Gore and violence in Animorphs. Was it too explicit?

[eacortes]

I cant help but ask what you guys thought of some of the goriest moments in the series, i had to reconsider if it truly was a childrens series. One such moment was in #53 when Cassie (fortunately a projection by Erick) is chewed up by a Taxxon and I quote: (...spilled entrailes all over the deck...bloodcurdlin g cries...).  Narly

[morfowt]

I tended to just skim through those places and not really let the scenes sink in. I have a weak stomach...

[musicman88]

I think that it was necessary to describe some of the battle details just for realism's sake.  How are you going to get across your message that war is horrible if you don't actually describe the horrible bit?  If it wasn't a children's series I would've expected a bit more graphic detail actually.

[Phoenix004]

None of the violence in the series bothered me, it would have seemed unrealistic without it. KA was always about showing the harsh reality of war.

I think that it was necessary to describe some of the battle details just for realism's sake.  How are you going to get across your message that war is horrible if you don't actually describe the horrible bit?  If it wasn't a children's series I would've expected a bit more graphic detail actually.

I agree. In recent years I've sometimes wished that the series had been aimed at an older audience to make it more real.

[Chad32]

I tended to skim over it too, though I understand why she would describe that stuff. You can't have a realistic war series if you don't go into the ugly descriptions of battle.

[RYTX]

Really? I always felt like they could have embellished it a bit more; half the fun was the morphing, the other half was using the morph.
But I'm a sucker for tooth and nail so...

[Essam 293]

I can't remember which book it was, but they were fighting in the opening chapter, and in the aftermath of the battle, Jake was basically walking around in his Tiger morph with his guts hanging out. That is the one scene that always sticks out to me when I think of the violence in Animorphs. The shark battle that left Marco's dolphin body nearly torn in half is also another one.

Even though this was a lot more graphic and violent than what you would expect from a kids series, I don't think it was too explicit or over the top. They were fighting a war, and literally did so tooth and nail. It was bound to get messy. The series wouldn't have been the same had K.A skimmed over the brutalities of their battles. In fact, I'd probably feel that there wasn't enough of it in there had this been a YA series, but I'm content with the amount that did make it into the books, especially for the target audience that they were sold to.

[Shark Akhrrana]

It didn't seem to bother me much. Not sure why.  It makes you see in your mind exactly what is happening in the scene.
There are plenty of violent gory scenes in the series. and well if you are into the story you expect them to be gory. I had to sometimes go back and re read sections to understand them better. But other than that it didnlt bother me at all. I.t just made teh story more real

[wolfev]

Rachel eating through her own tail was a little much. That is probably one of the most intense sequences throughout the whole series. Actually pretty much all of the solution is that way. Did that win an award? The thing to remember is that the morphs can cure you of any physical injury. That is K.A.'s loop hole that make's everything okay.

[anijen21]

I thought the loop hole was the thing that made everything so violent in the first place

you'd never see someone beating an enemy with their own severed arm in any other kid's series. Yeah, the technology allowed them to do that, but the technology didn't cure the psychological effects. And more than bloodshed and dismemberment and disembowelment, I think that's what made the series dark.

Even if the series was overly violent, at least it was appropriately honest.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Nah, I don't think the gore and violence in Animorphs was too much.  If anything, it was not enough.

For one thing, I did that "kill-counting" project for a while (to tally up how many kills each Animorph committed), and one thing I learned from that is that K.A. seems to like to weasel her way out of explicitly saying that someone died.  So many times, it's really ambiguous whether someone actually got killed or not, and it makes it really frustrating to try to count kills.  Anyway, I'm just bringing it up because I think the series would have been darker if they'd paid some more attention to each kill, and I think that would have made it better.

But, yanno, considering it was war and all, yeah, there's gonna be violence and gore.  And I think the books even left a lot of detail out.  A noteworthy example is in #3, when Tobias says something to the effect of "I won't say what happened next.  That will be my own personal nightmare."  Of course, that does have the effect of making the reader's imagination come up with what happened, which may almost be worse. 

[Chad32]

I think it was plenty, and I'm not really worried about giving all those warriors their five seconds to illustrate that they died, and how exactly they died, and what their names were, and all that. I actually think she was pushing the bar as it was, and much farther would have forced her to give it a higher rating.

[DinosaurNothlit]

I'm not saying that she should give names and backstories and such of every random extra that died.  Just that she shouldn't have been so afraid of the word 'kill.'  Loads of people died in Animorphs.  That should have been a much bigger deal than it was, that's all I'm saying.

And maybe it would have earned the books a higher rating, but . . . so?  They would have been better books for it, and if the publishers can't deal with that, then poo on them! 

[anijen21]

maybe it was less the author and more the first person narration...I can't picture anyone besides Rachel maybe being comfortable saying "I killed like eight Hork-Bajir that night." And from what I remember, one of the most brutally-written scenes was the mean Rachel one where she ran over a bunch of Hork-Bajir in #32

[tobiasthehawk]

I personally believe it should of been described to even more detail. War is horrible and frighting. A life changing experience and I think it needs to be written about in a deep descriptive way.