Indominus rex Protection Group

Thinking about how humans portray animals again, so I guess this is a "good and bad monsters, part 2", now with less focus on raptor shipping.

(Spoilers for all the Jurassic Park/World movies out so far)


A fictional character being a good character and a fictional character being a good person don't have to be the same thing, and one doesn't have to pretend away a character's evil deeds or decide they were justified in committing them, to justify finding a fictional villain interesting. But while I think that's important to keep in mind, whether the media one is making or consuming is fanworks or original, I also think it's irrelevant to portraying any of the carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park/World franchise doing anything but biting things to death 24/7. Because human villains and dangerous animals are also two completely different things.

Which should be obvious, but gets less so with incompetent use of narrative anthropomorphization, which the Jurassic World movies fall into. So we get people lumping especially the Indominus rex and the Indoraptor in with human villains, and applying to them the usually appropriate, but in this case in my opinion beside-the-point, concern about excusing villainy or just simply about whether having them do something too unvillainous is out of character.

(Image source: eevee64 at tumblr)

The first Jurassic Park movie has a pretty good quote to sum up how I personally think the Jurassic series should remember to portray its predators: "They're not monsters, they're animals. They just do what they do." Said soon after one of those animals has just eaten a person alive in front of these characters and has tried to kill them, too, it's a reminder from both one of the characters to the others, and from the movie to the audience, not to hate the T. rex for being scary and dangerous, because she was just doing what's natural for her to do, even if for the human characters that was traumatizing and life-threatening to experience. She's not being a danger to be evil. She just needs to eat, like all living beings do, and catching and killing other living beings that are available for her to catch is how she eats.

Granted (no pun intended), the first part of the quote is about herbivores in particular. At least veggiesaurs get to be more than just accidental trample hazard in the next movie:

I also really like the T. rex family from The Lost World. They're a serious threat and horrifying, but considering why they're involved in the movie's events at all, those events were probably pretty scary for them, too. I mean, imagine one day your baby suddenly gets kidnapped from your home, and that's just the start of it. As monstrous as the adult rexes are towards the human characters, from their own point of view they're just being good parents protecting their child. For the same reason I love the Velociraptors in the third movie. But, an animal doesn't need to be doing something as endearing as taking care of their babies for their being dangerous to not come off as them being monsters.

"Maybe if I yell really loud my mate will hear me and I'll know which way is home."

I don't think the Jurassic World movies' portrayal of the Velociraptors is terrible, either, and I don't need the species to be kept "badass enough" or anything. They're an example of these animals raised in different conditions, a logical direction to take their obviously being very social in, and one type of addition to the theme of attempts at controlling nature backfiring by underestimating it. The problems start at presenting one kind of dangerous wild animal as morally better than another kind, depending on how convenient they are for the human protagonists. The Indominus rex isn't any eviler than the Raptor Squad, mainly she's just bigger, and unluckier.

Demonizing portrayals of animals can do a lot of harm, a good example of this being the increased hunting and lack of interest in conservation of sharks that the novel and movie Jaws isn't wholly responsible for, but contributed to quite a bit. The Indominus rex isn't a real animal species, and nonavian dinosaurs are already extinct anyway, but the attitude of treating an animal as evil in a story told from the point of view of humans doesn't exactly help in trying to understand the predators we do share this world with and which are an important part of their ecosystem.

Showing something attacking humans is pretty easy to make scary. We humans are empathetic creatures and get scared for the other humans we see narrowly escaping death on screen. But we're also very knowledgeable creatures, who should know better than to forget that we do understand the "monster's" motivations, too. We can leave that knowledge aside for the couple of hours of experiencing and enjoying the movie, but once it's over, unless one is a child that does actually not know better due to not having found out yet, that knowledge should be picked up again. A shark is not evil, it just wants to eat. We now have information available to find out the shark in the movie isn't very realistic at all and we humans aren't even what they do want to eat the few times they happen to bite a human, if they could only tell us apart from their actual food better. And even if humans were a great white shark's primary prey, that would still not be the shark doing anything wrong by shark standards. Other sharks aren't going to put it in shark jail for murder.

The Indominus rex and the Indoraptor being made-up creatures even in-universe seems to be what sets them apart the most. They're artificially created hybrids of multiple, completely different creatures, so they're unnatural. But every creature in Jurassic World is artificial and made by humans. The motivation for the Indominus rex and the Indoraptor's creation was definitely something to condemn, but the resulting creatures themselves trying to live their lives and survive is as natural as in the case of any other living being, and rather than at fault, they're victims of not having been given any chance at being able to live a fulfilling life despite having been given life. The Frankenstein's monster is not the real monster.

The Jurassic World movies don't completely ignore this, though they don't keep a very firm grasp on it.

The Indominus rex is bigger than expected, but she wasn't given a bigger living space, just higher walls. She was known to be very intelligent, but the mental stimulation she was provided with seemed to consist of... having trees in her paddock, I guess - not a lot to do for entertainment but observe back the observers. An animal that's content in the space it's kept in doesn't devote that much energy to trying to escape a place where it's regularly getting fed (by a crane or otherwise).

 Mr. Masrani: Can she see us?
Claire: They say it can sense thermal radiation. Like snakes. (so, yes)

[pictured: A bunch of videos of prey animals moving around, that you can let your cat or dog watch and maybe try to catch by pawing at the screen, as enrichment.]

Claire: It tried to break the glass.

With her being a new species it's hard to know how social she might be, but finding ways to provide opportunities to be social in case she does need it seems to have been completely given up on after she killed her sibling. The reason she did so seems to have been decided on being that she's just a monster, despite sibling rivalry with deadly results actually being perfectly normal behavior to some real-life animals (which then go on to form healthy social bonds as adults if socializing is also a thing their species does), and if it's not normal for her particular species, it would probably be an extreme but from her point of view necessary reaction to insufficient care and resources (she did eat the sibling, after all, and how likely would she have been able to do that when full of food already).

She was never intended to be comfortable and happy, though, considering the real reason she was created, and the people who still thought she was a tourist attraction instead just didn't care whether she was happy. Claire Dearing's disinterest in the animals of Jurassic World as living beings is made a big deal out of, but the park's owner, Simon Masrani, who reminds her to pay attention to how the animals are feeling on the way to the Indominus' paddock, also speaks about this animal like one might about a fancy, new rollercoaster. The Indominus rex was a prototype of a prototype for a project that wouldn't need her alive past seeing if she can be made and how much of a fight she can put up when put under enough stress. Despite how much trouble she gave the humans along the way, after she did escape, she was doomed, herself.

Hoskins (the actual villain of the movie, remember this guy?): They're gonna learn all kinds of things about their new asset now.

Hoskins, describing the fake dinosaur they actually wanted (until they didn't, when that one wasn't exactly what was ordered, either): Imagine... that one, a fraction of the size...

She was seeing everything for the first time and not sure what she is, and her method of finding her niche was trying her teeth and claws on things because that's what she's got to interact with the world with. We don't see her kill those Apatosaurs, so "killing for sport" is an assumption of how things went and why. In Jurassic World Evolution all the sauropods are portrayed as pretty helpless and docile, and an Indominus rex can just walk up to them and bite them once to kill them, but in real life that would hardly have been the case. If we assume it was the Indominus that attacked the sauropods and not perhaps even the other way around (because if you look at modern animals, the ones that are the most likely to be aggressive towards you just for being near and top the lists of the most dangerous animals in their environment do tend to be herbivores), they're big and I'm pretty sure she'd never seen anything like them, so it could also be something they did looked enough like aggression that she got scared of them and thought she needed to defend herself (at which it turns out she's very good, because after all, she was made to be).

What are Owen's qualifications for being the authority on how she works and when her behavior is unnatural, anyway? That he was brought to inspect the paddock because of his work with the raptors was probably because the Indominus is part Velociraptor, even if Owen and Claire didn't know that's the reason, but she's also not all Velociraptor, and how Owen views the raptors isn't free of his personal biases, either (for that matter, what are Owen's official, should-be-legally-required qualifications for training the raptors? The only thing mentioned about his background in the movies, as far as I recall anyway, is that he was in the U.S. Navy when InGen hired him. Yes, I.B.R.I.S. is a military project, but. Does he, like... have any kind of education on working with animals??)

Owen: Animals raised in isolation aren't always the most functional.
(Unless they're highly territorial and housing them separately is healthier for them? Sometimes that's a thing, not much to go on at this point about whether or not it's a thing for this species. But you've known about this particular animal's existence for like five minutes now, I'm sure you're an expert.)

The Indominus was hunted more persistently than she hunted anything or anyone else, including being tracked down several times when she tried to hide in a dense forest. There's no way for her to have known she was on an island, with nowhere to run. And running away far enough to get away from humans and mind her own business is not unlikely to have been what she would have preferred to do. She did head for the place all the tourists had gathered in, but without a control room screen and an understanding of how a theme-park works, that was just a source of warmth to her, and as such something interesting to investigate.

She finally met creatures that seemed to be like her, who understood her vocalizations and wanted to talk to her. They seemed to want to be her friends. They, too, wanted to get rid of the humans who were trying to kill her. Except, turns out it was more complicated, and her new friends actually liked some of the humans, and they liked those humans more than they liked her. The situation between the raptors, their humans, and the Indominus, was a sad mess of miscommunications, and everyone got their turn to feel betrayed. Even if the Indominus and the raptors had managed to talk things out, though, the humans wanted her dead anyway - understandable at this point, as she was a danger to humans, but her being so wasn't because she was just evil.

Delta, Echo, and Charlie didn't live to see their first morning out of containment, but neither did the Indominus. All of which were just animals that did their best to survive according to everything they knew about the world, and all of which killed humans in the process.

If anything, Blue and her sisters, with their affection and loyalty to a select few humans, are the ones whose behavior is "unnatural" here. For them it makes sense - Owen and Barry raised them, so they probably consider them their parents and packmates, but it must be pretty weird from the point of view of another animal who doesn't share their experiences.

And it is tragic in a way for the raptors, too, since they have very little chance of being able to live with their human packmates outside the circumstances they were raised in, and at the end of both Jurassic World movies so far, it causes them to choose a human's safety over that of a creature that's at least closer to being their own species. Blue is a very social and communicative creature, who seems pretty eager to be friends with the Indominus when they meet. The Indoraptor is even closer to being her conspecific, perhaps even close enough to reproduce with, and, well, if that's something she wants, the pickings for a mate are pretty slim. But she can't have both a new raptor friend and her human, so with the choice she makes, she ends up with her human being alive and her being alone.

The Indominus and the Indoraptor see Owen as prey like they see any other human, the way Blue, too, sees humans in general (possibly making an exception for also humans who have helped her and/or for ones she can tell her human considers part of his human pack, but I'm glad we see the other characters knowing better than to try their luck at that). That she would see this human as family instead is not something the Indominus or the Indoraptor have reason to even consider as a possibility - they weren't treated in a way that would have caused them to imprint on their human handlers as parental figures, so the most likely interpretation of Blue's behavior for them might be that Blue is just trying to claim for herself their food.

It's hard to be sure whether or not they would be interested in being friendly towards Blue if she wasn't biting them for looking at her human wrong (not usually something you go to shark jail for), but how they respond to her strangely motivated behavior is far from strange. It's also hard to say how they would interact with creatures they see as potential peers under circumstances any less hectic than what they get in canon just from the human characters' descriptions of their social skills, because the humans draw most if not all of their data from these animals' interactions with humans, and are indeed mostly interested in whether the animals can be co-operative towards humans.

For an animal of an undomesticated species, not wanting to take orders from or to befriend humans is their natural way of being. An abused animal having behavioral problems as a result of its abuse is 100% not the animal's fault, but there's not really even very solid evidence of behavioral problems in the hybrids. Just the crime of not being they way humans want them to be.

In any case, natural or unnatural doesn't equal morally right or wrong. The latter is for humans to judge human behavior by human standards. The former is kind of just a different way of saying what's more common - nothing in nature is so simple there aren't exceptions to exceptions and all kinds of weird circumstances that lead to exceptional results, whether beneficial, harmful, or neither, for those involved.

Nature is neutral, no matter our subjective interpretations of it.

Anyway, here's a few looks at a vicious predator (not even joking, really - the domestic cat is an invasive species we keep introducing to ecosystems not evolved to suit it, by having our pets roam unsupervised outside our homes and by having created a substantial feral cat population, and along with that being full of safety risks for the cats themselves, they're such good hunters they can even drive to extinction native species they prey on. That's on us, though, cats just do what they do):

A cat (Felis catus).

A cat in a story told from the point of view of cats (Aristocats).

A cat in a story told from the point of view of mice (Secret of NIMH).

The same cat in the same story as previous, but briefly seen more from the point of view of human characters, showing that despite the eldritch horror seen at his introduction through the eyes of creatures he considers nothing but food, Dragon the farmer's cat is indeed a perfectly normal housecat (a bit big, admittedly, but maybe he's a Norwegian Forest Cat).