I can’t say I agree that broiling those Yeerks was tactically necessary. The Animorphs ended operations like the hospital all the time without slaughtering the unarmed.
First of all, since I’m realizing that it is, in fact, NOT immediately obvious, all of my backlogged Animorphs commentary was written on total sleep deprivation and thesis-powered anxiety, so my rhetoric is not always as clear as maybe it should be. That said, let me add real quick that ‘necessary’ in this context =/= morally or ethically ‘good’ in any way, nor does necessary mean…like, the best available outcome? If that makes sense? It just means ‘the action that the characters believed to be needed in order to both survive and accomplish their goal.’ I should have been clearer about this in the original post and that’s on me, but, again, sleep deprivation is one hell of a drug.
But like hear me out here. Because the potential for this hospital is…frankly horrific, in this book. If the Animorphs didn’t take steps to definitively end the plan, if they had just run for it (because let’s be real…by this point in the series they really haven’t had a definitive win, they’ve mostly just lived through some battles), they would have felt complicit in the massive enslavement potential for the hospital. The hospital is a revolving door of war crimes and human rights (beings’ rights?) violations. Whether or not they would be right to feel that complicity is a different conversation (and a short one because they’re six people, everything else aside they’re only six people against an army, they’re not complicit just because they couldn’t perform a miracle), but they would absolutely feel it. So in the moment, they have to do something more than run, because they can’t face the idea of just bailing on this mission. And in the moment, under the gun, this is all Jake can think to do. They don’t have the materials to destroy the hospital to any respectable degree (even an elephant could only do so much and they don’t have any other big wrecking-ball morphs yet, like the rhino), they don’t have the materials to stop the closing through any tangentially proper channels (like they stop the logging venture in the woods with the superpowers of Skunks And Bureaucracy), and even if they did just wreck the hospital…that would kill a lot of people. It would probably kill all the Yeerks in the pool, too. The casualty count of this was always going to be high, and Jake…this is the thing that establishes Jake’s stance most viscerally.
Jake is ultimately a utilitarian general to the fucking bone, I think I talk about this in a later book, but that means that he takes a very specific viewpoint on casualty count. Lowest casualties of ‘his side,’ highest casualties of ‘their side,’ and this is a rare opportunity to have all the casualties be Yeerks, rather than a potentially innocent host. He sees this as the only available way to both accomplish their goal (he knows they’re all high ranking Yeerks who presumably can’t just be magically replaced, meaning it will get them a better delay on the Hell Hospital) and get all of his people out alive–as brutal as it sounds…it’s a distraction. Jake could have made it really quick, electrocuted the pool or something similar that would kill all the Yeerks cleanly, but he’s gambling that the staff will be in such a desperate rush to try to save the Yeerks in the pool that the Animorphs will be able to get out, so he drags it out. He makes similar plays throughout the books, and again, they’re not morally or ethically ‘good’ nor are they the best available outcome…but that’s not really the point.
So like…yeah, that’s my logic. They absolutely do get out of situations like that without similarly atrocious acts on other occasions…but it’s a loss. It always means they lose that round. Their wins are awful. Hell, right in the next book, they literally take steps to starve every Yeerk in the vicinity to death. Destroying the Kandrona is the equivalent of poisoning every water supply for a human army (removing a critical substance without which survival is impossible), which is prohibited under the Geneva Convention. If a guerrilla squad did something like that in an Earth war they would IMMEDIATELY be slated as war criminals–not soldiers. And yet…the destruction of the Kandrona is necessary, because it’s all the Animorphs can think to do to buy themselves that critical bit of extra time, to strike even a tiny blow against their enemy. It’s not the morally sound play. This is why Cassie struggles so much throughout the war–she’s the only Lawful Good player on an entire Chaotic Neutral team. The Animorphs more often than not don’t have a morally sound option available to them, which is…frankly sort of the point.
Funfact, stray cats who were previously house cats (often abandoned in strange areas away from their homes) will sometimes go into whatever house they can find, because they know they belong in a house.
That’s not a fun fact. That’s a very sad fact.
I wanna point out that the last one is, in fact, NOT a cat and is, in fact, an opossum. As such, I extend my sympathies to that person for the loss of their upstairs. That’s the opossum’s staircase now. You shall not pass.
23 year old Bruce at a party, chatting up a supermodel, stiffening suddenly and hissing, “Shit. Shit.”
Her luminescent smile slides off her face. “What’s the matter?”
Bruce closes his eyes. “I came here with a little boy. Black hair, blue eyes, about three foot ten. I need to find him.” Bruce steps around her, but she stops him with her hand.
“We can help!”
“Pardon?”
“The girls and I?” She gestures to the models staggered throughout the room. “We can help you find him.”
And that’s the story of how twenty or so models went dashing around the venue, peeking under chairs and searching nooks and crevices. 8 year old Dickie Grayson was found napping under the bar counter by the new face of Prada.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: Captain! The replicators are malfunctioning, and the
ambassador’s party will be here in an hour!
KIRK: Don’t worry. We got this. *calls engineering* Hey Scotty, you
were in the dorms at Starfleet, right?
SCOTTY: Aye.
KIRK: And you weren’t allowed to have large appliances in your dorm rooms,
right?
SCOTTY: Nae, we were not.
KIRK: Ok. So, the ambassador and co are gonna be here in an hour, and we
need to set up a feast for them. And we have no replicators.
SCOTTY: *catching on* Right! I’ll take me team to the mess hall and
we’ll get right on it!
KIRK: Thanks. Kirk out.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: …What just happened?
KIRK: Ah, you weren’t in a dorm, I see.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: No, I was part of the offworlders’ fraternity… we had a
kitchen…
KIRK: So, you never fried eggs on tinfoil on a flat iron. Never painted a
can of stew black, poked a hole in the top, and set it in a sunny window to
slow-cook all day. Never used an instant coffeepot to boil rice to pour the
stew over.
ANDORIAN YEOMAN: *horrified* N-No, sir.
KIRK: We’re gonna treat the ambassador’s team to a Genuine Earth-Style Scholar’s
Feast!
*comm chirps* *Kirk answers*
SCOTTY: Well, we don’t have an iron or a coffeepot, but the warp core
produces heat and we think we can rig a pipe from one of the vents to a storage
locker to make an oven; Jones has volunteered some of his beer – good lad! –
and we’re gonna get the guys in Science to extract some of the yeast and grab
some of those grain samples and see if we can get some bread going. If not,
we’ll settle for more beer. Also the Weapons team guys think they can set the
phasers to shoot through a metal mesh screen and get us grilled cheese. So
we’re off to a good start.
BUT if we make enough noise NOW, so that EVERYONE at netflix from the presidents to the janitors mf KNOWS we’re NOT down with their trash decisions, we can possibly save shows like Sense8 from having to go through this kinda horseshit in future sO WE’D ALL BETTER BE SIGNING THIS PETITION RIGHT FUCKIN NOW
slyrider asked: MORAN IM SO DISTRAUGHT. SENSE8 IS MY FAVORITE AND SO IS THE GET DOWN AND NOW ILL NEVER KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO MY FAVS. like they both end on cliffhangers and I'm dead. Honestly I'm fed up
I’M SO UPSET LIKE I NEVER EVEN GOT THE CHANCE TO WATCH THE GET DOWN (mcfreaking college, y’all) AND THEY FUCKING CANCELLED IT??? AND THEY CANCELLED SENSE8 WHICH IS LIKE THE ONLY THING WITH MULTIPLE QUEER RELATIONSHIPS ON THE FIRST DAY OF PRIDE MONTH LIKE THE FUCK??? AND DON’T EVER TALK TO ME ABOUT THE CLIFFHANGER THING OH MY GOD OH MY FUCKING G O D honestly this is why I appreciate shows that actually wrap shit up at the end of each season BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THE EXECS ARE WAITING TO FUCKING SCREW YOU OVER.
LIKE?
CAN WE FUCKING SACRIFICE SUPERNATURAL ON THE ALTAR OF SOME KIND OF MEDIA DEITY AND SWAP IT FOR THESE?
