Book 19: The Departure

[gh astly]

Sorry it's late, sorry I copied the description from here, I got busy, blah blah, you all know the excuses.

Summary

Spoiler:

After losing control during a battle and needlessly killing a Hork-Bajir, Cassie decides she wants to quit the Animorphs. The others are angry, but Cassie is stubborn. A day or so later, Cassie is riding a horse when she sees a little girl running from a bear. She saves the girl, but is forced to jump into a river to get away. She loses consciousness and wakes up downstream, completely lost. The little girl, named Karen, has twisted her ankle but is otherwise okay. Well, sort of. It becomes evident in about two minutes that Karen is a Controller. Her Yeerk, Aftran, followed Cassie home after the battle because the Hork-Bajir Cassie killed was Aftran's brother's host. Cassie pretends to have no idea what Karen/Aftran is talking about and focuses on getting them some shelter. When an escaped leopard attacks Karen, though, Cassie is forced to morph to save her. Aftran is just happy they can stop pretending now. Cassie and Aftran discuss some interesting aspects of Yeerk life, though the conversation ends in a fight. But Aftran is beginning to crumble, and says that she won't leave her host and spend eternity as a blind slug unless Cassie agrees to do the same. So Cassie traps herself in caterpillar morph before the other Animorphs can stop her. The others want to rip Karen's head off, but Aftran convinces them that she and Cassie had a deal. So, heartbroken, the Animorphs take Cassie home. She spins a cocoon and emerges as a butterfly a few days later. At which point Ax says that the morphing process should have reset, since she switched forms, and she has two hours to demorph.

Discuss, my minions!! Bwahahahahaha!

[SamilinCorrathGahar]

<At least at the start of the book Cassie has the sense to quit the team, maybe this will finally be the last we ever hear from her. After all, by the end of the book she is trapped in morph.>

<...What do you mean she gets out!>

<Tobias must secretly HATE that about Cassie for the rest of the books.>

<Lets also take a moment to think about how this once freed host now is not showing up to meetings of the Sharing anymore and how the other Yeerks might notice this and re-infest her and scan her memories, and see that this little girl saw what seemed to be the Human morph of one of the 'Andalite Bandits', and that this Andalite stayed in Human morph for a lot longer than the time limit, and then still managed to morph some how.>

[gh astly]

Yeah, Cassie's kind of stupid.
This was a book I liked, even for all its faults. The natural morphing thing was some really stupid bullshit, though.

[NinaRayquaza]

Also, why was Aftran's brother called Estril? Aren't sibling Yeerks meant to have the same name?

[gh astly]

I think that's just for twins. Actually, that brings up the question of how twins are distinguished from just regular sibling Yeerks.

[Tobias_Marco]

<Twins break up later than other siblings.>

<So this leads to a KASU, natural morphing resets Cassie's morphing clock. She now has 2 whole hours to turn back into Cassie or be trapped as a butterfly forever. The book ends with the Animorphs chasing her, this means that she is flying around as a butterfly.>
<Here is the problem: When a butterfly first emerges from its cocoon its wings are too wet to fly, Cassie would have to sit in the sun for a while to dry her wings out before she could fly.>
<I once had the opportunity to watch a butterfly emerge from its cocoon, and I was excised to see it fly for the very first time, however I did not get to see that because I had somewhere to be, and it took a while for the wings to dry enough for flight. Long enough that she would have been trapped in morph again.>

<Not that I thought about Animorphs at all that day, I was in Walt Disney World at the time.>

[gh astly]

Again, I don't think that's a KASU, that's more of a failure to research. A KASU is when KA goes against the established continuity.

[MrCrazyGirl]

I liked it, but KA SERIOUSLY wrote herself into a hole by trapping Cassie in morph... I think she probably was thinking the whole time "oh, hey, I'll figure a way around this! Uh.. Oh... Yeah, I can't figure a way out of this one... Um... Okay.... Uh.... Natural morphing! Yeah, that'll save me!" it was kinda another talking whale incident to me... Other than that, I like it, though I have to admit, Aftran has more personality than Cassie...

[gh astly]

That goes for a majority of characters in the series.
The sad thing is, I think Cassie was generally written better in the ghost-written period than most books that KA wrote.

[Blu]

People criticize Cassie a lot for what she did here, but you have to take a few facts into consideration: She's terribly young (maybe 13 at the time?); she's in a war that only 6 of them (currently) fight in against an entire empire; she has a family who knows nothing of it; she could be killed at any moment; and she just needlessly killed a sentient creature who, were it not for the Yeerk, was a peaceful innocent. Add to that, she's probably wounded and killed a number of innocents before that event aswell...

I think 99% of kids her age would have quit a long, long time ago. She needs some credit for returning to the fight when most kids wouldn't even have started it.




Did I just defend Cassie?