#chee discourse

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 assumed—not just by Visser Three and not just by the Animorphs, but apparently by every member of the Yeerk Peace Movement, both Yeerk and human—that 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: It’s unclear in many places how much this is Applegate and how much it’s the ghostwriters but it honestly doesn’t matter for the purposes of discussing the effect of the text. I use “Applegate” as a catch-all for “the author of Animorphs” and I think that’s fair game because she put her name on the covers.

Edit the second: 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 kids’ 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 they’re 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 don’t think that’s exclusive to the portrayal of torture. 

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 you’ve 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. 

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