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The first two marine reptiles the Animorphs are chased by seem to be plesiosaurs - the neck rising above the water like a giraffe is how they were popularly portrayed but is almost certainly incorrect. Their necks were not nearly that flexible, and more likely they used them to scoop up crustaceans and small fish from the seafloor and reefs. Also, they would not have tried to hunt a pod of dolphins, that prey is just way too big for them. The later creature is probably some sort of mosasaur or big pliosaur like Liopleurodon, and they were apex predators that would have preyed on dolphin-sized ichthyosaurs so that seems plausible enough.
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# ? Mar 8, 2021 19:32 |
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# ? May 23, 2024 17:51 |
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:The first two marine reptiles the Animorphs are chased by seem to be plesiosaurs - the neck rising above the water like a giraffe is how they were popularly portrayed but is almost certainly incorrect. Their necks were not nearly that flexible, and more likely they used them to scoop up crustaceans and small fish from the seafloor and reefs. Also, they would not have tried to hunt a pod of dolphins, that prey is just way too big for them. Even though it doesn't identify these in the text, you're almost certainly right (Well, the animal that ate them wouldn't have been Liopleurodon, for reasons that will soon become obvious, but mosasaur is likely)
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# ? Mar 8, 2021 19:53 |
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:The first two marine reptiles the Animorphs are chased by seem to be plesiosaurs - the neck rising above the water like a giraffe is how they were popularly portrayed but is almost certainly incorrect. Their necks were not nearly that flexible, and more likely they used them to scoop up crustaceans and small fish from the seafloor and reefs. Also, they would not have tried to hunt a pod of dolphins, that prey is just way too big for them. -aaaaand now I'm lost in Wikipedia, reading about plesiosaurs. I very much look forward to this thread becoming "also, talk about Mesozoic beasties" for the next few weeks.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 03:07 |
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This thread finally gave me an Animorphs dream. I was posing as a controller in the yeerk pool, trying to inconspicuously collect enough... fertilizer, chemicals, and whatever, and pile it up somewhere to suicide-bomb the place. Visser Three ended up finding out and we had a stand-off where I threatened to blow the pile with a dracon beam and kill us both. True to canon, Visser Three was appropriately cowardly and very willing to arrange the situation in a way where he didn't get blown up. My brain rendered Visser Three without a human torso, nothing like the false lies of the book covers. Teach the controversy.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 03:27 |
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WrightOfWay posted:What kind of self-respecting 90's kids have never seen Jurassic Park? It shouldn't be that hard to figure it out. In the novel of Jurassic Park, Dr Grant gets sent a photo of the decomposed remains of an escaped compy that bit a girl on a beach in Costa Rica, has the lawyers from the biotech cloning company that funds his paleontology research ringing him up about that photo seeming very concerned, notes that the plans for the "resort" on Isla Nublar include very high fences and moats, is invited down because it would be "right up your alley," and still completely fails to twig what's going on until a dinosaur is right in front of him. Come on dude! Fuschia tude posted:Yeah. Again, I wonder whether the non-series books may have been written much earlier than their release dates would suggest, since the mistake in question is pretty fundamental. I assumed you were all just talking about not being able to morph the dinosaurs again when they get back home, which is less a mistake and more a handwavey way of making everything go back to normal, but now I think it must be something completely different that I've totally forgotten about.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 04:48 |
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freebooter posted:In the novel of Jurassic Park, Dr Grant gets sent a photo of the decomposed remains of an escaped compy that bit a girl on a beach in Costa Rica, has the lawyers from the biotech cloning company that funds his paleontology research ringing him up about that photo seeming very concerned, notes that the plans for the "resort" on Isla Nublar include very high fences and moats, is invited down because it would be "right up your alley," and still completely fails to twig what's going on until a dinosaur is right in front of him. Come on dude! The difference is, unlike these kids, Dr. Grant has never seen Jurassic Park.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 04:56 |
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Epicurius posted:Even though it doesn't identify these in the text, you're almost certainly right (Well, the animal that ate them wouldn't have been Liopleurodon, for reasons that will soon become obvious, but mosasaur is likely) freebooter posted:I assumed you were all just talking about not being able to morph the dinosaurs again when they get back home, which is less a mistake and more a handwavey way of making everything go back to normal, but now I think it must be something completely different that I've totally forgotten about.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 05:07 |
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Animorphs-Megamorphs 2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs, Chapter 7 Cassie quote:Jake jumped up out of that footprint like it was filled with rattlesnakes. So, I don't think they're in Madigascar....or at least not current day Madigascar. Chapter 8 Rachel quote:I was human! A human gasping for air inside the belly of the creature. Tobias is a hawk. Hawks are dinosaurs. No, but to identify the named animals in the past two chapters (and I defer to people who know more about prehistoric life than I do), Tyrannosaurus Rex probably doesn't need any introduction. Apex predator of the Cretaceous, although there's speculation it spent a bunch of time scavenging as well. Big, pretty scary, and famous. Hadrosaurs, sometimes called duckbills, because their jaws looked something like a duckbill, were a family of herbivores who lived in the Cretaceous. Some of them had big crests on top of their skull, which some people think they could use to make sounds, either mating calls, threats, or danger calls. Elasmosaurus was a genus of plesiosaur, which was an aquatic reptile and not a dinosaur, with a long neck. Like Another Scorcher pointed out, people used to think that their necks were flexible, and that they stuck out above the water, but that's generally not widely accepted anymore. They probably ate, as mentioned, crustaceans and small fish. Kronosaurus is a pliosaur, which is a type of plesiosaur (generally, the rule is, if it has small head and a long neck, it's a plesiosaur. If it has a big head and a short neck, it's a pilosaur. Kronosaurus was big and could have eaten a dolphin...in fact, it's generally thought they mostly fed on smaller plesiosaurs and sea turtles. In what's probably a KASU, you probably wouldn't have seen a Kronosaurus with these other animals....they lived in the Early Cretaceous and would have been extinct by the time Elasmosaurus, T. Rex and hadrosaurs were around. This is addressed later Shwoo posted:Doesn't Tobias identify them at the end of chapter eight? He does in my copy. He does, as you can see above. I was wrong in saying he didn't identify them, it turns out.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 05:37 |
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Epicurius posted:In what's probably a KASU, you probably wouldn't have seen a Kronosaurus with these other animals....they lived in the Early Cretaceous and would have been extinct by the time Elasmosaurus, T. Rex and hadrosaurs were around. This is addressed later
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 06:44 |
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I remember what the morphing error is now - it's a pretty blatant excuse to just not reunite the separate groups too early. Unrelated - is this the only book in the entire series that doesn't feature the Yeerks at all? Except maybe the Ellimist Chronicles?
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 07:38 |
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freebooter posted:Unrelated - is this the only book in the entire series that doesn't feature the Yeerks at all? Except maybe the Ellimist Chronicles? Book 26-The Attack doesn't have Yeerks in it, technically, at least.
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# ? Mar 9, 2021 17:11 |
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Epicurius posted:Book 26-The Attack doesn't have Yeerks in it, technically, at least. Ah, that's right. And I think that maaaaybe (but I barely remember it) David 2: The Return of David might not either.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 06:12 |
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Animorphs-Megamorphs 2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs, Chapter 9 Tobias quote:I was in pain. I didn’t want to mention it, though. What was the point? It's always sad when Tobias talks about his childhood. quote:We started to climb up the bank of the river. Or to be more accurate, Rachel started to climb, and I perched like so much dead, useless weight on her shoulder. Yep. There's no evidence of flowering plants before the Cretaceous period. Same with grass. quote:“So what’s the difference between Jurassic and Cretaceous?” So people talk about Applegate messing up here, and I think even she says she did, so I guess I have to accept it, but it doesn't seem like she did with Tobias not healing when he morphs and morphs back. It's weird, sure, But, as the text points out, it's a weird situation. Tobias is a nothlit who then got his morphing power back because of an Elimist miracle, and they've been zapped back in time 65 million years.It adsto the entire mystery and surrealness of the situation. Chapter 10 Marco quote:CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! Andalite tailblades are sharp.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 06:22 |
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Epicurius posted:So people talk about Applegate messing up here, and I think even she says she did, so I guess I have to accept it, but it doesn't seem like she did with Tobias not healing when he morphs and morphs back. It's weird, sure, But, as the text points out, it's a weird situation. Tobias is a nothlit who then got his morphing power back because of an Elimist miracle, and they've been zapped back in time 65 million years.It adsto the entire mystery and surrealness of the situation. So I would agree, BUT: Book 13, Chapter 19 posted:And just then, the first helicopter swept over me, roaring and ripping up the air. It was like being caught in a tornado. The rotor wash grabbed me and threw me sideways through the air. He morphs the raccoon, and then ... Book 13, Chapter 20 posted:Wait … was it possible? Could I remorph back into my own body? My red-tailed body? DNA isn’t affected by injuries. If I morphed back to red-tail, I wouldn’t have the broken wing. So maybe it wouldn't be a KASU except the exact same thing happened back when Tobias regained his morphing power. So I say it's an example of KASU. But, it definitely doesn't ruin the book.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 06:34 |
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Epicurius posted:So people talk about Applegate messing up here, and I think even she says she did, so I guess I have to accept it, but it doesn't seem like she did with Tobias not healing when he morphs and morphs back. It's weird, sure, But, as the text points out, it's a weird situation. Tobias is a nothlit who then got his morphing power back because of an Elimist miracle, and they've been zapped back in time 65 million years.It adsto the entire mystery and surrealness of the situation. As BOB says, plus as you point out, in the Q&A she said it was a mistake, too. She had written all of these chapters about Tobias's broken wing and how morphing wouldn't heal it, and then realized (too close to deadline to change it all) that it was a nonsense dilemma because morphing heals all your injuries, even in your original form.* So then she shoehorned these couple of lines into this chapter to "explain" it, but it's an rear end pull. *Actually, what I suspect happened was that Grant wrote it, and Applegate read it right before sending it off and was like "Wait." (Or vice versa.) But in the 90s she had to keep up the kayfabe that these were written by a solo author, for marketing reasons or whatever.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 07:22 |
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I think it's mostly because if Tobias could fly then he could (and, habitually, would) just surveil the area and they'd link up with the others straight away, and she wanted a plot point to stop them from being able to reunite too quick. Which feels lazy, I could probably think of one that doesn't screw up the science of the books, but meh. Re: Tobias loving dinosaurs as a kid, was that really common to the era, or longstanding, or... it just doesn't feel like today's kids are? Like, I subscribed to that Dinosaur magazine (maybe this was a UK/Australia thing) that came with posters and those cool glow-in-the-dark T Rex models that you slowly assembled where you got a piece with every issue, and I know it's not just me who was a big nerd because a lot of the other boys at my primary school loved it too - but that was in the mid to late 90s i.e. right after Jurassic Park. But then, I've read the Jurassic Park novel and I remember in the preface and also maybe in Grant's dialogue, at some point, they talk about how kids are just crazy for dinosaurs. (And come to think of it there was plenty of kid's media before Jurassic Park about Dinosaurs - Land Before Time, We're Back etc.) Why did kids love dinosaurs? And why don't they now (if that's true)?
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 07:35 |
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Tobias is definitely the right age to have been super into dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were huge in the late 80's and early 90's. Partially due to movies and media but also because there were a lot of exciting discoveries about them in that era. For instance, Sue, a 90% complete fossilized T-Rex, was discovered in 1990. Dinosaurs definitely aren't as popular today as they were 30 years ago but some kids are still into them. My nephew has some dinosaur toys he loves to play with and my niece was super into them when she was in the 8-10 range a few years ago.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 08:01 |
I mean.... yes, tailblades are sharp.... But it's a loving T-REX. Unless he hamstrung it and severed its spinal column or something i don't see him taking it down like that.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 08:13 |
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Just acquire the T-Rex Marco, come on.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 09:15 |
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WrightOfWay posted:Tobias is definitely the right age to have been super into dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were huge in the late 80's and early 90's. Partially due to movies and media but also because there were a lot of exciting discoveries about them in that era. For instance, Sue, a 90% complete fossilized T-Rex, was discovered in 1990. Dinosaurs definitely aren't as popular today as they were 30 years ago but some kids are still into them. My nephew has some dinosaur toys he loves to play with and my niece was super into them when she was in the 8-10 range a few years ago. Can confirm, I was basically the same age at the same time as the Animorphs and I was super into dinosaurs as a kid.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 14:10 |
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Cythereal posted:Can confirm, I was basically the same age at the same time as the Animorphs and I was super into dinosaurs as a kid. I'm older than the Animorphs, but I was also really into dinosaurs as a kid.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 14:46 |
the way to fix the screw-up would have been to double down and have one of the kids take a cut to the arm or something and retain it after going in and then out of a morph, instead of making it only tobias. then have ax say something about z-space distortions and extruded mass
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 17:37 |
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Or if they want to keep Tobias from flying, they could have pterosaurs or something threatening nearby.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 17:54 |
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freebooter posted:I think it's mostly because if Tobias could fly then he could (and, habitually, would) just surveil the area and they'd link up with the others straight away, and she wanted a plot point to stop them from being able to reunite too quick. Which feels lazy, I could probably think of one that doesn't screw up the science of the books, but meh. I was in grade school when these books started running and I was really big into dinosaurs. There were a bunch of new discoveries that ran in educational magazines at the school library, Discovery Channel tended to run series on them, Playskool Dinos and more intricate models were on all the shelves. I honestly think Book Fairs had a lot to do with it as well, because they tended to have a lot of easy-to-digest books about dinosaurs with a lot of pictures.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 18:37 |
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I have a hard time to this day remembering that other people know almost nothing about dinosaurs, when its such a baseline thing to me like the times tables or whatever. The concept that people only know about 3 dinosaurs maybe is very weird to me. Especially if they are freakin' punks who think a pterosaur is a dinosaur.
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 19:34 |
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I'm not sure of the reasons, but my kids are far, far less into dinosaurs than I was at their age. And kids in general, as far as I can see.Pwnstar posted:I have a hard time to this day remembering that other people know almost nothing about dinosaurs, when its such a baseline thing to me like the times tables or whatever. The concept that people only know about 3 dinosaurs maybe is very weird to me. Especially if they are freakin' punks who think a pterosaur is a dinosaur. Yeah, I still feel surprised every time I discover an intelligent person who doesn't know a whole lot about dinosaurs. Like, everyone gets twitchy at pictures of dimetrodon next to a stegosaurus and a triceratops, right?
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# ? Mar 10, 2021 23:28 |
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I had that Microsoft Dangerous Creatures CD-ROM, and I think the introduction to the section on dinosaurs began "Thought all dinosaurs looked like T-Rex?" I was very offended. I'd be surprised if anyone knew about Tyrannosaurus rex but not sauropods, though. But I did think that dimetrodons were from the Triassic for a long time. I'm sure the book I had said that was when they were around. freebooter posted:Like, I subscribed to that Dinosaur magazine (maybe this was a UK/Australia thing) that came with posters and those cool glow-in-the-dark T Rex models that you slowly assembled where you got a piece with every issue, and I know it's not just me who was a big nerd because a lot of the other boys at my primary school loved it too - but that was in the mid to late 90s i.e. right after Jurassic Park.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 05:04 |
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Animorphs-Megamorphs 2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs, Chapter 11 Ax quote:I wiped my tail blade on some large leaves. Unfortunately, more than my tail was stained. Oh, humans are so delightfully primitive. quote:My human friends stared at me. “So the Andalite Toys ‘R’ Us must be a wild place, huh?” Marco said. Don't mess with Cassie. Chapter 12 Rachel quote:My feet were torn bloody. I was leaving traces of red on the razor-edged saw grass. The legs of my leotard were torn and tattered. It was not a good look. The bare midriff thing, maybe. The fringe look? No. Technically, rodents, so the early version of rats, I guess, haven't evolved yet. quote:I smiled. “If Marco were here he’d make some snide remark about you having plenty to eat, at least.” So, people have probably heard of Triceratops. Bony crest, three horns. Rachel is probably making a bad assumption here that just because a triceratops is a herbivore it isn't dangerous. I mean, I don't know if it was or not, but a rhinoceros is a herbivore, and it's pretty dangerous. Deinonychus is Velociraptor in Jurassic Park. Basically, in 1988, this guy named Gregory Paul wrote a book called "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World". In addition to suggesting that a bunch of dinosaurs were feathered, which is generally accepted now, he decided that Deinonychus and Velociraptor skeletons were really similar, although different sized.....Deinonychus was about 5 feet tall, and Velociraptor was the size of a chicken, but that they were the same animal. So, when he put Deinonychus in his book, he called it Velociraptor. Paleontologists didn't generally accept this, but he published the book. So when Michael Crichton was doing research on Jurassic Park, he used that book, and when he put Velociraptors in the book, they were really Deinonychus. So, that's why the bad guys in Jurassic Park weren't bad tempered chickens. It probably is true that both animals were feathered, though.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 05:15 |
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They seem oddly averse to morphing at the moment. I get that Tobias wants his wing to heal but they have no reason to think the others are dead. He has morphs that wouldn't leave him "helpless" while Rachel goes to look for them; or he could go fly and cling to her. And even if they're not going to do that, surely he could just as easily ride on her as a bird if she morphs wolf or horse or bear and saves her feet?
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 06:12 |
Cassie gets grief for being too soft, but you see the cold, hard side of her here. She is every bit as ruthless as Marco when she has to be. Also Deinonychus was one of my favourite dinos!
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 06:17 |
freebooter posted:They seem oddly averse to morphing at the moment. I get that Tobias wants his wing to heal but they have no reason to think the others are dead. He has morphs that wouldn't leave him "helpless" while Rachel goes to look for them; or he could go fly and cling to her. And even if they're not going to do that, surely he could just as easily ride on her as a bird if she morphs wolf or horse or bear and saves her feet? KA wanted to write a scene where rachel and tobias make quasi-romantic sacrifices of their own well-being for each other and logic was not going to get in the way. i think all of the kids are pretty spooked and not thinking straight, being, uh, in the time of the dinosaurs and all except cassie, who is finally having a genuine animal expert moment that isn't "my dad has this thing in the barn and i've been taking care of it"
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 07:05 |
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Jazerus posted:KA wanted to write a scene where rachel and tobias make quasi-romantic sacrifices of their own well-being for each other and logic was not going to get in the way. Speaking of, gotta say I haven't really been feeling a lot of chemistry between them throughout the series, and having the most beautiful girl in school develop a thing for the outcast nerd feels a bit pandering. Cassie and Jake feels a bit more solid but even then not hugely natural. If I had to guess at who'd develop into a romantic couple without the exposition already explicitly pairing up Rachel/Tobias and Cassie/Jake, it would honestly be Rachel and Marco.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 09:09 |
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Cassie gets grief for being too soft, but you see the cold, hard side of her here. She is every bit as ruthless as Marco when she has to be. Cassie is kind of interesting. Rachel loves violence and is down for whatever and Marco is the most morally flexible which we all know. Cassie is a moralist but is also practical in the terrifying amoral sense, she often comes up with the really hosed up horrible way to save a situation which she really really does not want to do. Then she does it and feels sad.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 15:21 |
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Cassie‘s problem is that she is not particular well written. The authors really struggle to get in the mind set of a character that is an animal rights activist/pacifist and as a result you end up with a very inconsistent character and a narrative that sometimes seems to bend reality to proof their point, because the author can’t think of a natural way.
e X fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Mar 11, 2021 |
# ? Mar 11, 2021 15:53 |
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Applegate has said that, of all the characters, Cassie is the one closest to her in mindset and personality. A lot of that, though, means, that she becomes the authorial voice. I don't think the problem is that she's poorly written, because I don't really think she is. I think the problem a lot of people have with her is that, first, she's usually right in what she does, and second, she comes across sometimes as the member of the group that's there to stop the excitement happening.....it's The Animorphs come up with cool plan and there's going to be a cool fight scene, then Cassie comes across and says, "I dunno. Let's consider the moral implications of the cool plan, and you're reading it and you just want a gorilla to punch Visser Three in the mouth. It's "When do we get to the fireworks factory?!", if you know the Simpsons quote. So, I think that turns people off Cassie.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 16:29 |
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Epicurius posted:Applegate has said that, of all the characters, Cassie is the one closest to her in mindset and personality. A lot of that, though, means, that she becomes the authorial voice. I don't think the problem is that she's poorly written, because I don't really think she is. I think the problem a lot of people have with her is that, first, she's usually right in what she does, and second, she comes across sometimes as the member of the group that's there to stop the excitement happening.....it's The Animorphs come up with cool plan and there's going to be a cool fight scene, then Cassie comes across and says, "I dunno. Let's consider the moral implications of the cool plan, and you're reading it and you just want a gorilla to punch Visser Three in the mouth. It's "When do we get to the fireworks factory?!", if you know the Simpsons quote. So, I think that turns people off Cassie. Admittedly, is harsh and maybe unfair, and probably a bit too broad. But I don’t think it is a fair counter argument to just say I want more brainless action and don’t like character that gets in the way. Cassie does have good and even great moments throughout the series, but I still maintain that there are a lot of instances where her „moral objections“ and not particularly well thought out and a couple of books where she only end up being in the moral right due to author fiat, i.e some extremely unlikely events happen that turn out to make her justify her objections.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 17:04 |
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I think Cassie 's character is consistent in that - she is serious about her ethics and thinks them through fully, which normally just pops up in the story as benign finger wagging and people see her as a softy. But then an actual dilemma pops up and, because she has already given serious thought to her morality, if she has decided it's right to kill a bitch she'll just do it while the rest of them
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 17:05 |
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e X posted:Admittedly, is harsh and maybe unfair, and probably a bit too broad. But I don’t think it is a fair counter argument to just say I want more brainless action and don’t like character that gets in the way. Sorry. I wasn't referring to you personally with that second reason, obviously. It is something I've seen, though; people criticizing Cassie because her moral objections slow down the pacing of the books. Sometimes, though, you're right, she's right because of authorial fiat, and that can be a problem.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 17:14 |
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Epicurius posted:Sorry. I wasn't referring to you personally with that second reason, obviously. It is something I've seen, though; people criticizing Cassie because her moral objections slow down the pacing of the books. Sometimes, though, you're right, she's right because of authorial fiat, and that can be a problem. I admit that I didn't know that KA actually considered Cassie so close to her own mindset. Maybe it is a ghostwriter problem. A lot of media had environmentalist/pacifist characters in the '90 and a lot of them share the same problems I think Cassie has, so I always figured it was due to the authors not actually sharing their character's ideals and struggle to get into their heads.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 17:41 |
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# ? May 23, 2024 17:51 |
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quote:<I’m not an expert, of course. We studied the Sario effect in school. But I may not have been paying very close attention. Who knew I’d ever need to understand time-rifts?> Well they seem to happen roughly 100% of the time that there's a big explosion Ax.
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# ? Mar 11, 2021 17:45 |