Do you think the series is too brutal?

[Oceanspray]

Animorphs is aimed towards children, yet there are quite a few times where limbs are lost, blood is flowing, and gratuitous violence is all around.  Do you think the series was a bit too violent for its target audience?

[TobiasMasonPark]

     Yes, for the target audience. That's why I scoff at people who say it's for kids. I'm confused as to why it was a kids series anyhow, and not for teens.

     But is it too brutal for any genre? No. Not in the slightest. And, now that I think about it, maybe that was point of the series being for kids. Maybe K.A and Grant wanted to treat their audience like thinking people instead as "kids". Then again, that could be good or bad.

     

[11:11]

In my opinion no, because of the way it was written. While there were lots of battles injuries throughout the series I never found myself going "oh God!" and getting really disturbed by anything. The worst that I can remember is when Rachel picked up her severed arm and clubbed a Hork Bajir with it, but even that wasn't that bad. To me I think the way K. A. wrote it and described the violence through the characters' perspectives was appropriate for the target age. The themes however, you can definitely see transcending the "8-12" or whatever target age range. I don't know, just looking how Animorphs, a kid's series, compares violence-wise to some of the teen/young adult series out there I think it's appropriate.

[wotw2112]

I have to go with no.  Mainly because a lot of the worst violence happens to them when they're in morph.  This has two important consequences (or at least it did for me).

First, the damage is being done to animal bodies so it's easier to divorce yourself from the true horror (I am definitely NOT advocating cruelty to animals, I'm just saying it's hard to connect in any meaningful way with someone "losing a paw").

Second, there is an overriding sense throughout the entire series (for all she tries to set it up otherwise) that these injuries, no matter how bad, are almost irrelevant because a quick morph-out will erase them entirely.  It makes the violence and injuries rote over the course of the series as they ALWAYS find some way to escape them (until the end when she decided to finally kill one of them off to make a point she skirted the entire series...)  If they had lost someone earlier on in the series...  But I am digressing...

Personally I was always more disturbed when I would hear about Ax chopping off some poor controller's hand.  But then, they were the bad guys...

[Noelle]

I really don't think so.  Even if it was violent, it wasn't graphic, and it didn't glorify the violence.  Really the closest it got to glorifying violence was Rachel's character, and it was pretty much common 'knowledge' through the series that her sanity was possibly deteriorating as the series progressed.

I mean, compare it to kids video games, it's nothing compared to a lot of them.

[NateSean]

I'm going to respond to this question by citing some of the other things that were "aimed at children" in my lifetime up until the Animorpsh series came out, and why they are far worse than what was presented to us.

1: Tom and Jerry = A vain and suicidal Gosling.
2: Every Tex Avery Cartoon ever written = Gun violence. Farm tool and kitchen utensil violence. Mallets and Anvils. Explosives.
3: Pokemon = A game that allegedly teaches kids about nature...the kind of nature where it's okay to collect wild animals and make them fight one another purely for the gain of the trainer of course.

Animorphs was always geared towards the "Young Adult" section of every bookstore I had ever found it in. And by the time a child has reached to the age group that would be considered young adult, he has all ready seen far more violent forms of entertainment. Unless he's Amish or has overly religious parents. The term children has a broad number of applications that could even include a parent referring to her adult offspring as "my children".

[SkyMorpher]

A lot of people would beg to differ on the Pokemon part, though. I won't debate it here, it's not the place, but it's more complicated than that.

[NateSean]

I'm going to add Doctor Who and Star Trek to my list. The target audience is broad but both shows are iconic and have been popular with kids for forty to fifty years.

Both can be kid friendly at times but you know that both shows have had very violent moments. Both shows featured characters who were killed in brutal and painful ways and even with whatever standards were in place for whatever time each respective run of the show was filmed, no matter what punches were pulled like a lack of blood, or no dismemberment, some of those deaths were on screen and still quite frightening.

[MP Brennan]

Honestly, I didn't notice the violence that much when I first picked up the series at the age of 9.  I remember being a little disturbed by the gore at the end of #10, but I think that was mostly because they made a point of dwelling on the aftermath.  It's only on my recent re-read that I found myself going "wow, that's a lot of amputated limbs and eviscerations . . . good thing my mom never read these back in the day!"  At the time it just washed over me, not leaving much more of an impression than any superhero cartoon.  I think the books were written to be fun and exciting for kids but disturbing once you matured enough to understand what you were reading.

[matthew]

I will go with no, because most of the gore is animal/alien gore.

[Gumby]

Probably the most brutal scene for me was when (can't remember the book) Tobias in Hork-Bajir morph lost his entire front beak to one of the Blue-Band soldiers.

[SkyMorpher]

I forgot about that one. The one I remember was Marco losing about a third of his dolphin body in one of the early books.

[wildweathel]

So I read a lot of amateur fiction.  Without editors or Standards and Practices to rein authors in, things can get really gory.  Or horrific-attempt-at-sexy.  Or both.

Ugh.  I'd name titles, but... no.

One of the nicer things of the pony fandom is that, unlike most fandoms, the most trigger-pushing stuff gets segregated off into a mature category.  I've critiqued a few stories on that side of things, made a few "is this really teen-appropriate?" calls, and I may have a credit or two on stories that I can't discuss per RAF rules.  But unlike, say, Pokemon fanfics on FF.n, it doesn't get lumped in with everything else.

So, when I was reading The Hunger Games, I was in for a bit of a shock with one character's death.  Eye horror, decaying or dissolving bodies, that sort of thing happens in My Little Pony stories, but generally not without a content warning.  And if it does, people get unhappy.  So I'd gotten to think that it wouldn't be published for young adults.

Heh.  I've heard that it's particularly American to censor sexuality more heavily than violence.  Probably true here.  Tobias and Rachel might hold hands (GASP!), but we won't have any issues with dismemberment and extended torture scenes.

Now, here's a fun perspective: Dr. Seuss ran into some censorship early in his career.  "The Seven Lady Godivas" was an... interesting case of a very Seuss-style picture book for adults with no-so-attractive nude cartoon ladies.  The publisher was more excited about the thing than the doctor.

But they weren't so sure about the anti-tyranny "Yertle the Turtle."  Because of the following line:

"And that plain little Mack did a plain little thing. He burped!"

See, "burp" is a bad word - or it was at least at the time.

Or, well, the work of Shel Silverstein.

Now, I haven't read much Animorphs lately, but from what I remember, it would be questionable under typical pony-fan standards.

And let's not forget that K.A.A. has written for Harlequin.  I would love to get my hands on those books.

[Cornson]

"Do you think the series is too brutal?"

I would personally say no, but I was 16 when I read it the first time, and i have only read the first 8 books.

[Overtired]

 I think the serires has a lot of what tv tropes calls fridge horror. Things go over kids heads or they are caught up in the action and don't dwell on the more gorey aspects. It isn't until after you put the book down and reflect on what you read that you realize how horrific some of that stuff was. And no matter how much damager the Animorphs took their human bodies always made it out without a scratch. So it is easier to see what happened as action rather then violence.