Ask K.A. Applegate / Michael Grant Questions! (part deux)

[applegate/grant]

That falls into the category of theoretical "what happened next?" questions.  We have no answers.  There is nothing outside of the books from our point of view.  Anything that exists "outside the frame" so to speak is up to your imagination, not ours.

[Richard]

hey, KA/MG!
i'd like to thank you both for coming to RAF to answer our questions.

so, according to the book jacket, 9-11 was the target age for animorphs when it was first released. i can imagine that quite a few parents would have disallowed their children to continue reading if they had known the terrors of blood and slavery and psychological damage that their kids had been discovering behind those innocent-looking covers. many of your fans, myself included, appreciate the apologetically gruesome and disturbing nature of animorphs, but how do you respond to critics who say the series was too dark for the prescribed reading age?
-:goom:

[applegate/grant]

First off as parents we'd say what kids read is the business of their parents first and foremost.

That being said, we think people worry way too much over the content of books, movies, music, TV and websites.  We live in an age of irrational fear.  We've never been healthier or had longer lives but we run around obsessing over what we eat.  The statistical odds of any of us dying from terrorism are close to zero, but we're all worried about it.  We worry about second-hand smoke but there's almost no hard evidence it has any effect.  Women are terrified of breast cancer and oblivious to heart disease.  Which kills more women?  Heart disease by far.

Fear has a sort of fashion cycle.  It has nothing to do with the rationality of a given fear.  Some fears just suddenly become popular.  Fear of media was a big one in the 90's as we recall.  Explicit lyrics, smutty TV shows, violent video games, they were all supposedly driving kids off the deep end.  The fact that youth crime actually declined as violent video games became more popular of course did nothing to calm irrational mediaphobia.

Adults believe that kids are "impressionable" and easily upset.  That's no doubt true in some cases and again, mom and dad make that call.  But in general kids are very hard to scare.  Michael's GONE series scares the hell out of . . . mommies.  It doesn't seem to be causing nightmares in actual kids.

The fact is older people are easier to scare because they have more buttons you can push.  in HUNGER there's a lynching scene meant to evoke the old south and in other ways the Kosovo and Bosnia ethnic cleansing.  How many 14 year-old readers get those allusions?  Almost none.  Their moms and dads get it because it's part of their frame of reference.  The parents are more disturbed by the scenes than the kids because the parents get the context. 

Also parents just don't get how media savvy their kids are.  Kids old enough to read ANIMORPHS don't have a problem differentiating fantasy from reality.  There's not a single kid who ever actually believed their parents were Controllers.  Fantasize about it?  Sure.  But mistake reality for fantasy?  Nah.  And we're pretty sure none of our readers morphed into redtail hawks. 

It's bizarre that a parent will blithely tell a four year old a story about children being abandoned in the woods by their parents, entrapped by a gingerbread house, threatened with cannibalism, and top it all off with the triumphant resolution where the children burn a witch alive . . . and be upset when a 12 year old reads ANIMORPHS.

[Richard]

I actually always assumed the Ellimist had tweaked Tobias's morph so it would age with the others. Not the most elegant solution, but there you have it.

A couple questions:

How did the series backstory evolve as you wrote it? I've been rereading them and it's pretty clear there are some underlying assumptions in the early books that you later rejected, like some of the things about thought-speech and the whole Hork-Bajir being wired to go on the warpath" thing, but is there anything more subtle that you eventually tossed out the window?

What did you think of the job the ghostwriters did on the second half of the series? I thought most of them did an excellent job, but there are a couple books I just can't read anymore because the narrator seems so out of character (which is more noticeable if you're just reading that character's books instead of the series in sequence).

[applegate/grant]

I actually always assumed the Ellimist had tweaked Tobias's morph so it would age with the others. Not the most elegant solution, but there you have it.

Yeah.  Yeah, that was it.  This is why we hate answering speculative questions -- you guys always have better answers than we do.

Regarding discarded ideas you want to bear in mind that ANIMORPHS was a very hectic thing from where we sat.  Most writers put out maybe a book a year.  We were writing 14 ANI titles plus other projects (Barf-O-Rama, some leftover stuff from previous gigs, later Everworld.)  Plus having a baby who was a preemie, moving from Florida to Minnesota then to Chicago.  Also we were running just six months ahead of publication so that any delay -- a vacation, an illness -- would mean no book for a given month.

So the things you can now read at leisure were not written at leisure.  There's an old classic bit from I Love Lucy:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wp3m1vg06Q

It was more like that than it was us sitting around sipping wine and having deep thoughts.  Normal authors can spend all day working out the exact wording for a pungent metaphor.  We had maybe 30 seconds.  Plus of course ANIMORPHS just generated an amazing amount of backstory.  Dozens of characters, dozens of species, time travel . . . So basically anything you read that looks contradictory or stupid wasn't secretly clever or brilliantly thought-out on our part, it was probably just stupid.   Jake was born during book #11 as we recall and for the year after that neither of us ever slept, so the most likely explanation is:  they were stupid tired.

[Richard]

Hi Katherine and Michael,

I can't say how thrilled I am after all these years to be able to tell you how much I appreciated your books as I was growing up. Much like everyone on this forum I'm still a fan of the series and I can never quite measure the impact that it's had on me.

There's dozens of questions I'd like to ask you, mostly on factual information from the books, but I'll limit myself to just one that I find most important.

You answered in a previous question that you consider the idea of existential phenomenology as an inspiration for Animorphs. I find this really intriguing as I've considered myself an existentialist for years and looking back I can certainly see how some of the themes that hit home with me in Animorphs have shaped this belief (in a moment of utter geekiness I remember once saying my ideal thesis to write would be 'Existentialism in Animorphs'). Would you be able to elaborate at all on how you feel it had an impact on and/or how it was included in the series?

PS. Another used asked about the original Animorphs draft with Jake being named Matt. This was revealed in the AniBase, an infodex that Jeff Sampson wrote for Scholastic after the end of the series. "In the original manuscript for this book, back before a proposed trilogy called "Changelings" became the Animorphs series, Jake was named Matt and had a little brother named Joseph. Cassie didn't exist at all! Good thing for Rachel this was changed later on -- she would have been totally outnumbered by the guys. Of course knowing Rachel, she would have handled it just fine."

[applegate/grant]

Well, that's a big question.  Existentialism covers a lot of ground but it's basically the idea that meaning comes from choices made by the individual as opposed to coming from God or society or from reference to an outside authority.  There are religious existentialists but for the most part it's a secular approach to life and the meaning thereof.

Phenomenology is an epistemological approach -- a system of knowing how we know what we think we know.  Again this is like down the rabbit hole in terms of explaining it, but it's about seeing the world as it is, as a subjective experience, but one stripped insofar as possible of presuppositions.

That answer would earn a solid "-D."  But we're throwing it out there just as background for people who are reading this and think WTF?

Basically we're saying that we wanted to show the experience of being in animal morph with as much truth and as little assumption as we could, not in some cutesied-up, anthropomorphic, Disney way.  We wanted to create a universe that was independent of God or other external authority.  We wanted rational answers.  We wanted characters to face decisions between life and death, not between this type of existence and some theorized alternative.  We wanted to face moral choices squarely, to lay the alternatives out for readers and leave them to reach their own conclusions.  We didn't want to become self-appointed moral or philosophical authorities, we wanted to say, "Look, here's the situation, here's how this character handled it, now you decide if it was right or wrong."  We mostly avoided mysticism or the supernatural. 

Probably the most basic thing for us was letting readers make basic decisions about right or wrong.  We tried to avoid preaching for the excellent reason that, who the hell are we to be preaching?  We didn't always succeed in keeping our mommy/daddy voices out of it,  but we always intended to make you, the readers, responsible for deciding the right and wrong.  So you could say we were inviting you to be the existentialists.

[Richard]

Hi, not sure if this has been asked but, would you's ever think of re-releasing the original tv series onto dvd for the huge fans all over the world.

Question for K&M:

RaSkipper here.  I think it's amazing that you guys are dedicated enough to the fans to do stuff like this.  Thank you so much.
1) If Scholastic ever gets around to 'Animorphs 2.0' as it's being called, would you want to have the books be a monthly 150 page volume like it was, or would you like to try making much longer books once a year or so in the vein of Harry Potter and other book series being released now?
2) Did you ever think about writing a book from David's perspective?
3) In Megamorphs #3, the Animorphs keep the human host's parents from never meeting, erasing him and keeping the Time Matrix from being found.  My question: If the Yeerk itself put two and two together about where it was hidden, why would having a different host body change anything?

[applegate/grant]

1) We've tried on a couple of occasions to convince publishers that the monthly series concept can still work if we go digital.

Basically the problem is that bookstores hate monthly series.  So publishers abandoned the idea.  Our position is to say, look, we're shifting to a digital marketplace where the real estate of shelves in bricks-and-mortar stores are less important.  So we can either go fully digital or a hybrid -- some dead-tree books, some digital. 

But all of this is scaring the publishers.  They don't know how to handle the move to digital.  Everyone is confused and weirded out and most react by sticking their heads in the sand or by making half-assed efforts. 

It's not easy for the publishers because they have to maintain a pricing model that works with bricks-and-mortar stores and not undercut it with the low prices that digital will end up wanting.  Here our position is to say that if we want digital to work, and we want to minimize piracy, we should keep the prices of e-books low.  And rather than trying to artificially prop up digital prices publishers should be moving to enhanced books (text with video, music, backstory, etc... as links) and setting premium prices for those. 

But to be fair the pubs have a lot of voices yelling conflicting advice.  It's a weird time in publishing.

2) No.  We knew things weren't going to work out for David.  And we had an established pattern of rotating the stars.

3) Without re-reading the book neither of us remembers. 

[Richard]

Well well, I must say it is quite a pleasure and an honour to finally ask a question of the author of animorphs. first off I must simply say well done. You created sixty four amazing books, a TV show (It wasn't your fault it was that bad), millions of fans and of course with fanbase! Well done and thank you for the books and the inspiration! I was and am quite an avid reader of yours and can't wait until the reprint(?) For Mr. Grant you're GONE series is quite marvelous and i eagerly await to get ahold of HUNGER. Now for my questions.

1. Human military. Now, I am very patriotic of the humans and a bit of a gun nut. I love the series and all, but I think you understated the human military, especially in the last books. for example, in book 46 when the yeerks are assaulting the Aircraft carreir and duking it out with the Marines, I think maybe you should have mentioned the bloody losses those yeerks would have taken. The HB controllers and Taxxons had only dracon beams, hand held dracon beams. The humans had M-16s, .45s and other auto-semiautomatic weapons, plus the fact that someone opened up with the gatling gun which would have torn those slimy slugs to slimy shreds. General doubledays army in book 54, after the pool ship ceased fire, wouldn't they have slaughtered the yeerks constructing the new pool? Lightly armed Taxxons and HBs versus tanks, helicopters, automatics, snipers, the works! And even at close range, combat shotguns would blow those alien bastards to pond scum. Like I said, love the series, but I think the human military was a bit understated there.

Thank you for taking some of your busy tiem to answer my musings and ponderings.

 Much thanks and regards,

OH CANADA!

[applegate/grant]

It depends. 

As you probably know, technological mismatches have profound effects on military strategy.  For example, the First World War, where neither side at first understood the crucial role of machine guns.  Human wave assaults that might have worked against rifle fire were utterly futile against machine guns.  It took the development of the tank late in that war to begin to cope with machine guns.

Bottom line is that beam weapons -- presumably with smart targeting -- could have fired from beyond M16 range.  They could also have fired through barriers.  And there's the shock value of regular troops facing unknown weapons.  The Indian bow and arrow was superior in many ways to the arquebuses used by early European colonists, but the surprise of facing a weapon that could kill without visible means shocked and dismayed the Indians.

Also, it was ghostwritten.

[Richard]

Hey folks,

As a now-journalism major, minor in psych (specifically post-traumatic stress-disorder victims), I always wondered about your progression of the Tobias storyline. I understand that his ultimate reconciliation was after he ultimately defeated Taylor mentally, but it always felt like it was a too quick of a turnaround. He was withdrawn in #37, stating that he was unfit to lead, but he seemed almost himself (minus Marco's reference to him being off in his own world) in other books between Taylor narratives. Care to comment on him only seeming screwed up for those two book?

(Also, and this is merely a fan thing, I simply loved #25, which I feel is the most undermentioned/underrated book of the series. Just saying.)