Just random lines/sections I highlighted while reading.
And of course, all the girls just call me⌠gorgeous. Okay, maybe I've never actually heard anyone call me gorgeous, but I am confident that someone, somewhere, must have called me gorgeous at some point.
Or not.
He starts off so confident, too...
I've cut my hair. Or at least my stylist, Charise, cut it for me. That's right, Charise.
The way this is phrased makes me think that either A) with a name like "Charise," she has to be good at hair or B) it's a really small town, and everyone knows Charise is the best.
See, dog happy isn't like human happy. Human happiness always has this little voice in the back of your mind going, "Don't be too happy. Keep your guard up. Something bad could still happen."
You don't have to come right into my head, Marco. I already know what foreboding joy is.
We had important business, and I was not going to lower myself to training insults with Rachel. Besides, I couldn't think of any.
Lol.
At the time, I figured he was mad because he had to dress up. I get that.
Lol lol. Such an 11-year-old thing. (Related: my 11-year-old nephew successfully wore shorts every day of 2024.)
I could feel the rage flowing through me, the blind, violent rage that became little films in my headâlittle head-movies of revenge and destruction. I pictured the things I would do to TomâŚto ChapmanâŚsomeday even to Visser Three. I would do terrible things to them. Terrible, violent things.
It was a sick feeling. It was sick, and I knew it, and yet I ran those images over and over in my head.
Rage is addictive, you know. I guess it's sorta like a drug. Anger and hatred get you high. They get you high, but like any addiction, they hollow you out and tear you down and eat you alive.
Oof.
"Is there any way to see through the hologram?" Cassie asked.
"We could hit him with something as big as a bus," Rachel suggested.
Thank you, Rachel.
Rachel said, "Look, no one likes violence. All right?"
This is foreshadowing. And sad, in light of how everyone on the team comes to view her later.
"Not bad," I said. "He's not quite that Frisbee dog we saw on TV, but he's not bad."
"Hey, that was a professional Frisbee dog. Homer's just in it for the sport. Homer doesn't even have any endorsements."
Oh, Jake. One of your increasingly rare jokes. It's so sad when these go away.
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It really should have been. I don't really love this book or the addition of the android race to the canon, or Marco's narration that much (it's a bad haircut dude you'll live) tbh..but i do love Consequences. The battle at the end of this one is so fucking harrowing, so I suppose i'll give it a reread.
See.. that might be a you thing Marco, you poor traumatized boy who nearly just got run over by a car. I'm glad you even sought out a fun concert in morph but you can't judge people about their bad ideas about non-necessary morphing again. And neither can Jake.
After horrible termite time, are you really going to go on thinking Rachel never gets scared? like i'm sure he's exaggerating, but if he's shown to be observant enough to say she shakes her head when frustrated but not observant enough to see that she gets just as scared as anybody and covers it with anger/reckless courage while he covers his fear with jokes...like. come on Marco i know you're smarter than that.
Well that's odd. I get keeping to the core group is easier for writing, but like...Ax's input is often really helpful (and likely would be in this situation) and how can a morph be overused anyway? wouldn't it be better for him to get very familiar with his human morph and practice it often?
Maybe that's why Marco thinks Rachel is so fearless. I imagine he's been furious much longer than Rachel has had good reason to be, and knows how the aftereffects make him feel emptier than before. He also bottles things up even with Jake. Maybe Rachel and Cassie talk to each other about this stuff more than Jake and Marco do.
love this nice little nod to the last book. i love them your honor.
oh hey Z-space explanation! Ax is funnier than i remember. this feels late, but also makes sense to be placed here i guess? also why morph spider? Flies have weird eyes and they already have those for surveillance. sounds easier to me than spider but whatevs.
oh Jake is morphing fly! why not all do that? maybe they needed a wider variety of eye types?
oooh okay Marco!, predator mode is powerful huh? maybe you are more fun than I previously thought.
Itâs interesting, with 9&10 back to back, that Marco can morph out of a crow. Even with the taxxon in 7, with taxxons being notoriously breakable, they need Axâs tail to get free. (The other book where several people are swallowed is MM2 and thatâs special circumstances). And Cassie, who can certainly grow with force if she wants to, canât get out of a termite infested piece of wood. If the termites had been there long enough, rough handling would have it in pieces (though of course the yeerks would care enough to use non-falling apart wood). Anyway what I really mean is, if Marco can explode a crow Cassie should be able to burst out of a piece of wood.
Imagine youâre a ten thousand year old hardwired-pacifist invulnerable android with anger issues pretending to be a slug pretending to be a teenager and you attend the fake funeral of a woman disappeared by your evil slug fake boss and youâre so angry at this funeral that you canât even pretend to be sad, even though your face is an actual hologram that you literally control, because this woman was disappeared and because you know what this loss and this lie is doing to her family including her eleven-year-old child, who looks like his world just ended right in front of him, and youâll probably never be able to tell him the truth, you know this little boyâs mother is alive and you know where she is but your cover prevents you from offering that solace and your pacifist programming prevents you from righting this wrong, and then years later you finally get to have an honest open conversation with this kid and he just roasts you nonstop. He insults every member of your extended family as he like, passes them in the hallway.
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Itâs 2020 - weâre all grown enough to cast trans actresses as cis characters. I literally couldnât think of more perfect actresses to play Cassie and Rachel, and I think you should reach out to them immediately.
would u talk more about kaa's poor understanding of torture and how that manifests in the books
CW discussion of the use of torture in the Animorphs series.
I want to disclaim that I am absolutely not an expert on torture or torture apologia; my understanding of the topic is superficial. I recommend @scripttorture if you want to read more about the standard pitfalls of portrayals of torture in fiction, although with the caveat that if I read their blog for more than a few minutes at a time I start to get physically sick.
Torture is consistently treated by Animorphs as an unassailably successful way to acquire information.
Tobias in #33 is able to "withstand" torture for an extended period of time because he retreats into his hawk mind, but near the end he breaks and either is about to give up his team when he gets rescued, or he does and the guy who heard him died; I can't remember exactly.
In #29 it's considered an immovable priority to rescue Aftran from Visser Three's custody because it's assumedânot just by Visser Three and not just by the Animorphs, but apparently by every member of the Yeerk Peace Movement, both Yeerk and humanâthat under torture she will give up information about the Peace Movement and about the Animorphs.
On one occasion someone, I can't remember who, tells Marco something along the lines of "You're brave, but you won't be able to withstand the Visser's torture; if he gets ahold of you eventually you'll break and give up your friends." Marco accepts this as fact.
Except for #33, this could all be brushed away as characters being misinformed or disingenuous, but no opposing framework is ever offered by the narrative, and #33 happens literally on the page.
People don't give up real information under torture, basically, is the short answer to your question. This post and this follow-up by @scripttorture go into some of the mechanics of why torture flat-out does not yield useable information. I actually think Animorphs does an okay job with some of the items on this list; the average Yeerk's fear of what will happen if they approach a figure of authority in any way with any information is a big part of what undermines the Empire's ability to conduct itself with any efficiency and is part of what loses them the war. But where the series fails is that:
1) people don't inevitably "comply" under torture, cruelty is not a magic button that gets people to do whatever you want, in fact a fairly standard human response to profound cruelty is increased defiance,
2) people lie under torture all the time and torturers do not know when they're lying,
3) "Pain and stress destroy the human memory." (quoting @scripttorture here.) The idea that you either "withstand" or "break" under torture and if you "break" you give up your friends is missing the basic event that occurs during torture, which is that your brain gets so fucked up you can't recall accurate information or communicate it effectively.
The reason all of this matters is that the widespread belief that torture inevitably and reliably yields truthful intelligence is used to justify the use of torture in real life.
The Animorphs have a very good reason to believe their war ends if one of them is captured: the Yeerks can read minds. If they get taken alive in human form, the game is over, that's true without torture entering the frame. But a lot of the above examples are places where infestation is impossible, because the person is not currently shaped like a viable host, and torture is introduced to provide a similar sensation of the looming inevitable security collapse, and that's simply not how torture works.
The other big failing is the fact that the Chee, who claim to be hardwired for nonviolence, keep Yeerks in solitary confinement (possibly sensory deprivation, depending on the details of Yeerk physiology), which is torture. Full stop. At no point that I can remember does anyone in the narrative point out that this is torture and therefore cannot be considered "nonviolent" by any cogent definition. I think Cassie mentions feeling sorry for the Yeerk in Erek's head, but Cassie feeling sorry for someone does not really count as a narrative condemnation of that person's treatment. Cassie feels sorry for everything. Personally I think that the wild inconsistencies in the Chee's claims to nonviolence would be interesting if explicitly explored, and the fact that their definition of nonviolence in canon permits torture if it's done under their own obscure terms, could be fascinating if explored explicitly by the story, but the Chee's assertions that they are "not hurting the Yeerks" are left unchallenged.
The fact that Yeerks are not human and therefore maybe solitary confinement isn't torture 'for them' doesn't hold a ton of weight for me; for one thing, the Yeerks are deprived of all forms of stimulus standard to their species when they're in the Chee's weird wire cages, so I feel like they have to be experiencing some kind of comparable deprivation of their physical or psychiatric needs; and more importantly, since that distinction is never addressed in text, it is still a text that portrays solitary confinement perpetrated by the protagonist's allies and fails to communicate in any way that when you do that to humans it's torture. Since these books are targeted at eight-year-olds in a country where solitary confinement is common practice (at the time of writing and to this day), and since one of, perhaps the main goal of Animorphs is to acquaint that target audience with some of the gruesome realities of warfare and violence, and tear away the cheerful sanitized veneer that teen superhero stories tend to lay on violence, I think that's a major failing.
Edit: Itâs unclear in many places how much this is Applegate and how much itâs the ghostwriters but it honestly doesnât matter for the purposes of discussing the effect of the text. I use âApplegateâ as a catch-all for âthe author of Animorphsâ and I think thatâs fair game because she put her name on the covers.
Edit the second:Â Another arguable failing is that Tobias should, in blunt terms, probably be way more fucked up in way more lasting ways after the events of #33 than he is, but Animorphs to a certain degree requires suspension of disbelief about the kidsâ ability to function in the long term given the degree of trauma they sustain through out the series, and, frankly, their ability to handle the responsibilities theyâre facing given their age. Applegate portrays PTSD symptoms a lot more accurately than most writers in her genre, but she bends to the genre demand that the kids have to be functional enough to keep fighting the battle in front of them until the curtain drops. I donât think thatâs exclusive to the portrayal of torture.Â
Edit the third: Eva should probably be a lot less coherent and a lot less able to effectively relay information about Yeerk infrastructure than she is in Visser or in #45. And if youâve been reading my posting you how much I love the layered unreliable narration of Visser, but the fact that both Edriss and Eva were tortured at length leading up to the trial in Visser should probably have completely wrecked either of their ability to weave complex, narratively cohesive half-truths to the Council of Thirteen.Â
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TL;DR Torture doesn't yield accurate information and Animorphs pretends it does which feeds into IRL justification of torture. Meanwhile the Chee are torturing Yeerks by keeping them in solitary confinement and potential sensory deprivation and the text never acknowledges that.
I don't have anything to add to the torture discussion but i wanted to say that i was under the impression that the chee keep the yeerks in something like the matrix? Like feeding false memories and sensation to them? because they would still need to go to the pool i assume, otherwise the other yeerks would be suspicious that some of their colleagues are never in the pool yet still function in the hosts, but i may be remembering the situation wrong
I haven't read #10 recently (I donât think itâs ever discussed after that), so I can't speak with certainty on what's said about the Yeerks' sensory experience inside the Chee. What I remember clearly is:
The Yeerk never enters the pool.
The Yeerk never communicates with another Yeerk, or with anyone at all, as far as I can tell. Itâs possible that there is communication between the Yeerk and the Chee holding it captive.Â
The Chee keep the Yeerk alive via some kind of tech setup. (Sidenote: there's no reason this has to be physically in their heads...the Chee really just Did That for the aesthetic.)
When the Chee go to the Yeerk pool they create a hologram of the Yeerk leaving their ear and swimming deep into the pool where they're visually obscured by the sludge; then they drop the hologram. When they're walked to the pier to be reinfested, they do the hologram song and dance again. This raises a lot of questions and potential contradictions with later descriptions of Yeerk sensory experiences in the pool, but that's serialized science fiction for you.
