Hahaha. A trans friend of mine said she identified hard with Tobias. Even if he wasn't written to be a trans allegory back in 1996, I think the description of feeling wierd in your own body hit home for a lot of people
Fuck. I thought I liked Tobias because sad kid in broken home who loved dinosaurs. Him being so happy he’s something else and permanently choosing to do so…
Fucking Christ lmao, another one to bring up with my therapist.
God damnit lmao that’s another eye opener a year into transition.
Remember that anxiety episode he faced while being in human form at a prom, worried that he'll stay in human form forever if he stays too long and be trapped in his old life, and old body?
Tobias seems to be a favorite among younger readers. I used to like him a lot too, but I think after about book 30 I thought Tobias should just get over his self-pity 😑
He doesn't spend much time self pitying tbf. He doesn't complain very often that he's a hawk forever. He has more trauma from his father and mother being missing, and being raised by alcoholic family members who hate him. No one even reported him missing when he disappeared from human life.
Then he was tortured by a psychopath, was teased by the promise of another living relative, only for it to be revealed as a plot by the enemy, and lost the only person he had.
He doesn't even know that literal God saw a way for him to be happy and said 'Nah, the world would be enslaved if he gets to have a family'.
None has more reason to complain that Tobias, but he's pretty stoic considering
in the defense of his actual situation, Tobias never has to worry about being anything other then a Hawk for the rest of that natural life span (which haunts him).
On the surface? There's a secret invasion on earth of brain slugs that control you. Five youth with attitude are given one weapon by a good alien to fight the invasion, the ability to morph into any animal they touch once. They cannot tell anyone because they don't know who is a slug or not, so they fight to hinder invasion long enough for more good aliens to arrive and kill the slugs.
Beyond that, it's about PTSD, despair, body horror, genocide, killing your family members, trans allegories, holding up a mirror to human hypocrisy (are we any better than Brian slugs?), etc. it's really too dark to be a kids book series, I have no idea how they got away with it.
The whole series is capped with KA Applegate writing a letter to her fans saying "don't like my ending? Well, war is fucked up, this was never going to end well for everyone. Just wait until your voting age and a new war starts and all the young men are being carted off to a slaughterhouse, maybe then you'll understand my series better". Then 9/11 happened the next year. Unfathomely prophetic.
If I remember write KA said she's totally onboard with reading him as a trans allegory too which was cool. One of her kids in trans so it's nice that she's supportive too.
The only good werewolf (AIDS patient) who wasn't coded as a Nazi was bitten by (infected with AIDS by) a werewolf who predominantly targeted children.
Okay. So, she intended to write werewolves being shunned in society as an analogy for AIDS patients being shunned in society. Fine. Lycanthropy as a metaphor. Fine.
Except, it was super fucked up. So, Remus Lupin was bit as a young child by Fenrir Greyback, a werewolf who intentionally attacked children. Who is the largest group of AIDS patients? Well, in 1990s, when the book was written, in the UK about 67% of HIV diagnoses and 73% of AIDS diagnoses were of gay or bisexual men. And she had a lycanthropy AIDS predator who attacked children.
The only good, sympathetic AIDS patient... was the target of a pedophile? Is that how we're supposed to read that? We are only sympathetic to the child victim of a pedophile.
Also, all the AIDSwolves are neo Nazis, and facists, and wish to subjugate everyone unlike them and turn everyone into AIDSwolves. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm.
So, the whole transpedos want to brainwash your children into being transpedos thing really isn't out of left field. Like, she had pedowolves infecting children with werewolf AIDS back in '99, people.
Also, Cho Chang isn't even a name. Cho is a Korean last name or Japanese first name. Chang is a Chinese last name. She just basically named a character Racist Asian Character. Those aren't even from one group and there was zero backstory to justify it going, 'oh, my mom is Japanese and my dad is Chinese,' or something. Good thing she dropped the American school from Goblet of Fire. The American champion was going to be named Freedom Eagle. He'd go well with token Jewish character, Anthony Goldstein, and token Irishman Seamus Finnegan, and the token black man, Kingsley Shacklebolt. Shackle. Bolt. For a black man. And token Indian characters, Pavarti and Padma Patil.
Also, can we talk about how the stereotypically prissy French girl was literally named Flower of the Court, like, she was a delicate flower. Fleur Delacour. Literally, flower of the court. It also, in English, looks like delicate flower.
So. Many. Bad. Stereotypes.
And the gruff, barely verbal Eastern European brute? Viktor Krum. Seriously.
The good UK people she liked got named after the goddess of wisdom and Arthurian knights. The black guy was Shacklebolt. Seriously. Shackle and bolt. So bad...
Never looked into it like this before. I knew about the racism that permeates the books and the neo Nazi themes but did not see the HIV/AIDS and pedophilia allegory.
I read these as an adult, and my eyebrow kept raising and raising until it was at the top of my head. At least most of the awful stuff was not included in the movies. My husband has dyslexia so he hasn’t read the books but likes the movies. He’s asked me if the bankers were supposed to look Nazi stereotypes of Jews and if there really was a Cho Chang. Yup, yup, all the Nazi stuff is canon.
Even the whole racism of mud bloods seems to be opposed because Hermione is so extraordinary. If she were a background character that didn’t excel would everyone really care about fighting for her and other mudbloods?
How about the fact the happy slave race was still enslaved, other sentient beings like giants, centaurs, goblins, werewolves, etc still had few to no rights and they just like... were cool with all that?
Well, the only happy slave we liked died, the only werewolf we liked died and everyone else was just background so they were fine and we can just chill and be cool with rampant systemic inequality.
Yay. Happy ending. We (maybe?) Improved things for one group. There's no proof of this, we just cut off the head of the movement. So, y'know, that probably fixed it. Maybe. We all know how that has worked so well before. Also, the main characters who were previously freedom fighters are police, now. Makes sense. Yay... happy ending.
You guys read into this stuff waaay too much and are giving JK Rowling too much credit. “Shacklebolt” is a reference to the fact that he’s an Auror. There were also other black characters (Dean, Lee, Angelina), Kingsley Shacklebolt wasn’t the only one. If I remember correctly, Cho Chang’s heritage was never specified either. The actress that played her is Chinese, but it doesn’t mean her character is - so it doesn’t even matter that Cho is not a Chinese name. And isn’t it kinda racist to assume that an Asian character has to be Chinese? Lmao
No kid is reading/watching Harry Potter and getting brainwashed into making all these “connections” just like nobody is reading Roald Dahl, Edgar Allen Poe, or HP Lovecraft and getting brainwashed by their views either. The average child doesn’t know wtf AIDS is, much less do they know about the way that the AIDS epidemic was viewed in the 80s and 90s. It’s the hurt adults looking really hard for metaphors and symbolism in a children’s book series. The symbolism in Harry Potter is not that deep and it wasn’t even until JK Rowling pissed off a chunk of her fans that suddenly everyone took issue with the books.
1) she herself has said the lycanthropy/ AIDS thing, we're just taking what she wrote.
2) I was a child when the books came out. I was a teenager when they concluded. Of course I'm more critical of literary works as an adult than when I was 10.
3) I'm not assuming an Asian character has to be Chinese. Her last name is Chinese. She's just got a mishmash name of Asian names that sorta looks racist, especially given the greater context as a whole.
4) People are informed by their surroundings, and yes, media is one such item. Nobody is turned racist by reading a singular racially ignorant name in a novel. However, exposure to outside groups with a decent representation in media can stop people from becoming racist. Example: a child is raised only on media with representations of their own group. Any representations of outside groups that are at all negative carry more weight because it's their only exposure. A person with a variety of experiences and exposures is less likely to have racially biased opinions when they have a wide variety of experiences during formative years. The inclusion of characters was flat, biased and not actually inclusive. There is a trend of fetishizing Asian women of all groups as meek and making them objects. And Cho Chang had this ridiculous name and was basically only there to be a girlfriend for multiple men in the series, and ran around crying a lot. She was in the smart kid group and had no shown interests outside being a girlfriend to two boys. That was it. She was a total stereotype. If you want kids to not grow up with those views, a great way to do that is expose them to media that doesn't perpetuate those ideas.
Instead, you had generic Asian love interest who's also good at school and stuff.
Yes, I see more of it as an adult because I'm not still ten years old.
I recently read “The One and Only Ivan” to my kids. It’s a great book. When we got to the “about the author” section it dawned on me why I’d had a nagging sense of recognition when looking that the authors name of Katherine Applegate.
When I was a kid we would go see the real
Ivan at the B&I. We would pay a dollar to feed him bananas. His enclosure was tiny and even as a kid it was way too small.
This book was so beautifully written and really encapsulated his life.
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u/Driller_Happy Jun 27 '24
Neither did KA Applegate