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Author Topic: I feel rather differently.  (Read 2136 times)

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Offline Fishkiller25

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I feel rather differently.
« on: August 25, 2011, 05:59:22 AM »
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.

----

"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.

----

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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Offline TobiasMasonPark

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #1 on: August 25, 2011, 11:50:42 AM »
     Doubtful.
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Offline MoppingBear

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #2 on: August 25, 2011, 12:34:43 PM »
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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Offline Estelore

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2011, 06:54:22 PM »
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. ^_^
« Last Edit: August 25, 2011, 06:56:24 PM by Estelore »
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Offline Blazing Angel

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #4 on: August 25, 2011, 07:28:15 PM »
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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Offline Estelore

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #5 on: August 25, 2011, 07:33:23 PM »
Trapping him was Cassie's plan, NBA. Rachel was the person Cassie picked to do the trapping.
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The universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. There is, in truth, no Past, only a memory of the Past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. The only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

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Offline Blazing Angel

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #6 on: August 25, 2011, 07:56:12 PM »
What about the ax living thing?
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Offline Estelore

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #7 on: August 25, 2011, 08:21:33 PM »
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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Offline Chad32

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #8 on: August 25, 2011, 08:26:12 PM »
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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Offline Blazing Angel

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #9 on: August 25, 2011, 08:28:34 PM »
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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Offline Estelore

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #10 on: August 25, 2011, 08:49:23 PM »
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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The universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. There is, in truth, no Past, only a memory of the Past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. The only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

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Offline MoppingBear

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #11 on: August 25, 2011, 08:57:37 PM »
Quote from: Master of the drunk fist. on August 25, 2011, 08:28:34 PM
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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Offline Blazing Angel

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #12 on: August 25, 2011, 09:04:06 PM »
That isnt really assimilation so much as......body snatching
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Offline MoppingBear

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #13 on: August 25, 2011, 10:02:17 PM »
Quote from: Master of the drunk fist. on August 25, 2011, 09:04:06 PM
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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Offline Blazing Angel

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Re: I feel rather differently.
« Reply #14 on: August 25, 2011, 10:03:40 PM »
I thought he kind of absorbed ax and was able to take his form?
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