Animorphs and Discrimination

[blue_rampion]

Before we get into the minor character discussions, there is a topic I've been wanting to bring up here - discrimination and how they are dealt with and portrayed in the books. We see examples of racism, speciesism, sexism, and discrimination against the disabled, but they're all examined to different degrees and in different ways.

With racism, we see that most prominently with Cassie ("I can turn white" indeed). Marco gets all of one line about being followed by mall security, but they're both characters that would have both dealt with racism in their lives. But overall, while it's brought up on occasion we don't really go too heavily into this issue.

Now, speciesism - that we see a ton of, and I'd argue that a lot of the issues that usually come up in a discussion of racism are in fact explored through speciesism. All of the various aliens have opinions and stereotypes of the other aliens - the Andalites are 'arrogant', the humans are just meat to the Yeerks, the Yeerks are all 'evil', and Hork-Bajir and all nice and sweet and stupid. They've all got preconceived notions of each other, some of them good but a lot of them not good.

Sexism isn't gone into too much, but the series touches on it every now and then - Rachel's got some strong feminist leanings, and we have the Axis of Awesome assuming that the Governor is a man.

And as for discrimination against the disabled...well, we definitely go into that, and this is definitely one of the major failings of Andalite culture.

There's probably also other forms of discrimination in the books that I can't think of, but my questions to you are: Do you think the series do a good job of depicting these issues? Could it (and should it) have gone into more detail on any of them?

Comments

[natural-blue-26.livejournal.com]

Well Uhura/Kirk would be interracial and Uhura/Spock would be inter species.... So it's eitherCassie/Jake or Rachel/Tobias...

[taira602.livejournal.com]

Well, they would both be interracial (and I think it was Uhura/Kirk anyway... my knowledge of Star Trek is limited), and it was definitely about Jake and Cassie. Sci-fi may be "about" aliens but they are all ultimately played by humans on earth, and thus any relations come with the cultural baggage of race and gender, etc., to the audience, as much the writers would like it to be "different" in space. And for real now.... Spock barely looks any different from a human anyway, so that's how he's perceived, to the very human audience.

[cxrdevil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was a huge deal back in the day. It was Uhura/Kirk, FYI and their lips never actually touched - it was such a sensitive subject that they literally had to fade to black and turn away from the camera on a kiss because she was black and he was white. Not surprised at all that KAA wanted to pay homage to it, it was a huge event in the ~media world.