#according to their -own- beliefs neither john or george are really dead in a way that matters. so it's cool.

[asurrogateblog]

by far the best reaction to john lennon's death was george getting all irritated with him like "idiot should've been more prepared to die. good luck putting your spirit at rest now🙄🙄". and the reason its so funny is because, given the numerous ghost encounters even just between the three remaining beatles, by all accounts george was right

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

If you are still doing book reviews, could you do one for the departure?

Short opinion: I admire the hell out of #19: The Departure, and I’d put it on every summer reading list in the country if I could.  I also find it unbelievably annoying.

Long opinion:

I agree with all the people who point out that K.A. Applegate does something incredibly daring and complex and real-world important with #19, through showing that the Evil Empire of Evil can still have a ton of residents who just kind of ended up in Evilstown through the bad luck of being born there and can’t really be held responsible for (initially) believing the poison they’ve been fed their entire lives.  Aftran 942 is arguably the most important character in the series because her greatest sin is simply not questioning the beliefs that she grew up with—and as a result, she horribly enslaves and violates at least three or four people (including children) and commits at least one murder.  We come to understand that what Cassie asks her to do—to reject everything she was raised with and believes and cares about—is not only incomprehensibly difficult, but nearly ends up being deadly.  Applegate deconstructs the idea that entire groups or belief systems can be “evil” and simultaneously shows that the actions of an entire group can be so evil that the only moral choice is opposition.  She makes it clear that many of the yeerks fighting the war against humans are doing so because of false or distorted beliefs, and also shows that rebellion against those beliefs is possible.

But in order to accomplish this effect, #19 awkwardly uses everything from an enraged black bear to a fucking random-ass leopard to herd the characters around the plot.  How about just a bear, but maybe one that is humanized or has rabies?  How about a more straightforward survival story with no random-ass leopards, maybe one in which Cassie’s major moment of saving Aftran’s life is instead giving up all of her found mushrooms so that Karen can eat?

Regardless of how it happens, Aftran and Cassie together make this incredible, radical choice to trust each other, and they do so specifically because of their forced empathy for one another.  Cassie thinks of yeerks slugs and slavers, but never as individuals, until she and Aftran end up forced to spend two nights sitting around in a cave whining about their respective difficulties with the ongoing war.  Aftran dismisses gedds, hork-bajir, and other non-yeerks as “lesser” species in need of domination for their own good until she ends up unavoidably forced to take Cassie’s perspective as she is literally seeing through Cassie’s eyes.  It’s not that Cassie is anything all that special; it’s just that Cassie is a unique individual with fears and dreams.  Cassie’s a scared kid thrust into a war too big for her to handle, just like Aftran.  Cassie’s an animal nut and an only child who thinks shopping with her best friend is silly and has a crush on her CO.  Cassie deserves to live her life free from controllerdom, even if that means Aftran isn’t allowed to use her eyes.

However, in order to have that moment of empathy, CASSIE FIRST HAS TO BECOME A FUCKING VOLUNTARY CONTROLLER.  Just to be clear, I am 100% with Marco: once that happens, the other Animorphs have a duty and an obligation, albeit an unpleasant one, to kill Cassie and Aftran.  Forget letting Tom have the morphing cube; that decision right there is the most unforgivable thing Cassie ever does to her team.  Letting the yeerks morph is a bad idea.  Letting the yeerks know the names, addresses, faces, and personalities of every one of the Animorphs is a far bigger betrayal.  Worse still, it’s one that Cassie commits out of sheer carelessness: she seems to be suffering from temporary amnesia because she genuinely does not realize she is dooming all of her friends and her entire family to the same fate when she lets herself become a controller.  It is canon (according to Tom, Eva, Chapman, Allison Kim, Alloran, and John Berryman, all on different occasions) that being an involuntary controller is LITERALLY a fate worse than death; if not for Aftran, Cassie would dodge that bullet while allowing everyone she loves to take it in her place.  The only alternative would be forcing someone she loves (Rachel or Marco) to kill her in order to save the other people they love.  I cannot think too hard about this moment without despising Cassie as a human being. Anyway, would it have been that hard just to have Aftran abandon Karen and infest Cassie one of those times Cassie was sleeping next to her?

However, Applegate does an absolutely amazing job of showing that the moral choice—to give up on having a host—is the unbelievably difficult choice for Aftran.  She explains the rhetoric of “look out for oneself” and “fight to get what you and your group need” very clearly—and then utterly takes it down, not just on a societal level, but also on an individual level.  Cassie and Aftran draw strength from one another, saving each other’s lives several times until there’s no doubt that each one would be dead without the other.  Cassie’s whole character arc is about the importance of drawing on others for strength and about the power that comes from vulnerability, and her willingness to rely on Aftran to save her is an even more important part of her development than her willingness to save Aftran.  The lesson that Aftran takes from Cassie’s dependency as a form of strength is also really important: that it doesn’t have to be either-or, a matter of the yeerks having the humans’ strength or the humans having the humans’ strength.  It is possible for the two species to work together, and the moral solution to the power imbalance is definitely not one in which the yeerks punish the humans for the andalites’ bad choices and their own bad luck through using children as livestock.

And yet this lesson gets somewhat lost in that Cassie’s whole oops-I’m-a-controller fuckup miraculously works out for her.  She does not allow Aftran to infest her in the hope of changing Aftran’s mind; she does it because she’s unwilling to get Karen’s blood on her hands.  And then she not only avoids consequences for her mistake but ends up being better off for having made it.  I’d be less annoyed with Cassie doing something stupid and then the universe rearranging itself to make that stupidity okay if she didn’t do it four or five other times in this same damn book (quitting the team, using a horse to attack an angry bear, allowing a controller to see her morphing, becoming a nothlit) and if the universe didn’t accommodate her every damn time (Jake being way too understanding that she’s leaving her friends to die, the horse fending off the bear, the controller being one of the few on the planet who is wavering about the idea of involuntary hosts, caterpillars resetting as butterflies).  I’d be even less annoyed if the series as a whole didn’t demonstrate this pattern again and again and again.  Cassie risks her life to save some baby skunks, only for the skunks to become the key to stopping Visser Three from destroying Ax’s forest (#9).  Cassie thinks that the gang should trust George Edelman (#17) and Mr. Tidwell (#29) only for them both to prove to be trustworthy; she doesn’t think that they should trust Taylor (#43) but still manages to come out of nowhere to save their butts after she proves to be right yet again.  Cassie stops Jake from killing Tom because she doesn’t want Jake hurt; that decision ends up working itself into the morph-capable yeerks rebelling and Cassie claiming she knew it all along (#50).  Cassie just “knows somehow” that stopping John Berryman from ever being born will bring Jake back (MM3), just like she “knows somehow” that the Animorphs can trust Ax but not Tom (MM4).  It’s sloppy characterization, it’s awkward plotting, and it’s just bad writing.

AND YET this book is also incredibly important as an SF* story in general, because (I will be the first to admit, as a huuuuuuugggee SF geek from about age six on forward) SF specifically has an ethics problem.  No other genre promotes ideas such as “they were urgals so it’s okay for us to slaughter several thousand of them and then go have a party,” “we often shoot/stab/torture humans to hurt the demons inside them because, dude, they’re demons,” or “my dad being mean to me is a valid excuse for destroying a planet.”  The yeerks get a raw deal right from birth—but being born without eyes isn’t a valid excuse to steal someone else’s body in order to use their eyes.  Cassie is only trying to defend her home and her family from invasion—but defending one’s own isn’t a valid excuse for cruelty or capricious murder.  Applegate doesn’t allow the reader the luxury of an easy story with a simple moral; she shows how the right choice is neither easy to find nor easy to make once one finds it.  She also shows that the “heroic” gestures SF worships are often as harmful as they are helpful, and that making the truly right choice to care for others and avoid harm is a years-long commitment to exhausting and unrewarding selflessness.  In the process she also heroicizes both Cassie and Aftran for making that choice.  There are not enough SF stories that humanize the alien villains, and there are definitely not enough SF stories about strength that doesn’t come from fighting ability.

Nonetheless, I’d like to count off the freaking plot holes in this freaking book.  The leopard’s presence is never properly explained, and its behavior doesn’t make much sense: sometimes it’s frightened enough of a wolf to run away, and sometimes it’s willing to fight a wolf and a gorilla in one go.  The yeerks just let Karen go at the end for no really good reason, when they go through heroic lengths to kill other ex-hosts who know too much in #8 and #31 especially.  Cassie picks up the Idiot Ball at a couple different moments in a way that is frankly uncharacteristic of her.  Aftran manages to hunt Cassie down and follow her home while in the body of a seven-year-old child without morphing and apparently without using any public or private transportation, when none of the other yeerks succeeded in doing this with any of the Animorphs after any other battle.  A panicked horse, an angry bear, a flooded river, and a badly-placed rock manage to conspire to get Cassie and Karftran stuck out in the woods in a string of bad luck worthy of a Charles Dickens novel.  While they’re out there, five super-competent teens who can (among other things) see for miles, track scents, and run at 30+ MPH remain unable to find them for days.  Ax doesn’t feel the need to mention the whole “metamorphosis resets the nothlit clock” thing during the several days that Jake et al spent worrying about Cassie.

NONETHELESS, this book shows the awe-inspiring degree of courage needed to face down one’s entire society and systematically reject every aspect of it and its damaging beliefs.  It also shows that the Karens of the world need the Aftrans of the world to make that radical decision, because although it is heroic to choose to act in the face of one’s society committing atrocities, it is equally reprehensible to choose not to act in the face of those kinds of atrocities.  #19 is a clear example of what makes K.A. Applegate a writer like no other, in that it rejects the easy choice of writing YA SF with all-bad villains or all-good heroes in favor of the right choice of writing an emotionally exhausting but deeply thought-provoking war epic with no simple answers.  The fact that Applegate does so in a book that also has gutwrenchingly accurate descriptions of depression (Cassie feeling unable to care about anything, even her loved ones), uncontrollable-giggle-inducing moments of humor (Marco announcing that he has to be excused from class to go buy a nicotine patch because he feels the urge to become an adolescent smoking statistic coming on), and stick-in-your-brain imagery (Aftran struggling to describe blindness as she and Cassie stand in a field of wildflowers) is just another credit to her freaking amazing ability as a writer.

So YOU’D THINK she could come up with a better way to get this plot moving than a fucking random-ass leopard.  Le sigh.  

*SF ≈ speculative fiction ≈ science fiction, fantasy, horror, modern myth, etc.