Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Fwahm on October 10, 2009, 04:19:51 PM
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This is a poll topic, as I'm curious to hear about your opinions. In my opinion, the order would go
Jake = Tobias > Aximili > Rachel > Marco Cassie
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Hardest time in the war? Depends on what you mean by hardest. Cassie had the hardest time BEING in the war. Up to the last book, I would say Tobias was the most affected by it.
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I'd say Cassie had it really hard, since being in the war went against her very being. Ax had it the least hard because he had been born and trained in the war.
After the war, I'd say Rachel and Ax, then Jake and Tobias, the Marco and Cassie. But during the war, it would be different.
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After thinking about it a while...
Tobias, Jake, Ax, Cassie, Marco, Rachel
There is a quote... something like... "Only the dead have seen the end of the war!" or something like that.
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Cassie> Rachel and Tobias>Jake>Marco>Ax
I think Cerulean's right, during and after matter, but over all I put it like that.
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i think it depends on what you mean by the hardest time...
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Physically and emotionally traumatising, I suppose.
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What did you mean by "the hardest time", Fwahm?
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Jake>Ax>Tobias>Marco>Rachel>Cassie
Cassie always had that perpetual "I don't want to do this, but I'm doing it for a good reason" thought protective bubble which I think really benefited her. Marco moreso than Rachel because he had higher stakes what with his mom.
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Tobias and Jake probably tie. Tobias, well, that doesn't really need to be explained; but Jake [spoiler]had to kill his own brother,[/spoiler] and he led the whole resistance from the get-go. Rachel did give up the most, obviously, but she also enjoyed the actual war to some extent, so it wasn't terribly hard for her. I'd say it was very hard on Marco, probably more than the series indicates, as his personality allows him to deflect tough questions and he rarely displays any emotional vulnerability. He sort of had to keep the Animorphs together with his humour and reason, even though he was initially opposed to fighting back in the first place. Cassie definitely had trouble with her moral quandaries, but when her losses are stacked up to those of the others, they don't really compare. Ax had it bad, being so far from home; but in terms of the actual war, I'd say he didn't have it so tough. He did have to deal with the Visser Three rivalry, though.
Really, they all got screwed over.
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I think it is Tobias, Ax, Jake, Cassie, Rachel and Marco.
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I think the harshness of war was distributed evenly amongst them. They all constantly suffered one way or another. I don't think any of them could say they suffered any less.
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Hardest time, I'd have to go with Jake...
Marco is totally on the other end of the spectrum, though, all things considered... if you factor in after the war... :2cents:
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Sorry to bump, but I'm shocked that you guys seem to think Rachel had a relatively easy time with it. I think, her death notwithstanding, she was the most emotionally broken of any of the Animorphs--save maybe Jake. Rachel started out the series as a strong female character who wanted something more than what the world wanted out of her. She found that through the war, and at first she really liked it. But she completely lost herself to that and, unlike all the others (save Jake), wasn't ever really given the chance to deal with the terror and emotions she put herself through because she felt that she was strong enough to deal with it. So she had to keep getting stronger and stronger, until she lost herself. There are two ways to completely lose yourself to the war, I guess--to become too weak to fight it, or to give yourself up completely to the fight and rush.
Rachel had to give herself up completely. There was nothing in her salvageable after the war. She could NOT have coped or found a way to integrate herself into normal society. At best, she could be a ruthless military spy of some sort.
Jake is fairly similar in regards to being unable to find his place in the world afterward.
However, I believe that Tobias would have been able to do this--especially with Loren back--until Rachel died. Cassie and Marco ("the only real survivors") were obviously able to, though not perfectly. Ax, well, I don't get his resolution or situation. So I'm going to say he didn't have as hard of a time AFTERWARDS as DURING and that was due mostly to his separation from his culture.
So speaking from an after-the-war standpoint, looking at who would be most capable of integrating themselves back into society:
Cassie > Ax > Marco > Tobias > Rachel = Jake
Easiest to Hardest, sorry it's in the opposite order!
During the war, life sucked for all of them, but I could see it sucking a *little* less for Rachel because loving it was the only way she could deal with it and Cassie because her justification seemed to help her cope. Tobias had that bird thing, but he also seemed to be more happy with himself than before the war because he finally had a makeshift family of sorts ("go to your friends, tobias. they are your family now.") and belonged to something. and as MM4 shows us, Tobias had a better life in the war than he would have had without it. Jake's position sucked during the war as did Ax's and Marco's. So I really don't want to say that they can be RANKED for their sufferings during it...they all seem pretty damn equal.
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I feel Rachel had a relatively easy time with it because I feel she was styronger than she was made out to be. I feel she could have coped after the war, judging from the books she narrated. She's not some Blood Knight like the others see her. She didn't totally lose herself, because if she had she wouldn't have refused Crayak's offer in the last book she narrated, or hesitated to finish off V3.
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I feel Rachel had a relatively easy time with it because I feel she was styronger than she was made out to be. I feel she could have coped after the war, judging from the books she narrated. She's not some Blood Knight like the others see her. She didn't totally lose herself, because if she had she wouldn't have refused Crayak's offer in the last book she narrated, or hesitated to finish off V3.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
She probably would've been alright after the war. With time, of course...
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I feel Rachel had a relatively easy time with it because I feel she was styronger than she was made out to be. I feel she could have coped after the war, judging from the books she narrated. She's not some Blood Knight like the others see her. She didn't totally lose herself, because if she had she wouldn't have refused Crayak's offer in the last book she narrated, or hesitated to finish off V3.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
She probably would've been alright after the war. With time, of course...
I completely disagree. It might be because of the ghostwriters in the last arc, but the Return is really the last time we get to see Rachel struggle with a moral dilemma. After that, she turns violent and rude...she looses it, basically, in those last few books. Maybe she was preparing herself for the end. I don't think she would have turned to drugs or killed herself (that's so NOT Rachel) but I couldn't see her ever integrating herself back into normal society after she had gotten so...addicted...to the battle.
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She would've joined a more competitive sport, then joined the ARMY.
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The last thought she ever had was of shopping. I don't remember her being rude, but I do remember her crying in her mother's arms. Such contradictive stuff.
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The frayed nerves and strained relationships got to everyone toward the end... It wasn't just Rachel who was acting out of her usual character...
I am a firm believer that Rachel would have thrived in normal society after the war, (she did before the war...) partly because she viewed everything from that powerful, driven, competitor's point of view... like her mother, she would have been a terror to her enemies and a powerful ally for her friends, even if "life or death" wasn't on the table. With Tobias, Rachel would have been the second most successful Animorph after the war (after Marco)...
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I'm not sure anyone can quantify the horrors of war by stating that any one person is more or less affected. I think that they all suffered reasonably equally (okay, maybe some more than others, but I sure as hell can't say who), but for different reasons. Jake, "armchair quarterbacking his entire life" due to the burdens of his leadership, and all the people he got killed (don't forget him sending Doubleday's men and the auxiliary animorphs to their death, along with the more obvious example of Rachel). Rachel, obviously due to her death, and even more, due to her losing herself to the war. Cassie, for the fact that the entire war went against everything she believed in, and how her relationship with Jake kinda dissolved. Marco, in my mind anyhow, just made the best of the aftermath. He was damaged badly after the war, being (once again, purely opinion) basically Jake's tactical officer (his #1, as Picard would put it) and seeing how those decisions impacted the war, and his best friend. Ax ends up fighting a war he ends up hating, is disillusioned with his own people due to the decisions he has seen the result of, and, well, ends up dead as well. Tobias loses his last true link to humanity, the girl he loves, and for that matter, was trapped as a hawk.
So, yeah, in my mind, they all suffered equally, but in many different ways. Hard to compare different kinds of suffering, I guess.
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I don't know if I agree with all of that. I agree that they all suffered, and it's nearly impossible to measure the magnitude of suffering, but maybe what we have to look at is how they coped rather than what they went through.
Cassie, Ax, and Marco I think made out the best. Cassie may have holed herself away in her work to stave off having to deal with what she'd gone through, Ax may have put his humanity behind him in order to move on in much the same way, and Marco may have accepted the glitz and glow of fame and glory to outshine the darker parts of his life, but still. They all reentered their respective societies as functional, capable people.
Jake and Tobias did not.
I think Jake eventually did, what with him working with the military to train special ops fighters in the morphing technology, but Tobias just flew away and didn't talk to anyone. A lot of that came from before the war, but I think the point is that I agree that Tobias would have figured out a way to cope had Rachel survived. And it would have taken Jake a lot less time to come out of his funk.
Kind of weird that with everything they went through, most of their psychological health after the war came down to how they felt about Rachel's death. It was certainly the climactic event of the war, their struggle, etc., but it certainly wasn't the only thing.
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Yeah, but the question isn't who had the hardest time AFTER the war.
It's who had the hardest time IN the war.
I think they all suffered so much in their own respects, that it runs about even amongst all of them.
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I think I sort of answered that, though, and I guess I agree with you. Nothing really bad happened to any of them until the end. Of course that's definitely plot-contrived wellness and not realism, but, you know.
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Nothing really bad happened to any of them until the end.
0.o
what do you consider really bad?
Being trapped as a hawk wasn't bad?
Finding out your brother is a tool of aliens isn't bad?
Finding out your mother is the head of the invasion isn't bad?
Being torn apart by rival ants isn't bad?
Getting chopped in half isn't bad?
I think, perhaps, your meaning was lost in your word usage.
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I think I sort of answered that, though, and I guess I agree with you. Nothing really bad happened to any of them until the end. Of course that's definitely plot-contrived wellness and not realism, but, you know.
A lot of bad stuff happened to them throghout the war. And I wouldn't call it plot contrived that they managed to get through all that alive (sans rachel), since KA gives an in-universe justification. Which is more than other series I could probably think of. Ellemist just dropped the ball at the home stretch for some reason.
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Ellimist just dropped the ball at the home stretch for some reason.
Yeah, I thought Crayak was allowed a lot more leeway with messing with things in the end, and the Ellimist didn't do much to balance that out.
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of course bad things happened to them
I just mean no one had a breakdown during the course of the series, which, considering the things you listed above, is pretty damn incredible.
So yes, in that sense, I would call it plot-contrived. If I got chopped in half, trapped as a hawk, and found out my mother was the leader of an alien invasion of my planet, I might suffer from more than bad dreams and a lot of angst-filler. There were times it barely even felt like what happened to them affected them at all. Other times, it was handled well. But let's be real--if somehow the events of this series happened in real life, one of them, AT LEAST one, would have snapped long before the end.
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Tobias broke down in book 3, Rachel just about broke down in book 7, Cassie broke down in book 19, and Jake broke down after losing his parents. Marco also got extremely stressed out in 35, or some other book.
I thought it was handled well. I mean, if things really are generally worse for real life people in war times, I don't see how anythign less than the draft board could get people to join the military.
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that was all angst
I am talking about full-on straight jacket nervous breakdown. Not "waaah I don't want to do this anymore." I'd be doing THAT every third second.
Jake had a REAL nervous breakdown in #54. And if these kids really are "everymen" and not superheroes, like we're led to believe, this would have happened a lot sooner.
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Hmm. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and it can go a bunch of different ways, depending on what you mean by the original question. As such, I'm going to give my interpretation. Apologies in advance for the wall-o-text. Like I said, I've been giving this a lot of thought. That's why I haven't posted before now.
If you mean, "Who disliked/was changed by the war itself?" then that's easy enough to order. Cassie > Jake > Marco = Rachel > Ax > Tobias.
Tobias was the only animorph who never had any doubts about what they were doing. Sure, he had doubts about being a hawk, and he felt fear before going into battles, but he never once (to the best of my recollection) thought about doing anything besides fighting Yeerks. And I think I know why that is, too. More so even than Rachel, the war was actually a blessing for Tobias. Why? Because it gave him a way out. A way out of his life, a way out of the pointlessness of his own current existance. I tend think of him as an escapist. When he's stuck in a situation that he doesn't like, he'll try to escape from it, any way he can. Even if that means becoming a hawk and fighting a war against an alien race. For him, that was actually a step up from the life he'd had up till that point. Because at least with the war, his life actually meant something. So I think he actually had the easiest time dealing with the war itself. Now, his identity issues with being a hawk complicated matters a bit, but as far as fighting Yeerks? He was pretty darned straightforward.
Ax comes in second on my list, because he had time to mentally prepare himself for war beforehand. He'd joined the military out of his own free will, as opposed to the other Animorphs who were just thrust into the war. And it shows, too. Aside from a few dilemmas about which race he's actually fighting for, he never had many problems with what they were doing. And having the noble motivator of "honor" helped him out a lot, too, because he was able to fight for something greater than himself.
Rachel and Marco are about equal. They've both had moral qualms about war, and doubt themselves a lot more than either Ax or Tobias ever did. On the one hand, there's Rachel, who, on the surface, looks like she's enjoying the war. But it changes her, and for the worse, I think. I disagree with everyone who has thus far said that she would be able to integrate back into society and be normal again. Maybe, maybe she could be with some kind of military operations, and cope that way, but otherwise, no. She is too far gone by the end of the series to ever come back. And she knows it, too. That might be part of why she pretends to like it so much, because she eventually can't even admit to herself how much it scares her. It's a vicious cycle that pulls her in until she can't get out.
Then there's Marco. Like Rachel, he appears to be coping well, on the surface. But, as we saw in book #35, things really do get to him. And he develops as much of a 'dark side' as Rachel does, it's just that his is more subtle, and, in a way, almost darker. Rachel is straightforward with hers, diving right into battle yelling "Let's do it!" But Marco becomes a cunning and ruthless tactician who would shove his own mother off of a cliff if it might help them win the war. You cannot tell me that a person could come out of a decision like that unchanged. And I don't think he did. I just think he took all that doubt and shoved it deep beneath his funny/ruthless exterior, until everybody else thought he was coping fine, when really he was broken inside.
Jake, of course, has the unique burden of being the leader, and it weighs on him, especially at the end. All the decisions he's had to make were decisions that nobody can make, and it wrecked him. He actually dealt with it amazingly well up until the end, but he just hit a point when he couldn't take it any more, and fell apart.
Cassie. Cassie, Cassie, Cassie. The moralizing hypocrite. Of course she couldn't deal with the reality of war. How can you possibly keep the idea that "all life is sacred" while killing innocent beings? Actually, out of all the Animorphs, her character struck me as the least realistic. The war never even seemed to change her at all. She clung so rigidly to her morals, at the expense of, oh, I dunno, ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT, that it seemed almost contrived. But her morality may have been a coping mechanism, too. She was so unable to cope with war that she just stuck steadfastly to the very other end of the spectrum, and refused to make so much as ONE sacrifice, even to save millions. That kind of attitude is unhealthy. It's as sure a sign as any of being flat-out unable to cope with reality. Which is why I was always stunned at Cassie's quick recovery after the war. Of all the Animorphs, if any of them ought to have been left broken by the war, it should have been Cassie. My reasoning for that is that she's STILL in denial about everything, even three years later, and simply does not realize just how damaged she is.
To contribute a word or two to the current discussion:
Yes, the Animorphs could have had breakdowns during the war, and yes, that might have been more realistic. But how fun would that have been to read? I don't know about you, but I'd rather read about kids fighting a war against aliens, than about kids who go nutso and then can't cope with reality and sit around all day making raspberries at each other in their padded rooms while the aliens take over.
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I totally agree, which is why I called it "plot-contrived" rather than "realistic." But that also means that none of them really had that HARD of a time in the war, because they all managed to maintain their sanity. They had to give up their dignity at times, and their morals, which I think you've done a really good job of talking about, but SANITY, cohesion, togetherness, the very last thing they had to sacrifice? That remained thankfully intact until the last book.
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that was all angst
I am talking about full-on straight jacket nervous breakdown. Not "waaah I don't want to do this anymore." I'd be doing THAT every third second.
Jake had a REAL nervous breakdown in #54. And if these kids really are "everymen" and not superheroes, like we're led to believe, this would have happened a lot sooner.
The only ones with real goals were Jake and Marco in the war, and to some degree Ax. Jake wanted to free his brother and Marco wanted to free his mom. Ax just wanted to go home.
Rachel Tobias and Cassie wanted to fight off the Yeerks, which is a very vague goal to say the least. Weak goals are very hard to accomplish because you see no real progress along the way, which would, if not make you quit, drive you insane to the point of obsession. That never really happened, and the war went on for what, three years or so? At this point, I would imagine they would freak out because they aren't losing a soccer game, they are losing the will power of their friends and families with no serious visible progress until the final arc of the book.
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Their goal was to stay the invasion until the Andalites got there. Not to end the invasion. They knew they couldn't end it themselves. Their light at the end of the tunnell was the hope that more Andalites would show up. And every victory they achieved is what spurred them on. Every factory they blew up, every ship they decimated. Every "Sharing" project they tore apart. That was their goal. To stall the invasion until back up arrived.
Also I think the reason they didn't go completely insane, is because they knew that if they cracked, then everyone they knew would suffer a fate worse than death.
Their families is what kept them grounded. The hope of saving their families from slavery and torment. Remember, they did have some down time. Yes a lot of their time was spent as the Animorphs, but there were spaces in between the books where they had family time.