76 KiB
[RT][FF] Animorphs: The Reckoning Chapter 23: Jake
-
Author: u/4t0m Chaos Legion*
-
URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11090259/30/r-Animorphs-The-Reckoning
-
Score: 42
-
Created: 2016-11-08T04:46:00
Post:
Comments:
u/MagicWeasel [+17] Cheela Astronaut (35 minutes later)
Does anyone else feel like they're not smart enough to read this? Like, I think I need to read each chapter two or three times to properly understand it, and every few months I have the glorious experience of going through the whole thing again and seeing what else makes sense on the next go through.
u/etarletons [+7] (12 hours later)
That isn't "not smart enough", that's "smart enough to be intellectually challenged". :D
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
This is maybe a silly suggestion, but—have you tried reading it aloud? My writing is heavily oratory-influenced, and it's not all that misleading to say that r!Animorphs is "meant" to be read out loud.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+8] (14 hours later)
An audiobook of r!Animorphs would be the sickest thing ever.
u/None [+5] (a day later)
Any idea how one would go about doing that?
u/KnickersInAKnit [+6] (a day later)
Have a decent microphone, have some recording software, and give it a go. Have a friend (or yourself) who's good at cleaning up audio to give it some polish.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
You'd need some kind of effects work, afterward, to at least do things like distinguish thought-speak from verbal speech, in this chapter, or various layers of Andalite thought in other chapters. An echo effect or something. That's where the whole "meant to be read aloud" thing breaks down (as opposed to in my realistic fiction).
u/KnickersInAKnit [+3] (a day later)
Yeah, trying to distinguish the Ellimist's speech would also be kind of difficult. And the Arn's way of communicating.
u/None [+4] (a day later)
My writing is heavily oratory-influenced
Interesting, I hadn't consciously noticed before but that makes a lot of sense. Can you expand on that?
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
I'm just very, very verbal, and I read and write sentences in a flowy, rhythmic, syllables-matter sort of way. Like, often I'll be writing a sentence, and I'll know that the next word is "anger" or whatever, but it needs to be four syllables, not two, so I'll dig through my thesaurus and brainstorm phrases until I find something that fits the bill. That kind of thing. It's all very read-aloud-y, and when I'm getting back into the flow of writing, I have to rewrite the previous couple of paragraphs to pick up on the rhythm.
I even think in terms of things like changes-in-tone-of-voice when breaking one person's thought up with an interruption, or whatever. I use the em dash (—) so much because it's easy to see and anticipate as you're reading ... you see it coming, so your brain prepares itself for a shift in pace and tone.
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
Thanks for the idea! Normally the story drops while I'm at work so I, um, totally read it during my designated break times, and I don't think reading aloud will work.
I might see if I can read it to one of my many admirers though. I like reading aloud to others, and they need to know about the wonders of A:tR.
u/None [+7] (a day later)
Re SPOILER I love that /u/TK17Studios is incorporating fun bits of the canon in serious ways. I asssume that the final chapter will be a wight between tiny aliens and merpeople, and it will make total sense in context.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
That is my dream.
u/Salivanth [+5] (19 hours later)
Absolutely. Especially when I read the comments here, I hear about all these inferences people make, and all the shit that's going on behind the scenes, and I think "God damn, at least half of the brilliance of this story is wasted on me".
u/CouteauBleu [+10] We are the Empire. (6 hours later)
The Tom scene is great. I usually hate the "evil guys make an innocent suffer to show they're evil" scenes, but in this scene it's just so well done, so natural, it really brings out the stakes of the situation, the suffering there was, and why "Kill all these fuckers" is an option everyone is going to consider.
Often in stories, people who have been through horrible pain acknowledge it in a dispassionate way: "Yes, it was really painful and unpleasant and horrible! I hope it won't happen again!". It's great that this story shows the consequences of pain, with people flinching, crying, cracking up, being afraid, being angry, etc. Canon Animorphs made a big deal of Tom being a controller, but it never had a scene like that where we felt how much he went through.
Otherwise, it's great that everyone is cooperating, and no longer keeping secrets from each other. Join the Light Side! We have cooperation and hugs! Although I'm a bit surprised Erek cooperated too. More fuel for my "Erek is somehow different from interacting with humans" theory.
Can’t go around leaving loopholes like ‘let me infest you or I’ll kill all the hostages,’ after all.
Sounds like bitter experience. Someone read Book #53. Also, on one hand, "Erek disabled the implants" makes more sense that "The Andalites can shut off the technology but only if they want to deep in their heart(s)". One the other hand, I'm not sure relying more and more on Erek to solve narrative problems is a good idea from a literary perspective.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
Erek didn't exactly cooperate ...
Also, re: using Erek to close narrative loopholes, my sense is that this was the only one? I don't intend to rely on him "more and more," anyway, and I definitely want you to flag it if you keep getting that sense.
u/CouteauBleu [+9] We are the Empire. (17 hours later)
LALALA I can't hear you the nice friendly robot is being nice and friendly with no ulterior motives at all!
Regarding loopholes, I think I counted Erek bailing Rachel out of V3's trap in there? It's not a recurring problem or anything.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+10] (9 hours later)
Like those grad students that trained their professors on the D-L.
I feel this is out of character for a highschooler to know about.
I'm seeing the Vanarx in this chapter as well. It's just that how Jake sees it is different from Esplin, and his solution is also different.
“Order and chaos,” said the creature. “Unity and harmony. Silence and noise. A fundamental conflict of values.”
I think Jake is going for harmony and noise - everyone voicing their own ideas to have a result that forms a harmony, like a choir. Esplin, unity (under himself, of course) and silence, with his voice being the only one speaking. The ironic thing is that they're facing the same enemy. But anyway - Jake's chosen a side now, and it remains to be seen whether that's C or E's. Canon would say E, but who knows...
The argument rises and falls, as eight-one-three runs unobtrusively behind the van carrying the false Andalite
Beyond that, the Chee didn’t know where they’d ended up, since Rictic had stayed on the scene to take care of Tobias. The blue centaur pseudolite had also gone off radar, presumably to some government black site where it was being interviewed around the clock while waiting for the President, Putin, and whoever was in charge of China these days.
Well, the Chee are definitely lying about this then.
u/LeifCarrotson [+6] (11 hours later)
Like those grad students that trained their professors on the D-L.
I feel this is out of character for a highschooler to know about.
Agreed. Kids who trained their parents would be more apt.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
LeifCarrotson seconds; motion passes.
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (17 hours later)
While I see the big picture, I personally have no idea what specific events/studies/whatever are being referenced here.
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
Possibly apocryphal—the legend is that Skinner's grad students operant-conditioned him to only teach from the windowsill on the left side of a large lecture hall. Whether true or not, the story almost certainly inspired copycats in real life.
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (5 days later)
Maybe you could replace it with something like "Just like how you train a dog to like you"? It would be thematic.
YES I NOTICE WHEN YOU MAKES EDITS TO YOUR CHAPTERS. YOU CANNOT HIDE ANYTHING.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (6 days later)
Knowing CouteauBleu is watching is what keeps me on the straight-and-narrow.
u/None [+9] (a day later)
Another excellent chapter.
Loved to see the characters reactions to Ax, managed to both surprise me while remaining fully in character. Big theme of cooperation vs. defection going on in the last few chapters. But I like that 100% cooperation is not being depicted as super good, and hyper viglant paranoia isnt the position either.
Thoughts:
Why not give Tom morph capability now? They need every pair of hands they can get and hes 100% on their side.
Chee are going further and further into blue/orange morality territory, not just hyper pacifist. I wonder if a blackmail situation like in the last book of canon is feasible, probably not given they are so smart. The "censor" discussed in the interlude reminds me a lot of the way the minds worked in Max Harm's excellent Crystal Society. Especially their limiting of information makes a big difference. We cannot be sure of anything they have been saying to the protagonists that has not been explicitly confirmed in their internal monologue. Its very possible they know far more than they are letting on. [Given their tech it would be easy for them to have people on the yeerk ships. And I wouldn't be surprised given the canon connection with ellimist if they know more about the war in heaven than any of the characters. Elfanger and V3 were able to notice it in only one lifetime, they've been active for thousands of years and seem to be exponentially more intelligent. ]
"Whoever is in charge of china now" Has /r/tk17studios ever confirmed is this takes place at the present time or the same time as the original. Or a fuzzy 20 minutes in the future?
Animorphs are still reacting to situations not being proactive.
u/Zephyr1011 [+6] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (a day later)
Why not give Tom morph capability now? They need every pair of hands they can get and hes 100% on their side.
Tobias has the cube currently, so they can't. Whether they will later is uncertain, I can see good arguments both for and against. As you say, they need allies and he's emphatically upon their side. But he's also been through hell for two weeks, and is potentially a major loose cannon, with a massive grudge against the enemy
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
Heh—I loathed Crystal Society, but I did get a lot of value out of the first 8,000 words.
It's a fuzzy 20 minutes in the future.
Zephyr's right about Tobias having the cube. It's also not entirely clear how to get that back, if you're trying to keep the Chee in the dark.
The Animorphs are switching to proactive now, largely as a result of minor spoiler, you could've already guessed, it'll become clear over the next few chapters
u/Gd8909 [+8] (11 hours later)
This chapter reminded me for the first time that they're all thirteen. Like, pardon my French, but what the fuck? I've been picturing them as later-teens this whole time just because of their thought process. I know they were all groomed to represent the human race by the gods or whatever, but this is all some serious prodigy stuff.
Also, the whole thought-speak thing was funny and exciting. Adds a whole new dynamic when people can talk behind someone's back right in front of them, and when you know everyone is probably doing it to you at the same time.
Can't wait for the next one, as usual.
u/TK17Studios [+20] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
I have a pretty strong conviction re: the intelligence and personhood of younger teens, that comes from my own deliberately-preserved memories of that period of my life and has been borne out and supported in my personal experiences as a teacher. Essentially, my readers always rate my characters as being 2-6 years older than their stated age, and I always respond with "I think you have forgotten what it was to be thirteen." It's similar to the complaints OSC talks about in the foreward to Ender's Game.
Caveats, of course—not all kids are particularly sophisticated, and not all kids who are sophisticated express it all the time (I have some typical mind fallacy from being way right-tail as a kid). But I think the r!Animorphs, as written, are only two standard deviations above the mean, not three or four or five. I think I'm representing a side of thirteen-year-olds that adults don't often see, because kids conform to adult expectations and adults usually pretty clearly telegraph "I don't trust you because you're not mature/smart/capable."
This crops up in my original work, too, where the two main characters are twelve and accused of being sixteen. But—THIS IS MY HILL, I SHALL DIE ON IT.
u/CouteauBleu [+9] We are the Empire. (17 hours later)
I think it not so much that they're several notches above average kids, they're several notches above average people. If you gave me and my classmates (IT college) superpowers and told us to go save the world, I'm pretty sure we would not be nearly as coordinated, proactive, organized and serious about it.
u/TK17Studios [+9] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
I'm 90% confident that I and my peers would have been 90% as coordinated, proactive, organized, and serious, at the age of thirteen. However, I note that if I remove myself from the equation, my credence drops significantly—I was some fraction of a Marco mixed with some fraction of a Jake, in my friend group.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
Also note that the Animorphs have screwed up a lot, and all in all the density of accomplishment-to-action is pretty low.
u/Dwood15 [+4] (18 hours later)
Well, at their ages, the animorphs have seen people die around them, and their families effectively taken prisoner. It might take a while for the kids to wizen up, but they have to. Any 13 year old in their position would have to step up to the challenge or back down...
Why Jake & fam haven't backed down, i imagine, is part of the reason Esplin or whoever his name is, chose them.
u/TK17Studios [+9] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (22 hours later)
Yeah, our culture does a lot of things right, but one of the things it DOESN'T do is force thirteen-year-olds to ... exercise their responsibility muscles?
Young teenagers in history could've hacked this at a much higher rate than young teenagers in the first world middle class.
u/nonoforreal [+7] (a day later)
I just want to chip in that I think that TK17 is closer to the truth here than many people realize.
Jared Diamond, who has spent a lot of time among tribal peoples, has expressed some amazement at the children of many tribal cultures. (He is far from the only one.)
In one of his books, he relates a bit about a 10-year old boy named Talu, who hired himself out as a porter and guide to Diamond. His parents had no say - they had not been in the village for some days at the time Talu took the job - and everyone treated this as normal. The boy went with him for several days, helping when the trail was blocked by a flood, among other things, and then hired himself out longer as an assistant at his camp - he stayed with Diamond for a month until the work was done, collected his pay, and then walked home on his own. That level of independence was taken completely for granted among his tribesmen, with him just relaying messages to his family about what he planned to be up to using people who would be heading to the village.
Similarly, among the Piraha, children are basically treated as smaller, weaker adults. Parents deal with them by reasoning with them rather than appealing to authority or punishing - in fact, the apparently quite culturally egalitarian Piraha don't see children as being fundamentally that different than adults. They are allowed to play with sharp knives from when they are toddlers. This does result in some injuries, but many more children cope just fine.
Aka Pygmies trust their 10-year olds to travel and take care of themselves in the rainforest, defending against leopards and the like, and event trust them with 4-year olds while doing so.
Human children are capable of a great deal of intelligence and independence, and can be quite successful at it. Western civilization has generally agreed that the rate of attrition that comes with that is unacceptable, and chooses to have more surviving children rather than more capable children. This doesn't change the fact that, presented with the opportunity, children can deal with a lot of intellectually demanding things pretty well compared to an adult with a similar level of ignorance of the task at hand.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
more surviving children rather than more capable children.
Interesting summation. Thanks for the sources!
u/Dwood15 [+7] (23 hours later)
I think the major weakness is that your writing style (while absolutely amazing!) lends itself to completely mature characters, and doesn't really communicate their immaturity as much, giving your characters a perceived higher maturity and intelligence than they actually have.
That said, I still stand with my initial thought that those qualities which set them apart are probably why Esplin chose them as his chess pieces.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
If you're interested, I can share some other writing with characters of similar age and quality who, I think, exhibit notable immaturity, while having a "shown inner experience" that's basically the same quality as the r!Animorphs.
u/Dwood15 [+4] (a day later)
Thanks, but i think I'll decline the offer.
u/Evan_Th [+3] Sunshine Regiment (a day later)
I'd be interested in that offer, if it isn't any trouble for you?
u/FireNexus [+7] (17 hours later)
I think that children of that age certainly experience the world as if they're fully-formed, mature actors. But the fact is that their behavior (and this goes all the way up to mid-20s) indicates someone who doesn't really understand the world or have the decision-making skills of an adult. These kids have been through the minds of multiple highly experienced adults, multiple different intellectually (and possibly supernaturally) gifted peers, and hyperinteligent aliens. They've been afforded (and availed themselves of) the advantages of the yeerks, including a more limited form of their hive mind in the form of the backups. So they've probably gained a significant amount of experience and intelligence through osmosis. Tobias in particular has probably become an expert in national security without totally realizing. In fact, it would be pretty weird if they didn't start to rapidly become more intelligent and capable increasing exponentially as they enter the minds of different individuals and one another. Probably have them realize it when one of them begins speaking a foreign language known by a morph they've used, with a further insight when another who accessed that one's backup displays the same ability.
As far as your preserved memories and observations, two things. 1. Nobody's saying kids don't think they've got it together. Dunning-Krueger is quite real. Your memories "deliberately preserved" means that you've remembered them over and over? Because as I understand it, memories tend to get telephone-gamed and lose their accuracy each time you remember them. 2. For your interactions with students, you probably have a bit of confirmation bias happening because it's a deeply held belief. And because of the intellectual strengths of children, it can be easy to be convinced that their maturity, intelligence and wisdom is an order of magnitude greater than the actual value.
I'm not saying kids are stupid. They learn faster than adults and are much more adaptable (why I think your kids here prob disproportionately benefit from the insights afforded by the morphing tech). But they're inexperienced, immature, impulsive and oblivious to those facts.
u/TK17Studios [+9] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
Ah, so—I note that I replied with anecdotal evidence, and your reply is "your evidence isn't evidence." Which is certainly a fair position to take, on priors, but also doesn't exactly make me feel like taking the time to clarify and convince. You don't seem to be starting from a place that lends me the benefit of the doubt and assumes that I've maybe, y'know, read some child development psychology books and done explicit, objective checks of my assumptions, etc. etc.
I do like your point about them learning from osmosis, though. That's outstanding.
u/FireNexus [+9] (19 hours later)
I apologize for failing to provide benefit of the doubt. I'm usually very "force the point and see if their response contains valuable data". It's part of my aspergeryness. Allow me to rephrase: Memory alteration and confirmation bias are logical explanations for what you've described, thus far. And they have the benefit of being consistent with all observations pointing to children/young adults being prone to unwise choices that their elders are rarely subject to. (The young, young men in particular, are prone to death by misadventure of all types at high rates. Unplanned pregnancies spike among teenagers. Etc. Etc. Etc.) Since you've provided vague anecdotes and that can be dismissed by appeal to easily-overlooked and very common cognitive biases, your argument either requires sinificant clarification to coalesce around a valid contention, or can be dismissed as false out of hand.
I admit that I initially defaulted to the latter, but again, this is borne out of a habit of debating on the Internet with the thought of winning or being crushed and using the rubble as aggregate to form a more stable idea later. Crush away.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
No intention of playing into the win-or-be-crushed dynamic—just a general push toward "if someone clearly smart and experienced (who's writing a story that demonstrates at least SOME level of insight and attention to detail) makes a claim that goes counter to your models, don't immediately leap to the assumption that they're badwrongdumbcrazy."
i.e. I recognize that my earlier statement was pattern-matchable (hence, "Which is certainly a fair position to take, on priors"), but in the ideal world I would expect people to take a breath and push back against their own pattern-matching, in a context like "on a subreddit about rationality." Oh, the author of r!Animorphs is saying this? Huh. I'm curious (rather than dismissive).
Ultimately, no harm, no foul, but I think I'll save my lengthy justifications of my positions for another day and another post. In the meantime, feel free to interpret that as incremental evidence against me actually having a valid point, but hold that skepticism itself lightly.
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (23 hours later)
Turns out I'm not saving my lengthy justifications for another day. Huh. The things we'll do to distract ourselves from distracting current events.
HAHA I EXCEEDED THE MAX LENGTH AND HAD TO BREAK IT OUT INTO MULTIPLE REPLIES TO MYSELF.
Content warning: long, braggy, navel-gazing, possibly insufferable (by all means, hold me responsible for it, but don't act surprised by it)
I'm going to go through your reply point by point, not because that's necessarily the best layout but because it's easiest on my brain, which is tired.
don't really understand the world or have the decision-making skills of an adult
The main crux here, I think, isn't actually whether kids are bad at making decisions and understanding the world around them, it's whether adults are any better. My answer is emphatically no (I'm tempted to point at the American elections going on right now as definitive, and stop there).
The key mistake I claim "the system" is making is confusing the mean of the normal-ish curve with the range of the normal-ish curve. Here's a sinfully unitless graph that I made as part of a long post laying this out in more detail one time. Thirteen-year-olds (and sixteen, and eighteen, and twenty-one, etc.) have still-developing frontal lobes, yes, and this is a real handicap. But the vast majority of people with fully developed frontal lobes exhibit a commonplace mixture of having poorly trained them and refusing to use them.
Ultimately, I have never seen a kid make a mistake that I haven't also seen adults make, and I've seen a number of children who I trust as much as the most trustworthy adults I know. It's like betting on marbles coming out of a bag—sure, if you're betting on a person and all you know is "tween," your safe bet is "immature/irresponsible/dumb." But that's almost-as-true if all you know is "adult," too, and it's also not at all the same thing as saying that a given kid is incapable of outperforming adults in perception and judgment. When you factor out the smugness of self-congratulatory adults who downplay all of their bad decisions and highlight all of their luck and prowess, I think you end up with kids = D- and adults = D+, which is a heck of a lot less of a difference than most adults are comfortable even considering, let alone admitting.
(As I type this, I'm thinking of six different people, all currently under the age of eighteen, who I'd rather lend my car to than half of my coworkers, in part because they haven't yet convinced themselves that they're hot shit. I'm also thinking of the sum total of all the people I've met while they were under eighteen, and I'm only slightly more comfortable lending my car to any randomly selected person from all the people I've met while they were over eighteen.)
Your memories "deliberately preserved" means that you've remembered them over and over? Because as I understand it, memories tend to get telephone-gamed and lose their accuracy each time you remember them.
Not to keep beating a dead horse, but here's where a little bit of good faith could have gone a long way. Of all of the possible disambiguations of the phrase "deliberately preserved," you chose possibly the least flattering and defensible one, as a sort of strawman, and then proceeded to (correctly) point out its straw nature.
I did not know about the (as far as I know, uncontroversially true) telephone nature of memories, when I was little. But I lucked out, in that I have something like a one-in-three-hundred (made up number) aptitude for quotes. I remember exact quotes unusually well, think in quotes a lot, and tend to rehearse strings (and preserve them unchanged as confirmed by checks of objective records such as old letters and emails and going back to source material). e.g. if you read me any ~10 consecutive words of the book Ender's Game out loud, I have something like an 85% hit rate on telling you where in the book we are, who's present, and what's going on.
All of that is background for the statement that my confidence in my deliberately preserved memories is significantly more objective than the easily-available strawman: true, I rederive and reinvent my memories just as much as anybody, but they come along with a background (and MUCH more stable/lower-rate-of-mutation) library of remembered-quotations-in-context. I can refer to specific thoughts I had as far back as first grade, and note their complexity, the degree to which they do or do not synch up with my adult perspective on the situation, etc. etc. I can evaluate them against present-my reactions to the same sort of stimuli, and compare the degree to which I do or don't endorse my earlier framing and responses.
And what I've found is—yeah, I missed things, and yeah, I was dumb. But the reasoning processes that I was using were sound, and overwhelmingly resemble my current processes—my current processes are, in essence, those nascent processes + more nuanced information and improved heuristics. Furthermore, I have "messages from the past" that lead me to be confident that my close friends (at least) were operating on basically the same level, at basically the same quality-of-thought.
Now. I was pretty strongly right-tail (valedictorian, perfect SAT, shipped off to a nerd boarding school, etc.), but that brings us to the other half of the anecdotal evidence, which is my experience as a teacher.
For your interactions with students, you probably have a bit of confirmation bias happening because it's a deeply held belief.
I've been teaching since I was 14, including something like ten years of Tae Kwon Do, three years of public school sixth grade, six years of parkour, and a year of adult rationality education (overlapping). In that time, I got to have significant interactions with somewhere a little lower than a thousand kids between the ages of eight and fifteen (which is my revealed "main character" age preference).
I'm going to go ahead and completely agree with the statement "a bit of confirmation bias." I'd expect my responses to be skewed something like 5-10 percentage points off from reality, which seems to me to fit with the word "bit." But my claim is that everyone else is more skewed, on the other side.
/u/FireNexus
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (23 hours later)
My evidence here is essentially just "results." By treating kids as if they were autonomous, responsible, intelligent agents, I was able to elicit said behavior, from a plurality of my students. I was able to get them to do things like stay focused and diligent with no adults in the room, tackle complex interpersonal problems without becoming defensive or writing off their opponent, give and receive feedback and successfully use it to iterate, think through and solve complex design problems when given woefully insufficient input, etc. etc. I was able to get them to do these things at a higher (though not ridiculously higher) rate than my fellow teachers, and (perhaps most tellingly) I was able to witness the same kids underperform when led by an adult who thought they were stupid or irresponsible.
(No double blind, unfortunately, but we did kid swaps, lesson plan swaps, and room swaps, and ruled out room, subject, and subset of kids as possible explanations for the ~30% differential in results of a day's lesson between my class and the class across the hall).
I'd expect that my confirmation bias is creeping in here. Like, I'd expect that even after doing a solemn, careful, mature confirmation bias correction, I'm still overplaying the highlights and underplaying disconfirming counterexamples. I'd say that I've ratcheted down my claims and confidence by ten percent, and that a savvy outside observer should probably do that again. But simply by approaching eleven-year-olds as if they were Jakes and Marcos, I got consistently, noticeably, dramatically more Jakeish and Marcoish behavior out of them. Ditto in parkour, where I had kids younger than the Animorphs performing skills that were literally do-or-die, and performing them sanely, responsibly, and with a zero-percent failure rate (when it mattered; not talking about bumps and bruises). With maybe 30 hours of training, I got a batch of 12-15 year old coach candidates to step up and plan and run classes of ~10 adults, completely on their own, with quality that exceeded the average adult coach's quality (though it didn't come close to the best adult coach's quality). In my work as the curriculum director at the Center for Applied Rationality, I have yet to come across a single concept or technique that can be taught to thirty-year-old adults and not to a 90th-percentile tween (and with basically the same amount of investment in time, words, etc.).
(and I've only just now remembered that I've made, not one, not two, but three thirteen-year-olds swap seats with me in a car, first on empty country roads, then through the suburbs, then eventually out onto highways and through city streets.)
Note that I'm not making claims about all kids so much as I'm making claims about the existence of kids like Jake and Marco, and on the second level, about just how rare they are. The two (most extreme, sort of straw) versions of the null hypothesis that I'm fighting against are:
- No kids manage competence at the level of adults (because of e.g. frontal lobe development).
- Kids who manage competence at the level of adults are somewhere between one in a thousand and one in a million.
The former is straight-up false; counterexamples findable anywhere for people who are looking for them in good faith, especially once you factor in just how horribly adults are doing overall—
(checks election progress)
—and the latter I definitely thought might be true when I had only myself to look at (though given the existence and popularity of a book like Ender's Game, I was still pretty confident it was false), but in the intervening years, I've sought out sufficient proof that unless there's some crazy coincidence going on or I'm fooling myself by an order of magnitude AND ALSO all of my colleagues in four separate disciplines have failed to call me on it, people like Jake and Marco come along two or three times out of every hundred, not once every thousand or million.
It all boils down to whether you're comparing the hump or the tails. Stuff like children being prone to poor decisionmaking, or higher death rates among young males, gives clear data on the humps, but through availability bias and question substitution, it causes a good many well-meaning adults to be extremely infuriating toward (and to permanently curtail the potential growth of) a good many highly-promising kids.
(I have a second essay-length rant about why adults insist on forgetting what it was like to be their younger selves—why there are strong social and emotional incentives for adults to pooh-pooh their childhood thought processes and distance themselves from their early embarrassing failures—but I'll save that for another day (or maybe never).)
they're inexperienced, immature, impulsive and oblivious to those facts.
Yeah, but the "they" in that sentence is humans, not children specifically. My tagline, as a teacher and as a person-who-wants-to-force-multiply-good-people: I treat everyone like children, because I treat children like humans.
(oh God, these kids are going to get us all killed)
Further reading, if you want. In particular, Educ 101, 102 and 103.
*edit: forgot to include relevant data from my cogsci reading. Simple shorthand: somewhere between 11 and 13, most people make a final shift into "ability to grok these memes." An easy example is that if you try to get fourth graders, seventh graders, and college students to answer symbolic logic questions, the fourth graders will suck, the college students will be kinda decent, and the seventh graders will be all over the place. But if you precede the test with a straightforward explanation on how symbolic logic works, the fourth graders and the college students are unchanged, but the seventh graders become basically indistinguishable from the college students.
(obviously some hit this transition early, and some never hit it)
I posit that there's a similar thing going on with a lot of relevant decisionmaking ability, frontal lobes be damned—that the right environment and education dominates over brain chemistry. I can think of easy confounds (like maybe all my examples were in the upper quartile genetically to begin with), but it's a principle I've seen borne out. Kids under ten gotta be conscripted into rationality; for them, it's a religion. But by the time you hit Jake/Marco age, you can actually get it—you can be recruited into sanity, make the choice for yourself.
/u/FireNexus
u/Zephyr1011 [+5] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (a day later)
(and I've only just now remembered that I've made, not one, not two, but three thirteen-year-olds swap seats with me in a car, first on empty country roads, then through the suburbs, then eventually out onto highways and through city streets.)
Can you clarify what you mean by this, and why it was relevant?
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
Thirteen-year-olds driving as competently as sixteen-year-olds (i.e. first time, zero experience), despite three years' less brain development.
u/MagicWeasel [+6] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
if you read me any ~10 consecutive words of the book Ender's Game out loud, I have something like an 85% hit rate on telling you where in the book we are, who's present, and what's going on.
I don't have any interest in getting involved in your (interesting) discussion either way, but I'm actually curious to test this claim if I may?
Here's some quotes from my copy of Ender's game ("Author's Definitive Edition", so says the cover), with my usual disclaimer about how Speaker for the Dead is by far the better novel.
I have randomised the order of some quotes! Do you know where they come from? Can you put them in order?
They're ten quotes chosen by getting page numbers from random.org and doing the first 8-12 words that are at the top of the page (number chosen by random.org).
let him go home. Bonzo had been assigned to Cartagena.
"It'll be over before I grow up," Ender said.
"I hope
among the rest, all became somber. Authority was about to speak.
"No
that was completely out of her control. Ender never surrendered to Peter,
but the race as a whole can never decide
Either the teachers had been kind to him after all, or he
under him, straight toward the opposite wall, flashing between his legs
the officers' quarters; finally they came to where Graff
"What's the worst that could happen? You lose one
and everyone settled into the new pattern. The launch
Anyway, if you want to know if you're right on the ordering I've put the order and page numbers on this pastebin entry, context you'll have to wait for me to check for you.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
let him go home. Bonzo had been assigned to Cartagena.
Ender, in Command School, sort-of-fantasizing about throwing the game, doing badly enough that they'd wash him out and finally leave him alone. Not super confident on this one; I could see it swinging between one of his moments of sullen introspection or I could see it being right before the key decision in the last battle.
"It'll be over before I grow up,"
On the shuttle (just about to get off it, actually, or maybe in the hallway just outside), when Ender's trying to figure out what the hell Graff was up to by turning all the other kids against him. Graff said something about priorities or not telling the truth and stuff being able to wait until after the war was over.
among the rest, all became somber.
Bernard is blowing up, in the launch group, and he just crossed the line somewhat with Dap, yelling over the messages Ender's been sending under pseudonyms. Dap said something along the lines of "Are you shouting at me, soldier?" and the "No" in your quote is the start of Bernard backpedaling.
that was completely out of her control.
Valentine, obvs, when she's talking to Graff. Graff's sounding her out about her relationships with Peter and Ender, and getting a handle on what Peter's been up to, and is about to say something like, "is helping Peter really all that bad/is Peter the worst person there is" and she sort of petulantly says "yes." I believe this is the conversation that ends with Val choosing to write the letter to Ender, to get him out of his funk.
but the race as a whole can never decide
"Individuals can be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decided to cease to exist." Graff, talking with Ender about the moral axis of the us-or-them decision to send a fleet after the buggers' home world and colony systems. Ender says something along the lines of "I'd rather survive," which is evidence that the months on the lake and the talk with Valentine put him on the path to recovery.
Either the teachers had been kind to him after all, or he
Ender, musing on the prowess of his soldiers. Either the teachers had been kind to him after all, or he was a better teacher than he'd thought. He goes on to think about how his veterans, "utterly without honor" in their previous armies, had "blossomed into capable leaders," so much so that instead of the usual four toons, he'd created five.
under him, straight toward the opposite wall, flashing between his legs
Don't think I'm going to get this one; unusually generic. I can narrow it down to a few places—it could be his very first experience with his launch group, or it could be one of the Bean perspective moments, or it could be the time that Ender was forced to kamikaze by Rose de Nose. I'll look this one up afterward, because I feel like I'll kick myself once I know.
the officers' quarters; finally they came to where Graff
I'm thinking this is when Anderson brought Ender to see Graff, after like a week of battles? Ender eventually says something about not really getting a fair fight, and Graff says "you're getting one now," and this is the battle where Bonzo's army got advance warning and is arranged around the door. I think this is the same conversation where Graff asks Ender why he's watching the Bugger vids.
"What's the worst that could happen? You lose one game."
Bean, to Ender, as Ender's recruiting him to run the secret, sixth toon. They're in Ender's quarters. Ender says yeah, that is the worst thing that could happen, he can't lose any games, because if he loses one—and then he trails off, and Bean is left wondering, what? What would happen? That the legend would die? That the adults would lose faith? There's a long pause, and then Ender says that he needs Bean to be clever.
and everyone settled into the new pattern.
"Bernard sulked for a few days, and then he was fine, and everyone settled into the new pattern." The new pattern being the whole "Alai was the bridge" thing ... Ender solved the Bernard problem by making neither of them the alpha, and Alai almost unanimously got voted as the head of their launch group, then . This is just after the battle in the practice room where Ender and Alai came together, and then invited Bernard and Shen and together they slaughtered everybody else.
So, ordering your ten quotes temporally, I've got ...
2, 3, 10, 4, 6, 8, 9, 5, 1, with number 7 being a big question mark.
How'd I do? I note that in my previous tests, I overlooked the fact that humans don't actually choose a random string of ten consecutive words ... most people have read me complete lines, and this was harder (but a fun challenge).
**Edit: AW, I'M SUCH AN IDIOT. THAT WAS BEAN ANSWERING HIS QUESTION ABOUT "AND HOW DO WE ATTACK?" AND THEN BEAN'S LIKE, FUCK IT, I CAN'T ANSWER THIS IN WORDS, AND THEN ENDER'S ALL, "IS BEAN THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS HOW?" SO ICONIC. SO OBVIOUS.
u/MagicWeasel [+5] Cheela Astronaut (2 days later)
Can I just say I'm really super impressed? I can barely remember which order the quotes came in without my pastebin, and I selected them.
Your order was: 2, 3, 10, 4, 6, 8, 9, 5, 1, with number 7 being a big question mark.
The actual order was: 2, 3, 10, 4, 7, 6, 8, 9, 5, 1 - so you were right except you weren't sure where #7 went. Bravo!
After looking at the results the 85% was probably pretty on the money though a sample size of 10 is not perfect, but it's actually taken me a surprising amount of time to evaluate your guesses so I'm not entirely keen on repeating it. The methodology I used isn't perfect either; due to the layout of books and my decision to choose the tops of pages, it means that it's much more likely to be at the beginning of dialogue than during, and probably other things too.
let him go home. Bonzo had been assigned to Cartagena.
Ender, in Command School, sort-of-fantasizing about throwing the game, doing badly enough that they'd wash him out and finally leave him alone. Not super confident on this one; I could see it swinging between one of his moments of sullen introspection or I could see it being right before the key decision in the last battle.
Yep, it's just before he sees the formation for the last battle.
"It'll be over before I grow up,"
On the shuttle (just about to get off it, actually, or maybe in the hallway just outside), when Ender's trying to figure out what the hell Graff was up to by turning all the other kids against him. Graff said something about priorities or not telling the truth and stuff being able to wait until after the war was over.
Graff is talking about how humans are tools, and that it's not his job to make Ender happy. You're dead right on the setting and context but maybe not so much on Graff? It's the very last page of Chapter 4 so if you wanted to read it in your edition that's where you'd find it.
among the rest, all became somber.
Bernard is blowing up, in the launch group, and he just crossed the line somewhat with Dap, yelling over the messages Ender's been sending under pseudonyms. Dap said something along the lines of "Are you shouting at me, soldier?" and the "No" in your quote is the start of Bernard backpedaling.
Exactly right.
that was completely out of her control.
Valentine, obvs, when she's talking to Graff. Graff's sounding her out about her relationships with Peter and Ender, and getting a handle on what Peter's been up to, and is about to say something like, "is helping Peter really all that bad/is Peter the worst person there is" and she sort of petulantly says "yes." I believe this is the conversation that ends with Val choosing to write the letter to Ender, to get him out of his funk.
The second I pulled up a quote with "her" in it I was trying to think if there were any female characters other than Valentine and of course Petra. You're right, the conversation is about Peter and ultimately results in Valentine being able to write a letter that gets through to Ender.
He does ask if Peter is the worst person in the world, but Valentine says "How can he be? I don't know. He's the worst person I know."
but the race as a whole can never decide
"Individuals can be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decided to cease to exist." Graff, talking with Ender about the moral axis of the us-or-them decision to send a fleet after the buggers' home world and colony systems. Ender says something along the lines of "I'd rather survive," which is evidence that the months on the lake and the talk with Valentine put him on the path to recovery.
Perfect! Word-for-word on the part you put in quotes too!
Either the teachers had been kind to him after all, or he
Ender, musing on the prowess of his soldiers. Either the teachers had been kind to him after all, or he was a better teacher than he'd thought. He goes on to think about how his veterans, "utterly without honor" in their previous armies, had "blossomed into capable leaders," so much so that instead of the usual four toons, he'd created five.
Almost perfect as well, almost word-for-word even in the parts that you didn't quote, but it was written "blossoming" into capable leaders.
under him, straight toward the opposite wall, flashing between his legs
Don't think I'm going to get this one; unusually generic. I can narrow it down to a few places—it could be his very first experience with his launch group, or it could be one of the Bean perspective moments, or it could be the time that Ender was forced to kamikaze by Rose de Nose. I'll look this one up afterward, because I feel like I'll kick myself once I know.
As you wrote in your edit, didn't quite get this one but you were kind of sort of there.
the officers' quarters; finally they came to where Graff
I'm thinking this is when Anderson brought Ender to see Graff, after like a week of battles? Ender eventually says something about not really getting a fair fight, and Graff says "you're getting one now," and this is the battle where Bonzo's army got advance warning and is arranged around the door. I think this is the same conversation where Graff asks Ender why he's watching the Bugger vids.
Again exactly right.
"What's the worst that could happen? You lose one game."
Bean, to Ender, as Ender's recruiting him to run the secret, sixth toon. They're in Ender's quarters. Ender says yeah, that is the worst thing that could happen, he can't lose any games, because if he loses one—and then he trails off, and Bean is left wondering, what? What would happen? That the legend would die? That the adults would lose faith? There's a long pause, and then Ender says that he needs Bean to be clever.
Again, exactly right!
and everyone settled into the new pattern.
"Bernard sulked for a few days, and then he was fine, and everyone settled into the new pattern." The new pattern being the whole "Alai was the bridge" thing ... Ender solved the Bernard problem by making neither of them the alpha, and Alai almost unanimously got voted as the head of their launch group, then . This is just after the battle in the practice room where Ender and Alai came together, and then invited Bernard and Shen and together they slaughtered everybody else.
Geez, you're good at this. You were right to make that claim. Another dead-on call.
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
Probably you and I are the only ones who'll read this, as the thread passes to the second page, but ... SLATE STAR CODEX COINCIDENTALLY MAKES ME RELEVANT:
This puts me in a weird spot. My internship (I find myself saying) wasn’t so bad. I can give you some arguments why this might be true – things have gotten a lot better since The House of God was published (with no small credit to Shem himself), a small community hospital in Michigan is less intense than Harvard Medical School’s training hospital, psychiatry interns sometimes have it easier than internal medicine interns since everyone knows this isn’t a permanent deal for them.
And yet I distinctly remember one night a long time ago, coming home from high school. I had noticed that all of the adults around me said high school was some of the best years of their lives and I would miss it when I was gone, and yet high school seemed objectively terrible. I wondered if there might be some bias or bizarre shift in memory that happened sometime in people’s twenties and gave them a localized amnesia or insanity. So I very distinctly recall telling myself “My current assessment is that high school is terrible, and if you ever find yourself remembering that high school was lovely, please be aware that your memories have been hijacked by some malevolent force.”
And God help me, but every single part of my brain is telling me that high school was lovely. I fondly remember all the friends I made, the crazy teachers I had to put up with, the science competitions I won, the lunches spent in the library reading whatever random stuff I could get my hands on. It seems like it was a blast. It’s hard for me to even trust that one memory as anything more than imagination or the product of a single bad day. But although high-school-me had a lot of issues, he generally had a decent head on his shoulders, and if he says my memories have been hijacked, then I grudgingly believe him.
u/MagicWeasel [+4] Cheela Astronaut (3 days later)
I've noticed that same thing, but I think just like SA says, it's because the memories are getting hijacked by rose-tinted glasses. I remember the good grades, the fun I had in class, etc, but when I try and remember how at lunch I used to sit in the toilets the whole time and that I was so angsty that I was using the fact that highschool wasn't going to last much longer as reasons not to seriously contemplate suicide, I can sort of reality check my way back out of it.
I never had the inclination to attempt to "calibrate" my memories or impressions.
I find it weird that someone who had a terrible time in high school might somehow forget it. Like, I know I had a terrible time, I know it was hard for me, and I don't see how much fond memories of having no responsibility so I could roleplay on MSN every single night can make me forget that. Or maybe I'm too young (28) to forget that. Or maybe "terrible time in high school" is too much a part of my identity for me to allow myself to forget it.
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
I think you're in the minority. I see enough people making massive, retroactive updates that I suspect there are large incentives at work in the general population (this is part of what I alluded to above, when I said I had a different essay-length rant). I'd gently nudge you to preserve your impressions in some way that's likely to be robust, just on the off chance that it hasn't hit you yet.
(The worst offender here seems to be something like "I'm now wiser with more perspective, and therefore I invalidate my previous assessment!" which Scott and I are able to overcome through some sort of self-consistency assumption-of-good-faith, and many other people just ... don't.)
u/MagicWeasel [+4] Cheela Astronaut (3 days later)
I'm now wiser with more perspective, and therefore I invalidate my previous assessment!
That's so lame. The most you could do is say, "I shouldn't have been upset", "I should have been happy", or even, "I wish I knew how good it could have been so instead of having a terrible time being bullied I could use my adult interpresonal skills to put myself in a different clique and have a good time". How can you say, "oh no, I was actually happy the whole time"? Who the hell lies to themselves like that?
Like I can see a 6 year old kid being given a blanket that grandma spent months crocheting and being like "this is dumb I wanted a transformer", and the 24 year old version of that kid being like "that blanket my grandma crocheted me when I was a kid is one of the best things I ever own". Because you appreciate different things (work, family, etc) when you're an adult.
But this is personal experience and how much you actually enjoyed yourself. Not, "oh I wish when I was ten I appreciated my parents taking me to the MoMA".
u/CoolGuy54 [+2] (20 days later)
How many times have you actually read the book?
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (20 days later)
Somewhere between 15 and 25, probably, and zero in the past five years. This was the spark for a reread; it's now near the top of my list.
u/CoolGuy54 [+2] (20 days later)
I've only read it the once—and fairly recently—followed by Ender's Shadow, the much later Bean-focused sequel. Which other books in the series should I be hitting up in what order, if you have an opinion strong enough to be worth sharing?
u/TK17Studios [+1] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (21 days later)
Ender's Game (9.8/10): the gold standard
Ender's Shadow (9/10): the ... silver standard? Very good, in an only-somewhat-different way
Speaker for the Dead (7/10): entirely different genre; read if you like philosophical musings on personhood and an interestingly realistic (in some ways) take on First Contact.
Xenocide (sequel to Speaker)(7/10): read if you liked Speaker AND if you like metaphysical musings and power plays by individuals influencing large civilizations.
Children of the Mind (sequel to Xenocide)(6/10): read if you want to resolve cliffhangers from Xenocide (they were originally one book that got split) and for completeness if you want to link back up for the final, as-yet-unwritten book.
Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant (sequel to Shadow)(5/10 on their own, 7/10 taken as a single "book"): read if you always wanted a Tom Clancy knockoff of how Peter Wiggin took over the world, or if you liked Bean being a smartass and wanted MORE.
Shadows in Flight (sequel to Shadow of the Giant)(8/10): read if you want an interesting take on the consequences of previous books and for completeness if you want to link back up for the final, as-yet-unwritten book.
Formic war books (2/10): read if you like badly plotted and remarkably poorly characterized Earth-centric invasion stories that shoehorn in characters the same way the Phantom Menace did.
Ender in Exile (takes place DURING the end of Ender's Game)(bimodal distribution 2/10 and 10/10): read this last, if at all, and IFF you feel, at this point, like Ender is an old friend you haven't heard from in a while, and you'd like to shed some tears at your reunion. Contains a rapid rollercoaster/whiplash back-and-forth between the crushingly sublime and WTF, Orson Scott Card, don't you even know who your characters are??? Moderately requires Bean's books as a prequel, but only for the parts that kind of suck anyway.
You're not going to get ENDER'S GAME out of any of these books; it's like Chuck Palahniuk and Fight Club. I'd say that if you like the first third of Speaker, it's worth following that through to the end, and if you like Shadow of the Hegemon, it's mostly worth following that through to the end. I'd choose which to start with based on whether you liked Ender's Game or Ender's Shadow more.
u/CoolGuy54 [+2] (21 days later)
This is a better guide than I had any right to hope for. Cheers!
u/None [+8] (a day later)
I work with really smart kids a lot at the moment [won't say any more to keep identities seperate, but feel free to PM me specific questions]
I tihnk you are right in some respect that kids are smarter than people take them for on average (at least in the 12-18 range) but I have come to think they people underestimate teh extent to which adult emotional maturity and ability to cope with situations makes a difference.
For example I recently had a student who I had come to quite like personally absolutely freak out at what, to me, would seem like a very small setback, making angry social media posts. Blaming everyone, saying they were quitting forever, etc etc. This lasted for several days and then they calmed down. Whether this is due to teenagers being innately more emotional, or not having as much experience fo setbacks, is hard to tell. But it makes a massive difference in their ability to get shit done. Ender isn't realistic because he's smart, he's unrealistic because he doesn't break down crying every few pages.
More generally I think children benefit from structure and organisation much more than adults. With an adult I can say "do the thing" with a student I have to build scaffolding around it.
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
I think everything you've said here is true, but I also think that upper-quartile kids can be brought to near-adult levels of emotional maturity pretty quickly and easily, except that people often don't bother to try.
Like, there's usually a lot of generally-agreed-to-be-more-important stuff that needs to be covered, and the assumption is that they'll just ... get the emotional maturity stuff as they grow older, but if you actually have the luxury of making it a part of your curriculum, it does indeed work for a large minority.
I also envy the adults around you, where you can just say "do the thing" and they'll get it done. I've found I have to put 70% as much scaffolding for grownups as for eleven-year-olds, and basically identical amounts for fourteen-year-olds and adults. Maybe I need a new social circle, or less death-by-lowered-expectations on my peers.
u/PeridexisErrant [+4] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (21 hours later)
It's similar to the complaints OSC talks about in the foreward to Ender's Game.
I remember reading Ender's Game in primary school, and thinking that the characters were not sufficiently competent to be realistic. Why would I believe that career military bureaucrats can actually hide secrets from and manipulate anyone like Ender, especially with training in strategy and intelligence operations...
u/None [+7] (5 hours later)
Slow-paced, zero-action, deeply intense chapter. I love it. I love all the "they know that we know that they know" psychology. I'm impressed with Jake, the whole no-more-cowboying thing can only be a good thing. And of course it helps that we've been inside Ax' head and seen how much the isolation was fucking with him, but I believe in Axrash. I did not think Jake might come around to that point of view for a long time, never mind dragging Marco with him, and still being smart about it.
That being said, can't wait to smash up an oatmeal factory next time.
u/None [+4] (5 hours later)
Also the Tom scene made me tear up. Poor Jake, man.
u/ZeroNihilist [+5] (an hour later)
Well, this was basically the best outcome of V3's gambit for the Animorphs. They've managed to avoid being railroaded by the Chee, perhaps even improving their cohesion.
I still haven't figured out whose purpose this whole thing serves. Of our two superbeings, which is the one that wanted this result? Or is it a cooperative effort, both leveraging the same shift in the game to their own ends?
u/Cifems [+5] (9 hours later)
I have nothing intelligent to add, so I'll just say I liked the small bit humor. I vividly recall Marco saying "Don't diss TPM, cool is cool", and even as a kid that line seemed like a really awkward pop culture reference.
u/FireNexus [+6] (11 hours later)
I'm a few chapters back, but I'' wondering if the yeerk morph limitation has been addressed? My pet theory is that the false yeerk tissue that allows the morphed to control the morph immediately induces a reproductive response in the yeerk. Since they reproduce via fusion and grub splitting, it's the only explanation I can think of.
u/ketura [+3] Organizer (13 hours later)
It is addressed, yes.
u/FireNexus [+6] (13 hours later)
Thanks! I'm just past the big mission, and looking forward to seeing more. I actually tweeted out a screenshot of the "AK-47s don't weigh much." Section to KAA. She liked my suggestion for mods to the story in a hypothetical new TV adaptation a few weeks ago. Maybe she'll get a kick. I'm seriously impressed by this story. Like I said, I was thinking about how the whole series is low on making sense, and stumbled upon this work that rights all of its errors. And explores interesting alternatives/what would happen if there was no act of plot to make people be stupid for no reason.
Seems like you're the author, and I'd love to read your original work if you have any. And, if you're ever interested, I'd love to collaborate on a story in a world I've been building on my own for a long time. Your approach to the material makes me think you'd be super valuable in helping tighten the concept and create a compelling motivation, which has eluded me. I like world-building but have trouble when I start pulling at threads.
u/ketura [+7] Organizer (13 hours later)
The author is actually /u/TK17Studios. I just beta read.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
Shoot me a PM and I'll be happy to talk at least a little.
u/FireNexus [+3] (17 hours later)
Sent a PM re an aspect of the morphing tech from your story. Let me know what you think.
u/None [+4] (a day later)
Where? I must have missed that bit
u/ketura [+2] Organizer (5 days later)
u/FTL_wishes [+9] superluminal (3 hours later)
Okay, so they strike at the factory, take it out, and then what? I mean, what would Visser 3 even want with the factory? It'd be simpler to just have the agents the Yeerks have on Earth buy the stuff off the shelf, and if they only have a few sleeper agents worldwide they could supplement the Ralph's Oatmeal with discreet supply drops of synthetic oatmeal from the poolship.
The unanswered question here is....what the hell was Silat (the pool mentioned that was split off) for? I suspect the sleeper agents on Earth are from that separate pool, it'd make sense that if the Visser was doing memetic contamination protocols he'd also compartmentalize Earth-side operations. Maybe the Animorphs will end up meeting Silat when they assault the oatmeal factory?
Would also like a POV from President Tyaagi if possible soon, or with our intrepid Secret Service agent pretending to be the President. The thought-speak possiblities are endless.
u/LeifCarrotson [+8] (11 hours later)
Okay, so they strike at the factory, take it out, and then what? I mean, what would Visser 3 even want with the factory?
Specifically, what's different about this factory in particular that makes it viable Yeerk food?
- Does literally any oatmeal work? Does any maple and ginger oatmeal work? Does it have to be treated with a particular coloring or preservative that Ralph's uses?
- Does replicating the Ralph's oatmeal work? They might not get the right proportions for good-tasting oatmeal, but the ingredients lists are on store shelves across the country, and the production methods are in the minds of the factory workers for the Yeerks to extract.
I'm going with either the factory is a secret Silat/Yeerk research facility, where they did a chemical analysis of Kandrona and decided to add it to factory outputs, or they're not going to succeed in their larger mission to stop the production.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
Probably this is going to be left at least a little bit "magic." It's a port from canon, in which there was a single flavor from a single brand that did the thing (with serious side effects). The Yeerks certainly would've been doing work to try to isolate the "active" ingredients, but I'm imagining it wasn't their highest priority and it's plausible they didn't get very far. Note also that it's not a good Kandrona substitute—it's low-efficacy and requires a high dosage, so it's possible that replicants wouldn't even be worth how much you'd have to eat or whatever.
As for buying the stuff off the shelf, if only they had, like, a hundred thousand allies they could use to clean out the existing supply all at once ...
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (14 hours later)
Five dollars (or an in-text shout-out) to anybody who correctly guesses what the deal with Silat is.
u/FTL_wishes [+6] superluminal (16 hours later)
Since my first guess was wrong, my second guess is that Silat is currently growing in North Korea. It makes sense, it's an isolated country, and while it's not actually 1984 levels of crazy (contrary to popular opinion), the highly secretive nature of the upper eschelons of the country make easy to take over the entire country by infecting just a few tens of thousands of elite, most of whom happen to be concentrated in just one city (Pyongyang).
It'd also be easy to hide manufacturing facilities in the already existing secret missile component factories scattered around the country.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (16 hours later)
For the record, I haven't confirmed that your first guess is wrong. I'm more curious what everyone thinks.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
u/FTL_wishes [+5] superluminal (a day later)
I think your last point is probably the right one, on further thought. It makes sense. What's the opposite of curiosity and cooperation? Indifference. If harnessed right by Esplin, that means that he has a pool that will listen to him and mostly not care about anything else. Done right he now has a personal supply of Kandrona separate from what the Yeerk Empire originally granted him, along with a loyal minion with which he can flee if the war starts going poorly or he finds himself alienated from the wider Yeerk command structure.
The only issue is where Silat is located? On Mars running the hidden factory Esplin was visiting in his interlude? It can't be on the poolship itself because Telor resides there.
u/DCarrier [+7] (19 hours later)
They need to make sure the factory doesn't reformulate the oatmeal. They need to guard the factory in case the Animorphs do decide to strike there. They need to learn to duplicate the oatmeal so they're not as reliant and they won't need to worry about the first two things.
u/4t0m [+3] Chaos Legion (35 minutes later)
Typo Thread:
“I’m sorry, are we seriously entertaining the idea that there’s anything other than a zero percent chance that this is a trick?..."
I think the intended meaning is the opposite of this.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (an hour later)
Oops. Yes. Thanks. Fixed.
u/Dwood15 [+3] (16 hours later)
Well written!
u/4t0m [+5] Chaos Legion (a minute later)
Ok, now to actually read :D