A couple weeks ago there was someone in the animorphs tag (idk who; I blocked them immediately out of exhaustion) who was arguing that the animorphs tv show was better than the books bc the books are ableist, racist, and misogynistic (and anyone who likes them is all those things as well). Do you feel like those are valid criticisms of the books—and do you think the show avoids these pitfalls?
1. You are correct that the thing to do is hit Mute on XKit to get rid of the kind of posts that do nothing but raise blood pressure.
2. The whole process of comparing media to say “x is more racist than y” is… kinda wonky at best, because it’s almost never comparing apples to apples and there’s no such thing as a non-racist work because we live in a racist society. So I think we should criticize the things we love, but I don’t think stacking them up against each other is necessarily useful.
3. AniTV has a few not-good decisions that aren’t present in Animorphs, including:
Casting white non-Hispanic actors to play Ax and Eva
Having a Magical Negro scene where an older Black man convinces Tobias to become an Animorph through the power of simple folk wisdom
Adapting multiple plots where Rachel gets rescued by Jake or Tobias, but never any of the plots where she saves them
Casting Cassie as a light-skinned actress with long wavy hair, when she’s described in the books as dark-skinned with short tightly curled hair
Casting a 27-year-old actor as Tobias and a 17-year-old actor as Rachel
Having a few not-good jokes about an oatmeal-addicted controller having psychosis or needing medication
Diverting from Cassie’s and Marco’s book descriptions to make them more traditionally gendered by late-90s American norms
Other things I’m forgetting
4. Animorphs has a few not-good decisions all on its own, including:
Not questioning Ax’s assumption that disabled andalites have no quality of life because they’re disabled
Killing or curing all of its disabled characters, thereby buying into the idea that disabled bodies are a “problem” that needs to be “resolved”
Telling a story that parallels a group of Black Americans to a group of nonhuman aliens
Everything about #40, none of which ages well
Having Cassie mention that Jake “doesn’t care that I’m Black” like he deserves a fucking cookie for this or something
Other things that I’m forgetting or didn’t spot as a nondisabled whitey
5. I don’t have a single good answer for what to do about anything I just said. My own stance has always been to love what I love and also not shy away from criticizing it, to try to learn from the failings of these works and do better, and to do my best to reflect and self-educate. To recognize that Your Mileage May Vary, and that anyone who chooses to “nope” out of the series because of those elements is entitled to do so. To be aware that my own personal “can’t enjoy it because can’t see around the imperialism” (Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Discworld) story is someone else’s “hate the imperialism, love the plot” series. To remember that I can still love deeply homophobic series (Supernatural, Angel, The Path) while being loudly and proudly queer.
Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist talks endlessly about the question about what one can do as a fat Black queer woman and assault survivor who finds the music of Robin Thicke just so dang catchy, and doesn’t arrive at a single answer. Because I don’t know that there is a single answer, but I don’t think that either extreme of “let’s pretend there’s nothing wrong with this work” or “you’re a terrible person if you tolerate the existence of this problematic work” is a useful solution.
