i have SO many feelings about maximum ride. i also post birds. my maximum ride rewrite was Gay Birds. find me on Ao3 @maxtothemax. my icon was drawn by @aviandaleks!
let's talk about adultification! specifically, the literal adultification that happens in when the wind blows, where max says multiple times "i'm only twelve but i'm suuuuper smart, like mentally i'm basically an adult" and then frannie's narration also confirms this with her always being impressed at how clever max is for her age - even though, from my perspective as a reader, max read as a child in many ways, and frannie just read as neglectful for not treating max as a vulnerable and inexperienced.
AND THEN max's adultification was used, in the lakehouse, to sexualize her and put her in a very adult-coded relationship that read as creepy and fetishistic. this is juxtaposed to max's main plotline in the book being very teenager-coded: the custody battle where max and friends want more freedom from their biological parents who treat them like "normal" children (i.e., bossing them around), even though as avian hybrids who are "wise beyond their years" (ugh) what they need is freedom - so sayeth the plot, anyway. and yet this battle is also framed in terms of max and friends' adultification: frannie and kit are constantly telling other adults that max and co. are basically adults and should just be allowed to do what they want.
transitioning to maximum ride, the adultification is less in-your-face, but it's still a clear part of the plot. max is framed as the mom figure of the flock, despite being fourteen, and no older than her male counterparts. and although (as far as i remember) none of the characters really pay lip service to the idea that max and the flock are wise beyond their years, tropes-wise there's a lot of adultification and disproportionate responsibility going on.
example: the saving the world plotline. while that's a really common YA trope, and was definitely in its heyday as MR was coming out, it still feels inextricably intertwined with max's adultification. plus, max's relationship with fang, paralleling the max/oz relationship in WTWB, reads less like two fourteen-year-olds having their first relationship and more like a generic romantic subplot written with adult characters in mind. but in MR, max's struggles for freedom and agency are still framed in a very teenage way, versus how they were framed in WTWB.
to be clear, i don't think any of this was done on purpose. actually, the fact that none of it was thought through is pretty much why everything shook out this way. and i think there's a type of adultification that winds up being really common in YA because, without examining ageism and discrimination against children, that's just an easy shortcut to giving teenage characters agency. but! WTWB isn't YA; it was written for adults, and it sold millions of copies - definitely not a fringe novel. so it just ends up reading as very weird and uncomfortable when the only likeable adults in the novel are like "no yeah, this twelve-year-old is basically an adult, what are you talking about?"
... either weird and uncomfortable, or completely socially acceptable, in certain ways. after all, girls are more mature than boys! they grow up so quickly! surely we can give her all these responsibilities, like taking care of her siblings and saving the world! she'll be fiiiiiine ;-;
I’m really enamored with the dynamic of two characters who work perfectly in tandem, like pacific rim drift compatible level, but they don’t like each other. It’s not even as strong an emotion as hate it’s just a very neutral-negative dislike, but they still act in perfect concert and their individual abilities are fully complementary
one thing that really annoys me (potentially enough to drop the whole story over it) is when someone creates a sci-fi/fantasy culture that's matriarchal, and then goes and gives a 'reason' for the matriarchy. like oooh the women can do [x magic] or have psychic powers, and men don't, so they're stronger! makes it seem like patriarchy is the Natural State Of The World written into our biology, and therefore upsetting it should also have an inherent reason. 😐 ok well i don't think that's true.
i'm gonna have to put some time into a photodump at some point, bc going through my old photos the other day (circa 2012-2014) there was so much maximum ride stuff. screenshots of fanart, pictures of merch, doodles of winged ocs, etc.
(things i will not be posting: the copious amounts of self-insert "omg i got kidnapped by the school and now i'm part of the flock!!" fanfiction. the one i wrote with my friend was at least 40k words, and i frequently wrote drafts of it in my school notebooks.)
To be quite honest with you all I do think that aro/ace-spectrum fans in fandoms where people are desperately inventing crossover ships and humanizing non-human characters in order to have a conventionally attractive guy to ship the main character with, instead of possibly having to enjoy a story with no romance in it, have the right to refer to everyone else as cowards.
This post has officially reached the "Let people enjoy things" crowd so I'm just going to come right and say it: Do I or do I not also count as a people.
I'm Maximum Ride, you son of a bitch! @maxtothemax - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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