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animorphslj...and how their homework was suffering as a result...when exactly did they write down their stories?
I think we've touched on this topic before, in one of the character discussions or something, but it's something that's irked me again as I'm rereading the ending arc and I thought perhaps we could go a bit deeper.
I know, I know. It's a book series, and it's not Jake or Cassie or anyone in the books actually writing and most normal people wouldn't be getting their panties in a wad, but for a series that actually has a fairly impressive continuity (other than that thought-speaking while not in morph in the first book), we're given some fairly contradictory clues as to the stories' origins, insofar as they exist as words-on-paper.
Throughout the series you just assume that it's first-person stream-of-consciousness kind of stuff, that they're not actually writing it down, you're just miraculously reading their thoughts--like any first-person book. (See Bones, The Lovely.) But then in #53, when Jake reveals his last name...
A) he refers to "Mighty Jake the Yeerk Killer," a nickname he hasn't earned yet (in continuity), and
B) he also refers to "the secret accounts we've kept."
Okay, so they've all been keeping these books as diaries? Yeah, that seems safe--if, say, Tom had stumbled across any one of Jake's, it's going to be fairly obvious even without the last names. "My bro and his BFF and the girl he's loved forever and our cousin are four of the Animorphs!" Even if it's on a computer and password-protected, I don't imagine that'd be a challenge for Tom's Yeerk. (The fact that their security measures aren't really all that secure is something else I know we've touched on.)
And then, Rachel's last thoughts are cut off midsentence and there is no freaking possible way that she could have ever, ever, EVER written them down. So...WTF?
Even allowing for the idea that every character spent enough time at Ax's scoop to type it up on his computer and Ax was maintaining the collection...when were the kids planning this? (And Rachel's last thoughts still make no sense.) Whose idea was it to write everything down? Was there another meeting in the barn after each adventure and they voted on who had the closest tie to the action? "Well, we were dealing with Visser One again, so obviously Marco's got writing duty"?
And how were narrators chosen for each book? Since each kid explains the whole scenario over again at the beginning of each book, it's not like all six were chronicling the whole war the whole time, and the best parts of any one account were pulled to make books. (I kind of have to believe that if that were the case, we wouldn't have had that book with Jake reading his Civil War grandpa's diary.)
Oh, and what are the odds that a group of five random mallrats are all going to have such good grammar? And, well, writing finesse? I guess they could've had someone clean up the grammar afterward, but that doesn't necessarily allow for things like dramatic tension ("Tobias can't write this one because we all think he's dead for like half the book!").
I'd almost buy the "literary agent" theory that so many people attribute to Sherlock Holmes/A. Conan Doyle (ie, the characters are real, but to protect anonymity the stories are handed over to an author to publish under his/her own name--here's the TVTropes link if you don't mind losing half your Sunday--there's actually discussion of Animorphs under the Literature section and they couldn't come to a conclusion, either)...but obviously the only disasters California has suffered in recent history have been of the natural variety, obvs.Unfortunately we are not so lucky as to live in a world where Andalites and morphing actually exist. Boo.
(Then again, looking over the actual article, there's this: "Some Speculative Fiction series take this a step further, lifting a page from quantum mechanics and postulating that all works of fiction are reflections of various Alternate Universes somewhere in a multidimensional meta-space-time. Often, this will be revealed during a trip by the characters to (or from) the "real" world. Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast revolves around this idea, and he coined the term "World-As-Myth" to describe it. It is a kind of metafiction known as "transfictionality".")
But that still doesn't reconcile with the fact that Jake pretty explicitly says they wrote their own accounts (editing after the fact by a book editor before publication still being allowed).
Something that has crossed my mind is the possibility--given the other things we've seen Andalite technology do--that they were all given/implanted with some kind of thought-recording device/chip at the time they got morphing technology, and the accounts were drafted from those, possibly by a third party who wrote them in present tense after the war was over. This would explain Rachel speaking from "beyond the grave" if you assume her human body was alive until her thoughts cut off, but it's discredited by the fact that, well, it's never mentioned, ever. (If this were the case, I'd be satisfied by a footnote/foreword/whatnot stating "these stores are novelized from accounts taken from the recordings blah blah blah.") Even Elfangor's hirac delest had to be expressly narrated, not taken automatically.
So GRARGH. Pleas share with me your nerdy hypothesis and/or fanwank. Meta is awesome.
I think we've touched on this topic before, in one of the character discussions or something, but it's something that's irked me again as I'm rereading the ending arc and I thought perhaps we could go a bit deeper.
I know, I know. It's a book series, and it's not Jake or Cassie or anyone in the books actually writing and most normal people wouldn't be getting their panties in a wad, but for a series that actually has a fairly impressive continuity (other than that thought-speaking while not in morph in the first book), we're given some fairly contradictory clues as to the stories' origins, insofar as they exist as words-on-paper.
Throughout the series you just assume that it's first-person stream-of-consciousness kind of stuff, that they're not actually writing it down, you're just miraculously reading their thoughts--like any first-person book. (See Bones, The Lovely.) But then in #53, when Jake reveals his last name...
A) he refers to "Mighty Jake the Yeerk Killer," a nickname he hasn't earned yet (in continuity), and
B) he also refers to "the secret accounts we've kept."
Okay, so they've all been keeping these books as diaries? Yeah, that seems safe--if, say, Tom had stumbled across any one of Jake's, it's going to be fairly obvious even without the last names. "My bro and his BFF and the girl he's loved forever and our cousin are four of the Animorphs!" Even if it's on a computer and password-protected, I don't imagine that'd be a challenge for Tom's Yeerk. (The fact that their security measures aren't really all that secure is something else I know we've touched on.)
And then, Rachel's last thoughts are cut off midsentence and there is no freaking possible way that she could have ever, ever, EVER written them down. So...WTF?
Even allowing for the idea that every character spent enough time at Ax's scoop to type it up on his computer and Ax was maintaining the collection...when were the kids planning this? (And Rachel's last thoughts still make no sense.) Whose idea was it to write everything down? Was there another meeting in the barn after each adventure and they voted on who had the closest tie to the action? "Well, we were dealing with Visser One again, so obviously Marco's got writing duty"?
And how were narrators chosen for each book? Since each kid explains the whole scenario over again at the beginning of each book, it's not like all six were chronicling the whole war the whole time, and the best parts of any one account were pulled to make books. (I kind of have to believe that if that were the case, we wouldn't have had that book with Jake reading his Civil War grandpa's diary.)
Oh, and what are the odds that a group of five random mallrats are all going to have such good grammar? And, well, writing finesse? I guess they could've had someone clean up the grammar afterward, but that doesn't necessarily allow for things like dramatic tension ("Tobias can't write this one because we all think he's dead for like half the book!").
I'd almost buy the "literary agent" theory that so many people attribute to Sherlock Holmes/A. Conan Doyle (ie, the characters are real, but to protect anonymity the stories are handed over to an author to publish under his/her own name--here's the TVTropes link if you don't mind losing half your Sunday--there's actually discussion of Animorphs under the Literature section and they couldn't come to a conclusion, either)...but obviously the only disasters California has suffered in recent history have been of the natural variety, obvs.
(Then again, looking over the actual article, there's this: "Some Speculative Fiction series take this a step further, lifting a page from quantum mechanics and postulating that all works of fiction are reflections of various Alternate Universes somewhere in a multidimensional meta-space-time. Often, this will be revealed during a trip by the characters to (or from) the "real" world. Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast revolves around this idea, and he coined the term "World-As-Myth" to describe it. It is a kind of metafiction known as "transfictionality".")
But that still doesn't reconcile with the fact that Jake pretty explicitly says they wrote their own accounts (editing after the fact by a book editor before publication still being allowed).
Something that has crossed my mind is the possibility--given the other things we've seen Andalite technology do--that they were all given/implanted with some kind of thought-recording device/chip at the time they got morphing technology, and the accounts were drafted from those, possibly by a third party who wrote them in present tense after the war was over. This would explain Rachel speaking from "beyond the grave" if you assume her human body was alive until her thoughts cut off, but it's discredited by the fact that, well, it's never mentioned, ever. (If this were the case, I'd be satisfied by a footnote/foreword/whatnot stating "these stores are novelized from accounts taken from the recordings blah blah blah.") Even Elfangor's hirac delest had to be expressly narrated, not taken automatically.
So GRARGH. Pleas share with me your nerdy hypothesis and/or fanwank. Meta is awesome.
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