#and — in my experience — overwhelmingly adds to The Boring Parts of a story while stealing time from the interesting ones

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I read a fic today where David burnt down Cassie’s barn, and it got me thinking about that as a plot point- her barn was sort of their refuge, place of safety, and it being destroyed was a surprisingly large emotional impact. Do you think that’s something the series should have done?

My immediate response is "no", the series should not have. Supernatural, Angel, Batman Inc., et al. have tried taking away the characters' only home base — and it mostly creates inconvenience, rather than plot fuel. Like, instead of handwaving a cool gadget with "I bought it with my money," Batman has to instead come out with a dumb line about having found it in a dumpster. Instead of just letting the Winchester boys retreat to their car to talk it out, you have them standing around an alleyway doing the same.

Assuming that Cassie's barn that is destroyed, the biggest effect both in-universe and out- would be hassle. The kids still have to meet regularly, but now have to do it somewhere that's harder to get to or harder to talk openly in, and without any local animals' DNA nearby. The first few books do see the kids trying several locations — Jake's, Rachel's, the bell tower. But Tobias stands out inside a house, Jake's is a no-go re: Tom, and the human kids can only go so far from home most days.

Cassie's barn can easily hide a hawk, it's a place that both Jake and Rachel hung out regularly before the war, and it has several animals in cages right there. It has privacy, being its own area not inside her house. It has legitimacy, since it's semi-supervised and also the home of The Responsible Friend so none of the human Animorphs' parents have reason to worry about their kids spending most afternoons there. It has security, being hard to infiltrate even in morph without Tobias noticing. I feel like if you took all that away, you'd just be adding more inconvenience at the start of the story to explain how the kids got to the adventure and had useful DNA when they arrived.