Cassie and Guilt

[Bealocwealm]

So... we all know the bit about Cassie and the termite queen, and how she was so upset and guilty over killing her, that she tried to become a nothlit.

HOWEVER, in my brainstorming about what one would do with the script for a Not-Sucky Animorphs TV Show, and reading Cinnamon Bunzuh, I ran across something interesting:

In book 1, Cassie totally kills a guy.

    And Cassie had gotten away clean. It had been the suspicious Controller policeman who had grabbed her. He was the only Controller to know her name, where she lived, and that she had been spying on The Sharing.

    Cassie said we didn't have to worry about him anymore. She didn't want to talk about what had happened to him.

    ----The Invasion, Chapter Twenty-Seven

Now, I know the books tend to leave no mystery about what the characters are feeling; if something isn't mentioned, it generally isn't important or relevant. And this thing is never mentioned again.

BUT. Would it be realistic to assume that Cassie, as a person or character or whatever not just constrained to What Is Written, might be burying her guilt about this incident until the termite incident, when her horrible feelings about everything that she (and the Animorphs) have had to do come bursting forth? I think she DOES feel awful about the termite queen, because of the termite MORPH -- since the morph assigned the utmost significance to the life of the queen, killing the queen is the worst possible thing she could do in that morph. It's not because she, as Cassie, cares so deeply about a termite; it's just that see, as an empath, can't let go of the feeling of a morph that quickly. But the feeling of betraying all her values, and being a murderer, might also bring the other guilt to the surface.

What do you think, am I just reaching here? I seem to recall that Cassie only became so obsessive with being ethical AFTER the termite incident, so I think it's a reasonably valid insertion.

[AniDragon]

I'm pretty much of the opinion that Cassie would have been a much more interesting character had she been Buddhist. Buddhists believe that ALL life is sacred, even animals and insects, so Cassie's guilt over things like the termite queen would have made loads more sense. (Although your theory is interesting, too) Of course, religion isn't really mentioned in Animorphs, so for all we know, maybe she WAS Buddhist.

[RYTX]

So... we all know the bit about Cassie and the termite queen, and how she was so upset and guilty over killing her, that she tried to become a nothlit.

Wait, when did she try to become a nothlit over that? Running around lost for a moment and falling asleep with skunk babies? That's a far cry from letting herself be trapped. And if your talking about the caterpillar thing I'd say that's a totally independent circumstance.

As for the cop killing thing, we have a whole thread on that, and if I may be so arrogant as to quote my own words from there

All have have to say is that I have Cassie when to the Yeerk pool armed with horse morph. Now I know a horse can kill a man, but still....
And based on KA's style, Cassie wouldn't have to have done it to not say what happened: two books laters Tobias wouldn't describe what happened to a Hork-Bajir punished by Visser Three.

One last thing on a closer look at book 1: In the pool Cassie brought in by the cop, but was handed over to the line guards, Hork-Bajir, until she is released, than goes straight to morph, and catches up to Jake, and they make their way out.
The way it's written, there is no time she could have killed the guy

Unless you want to wager that she managed to get his gun before being kept in line.
I wouldn't

Little to no evidence she killed him; saying he was not longer a concern is clean up less they would have had to deal with him again.

And the books leave tons of mystery about character feeting and never bring them up again: who torched to Joe Bob's Manor, would Ax have bombed the town? I wondered if-

I for one would say you're reaching. I feel that from the start Cassie had her ethics lined up and hated to betray them. She did so as necessary, but never passively. Her guilt didn't make her self destructive, rather more self critical; when such things reoccurred she used them to reflect how what she calls misdeeds could be avoided or alternatively carried  out in the future.
The morph empathy is an interesting concept, but I think all an all it's Cassie being Cassie. This time she felt she violated her place by inflitrating the colony and killing them because it suited her needs, and it speaks to her character that she can feel foul doing that to any creature

[Noelle]

I think that if Cassie was having trouble killing in her morphs, and it had to do with empathic ability, she wouldn't have had nearly as much trouble as she did in the rest of the series.

When she returned to her human form, she would feed off of the empathic feeling that she essentially saved the human race by killing the termite queen, and she wouldn't have been so upset over it.  Nor would she have felt so upset over killing the Hork-Bajir in 19 as wolf morph, because wolves are predators.

I think it was just her forcing to deal with her values dissonance, the ultimate realization that in order to live sometimes you have to kill, and that was just the way it was.  Except she never really learned that...