Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Gumby on April 03, 2010, 10:47:35 PM
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I think that in book 17 the underground, instead of usin oatmeal to drive yeerks loco, they should have used something like, oh I dunno, poison? Ax could most definately tell them if stuff like rat poison was lethal to yeerks, and thne they could have just tossed rat poison or something into the pool. I also think they should have had Ax rgsome very powerful explosives to use to their advantage. seeing as how they got onboard the bladeship a few times, they could possibly toss in some HE in their and eliminate a major threat.
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I think you're missing the point...
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Why would Ax know if Yeerks would die of rat poison? And they wouldn't have done stuff like planting explosives.
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Come on. Seriously. Poison is so not memorable. Oatmeal... oatmeal's the thing that people who haven't read the books in years remember.
"Remember when they morphed ants?"
"What?"
"Remember the oatmeal?"
"YES!"
...Seriously, I've actually had a similar conversation with people.
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To the first comment about poison . . . well oatmeal kind of was poison to the Yeerks, not readily leathal poison but still a sort of poison that screwed them over pretty bad and the book was already walking a thin line as what the Animorphs were planning was pretty close to an act of terrorism (attacking the hostless Yeerks in the pool, many of them noncombatants) further consider that Ax might hate Yeerks but we see in TAC that chemical warfare isn't on the list on Andalite weapons of choice. Besides, consider your comment about rat poison; They, as moles, wold handle rat poison? Even if it were done safely don't you think they'd be a little nervous about that? Maybe that's why they wanted something bad for Yeerks but harmless to humans and earth animals.
To the second comment how would they get explosives onto the blade ship? As far as I can recall they'd never gotten onboard the Blade Ship on purpose as early as seventeen, and I don't think they would have been able to take an explosive with them if they had a morph that could sneak aboard, and what major threat did the ship itself present? The Blade Ship itself wasn't that big of an issue for them since generally it just landed to deliver Visser 3, at no point did it go flying around during a battle sniping them with its cannons or anything (which is what I would have done if I had command of it) a bug fighter could just as easily have done that job and the loss of a Blade Ship might have been serious enough for Visser Three to not only get a replacement (he is Visser Three after all, there shold only be two people with greater requisitioning power than him) and reinforcements, even that open war he was wanting. It could only have benefitted them if he were on it and then they'd have a new Visser to deal with probably V-One or Two since the Yeerks wouldn't send someone ranked lower than their newly martyred hero and Visser One wouldn't have made the same mistakes Visser Three did.
I think overall you have to remember that everything you do will get a reaction from your enemies, if you poisoned the entire Yeerk pool and blew up the Blade Ship you'd make Visser Three's call for open war look that much more reasonable just to flush out the "Andalite bandits" the Yeerks themselves wold be more determined and less likely to surrender since they'd expect no quarter from their enemies.
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My central point is, if the Animorphs had used a bit more weaponry, they could have done much more damage.
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But they were still kids, not hardened warriors. they wouldn't have done it.
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It was to be funny! I mean, oatmeal? Plus, that book had one of the best lines in the whole series: "It's oat-freaking-meal!" I also agree with what Genie said. You would remember oatmeal far more than some boring poison...
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oatmeal is good enough. :)
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I KNOW that oatmeal is more memorable, I'm saying that in a real war, I would pick death over insanity for my enemy. And chad, they were quite hardened warriors by that time.
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Were they? Do you think they'd be willing to pull that kind of stuff then? I thought the oatmeal plot was one of the earlier books, before they started doing the more morally questionable stuff.
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By book 17, they'd seen more blood and gore and violence and been in more battles than many SpecOps teams. They were battle hardened.
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Battle hardened sure, hardened against deadly enemies who could and would fight them, but ready to kill thousands of technical noncombatants just because they had a target of opportunity? They did it later, but at this point in the series the darkest they'd gotten was boiling a hot tub full of Yeerks, which honestly is pretty dark but still not quite on the same field as lethally poisoning the entire earth bound pool, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of defenseless lives, I'm firmly with Chad on this, they weren't that hardened yet.
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No, no the pool ships supply, just the main earth pool.
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Also rat poison, think of something more creative. If some Japanese crazies can make Sarin nerve gas why couldn't Ax? Spray the entire pool with a canister of Sarin and problem solved.
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But that would also kill off most of the human hosts.