Someone whose blog I follow has been posting about how the portrayal of the Hork-Bajir in Animorphs isn’t really internally consistent. If you’re unfamiliar, they’re these huge biped dinosaur-bird guys. No feathers, but they have horns on their heads and blades growing out of their arms and legs.
(They’re pacifist herbivores. The blades are for stripping bark from trees to eat.)
And they’re portrayed as this kind of stupid, noble-savage stereotype. Except for the once-in-a-generation mutation they call "seers", who have intelligence on par with the ~smart~ species in the series. One weird moment in “The Hork-Bajir Chronicles” is when the seer Dak Hamee is making little stick-drawings in the ground and tells his friend Jagil Hullan “hey look it’s you” and Jagil is like “what no that’s not me, I’M me”. The whole conceit of the book is that a Hork-Bajir is telling this story to one of the Animorphs! Can they or can they not recognize representations?
I can’t claim credit for noticing that, though.
The thing that has always always always bothered me, though, is— okay, so most Hork-Bajir have this stilted, broken English they speak, mixed with their own native language and with Galard, this interstellar auxlang that keeps being mentioned. (My one wish for an Animorphs sequel: Tell us where Galard comes from.) But Toby Hamee, who’s a seer, is “smart” enough to speak in fluent English (somehow, despite being raised mainly by “stupid” Hork-Bajir and only seeing the Animorphs infrequently). That’s annoying, but the thing that ACTUALLY bugs me is, Toby’s ancestor Dak Hamee in “The Hork-Bajir Chronicles”? He ALSO speaks in fluent, grammatically-correct language, while all the other Hork-Bajir around him use that same broken stilted language.
How is one out of a thousand or a million Hork-Bajir the ONLY one who uses THEIR OWN LANGUAGE correctly?
The headcanon I decided on to explain this away is that in the Hork-Bajir language, stuff like tense and number are all just implied. To compare to real languages, it’s like how you don’t always need a subject in Japanese, or like how some languages don’t use past/present/future tense. The language Dak Hamee is using is like... super technical jargony stuff that most Hork-Bajir only use if being specific is absolutely vital.
Dak Hamee is like one of those people who stomps their feet about never ending a sentence with a preposition. Or... like a thesaurus-fucker.
Tagged: