Disability and Character/Text/Reader Disparity in the Animorphs Narrative
April 27th, 2016
NB: This essay was my senior thesis as an undergraduate. It contains full spoilers for the Animorphs series.
Animorphs begins with a warning. When they are walking home one night from the mall, a group of five teenagers encounter an alien who tells them that a race of parasitic mind-controlling slugs called Yeerks are secretly subjugating humanity. He gives them an opportunity to fight back by bestowing upon them the power to transform into any animal, with one condition: if they stay in an animal body for more than two hours, they will be trapped in that body forever. As a series targeted to younger readers, Animorphs uses the hyperbole of a fantastical war to draw out the conflict between different types of bodies and how bodies of inconsistent functionality clash with moral systems and ideologies. Disability inevitably plays a key role in this conflict. The Animorphs frequently risk becoming trapped in foreign, less-functional bodies as they wage war against an enemy that must render victims disabled in order to become not disabled themselves. Kathryn Allan asserts in Disability in Science Fiction that “[Science fiction] takes the abnormal body, the novel form, and reimagines its usefulness. Instead of viewing bodily variation as deviancy, many SF texts reframe the disabled body not only as monstrous but also adaptive and subversive. […] Since much SF takes up issues of technology, the notion of the body as tool becomes repositioned or reframed through the lens of disability studies” (8). “The notion of the body as tool” is arguably Animorphs’ most fundamental theme, and it uses this theme to heighten the reader’s awareness of their own and others’ bodies. Disability as threat is undermined over the course of the series through the true-to-life treatment of disabled characters and perspectives, which are thrown into sharp focus by the hyperbole of the fantastical war. Readers are able to engage with the implications of disability for both the body and the mind within the safe space of the text and are encouraged to question the intersection between the portrayal provided by Animorphs with their real-world experiences.
Animorphs has largely been passed over in terms of critical discourse in favor of other late 90s/early 2000s genre texts like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, and the few who have taken note of the treatment of disability in Animorphs have been highly critical. Book seventeen, The Underground, and the slaughter of the physically impaired auxiliary Animorphs in the final arc of the series are frequently cited as perpetuating ableist tropes and prejudices; however, these criticisms deliberately ignore the many positive portrayals of disability in Animorphs and fail to take into account the disparity between the characters, the text, and the reader late in the narrative. As a serialized narrative stretching across sixty-two books (it’s not as episodic as it might appear upon an initial reading) Animorphs takes full advantage of its length to arc characters and themes across vast distances through almost imperceptible increments. The sympathies and moral standings of the characters, the text, and the reader are all in alignment as the series begins: the Yeerks are evil, and the Animorphs must do whatever it takes to stall the subjugation of humanity. By the end, though, these three aspects have splintered. The Yeerks are defeated and the Animorphs have triumphed; it’s everything we hoped for since page one, finally come to fruition—but the intervening books have changed everything. Despite moments of doubt, the Animorphs and the text itself both continue to assert the same moral high ground in The Beginning that rallied reader sympathy all the way back in the Invasion. Applegate relies instead on our knowledge of everything that has happened over the course of the series, and the treatment of disability in particular, in order to intentionally desynchronize our sympathies from the characters that have earned them through more than ten thousand pages of blood, sweat, and tears. Disability is never reduced to a mere literary tool in Animorphs—the variety of disabled perspectives are too expansive, too nuanced, and too saturated outside of the core narrative to make that criticism—but Applegate does capitalize on her work with disability early in the series in order to highlight this late-series dissonance. The use of disability as a wedge that creates a disparity between the characters, the text, and the reader is deliberate: it provides readers, especially those who are younger and encountering these issues for the first time, with the tools and the opportunities to make critical distinctions between their own moral values and those that are extolled by characters and texts in fiction and in life.
The shift in the presentation of disability throughout the Animorphs series can be brought into focus by dividing the narrative into three loose arcs based on pivotal moments that occur in books nineteen and thirty-eight: Cassie’s ideological battle with a Yeerk in The Departure (the Animorphs stand on infirm moral ground for the first time) and the return of the Andalites in The Arrival (the original series endgame and moment of triumph as promised by The Invasion, now subverted into another complication and another enemy for the Animorphs to reckon with). Disability in the first arc is highly personal, experienced by core members of the Animorphs team and by the reader through their eyes. Characters who deal with physical impairment, depression, and PTSD as the result of wartime experience tend to be presented post-conflict in fiction—Animorphs, however, brings these complications into the war itself. The danger of exceeding the two-hour morph time limit is a threat that hangs over the Animorphs for the entire series (it’s not hard to imagine an ending in which one of the characters sacrifices themselves by exceeding this time limit in order to save his or her friends), but Tobias is trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk at the end of the first book. The serialized structure of the series and the length of the narrative offer an opportunity for disabled characters to grow over a long period of time, particularly Tobias. Tobias spends the remaining sixty-one books learning to reconcile his human mind with his hawk body, a struggle which is complicated by both fantastic and mundane events and is never fully resolved. Mental disability is highly pronounced in the early books: Rachel is traumatized by her experiences as a shrew and as an ant, triggering nightmares and panic attacks that will haunt her and inform her decisions all the way through to the final book. Tobias’ nothlit body, his depression, and Rachel’s PTSD are key components of this first arc. Disability in the second arc is in a state of transition for both the characters and the reader as the series continually redefines and recontextualizes the functionality of bodies through the Yeerks and the fate of characters such as David, who becomes trapped in a nothlit body in an end suggested by the text to be worse than death. The third arc demonstrates a clear break in its presentation of disability as the subject simultaneously becomes more pronounced in the narrative and is relegated to physically impaired supporting characters who are wielded as weapons by the same Animorphs who once brought such humanity to their own struggles with disability. The connection between the reader and the characters is finally and irrevocably splintered by disability.
The first narrative arc in Animorphs emphasizes the humanity of disabled characters by depicting their struggles realistically from their own perspective and seamlessly integrating those struggles with the decidedly unrealistic series mythology. The second book in the series, The Visitor, features a plotline in which Rachel must morph a shrew in order to lure out a cat that she needs to “acquire” (a term used by the Animorphs to describe the process of absorbing an animal’s DNA through physical contact in order to morph that animal in the future). Becoming such a vulnerable creature is an experience she knows will be deeply terrifying, and so she disguises her fear with can-do confidence and quippy one-liners; she will continue to put on a hardened exterior as a cover for her fear throughout the series, but that fear will morph from fear for herself to fear of herself, a trend that begins during her violent attack on David in the twenty-second book and culminates with her death in the final book. The first instance of an Animorph using a vulnerable morph occurs when Jake becomes a lizard in The Invasion. Having succumbed to the animal brain, his first action in this new body is to eat a spider. This is an event that horrifies and disgusts him, but does not haunt him. He speaks to this after Rachel returns to human form from the shrew: “‘Don’t worry, you’ll get over it. Mostly. At least you didn’t eat a spider’” (64). Jake is dismissive of Rachel’s experience because he is not scarred by it in the way that she is; Animorphs demonstrates realism by letting characters respond differently to similar situations. Jake’s experience as a lizard is juxtaposed by Rachel’s experience as a shrew: “The fear kicked in. The shrew’s fear. It hit me so hard I began to shake. I rattled with terror. I quaked with terror. I was surrounded! Predators everywhere!” (57) The fear of predators upon transforming into prey is an expected move for a series that frequently features characters physically becoming vulnerable organisms. Finding oneself at the bottom of the food chain is an easy fear for a writer to prey on, however, and so Applegate is quick to subvert this: “There were other feelings. Hunger. I smelled nuts. I smelled dead flesh. I even smelled the maggots squirming on the dead flesh. And I wanted them. I know it’s too gross, but I wanted to eat those maggots. [...] I could get away. I could get away and find that dead smell and gorge!” (58) This careful consideration of the human condition in the midst of wildly inhuman scenarios is one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Animorphs series, and that consideration carries over in regard to disability as well.
It is her intense hunger as the shrew—not the fear of predators—that traumatizes Rachel, triggering relentless nightmares and anxiety attacks which will haunt her through the rest of the series. Her symptoms are a hair’s breadth away from a textbook definition of PTSD: “DSM-IV TR defines that PTSD can occur after the person has been exposed to a traumatic event, in which the person experienced actual or threatened death or serious injury or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others and their response involved intense fear, helplessness or horror. Traumatic event is reexperienced and there are persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with trauma” (Wiederhold 118). All of these qualities describe Rachel’s experience with this particular event and her response going forward. Aggression, another possible symptom of PTSD (115), increasingly becomes one of Rachel’s defining tributes as the series continues. She stabs a classmate in the head with a fork in book twenty-two, and it is strongly implied that she becomes a murderer in book forty-nine (the text leaves the moment ambiguous, but a close reading of Rachel’s character offers little flexibility for another interpretation). Disability in Animorphs is always inextricably tied to its mythology, illuminated by its proximity to inventive science fiction scenarios. It may be difficult for non-disabled young readers from the target demographic of the series to imagine what it is like to suffer from debilitating trauma; Animorphs, like any fictional narrative, cannot provide them with that experience, but it can open a window through its use of metaphor and hyperbole. Imagining oneself as a non-human animal and the various fears and perspectives associated with that body provides the reader with opportunities to imagine how similar fears and perspectives might come into play for humans in different mental states or bodies of varying degrees of functionality.
Following Rachel’s experience as a shrew in The Visitor, the next chapter doubles down on the damage and firmly emphasizes trauma as a major theme of both the book and the series. Rachel is awoken by her sister Jordan after screaming in her sleep: “‘Aaah! Oh. Oh. Oh.’ I sat up. I was gasping for air. It was dark, but I could just make out Jordan’s face. She was shaking me awake. I felt my face. Lips. Eyes. Nose. I patted myself down frantically. Human. I was human. No fur. No tail. Human” (67). Her trauma has already become disabling. It prevents her from sleeping soundly; it will prevent her from participating in certain missions (after a near-death experience during a colony clash in an ant tunnel a few books later, Rachel will refuse to morph an ant again; the shrew is also a morph she will never return to) and communicating with her friends. Even Tobias, who becomes her boyfriend later in the series, will not be able to connect with her on this issue until he is violently and graphically tortured by Visser Two dozens of books later, an event which traumatizes him in turn. It is no coincidence that Tobias frequently visits Rachel late at night and finds her awake when their teammates are all sleeping. Rachel defends herself to Jordan when her sister comments on the severity of her nightmare; only a few pages after the shrew sequence, Rachel has already made the shift to hiding her hurt from those close to her: “‘I can’t even remember [the dream] now. You know how it is. Dreams fade away so you can’t even remember them’” (68). It’s tempting to say that Rachel downplays her mental and emotional scars in this case because she is fully aware of the possibility that Jordan is playing host to a Yeerk and doesn’t want to reveal her status as an Animorph, but it would not be out-of-bounds for her to acknowledge a disturbing dream without referencing its content. She denies it entirely, though, and she will continue to do this even to those who share the secret war with her. Rachel’s trauma becomes a struggle that she will internalize and deal with on a purely personal level. Unable to see a future in which she can function as a disabled (and, she fears, dangerous) member of society, she resolves her dilemma through a heroic last stand that functions as a proxy to disguise her suicide. This careful attention to Rachel’s trauma in the early books highlights the dismissive treatment of disability by the Animorphs later in the series and encourages the reader to identify further discrepancies in the behavior of the characters and the text between the beginning and the end of the narrative.
Following immediately in the wake of The Visitor, The Encounter (the third book in the series and the first from the POV of Tobias) is the second explicit reckoning with mental disability for one of the major protagonists. Tobias, now trapped in the body of hawk and unable to participate in the activities which he traditionally enjoyed—a clear parallel to any incapacitating injury that a human might suffer—spirals into depression. “When I hadn’t been in school, I used to spend most of my free time watching TV, hanging out at the mall, doing homework, reading...all things it was difficult for me to do, now” (21). The phrase “difficult for me to do, now” indicates that Tobias is clearly still in a state of denial regarding his condition at this point. He later describes his ability to watch television and read to a limited degree by looking on when other people are participating in those activities, but “hanging out at the mall” isn’t something that is now “difficult” for him—it’s impossible. The same applies to “doing homework,” which is both impossible and unnecessary. Tobias is expecting, perhaps subconsciously, that his state is not permanent and that he will eventually be able to return to his human body. It makes sense, then, that his transition into depression is gradual rather than immediate: “I hated the way they all felt sorry for me. All they could see was that I was not what I used to be. All they saw was that I had no home. But they didn’t really understand. I hadn’t had a real home since my parents died. I was used to being alone. And I had the sky” (19). Tobias’ initial outlook on the situation is not negative. (In an interesting offhand remark forty-nine books later, Ax will mention to the reader that he suspects Tobias let himself become trapped on purpose. Tobias never refers to this possibility even implicitly—and Ax’s comments range from piercingly insightful to the far opposite—so it remains ambiguous even unto the ending of the series.) Note that Tobias refers to his friends feeling “sorry” for him in the aforementioned quotation; “pity,” a word which appears frequently in reference to disabled persons, will appear frequently throughout Animorphs in reference to Tobias and later the physically impaired auxiliary Animorphs. Whether stated explicitly or implied through a look or other action, these characters will never cease to protest with vehemence anyone who feels pity for them.
Tobias’ simultaneous joy at being able to fly and despair at not being able to participate in human activities bears some similarity to a scene from Avatar that Katie Ellis discusses in Disability and Popular Culture: “Jake, having reclaimed an able body through his Na’vi avatar, runs, skips and wiggles his toes in the sand. The scene has both been criticised for perpetuating compulsory able-bodiedness and described as a realistic representation of what a person would do if they were suddenly to become able-bodied again” (76). Like Jake, it is not entirely fair to describe Tobias’ entrapment in the body of a hawk as disabling. It prevents him who doing many of the things which he wants to do as a human being, but it also lends him superhuman vision and the ability to fly. The line between “disabled” and “differently-abled,” especially when the many bodies available to the Animorphs are taken into account, becomes blurred. The series is not interested in a simple binary where some bodies are functional and others are not. This is what makes disability such a complicated issue in Animorphs: disability occurs rarely—with a few very, very notable exceptions—in reference to human bodies with varying levels of functionality, but more frequently in reference to a wide spectrum of bodies that become differently-abled or disabled in regard to their situation. Disability is constantly, continuously recontextualized. The Animorphs might transform into flies (as in The Warning), lending them abilities that are literally superhuman in terms of infiltrating a secret meeting and remaining undetected. At the same time, their senses of sight and hearing are distorted to the point of uselessness when it comes to gathering information, and the simple swipe of a hand or stray spiderweb is enough to render their bodies functionless when almost any other form would remain unaffected. Animorphs asks the reader to consider the role of the environment, whether that be in the form of physical terrain or the social stigma in a particular culture, and evaluate its potential to alter or distort the perception of disability; these critical distinctions will again come into play when the characters, text, and reader are at odds with one another at the end of the series.
A third aspect of Animorphs tangles the web to an even greater degree: the Yeerks, who are sometimes perceived as disabled in their natural state by members of their own species and others, render their host bodies disabled by necessity when they take control. Ann Schmiesing observes in Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimm’s Fairy Tales that “in many fairy tales, able-bodied protagonists are thus contrasted with antagonists who exhibit or are punished with impairment. And when a disabled hero is portrayed, his heroic qualities are often brought to the fore as he triumphs despite the social stigma of his disability—a triumph typically rewarded in fairy tales with the magical erasure of his physical anomaly” (1-2). Animorphs has only passing resemblances to the Grimm fairy tales, but the stereotype of the disabled villain seems to remain in the form of the Yeerks. They require control of external bodies in order to function. On the other hand, triumphing “despite the social stigma of his disability” describes neither Tobias nor any of the Animorphs, and Tobias’ “physical anomaly” is never erased despite him having the opportunity to do so. The rabbit hole deepens when Yeerks in possession of a host body acquire the morphing technology—in effect, that means a debatably disabled parasite is controlling an indisputably disabled (and possibly willing) host with the ability to transform that host body into other bodies that have varying degrees of ability.
Animorphs draws attention to the ways in which various forms of disability can complicate and exacerbate one another by emphasizing both physical impairment and mental instability in Tobias. His descent into depression begins when he watches over his friends as they transform into wolves for the first time and undertake a lengthy journey during which they never have to rest: “I tried to imagine what it must be like to be a wolf. The amazing sense of smell. The incredible hearing. All that confident power, those ripping teeth, the cool intelligence. Maybe later I would ask Jake or Rachel about it. Then you could ask them what it was like to be human. Maybe they can tell me about that, too, I thought bitterly” (38). Tobias was somewhat disconnected from the human experience due to his social isolation before becoming trapped as a hawk, thus minimizing the severity of his bodily break with humanity. It is only once he witnesses his friends experience bodies which a) have clear physical advantages over his own, and b) he never has and believes he never will experience himself that jealousy and despair ensue. “Stop it, Tobias, I ordered myself. Stop it. I guess I felt that if I ever started to feel really sorry for myself, I might never stop” (41). Here again arises the motif of pity, which Tobias readily rejects. Juxtaposed against his envy of other bodies is Tobias’ primal attraction to the life associated with the body in which he resides, embodied here in The Encounter by a female hawk who he joins in flight. This feeling, which will create the tension that forces him to grow over the course of the series, initially frightens him: “It hit me in a wave of disgust and horror. No. NO! I was Tobias. A human. A human being, not a bird! [...] I was human. I was a boy named Tobias. A boy with blond hair that was always a mess. A boy with human friends. Human interests. But part of me kept saying, ‘It’s a lie. It’s a lie. You are the hawk. The hawk is you. And Tobias is dead” (56). Rachel’s primordial terror in The Visitor—“I was that shrew”—is echoed here, and will continue to echo in the experiences of the human Animorphs throughout the series. With the exception of Cassie, who is more comfortable in and cares more deeply about the natural world than her teammates, every member of the group exhibits a deep fear of a foreign body subsuming their own—in effect, becoming disabled through the removal of human functionality. The series provides the reader with two primary juxtapositions for this fear: Rachel and Tobias, who we see learning to cope with disability firsthand over the course of the series, and the auxiliary Animorphs, who are conveniently sacrificed by the core Animorphs for a strategic advantage. It is this parallel in the text that forces the reader make moral distinctions that may be at odds with the characters they have come to know and love.
The less functional the body, the greater the fear. This is demonstrated in The Encounter as well, when the Animorphs sans-Tobias (who witnesses and narrates the ordeal) nearly become trapped half-morph between wolf and human: “It sent a shiver of disgust through me. I suddenly saw myself as they all must see me: as something frightening. A freak. An accident. A sickening, pitiable creature” (64). The fear of becoming trapped in the body of a non-human organism never ceases to linger in the minds of the Animorphs, but the moments in which they risk becoming nothlit mid-transformation transcends the fear associated with any particular animal; the non-functionality of a mid-transformation nothlit body is precisely the reason for this heightened fear. Whereas even the least-functional animal body has some capability in the appropriate environment, a mid-transformation nothlit body, with half-formed features and disassociated limbs, has none. The fear of all-encompassing physical impairment—and the social stigma that would come with it—exceeds every other personal fear faced by the Animorphs.
Tobias’ depression becomes more severe as he becomes more aware of the limitations of his hawk body: “I felt an awful, gaping black hole open up all around me. I was sick. Sick with the feeling of being trapped. Trapped. Forever! I looked at my talons. They would never be feet again. I looked at my wing. It would never be an arm. It would never again end in a hand. I would never touch. I would never touch anything...anyone...again” (66). The restrictions on physical intimacy imposed upon an impaired body become more pronounced here. Disabled individuals, especially those with physical impairments, are commonly and inaccurately desexualized by society at large, which can make it difficult for their sexual needs to be met (Heim 139). Animorphs, due to its target audience demographic, rarely addresses sexuality, and when it does it is always implicit; the series treads carefully at the intersection between disability, sexuality, and age-appropriate content in the Rachel/Tobias relationship. As an older reader, it is impossible to read about a hawk/human couple without seeing the spectre of implied bestiality lingering insidiously in the subtext. The series provides itself an easy out from the threat of bestiality with the events of the thirteenth book, but Applegate wisely chooses not to take it. Even though Tobias gains the ability to become human (temporarily, or permanently if he so chooses) in The Change—meaning that sex between Rachel and himself is entirely within the realm of possibility—they spend virtually all of their time together when Tobias is in hawk form. The text makes it clear that their emotional and physical chemistry fizzles and dissipates when Tobias is in his human body because that is not his true body; Rachel and Tobias instead find ways to achieve mild physical intimacy in spite of their wildly different bodies. Rachel touches Tobias’ feathers in a way that reminds him of preening and which he explicitly describes as “pleasurable.” Given how specifically the series has associated Tobias’ physical impairment as a hawk with the physical impairment that a human might experience, these interactions with Rachel present an extraordinarily sex-positive portrayal of a disabled individual.
Like Tobias himself, it takes Rachel some time to arrive at a point where she is comfortable with his non-human body. In The Encounter, she demonstrates her ability to distinguish between the mind and the body: “‘You belong with us,’ Rachel said firmly. ‘You are a human being, Tobias.’ <How can you be so sure?> I asked her. ‘Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart,’ she said with sudden passion. ‘A person isn’t his body. A person isn’t what’s on the outside.’” Her heart is in the right place, but her denial of his body is still troubling. When Tobias tells her that he can’t remember what his human body looked like, she shows him a photograph: “‘It’s not a great picture. In real life you look better.’ <In real life,> I echoed” (71). This mindset will fade away as Rachel’s relationship with Tobias develops and she comes to understand that Tobias “in real life” is a hawk. There is no pivot point at which her transition is textually stated, but her eventual acceptance of his non-human body dissolves the barrier between Rachel/Tobias as friends and Rachel/Tobias as a couple.
In terms of disability, one of Animorphs’ most realistic touches occurs when Marco pokes fun at Tobias in the succeeding scene: “The others all shot him nasty looks. But the truth was, it made me feel okay to be teased by Marco. Marco teased everyone” (76). Speaking personally as someone who suffers from depression, I find this moment to be exceptionally truthful. After an incident in which I was hospitalized after intentionally hurting myself, hugs and concerned questions were the universal response from coworkers and classmates upon returning normal life. There was one exception: when I showed up in class for the first time in a week, a particular peer (a friend) rolled her eyes and chastised me for my extended absence. That was the response that meant the most to me, because she made me laugh and made me feel normal. I was free to make jokes again, be silly again, be myself again. Animorphs demonstrates a deep understanding of this sentiment in Tobias’ response to a playful insult from Marco, which is enhanced even further a few pages later when Tobias makes a self-deprecating joke in return: “I think Marco was surprised I could make a joke about myself” (81). I also found that it took time for people to react normally when I made a joke; incorporating this minor detail lends Animorphs a great deal of credibility in its treatment of disability. Humor is a tool frequently used by disabled individuals to relax the barriers between themselves and non-disabled individuals, and the auxiliary Animorphs bring this theme to fruition when they appear late in the series. They laugh and joke with each other and with the core Animorphs, sometimes even poking fun at their physical impairments. The core Animorphs are initially shocked by this and implicitly insist that the auxiliary Animorphs should only react to their impairments with self-pity. Not only does the behavior of the auxiliary Animorphs humanize them and reemphasize realism, but the reaction of the core Animorphs makes clear just how much they have changed over the course of the series and how desensitized they have become to the human lives they are fighting for. Their unwavering focus on winning the war ultimately forces them to see anyone who isn’t them as inhuman and expendable.
Tobias’ joke functions as the calm before the storm. It is followed by his suicide attempt in the scene commonly cited by fans as the moment Animorphs becomes “serious,” indicating that this is point at which many readers realize that the series features scenarios that are realistic as often as they are absurd. Tobias is triggered when he succumbs to his instincts as a hawk and kills a rat. He inaccurately sees this moment as part of a spectrum in which his entrapment in a physically impaired body took away some portion of his humanity. Giving into the needs of that body, then, indicates to him that his humanity has been irrevocably destroyed: “I flew as fast and as hard as I could. I wanted to go so fast that the memory of killing and eating the rat would be left way behind me. But not even I can fly that fast. Human! I am human! I am Tobias!” (87) He does not entirely commit consciously to his suicide attempt, however, and flies into the mall with the intention of seeing Rachel because he finds her presence comforting, wavering in a middle ground as tries to simultaneously kill himself and seek help:
I wasn’t going to stop. I wasn’t going to slow down. I was just going to end this right now. I would hit the glass at full speed and maybe that would awaken me from this nightmare. [...] I heard screams. I heard cries of amazement. I didn’t care. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to fall to the ground because my wings had disappeared and been replaced by clumsy legs and flailing arms. I wanted to be me again. I am human! I am human! I am Tobias! (88-89)
Tobias’ repeated references to “waking up” are particularly striking, bringing to mind the escapist language commonly associated with those who attempt or succeed in committing suicide. He also makes a clear reference to his possession of wings in lieu of human limbs as a factor feeding into his fractured psyche. This all reflects the misguided societal perception that, if a physically impaired individual cannot be restored to a “normal” body, the only other way to “resolve” the situation is through death. Tobias has been conditioned to believe that suicide is an endgame for a disabled individual; the text undermines this by portraying his struggles to adapt to his new body throughout the rest of the series. Those struggles begin once Rachel sees Tobias during his suicide attempt and calls his name—he continues to attempt high-speed collisions with hard surfaces but introduces the word “still” into his stream of thought: “I was still moving fast. [...] I could still...wake up from the nightmare” (emphasis mine). This hesitation, instilled by Rachel—the only person with whom he has a genuine connection at this point in the series—is enough to prevent him from committing to a fatal collision. He is then able to escape the mall when Marco breaks a skylight, which the hawk is irresistibly drawn to. Tobias’ emergence back into the outside air functions as his symbolic rebirth into a physically impaired body: “The hawk flew fast and straight. I let it go. I surrendered. Tobias, a boy whose face I could no longer remember, no longer existed” (91). It is at this point that he begins to use the pronoun “I” to refer exclusively to his hawk body and “the human Tobias” as his former self. When he recommits himself to the war in The Encounter’s final act, he describes the Yeerks as disabling entities by comparing their host bodies to his own, as prisons where a person is trapped (the associations between the Yeerks and disability will become explicit in the text during Cassie’s conversation with one in The Departure). Coloring the Yeerks as agents of disability, while not strictly accurate and not entirely inaccurate, will warp the moral choices of the Animorphs for the next fifty-one books.
Tobias’ arc continues in book thirteen, The Change, when a godlike being called the Ellimist gives him the power to morph again (with his hawk body now serving as his “natural” state; the reasons for the Ellimist’s gift are not relevant here—suffice to say, they are not altruistic reasons), which he implements in order to heal a broken wing. Animorphs treads dangerously close here to the cure or kill trope that tends to plague disabled individuals in fiction, but this is undermined by Tobias’ conscious choice to almost exclusively remain in his hawk body, even when it impairs him, throughout the rest of the series. When he returns to his hawk body after his first morph upon regaining the power, he says that “I became myself again” (122). The book concludes with the Ellimist sending Tobias back in time to the night before the series begins, where he encounters his younger (human) self:
<Tobias,> I said. <Walk home with Jake. Walk through the construction site.> [...] Why had I told him to do that? Why had I sent him to the construction site? It was there that everything had begun. It was there that I had started down the path that led to my being trapped as a hawk. [...] I was looking at myself. Back when I was human. And looking at myself, I couldn’t escape the truth. That wasn’t me anymore. [...] I had become something else. Something new. (159)
Tobias’ choice to actively trigger the events that will lead to his physical impairment is a wildly empowering move for a difference-positive character and for the reader through him. Not only does he learn to live with impairment: he seeks it out. He is proud of the individuality and unique perspectives provided by his entrapment in a body which does not always allow him to do what he wants to do. Animorphs resists the cure or kill trope that colored Tobias’ suicide attempt and instead celebrates a disabled individual; in light of pivotal narrative moments like this, the rift between the characters and text that becomes so prominent later in the series is made even more apparent.
Outside of the five concluding books, Animorphs is most notorious for its treatment of disability in the seventeenth entry of the series, The Underground. Critics of disability in Animorphs frequently point to this book as perpetuating ableist narratives and prejudices against disabled individuals. They are not wrong. To put it bluntly: this book is indefensible, but to ignore its existence in the canon would be dishonest. Textual and moral inconsistencies are not surprising in a sixty-two book series that features the work of multiple ghostwriters, and so it becomes important to acknowledge these inconsistencies while looking at the context surrounding them in order to determine to what degree they are at odds with the rest of narrative and thus the weight we should assign them. The Underground is one of these inconsistencies; its offensiveness should not be dismissed offhand, but it also should not be held up as representation for everything Animorphs has to say about disability. The book begins with the Animorphs rescuing a man who attempts suicide (unbeknownst to them, he was a Yeerk host who had temporarily regained control of his body). Rachel reflects on the experience: “I wasn’t really feeling sorry for him, so much as really annoyed. I mean, what is it with people killing themselves? How big a moron do you have to be not to figure out that at least if you stay alive you have some hope, as opposed to being dead and having zero?” (17) This is the only disability-centric passage in the book that can be safely interpreted as a non-instance of ableism on the part of the author. It is entirely within Rachel’s character to make a comment of this nature at this point in the series. She will commit suicide by volunteering for a sacrificial mission thirty-seven books later in The Beginning—albeit because she wants preemptively wants to stop herself from hurting others rather than stopping hurt which she herself is enduring. This is made possible by her increasingly-liberal understanding of death, an arc which will not begin for her until book twenty-two. Given that The Underground takes place before this point, it is not inconsistent for her to make an ableist comment.
The same cannot be said for the rest of the book; ableism quickly spills over from the characters into the text itself in an unrelenting barrage of insults targeted at the mentally ill. The only two characters to push against this are Cassie and Rachel’s mom, and the book silences them by transforming their legitimate protests into caricatures of overzealous left-wingers. At no point in the series do the Animorphs demonstrate a particular affinity for self-awareness—it is this very quality that ultimately gives them the edge they need to win the war, a vicious bit of satire that doesn’t develop until the back half of the series—but they are at an all-time low in The Underground. Despite being a group of teenagers who literally transform into animals in order to fight a secret war, a ludicrous premise in and of itself, they remain dismissive of those who suffer mental instability as a direct result of parasitic mind-controlling aliens that they know exist. Only a passing reference is made to the Animorphs’ blinding hypocrisy, and the reference holds no weight as a result. (The Animorphs will similarly fail to note, upon sending a group of physically impaired teenagers to the slaughter as a distraction during their final battle against the Yeerks, that their victims are serving the same function that the Animorphs themselves once served in the early days of the war.) Rachel again brings to the fore her debilitating dreams: “I dream a lot now. Terrible dreams where I’m trapped in some hideous shape, half-human, half-insect. I dream about that awful battle in the ant tunnels. I dream about the screaming, slashing massacre when we took the Kandrona.... But I dream most about the Yeerk pool. I hear the screams and curses of human hosts held in cages while their Yeerks swim in the leaden water of the pool” (66). When a man cries out for help because he has one of those very Yeerks in his head, however, Rachel condescends: “If you ever see some poor, mad, deranged gentleman wandering the streets and raving away about things that live in his head...well, if you can handle it, give the man your spare change” (164). The dissonance is unintentional and baffling, and The Underground should rightly be condemned for its presentation of disability. It is an extreme outlier in terms of the overall narrative, however. Greater weight should be placed on the treatment of disability across longer arcs in the series.
Two books after The Underground comes The Departure, commonly regarding as one of the best entries in the series. It is with good reason: in its nineteenth book, Animorphs becomes self-aware, satirical, and irrevocably morally ambiguous as Cassie faces off against a Yeerk possessing the body of a girl named Karen in a battle of ideologies. A troubling metatextual stance on disability also comes into focus in The Departure. The Animorphs books frequently open with a chapter in which the POV character addresses the reader directly, promising to tell their story—but with the details altered. The implication is that they are describing the war as it is ongoing rather than in its aftermath, and thus they cannot risk jeopardizing their mission for the sake of the sharing their experience. This is confirmed by many lines and passages throughout the series, such as Rachel’s declaration that “We never heard from David again” (151) at the end of The Solution. They will hear from David again twenty-seven books later, however, so that statement must have been recorded sometime between books twenty-two and forty-nine. Consider also Rachel’s chapter-opening sentences from The Visitor: “It was a dark and stormy night. Sorry, I’ve always wanted to write that” (120). This one line unfortunately strains the credulity of the meta-narrative once Rachel’s final POV scene is taken into consideration. If the Animorphs are indeed physically writing their stories, as seems to be implied here, a first person narration of the events leading up to Rachel’s death as told by Rachel herself would be impossible (the only possible solution involves the Ellimist, who is indeed involved in the scene, giving Rachel an opportunity to record her thoughts during the time stasis he initiates in the moments before she is killed; that would be a generous, but not entirely unreasonable, subtextual reading of the Animorphs mythology). This becomes relevant to disability when Cassie’s opening lines in The Departure are taken into consideration: “The story I have to tell is too strange...for me to tell very well. But I’ll do the best I can. And later, when I can no longer tell the story, Jake will take over” (1). Cassie does indeed hand over her POV to Jake late in story, after purposefully letting herself become trapped in the body of a caterpillar in a desperate bid to free Karen from the Yeerk in her head; the Yeerk asks Cassie to commit herself to life in what both they and the text perceive to be a disabled body so that she might know what life is like as a Yeerk. A loophole eventually allows Cassie to return to human form, however, so there is no legitimate reason for Jake to hijack the narrative (nor would there be even if she didn’t, given that at no other point does Animorphs choose to abandon a character’s perspective based on the functionality of their body). The Departure specifically chooses to silence a character upon placing her in a body of limited functionality, then reverses said functionality and returns her voice. This all takes place during the second narrative arc of the series, which means that the moral standing of the characters, the text, and (possibly) the reader are beginning to diverge. They will splinter completely in the third narrative arc.
The final quarter of the series features a distinct emphasis on physical impairment. Book forty, The Other (a title that is by no means a coincidence), revolves around an Andalite named Mertil, who is considered disabled by his own people on two fronts: he is incapable of morphing for genetic reasons, and he has lost half his tail during a battle in which he became a war hero. Ax, an Andalite himself, describes Mertil with extreme prejudice: “<A vecol!> There was disbelief in Ax’s voice. Something else, too. More than his normal, well, arrogant tone. It sounded like disgust. [...] <He is disabled. A cripple>” (15). Even Mertil’s status as a war hero, which might result in him receiving “preferential treatment” in human society (Fleischer 170-171), is insufficient to spare him the stigma of a “cripple” from a fellow member of his species. When the Animorphs attempt to call out Ax for subscribing to the ableist views of his people, he responds by pointing out that humans also isolate and dismiss disabled individuals with similar disdain. The Animorphs have no response—they themselves participated in this very behavior only a few years ago in The Underground. They have grown, however. Marco, who instigated the vast majority of the inappropriate ableist exchanges in The Underground, concludes The Other with a thematic wrap-up: “People tend to get identified by what kind of hat they wear during the day. By what is visible, noticeable, obvious about them. So, if you’ve got one arm or get around in a wheelchair or are blind, you’re a handicapped person. Maybe you’re also a poet or scholar, a sinner, or a saint. But first and foremost in people’s minds, you’re handicapped. Not a lot you can do about it, either” (128). Marco’s comments do not stand for the entire team, however. He takes this stance; Cassie sees disabled individuals as vulnerable and in need of protection; Jake sees them as less than human and covers his tracks by sending the auxiliary Animorphs off to die with the claim that everyone is expendable in the meat grinder of war. Tobias, Rachel, and the text itself are curiously quiet at this point. The reader is suddenly forced to find their own moral standing in the midst of conflicting character ideologies and a narrative that has been telling them something entirely different for the past thirty-nine books.
Animorphs finally fractures any semblance of alignment between the characters, text, and reader in its presentation of disability during the controversial final arc, when the core Animorphs send the physically impaired auxiliary Animorphs to certain death in order to distract the Yeerks; it is the ploy that wins them the war. Cassie, who eventually comes out against the plan, is the first to make the realization: “‘The Yeerks don’t want a blind Controller. They don’t want a disabled Controller. Deaf people, people in wheelchairs, people with serious illnesses.” [...] <Hundreds, thousands of people,> Tobias said. <The Yeerks just write them off. So do a lot of humans>” (The Ultimate 45). The Animorphs are quick to take advantage of and recruit a select group of people who they know have not been enslaved by their enemy, introducing them to the morphing power in a desperate bid for new allies: “The new guys got control of the morphs almost immediately. I mean, there was no lag time at all. The animals’ instincts kicked in and almost immediately, James and the others got them under control. No rampaging tempers or out-of-control panic. I thought about that. Finally figured that James and the others had spent years—if not all of their lives—surviving by allowing mind to conquer and replace matter. Their bodies might be weak, but their wills were stronger than ours” (94-95). Another interesting parallel to Avatar arises here, this time addressed in Disability and Science Fiction: “Because the Na’vi understanding of embodiment is so radically different from the human, Jake succeeds in part because of his experience with disability. As a paraplegic, Jake is familiar with the prosthetic through the use of a wheelchair. His transition from able-bodied to disabled already modified his understanding and practice of embodiment. It is possible that Jake’s immediate facility with the avatar – a high tech biological prosthesis – can be attributed to this lived experience” (McReynolds 121-2). Both Animorphs and Avatar seem to pick up on the prospect that, by their very nature, disabled individuals are able to more readily adapt to new bodies. This makes them valuable members of the team, a fact which Animorphs’ Jake never takes into consideration.
It is no coincidence that, immediately following the slaughter of the auxiliary Animorphs on Jake’s orders, he goes on to command a small-scale genocide of more than 17,000 impotent Yeerks: “They could have stayed home, I thought. No one had asked them to come to come to Earth. Not my fault. Not my fault, theirs. No more than they deserved. Aliens. Parasites. Subhuman” (151-152). He uses “othering” language to justify his actions against the Yeerks and thus the disabled Animorphs by proxy, which forces the reader to lock in and pay attention as the series capitalizes on sixty-two books worth of moral ambiguity. Everything is thrown into sharp relief in the juxtaposition of these two scenes. The Animorphs have finally won the war that we as readers have been rooting for them to win since page one, but at what cost? Are these Animorphs, the ones who are willing to offer up a group of physically impaired teenagers as cannon fodder, the same Animorphs that spent so much time struggling to come to terms with their own disabilities? Has the text finally resigned itself to the cure or kill trope and undermined its nuanced portrayals of Rachel’s PTSD or Tobias’ impairment across dozens and dozens of books? I have my own answers to these questions, but it is necessary to leave them unresolved here. That’s the point. Animorphs spends sixty-two books driving readers away from the same characters they were intended to connect with a beginning, leaving us to ask not only why and how our sympathies have diverged but if they were ever aligned correctly in the first place.
The themes and issues presented in this paper are hardly a comprehensive representation of disability in Animorphs. It lurks on the fringes of the series as well—Tobias, the only major character who is physically impaired, receives half the number of POV books given to his non-impaired companions, even though his character is as rich and his plots as engaging as any of the other protagonists. One of the most powerful characters in the series, a Satanic figure named Crayak who continually manipulates events as a villainous counterpart to the Ellimist, is also described as having physical impairments: “A creature. Or a machine. Some combination of both. It had no arms. It sat still, as if unable to move, on a throne that was miles high” (The Capture 150). It is inarguable that Animorphs contains deeply, deeply troubling portrayals and comments regarding disability, The Underground being the only truly indefensible example, but it also features highly positive portrayals and (more importantly) opportunities to distinguish between the two. “Readers learn about ‘sameness and difference’ as they encounter characters with disabilities in young adult literature,” Jen Scott Curwood says in Redefining Normal: A Critical Analysis of (Dis)ability in Young Adult Literature. “Finding sameness helps readers understand others’ lived experiences and it builds a sense of shared humanity. Uncovering difference allows readers to interrogate social constructions related to normalcy and disability. Young adult literature can support critical literacy by resisting the ‘othering’ of people with disabilities and promoting students’ knowledge of disability rights and sense of social justice” (19). Animorphs takes this a step further: it uses the unique perspective of the Animorphs to humanize disabled characters, then unleashes the Animorphs as forces of dehumanization in their own right. The reader must make a choice as the series comes to an end. Do we follow the Animorphs that we have known and trusted for so long, or trust our own instincts and turn our back on them? They say they’re doing the right thing, the necessary thing, when they send a group of disabled children to die and when they slaughter their enemies by the tens of thousands. We know that these actions save the entire human race from subjugation, and yet—we’re still not sure if it’s necessary, if it’s right. Animorphs uses its heroes to show us what it means to be a good person, then gives us the opportunity to reject those heroes if we believe that they indeed have become the monsters. Applegate doesn’t tell us to reject them. She doesn’t even encourage it. She merely offers up the choice. By featuring true-to-life depictions of disability and creating a disparity between the characters, the text, and the reader over the course of an unusually long narrative, Animorphs provides young readers with the tools and the opportunity to make critical distinctions regarding their own moral values and the values they encounter in other people and texts. It’s not only an invaluable skill that will make them better readers and better people: it comes at an opportune time for the target demographic of eight- to twelve-year-olds, who are inevitably beginning to encounter the stories and situations that demand this skill.
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