oh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS one! i've been waiting for this one for so long. i do not have the spoons to read/live blog rn but i am really looking forward to it. It is SO fucked up. I hadn't played silent hill 3 at that point but its the equivalent of that iconic wham moment in it where that guy was all "they look like MONSTERS to you" and you're forced to recontextualize everything you've done up till that point. are yeerks still a terrible threat to humanity, and the greater universe? yup. definitely. are they pure evil, with no moral weight at all against killing them? nope! we've seen flashes of it up till now. but usually shades of grey. a yeerk wanting revenge on visser3 for killing someone important to him, so leaking his location for ax to do an assasination attempt on. visser 3's twin brother who just goes around eating yeerks but otherwise minding his own business. but this is the first time we really see the potential they could have to be something MORE. the next(?) megamorphs where they go to fight the howlers drove that home further iirc. the idea of the parallel evolutionary line of the yeerks. the symbiotes they could be instead of the parasites. memory says the plot of this one is: cassie kills a hork bajir while in wolf morph. Later, as a human, she picks a scrap of its flesh through from her teeth and thinks about how horrible it all is. she wants to quit. she (i don't remember how) ends up infested with a yeerk. its not as sadistic as tom's old yeerk that got jake, and cassie is naturally empathetic and so so tired of fighting in this war. it turns out this yeerk loved the yeerk that had been inside the hork bajir cassie killed, adn blames her for it. cassie feels like being blamed for that is correct. murder is wrong. she wants to give her body to the yeerk. the yeerk is distrustful of this idea. ultimately each of them are put in situations where they must trust the other, adn the book ends with cassie not infested but seemingly stuck forever in caterpillar morph, but then something something asspull the catterpillar turning into a butterfly resets the morphing clock (which we were PREVIOUSLY told was about z-space connections which a butterfly should NOT effect but WHATEVER) in future books the yeerk cassie trusted is an ally and helps organie a yeerk resistence, which eventually is given the power to morph and become nothliths on PURPOSE to get access to permanent senses and bodies without having to enslave anyone (in a parallel to what the species in the howler book had done, actually WAS it a megaphorhs book? i can kind of remember the front cover) so lets find out what ACTUALLY happens without so many years of time to twist and warp in memory. oh wait, actually i also remember WHY the catterpillar thing happened. the yeerk was trying to make a point of how HARD it was to not to do evil as yeerk, how HARD it is to choose to be blind and helpless when you KNEW it didn't have to be that way so cassie chose to trap herself as a catteripllar to show the yeerk she did think it was possible to intentionally make that choice THOUGH, I do want to point out that its still not a 1-1 comparison. cassie only had to make that choice for two hours, then it was permanent. the yeerk would have to make that choice every day for the rest of its life. much harder. but yeah, resting for now, but tomorrow i can start up reading. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ man today was a DAY but i am ready to read also i really enjoy how agressive the autocorrector is here cuz i'm literally typing all this in vscode and boy does it want certain words to become javascript keywords or words i've otherwise typed before. it really is glorious. even down to capitalization, it didn't like that day up there was all caps. ah thats right, first time we get multiple narrators in a single book cuz i DO remember the whole "finding cassie as a catterpillar" was from the outside and yeah, right off the gate, it establishes 'evil' as something she USED to believe the yeerks were. weird marco went wolf instead of gorilla man that was a bad plan. saving the yeerk about to be executed wouldn't do all that much, cuz she would only have three days to live after, tops, unless the animorphs can get kandrona rays honestly THAT more than anything is why yeerks are so fascistic. its not inherent to their nature, or even their biology. if you have centralized food sources, then the ones who control the food control *everything* even if you want to support a different way, you step the slightest bit out of line and you just get starved out. how can ANY rebellion ever work if three days after you start you're dead. ...THATS right. she wasn't sure if she killed the hork bajir before or after jake gave the order. and its not as if it were still able to fight. but she still killed it. "Marco jokes after a battle. And before. But the jokes afterward are always kind of strained." i really do love cassies books. she notices just SO much. gives you a lens to read the other books with. and then she just quits. THATS right. the yeerk follows her home. thats what the extra set of eyes are. its all coming back to me. oh yeah, the leopard is important iirc i mean, obviously, narrative rules say it is, but i remember cassie as a control being hunted by it the hork bajir flesh. not when she's brushing her teeth, but still, in her human teeth. oh man actually referring to a megamorph in a main book. i guess that its in a dream sequence is how they get away with it cuz iirc, the megamorphs were considered OPTIONAL to the main series kinda vaguely canonical. and now that i know the dinosaur megamoprh comes before THIS BOOK, exactly... it DOES make more sense. i never really knew how to order them before, i think? and her going straight from t-rex to QUITTING... well, that hits different. she hated trex so much. okay, theres the tooth brushing sequence, i thought i remembered it ```But even though there had always been something “adult” about Jake, there was always still the kid underneath. That had changed. He had faced too many dangers. Worse, he had made too many lifeand-death decisions. That shows up in your face after a while. In your eyes. It showed up in the way Jake stood taller than before, and yet somehow a little worn-out. There was a ragged look to him. ``` yeah, no kidding and jake has a POINT. they need to understand her. she keeps telling them they have a wrong idea, but she said early in the book... she can't... she can't find the right words to tell them what she's feeling. yeah , jesus christ, horrors of war: ```“No. I feel bad because I felt nothing. I felt … nothing, Rachel. At that moment I felt like I was just doing my job, you know? And now they’re shutting down the clinic, and my dad tells me and I feel … nothing. It’s been going on for a long time. Each day, each battle, each mission, I just feel less and less.”``` lol i just realized i've been doing discord quotes. oh well ```Rachel had an expression I’ve almost never seen on her face: She was hurt. “Rachel, we can still be-” “No, we can’t,” she said, cutting me off. “See, you’ve just said the whole world can drop dead, so long as you, Cassie, don’t have to end up turning into me.” She stormed from the barn. I should have said something. But it was true. It was true I didn’t want to turn into Rachel``` like LOOK at this. look at how savage this is. Because its true, isn't it? like. let me gather my thoughts. i think where cassie is failing to explain herself is ... its not about "i don't want to become you, because you are bad and gross and wrong" its about "i will DIE, as a person, if i change enough from who i was. " she described rachel as having found her place in the universe, of jake losing the kid and keeping the adult, of tobias perhaps PREFERRING to be the hawk but she can't reconcile the massive identity change continuing this war would cause in her. it wouldn't be HER but something. not her but more ruthless. not her but more tired and adult. it wouldn't be HER. and theres only so much trauma you can endure while also having who you are as a person eroded. (heart player cassie seems like it would be a reductive trope but the more i think about it. ) obviously i stopped reading to wax poetic, but i think that might be core to why she lets the yeerk in... the idea that if she can just STOP, she can stop the erosion of her identity. if she can never make a another choice, hard or otherwise, ever again, she can just be safe. this is the first time they truly break. like, nightmares and trama have been TEXT in this series, not subtext but this is the first time we see the breaking point of the human psyche. not everyone is cut out to be a guerilla warrior with zero breaks and the literal weight of the world on their shoulders. can you imagine finding out everyone ever would DIE or WORSE if you took a weekend off? so yeah, she just. she feels nothing. and she just. has reached such a severe breaking point she can NOT keep going. and i think this is where we see how they are KIDS more than ever. Jake knows to research generals and combat techniques. It has never occured to him (and why would it) to research ptsd treatments and morale techniques. these 13 year old or whatever kids see cassie breaking and decide that means she hates them and doens't care about humanity and its not their responisibliy to manage her breakdown, of course its not. but... if their goal is to keep cassie fighting...that reaction definitely didn't reach it i guess. i'm thinking about when i left the farrago server? i realized i hit a breaking point and if i kept going i would be doing damage to myself and to everyone around me. sometimes thats just what you hit. and it took a whole year of rest before i was ready to really start coding sims again. anyways, reading time. huh. i might know more Animal Facts (tm) then ka applegate. i'm p sure i read somewhere that horses can't SEE the fence they jump over. they're relying on the rider to tell them to do it. but cassie explicitly doens't know how to tell the horse to jump ah well ah, that explains how cassie gets captured. okay no, it doens't. i thought the yeerk took her while she was knocked out but nope. i ... i do remember it being... honestly, maybe she never IS taken. maybe its just talking for this book? but i know cassie has yeerks in her heads consentually eventually this yeerk even. p sure ppl ship them on tumblr? okay yeah its really obvious karen has a trap prepared, but cassie is still just trying to do damage control also, cassie just, really isn't the type to kill someone to silence them, except in the VERY FIRST BOOK the controller who knew her name and face "wasn't a problem" anymore in her own words. so. and then cassie morphed, rip okay yeah they acknowledge the dinosaur book directly in this book ```“I didn’t want this body! I wanted a human body, but not a weak, innocent little child. This is what they assigned me.” I noted the word “innocent.” What a strange word for a Yeerk to use.``` presented without comment. ```Karen jumped up, wincing at the pain in her ankle. “We have a right to live!” “This isn’t about you living!” I yelled. “It’s about you enslaving other people.” “It’s what we are,” she yelled back. “We’re parasites, you humans are predators. How many pigs and cows and chickens and sheep do you kill each year to survive? You think being a predator is morally superior to being a parasite? At least the host bodies we take remain alive. We don’t kill them, cut them into pieces, and grill them over a charcoal fire in our backyards.”``` ```Suddenly she stooped down and snatched up a caterpillar from a leaf. “Do you see this? This is what I am, without a host body. Helpless! Weak! Blind!”``` haha yup, foreshadowing ```“Most of you humans don’t even know what you have. You have the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. No other place is so alive. In no other place are there so many trees, so many flowers, so many amazing creatures. You live in a palace. You live in paradise, and you hate me for wanting to live there, too.``` i remember when the ellimist showed them the vision of the future under visser 3, it wasn't beautiful anymore. the yeerk inside karen might believe that beauty is waht they seek but... the yeerk high command does not agree. god i didn't remember the animorphs finding her. my memory just focuses on the intense back and forth between cassie and the yeerk, as BOTH come to terms with the fact that their enemy isn't all one thing or another thats right. cassie volunteers. god can you imagine the animorphs worrying they have to kill cassie? its one thing to worry you have to kill a kid... aftran. i remember the glory and shock of sight stuck with me for a long time after that. the idea of feeling gratidude for the simple things. ```She saw the first time I ever morphed a dolphin, the amazing, giddy joy of it, and I swear she laughed inside my head, enjoying the memory, too.``` and i'm so glad thats what the compromise they end up finding is. i know the nothlith thing was to keep them out of the fight, to keep them from needing kadrona... but. i'm so glad that the idea of permanent morphs was brought up. because yeerks want nothing more than to BE something, ANYTHING than what they are, and what greater gift could they get than morphing. god this book just stuck with me so hard. i hope i can finish it before bedtime. i still remember that it was aftran that tried to save cassie in the end. but lets see ```Surely, if she were alive and okay, she would morph and fly home. ``` jake, i don't think you realize how seriously she took her promise. it took a leopard attack and someone to protect to make her drop it. i really do appreicate that jake gets cassie more than anyone. ``` Rachel said coldly. I said. Everyone fell silent for a while, and we just flew hard. It was strange, the silence. I’m supposed to be the leader, although every day that goes by I wish a little more that I wasn’t. But one thing a leader does is try to understand his people. I understood the``` goddamn like goddamn it goes so hard on justifying pacifism despite being in a fight for survival. it struggles with and weighs in on issues and concludes that pacifism is a moral stance. you see why this series shook me so much as a kid? this idea that... its not just this shallow idea of "good guys good, bad guys bad" or even falling into ruthlessness because they convininetly have the highest possible stakes. its just it lets things be complex. that no matter how high the stakes there are ideals worth holding to AND that these ideals are not a moral necessity for everyone. cassie doens't want to kill. but at no point did she say it was wrong for OTHERS to kill. at no point did it decide that sacrificing ideals for human lives is better than doing what it takes to make there be a tomorrow or vice versa animorphs is about the idea that complex morals and ideals can and should co exist and its up to each of us individually to make decisions we'll have to live with for the rest of our lives. so many ADULT books can't handle that. like, goddamn and jake orders cassies death if they can't contain her. ```I felt sick inside. It was right that I make the decision. And it was probably the right decision to make. But oh, man, I felt like I’d swallowed broken glass. ``` okay so karen didn't go for help, but she did stay to watch ```“Right at the end, right before the two hours were up, I told her to stop. I told her she’d proven herself to me. I begged her to stop, to demorph.” Karen raised her green eyes to me. “But I’d forgotten. I don’t think the caterpillar could hear. At least not speech. She didn’t know that I had seen enough. And now …``` okay yeah she did try to take it back also do catterpillars really transform that quickly? i don't remember wondering that before but i knew MORE about butterflies as a kid 7-10 days. internet says. we had butterflies in a container in kindergarten. oh, she's not becoming a butterfly, crysalis i do like that aftran was shown first hand why marco isn't 'a monkey' ```What Cassie had done was insane. But it wasn’t wrong. And I just kept thinking, as idealistic and naive and even dumb as Cassie’s actions might have seemed, did I want to undo them all now? Did I want to destroy the meaning of her sacrifice? Cassie had given her life, making an absurd, hopeful bet on peace. If I gave one order … her bet would be wasted. If I gave the other order, we might all die.``` this really is my favorite book of this series. god it just makes me feel ```“I guess sometimes you have to choose between smart, sane, ruthlessness, and totally stupid, insane hope,” I said, not even realizing I was speaking out loud. “You can’t just pick one and stick with it, either. Each time it comes up, you have to try and make your best decision. Most of the time, I guess I have to go with being smart and sane. But I don’t want to live in a world where people don’t try the stupid, crazy, hopeful thing sometimes.” I looked at Rachel, towering above us all. “Rachel, I’m not going to give any orders. Each of us has to decide for ourselves right now.” ``` it really is a choice you have to make constanttly. theres two ways this war ends: killing enough yeerks they all just leave or. destroying their will to fight. jake wants to have the hope of getting to live in that second world. you know, this is the original "would you love me if i were a worm" god and the butterfly metaphor. the idea that... that. if you just choose blindness and peace you can find salvation in color and beauty and freedom. ```Had I cheated Aftran the Yeerk? Had Karen known about caterpillars and butterflies? Maybe not. ``` i love how after waking up trapped as a bug her first worry is if she CHEATED aftran because being a butterfly is probably better than being a yeerk and yeah, book says it should take ten days, but she goes in 3 . probs cuz shes so good at morphing ```“This naturally-occurring morph should reset the morphing clock. She has two hours to demorph.”``` see, this JUST does not match what i know about morphing at ALL. even if butterflies transforming accessed z-space, you'd think the link would be to the CATTERPILLAR body, not the human one. there, its complete. god. i am a sucker for complex moral quandries and shades of grey.