I keep seeing people putting Animorphs #16: The Underground, aka “the oatmeal book” on their “favorite trash books” or such, and I frankly don’t see why it even qualifies in the “trash” category. I mean I know out of universe Instant maple and ginger oatmeal was chosen as the drug that is to Yeerks what meth is to humans because of the “lol oatmeal really” bit of humor.
But in universe? While the Animorphs at first don’t take it seriously (because it’s oatmeal), it’s soon made clear it’s played serious enough. Because while Applegate lets these kids laugh at what would normally be a humorous situation, she also shows that there’s really nothing funny about it. If Yeerks consume the stuff, they are freed of their dependency of Kandrona rays, but become hopelessly addicted to oatmeal that it eventually leads them to insanity. We the reader first think it’s still outrageous, but I mean, our species can eat chocolate fine, but do we think it’s funny if it’s fed to a dog?
This book poses perhaps the first real moral dilemma for the Animorphs when it comes to this war and how they should fight it. These Yeerks have discovered completely by accident that oatmeal is an addiction to them, and they happened upon it because the Animorphs destroyed the Kandrona generator of the Yeerk pool: the Yeerks who weren’t high rank were left out of the ship with the only generator to starve, and here they thought they found a new means of survival, but instead it destroys them. With their insanity also comes a price to their hosts: they cannot leave their hosts’ heads, and while humans might sometimes break through the Yeerks’ insanity, they can never be rid of them. This was enough to drive the human controller Edelman to attempted suicide.
So the Animorphs have an option: they have a substance that is easily obtainable and almost a joke to them. But they essentially have a chemical weapon at their use; it obviously has freaked out the Yeerks enough that they bought every ounce of the stuff they could find so it couldn’t be used against them. For the first time, the Animorphs really feel they have something big on the Yeerks. They can dump it in the Yeerk pool and inflict harsh mental damage on a sentient race. But they then have to ask themselves: is this right?
Amazingly it’s Cassie who suggests that they just dump a case in the Yeerk pool (this is obviously before she met Aftran and the Yeerk Peace Movement; compare this to her later decision to not try and blow up the Yeerk pool, yay character development). And they do it. They drop the proverbial bomb on the pool, essentially dooming hundreds or thousands of Yeerks to a lifetime of insanity (or more realistically, as the book implies, Visser Three will just kill them since they are useless now). And that kind of victory proved hollow. After all, they didn’t get Visser Three or any high-level Yeerks; those Yeerks in the pool were just grunts.
Ultimately the Animorphs decide never to use the weapon again. They choose to erase the possibility of biological warfare from their arson. Applegate made me take oatmeal as a weapon seriously.
I’m really really glad I didn’t have to be the one to make this post.
(via sohmamon)
