points for the Animorphs to take a deep breath and stop thinking about the Yeerks for just a second.
But, of course, the Yeerks have none of that, and assault these summer events in the loudest and most destructive ways. This could almost be described as an summer implosion, big summer events, in this case the blockbuster movie aspects of the story, destroying other summer events until it curls in on itself into a ball of cloudy chaos. The Big Ol' Monster itself is a dark cloud, like a rain cloud come to bloat out the sun for all the beach-goers and mountain climbers and naps-on-the-porch-takers. The message is clear: the Animorphs themselves can't afford summer. They cannot afford to relax and take it easy, they can't take their eye off the ball for one second, or Rachel might lose her memories and they'll get chased around by Visser Three's pet.
That's still a simpler idea than the ones explored in past books, but for my money, its enough to qualify the book as a worthwhile summer blockbuster.
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I remember it had been a couple months between the relase of seven and this book and the hype online was like watching the trailers both in the theater and on TV progressively as the release date got closer. Even the ending was like watching the Godzilla films, which always ended right after the major monster fight (or in the case of 1985 and the horrible Emmerich Version, the fight between monster and man) with an often tacked on scene or line of reflection, like "Well now we have hope".
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#9 - Whatever we learn, you'll learn (#8 The Alien)
It's July 1997. Puff Daddy, Faith Evans and 112 team up to top the charts with their Notorious B.I.G. tribute song, "I'll Be Missing You," sampling The Police's "Every Breath You Take" as to confuse everyone when the song would start on the radio. It's OK, because the music video has multiple shots of Puff Daddy falling off a motorcycle. Radiohead releases the album "OK Computer," and I almost completely drop thrash metal overnight. In theaters, people flocked to see the very entertaining Men in Black, taking the wise-cracking Will Smith character from Independance Day and putting him in a film environment that actually compliments him. Batman & Robin, My Best Friend's Wedding, Face/Off, Contact, George of the Jungle and Good Burger also hit theaters. James Stewart passes away. Farrah Fawcett embarrasses herself on the "Late Show with David Letterman." Cartoon Network debuts both "Johnny Bravo" and "Cow and Chicken," and we also see the beginning of "Stargate SG-1" and "Win Ben Stein's Money" while "Married... with Children" and "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" stop production. "Final Fantasy Tactics" hits the Playstation while "Star Fox 64" comes out on the Nintendo 64. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" is published.
In real news, Timothy McVeigh is sentenced to death for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing. Mellisa Drexler delivers her baby on prom night and proceeds to kill and dump the infant in the trash, creating the term "dumpster baby." The House of Commons votes for a total ban on handguns in the UK. An unmanned spacecraft crashes into Mir while NASAS's Pathfinder probe lands on Mars. A hotel fire in Pattaya, Thailand kills 90. Andrew Cunanan shoots fashion designer Gianni Versace to death. F.W. Woolworth closes. My mom used to work at one of those stores. Said it sucked.
Backing up, let's talk about Men in Black for a moment. Along with being a better film than Independance Day, it's both astrologically smarter and a lot closer thematically to Animorphs, with aliens secretly landing on Earth and taking human disguises (one even being a tiny alien controlling a human-shaped robot from inside it's head), huge galactic wars taking place off-camera, and the film's main villain sharing a close resemblance to a Taxxon. Most prominatly is the idea of Forbidden Knowledge, the idea of protecting a great secret in fear of what floodgates it might open. Both the MIB and the Animorphs keep their identities secret so that they can continue their operations to keep the peace. The Yeerks and Edgar the Bug take human identities to hide their tracks as they lay conquest. All four parties need to keep their Forbidden Knowledge protected.
Of course, the concept of Forbidden Knowledge goes back to the book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God forbids Adam and Eve to eat from the tree, but Eve is tempted and consumes the fruit, and Adam follows suit. The result was a sudden understanding of their own mortality and fallibility. The fall of innocence. The Andalites have their own name for the Tree of Knowledge: Seerow's Kindness. The Yeerk Homeworld is, for a Yeerk, a Garden of Eden. Unlimited food supply, good company, Gedds to see and hear it. Than the Andalites came, and the Yeerks ate the fruit from their branches, obtained Forbidden Knowledge and were subsequently banished from Eden, never to return. The Andalites then created the law of Seerow's Kindness, positioning themselves as the guardians of Forbidden Knowledge, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill an inheritor of this role. Ironically, the origin of Seerow's Kindness is also Forbidden Knowledge.
The problem is that there will always be the temptation to obtain Forbidden Knowledge. Ax observes that the human race are greedy for it at accelerated rates, gaining the knowledge of flight and advancing to the knowledge of space flight in record time. The Animorphs' temptation of information about the Andalites is strengthened by Ax's protection of it, and Ax is tempted for knowledge on the human race because the Animorphs literally wave books at him. The drive for Forbidden Knowledge is represented by the radio telescope in which the book revolves around. It's a tool of exploration, of searching the depths of space for answers. Incidentally, this book came out the same time Contact was in theaters, a film revolving around using radio telescopes to obtain Forbidden Knowledge from aliens. It is within the radio telescope compound that three nuggets of Forbidden Knowledge reside. The first is the code Ax accidentally gives Marco's father, with which human technology would take an unnatural leap forward. The second is the knowledge that Elfangor gave five humans Andalite technology, something the Andalite forces must keep hidden or shatter the public image of Elfangor as a Hero and Upstanding Citizen.
In both case, Ax finds himself once again the role of guardian (guards, of course, represent rules, and rules are meant to be broken, hence why he is a temptation to the Animorphs. Incidentally, I find it very appropriate that Ax morphs a serpent in this book). However, the third instance of Forbidden Knowledge is the most important, as it is Forbidden Knowledge in which Ax is tempted by as opposed to guarding it: The idea that Yeerks are not all Evil. Within the compound, Ax meets a Yeerk who reveals that it loved someone, and that someone was taken from it by Visser Three. Ax eats from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which in turn reveals to Ax the fallibility of Good and Evil, bringing forth the shades of grey that the Andalite propaganda machine had been hiding all this time, a Seerow's Kindness kept from their own people. And with his own consumption of the fruit, with his own obtaining of the Forbidden Knowledge, he proceeds to shed his role of guardian to his human companions.
Forbidden Knowledge leads to the uncomfortable Enlightenment that the Animorphs have been steadily approaching. Elfangor gave the Animorphs the Forbidden Knowledge of morphing, and turned their lives upside down. The Yeerk with a broken heart gave the Forbidden Knowledge of grey morality to Ax, and finally, standing over the empty vessel of Visser Three, he can't find it in himself to make the final blow and deliver serious damage to the Yeerk forces. The fruit will always be eaten, and Eden will always be lost. Ignorance is bliss.
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Great post, just noticed it sadly.
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Wait a second, (and probably totally off topic), did they change the wording in the books for the re-release of the books?
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I haven't read any of the reprints, but as I understand they just changed a few words to keep it from being completely dated. Like changing the word "Sega" to a more generic "game system".
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Wait a second, (and probably totally off topic), did they change the wording in the books for the re-release of the books?
They're doing their best to take the 90s out of them.
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Lame! I did notice the "game system" change... felt very weird as I was reading it out loud to my fourth grade class. I was able to blow their little minds when I told them that I loved the series when I was their age. It was awesome to see how sucked in they were, thouugh.