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

[anijen21.livejournal.com]

okay, I getchu. That makes sense. Kind of a suspension-of-disbelief plot hole than "IN BOOK ONE WHY JAKE CAN THOUGHT SPEAK AS HUMAN?" kind of thing

[acts_of_tekla]

Exactly -- I suppose the test is, "If I got rid of this plot hole, what would happen?" In most cases, the answer is "nothing" or "the book would be much shorter (because it's an Idiot Plot)"; but if the answer is "the entire series implodes", it's probably a candidate for the One Plot Hole rule. That's why I call it the One Plot Hole Rule -- if a story requires major suspension of disbelief for more than one element, it indicates lazy writing. The other test I use for the One Plot Hole Rule is, "Can I come up with a way in which the story could have been constructed so as to eliminate the necessity for the One Plot Hole?" If I can't, then I can hardly blame the author for not being able to figure it out. In the case of the morphing cube, I have a couple of ideas that sort of work, but they would substantially change the story, and in ways that I don't particularly like.

So...yeah. Thus concludes my digression on silly, arbitrary "rules" that only I care about. Thanks for humoring me, y'all.