On Cassie's "Intuition"

[NickDaGriff]

No, because it's been stated that decisions are left up to the Animorphs themselves.  He can try to show them a path, it's up to them to take it.  He even said he never planned for Jake and Rachel, they just kinda showed up and made themselves awesome.  It's not like he was micromanaging every day of their lives, just making some broader moves in the course of the war.  Like I said, it's still entirely their struggle.  They had to be individually strong enough to push to the end, and not a lot of people could do that.  Rachel chose to sacrifice herself so that Tom couldn't take out the pool ship, which would have left no one in a position to negotiate surrender, resulting in the Andalites glassing Earth.  The Ellimist had nothing to do with that.  Jake had to be the one to plan for that contingency, and Rachel had to be tough enough to accept it. 

[Chad32]

It's funny if the Ellemist didn't plan for Jake, but all of the Human team members have some relation to him. His best friend. His kind of girlfriend. His cousin. A guy he protected once.

[NothingFromSomething]

I always sort of took all that to be bullsh*t on the Ellimist's part anyway.  Like Marco (I think it was Marco?) says, he doesn't interfere, but he does.  The big guy's kind of justifying it to himself through his own little loopholes and warped reality (though with the best of intentions), while basically playing god with all the lowly little insects.

Sure, the kids had to have the fortitude and strength of character to make it work, Ellimist's goals weren't guaranteed successes, but he's still doing whatever he can to sort of stack the odds in the same way Crayak was, yin and yang.

Just never liked that.  Loved the brief "showing up to show them an alternative and make sure they don't all die horribly" on occasion, but the whole implication he basically orchestrated them all being at the mall at the same time and witnessing the crash, it's all just a little unnecessary and cheapening.

[NickDaGriff]

That's true, it is total BS.  He says he doesn't interfere, but that's not entirely true.  Like I said, the Ellimist always lies.  The cosmic game is largely modeled off of Toomin's gaming career in Ketran Spore, so it's centered around non-interference.  Of course, Crayak and the Ellimist are deciding their own rules just to keep each other in check, so it gets a little into Cosmic Calvinball territory when they agree on particular exceptions to their self-imposed rules.  And as long as they don't outright break whatever rule without the other's permission, then the other isn't allowed to either.  If one of them did, that would lead to unimaginable havoc as they both try to get retribution for whatever the other did last.  They're not justifying it to themselves; they're justifying it to each other.  Anyway, I think the non-interference thing was just something he said in #7 as part of his made-up "chance to rescue your species" ploy.  Of course he interferes, he just has to have permission and/or be sneaky about it.  The Animorphs were on a need-to-know basis at that point.

As for Jake and Rachel, I think of them as the tack holding the Ellimist's strings to the bulletin board (that's my mental picture of the Ellimist making his plans XD).  They were mostly just local kids that fit the bill for what he needed, and ended up working out better than he could have hoped.

I wouldn't say it's unnecessary or cheapening to say that an early-established character is responsible for setting up the premise rather than sheer, highly improbable coincidence.  I like cause and effect in stories, because that makes it feel more meaningful to me.  Makes it feel like everything has a reason for happening.  I guess maybe that's an opinion thing, but I dunno.  If the Ellimist had only shown up after book #30 or so, then of course it would all just be a cheap, retroactive hand-wave for all the coincidence in the series.  But no, he showed up early within the second narrator rotation.  And we know for sure he set up Tobias for the construction site in #13.  It was a bit of a gamble on Tobias' reaction to the time warp, but it's definitely more than just an implication.  And man, I loved that scene.

The way I see it, it's a war story.  If you look at the generals making their grand maneuvers and strategies or the infantry grunts just fighting to stay alive, it's all a huge tapestry of struggle with everyone playing an important part.  Whether you look at WWII from the POV of the soldiers on the ground, the Jews being persecuted, the politicians making grand inspirational speeches, or the British Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare playing mind games with Hitler, nothing cheapens the whole of it.  It's a huge chunk of history, and if (hypothetically) a secret intelligence branch told a soldier to be in a certain place at a certain time while the politicians put on their show of denial and jingoistic propaganda, that doesn't make it any less meaningful to the soldier risking his life, the Jewish citizens he saves, the intelligence operatives that can continue working in the field, or the war effort as a whole, which in turn affects the lives of all the citizens of every nation involved.  A story from any of those people can be equally compelling, regardless of how many layers their story has hanging over it that they might not even be aware of.  Now I know Animorphs is fictional and WWII was real, but I hope you see the point I'm getting at.  The main series, overall, belongs to the Animorphs.  The Ellimist may be a big player, but he's not central to it, and that doesn't take away from anyone else's story.  Heck, I personally want a full series just about him, but I'm just gonna have to settle for my fanfics.  :\

[Shenmue654]

To me, saying that Cassie just happens to have all these rare attributes on top of all these terrible decisions miraculously working out is far more contrived and makes her more of a Mary Sue

I think, ever since I heard the "Batman himself is a Mary Sue and technically so is Spiderman half the time" explanation...I have been dubious towards the idea of Mary Sue as a category. It seems to be mostly applied to female characters who take on the characteristics of male power fantasy heroes, but in a decidedly "feminine" manner. I.E. They appear to solve the series' problems mostly through their likeability, intuition and kindness rather than their brilliance or raw martial ability.

Cassie can be interpreted as a stand-in for K.A. Applegate herself, yes--- But that doesn't necessarily mean that Applegate was a bad writer. Stephanie Meyer is an example of how you can do it very badly. I'm not so sure Cassie was. Applegate's character preferences may not necessarily equate with those of the audience (The audience tends to prefer Marco and Rachel whereas Applegate showed clear preference for Jake and Cassie)...but again, that doesn't mean much.

If you write a book series for ten years, chances are you are getting something out of it other than the audience's appreciation. XD <3 I would know....I've been Roleplaying for more than a decade.

[Chad32]

Well, she only actually wrote about half the series. 1-24, 26, 32, 53, 54, and all chronicles and megamorphs. I do believe something was lost during the second half when the ghostwriters took over.

[Shenmue654]

I do believe something was lost during the second half when the ghostwriters took over.

Her wit was lost, honestly. Her clever, tactful way of developing the characters. It was as if the ghostwriters received her notes explaining what they had to do on the project but didn't quite know how to get inside her head.

Granted there were good ghostwriters and awful ghostwriters...

[Chad32]

Yeah, some were better than others.

[NickDaGriff]

I think, ever since I heard the "Batman himself is a Mary Sue and technically so is Spiderman half the time" explanation...I have been dubious towards the idea of Mary Sue as a category. It seems to be mostly applied to female characters who take on the characteristics of male power fantasy heroes, but in a decidedly "feminine" manner. I.E. They appear to solve the series' problems mostly through their likeability, intuition and kindness rather than their brilliance or raw martial ability.

I wouldn't really say that.  It's got pretty much nothing to do with whether a character solves issues through a "masculine" or "feminine" manner.  I've seen plenty of katana-wielding, fireball-slinging, bloodthirsty half vampire/werewolf/demon/whatever OCs from either gender that fit the bill solidly all over deviantArt.  A Mary Sue (or Gary Stu/Murray Sioux, if you want a male nomenclature--the name just happened to come from a specific fanfic) is a character that is unbearably one-dimensional and perfect at anything they do.  The most typical symptom of a Sue is when they barely suffer any consequences for any actions.  There are truckloads of Sues out there that just casually torture or kill people who tick them off, and no one in-universe thinks anything of it.  Like Sonichu.

Spiderman and Batman are basically power fantasies at their core, like most other comic book superheroes.  I wouldn't really count them as Sue type characters, because they've both had plenty of stories fleshing them out and exploring their psyches in depth, and they develop and grow as characters throughout their lives.  They both have more to their character than swinging around the city and punching out bad guys, even if that is what they do regularly.  Some kind of a power fantasy is usually a core component of a Mary Sue, but it's just one element.  The problem with a Sue is that it rarely goes beyond that.  The character never learns anything, or has any reason for existing other than being the author's cathartic mouthpiece. 

The problem with Cassie is that without this theory, she's really not much more than a mouthpiece to criticize everyone else and set arbitrary limitations for everyone else based on her own skewed preconceived morals.  My whole point here is to try and make her less of a Mary Sue, because I really don't want her to be one.  KAA is a good author who made a pretty awesome series here, but nothing is perfect, and Cassie's behaviors are a bit of a tarnish.

[Shenmue654]

I wouldn't really count them as Sue type characters, because they've both had plenty of stories fleshing them out and exploring their psyches in depth, and they develop and grow as characters throughout their lives.  They both have more to their character than swinging around the city and punching out bad guys, even if that is what they do regularly

They have multiple writers onboard. When Superman first premiered, and to a certain extent even now, he was an utterly flat character designed so that two Jewish guys could live out their power fantasies in him in a world where they were discriminated against. This is what a "Mary Sue" really is--- A frustrated human being with their internal fantasies taken form. The difference between one and a good character is merely time, skilled writers, and enough people agreeing that it is their fantasy too.

A Mary Sue (or Gary Stu/Murray Sioux, if you want a male nomenclature--the name just happened to come from a specific fanfic) is a character that is unbearably one-dimensional and perfect at anything they do.

You mean like James Bond? He gets in trouble all right (Good writers), but it doesn't do a lot to diminish his perfection and unbearable one-dimensionality. X] In a sense, a Mary Sue comes off as a Mary Sue to the person whose power fantasy it cannot be. This is why the Jason Bourne movies bugged me, and I couldn't put my finger on why. It was good action. It's also why the Twilight series, while badly written, was loved by a whole generation of teenagers and mothers--- Bella Swan acted very much like them.

The problem with a Sue is that it rarely goes beyond that.  The character never learns anything, or has any reason for existing other than being the author's cathartic mouthpiece. 

I think people who say this misunderstand why writers actually write. XD Writing IS a cathartic mouthpiece to the author, because the story they are telling is about their Heart. The key is to mask the catharsis, because the reader's reading for similar reasons and needs to be able to escape. That's what fledgling writers fail to do.

The problem with Cassie is that without this theory, she's really not much more than a mouthpiece to criticize everyone else and set arbitrary limitations for everyone else based on her own skewed preconceived morals.  My whole point here is to try and make her less of a Mary Sue, because I really don't want her to be one.  KAA is a good author who made a pretty awesome series here, but nothing is perfect, and Cassie's behaviors are a bit of a tarnish.

And this brings me to the point of my rambling: I never saw Cassie as a Mary Sue because Kid Me was most like Cassie of all the Animorphs. Without the gap between the author and the audience (Especially if the writing's actually pretty good), this isn't a thing they notice.

Since I never read the ending, my opinions may differ for this reason--- I knew only the Cassie portrayed for most of the series. But in that Cassie, I don't see the Mary Sue thing at all. She has her weird spiritual advantage, and that's that. 

[NothingFromSomething]

I think maybe it's better to say Cassie was probably a representation of Katherine herself, her perspective, rather than delving into infallible "Mary-Sue" territory.  She certainly wasn't "too perfect", that's almost the definition of the concept.  It's probably just more likely that Cassie was very Katherine-esque, with maybe Marco representing some of Michael's take on the world or something.

[NickDaGriff]

Yeah, Cassie and Marco were definitely supposed to be similar to Katherine and Michael with their respective worldviews, they've stated as much in interviews.  Even the names are vaguely similar.  Kinda makes it funny that they never got along in-universe.  XD 

Look at the Animorphs' development through the series. 

• Jake steps up as leader, and while he was kinda flat and boring early, he turned from an idealistic jock into a hardened veteran, crippled by desperation and self-doubt, and ends up unable to function without a war going on. 
• Ax is a proud young cadet just trying to do his duty and make his species proud even as he was stranded on an alien planet, burdened by feelings of inadequacy that he tries to overcompensate for, and ends up being forced to choose between the friends he made or the species he was brought up to serve. 
• Rachel finds out she's really good at killing stuff and is disgusted by herself for liking the thrill of it, but keeps that side of herself hidden so that she doesn't drag the team's morale down with her, and ends up drowning in a pit of self-sacrifice all by herself. 
• Tobias has to learn to deal with the hawk body and adjust to his new life, hoping desperately that he can be strong enough to help his friends and not be a burden, and barely maintains his sanity through all the crap that he goes through. 
• Marco has to try to keep his deeply personal stake in the war from getting his friends killed, and keep his anger, selfishness and denial from clouding his objectivity, all while trying to see if he can still keep a positive attitude about life to keep everyone else from sinking into depression.

They all have their own journey through the war that totally changes them.  By the end of the series, they are all completely different people. 

All except for Cassie.  She starts off idealistic, naive, and and constantly trying to force others to live by her arbitrary double-standards, utterly rejecting everyone elses' views as invalid, and never stops.  She does that straight through to the end of the series, and never learns from her mistakes, because they have a habit of magically working out for the best, and that's just attributed to her being highly perceptive when there's really no way she could have predicted anything (see my examples above).  Her special attributes just pile up to compensate for her lack of any character-based struggle (estreen, animal whisperer, infallibly intuitive, sub-temporally grounded, etc.).  She could have had her own story arc, maybe something with the Yeerk Peace Movement, but that never went anywhere.  Books #19 and #29 were good.  Unfortunately, it felt like Applegate ran out of ideas for that, and every other Cassie book apart from #50 was pure filler.  It's almost like she didn't know what to do with her own self-insert character.

It's kinda similar to the difference between Batman and Superman.  The writers have Batman deal with a whole gallery of villains that all reflect some part of his personality that he's trying to overcome or come to terms with, and try not to go insane from stress.  He always thinks his way through things and makes difficult decisions that even got him kicked off the Justice League.  With Superman, their solution for decades has always been to just make him punch something harder than he's ever punched before, or get some new BS power on top of his already ridiculous collection.  Flying and super-strength/invincibility?  Totally, that's iconic for him.  Super speed?  Sure, gotta fly fast.  Laser eyes?  Well, he is solar-powered, so it's thematic, I guess.  X-ray vision?  Um...  Frost breath?  Lie detection/telepathy?  Seeing peoples' souls?  Getting stronger to the point where he can punch planets into dust and literally bench press more weight than probably even exists in estimates of the known universe?  Yeah.  That's all new powers as the plot demands, and he's a total mess nowadays.  He literally just has to be stronger than whoever he's facing. 

[spoiler]And provided his one token weakness kryptonite isn't there, he always is.  Although there was that one time some minor nobody villain managed to beat him to death in a fistfight, but that didn't last long for whatever reason.  Apparently, that whole arc was a mess anyway and I think it got retconned.[/spoiler]

Batman doesn't get stronger as his story goes on (origin story aside, obviously).  If anything, he gets weaker as he ages.  His knees actually get totally shot from all the injuring, face-kicking and rooftop-parkouring he does, leaving him crippled with arthritis if he doesn't have his knee braces.  He has to work to figure out ways around all his weaknesses as a human being and a character, rather than just getting stronger to meet the challenge.

And that's a problem Cassie faces.  Most of the stories where she shines are specifically set up for her to take advantage of some special attribute she had dumped on her.  In #4, she can hear Ax for unexplained reasons, when it really only kinda makes sense that Tobias would, and then the whole whale thing happens.  In #7, she figured out the Ellimist's game, even though Marco (the paranoid analytical one) really should have been the first one to see that there was another level there.  Not even gonna go near #9.  Book #19, her "intuitive" leap of faith gets Aftran to trust her, and luck makes everything work out.  Book #29 was awesome because the ghostwriter knew what they were doing, but the plot still centered around setting things up for her area of expertise.  Book #34, she saves the day because she's an estreen.  In MegaMorphs #4, she unwittingly saves the day by doing nothing all book long, just by being sub-temporally grounded.  There's more, but this comment is long enough as-is.

So yeah.  I guess the obvious conclusion we can draw from this is, Cassie is actually Superman.  NEW HEADCANON  XD  [/sarcasm]

Bond and Bourne are both definitely Sues, albeit slightly different kinds.  Not gonna argue that point.  Bourne is less so in his movies (he at least acts like a real person in the movies, the books are kinda weird and convoluted), so I like him as an action hero and enjoy that power fantasy (in fact, I even started an original story based on the character concept), but yeah.  I haven't really watched the Bond movies, so I can't say much there, but the character never interested me from what I saw.  Too much of a slick alcoholic womanizer, the kind of scumbag the writer wished they could get away with being, as opposed to being a strong character who also happens to be a scumbag.  My sister read one of the books by Ian Fleming, and told me that's basically the case, along with some really silly amateurish prose.  XD

You said that the difference between a good character and a Sue is a matter of time, skilled writers, and people agreeing with the fantasy.  But time adds nothing.  You can have an excellent character-based story that's only a couple pages long.  Check out Ray Bradbury for some excellent short fiction.  What do skilled writers add, if it's just a matter of people agreeing with them?  Good writing is much more than just appealing to the lowest common denominator.  It will make you millions of sales a la Twilight/Fifty Shades/Superman/Bond, but it won't make your character not a Sue.  Good writing and appealing to the lowest common denominator aren't mutually exclusive concepts, but they accomplish different things, and don't really substitute each other well.

Writing is a fun, cathartic experience.  Trust me, I know that well.  But it is so much more than just that.  It's art.  Anyone can whip out a stick figure and call it good, and you can produce some really good stuff with stick figures.  But trying to represent a person or object with accuracy takes objective technique.  A power fantasy that doesn't care enough to explore anything further is how you get a Sue, the literary equivalent of a stick figure the artist never cared enough to improve.  My first attempts at writing were awful for just that reason.  I had no themes, no real plot beyond kids turning into dragons and killing people, and no character development of any kind.  I identified with the power fantasy completely (still do, in fact) but the story was boring, predictable, and had no point in existing.  All of it was just schlock no one would bother to read if they didn't already know me.  Fantasy alone doesn't give the substance a good story or character needs.  Any story starts with the author sitting down and figuring out what they find cool.  Then, they build on that.  Coolness is a foundation and a means, not necessarily the end.  Yes, the reader's enjoyment is subjective and based on how much they agree with the author's idea of cool, but there is an objective basis for how much the author decides to expand on things, and that increases audience interest significantly.

TL;DR: The other animorphs all have more to them than just being self-inserts with superpowers.  Every one of them has a story arc and can stand on their own.  Cassie wasn't given that chance, just loaded down with people saying she's special, when she actually had much more potential as a character.  It might even be the case that Applegate didn't even care that much about her as a character.  It's sad, and I want to fix that.

Okay, how the heck did this comment become over 3 pages long?  Sorry 'bout that.  My comments have a tendency to explode.

[Chad32]

That was one hell of a post. Yeah, it's odd that the other characters changed so much, but Cassie never changed. That's part of the reason I don't care for her. Not only does she not change, but she does things that should have doomed them all, and doesn't learn from them because of an author saving throw.

[NothingFromSomething]

I don't know if I'd go as far as to say Cassie being more or less the same at the end of the series makes her superhuman, or overly unrealistic.  She does sort of evolve and compromise, just nowhere near to the extent of the others, and I think maybe that's because she resists it more.  She gets the whole "if we stoop to their level, there's no use in us winning, we might as well let them infest us all" deal to an extent the others don't, or don't want to admit/face.

I like your comic analogy.  To use another, think of Steve Rogers in relation to the other Avengers.  People like Tony and Thor, they go through character arcs, they grow up over the course of a story, have some realization about themselves and grow as people as events shape them.  Steve, he starts as the selfless, sacrificing, humble, well-intentioned guy.  And he doesn't change, not where it counts, it's more like he's the constant point, and rather than the world changing him, he changes the world.

Cassie's sort of the same to me.  I love that about the character, that even when everyone else is dragged down in the dirt and close to just thinking "**** it, let's give them a taste of their own medicine", she drags them back from the brink.  It's not that she doesn't falter, or make compromises she wouldn't have wanted to, it's just that there's a line, and it's much closer than Jake's or Marco's or Rachel's.  And, sure, that moral-constant trait results in major mistakes, yeah, but she's also the only thing stopping for example Jake blackmailing Erek way earlier in the series.  Or the group kidnapping and threatening people with torture and such, when they're in desperate need of information.  Or Marco going way too Machiavellian for his own good.

She stays the same, and for better or worse, she shapes the world.  It's awesome.  Everyone else has an inward arc, personality evolution, she's a total rock and influences events outwardly.

[Chad32]

One problem is that one of the main reasons they won the war is that they finally decided to just drive a train of explosives into the pool, and I doubt that Jake really would have killed Chapman if Eric didn't help, but that was the only way to get around his programming. Could they have won without doing that kind of stuff? This is heavily debatable stuff.

There's a slippery slope fallacy that assumes if they cross some arbitrary line, there's no line they'll never cross. Does anyone honestly think that if they acquired a Human at any point, that they'd eventually start using that morph to commit crimes for self gain? If people say the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, someone's bound to ask well what if it was your family?

Of course different people have different opinions, which is why the group tends to suffer according to how much they actually like what they're doing. Some other author would have different opinions, and th plot would be something else.