11 KiB
Some Superficial Analysis of Animorphs: The Reckoning (Spoilers All)
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Author: u/4t0m Chaos Legion*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4od6p0/some_superficial_analysis_of_animorphs_the/
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Score: 20
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Created: 2016-06-16T12:59:51
Post:
The author asked for long comments, so I've written some scattered thoughts. Add your own!
So, despite being something your annoying high school english teacher talked about constantly themes are a real thing and can be interesting to think about. When you find a theme of a story, you've discovered something about the underlying structure of the work: why certain things happened, why certain things were emphasized, what the point of it all was. When you read something with a solid theme, you walk away having explored an idea from a bunch of different angles, and the book's plot acts as a mnemonic device for all of the hopefully interesting and complex thoughts that the book contains.
For example, some themes of HPMOR are that not destroying the world is really hard, and that you are less sane than you think you are (Yes. You. Not just average students. Not just Chaos Legion generals who've read some LessWrong. But you, even if you think you pretty much have it together). As /u/alexanderwales pointed out in his review, HPMOR is thematically really sloppy, but it's still fun to think about the plot from this angle, to rethink all of Harry's Crowning Moments of Awesome and contemptuous thoughts about basically everyone in the context of the larger game, which he spends most of the story not even playing. Once you've identified the theme (and actually thought about it in the context of the story, as opposed to just limited to the chapters where it is explicitly discussed), you can hopefully walk away from HPMOR having learned something on a gut level about humility, beyond all of the individual bits of information about cognitive biases and rationality and so on.
Does Animorphs: The Reckoning have a theme? I wasn't really sure so I started thinking about each character. Despite the repeated mentions here about each character "having their own brand of rationality," I don't think anyone has explicitly written it out. Let's do that. I'm just doing this from memory, so I'm going to do a poor job. Comment with suggestions.
####Characters Jake
Strengths - Models others really well.
Weaknesses - Overconfident? Excessive empathy leads to disaster?
Arc - ???
Marco
Strengths - Standard rationalist guy? Gets it?
Weaknesses - Not a leader? (There's got to be something better).
Arc - ??? / MarcoxRachel <3 <3 <3
Rachel
Strengths - Brave. Strong. Knows own limitations.
Weaknesses - Too quick to act. May not realize that she can overcome her limitations.
Arc - I think she's sort of in the middle of her arc. She made a big mistake early on by taking reckless, unilateral action. However recently she seems to have started thinking explicitly as a soldier, someone who will execute the plans of others, who will take risks and bloody her hands so that others won't have to. I'm hoping she'll find some middle ground such that she can stay agenty without ruining everything.
Cassie
Strengths - Moral humility.
Weaknesses - Indecision. Lack of confidence. Inability to spread her memes.
Arc - Learning to act under moral uncertainty. Hopefully not ruining everything when you do?
Tobias
Strengths - Perspective. He gets the scale of the invasion immediately, and has no time for the rest of the group's bickering. Even though he totally falls apart in this last chapter, he does so in such a lovely way.
Weaknesses - DON'T YOU DARE.
Arc - Learning to work with people (Bailed on the group early on, but also contacted Ax and served as the representative to the government)? Caring about people with whom he doesn't have a personal connection (Started out mostly caring about Garrett, then saved David who it was explicitly noted looks nothing like Garrett)? What else?
####Theme? One stab at a theme, hammered home by the most recent chapter but also tying into everything that's happened so far, is that everything is unpredictable and more will go wrong than you expect (even accounting for... and so on).
We see this in the aftermath of every "clever plan" the Animorphs execute, and in the consequences of their split-second emotion-driven actions as well. We see it in the Cassie's heroic final moments, and discussion from people who've read canon suggests that rescuing David will lead to disaster as well (maybe the theme is that you should just be evil?). The sense of humility this seems to be driving for is manifested both in the difference in scale between the invading and defending forces, and again through the introduction of the god-like players orchestrating things (mostly) behind the scenes.
I imagine something interesting could be drawn from the fact that the world is teaching the Animorphs how unpredictable everything is and how little control they have, when the game the gods are playing is based on predictions of the Butterfly Effects of minuscule interventions.
This is a bit easy though, and thus unsatisfying. Also I'm not really sure it's a really a theme in the first place. We can go deeper. I'm just not sure how just yet.
So, anyone have thoughts on the strengths, weaknesses, and arcs of any of the characters? And besides the whole thing with the shapeshifting teenagers and the alien invasion, what is this story about?
Comments:
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (23 hours later)
I'm not sure Marco actually has any strong weaknesses, actually. Well, none that are relevant to the story so far. Which kind of makes sense to me: when the introductory line of your character is "I try to get things right as often as possible", you can afford to have him not to have any major flaws that are relevant to planning a high-scales guerilla war. Marco is sort of the right character for the right job.
Actually, Rachel aside, I don't really think any of the main characters have a strong theme or a strong arc. They each have a strong personality and a strong, I don't know, decision tree? And their individual stories flow from their approach to the problems they're confronted with.
If I had to name one theme for the story, it would be "Don't try to do everything yourself, and don't take unilateral action". Visser's main weakness is that his only advisor is a voluntarily biased hostile. Cassie gets killed when she's manipulated into not listening to the rest of the group. Jake almost gets killed by not listening to Marco. Rachel screws up everything the first time she strikes on her own. Tobias wastes weeks trying to do his intelligence-gathering op alone.
Also, "Don't engage in wishful thinking" seems like a recurring sub-theme.
u/4t0m [+3] Chaos Legion (a day later)
Yeah, "don't take unilateral action" works well.
You don't see Cassie's arc as being something like "paralyzed by moral uncertainty and unwilling to choose among bad options" to "at least do something, and save whoever you can"?
Also you don't think Tobias is learning to trust people? It seems like a change in one of his fundamental character traits at the start of the story.
As for Marco, it isn't really a weakness, but I think he's wrong about Jake. Since Jake can't explain how he's making his predictions, and since it seems impossible to Marco to correctly draw the conclusions Jake is drawing with the evidence Jake has, he's kind of writing off Jake's incredible predictive power. It seems like he hasn't quite updated on the fact that Jake is so consistently correct.
Anyway, if everyone doesn't have some sort of arc by the end of the story, I'll finally have a decent criticism. And I do hope there's a theme. It doesn't make a book bad to lack a clear theme or characters who learn and change, but it does make a book worse as art. I really do see "theme" as like the point of a book / why the book needs to exist. It's fine if the reasons for a book's existence are "it'll be fun" and "the Animorphs books could have been so much better," but would be a bit unambitious on the part of /u/TK17Studios, and he hasn't let me down so far.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (a day later)
You don't see Cassie's arc as being something like "paralyzed by moral uncertainty and unwilling to choose among bad options" to "at least do something, and save whoever you can"?
Also you don't think Tobias is learning to trust people? It seems like a change in one of his fundamental character traits at the start of the story.
I don't know. I guess it depends on how you define "arc" or "theme", but I think I see Rachel's arc as more of thing because she's actually trying to consider and work on her issues, and her chapters reflect on her progress in working through them, while Tobias and Cassie's issues are more incidental to their chapters. They're there because it's their personality, but, I don't know, it's not actually a plot point?
u/4t0m [+2] Chaos Legion (a day later)
Yeah, I guess I don't think a character's arc has to be something they explicitly recognize, just how they are changed by participating in the narrative.
Also, I didn't say this earlier, but I definitely think Marco needs to have flaws/weaknesses. He doesn't need to have clearly defined negative traits, but at the very least he has to be less than perfectly rational/intelligent/quick-witted. Probably you agree with me about that.
u/CoolGuy54 [+2] (10 days later)
Marco's weakness: under-rates others. He acts like he's Ender Wiggins or Yudkosky in a book written by Yudkowsky: always right, always being held back or led astray by the weaker minds around him, always being reminded that he should only trust his own judgement, not the flawed assessments of those around him.
Never mind that in this story he happens to mostly be right....
u/4t0m [+2] Chaos Legion (10 days later)
Good point!
u/creatureofthewood [+2] (6 hours later)
/u/TK17Studios
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (12 hours later)
I'm ... not sure what I'm supposed to do, here. I mean, upvotes as a matter of course, but it seemed like 4t0m wanted you guys to weigh in, more than me. I have thoughts.
u/creatureofthewood [+3] (12 hours later)
nothing, it was just to notify you that this thread exists. Just in case you don't obsessively check /r/rational every day haha.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (13 hours later)
one of you one of you
I mostly just lurk in other threads, though.
u/4t0m [+2] Chaos Legion (a day later)
Yeah. I wish there had been more discussion. At least /u/CouteauBleu came to my rescue in the end.