#justifications and trying to convince the self in order to continue forward. its just a machine. a machine must behave as a machine

[cent-scratchnsniff]

doodles and stuff. struggled with painting until i gave up

[bestworstcase]

anyways race to the spire is my favorite episode of season three but i think in terms of cassandra’s villain arc and the cass/zhan tiri manipulation dynamic, once a handmaiden is the strongest.

fictional portrayals of “master manipulators” / the chessmaster archetype often get two things wrong: 1) they depict successful manipulators as meticulous planners, and 2) have them emotionally fall apart if their plans fall through, often by becoming enraged and violent. the second is not unrealistic per se, but it does shove the character out of the “chessmaster” category and into the “garden variety emotional abuser” one for me. 

the first, however, i think speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way skillful, chessmaster-level manipulation works. there is no plan, and there shouldn’t be a plan. people are much too complicated and unpredictable for any plan built around manipulation to reliably succeed; thus truly successful manipulators have a clearly defined goal, a solid understanding of human nature, and an exceptional ability to improvise. this is zhan tiri to a T, and once a handmaiden showcases this more than any other episode in season three.

let’s break it down.

it’s difficult to say whether zhan tiri intended for cass to find the mirror shard or not. it would have been good for her if cass never saw the missing piece of that memory, because then cass would have continued to trust her; on the other hand, zhan tiri spun the fallout of cass finding the mirror shard to her benefit so effortlessly that it’s conceivable she prepared for it ahead of time. in the end, i think i come down on the side of zhan tiri just didn’t care, because by now she knows cassandra so well that it honestly did not matter whether cass found the shard or not. +1 for zhan tiri. 

so here is our starting position. cass realizes that zhan tiri lied to her and manipulated the situation in gothel’s cottage, and she’s furious. she storms up to her throne room to confront zhan tiri about it. what happens?

not only is zhan tiri not bothered, she seems almost pleased that cassandra has finally figured it out. instead of explaining herself as cassandra initially demands (“Do you want to explain to me how this got here?!”) or trying to make up an excuse, she calmly waits for cassandra to finish ranting. her only interjection is actually to goad cass into following the evidence to its natural conclusion:

CASS: Back at Gothel’s, I thought Rapunzel was hiding the one memory that proved my mother loved me.

ZHAN TIRI: And...?

CASS: And you manipulated that memory, didn’t you?! You took this piece out. You tricked me into abandoning Rapunzel!

zhan tiri also physically waits for cassandra to approach her, implicitly positioning herself as the one with all the power in this scene. note her relaxed posture here, also:

then, instead of answering the accusation directly, zhan tiri calmly flips it around to be about cass instead and again positioning herself as an authority, someone who knows cass, and what’s good for cass, better than cassandra herself: “Perhaps. Or perhaps I merely pushed you to become what you were always meant to be.”

this reaction lays the foundation for everything else zhan tiri does in this episode. she shifts the fulcrum of the conversation such that everything rests on cassandra’s identity rather than zhan tiri’s manipulation. she also reveals her true identity to cass in a manner that implies they are fundamentally alike by visually linking them together.

in race to the spire, both cassandra and rapunzel directly touch zhan tiri without getting any “glimpses” like this, so we can conclude that everything here is something zhan tiri consciously showed to cassandra. things to note: 

1. the line between what is zhan tiri and what is cassandra in this vision is intentionally blurred. is the reaching hand at the beginning zhan tiri attempting to grasp the original ancient power, or is it cassandra claiming the moonstone and emerging from the sundrop’s shadow as the next piece of the sequence would seem to imply? 

2. zhan tiri is depicted as appearing from within cassandra herself, visually implying that cassandra’s inner nature is similar to zhan tiri. this connection is further emphasized by the similar style in which they’re both drawn, silhouetted with glowing white eyes. 

again, the purpose of this is to change the course of the conversation so that it centers around who cassandra is, rather than what zhan tiri has done, and zhan tiri’s argument here is that fundamentally, she and cassandra are The Same. 

cassandra is shocked, and it is at this point that zhan tiri starts to lay on the emotion; switching from tolerant amusement to chiding cassandra: 

ZHAN TIRI: Oh, quit pretending you’re horrified. We’re not so different, you and I. We were both cheated out of our destinies. In fact, we’re more like sisters than you and Rapunzel ever were! We even want the same thing, and we can get it, if you continue to let me help you.

in this little speech, zhan tiri: 1) dismisses cassandra’s fear, casting it as just another lie she’s telling herself that is stopping her from achieving her full potential, 2) leans hard into associating cassandra’s nature with her own, and 3) continues to position herself as not just cassandra’s ally but also her friend—a better friend than she had in rapunzel, even. on the face of it, this may seem a little silly. you may be wondering how zhan tiri could possibly have imagined this would be at all convincing to cassandra. 

but the thing is... zhan tiri clearly doesn’t expect this to be at all convincing to cassandra. her goal here isn’t for cassandra to suddenly be all, “you’re right, ancient evil demon who’s been stringing me along for months, we ARE the same.” it’s to provoke cassandra into having an identity crisis. 

and it works.

see, the thing is, as soon as cassandra found that mirror shard, it was game over for zhan tiri’s ability to lie to her effectively. the breach of trust was just too egregious. but rather than cling to her old strategies even though they’re no longer functional (as she might do if she were a ‘planning’ manipulator with the inflexibility that implies) or fly into a rage and attempt to force cass to do what she wants (as the possessed-cass theory anticipated), zhan tiri simply moves seamlessly into a different strategy. 

she knows cassandra. she’s spent months digging into her brain, learning her weaknesses, familiarizing herself with what makes cass tick. she knows exactly how fragile cassandra’s self-justifications are, she knows how insecure cassandra is, knows how difficult it is for cass to be vulnerable and trust people. and she also knows, because she cultivated it, exactly how volatile and dangerous cassandra’s temper is.

so this:

CASS: ...No. No, I’m nothing like you. Just because I’m pursuing my destiny doesn’t make me a bad person!

ZHAN TIRI: [laughing] Doesn’t it?

is cassandra playing directly into zhan tiri’s hands. this is the Ideal Outcome, from zhan tiri’s perspective, of this confrontation, and that is why when cassandra turns around and sprints out of the tower to have a panic attack in the woods, zhan tiri just laughs and calls after her: 

ZHAN TIRI: Run, Cassandra! But you can’t run from who you are!

simply watching the rest of the episode demonstrates precisely why zhan tiri provoked cassandra into having this identity crisis. not only did it divert cassandra’s focus away from zhan tiri’s actions (and motives), it also enabled zhan tiri to exploit her insecurity and volatility in order to get cassandra to snap, destroying corona, forcing an eventual confrontation with rapunzel, and getting zhan tiri one step closer to achieving her ultimate goals. 

now let’s skip forward to the the scene in the tent, which i’m just going to quote in full here: 

ZHAN TIRI: You didn’t really think your plan to make things right would work, did you? 

CASS: What are you doing here? 

ZHAN TIRI: I don’t understand. You could have just gone up to her and apologized, face-to-face.

CASS: I said, get away from me.

ZHAN TIRI: You’ve had more than a few opportunities, and even still you haven’t done it. Why is that? I think—

CASS: Because I’m scared she won’t forgive me!

ZHAN TIRI: You’re right to be scared. I’m guessing she hasn’t told you about Project Obsidian. A weapon that was designed to destroy you. Rapunzel just authorized it yesterday.

CASS: What?! No, I don’t believe you. She would never— 

ZHAN TIRI: You can ask her yourself if you don’t believe me. You might want something to defend yourself against her; this potion may be your only protection against the princess when she inevitably turns on you.

the brilliance of this is that nothing zhan tiri says here is untrue. she is one hundred percent correct in her assessment of cassandra’s actions in corona: pretending to be someone else while doing vague nice things in no way makes up for what she’s done, and she has been purposefully avoiding the riskier but correct course of action ie to plainly apologize and accept whatever comes. 

by playing evil therapist here, zhan tiri goads cassandra into articulating her exact fear that her actions are unforgivable. this is something that cassandra needed to express, instead of continuing to run away from her feelings. it’s a vital moment in her redemption arc, and like zhan tiri’s little speech in the tower it can seem silly or even outright counterproductive for her to push cassandra in this way. after all, she’s literally encouraging cass to go make up with rapunzel for real. 

but what she’s also doing here is drawing cassandra’s subconscious fear into the open and putting that at the forefront of cass’s mind. she is forcing cassandra not just to articulate this fear but to intently feel it, which is the key to everything that comes next. this is why, after cassandra admits that she’s scared, zhan tiri moves right into reinforcing that fear—again, by bringing up objective facts. project obsidian does exist, it was created with the intention of destroying cassandra, and rapunzel did indeed authorize it yesterday. cassandra doesn’t trust zhan tiri anymore, but the beauty of zhan tiri telling the truth now is that cassandra’s doubt becomes a weakness rather than a strength.

because she no longer trusts zhan tiri, cassandra immediately goes out to “prove” zhan tiri “wrong” by doing the opposite of what she appears to want cass to do: from cass’s perspective, it looks like zhan tiri is making up lies to get cass to give up on reconciling with rapunzel and go back to following zhan tiri’s plan, so the most logical thing to do is to try harder to reconcile with rapunzel instead (despite the tiny grain of doubt that convinces her to take the potion anyway, just in case). 

except project obsidian isn’t a lie, which means that cassandra is actually placing herself in an even more vulnerable position, by walking outside and approaching rapunzel so that they’re right next to each other when zhan tiri pulls the cloak away. and then, when the gun is fired, and cassandra finds herself encased in amber it creates this terrible moment for her of zhan tiri was right. and it’s that that makes cassandra snap. and that’s exactly what zhan tiri intended to happen, and that’s the outcome zhan tiri is working towards from the instant cassandra reveals that she found the mirror shard. 

(i think in the end this manipulative strategy wasn’t 100% successful, because zhan tiri’s Ideal Outcome in plus est seems to have been that cassandra really would buy what zhan tiri was selling re: she and zhan tiri being The Same, and that didn’t happen. but again, zhan tiri knows cassandra well enough to see her betrayal coming, and swiftly and easily changes her tactics when it happens.)

so, more than any other episode in season three, i think once a handmaiden shows us not only that zhan tiri is manipulating cass, but how she does so, and just how skilled she is at manipulation in general. it also very neatly avoids the two biggest pitfalls of writing manipulation in stories and in general is a masterclass on how to write it well. 

also here is a bonus picture of zhan tiri and her grapes

in conclusion i love gremlin baby and once a handmaiden isn’t about cassandra flip-flopping it’s about zhan tiri seamlessly switching from manipulation with lies to manipulation with facts and cassandra not being able to keep up with the change of tactics and thus falling victim to them again

[toast-the-unknowing]

hi! I just wanted to say that I really, really love your writing, and I was wondering if you ever outline? And if so, how do you go about doing that? And I'm curious about your writing process in general (if that's a good way of putting it?). in any case, thanks so much for sharing what you write. It's really an absolute joy to read! :)

Hi and thank you! The short answer to this question is no, I don't outline. I've tried three-act structure and flashcards and Scrivener and whiteboards and a dozen other things and it just doesn't work for me. It forces me into making decisions I'm not ready to make yet, while delaying me from working on the parts that I am excited about, which 1. kills my desire to actually do any work and 2. delays my learning the things that I really do need to know about the story. But I also don't just write beginning to middle to end (honestly I can't believe anyone on earth does that besides, like, Spiders Georg). To the extent that I have a process it can be summed up as "I write the parts of the story that I know at the time that I know them, and they teach me what the next part of the story is."

The extremely long answer to this question is behind the cut, because like any good self-centered world-destroying Millennial I love talking about myself, and I love hearing people talk about writing, so maybe someone else does, too.

The beginning of a story tends to be like a cartoon character running off the edge of a cliff and building a bridge under them as they go. I open up a document and just start typing thoughts out as fast as I can. Some of the words that come out at this point make it all the way through the process to the final draft, but a lot of them don't, and I never commit myself at this point to typing usable words. I mostly end up with stuff like this:

flashforward: comes across opal somehow -- hunting or otherwise in the woods/wilds -- and she's this half-feral child, slowly builds up trust with her -- convinces her to come live in his house -- she's clearly cautious, but over the day settles in, and crawls into bed at night and falls right asleep, like she's not afraid of anything -- the next morning, dawn, wakes up and knows there's someone in the house, moving about, goes for opal's room and she's not there, runs out to the main rooms and there's a strange man standing there -- you won't find the girl -- what the fuck did you do to her -- I've taken her. as we agreed I would -- ronan finally recognizes him as the strange witch boy from so many years ago -- give her back -- I'm afraid that isn't possible. goodbye -- leaves and when Ronan follows him out the door he's nowhere in sight

Sometimes at this stage I'm jumping around in the document --  I'll have a thought about something I want to happen later in the story, so I'll put that in and then jump back to the earlier part -- but sometimes it's coming at me more or less in order, or there's so much I'm trying to get down at once I might as well just go in order. Also, a lot of the stuff I know about a story at this stage is related to the set up/concept/inciting incident/premise. So, in Careful the Tale You Tell, I jotted out about 800 words of Ronan making the deal with Adam, and meeting Opal, and Adam taking Opal, and Ronan trying to take Opal back, and then literally the only thing I had after that for the entire rest of the story was:

the two of them start living together, taking care of opal together, etc.

During/after/immediately before the "get down initial thoughts as fast as possible" stage, I write either the first scene or one near the beginning (if the opening moment is eluding me, which it sometimes does). The very early stuff, being a lot clearer in my head, tends to be a lot easier to write in full actual real paragraphs with real sentences and punctuation and dialogue tags and a minimum of placeholders. I find it helpful going forward to have that springboard -- a scene, or even just part of a scene, that looks like what I want the story to look like.

And then the process is "the same but more". Read back over what I have already. Admire how clever I am. Despair of what a hack I am. Realize an additional detail about a scene I only have two sentences for. Realize that that scene needs to happen in an entirely different part of the story. Move it. Think of one thing that's going to happen in one scene I didn't know existed yet. Come up with a funny bit of dialogue for the end of the fic.

With a lot of stories I hit a point, about a quarter to a third of the way through, where I realize what the story is actually about. That's tremendously helpful in knowing what to put in those nebulous holes in between "X happens and then Y happens." So with Careful, the key was realizing the story was about two things: it was about three sad loners who all choose each other, but also specifically it was about the way that two of those loners were profoundly misunderstanding each other, and how they had to stop telling themselves fake stories about each other and see what was really happening. That cleared up a lot of things about the story for me. For one thing, that's what told me I needed a four-part story from two POVs. And it let me fill in a bunch of scenes in answer to that dreaded question of "ugh what do I PUT on this BLANK WHITE PAGE with its CRUEL MOCKING CURSOR." I needed scenes of Adam thinking Ronan was a bad father, and I needed scenes that could be taken as justification of that opinion, and I needed scenes of him realizing Ronan isn't like his own parents. And I needed scenes of Ronan thinking of Adam as this uncaring vengeful other, and then I needed scenes that totally destroyed that image. And then because Adam is just the saddest sad loner ever I needed scenes where he's telling himself this new fake story where he denies the extent to which Ronan and Opal have already chosen him, and then I needed scenes that would make it impossible for him to continue in that denial.

This is maybe an example of why all the traditional outlining I was shamed into doing in film school fails me. None of this points to the shit with Ronan's mom being cursed and his dad being killed by an evil witch (except that I had notes to myself about a scene where Ronan finds out Niall tried to sell Declan to the witch -- but that was a product of one of those "I DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING WITH THIS EXACTLY BUT IT'S AWESOME AND I WANT TO WRITE IT SO I'M GOING TO JOT IT DOWN IN AN EMPTY SPACE IN THE DOCUMENT" moments). In as much as those are "plot" elements they might be the sort of thing you're supposed to decide while you're still at the "write one sentence on one flashcard" stage. For me that entire aspect of the plot only came to me when I had something like 50% of the story written, and the specific details and beats of it I figured out and incorporated gradually along the way, because that wasn't the important or interesting part of the story to me. It sure wasn't the thing I wanted to shape my entire story around. I don't think I could have shaped the story around that.

At this stage of a story I sometimes write in nice beautiful paragraphs, particularly if it's a scene that develops really quickly from "hm maybe something like X happens" to "oh FUCK YEAH I'm going to make X happen." The storm scene in Careful came on like that -- I left the occasional placeholder and it needed edits and I rewrote some stuff, but if I had live-streamed my screen while I was writing it, you would have gone "yeah, that looks like a story."

More often, though, my writing looks like that flash-forward paragraph above. A mix of dialogue, and action that I'm sure of, and action that I only have a vague idea of, and shit that I don't know yet but I know that stopping to figure it out is only going to keep me from writing the parts that I do know. This is because 1. I can get stuff out faster writing these pseudo-paragraphs, and I really just want to get as much stuff on the page as possible in any given writing session; 2. weird messy half-written paragraphs are easier to edit, move, change, rewrite, or make my peace with deleting entirely, than big beautiful paragraphs with clever turns of phrase that I spent hours on.

Often those moments that I skip, I either know enough about them to be getting on with, or they're trivial in the scheme of things. Sometimes I skip a detail and find out later that I was wrong about what it was going to be or how important it was going to be, and now I have to change parts of the story that I thought I knew. But that's often a gift, because the new version is more detailed, or more interesting, or more relevant to what the story is actually about.

I also leave myself notes like this:

[ronan starting to notice his feelings and be really stupid about it??? or leave that more for part 4]

These can function as "I know I need a scene here that does X but that's all I know" or it can literally be "I need a scene here and I don't know what it has to do but there needs to be SOMETHING". Sometimes these comments are just character/tone/theme notes to remind me of how a scene is supposed to function within the larger story, so I don’t write a really cute wonderful scene and then realize it makes no sense for the characters at this point in their arc to be behaving that way.

At this point writing a story is a mix of four things:

come up with things to fill the gaps in the story, even if it's just [A SHORT SCENE OF THEM ALL DOING SOMETHING TOGETHER -- AT ONE POINT RONAN TOUCHES ADAM WHEN HE DOESN'T REALLY HAVE TO

take those one sentence scene descriptors and turn them into those big blocky ugly nonsense paragraphs with no capitalization and too many em-dashes

take those big blocky ugly nonsense paragraphs and turn them into readable paragraphs -- this is a really great thing to do on days when I feel tired/sick/stuck/depressed/like a fraud/hungover/uncreative, because I can tell myself "all you have to do is turn half-sentences into complete sentences, this is basically seventh-grade English homework, you can do that." Sometimes doing that gets gears turning in my brain and I can do a LOT of this kind of writing, or I can move up to doing writing that involves more decision-making and connection-building and character-understanding. Sometimes it doesn't, and all I achieve for the entire day is turning one fake paragraph into one real paragraph. Which still means I have a real paragraph where I didn't before.

reread and refine and tweak the readable paragraphs to get to a place where I'm happy with them

Then there comes another milestone moment -- about 90% of the way through a story, I become thoroughly convinced that it's disgusting irredeemable garbage. This step sucks, and the only real cure for it is to go "yup, but I'm writing it anyway, so let's at least make it finished, complete garbage." The alternative isn't "realize the story ISN'T garbage and then keep writing with a renewed sense of self-worth!" The alternative is that the story dies, and that's how I end up with a hundred unfinished WIPs that quietly pass into obscurity. I think this might be the real reason that Raven Cycle is the fandom I've posted the most complete fics in, despite having been in other fandoms longer -- sure, these characters spark a lot of ideas for me, and I'm a better writer than I used to be, and I understand my process better (instead of trying to write the way I think I SHOULD write), but honestly the most important thing is that I figured out how to go "maybe this does suck, but I'm still going to finish it."

The thing that I've found the most helpful with making that push is to find the one thing in the story that I really, really like, and remind myself that if I don't finish the story then no one gets to see that one scene, that one moment, that one PHRASE that's actually good, and wouldn't that be sad? With Careful that was the storm scene -- I would tell myself, "okay you keep saying that the pacing is awful and the first chapter is boring and this story is a waste of everyone's time, buuuuuut if you don't finish it, then no one will ever read the storm scene." Sometimes the story's existence is sufficient motivation. The Pokemon AU gave me the worst case of writerly-self-loathing I've had in years, but I just kept telling myself "yeah but don't you want to make people laugh in disbelief about the fact that you wrote a Pokemon AU?" And that makes my insecurities go pout in the corner like a sulky child where they shut up long enough for me to sneak the last 10% of the story in there.

(Once a story is done and posted, I'm able to look at it with more compassion, perspective, and nuance.)

"The last 10% of the story" doesn't necessarily mean "the last ten pages of the story". The last bit that gets finished is usually somewhere in the middle, although occasionally I do just write until I don't know what else to write and then slap some kind of closing line on it. (Usually that happens with stories I write very quickly; the florist!Henry fic was like that.) There's generally a lot of places spread throughout the fic where I left things unfinished -- sometimes as little as one detail, sometimes as much as an entire scene. I think with Careful the last scene I finished was the one where Adam tells the guy how to find his lost money. When I'd first drafted that bit it felt like homework -- I knew the story needed examples of people doing business with the witch, but, ugh, I couldn't make myself care about them. But I had managed to eke out some of those weird blocky [bracketed] paragraphs, so I kept building on those bit by bit. It also helped to keep in mind the real purpose of the scene. It's not about someone doing business with the witch, or even about Adam's habit of casually tossing out details he has no way of knowing (though I was happy to add that in to presage the conversation about how he knows Opal's name and age). The scene is about Ronan seeing Adam as otherworldly. So I got to add in those little details about Adam smashing the glass, and Opal and the visitor being surprised, and Ronan not being surprised -- which is really the most interesting part of that scene.

Then I do a word search for brackets, "Shine" and/or "Toast", and any other placeholder characters I use, to make sure every detail is filled in and none of my notes to myself like [nb shine check this is true] make it to publishing. I upload to AO3, save as draft, replace all my single asterisks with italics html, realize I've used too much italics, take half my italics out, proofread, publish, catch three-or-thirty typos I didn't catch before I published, fix those, catch another three-or-thirty typos, and decide to leave them in for authenticity/because perfect is the enemy of good/because I'm too damn lazy.

That's essentially the longest version of my process. Sometimes I write a story very quickly and so it skips some of these stages.

"A story I write very quickly" is not the same thing as "a short story." see you somewhere, some place, some time was gestating, in one form or another, for about sixteen months, and it put me through aaaaaaall the same heartache as its longer brethren.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Number 17, The Underground...Aaaaaaand GO!

Short opinion: My hat is off to K.A. Applegate for being maybe the only author on the planet capable of taking a story about teenage superheroes fighting aliens with the power of oatmeal… and making it into a surprisingly serious debate about the morality of chemical warfare.

Long opinion:

As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of what I love about this book is the fact that it refuses to be simple comedy even though it has a nearly-perfect comedy setup.  The idea of super-powerful aliens being taken down by otherwise harmless Earth substances is oftentimes played for laughs in other works of sci fi, and the fact that these are teenagers debating about oatmeal adds a whole other layer of ridiculousness to it… But although Applegate acknowledges the humor of the premise in several moments (Jake bemoaning the fact that this battle was destined to end in silliness, Rachel repeating “it’s oatmeal!” six or seven times in a row, etc.) the implications of the premise are distinctly not funny for large parts of this book.

Because this is one of those moments where the Animorphs have a crystal-clear decision between two choices, one of which is probably the right thing to do and the other of which is definitely the easy thing to do.  The easy decision would be simply to dump oatmeal in their town’s water main or otherwise ensure that most of the humans would end up eating it, and then pick the partially-freed controllers from the people who just had some weird-tasting water and start getting information from them.  Easy would be starting out by poisoning Tom with the oatmeal (since Jake has access to his food supply) and then using whatever advice he can give them to figure out how to poison as many other controllers as possible.  Probably the right thing but honestly we’re not sure is spending A FREAKING WEEK tunneling slowly down to the yeerk pool in order to try and poison the yeerks directly, and even then only doing it as a last resort.  Probably the right thing is doing everything in the Animorphs’ power to avoid harming the hosts, even when doing so nearly gets them killed.  Probably the right thing means continuing to fight back with a minimal possible number of casualties.

Part of what’s so great about the way that the Animorphs reach the decision to go through the huge pain in the butt (and screaming terror, for that matter) of delivering the oatmeal to the yeerk pool in person is the understanding that, no matter how many times Rachel repeats “It’s just oatmeal,” it’s not just oatmeal (#17).  According to Marco, “We have green kryptonite here… They’re yeerks. They’re the enemy.” and therefore the oatmeal is destined to be their super-weapon.  The way Tobias sees it, “A drug is in the eye of the beholder… If you get addicted to the oatmeal and it messes you up…” and they’d be taking away the autonomy of the yeerks through fighting dirty with chemical warfare.  Ax, meanwhile, asks my favorite question: “What about the hosts?”

This debate has a very existential kind of cynicism to it, asking multiple times: if we take oatmeal out of its original context, what does it actually mean?  If we choose to interpret it as a chemical weapon (the way Marco and Ax clearly do) then does that make our decision to use it immoral by default?  If we choose to see it as a drug (the way Tobias does) then what does that make us if we force people to become addicted?  If it is just oatmeal, the way Rachel wants to see it, then does that make using it automatically okay?

Largely unrelated aside: it also fascinates me how much Jake and Cassie aren’t involved in this book.  They both largely abstain from the debate about how and whether to use the oatmeal, which Rachel notes is uncharacteristic for them both, and although everyone respects Jake’s right to make the final call on Tom, the issue of whether to use the oatmeal at all gets made largely without his input.  We also know why they both seem to be largely along for the ride in this book, because #17 repeatedly harkens back to the events of #16.  When they’re all running around as roaches nearly getting squashed after they break out of their banana crate, Jake freaks out more than anyone else and also brings up having been squashed as a fly and mostly-killed in #16.  During the earlier debate about how to get into the mental hospital, they discuss the fact that this should be a piece of cake compared to the disastrophe at Joe Bob Finestre’s house (#16), and they only see poor George Edelman try to kill himself because everyone convinces Jake that after last mission they really really need a vacation.  Cassie pretty much explicitly says that the reason she’s abstaining from the oatmeal-morality discussion is that she’s really not sure what’s right or wrong anymore, given that she not only tried to commit murder in (relatively) cold blood last book, but also tried to use Jake as her means of doing so.  We can see the impact that this war is having on the kids, because both Jake and Cassie have this attitude of not even knowing who they are anymore, much less being able to trust themselves.

Speaking of the impact of war on identity, one of the more fascinating motifs in this story is just how much time Rachel spends interrogating her own roles.  She’s not really one for self-reflection, at least not compared to Tobias or Jake, and so it’s striking that she does stop and take a moment to reflect on her place within her team and within her family at several points in this book.  Just before they’re about to go into the yeerk pool, she thinks “Everyone in a group has a role to play. At least that’s how it always works out. My role was to say, ‘Let’s do it. Let’s go. That’s what we came here for.’  But I was tired. And I’d had a really, really bad few days digging down to this stupid cave…  So I said, «Let’s do it. That’s what we came here for.»”  Rachel understands that in many ways the team needs her to be brave and gung-ho, because she’s the force dragging them forward, toward danger and also toward victory.  When none of them want to be the first to tunnel down as moles, she volunteers without (outward) hesitation.  When they reach the cave filled with bats and end up forced to demorph down there, she emphasizes that this is a good thing.  When everyone is exhausted and cornered in the yeerk pool, she becomes the one to get them off their butts and toward an exit plan.  When everyone else is too wiped out and traumatized from the battle to worry about tying up loose ends, she becomes the one to go make sure George Edelman’s still going to be okay.  

Because it’s what she does.  Because she’s Xena.  Because she has to be, even though this book opens up with her looking down at Lucy Lawless and realizing that they’re both just acting as Xena, because there’s no such thing as Xena, because when people look at her and see Xena they’re inevitably projecting something that’s not real.  However, as Rachel says, “sometimes it’s hard to get out of a role once you’ve started playing the part” (#17).  She’s genuinely not sure who she is, if not Xena.

Although that’s not the only role she plays.  This book also has several moments with Rachel at home, where we see her in a different role entirely.  Rachel is not, perhaps, doing as well as Marco or Jake at playing the role of an ordinary civilian.  It’s not often that we see PTSD come out in the form of hypervigilance or impulsivity in fiction, but we do see it a lot in this particular series with Rachel.  She yells at Jordan for throwing out her rotting leftovers, snaps at her mom for expecting her to be an ordinary teenager, and generally behaves as though she doesn’t have time for her family at all.  We as the reader understand why Rachel’s on such a hair-trigger, given the kind of week (month, year) she’s had at the time, but Naomi still has every right to be worried and Jordan still has every right to be annoyed.  They’re not seeing Rachel’s internal justification for her willingness to blow up at anyone who so much as looks at her wrong; they’re just seeing the explosions.  And Rachel understands on some level that she’s failing in the role of sister-and-daughter.  That she should have priorities outside of the war, but that she’s dropping the ball on most of them.

The series seems to have another mini-motif in this cycle of books, given how much role interrogation the other four do in the surrounding novels.  If the early 30’s are all about the Animorphs alone, the late teens are about role-reflection and the realization that the role of Child Whom Parents Care For is now officially out of reach.  #16, as I mentioned, is all about Jake trying to figure out who a leader is, what a leader does, and how he can play the part of The Great Man From History while also being a good friend; the entire book goes back and forth between that idea and the domestic scenes where his family treats him like the baby (since he is) as he comes to the realization that, not only can they not protect him anymore, but he might not be able to protect them.  Before that, #15 gets into Marco’s conflict between being a good son to his dad and being a good son to his mom, which (thanks to Visser One) are mutually oppositional roles and leave him with the conclusion that if he can only save one it’ll have to be his dad.  #18 once again shows an Animorph fleeing into the arms of home and family, only to realize that those aren’t sources of comfort or safety anymore, only in this case it’s Ax coming to realize that he won’t just be going home and rejoining the andalites anytime soon, so he might as well get used to looking to Jake as his prince.  Although #19 ends up focusing on Cassie alone in the woods with Karen and Aftran, a lot of what drives her out there is the scene where she looks at her parents and does the math that she is older and more hardened than they will ever be, and that she has already infected their innocence and goodness with her darkness.

This book and its surrounding fellows are a lot about settling into the war for the long haul.  And that leads to (and from) the question: What are we really doing in this war?  How are we going to fight it?  What compromises are we willing to make, and what ones are we unwilling to touch?  If it’s not “just oatmeal,” then what are we going to do about it?