What do you think of the Capasins from Ellemist Chronicles? I'm fairly certain there's deliberate parallels between them and andalites and/or humans, but I can't quite figure it out.
I think there’s something really interesting in the idea of gaming as being a place where the absolute no-consequences worst of humanity comes out, and of games (when stripped of context) as being completely horrifying comments on the way that humans behave when nothing matters. Like, I know Michael Crichton was the most cynical cynic ever to cynicize, but Westworld does a really great job of grappling with the multi-faceted question of what it means about you as a person if you spend all day committing heinous crimes for fun, and maybe more importantly what it can do to you as a person if that’s your only source of fun. The main point of the show definitely isn’t about condemning gaming as a whole; it’s about condemning gaming to excess, and about the illusion of control created by games that are really just about tilting a ball around a labyrinth on a macro scale.
Anyway, I’ve speculated before that “God is a gamer” is kind of supposed to be a major theme of the series, and that there’s a deliberate fuck-you to the “war = chess” view built into that theme. Like, K.A. Applegate is all about showing how there’s something despicable and dehumanizing in trying to reduce war to a game or trying to make a game of war. So I think that’s a lot of the commentary in the capasins — that if Toomin et al were really performing those in-game actions on real species, that’d be unconscionable. Maybe even so much so as to justify their immediate execution. Obviously that’s not what the ketrans are doing, and it’s a horrible misunderstanding... BUT that is what the Ellimist and Crayak are doing to humanity and yeerks and all in canon.
The fundamental difference between Ellimist and Crayak, then, is that Toomin knows it’s not a game. He cares about the individuals whose lives are being damaged or ended by the struggle. He knows about Ax’s fears and Cassie’s strengths. He takes the time to argue with Tobias about policy, to answer Rachel’s questions about what it all means. Crayak views the war as fun, as a way to find out who is “the best” through competition. And if a few species get annihilated along the way, so be it, it’s just a game. The Ellimist still has a pretty distant and sometimes problematic view of the war, but he most certainly knows the consequences of pretending that the “nothing matters anyway” view applied in game-space can ever be applied to a reality where your actions have the power to affect other people.
