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Fuschia tude posted:Oh great, one of the minds Ellimist absorbed was Jordan Peterson If only...
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# ? Sep 4, 2022 12:57 |
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# ? May 24, 2024 07:12 |
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Being of immense god-like power: I, TOO, AM A GAMER I'm a little surprised, I figured Crayak wouldn't appear until Ellimist had started transcending the limits of the physical plane, but this seems to imply they're both (at least at this point) very powerful but still limited to existing in 4 dimensions just like regular beings, whereas their interference in the books implies they exist somehow outside of spacetime as we understand it. Also good to know Crayak isn't just a big eye, he's also swole as hell.
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# ? Sep 4, 2022 18:23 |
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This is right up there with MGS as works that become retrospectively hilarious with the continued refinement of the word "gamer."
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# ? Sep 4, 2022 20:18 |
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Rochallor posted:This is right up there with MGS as works that become retrospectively hilarious with the continued refinement of the word "gamer." If anything, it makes Crayak being a colossal racist, nihilistic, and petulantly destructive peice of poo poo all the more resonant.
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# ? Sep 5, 2022 01:10 |
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Chapter 23quote:How many years, how many decades had I played Father’s games? Losing every game. Until by sheer luck I found the game he could not win. The game's afoot! Chapter 24 quote:The next game. Guess who discovered the primitive Andalites. And morphing, I guess. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Sep 5, 2022 |
# ? Sep 5, 2022 02:30 |
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And now the Ellimist decides to go and play Andalite Jesus?
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# ? Sep 5, 2022 08:51 |
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Turns out tribal communities are very suspicious of outsiders! Who knew? Considering how Ax was always very suspicious of the Ellimist, I'm guessing the next chapter doesn't go "And they shanked my clone, so I had nothing to do with those savages anymore." It's ancient aliens but... you know...with actual aliens.
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# ? Sep 5, 2022 13:26 |
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They were astonished at his doctrine! <SHUT UP!!>
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# ? Sep 5, 2022 20:14 |
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And Yea, the Ellimist Appeared among the Tasty Grass; and preached to us the Doctrine of Flight, and the Joy of Thermals
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# ? Sep 5, 2022 21:08 |
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Chapter 25quote:I held up my hands, palms out, to show that I carried no weapon and meant no harm. But of course this gesture was less meaningful when dealing with a species that carried its weapon in its tail. So, that's the lesson the Ellimist thinks he learned from the Andalites, and, obviously he did, but I think there's another lesson there. Ever since the Ellimist merged with Father, all his relationships with other alien races, he's come as the superior, the benefactor. He had what he saw as this holy mission to fix the galaxy, and he came in from this place of power, to meddle, to fix, to feed the hungry, to cure disease, to lead his inferiors. Then he comes here and he doesn't do that. He comes as an Andalite, and lives as an Andalite, and suffers as an Andalite, even losing his child to a disease that he could cure. And still, he resists the temptation to do it. He's willing to humble himself and thereby learn empathy, and that's the big thing he learns from the Andalites, because he's willing to learn from the Andalites.. Chapter 26 quote:A hundred thousand generations passed and I had seeded life on as many worlds. I was growing "children” faster than Crayak could exterminate them. My travels, and the database of my multitude, had left me with an encyclopedic knowledge of habitable worlds and systems. And in some cases I simply created habitable worlds where only barren land had been: Melting ice caps to release water was one method, introducing oxygen-producing plant species was another. I don't even know how I'm going to record this on my genocide chart.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 02:10 |
I love this book. It's so, so good.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 02:20 |
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I always wondered if Andalites eventually evolved Thought-Speech because of the Ellimist's Andalite body introducing some kind of genetic mutation into the population. Because as it is we see them in basically a modern configuration a couple million years before present day... except missing Thought-Speech and only having some sign language.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 02:30 |
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Maybe, but it does say "They seemed capable of projecting a sort of basic emotional language...", which suggests primitive telepathy existed even then.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 02:38 |
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I wonder that too. I'm not sure how to interpret this:quote:<I’m not an enemy,> I said. I said it without thinking, automatically accessing my communications system - a system that was part of my other body, no part of this form. I think what he's saying is that he tried to access his ship body's communication system, but that didn't exist so he accidentally used the Andalite's psychic hardware to make words, which they didn't know how to do before and they learned and snowballed from there. Though I guess it could also mean that he actually used his ship's hardware to talk to them remotely.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 04:54 |
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It seems to me like they could do this before he showed up, a primitive thought-feel precursor to thought-speak. He just tapped into it by instinctively trying for communication. Does this explain the malevolent aura Visser Three emitted, more often at the beginning of the series?
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 06:14 |
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This battle between the Crayak and the Ellimist is so, so good. Just two indescribable space-gods throwing everything they can at each other and annihilating everything in their path on a galactic scale. It's insane to try and think about and comprehend. I love it.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 06:48 |
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I love how unafraid this book is to go buck wild with scale and concepts.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 07:09 |
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Interestingly William Golding (Lord of the Flies) wrote another book called The Inheritors about Neanderthals and depicted them as having a primitive sort of telepathy, more about transmitting emotions than language. And speaking of other books, I love that Crayak of the Big Red Evil Eye also has an entire floating Mordor planet full of gross species he genetically-engineered himself to cart around on his galactic genocide.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 07:40 |
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freebooter posted:Interestingly William Golding (Lord of the Flies) wrote another book called The Inheritors about Neanderthals and depicted them as having a primitive sort of telepathy, more about transmitting emotions than language. I remember finding a compilation of sci fi short stories from around the period that was written, and all but one of them featured telepathy. It seems to have been A Big Deal in the genre for a decade or so there.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 08:05 |
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Vandar posted:This battle between the Crayak and the Ellimist is so, so good. Just two indescribable space-gods throwing everything they can at each other and annihilating everything in their path on a galactic scale. It's insane to try and think about and comprehend. I remember that the very first introduction to Crayak as a character had the Ellimist note that, in his words, their open war destroyed a tenth of the galaxy and exterminated hundreds of sentient species, and thousands more that might have achieved sentience.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 12:32 |
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A lot of people believed in telepathy then for some reason. Alan Turing said the evidence for it was overwhelming. I'm not sure why. It was a big part of Asimov's Foundation series too.
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 12:37 |
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species uplifts $200 data storage $150 exploration probes $800 nuclear arms factories $3,600 z-space fuel $150 someone who is good at the godhood please help me budget this. my galaxy is dying
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 16:43 |
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Capfalcon posted:species uplifts $200 you must construct additional pylons
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 16:54 |
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Acebuckeye13 posted:you must construct additional pylons NO!
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# ? Sep 6, 2022 20:29 |
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Chapter 27quote:I now consisted of four thousand two hundred and twenty portions. I emerged from Zero-space trailing my vast, extended body behind me. The instant I emerged I saw the trap. It's one last change. Tomorrow, we move to the last section and the last version of the Ellimist....End Game
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 02:53 |
Where you're going, you won't need eyes to see.
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# ? Sep 7, 2022 03:23 |
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End Game Chapter 28 quote:I don’t know how long I floated through this eerie, brilliant, wondrous landscape of pure energy and purest beauty. Time was for other creatures. Time’s arrow did not carry me along with it. The dominant species, as we've learned, being the Nesk. It's an intesting dilemna, though, because doing nothing effectively surrenders to Crayak, but acting and revealing yourself boosts his power. Chapter 29 quote:“So here you are, Ellimist” UIltimately, for all that the Ellimist is, he's a game plater, and Crayak is his twisted mirror. And what the Ellimist said last chapter is true. Nothing that's happened to him changed his nature, and the same is true of Crayak. Ultimately, for both of them, there must be a game. Epilogue tomorrow. The end is the beginning.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 02:46 |
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Is this, like, the Zoroastrian version of the Narnia books? Introducing kids to theistic dualism?
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 03:06 |
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introducing kids to gamer culture Ellimist cracks open a can of mountain dew and lazily licks Cheeto dust from his fingers. "Looks like it's just the two of us, Crayak." Crayak cranks his microphone to full blast and shouts a bunch of racial slurs as loud as possible, followed by, "Git gud, noob!"
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 03:20 |
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Epicurius posted:Chapter 26 Wait, it's spelled "Pemalite"? I think I've been reading it as "Permalite" this whole time.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 06:21 |
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The hairdresser planet was also destroyed by Crayak, rip
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 07:26 |
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So the Andalites have only marginally evolved over several dozen millions of years? How odd.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 08:03 |
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They achieved physical and cultural perfection, you see, and so did not require further change.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 08:22 |
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cptn_dr posted:They achieved physical and cultural perfection, you see, and so did not require further change. sharks, crocodiles, many kinds of bugs, andalites sometimes you hit a winning idea but also you know what? The imagery of Toomin being trapped by Father is horrifying. Just floating in an endless kelp forest graveyard
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 09:51 |
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Flowers For Algeria posted:So the Andalites have only marginally evolved over several dozen millions of years? How odd. yeah I think that the scale is a little off, it being maybe 1-2 million years in the past would make a little more sense
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 12:37 |
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Ellimist did it
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 12:43 |
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Soup du Jour posted:yeah I think that the scale is a little off, it being maybe 1-2 million years in the past would make a little more sense On the other hand, we're just hearing things from Ellimist's perspective. Dude was thinking he was so humble, living down with the "primitives" for a while, with only his laser gun, fully realized telepathy, complex grammar while everyone else was speaking cave-Andalite, and orbiting supercomputer the size of a moon. He definitely accidently jumpstarted the Andalites so hard that even a lackluster student like Ax immediately knows who he is when he shows up the first time.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 16:19 |
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If we imagine the Andalites he lived with are the equivalent of like Homo Habilis it kind of works? Especially if you consider Ax's history lesson from earlier in the series where he says Andalites took several times longer to develop from flight to spacefaring than humans did and extrapolate it out a bit. Culturally we see that they're incredibly slow to change as well if we take Aldrea's thoughts on how the Andalite military works into account. Add onto this that in general there aren't that many Andalites, at least not compared to humans. Even now they probably top out at fewer than a billion across all their colonies and the homeworld. Its still a bit wonky and clearly just because they wanted to line up the scene where the Ellimist saves Earth circa the Triassic period from Crayak.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 16:37 |
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Ax also points out in another book that at one point, Andalites lived in cities and then rejected that urbanism for the way they live now, spread out, and the Andalite Chronicles talks about how the Andalite government regulates the birthrate (Elfangor mentions that, with the war on, the government is probably going to give his parents permission to have a second kid), so it's not just stagnation. The Andalites actively work to preserve their way of life. The impression I get of the Andalites is that they, as a rule, tend to be very cautious and conservative, worried about upsetting the status quo that makes them the dominant power in their region of the galaxy. And there's not many of any alien race compared to humans. The reason that the Yeerks have Earth on their target list is because there are billions of humans, compared to millions of every other intelligent species out there. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Sep 8, 2022 |
# ? Sep 8, 2022 17:44 |
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# ? May 24, 2024 07:12 |
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Epicurius posted:
I think she means dinosaurs. The impression I get was the Nesk and the broccoli farmers were there relatively briefly on the timescale before the Animorphs genocided them. Were the brocolli farmers from Mars, I can't remember? Otherwise it's weird she also casually drops that oh yeah Mars used to have life.
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# ? Sep 8, 2022 21:17 |