Why were we allowed to read Animorphs as kids, anyway?
It’s a question I see come up in this fandom again and again: How the heck did Animorphs books make it into school libraries and book fairs across the country to be marketed to eight-year-olds when they feature drug addiction, body dysmorphia, suicide, imperialism, PTSD, racism, sexism, body horror, grey-and-black morality, slavery, torture, major character death, forced cannibalism, and genocide?
To be clear, I don’t actually know the answer to that question. It is, admittedly, a little odd to consider, especially in light of the fact that Bridge to Terabithia gets banned for killing one character (much less several dozen), The Witches gets banned for having a character trapped in the body of an animal (without even going into issues of predation or body horror), The Chocolate War gets banned for having moderately disturbing descriptions of violence between teenagers, Bird gets banned for dealing with the realities of drug addiction, Winnie the Pooh gets banned for having talking animals, Harriet the Spy gets banned because the main character lies to her parents, and The Secret Annex gets banned because Anne Frank describes normal teenage puberty experiences throughout her diary. And yet Animorphs was marketed to children as young as six nationwide, and (despite selling better than even some classics like The Chocolate War at its peak) no one ever bothered to burn those books or cry that they would rot children’s minds.
If I had to take a wildly inexpert guess, knowing as little as I do about the publishing industry and the standards parent groups use to determine whether books are “moral,” I would venture to speculate that there were several different factors at work.
Grown-ups judge books by their covers just as much as children do. For proof of that phenomenon, just scroll through the Animorphs tag on tumblr, any relevant forum on Reddit, or any old post that uses that stupid meme. The book covers suggest that the stories inside will be silly, campy adventures about the escapist fantasy of turning into a dolphin or a lizard. People don’t look too closely at the books with the neon candy-colored backgrounds and the ridiculous photoshop foregrounds, especially not when they imply a promise that the novels themselves will be the most inane form of sci fi.
There’s no sex. To quote the show K.A. Applegate most loves to reference: “I guess parents don’t give a crap about violence if there’s sex things to worry about.” The large majority of books that get banned from schools are thrown out for having sexual content: the freaking dictionary was banned from California schools for explaining what “oral sex” is, And Tango Makes Three was removed from shelves because apparently married couples are inherently shocking if they happen to be gay, and the list of most-banned books in the U.S. is full of books which explain in perfectly child-appropriate terms what puberty is and where babies come from. Animorphs, by contrast, never gets more explicit than Marco calling Taylor a “skank” or Jake and Cassie’s few stolen kisses. The only mentions of nudity are implied (and even then only when the kids are first coming out of morph), and the most explicit thing we ever hear about Rachel and Tobias doing is staying up late in her room to do her homework together. It becomes unbelievably obvious in retrospect that there’s a decent level of queer representation in the books (Marco repeatedly describing both Jake and Ax as “beautiful” or “handsome,” Mertil and Gafinilan, multiple characters casually morphing cross-gender), but it’s also possible to overlook the queerness if you don’t know it’s there. There might be explicit autocannibalism in this series, but at least it never uses the word “nipple.”
There’s no profanity. Again, there’s a strong implication of profanity—Rachel and Jake especially often “use certain words to describe things” in a way that makes it incredibly obvious what they’re saying, and context clues tell us Ax says “fuck” at least once—but given that the strongest expletive that comes up with any regularity is “good grief,” this can act as an obvious (if dumb) heuristic for parents that a book is appropriate for children. People love to count the swear words in Catcher in the Rye when describing why it should be banned (generally without, heaven forbid, reading the goddamn book). Other works such as To Kill a Mockingbird have been banned for using a single word, regardless of context. If a parent is looking to object to a single word or set of words as grounds that a book is inappropriate, the worst they’re going to find is half a dozen instances of “heck” and maybe a dozen of “crap.”
Some of the worst content is context-dependent. As I pointed out above, at least five or six different characters (Tobias, Arbron, Alloran, Tom, Allison Kim) attempt suicide over the course of the series. At least three or four species that we know about (Hork-Bajir, Howlers, Nartec) get largely or entirely annihilated. However, in order to understand that any of that occurs, you actually have to read the books. Not only that, but you have to read them closely. Cates pointed out that some of the most disturbing passages from #33 are, in a vacuum, just descriptions of blinking diodes and weird hallucinations. The description of Tobias attempting suicide is just a long list of mall venues that flash by as he zooms full-speed toward a glass wall. Even the passages with Rachel threatening David (or carrying out those threats) don’t make much sense unless you know how a two-hour limit on morphing works. For the parent skimming these books looking for objectionable content, nothing jumps out.
The books are, in fact, appropriate for children. This quality is what (I believe) prevented parents like mine from taking the books away from us kids even after reading several entire novels out loud to us before bed. The books contain violence, but they sure as hell don’t condone it. They touch on subjects such as drug addiction and parental abuse, but they do so from the point of view of realistic-feeling kids and don’t fetishize that kind of content. Most of the lessons contained within are tough—that there’s no such thing as a simple moral code, that people with the power to prevent atrocity also have the obligation to do so, that members of the hegemony aren’t actually all that special, that the world is a scary and violent place for most people who have to live in it—but they’re also important lessons, and good ones to teach to children. I would be comfortable with my own children (assuming I had any) reading these books at the same age I started reading them, in first and second grade.
You have to understand the fictional science to understand (most of) the horror. Trying to describe some of the most horrifying passages in Animorphs is like “and then they flushed the pool for cleaning, but the pool was full of slugs!” or “but she explained to her son that she had to have a parasite in her brain so the parasite’s friends wouldn’t be suspicious!” or “and then the hawk ate a rabbit, as hawks are wont to do!” while one’s non-fandalite friends stand there and go “… so what?” The laws of Applied Phlebotinum in the series turn those earlier moments into a war crime, an assisted quasi-suicide, and a loss of identity, respectively; however, you have to understand the laws of applied phlebotinum in order to know that. For anyone not reading closely, the horror can be overlooked. For those of us who are reading closely, phrases such as “host breeding program,” “fugue state,” “eight minutes too late,” and “the howlers are all children” (or any mention at all of people being injured while taxxons are in the vicinity, for that matter) are enough to chill your blood. But again, for that to happen, you actually have to read the books. Which we can assume most of the people skimming for curse words do not.
Some of those exact same premises wouldn’t be horror at all if handled by a different author. K.A. Applegate subverts the “wake up, go to school, save the world” trope; normally premises that feature teen superheroes fighting aliens are considered appropriate for all ages (e.g. Avengers Assemble, Kim Possible, Teen Titans) because they feature bloodless violence and gloss over the question of whether aliens are people too. The utterly arbitrary standard that kids should be allowed to see violence but not blood allows for justification of movies like Prince Caspian, Night at the Museum, and Ghostbusters to feature characters getting murdered in all kinds of ways in PG-rated movies. “Violence” and “sci-fi violence” are two different categories according to the MPAA rating system; guess which one gets a lower rating. Of course, there’s a crapton of science showing it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference to kids whether or not they see blood, they’re still gonna learn violent behaviors and potentially be traumatized, but again where the arbitrary standard persists. Therefore, if most of the premises of Animorphs books don’t sound horrifying, they must not actually be horrifying. Right?
The books are almost as light as they are heavy. Part of the reason I have comfortably loaned my copies of the early books to friends with ten-year-old kids is that it’s not primarily a downer series. Animorphs aren’t R.L. Stein books, which always end on (the implication of) the protagonist’s death. They’re not uniform horrorfests like Dolls in the Attic or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Applegate doesn’t fetishize violence the way that Cassandra Clare and Ransom Riggs do. The most-quoted passages from these books are the ones that are funny, not horrifying. These are stories about the joy of aliens discovering Volkswagen Beetles, about the wonder of being able to fly away from one’s life, about friendship and the power of love being enough to make the gods themselves sit up and pay attention. The whole saga tells the story of six kids sacrificing more than their lives to save their families, and of how that sacrifice brings down an empire. I suspect that many parents were either paying so little attention they didn’t realize these stories could be classified as battle epics or as kiddie horror, or else were paying so much attention that they concluded that this series is a battle epic worth reading.
Then again, maybe there was a whole other set of market pressures which accounted for the lack of censorship which I don’t know about. If so, the economics side of tumblr is encouraged to enlighten me.
Speaking from my experience as an (ex) public librarian here, I’d say that all of those are valid points. But, ultimately, I think that they - and a few others I was going to add (around the value of science fiction and the lack of formal study or requirement to read) - come back to a single factor:
The people most likely to complain are least likely to read.
I’ve never encountered a wowser who was well-read. And by well-read, I don’t mean ‘well-versed in the English Literary Canon of Dead White Dudes’. I mean someone who has read, who reads, who takes enjoyment from reading. Someone who reads because it is a pleasure to do so.
Someone who doesn’t read will simultaneously under and overestimate the impact that a book can have on its reader. That’s human nature, cognitive bias at play. In particular, we have interplay between:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect People who don’t have the skills to properly engage with a text will overestimate their ability to do so, and underestimate others’
The Third Person Effect People perceive that media has a greater impact on others than themselves
Trviality Bias People latch onto minor, incidental details of something because they are easier to understand.
Empathy Gap People are very bad at judging their own emotional states, and the states of others
In other words, wowsers who don’t read imagine themselves to be expert readers when in reality they’re not engaging with the text very effectively at all. What they’re doing instead is latching onto trivial controversies - a mention of sex, a swear word, talk of the Dreaded Gays, Are You There God, it’s Me Menstruation - which trigger a visceral, emotional reaction. And then, because they imagine themselves to be well-adjusted experts, they presume that everyone else will have an even more extreme reaction. Ban that Book!
But because they don’t have the skills to engage with the text in anything more than a trivial fashion, they don’t understand subtext. At all. Anything that isn’t obvious, there on the page (and some of the stuff that is) - that shit just flies right on over.
Meanwhile, librarians tend to be both expert readers and good judges of reading competency in others. And being experts and good judges (these two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand), a good librarian knows that reading expertise, and the ability to engage with a story beyond what’s just written on the page, is something that is developed over time. A reader can only engage with a book to the extent of their expertise.
An eight-year-old who reads Animorphs and thinks it’s a rollicking adventure with cool aliens is reading at an appropriate age level. A twelve-year-old can read the same book and realise it has themes about suicide and talk about it with their friends will be reading at an age-appropriate level. An adult can that same book and realise that it’s not just suicidal themes, but that the text has a densely layered narrative that’s fundamentally about what it means to be human, both physically (through the continued and sometimes extreme use of body-horror) and metaphysically (is it human to sacrifice?). And that adult will be reading at an age-appropriate level too. Same book, appropriate for multiple audiences, separated by their expertise in reading it.
Books and their readers are self-selecting. Wowsers select ignorance.
I worked in a bookstore when Animorphs was a thing, and I think a real contributor is that they were series books. The examples of books that were challenged all tend to be those which were labeled Important Single Novels With Themes To Be Discussed In English Class. When’s the last time you saw, oh, Sweet Valley High or the like (dating myself, whatever the current thing is) on reading lists? Like with the Harlequin monthly releases, churn-em-outs get treated like literary popcorn. Saw it in store – parents who did carefully look at that one book the kid wanted would just toss the next of the series onto the counter. The fact of being an official for-kids series kind of carries with it an assumption that Someone is making sure that these are appropriate meaningless fluff.
Reading through all this I must add the hilarity of my situation of how I got into the series.
I got my first book at the school book fair, it was #11 which is a wild first introduction let me tell you. But even starting out of order I was hooked. And not only did mom by the whole series for me no questions asked (and I remember being the same age as the gang when I read them) but mom read them with me and my sister. Not TO us, but for herself. She was just as into them as we were. We’d each read the new book and then get together and talk about what we thought of the plot and characters. We had every book she wrote for it, even hardbacks for the novels that went alongside and the chose your own adventure books.
Those books are deep fucking shit. But they were so very much appropriate too. Out of everything I read growing up I never felt an author better understood me and my point of view and the sorts of things I was struggling with than K.A Applegate did. Because yeah, in high school I did have to deal with suicide of classmates and dysphoria and relatives with PTSD and deep moral questions I in no way was qualified to answer. But I also felt far more capable than adults gave me credit for. I also struggled with how to trust adults and which adults I could trust. Secrets (in my case questions of sexuality and gender) that could cause repercussions for myself and friends (bullying or worse). So like… these books are just so damn good and I want to throw them at every young kid. Because even though they are such a product of the 90s, I will forever be grateful they were openly available to me.
(and god, yeah… like deep fucking psychological horror in so many books. The one where Racheal doubled? The one where everyone died and only Jake remembered? The fucking ENDING??? The one where Tobias was tortured? Just the very idea of the Controllers and the fact that how they were treated while not explained in gory detail was very much fully described in the phycological effect on both the people used as hosts and the kids when they go to the pool? Or just the very blatant mentions of military war crimes and death of civilians and propaganda?
These books fucking shaped me into the queer thoughtful person I am today.)
I think part of it might also be that people assume books with animals in them are more appropriate for kids (which is a major misunderstanding of animals in general). Neither the Warrior Cats series nor the Ga'Hoole universe books were banned en masse. While the Animorphs doesn’t have an almost entirely animal cast like these books, you can still get that it’s about animals from the cover. And so while Warrior Cats has it’s violence, death, war, and even has issues of disputed paternity- it’s about cats. And so even though one could summon up objectionable in isolation passages from the series until the cows come home- it doesn’t provoke much of a reaction. In addition, there’s no human swears and not even implied sex (except for when you need to know about it to fix what seem to be plot holes). And for logistical reasons, there’s not even kissing and no nudity. Same with the Guardians of GaHoole. Not even the slightest PDA, no human swears, and no nudity. But with Owl Nazis, Owl Catholics (as villians), infanticide, and a wolf pup protagonist killed for his disability (but in the end the story makes for a very good message to disabled kids who would relate to Faolan).
All this is to demonstrate how I think the animals helped the Animorphs get a pass. While it played a much bigger role in these series, I still think it played a part with the Animorphs.
The only things I haven’t seen anybody add (besides, of course, how Ga'Hoole owls have like six or ten different brainwashing techniques with their own names, not least of which is leaving owlets in crypts of human bones) is the sheer fact that it was a series. If you read one book, and it was fine, you assume the next one can’t be any worse.
If your mom loved book 14, why not 33 next?
And the other factor is that Scholastic didn’t care, just get it out the door. According to TVtropes, by the time Applegrant wrote “Remnants,” their copy editor was the only person at Scholastic who even bothered to read the books (besides which Grant has stated that they had zero time for rewrites, hence the big chunks of the ghostwritten books that he admitted he simply threw out and rewrote rather than get a second draft from the ghostwriter in question). And, if anyone else has read “Remnants,” isn’t that amazingly accurate? It’s like Victor Hugo or one of those old guys who would publish a first draft that was 90% cocaine. “This needs more trypophobia worms.” So yeah, pearl clutchers got no ammo from the publisher’s statements. The publisher had barely any more of a clue than they, one would imagine.
