17 KiB
[RT][WIP][FF] r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (Interlude 10)
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Author: u/TK17Studios Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning*
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URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5627803/chapters/26865099
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Score: 45
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Created: 2017-08-24T07:23:56
Post:
Comments:
u/TK17Studios [+15] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (33 seconds later)
Shoutout to u/CouteauBleu, who is something like 99% responsible for this chapter existing and also something like 75% responsible for its content.
Tobias incoming shortly; I will make an Actual Effort to get it done by Sunday evening.
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a minute later)
u/kleind305 [+2] (3 days later)
I haven't read it yet, but I am so very happy to see more Reckoning.
Even if it is "just" an interlude.
u/DaystarEld [+13] Pokémon Professor (7 hours later)
Brief and disconnected from the plot as it was, I love these meta-inspired chapters a lot; they make the world feel more lived-in and expands it past our imagination's first pass.
Also appreciated the cameo of sorts, though I'm curious to know what inspired its inclusion: it matched my attitude pretty well despite me not explicitly saying anything on the topic before :)
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (12 hours later)
I just knew I had to include at least one visibly antagonistic comment, and I knew I had to include at least one "trying to keep it reasonable" reply, and from there I was like, oh. =P
u/DaystarEld [+5] Pokémon Professor (14 hours later)
<3
u/Altoid_Addict [+11] (8 hours later)
I saw the thread about this one, but it's really improved here by cutting out so many of the comments. I like this presentation of the material quite a lot, and I think I saw things that I missed last time. I think I was frustrated with the direction of some of the comments there. Thanks for cleaning it up and posting it. I like that this kind of meta-fic can become part of the story.
Also, I wouldn't feel too guilty about the update schedule. Life happens, and I know plenty of fics with much worse update schedules. Mine, for example.
That said, I am looking forward to the next chapter.
u/philh [+6] (12 hours later)
Oh snap, I didn't realise this was based on an actual thread. For anyone else: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/6rnjtx/ama_im_a_soldier_for_the_yeerk_empire_and_im
u/callmesalticidae [+4] writes worldbuilding books (15 hours later)
Any time you see a Reddit interlude, it was crowdsourced.
u/PM_ME_CUTE_FOXES [+3] (16 hours later)
Wait, the Ventura interlude was crowdsourced too?
u/Evan_Th [+6] Sunshine Regiment (21 hours later)
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (22 hours later)
Usually the crowd gives me something like 70% of the material, and then half my work is tying it together/rearranging it, and the other half is writing new additional content.
u/callmesalticidae [+2] writes worldbuilding books (16 hours later)
Yep
u/MagicWeasel [+10] Cheela Astronaut (16 hours later)
(And the choice of brain is relevant. When I’m in a stupid brain, I’m stupid. When I’m in a smart brain, I’m smart.) So no, I’m not going to go live in a cow brain or something like that
THIS IS A BOMBSHELL IF IT BECOMES WIDELY KNOWN. V3 is saying that the faux andalite is as smart as a cow.
u/CouteauBleu [+6] We are the Empire. (a day later)
I think it's already widely accepted that Esplin is full of shit. If nothing else, he said he'd stopped in the invasion, but the Animorphs then captured several controllers semi-publicly.
But yeah, a lot of the information in this is pretty important. On the other hand, it's nothing the Animorphs haven't likely shared yet with American intel services. This is more of a second opinion, distributed more directly.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+7] (12 hours later)
I wasn't too keen on this chapter. I think that there was a missed opportunity for including fictional-reddit's reaction to Starrat's assumed death, be it sympathetic towards Starrat's desire to have some of his experiences live on, or vindictive ex 'fucking slug, glad you're dead, hope you're okay Alexandre' or even at the most basic level 'RIP OP'. Personally, I've always been fascinated by humanity's capacity for empathy and hostility, and I'd've liked to see more of that from fictional-reddit. Also missed opportunity for a cameo of 'FREE OR DEAD'.
I feel like there's a similar issue here to the other reddit interlude - a lot of debate, and much less reactions/emotion (I did like ControlGroup9's comment, that was awesome). I remember there being comments in previous threads about the Animorphs in this universe seeming way older due to their rationality, which is fine if you're talking about a group handpicked by E/C. However, I don't think the rest of the world would react so calmly to an alien invader going 'yo reddit I'm an alien that's part of the group responsible for massacring a major city, AMA'. Overall the feel of the interlude to me was a bit too much 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?'
I got to the AMA thread a little too late - it had already closed, but I'm happy to go back and make contributions if /u/CouteauBleu is willing to reopen it :P Or hell, I'd be happy to write a vindictive/angry reaction to Starrat's death if you want to bring TroubledTrousers back, haha!
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (12 hours later)
Talk to CouteauBleu directly; if this gets updated, it'll do so via back-and-forth between me and him rather than us looking at the original thread. I estimate 60% odds of a fairly major stealth update or revision.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+2] (12 hours later)
Sounds good. Paging /u/couteaubleu, PM me if you'd be interested? :D
u/CouteauBleu [+6] We are the Empire. (12 hours later)
I'm currently at my grandparent's and internet connection is limited (also we're supposed to enjoy nature and stuff), so progress is going to be slow. But yeah, I'm in the middle of a pretty major rewrite. I'll PM you details.
I agree that the interlude lacks emotion, both from Starrat and the redditors. On one hand, I can sort of justify this as Starrat being very stoic and only answering level-headed questions, and filtering out streams of insult. But yeah, that's pretty thin. And there's a lot of cold-headed discussion of slavery, genocide, etc, and it could use more anger.
I'd absolutely like a vindictive/angry reaction from TroubledTrousers, as long as it's at least vaguely a question and not just a rant (I need to be able to answer it and engage what you say)
On the other hand, the interlude is already pretty packed. A lot of questions were asked, and I don't want to add too much; I don't want to skip existing questions either, since they're all great; I might merge some, and edit them to add more bile. I'll definitely add a "FREE OR DEAD" cameo now that you mention it.
I kind of want to leave it ambiguous what happens to the character. Kind of a "this is the journal's last entry" thing, where we presume that the guy just died.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+3] (13 hours later)
Sounds like fun! I should have something for you by the weekend. I'll go back to the AMA and find some posts to respond to and/or write some top level questions for Starrat. I won't add them to the existing AMA, but I'll PM them to you with a permalinked parent comment that TroubledTrousers would be replying to.
EDIT: HURRDURR THOUGHT THIS WAS A PM
u/CouteauBleu [+4] We are the Empire. (13 hours later)
You can add the to the AMA too. I declared it "closed" because I felt the questions and remarks were getting off-topic, but there's nothing stopping you from posting anyway.
EDIT: In retrospect, I glad some of those "off-topic" question were there, they add levity
u/NukeNoodles [+6] (a day later)
So when Starrat 731 mentions multiple hosts here :
"The game theory and sociology bits are mostly from Alexandre and my other hosts. The philosophy and future predictions are me."
And when they respond "No and no. " to "Have you ever been in other species? Or in other people besides Alexandre?"
Along with going into the differences between different species of host and different hosts within a species, that they're drawing on shared knowledge of other hosts from the Coalescence of Starrat?
u/FireNexus [+6] (4 days later)
"Anyway. Scale matters, Ventura was worse than the broadcast. But they murdered a Yeerk on live TV just to make a point. Think about which human groups do that sort of thing."
Sick burn, Sluggo. SICK. BURN.
u/Agnoman [+12] (an hour later)
At first I didn’t think I was going to like this chapter: on the surface it seemed to be about a character we’ve never met before, who is unwilling to talk about the main conflict, and is now likely dead. I thought it seemed a little disconnected.
But it actually turned out to be pretty fascinating.
Watching Starrat 731 dance around topics that we the readers are informed about, while the in-universe readers try to piece things together was great. There was a lot of information buried in there that only makes sense with our outside knowledge, and trying to puzzle it out was fun, and all the implications of what the Yeerk was saying were interesting.
And the morality debates were quite good too.
u/CouteauBleu [+12] We are the Empire. (6 hours later)
Yeah, those parts were pretty fun to roleplay.
Both the "how I would react if I were a nihilistic soldier for an alien invasion and people were insulting me" parts and the "what Starrat does or doesn't feel comfortable sharing" parts.
u/philh [+5] (5 hours later)
Woop woop!
I'm sure there's much that I didn't pick up on, but a thing I did: is StrongerThànYou the username of Thàn Suoros?
Is ZombieAsInAlanis a reference to something, maybe to do with Alanis Morissette? It looks like she's done a cover of Zombie, but if that's what it is I still don't get it. Alexandre might have picked that username pre-infestation, but I'm guessing not.
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (12 hours later)
StrongerThànYou is Thàn Suoros, yeah. I asked the real-life inspiration for the character what sort of question he'd drop into such a Reddit thread, and he gave me some loose guidance, and I wrote it in for him.
The main line in the cover of Zombie is "In your heeeaaaaaad, in your heeeaaaaaaaaaaaaad." Alexandre picked that as the username for the throwaway account. Also yeah, they referenced Alanis Morissette in canon a few times ("Note to Alanis: that is ironic.").
u/NukeNoodles [+6] (a day later)
Canon had some great music references. I'll never forget the NIN = "Nice is Neat" joke.
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (6 hours later)
I seem to remember Marco saying something about irony to someone named Alanis in one instance somewhere in the books... but that's probably the most obscure Animorphs reference I remember, and it was a weird one.
EDIT: And now after 15 years I finally understand that reference.
u/CouteauBleu [+4] We are the Empire. (12 hours later)
For the record, I'm surprised this turned out as well as it did, and yet I'm really not satisfied. Expect a rewrite by the end of the week.
Also, "best thing since endoskeletons" is my new flair. Pfffmhaaahahah!
u/keeper52 [+5] (17 hours later)
Clearly Starrat 731 is someone who the authorities should be working hard to capture alive, in order to subject him to the finest rapport-based interrogation techniques. He already let a ton of info slip out through his AMA and seems like a perfect candidate for revealing more to the right sort of audience.
I wonder how many of the questions (and upvotes) came from the FBI, MIB, or similar. Plausibly mine (SoccerJack's) could have, with the ducks/horses question serving as a relatively skillful "How do you do, fellow kids?" At the very least, lots of important people have been reading it very closely.
Esplin, Ellimist, Crayak in relation to this AMA: who is fucking pissed, who is causally responsible for it, and who is amused & strategizing?
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (16 hours later)
Typo thread! There seem to be more than normal so I'm wondering if they were deliberate? But here they are all the same!
Alexander VS Alexandre
Beaker305's comment has his surname as Fauve instead of Laurent in part of it
Hélene name should have two accents (Hélène)
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (20 hours later)
1 is intentional 2 and 3 are typos thank
u/None [+3] (2 days later)
[deleted]
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
Part of the implication in the very low view-and-karma counts was that this isn't a particularly mainstream sub.
u/LieGroupE8 [+2] ** (15 hours later)
Yay, my words are immortalized in my favorite rationalist fic!
For the record, I was in fact playing a character (or trying to) with similar views to myself, but a different personality. At the end I sort of got tired and just lazily replied with the "I don’t really disagree with any of that on a factual level..." sentence.
"ControlGroup" is not the modification of my username that I would have expected, given that it refers to the mathematical kind of Lie Group, but it works just fine. (In retrospect, it may have been a bad decision to pick a username that most people will associate with lying).
The reddit post you made giving a progress update was much appreciated... though it seems you fell prey to the planning fallacy... I would have preferred regular small regular updates, like twitter updates, to a single update without a follow up. Even if it's only to say "hey, lots of CFAR stuff this week, next chapter date unknown, will tweet next wednesday with revised estimates." Now that I think about it, I would totally follow a r!Animorphs twitter account - that's much better than using this subreddit. And maybe it would be extra motivation to write!
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (a day later)
Oh yeah, I didn't really think about it, but it's pretty cool that I get to immortalize my philosophical outlook in, like, one of the Top 5 rational fics!
u/LieGroupE8 [+3] ** (a day later)
So that is your outlook and not just your character's?
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
It's CouteauBleu turned up to eleven.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
Yes and no.
The short version is, I don't think there's any higher reason to be altruistic. There's no God, nobody exists for a purpose, we're all gonna die, etc. I do think altruism can be rational (Glimwarden puts it well enough with Philip's character), and altruism can be motivated by core values (you want to help people for the sake of helping people), which I think will come across better in the rewrite.
So this would be, like, evil!me's outlook.
u/Yama951 [+2] (2 days later)
I always wonder what would happen if a Yeerk were to end up in the brain/mind of a person who tries to factor in every factor of something then mentally visualize them as separate selves giving their perspective on it to the point of having debates about it.
u/thrawnca [+2] Carbon-based biped (5 days later)
The fact that it said "I get my sloppy typing habits from my host" is interesting, in that it suggests the Yeerk has to consciously alter aspects of the host's personality; by default they're unchanged. "I kept almost everything else the same when I moved in" seems similar.
So if, say, a bunch of death row inmates were offered the option of infestation instead of execution, there might still be a risk of reoffending.
And yet, that's not the experience of the Animorphs in construct bodies. They basically have to reinvent the host's behavior.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (19 days later)
[–] ZombieAsInAlanis [S] 89 points 4 days ago
Yeerks don't have a sense of humor except when they infest a creature with a sense of humor.
I think this is supposed to be bolded, or is there a reason why it's not?
Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die.
For some reason, R&M seems like a very appropriate show for a Yeerk to be a fan of.