Radical Ecology in Kid Fiction
Octonauts, Sunny the Shark, Baby Shark
It’s not hard getting to the what-you’re-supposed-to-think of things. It’s apparent in every exchange we have, the quiet presuppositions that define our engagement with the world. But what kid fiction shows is how to enjoy these presuppositions, what structures we use to cling to them.
Storytelling doesn’t care for the presuppositions; it’s is an engagement with otherness which is by definition enjoyable (i.e. persisting in the gaps of social order where enjoyment becomes possible). With storytelling, we access this persisting at its purest.
When kid fiction strays from storytelling, it often strives to provide children this aforementioned Velcro they need to function in our world, to make the presupposed rules their own. The Velcro here IS enjoyment, and enjoyment means persisting in the gaps, an embrace of what doesn’t fit in. So there’s a natural conflict here between enjoyment and rules of thought and behavior: you need enjoyment to make the rules stick, but enjoyment itself is an embrace of how the rules don’t stick.
The more kid fiction dedicates itself to normativity, the less enjoyable it becomes. Any discerning parent comes across this a lot. Kid fiction that fully dedicates itself to normativity is as a rule bereft of enjoyment. It’s lame and sapped of its narrative energy, painfully reminiscent of an adult who thought they could get a kid to sit through a lecture if they threw in enough colorful pictures. And what defines good science/information books are how well they create holes that the imagination can fall into, how much they provide a world rather than a system.
Good kid fiction has a tug and pull between norms and enjoyment. What this dynamic exposes is the underside of the norms themselves: their outside structure, the presuppositions of the presuppositions themselves. And THAT’S why writing about kid fiction is necessary and often ends up in better thought-out territory than the adult fiction we jump into. It’s genuinely smarter. Adult fiction chases the normativity (things aren’t right but this story makes it right) while kid fiction enjoys it. And it’s in this enjoyment where we’re closest to ourselves.
OCTONAUTS
One of my kids’ favorites is watching The Octonauts. It’s full of dynamic plots and cinematography, and it weaves the science of marine biology into a rich, palatable soup. Each episode closes with a catchy cheer-song about the featured creature, and you end up shouting, “Go sea slug! Go sea slug!”, more than you’d expect.
Here’s Octonauts at its core: sea life needs our help to not get eaten by other sea life, so the Octonauts swoop in with kelp cakes and fish biscuits to meet the needs of hungry predators and save the fleeing fish. Then everyone celebrates. So Octonauts applies vegetarianism directly to the animal kingdom—its goal is to wipe pain and suffering out of biological life itself. And it’s only here that marine life can be properly enjoyed…with a dance break.
This serenity that the Octonauts forge amidst ocean life gets abruptly cut off when a storm throws the Octopod into a desert; and this is how Octonauts transitions to Above and Beyond, its above-ground offshoot for a slightly older demographic. The situations on land get more stressful—predators begin to feel actually dangerous and show their pleasure in getting the upper hand on prey—but animal conflict itself gets dwarfed by the sudden inclusion of nature’s other dark side: the dominating factor of our own time, climate change.
With Above and Beyond, climate change translates to a panoply of exciting catastrophes. A snap freeze in the bayou sends the Octonauts after falling iguanas. There’s a hurricane they have to fly into. There are mud slides and disturbed fragile habitats. And the cheering oceanic bliss from before turns into a, “As things get warmer, X is going to occur, which disrupts Y factor of life.”
Not as catchy, but the emphasis is important. What Above and Beyond states is that climate change IS nature; we need to approach it AS nature. We need to help animals out, but sublime maelstroms and life-disrupting catastrophes will only increase. All life will have to adapt. There is no privileged position from which one can feel responsible for it all (given over to the infinite call to conserve) or hold the horror back (with rituals that help us to easily continue our everyday lives—reusable bags and unflushed toilets). What climate change calls for is our Octonaut spirit of adventure, how we bravely rush into the maelstrom and save the day.
The Octonauts’s radicality lies in how it engages nature through its points of being messed up. What the team of Octonauts reach is the horrifying truth of Cousteau serenity—that all that beautiful sea life on which we lean to feel calm and collected is itself constantly gobbling each other up. And now the maelstrom of climate change has begun swallowing all life on earth in the same manner. Both of these sites of being eaten are what we have to tarry with, what the Octonauts engage with in a state of openness and vulnerability. Nature doesn’t present us with a closed system, and the Octonauts don’t right its wrongs when they save the day. They don’t seal its gaps shut; they tarry with them.
By fighting to make the animal kingdom vegetarian, the Octonauts highlight the problem of nature itself: that it’s infinitely gobbling itself up. Nature isn’t harmonious but askew (and humanity is where its derangement is most expressed). Our call is to take a heroic stance in it, to work through its antagonisms and see them through. It’s a public “Go sea slug!” that gets us involved, going deep to where the slug lives and living there too like the Octonauts.
SUNNY THE SHARK
Every time we are in a bookstore, my two-year-old has to find a shark book. Baby Shark is her preferred early life media, and sharks are her favorite animal. Which is itself pretty interesting…there’s a pelagic ferocity that remains throughout all its kid-iterations. Instead of the multiplicity of dinosaur forms or the fluff of tigers and wolves, you get a sleek, dead-eyed missile with fins and teeth. My gambit is that this engagement is all leading to a childhood study of human subjectivity (our disavowed structural parts), but who knows. Maybe it just encourages biting.
Our latest pickup was Sunny the Shark, a “Surviving the Wild” graphic novel by Remy Lai. Sunny’s an oceanic whitetip who gets tagged by researchers right before garbage latches onto her body and pins her fin. Her story is a long ordeal about her inability to hunt and be the fearsome predator that everyone stresses she is.
There’s a very nice not fitting in with one’s identity component here. But more than just failing to live up to your title, we have Sunny’s inability to remove her own obstacle. It’s the obstacle that sets the story in motion. It’s external, an effect of humanity, and after multiple botched attempts Sunny finally does get freed. It’s the research tagging itself that saves her, the effort of the scientists to finally track her down and remove the obstruction before she succumbs to it. Humanity rights its wrong and natural order gets restored, but that’s not why the story sticks.
There’s an additional righting of wrongs in Sunny: the wiping away of science’s own harm. The marine biologists’ intrusions on the natural world traumatically disrupt Sunny’s life, but the bait they offer keeps her from starving twice (again the predator’s saved from causing harm). While one manifestation of humanity is crippling her, the other (her tracker) is the one thing that saves her from death in the ocean’s depths.
This dual intrusion on Sunny’s body really highlights the indelible mark that humanity already has on nature. We’re never watching from afar but are always too close, penetrating biological life for their very data (migratory paths) as well as in our personal enjoyment (what’s choking her is the string of a birthday balloon, a kid’s toy).
Instead of striving for a painless utopia, here we’re cheering for Sunny to hunt and kill and finally get something to eat. But we still end up with the same being fed as with The Octonauts: Sunny is saved from starvation by researcher fish bait, she gets scraps of squid from whales, and she nearly dies when she bravely takes on a giant squid with one fin tied behind her back.
There’s nonetheless an embrace of life’s violence that presses against this being fed. Sunny’s not in pain or running for her life. She’s a fearsome predator who should be able to be a fearsome predator. It’s an embrace of the shark without making the shark a spectacular killing machine.
What makes Sunny’s story actually philosophical is her struggle for survival, a persisting against her limit. And this string is given voice by the barnacles who are growing on it. Already nature’s subsumed the trash that’s choking it.
Sunny wants to be alone, but she’s made to realize her desire for friendship by the pilot fish who follow her around anyway, and then the immobile barnacles get stuck right to her. The pilot fish must abandon Sunny when it’s clear she can no longer hunt and leave them scraps. But one fish sticks by her side as she desperately takes on a giant squid, and it's only the pilot fish’s support, her belief in Sunny, that gives Sunny the strength to break free from the squid’s grip.
Together, Sunny and the pilot fish undertake an ethical dying-for-cause. They inspire each other to abandon their base needs (the pilot fish is better off leaving Sunny, Sunny is better off succumbing to her ill-fate and fatigue) and strive to live for each other. In other words, they both act out of love.
What the book really sits with is Sunny’s fatigue. We could simply be told/reminded in storyteller fashion that Sunny is tired and hungry. But we actually end up sinking multiple times into the dreary depths of the ocean where there’s nothing but the cold darkness of empty space.
Basically, the trash necklace is the necessary extimate excessive objectal counterpart to the void of subjectivity. Contra warm inner life and character motivation driving the story, contra a battle of will against humanity’s negligent trash, we get the ethics of love, the death drive of carrying on in fixity past the point where we’re better off surrendering. We’re all sharks swimming around with a balloon string tied around us—not fighting life’s direct conflicts/goals but how objects themselves stick out to us with an ontological weight. The balloon string isn’t a hurdle to pass; it’s a line we set to hurdle ourselves.
It's by giving us the void of the deep ocean and a calm, concerned “Sunny?” from a pilot fish who’s unable to leave us that we actually reach who we are in Sunny the Shark. The cold impassivity of the natural world, the whole cosmos, isn’t guilting us into recycling. We aren’t finding our place in it. Nor does its void direct us to the space dust that we’re all part of. We’re the ones who put the line of trash in our own way that we then strive against. Empty space just brings us to the struggle of our own interworkings.
One could imagine an adult version of Sunny where there is no deus ex machina hand of god/humanity that plucks Sunny out of the water and frees her. She’d starve or get eaten, and the pilot fish would go down with her or perhaps offer herself up as food. But I don’t think there’s much interest to be found in either the happy ending or the “realist” misanthropic one. What really remains is our own “what-is-to-be-done?” with Sunny’s story.
Pick up trash and reduce waste, but also cling to one’s passion for sea life, cling to one’s relationships, strive through one’s impenetrable limits. Don’t turn away from the impossible but press into it even though there’s nothing on the other side. Infinity’s already there in the striving.
Sunny’s gotten three reads so far. We’ll get to the other new books eventually.
BABY SHARK
This brings us back to “Baby Shark”. The infectious, sung-to-death song is “Cling to your family in shark form. Go out in the world to the fun chaos of hunting. There, you’ll take a sudden shift in perspective and find yourself cheering for the fish who are fleeing us. And finally, close the curtain with a happy ‘That’s the end!’ as though our drama has reached its conclusion”. So in a third, younger mode we have another wiping clean the horror of the natural world, but what it leaves us with needs to be made clear.
So we disavow violence (i.e. reach our harmonious end) by clinging to family, but that “Let’s go hunt!” still keeps our wheels spinning. We need the song and its much ado about nothing to get to a point of stillness. There’s no only staying at home.
The shift in perspective that denies any resolution to “little fish vs shark” (so logically, the shark starves, but in undead cartoon form it persists in renewed musical bliss) directly recalls The Last of Us 2, which radically undoes the knot of our/its own revenge quest by forcing us to play as the person whom we’re seeking revenge against. It’s only here that we confront our own involvement in the figure of the enemy, that we realize the manner in which we construct the thing we’re chasing (i.e. dialectics). And it’s here by shifting only our perspective (as everything remains the same) that the cause of revenge/hunting can be given up, and given up for nothing. So both “Baby Shark” and TLOU2 highlight our own structure.
As much as “Baby Shark” is a fierce, toddler embrace of family, it only points to the need to go out and hunt, to engage the world. And “Baby Shark” shows that its inherent violence can be not just disavowed but undone. We can undo our own actions, our own constitutive knots of being. And we actually enjoy doing it.
As we said earlier, it’s easy to begin from a point of ,“What are the rules?” Predation is bad, climate change is bad, human waste is bad, science is good, love your family. But something deeper needs to be at work for these rules to have any sticking power, any enjoyment. And that’s the side that actually makes us save the Earth.