Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Planet of the Apes Questions Apes
Could you ape the themes in this book in a game at the table? How would you do it? Would the players be the humans, or the apes? Would you even use apes, or some other animal? Is Prax, for example, the Planet of the Tapirs? How many ways can you think of 'rolling the ball over'?
Comments
For me, the key message wasn't about "who is human?" so much as "how should we treat non-humans?" I think the core of the book was how the apes treated the humans when they were exactly what we would call "animal" in the real world. Is it right to perform medical experiments on animals? Put them in zoos? Use them for food?
I think that message loses its impact a bit if there's an easy way for individuals to step across that person/animal divide. That means that the Prax example isn't the same.
Perhaps the idea gets closer to home if we look at in terms of racism, and some ethnic groups being written off as "less human" than others.
There's also the revenge component of the apes' behaviour - they ended up particularly good at medicine precisely because that was where they were (and have been) most experimented on.
But yes, any division where someone says "they're not like us you know" is fair game for being satirised by this
I wouldn't. I didn't like the heavy-handed allegorical nature of the book and only made it half way through. I had thought I had read it way back in the sixties as I remember buying it, but I don't think I did now, as nothing was familiar except things that were also in the film. I think now that I bought it intending to read it and never did...