|
To clarify, Tom's identity is a pretty good one for a yeerk to assume - he's strong, well-liked, and clever. Furthermore I've been assuming he's probably like, 17, so not so young as to be very inconvenient. I'm mostly joking about how boring and/or banal high school classes and drama would be for a yeerk. I mean, unless they're into that I guess?
|
# ? Jul 18, 2020 23:29 |
|
|
# ? Jun 13, 2024 03:59 |
|
If anything, the brutal, hyper-competitive nature of Yeerk society is probably excellent training for the high school social scene.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 00:49 |
|
The Capture-Chapter 6quote:How long do you think this will take?" Rachel asked. She checked her watch. "I set the VCR for two of my favorite shows, but I forgot to tape the movie of the week." A dry wit can often be confused for no wit at all. quote:"There's the place," I said. It was up ahead, at the end of the block. That feeling when your girlfriend has to remind your cousin not to murder your brother. I mean, we've all been there, haven't we? quote:"Let's morph already," Rachel said. "Come on. I'll miss the movie." That's loyalty right there. quote:A few moments later, we were five cockroaches amid the scattered garbage on the bare concrete floor. Remember before when I said the idea of the Yeerks taking over a hospital was a good idea for them? Well, this is a better idea for them. Also, Visser Three has a human morph now.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 01:13 |
|
-glad that Tobias is more and more comfortable with his new life -Rachel already getting a little too gung-ho about things -looks like the Governor gets replaced one way or another in the next three years, as in #51 it’s a different person
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 01:25 |
|
Spoilers for the finale.Soup du Jour posted:-looks like the Governor gets replaced one way or another in the next three years, as in #51 it’s a different person Also, since we learn at the end that they're in California, the governor when KAA wrote this was Pete Wilson, who did indeed run for president in 1996 for about a month.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 01:32 |
|
Soup du Jour posted:-looks like the Governor gets replaced one way or another in the next three years, as in #51 it’s a different person This is one of the things that I'm curious about in the re-release and the audiobook versions that have come out since the end of the series, did they change the Governor's gender in The Capture to improve continuity with The Absolute or did they just leave it be?
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 01:33 |
|
nine-gear crow posted:This is one of the things that I'm curious about in the re-release and the audiobook versions that have come out since the end of the series, did they change the Governor's gender in The Capture to improve continuity with The Absolute or did they just leave it be? Eh, was there really a need to change the gender? There's three years between them, elections happen. I always assumed it was just a newly elected governor, because Rachel knows who the governor is here but didn't know the governor in #51 was a woman.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 01:41 |
|
nine-gear crow posted:This is one of the things that I'm curious about in the re-release and the audiobook versions that have come out since the end of the series, did they change the Governor's gender in The Capture to improve continuity with The Absolute or did they just leave it be? The governor is a man in the 2012 reprint
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 02:07 |
|
Oh, hell.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 03:12 |
|
Wow, Jake, that's pretty Americentric of you!
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 03:29 |
|
PetraCore posted:Wow, Jake, that's pretty Americentric of you! In the 90s it pretty much was true.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 07:29 |
|
disaster pastor posted:Spoilers for the finale. Quick, someone needs to edit his wikipedia page to include a number of inexplicable attacks from various wild animals
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:12 |
|
Tree Bucket posted:Quick, someone needs to edit his wikipedia page to include a number of inexplicable attacks from various wild animals Also Arnold Schwarzenegger is name dropped in one of the books coming up, and then two years after the series ended he ran for and became the governor of California.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:48 |
|
nine-gear crow posted:Also Arnold Schwarzenegger is name dropped in one of the books coming up, and then two years after the series ended he ran for and became the governor of California.
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:50 |
|
Daikloktos posted:Glad you spoiled that, I'm working my way through the Conan archives and I've been wondering how the recall ended up turning out At this point I'm convinced that Robert Smigel single-handed got Schwarzenegger elected, and you'll never convince me otherwise
|
# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:56 |
|
The Capture-Chapter 7quote:Let's bail. We've learned all we need to know,> I said. Visser Three and his wonderful management skills. quote:I felt the world spinning around me. Someone had been shot! Was it ... Tom? Could it have been? Do roaches really have "tails"? I'm thinking this is an error quote:"Kill those insects!" Visser Three screamed. Tobias with the save. So it's clear that even practicing their morphs doesn't do a lot to help.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 00:09 |
Almost defeated by bug spray. Its so perfect.
|
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 00:15 |
|
This has got to look hysterical from a human sized perspective
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 02:36 |
|
Mazerunner posted:This has got to look hysterical from a human sized perspective Just a bunch of Controllers running around trying to catch cockroaches.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 02:50 |
With Visser Three yelling at the top of his lungs, and blasting fools. He really is the worst boss. I'm put in mind of the boss from the first season of The IT Crowd
|
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 02:56 |
From the human perspective, that was no different from a regular roach infestation.
|
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 03:55 |
|
lol why would you choose a roach if you wanted to choose an insect morph for stealth purposes Maybe that's why the book cover has him morphing into a house fly; they realize that roaches are a really dumb stealth morph, while a housefly would basically be perfect under human control.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 05:19 |
|
nine-gear crow posted:It's incredibly telling that there is a metric fuckton of Tom POV fan fiction out there and it usually comes in one of three flavors, 1) what a hypotheical post-Yeerk Tom would be like, 2) Tom's struggle against his Yeerk Controller parallel to the Animorphs journey through the series, or 3) speculative pieces where either Tom is an out-and-out Yeerk collaborator or is paired up with a Good Yeerk that explores a similar but less hostile dynamic to #2. if anyone is looking for fic recommendations, i would say eleutherophobia is by far the best of the first kind, and i'm interested in hearing about examples of the other two.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 05:30 |
|
Turpitude II posted:if anyone is looking for fic recommendations, i would say eleutherophobia is by far the best of the first kind, and i'm interested in hearing about examples of the other two. Just a general warning, beyond, you know, a lot of fanfic isn't always good.....fan fic might contain spoilers for the actual book series.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 06:05 |
|
drat, this thread got to fanfic recommendations before I could establish why "Animorphs: The Reckoning is Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality done right" is not a ridiculous sentence to type. The pithy emblematic thing I'll say is that it casts the transhumanist hyper-rationalist optimizer that was the protagonist of that work in Visser 3, and the kids are written as thoughtful human beings struggling with their own limitations. This is a series where the themes and subjects "rational fiction" (as descends from HPMOR) wants to explore are actually congruent to the original canon and for vast stretches it feels more like just thoughtful fanfic than anything written to a literary movement and its philosophies. You'll find virtually every aside we've explored in this thread fleshed out to fantastic depth - I imagine some of you have secretly read it, so please back me up
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 12:47 |
|
I think Eleutherophobia rules but yeah absolutely do not read it if you haven’t read the whole series yet
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 14:00 |
|
Daikloktos posted:drat, this thread got to fanfic recommendations before I could establish why "Animorphs: The Reckoning is Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality done right" is not a ridiculous sentence to type. The pithy emblematic thing I'll say is that it casts the transhumanist hyper-rationalist optimizer that was the protagonist of that work in Visser 3, and the kids are written as thoughtful human beings struggling with their own limitations. I've never read it, but anything that makes Visser 3 a hyper-rationalist optimizer or the Animorphs thoughtful human beings is such a departure from source material.... In all seriously, if you want some sort of hyper-rationalist, Machiavellian chess-master, make it Visser One, who still isn't, but at least doesn't start killing subordinates when she sees a roach. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jul 20, 2020 |
# ? Jul 20, 2020 14:45 |
|
Daikloktos posted:drat, this thread got to fanfic recommendations before I could establish why "Animorphs: The Reckoning is Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality done right" is not a ridiculous sentence to type. The pithy emblematic thing I'll say is that it casts the transhumanist hyper-rationalist optimizer that was the protagonist of that work in Visser 3, and the kids are written as thoughtful human beings struggling with their own limitations. This is a series where the themes and subjects "rational fiction" (as descends from HPMOR) wants to explore are actually congruent to the original canon and for vast stretches it feels more like just thoughtful fanfic than anything written to a literary movement and its philosophies. gave this a go but i don't really like it. it feels so, so completely different from the series proper, like i'm not even reading the same characters. on the other hand i noticed Sacred Host; i'm only about 7 chapters in but so far it seems to be a story about a young woman teaching yeerks about god. very very strange but also kinda cool.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 19:07 |
|
As for the vein of "Tom with a Good Yeerk" fics, there's The Swap and its recently started follow up The Funeral. General spoiler content warning: it kicks off with right away with one of the big reveals for The Capture, and then very quickly starts running parallel of the events of the series that we haven't gotten to yet. So this isn't one to read if you're going through this let's read blind.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 20:30 |
|
Radio Free Kobold posted:gave this a go but i don't really like it. it feels so, so completely different from the series proper, like i'm not even reading the same characters. Yeah, I tried to read it and can't. Everyone is more of a dick and there's this insufferable smug tone hanging over the narration.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 20:39 |
|
disaster pastor posted:Yeah, I tried to read it and can't. Everyone is more of a dick and there's this insufferable smug tone hanging over the narration. I've tried reading it on and off too and yeah there's something... off about it. Also I've been poisoned to the term "rational" by folks like hbomberguy, because folks who use the appellation "rational" online to describe themselves or things these days tend to be Jupiter-sized wank-sticks. Not trashing the fic or anything, but yeah...
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 20:52 |
|
disaster pastor posted:Yeah, I tried to read it and can't. Everyone is more of a dick and there's this insufferable smug tone hanging over the narration. It also seems that nobody actually talks...they lecture. So like, to take a spoiler free example, in the book, the dying Elfangor explains morphing to the kids like this: quote:<To change your bodies,> the Andalite said. <To become any other species. Any animal.> And this is how he explains it in the fanfic quote:"The closest word would be morphing, I think. Shapeshifting would seem to be too broad, since you can't take the form of anything that is itself incapable of moving or sensing its environment, nor anything that lacks some kind of a genetic map. I mean, Elfangor, man, you're dying and you know the Yeerks are coming. You don't have to give these kids a lecture on nanotech. You don't have to use terms like "manual acquisition". Focus here. Give them morphing power and get them out of there before Visser Three comes.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 21:03 |
|
Radio Free Kobold posted:gave this a go but i don't really like it. it feels so, so completely different from the series proper, like i'm not even reading the same characters. on the other hand i noticed Sacred Host; i'm only about 7 chapters in but so far it seems to be a story about a young woman teaching yeerks about god. very very strange but also kinda cool. I'm liking this. Kind of like Animorphs meets the Screwtape Letters.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 21:17 |
|
Indeed, the disadvantage of fanfiction is authors of uneven skill only able to render part of what they're trying to achieve. The flaws you guys are picking out, legitimate ones, are probably especially due to the author coming from a more engineering background and only having written essays about Magic: The Gathering metastrategy before. Still, the flipside of fanfic is seeing these stories rearranged to bring different elements to the fore, even in structually flawed ways; I think it's worth it if you can put up with the writing style and literary aims. I mean this guy read the transhumanist rationality cult didactic Harry Potter fanfiction and felt inspired, don't let me oversell you on how little one can do to shade themselves away from that origin.Radio Free Kobold posted:on the other hand i noticed Sacred Host; i'm only about 7 chapters in but so far it seems to be a story about a young woman teaching yeerks about god. very very strange but also kinda cool.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 21:26 |
|
Daikloktos posted:Indeed, the disadvantage of fanfiction is authors of uneven skill only able to render part of what they're trying to achieve. The thing is, I'm not sure he's not completely successful at what he's trying to achieve; nobody has conversations, they just narrate the audiobook of "Why I'm Being Completely Logical and Therefore Right," and I feel like that's wholly intentional. It's just not for me. If you like it, I'm glad for you!
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 22:13 |
|
The Capture-Chapter 7quote:<Morph , Jake! Morph now!> So that's Jake's dream. Any thoughts? quote:I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again, I saw, right above me, fierce eyes staring Yep, that's certainly true, as do people who interrupt him when he's gloating, diminsh the importance of roaches or are sometimes just in his way.
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 23:11 |
Epicurius posted:The Capture-Chapter 7 HEY VISSER THREE WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE ROACHES GET HIM
|
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 23:18 |
|
Epicurius posted:Yep, that's certainly true, as do people who interrupt him when he's gloating, diminsh the importance of roaches or are sometimes just in his way. "So, why'd the Visser kill Glorp?" "Glorp diminished the importance of roaches." "Huh. Never took the Visser for a roach-lovin' kinda Yeerk..."
|
# ? Jul 20, 2020 23:21 |
|
Yeerks wish they could be as robust as roaches.
|
# ? Jul 21, 2020 00:49 |
|
|
# ? Jun 13, 2024 03:59 |
|
Epicurius posted:The Capture-Chapter 7 Actually, they do! They just barely peek out so being very close to one's tail also means being very close to just plain squishing.
|
# ? Jul 21, 2020 01:13 |