One of my favorite stories is @featherquillpen's (Poetry's) Daemorphing series, a daemon AU retelling of the Animorphs series. It's a wonderful (though often painful) scifi series with a lot of insightful writing about many topics, but especially anti-imperialism.
One of the earlier stories in Daemorphing contains a really lovely simile. I keep rotating it in my head and there is a really remarkable depth of meaning in this one piece of imagery. I wanted to break it down a little as a case study of how meaningful symbolism can be in prose. This feels especially relevant to me at the moment since there's been a bit of discussion on Tumblr recently about visualization during reading - I don't imagine any sights or sounds at all when reading unless I pause and purposefully try, so I really appreciate descriptive writing that has functions beyond communicating a mental image to the reader. (The imagery is purely metaphorical in this case, but imagery is capable of being both metaphorical and literal.)
My favorite simile appears in Seeing in Color, a retelling of Animorphs #19: The Departure. The most prominent antagonists in Animorphs are Yeerks: sluglike aliens that can climb into people's brains, read their minds, and control their bodies. The Yeerk Empire is using these capabilities to mount a secret invasion of Earth. Seeing in Color/The Departure is mostly about one of the Yeerks, Aftran, who believes humans can only be her enemy but is reaching a breaking point with the evil empire she has been raised in. At the climax of the story, the Animorph Cassie defies her teammates and allows Aftran to climb into her brain as a desperate attempt to make peace with at least one Yeerk.
«Why did you do it?» I demanded as I demorphed. [...]
Cassie didn't even try to hide her emotions from me. She offered them up like a bouquet. «Because I'm sick of hurting people. I just wanted it to stop.»
«Sick of hurting people,» I said, lingering over each emotion: weariness, desperation, empathy for me. «Does that mean I'm a person?»
She offered them up like a bouquet. There is SO much meaning in this.
First, on the simplest level: bouquets are good things! When Aftran's narration uses a word with such positive connotations, it implies she likes the thing she's talking about. Cassie's feelings aren't burdensome or gross or pathetic, they're a nice present.
Thinking about what a bouquet looks like, this also gives me an idea of what Cassie is feeling. Bouquets are complicated and have a lot of different flowers, but they're designed so every element is visible at once and they make a harmonious whole. Cassie's feeling a lot of different things, but they're all part of one coherent picture. She's not conflicted or confused about what she just did or why she did it.
I believe this also gives a hint about Cassie's state of mind when presenting her emotions to Aftran (something Aftran would be fully aware of, at the moment). Gift-giving, especially of something a little special like a bouquet, is generally a relatively deliberate and premeditated action. Cassie isn't thinking things through here, but she's not completely given in to desperation - she's still acting with intention, the part of her brain that's perceptive and even manipulative is still turned on.
The last thing I wanted to touch on - the bouquet simile ties into the main point of Seeing in Color, a critique of imperialism and ableism that is important to Aftran's character and to the Daemorphing story of Yeerks. Poetry writes Yeerk characters as frequently disparaging their own bodies and capabilities with words like "blind", talking like they've been unfairly denied the sensorium of other beings and they're owed the experience (via slavery). But it rapidly becomes obvious in Aftran's story, and in the stories of other sympathetic Yeerks, that sight (and hearing, and smelling, and so on) isn't what Yeerks are really lacking. They're desperate for connection and mutual understanding. They're desperate to enjoy beauty and meaning. Human sight isn't better than Yeerk sonar, but a sighted human on Earth can look at the beloved flora and fauna of their homeworld or the face of a loved one, and a Yeerk on Earth that's not in a host brain can only direct their sonar towards a miserable artificial sludge pit full of fascist narcs.
Aftran comparing Cassie's feelings to a bouquet ties in to this narrative thread. Bouquets are a great pleasure to see, smell, and touch. Cassie's feelings freely given (shocking enough that Aftran takes note of it - "didn't even try to hide" - even after Cassie deliberately let Aftran into her brain) are as precious as anything Aftran could experience through Cassie's senses.
