On Cassie's "Intuition"

[Shenmue654]

XenoFrobe, that comment is actually amazing. We have been waiting a long time on this forum for someone to really debate with and engage us in this very intellectual way. So we will proceed to deliver back exactly the same kind of response (Although probably not as long).

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.

But are they really two different things? I'm not so sure on that very point. It actually brings up this entire thought process that's been going in my head about Twilight, and to some extent Harry Potter.

The phenomenon known as "good writing" tends to not only be highly subjective as concepts go but correlates with the level of identification the viewer has with the author. The whole way that art and writing even operate is that they are the creations of someone else's Heart that manage to pierce yours. Books considered almost universally "good" aren't just good: They often draw upon a subconscious backdrop of archetypes and characters that resonate with almost every potential viewer. This is why Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter work--- They are, in a metaphysical sense, the "same story." It didn't even matter that Tolkien couldn't write worth a damn--- He tapped the Leviathan/Library/Collective Unconscious. There are maybe a couple stories like this in human history (Some people say about six, actually) and if you hit one with enough accuracy the result ripples through the whole network.

The result is that you can have Mary Sue-like characters in all or any of these stories, or characters that are too powerful...And nobody cares because whether or not they exist isn't even "the point."

But trying to represent a person or object with accuracy takes objective technique.

And again, I have no idea where you're getting the idea that this thing called "objective technique" even exists. There is fully nothing objective about art. Nothing at all. Some people hate Modern Art and other people worship it. I hate rap and other people are experts who know its nuances and cultural rhythm. An individual artist, like you did, can improve their skills and learn a lot from other artists. Then that artist is clearly "better than they were" according to their own definition. Yet I have read deeply eloquent prose written by authors who later dismissed their own creations as Mary Sues and their writing as trash. Writing that I had loved, and sometimes still do.

These people you define as the "lowest common denominator," the ones who like things like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight....The assumption that's going into all the comments nerd culture has made is that these people are stupider than us. Because the stories there do not and cannot appeal to a subculture like ours. We cannot enter the protagonists. Yet I don't think our opinion is even what was being targeted. Similar to how I am not Mr. Bond's intended consumer, and so I view him as a Mary Sue. If I am not, how might I judge his significance?

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.

Cassie-As-Steve-Rogers is an interesting point, although that isn't the comment above. Is Captain America a Mary Sue? I don't typically think of him as such, yet he actually possesses every trait one might attribute to them. He is a modern-day paladin, a rock, in every sense of the word. Although to be frank, the Red Skull is a ****ty blackguard in the movies. -__-

Do we, as an audience, now disdain characters who either "have it too easy" or aren't flawed enough? And for that matter, exactly why is that? When Snow White and the Seven Dwarves came out in 1930, the main character was herself very much a "Mary Sue" if we rely only on mental characteristics to define such a person. She spent most of the story getting very, very lucky and having all of the traits of a perfect housewife. The only difference, perhaps, is that she needed saving by a prince. Cassie was never exactly the fighter of the group. In fact it's heavily implied she can't fight worth a damn. XD

But she does develop very similar bird-attracting, impossible superpowers consistent with her "shaman" role in the group. As for the book list, honestly it just seems to be the means that bug you. Every character in Animorphs has scenes and situations tailor-made for what makes them unique. The only difference is that their skills are not "earth-mother"-ish.

Something about this whole setup really bugs me, but I'm struggling to explain exactly what.

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.

As someone who, in my youth, wrote such things myself....I don't think this can really be the case. It may seem like that looking back, but there's a lot more even to why inexperienced writers write than just a power fantasy. People start writing because there's a story they want to tell that does not exist, and I still haven't managed to write the one Kid Me was after.

It's a story about these two friends who knew each other in childhood. One changes for the better and goes good, and one gets wrapped up in conflict and goes evil. They're both portrayed with equal sympathy. We see both the challenges that lead Character One to stay true to his ideals and the challenges that lead Character Two to break them. Sometimes, something goes horribly wrong that causes them to drift apart and we get a side-story about unquestioning, worshipful love and loyalty (And its power to create and destroy). Sometimes it happens over time and we get a story about the corrupting influence of power on desire and about how heroes can alienate themselves from the general public by being too selfless. Eventually they meet in an explosive, intense confrontation evoking love, hate, and regret.

At least in my case, even though I couldn't write it properly at the time...There was a lot more of a point than just art, or just a power fantasy. Rant relatively over.

[NickDaGriff]

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.

Not exactly what I'm saying.  The Sue issue and my Ellimist theory are kind of related but separate discussions that are inadvertently getting mashed together. 

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.

That's actually looking at him from the wrong timeframe.  Sure he's a humble, selfless, idealistic guy throughout, but that's not the point of his character's struggles.  WWII is basically just his origin story, setting him up for when he thaws.  The real issues he faces are his fish-out-of-water lifestyle and cultural differences between the '40s and modern day (casual sexism and racism, ho!), blind patriotism under an increasingly sinister government, and trying to find people he can trust when everyone he once knew is dead.  The fact that he's so idealistic and selfless actually gets used against him again and again by supposed friends and enemies alike, and apparently leads him down a controversial path in the Marvel Civil War (which I actually have yet to read).

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.

Yeah, she definitely does her job as the limiter.  I'm definitely not saying that's a bad thing.  The group really needed someone in that role at times.  Tobias sometimes filled it, and Ax too, but 90% of it was Cassie.  And yeah, sometimes it was too much.  You'll notice, their individual and team effectiveness actually increases significantly when Cassie's not around.  Whenever it was just Marco, Ax, and/or Tobias, for better or worse, they got stuff done.  Hella effective.

The problem with her character is that these traits aren't fully explored and fleshed out, and so she comes off as nagging, preachy, and downright hypocritical at times.  It's like she just decides something, and decides to make it so without any discussion on the matter.  She could have very easily had a character arc centered around all this that would have landed her in exactly the same place at the end, and it would have improved her character immensely, if only because we'd get to see her thought process better and understand her more.  She could have been figuring things out with the Yeerk peace movement, trying desperately to find a more diplomatic solution to things or stage a less violent internal uprising, and that would have been well within character for her. 

There's a real wealth of untapped story there.  Example, imagine a book between #19 and #29 where she starts attending secret YPM meetings to help them coordinate and doesn't tell the others because she knows they'll disapprove.  Tobias spots her, and reports it to the others and causes them to all start questioning her loyalty/uninfested status while she tries to find a way to convince them that Yeerks really aren't inherently evil.  At the same time, their numbers are increasing to the point that just meeting is a huge security risk, and Visser 3 gets wind of it, culminating in Cassie convincing the others to help her defend the YPM in an awesome battle scene.  Themes would be about how she's growing apart from the other animorphs because of moral differences, but she still realizes she has to help them out, with aspects of the YPM subtly mirroring the Animorphs.  It would pay off later, as they'd have more motivation to go help Aftran, beyond just seeing her as a security risk.  It would really show how far gone Jake is at the end, that he can't see the Yeerks he flushed as having basic sentient rights, and it would also help drive the wedge between him and Cassie even further, as she might have had friends in that pool. 

See, just off the cuff, there's already a solid premise that's totally up her alley.  That would be awesome.  Better than the Helmacron episode.  I'd read it.  Heck, I might write it.  Or bribe someone more talented and less lazy to write it. 

[NickDaGriff]

XenoFrobe, that comment is actually amazing. We have been waiting a long time on this forum for someone to really debate with and engage us in this very intellectual way. So we will proceed to deliver back exactly the same kind of response (Although probably not as long).

ARGH, NOW I'VE FALLEN INTO THIS TRAP AGAIN

I constantly find myself getting roped into conversations and debates where I basically end up trading essays with other people, and I love the discussion, but it's like sandpaper on my sanity.  The last one took me several days to write and proofread, and I was up at 3 AM editing it at one point.  I'll get back to this thread in a bit.  XD

[NickDaGriff]

Oh gosh, eight pages this time.  THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT YOU DID THIS TO ME YOU MONSTERS

Okay, clarification: so when I said “lowest common denominator,” I was basically speaking in the mathematical definition of the term.  I was referring to the most basic elements that the stories all share that make them appealing when you boil them down (i.e., romantic/power fantasy), not "lowly peasants/common rabble who suck in the stale tripe they're trough-fed by the mainstream media because they have no sense of taste or gag reflex."  I didn’t initially realize that there was another connotation to the phrase.  I swear, I’m not trying to be an elitist culture snob here.  XD

But are they really two different things? I'm not so sure on that very point. It actually brings up this entire thought process that's been going in my head about Twilight, and to some extent Harry Potter.

The phenomenon known as "good writing" tends to not only be highly subjective as concepts go but correlates with the level of identification the viewer has with the author. The whole way that art and writing even operate is that they are the creations of someone else's Heart that manage to pierce yours. Books considered almost universally "good" aren't just good: They often draw upon a subconscious backdrop of archetypes and characters that resonate with almost every potential viewer. This is why Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter work--- They are, in a metaphysical sense, the "same story." It didn't even matter that Tolkien couldn't write worth a damn--- He tapped the Leviathan/Library/Collective Unconscious. There are maybe a couple stories like this in human history (Some people say about six, actually) and if you hit one with enough accuracy the result ripples through the whole network.

Pretty much what I meant by lowest common denominator here.  There are basic elements to a story that people just like.  Various romantic/power fantasies and character archetypes hold a near universal appeal.  However, appealing to this is not that same thing as writing skill.  Tolkien may have had rambling prose, slightly excessive detail, and gotten a little verbose at times, but it was still highly readable, and you could get quite a bit out of it beyond just appreciation for the plotline.  I attribute those issues to his obsession with world-building above all else (the stories were actually written as an excuse to use the languages he was creating in his spare time).  He was a very good writer, and not just because his stories had innate appeal.  No one would have bothered to read them through to appreciate the vast lore of Middle Earth if his prose was actually tripping over itself to a painful degree, or the sage wisdom, lovable humor and clever wordplay all fell flat, or the characters made no sense.

And really, I think the amazing depth to which Tolkien developed the history, mythology, and cultures of Middle Earth is a large part of, if not the main reason, why it remains such an influential force on the fantasy genre to this day.  Just reading it gives this magical feeling of exploration, because there’s so much to learn about the world.

The result is that you can have Mary Sue-like characters in all or any of these stories, or characters that are too powerful...And nobody cares because whether or not they exist isn't even "the point."

Sue-ishness can work for a story.  Plenty of well-respected stories from well-respected authors have characters that are total Sues on any litmus test you put them to, LotR included.  Aragorn’s the heir to the throne, sort of a “chosen one” from an übermensch bloodline that gives him some light superpowers, ruggedly handsome and has various women interested in him, a master swordsman and good shot with a bow with unrivaled martial prowess (he can duel frakking trolls), and a really good person to boot, even able to overcome the corrupting influence of the Ring when humans are especially weak to it (including a notable ancestor of his).  When you add up all these things, he looks pretty sue-ish.  However, his story is all about actually stepping up as king and putting these traits to the best possible use, and his internal conflict keeps him from being one-dimensional.  But when you make the character’s arbitrary specialness the entire driving force for the story without a shred of self-awareness, like My Immortal or Sonichu, that's where you run into problems.

And again, I have no idea where you're getting the idea that this thing called "objective technique" even exists. There is fully nothing objective about art. Nothing at all. Some people hate Modern Art and other people worship it. I hate rap and other people are experts who know its nuances and cultural rhythm. An individual artist, like you did, can improve their skills and learn a lot from other artists. Then that artist is clearly "better than they were" according to their own definition. Yet I have read deeply eloquent prose written by authors who later dismissed their own creations as Mary Sues and their writing as trash. Writing that I had loved, and sometimes still do.

All art has some objectivity to it.  Art is a medium for communicating ideas, from thoughts as intellectually complex as the destructive ramifications of socio-political interactions of various power-grabbing noble families on individuals in a feudal fantasy world, to as primally simple as the fun in exploding zombie heads by the dozen.  If you want to communicate your ideas, you need technique.  Technique is  all objective factors, essentially how precisely you can match reality or the vision in your head while you’re creating art.  For literature, poorly paced prose, awkwardly structured scenes, and flat characters will start to muddle the points you’re trying to get across, because those all result from a lack of attention to aspects of your own creative vision.  Themes will come across as an incoherent mess, and people will misinterpret your work (not that that won’t ever happen anyway).  There are objective ways to improve your technique, and an understanding of them is important, even if you ultimately choose to reject them.  What makes art art is intent, and if you don’t have the technical skills to correctly carry out that intent, your vision gets lost, and no one will see the dream you wanted to realize.

Subjectivity and style come in when you start to modify your technique.  What you add or take away from a 100% accurate depiction of real life is what defines your art as yours.  What would Bond be without MI6, his tux and arsenal of gadgets?  What would Superman be without his flight, strength, and the red and blue suit?  What would Edward Cullen be without his sparkliness, or Jacob Black with a shirt on?  Boring, ordinary people is the answer.  Nowhere near as many people would be interested in their stories, because their stories would be completely indistinguishable from anything else.  Breaking from what people see in their everyday reality while maintaining identifiable features is a large part of what makes fiction enjoyable, and that’s why we get cultural trends in our fiction; while everyone may have a different reality shaping their identity, we all have a basis of common humanity, and share cultural interests.

Technique without any common appeal becomes too esoteric for people to actually enjoy.  Appeal without any technique becomes bland and cliched, or unreadable due to the author's inability to remain coherent, potentially even both.  Having neither results in Dadaism.    (just kidding)  They're separate concepts that do correlate, yes, but correlation is not causation.

Being an artist is tough because self-criticism is super easy when you know every in and out of your own work.  You can see every flaw better than most other people can, and they just end up glaring at you.  Halo: Combat Evolved was a great game, and there was one mission I totally loved called The Silent Cartographer, which was kind of an open little mission on this small island, and it just had such a beautiful environment.  I later saw one of the level designers in an interview talking about how he was proud of the work he did on the level, but there was one horrendous flaw they overlooked: a tree in a corner of some rocks was floating six inches off the ground.  XD  I’d never noticed it up until that point, and I only ever notice it if I remember the interview while playing.  But yeah, he said it haunted him.  So while you may only see the good in a work, you’re probably overlooking many flaws that that the author sees that would actually improve the work even further.  But of course, we can’t pick at flaws forever, we have to move on at some point.  As Leonardo Da Vinci once said, art is never finished, only abandoned.

Cassie-As-Steve-Rogers is an interesting point, although that isn't the comment above. Is Captain America a Mary Sue? I don't typically think of him as such, yet he actually possesses every trait one might attribute to them. He is a modern-day paladin, a rock, in every sense of the word. Although to be frank, the Red Skull is a ****ty blackguard in the movies. -__-

Do we, as an audience, now disdain characters who either "have it too easy" or aren't flawed enough? And for that matter, exactly why is that? When Snow White and the Seven Dwarves came out in 1930, the main character was herself very much a "Mary Sue" if we rely only on mental characteristics to define such a person. She spent most of the story getting very, very lucky and having all of the traits of a perfect housewife. The only difference, perhaps, is that she needed saving by a prince. Cassie was never exactly the fighter of the group. In fact it's heavily implied she can't fight worth a damn. XD

But she does develop very similar bird-attracting, impossible superpowers consistent with her "shaman" role in the group. As for the book list, honestly it just seems to be the means that bug you. Every character in Animorphs has scenes and situations tailor-made for what makes them unique. The only difference is that their skills are not "earth-mother"-ish.

Something about this whole setup really bugs me, but I'm struggling to explain exactly what.

Cap's not really a Sue for the reasons I listed in my reply to NothingFromSomethin g.  It's all about context.  He totally has all the traits that would otherwise qualify him as one, but his character struggles are actually separate or based around deconstructing those traits.

Look at how many Jaime Lannister fans there are for Game of Thrones.  From an outside perspective, he's totally a rich, smarmy, spoiled prettyboy who just seems to enjoy flaunting his sword skills and basking in the radiance of the most powerful person he can get close to.  But then you later realize that he actually has depth beyond that with some of the choices he's made in the past, and that they weren't all about personal gain/securing his position of power.  He ends up suffering quite a bit and his actual feelings for his family become more apparent, which gradually makes him quite sympathetic (despite being so easily hateable at first) and you can actually look back on him earlier in the series with a newfound appreciation for what was probably going through his head while he did all the stuff that made you hate him.  That all makes him a well-rounded, deeply thought-out character in spite of how easy he's had it in life or whatever despicable things he may have done, and we fans just eat that up.

It's not that we currently, as a culture, disdain people who've had it easy.  It's because conflict and struggle are what any compelling story is made of.  Any story that's ever told, from a high school drama about fitting in, to a superhero saving the world from annihilation, to a funny anecdote your friend once told you, has some kind of conflict creating drama at its core.  When an author contrives for circumstances to work themselves out, they're removing all the conflict that made the story compelling in the first place.  People want to see characters in a rough spot, and they want to see the characters handle it in whatever manner.  That’s the essence of storytelling.  If you remove that, it’s really not much of a story.

It kinda reminds me of the Matrix movies, when they're talking about the early Beta stages of the Matrix.  In the first version, the machines made it an absolute paradise.  They aimed to keep the humans to stay motivated to stay in the virtual world by appealing to every positive emotion and supplying for every need and want that could ever pop up.  It didn't work.  The humans ended up being basically bored to death from lack of stimulation (which really is something that could happen--an old study showed that babies that are cared for but aren't given any social interaction with a maternal figure in their first months will actually die from no medically apparent cause), and they collectively rejected the reality, causing entire crops of humans to be rendered useless and disposed of.  The second beta went to the opposite extreme.  The machines determined that lack of stimulation and appeal to certain instincts was the issue, and so they took inspiration from the genre of fiction that appealed to those things most: horror.  Essentially, the second beta is believed to have looked very much like a B horror movie, with vampires, werewolves, ghosts and various monsters roaming around and preying on the population (the ones in the Merovingian’s chateau were left over from there).  However, the peoples' will to go on living in such a crappy world dropped, and the machines determined that they were losing too much of the population to keep it viable.  So, they eventually decided to go with a system that actually worked for humans in the past: modeling real life in modern-day 1999.  They removed all limits on freedom within the construct, allowing the humans to police themselves and do as they liked with a bunch of artificially intelligent programs running around as social guidelines.  No one ever had reason to question it, because their problems in life came from obviously human sources.

The whole thing is basically an analogy for storytelling with willing suspension of disbelief.  Ultimately, the point in the movie was that people actually thrive on suffering and personal conflict because we’re a backward and stupid species.  Naturally, it follows that when you have a character that faces no conflict of any kind or has it solved for them, it becomes very hard for most people to actually identify with them.

Trust me, it's not the "shamanistic" means I dislike.  I've written for and enjoyed reading about spiritual, connected-to-all-living-things characters before.  But Snow White and Cassie's issues are completely different.  Snow White is a weak character because she has absolutely zero agency within the story, and yet the focus is entirely on her.  I mean, what does she even contribute to the story?  She tidies up around the house, gets the dwarves to enjoy her presence...  And that's pretty much it as far as her actual actions go.  When the huntsman spared her life, was it because she evaded him or talked him out of it, or through anything she did?  No, he just chose not to lop her head off because he thought she looked pretty.  When her life was in danger, was she given any chance to solve things herself?  No, because she's got a herd of cute animals and a bunch of men to come riding to her rescue.  She does absolutely nothing in her own story.  Many Grimm’s fairy tale girls have this problem, it’s just a product of the time when they were written.  It’s part of the reason reimagined fairy tales have had rush of popularity in recent years.

Cassie on the other hand, has plenty of agency.  Maybe even too much.  Wolf may not be the ideal combat morph, but she can handle herself in a fight, and does so far more than she'd actually like to.  She actively does things to contribute to the team's welfare, helping make plans, reining other characters in, providing a meeting space, etc.  She arguably has the most influence on what the group does, because Jake's so infatuated with her that he'll just go along with some of her more ridiculous ideas (like the Rainforest Cafe parrots).  I imagine this is the kind of difference in writing you'd expect between men in the '30s, and a woman in the '90s.  She’s a strong female character in her own right.  What I don’t like is the way she wields her agency.  She has quite a few times where she goes off on her own and makes decisions that affect everyone else in the group, based on some gut reaction to something she didn’t like because she's rigidly set in her ideals with no impulse control.  She's like an emotional gun with a hair trigger and no safety.  She'll go off with any bump in some drastic way that could literally get someone killed, but it's okay, because the muzzle always happens to be pointing in what was actually a safe direction all along that no one knew about.  The way things work out for her just ends up feeling contrived, and it kills potential conflict in a cheap way. 

Now, it’s not necessarily true that coincidence automatically makes things contrived.  It’s perfectly acceptable practice to kick off a plot with something happening completely out of the blue, or use freak occurences as a plot device.  However, excessive coincidence, using it as a crutch for your story, can strain the willing suspension of disbelief and leave readers wondering if there was supposed to be more.  Coincidence being used to remove conflict (i.e., deus ex machina) will leave your audience unsatisfied with the resolution, because if some random occurrence was going to take care of everything anyway, the characters might as well have not even been there, and all their struggles up to that point have basically been rendered completely pointless.  In Cassie's case, she gets deprived of anything having an impact on her character.

In that book list, those are situations that actually cheapen her natural agency by contriving the situation to be easily solvable specifically for her talents.  It’s an issue of cause and effect vs. effecting the cause.  The other animorphs do get tailor-made situations sometimes, but Cassie has it almost every time.  #29 was the best Cassie book in my opinion, because it forced her to step up and basically take on the responsibilities of the entire team.  Even still, she literally had to be the last one functioning to be able to shine on her own.  The other animorphs all have to step up to the plate themselves and take action in whatever situation using their unique skillset.  Cassie usually has it conveniently twisted around for her by the author so that she can use her unique skillset.  I think the reason for this is that she was never given her own specific arc, which made the writers unsure how to approach her or justify her being the narrator of her own books.  Hope that explanation's clearer.

What my theory does is maintains her agency, but actually provides a decent motivation behind her more controversial actions (beyond selfish gut instinct) and gives a plausible cause for her many special attributes within the established sci-fi universe (beyond mere coincidence).  I don’t irrationally hate Cassie for her spiritual side.  That’s not me, I’m kinda spiritual myself.  Though when you think about it, her spirituality rarely even came up unless Marco was poking fun at her, so most of what we hear about it is Marco hyperbolizing.  Heck, after rereading most of the books, I’m still not even fully sure what she actually believed in. 

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.

As someone who, in my youth, wrote such things myself....I don't think this can really be the case. It may seem like that looking back, but there's a lot more even to why inexperienced writers write than just a power fantasy. People start writing because there's a story they want to tell that does not exist, and I still haven't managed to write the one Kid Me was after.

*shorten*

At least in my case, even though I couldn't write it properly at the time...There was a lot more of a point than just art, or just a power fantasy. Rant relatively over.

See, right there your story already has a million times more depth than mine ever did.  Here:  http://fav.me/d2povts  http://fav.me/d2rskex  Those copies were apparently edited by Past Me at some point, as they're not as crappy as I distinctly remember them being (Karen was a snotty a-hole in early drafts because I didn't know how else to write a girl character at the time).  I lost the original copies of the story in the Great Hard Drive Seppuku of 2013, which I have mixed feelings about.  Anyhoo, those two links are literally the whole extent of it.  A whole lot of worldbuilding centered entirely on the dragon forms themselves with a shoddy knowledge of history, and action scenes based on Call of Duty 4 with an emotionally blank narrator.  Literally nothing else.  It was pretty much just masturbatory self-insert power fantasy, and looking back on it disgusts me every time.  My writing has improved massively ever since I realized why it sucked.

The fantasy continued on when I got into werewolf stories on deviantArt, and I actually started digging into why I like shapeshifters so much.  Did a whole bunch of introspection and made a ton of personal revelations, but I won’t bore you with those.  Point is, my writing was better as a result.  Still wasn’t perfect, or even up to my current standards at that point, but yeah.  All part of the technical learning process. 

Your stated motivations there are absolutely about doing it for the art.  We all write or draw because we have a story or picture we want to see, but no one has written or drawn yet.  Wouldn't be much reason to otherwise.  Art is your vision, manifested to share with the world.  And sharing something that really shows your passion, that you successfully crafted into exactly what you wanted it to be is such a joy.





So, uh...  Could I maybe get a bonus to my insanity meter based on sheer length? 

[Shenmue654]

Oh honestly this is amazing. You don't have any idea how glad I am that you're just listening to my rambling about storytelling and choice. I spent a year on this very site feeling ignored and unimportant because no one was bothering to go through it all and respond intelligibly.

I can't quite respond to this one just yet (I'm pretty overworked) but if we're derailing too much we could totally take this on PM. ;}

[NickDaGriff]

Well, I generally try to answer as thoroughly as possible.  *looks at 8 page comment*  You know, in case it wasn't immediately obvious.    Y'all're bringing up good points, it makes answering more interesting.

But darn it, why can't my creative writing come to me this easily? 

As long as we're talking about Cassie, the Mary Sue concept, and whether or not it applies, I guess we're technically still on topic.

[Rasstik]

Just going to ask you, XenoFrobe: could one basic concept of how Cassie is treated could be that she's the 'Aquaman' of the group, what with all the convoluted and illogical storylines designed to give her specific 'specialness' a chance to shine? Sorry if my metaphor seems like further derailment, but I'm sure he has a storyline reflecting your 'special little slice of awesome' theory where we find out why so many baddies care about fish, so I'll pretend that it's totally okay.

More generally, I just want to express support of this headcanon; my one caveat would be that Cassie did develop, just not internally. I'm not saying she shouldn't have been expanded upon, I would have really liked to see the moralizing and from-the-hip decisions dealt with and acknowledged beyond Marco's ribbing. What I am saying is that Shenmue makes a couple of excellent points about what development does exist, and I personally liked seeing her gradual removal from the group when they began to step over her boundaries.

[NickDaGriff]

Sorry, I actually haven't seen or read anything about Aquaman.  All I know is that his kid sidekick on Teen Titans was a lot more powerful, and that's really sad.  XD  But yeah, if he's in his element defending Atlantis or whatever, it makes sense that he'd be pretty powerful and able to work things to his advantage.  If he's in the middle of an urban environment or something and he finds use for communication with aquatic creatures on a regular basis, then I call massive shenanigans.  I think you got what I meant, though.

She does fall away from the group at the end, and that tendency was shown early in #9 and #19.  Still, I'd argue that that wasn't so much from change on her part, more that she didn't like facing what the others were becoming/had become.  And honestly, that's totally fine by me.  I really feel like her attitude should have been expanded on, though.  Some depth into her thought processes and why she hung in with the group for so long even though the violence disgusted her would be more than welcome. 

It always struck me as kind of odd that Cassie briefly tried to justify Jake's actions to Erek in #54, that felt kind of out of the blue.  In #50, Visser Three One is stopped from killing Jake by what was apparently a YPM member that no one even saw, and there was no foreshadowing or justification for that whatsoever.  And if she was such a peacemaker, she really should have spent a lot more time seeking out every opportunity to actually make peace, rather than just waiting for something to come to her like it did in #19.  I get the feeling KAA had a plot she wanted to cover with Cassie, but never got around to it because she just didn't know how to continue it with Aftran effectively out of the fight, or got distracted by filler that she also felt like writing at the time which she dumped on Cassie because she couldn't think of anyone else that would fit it.  Maybe both.  As a result, we get these fragmented hints of what it could have been, but no substance in that direction or major development for Cassie, which makes a lot of aspects of her character not make as much sense.  The solution to that, unfortunately, was to try and cover it up with more specialness.

Yanno what, after I get some progress done on my current fic, I'm gonna write me some Cassie stories. 

[Chad32]

Why is it that self sacrifice, like taking a bullet for someone, is considered virtuous, but becoming darker due to a need to save Humanity is considered wrong? Isn't becoming the dark hero that's willing to disregard the few to save the many a form of self sacrifice? If they hadn't blown the pool up, they couldn't have won. If they had stayed exactly the same, or as close to possible as Cassie insisted on, do you really think they would have saved the world? This is part of the reason Cassie annoys me. She comes off as selfish, willing to leave the group and abandon humanity because she doesn't want to change, and apparently KAA is ok with this.

[NickDaGriff]

Having a character with that mindset is totally fine, but...  Yeah.  It's all about where you draw the line, and Cassie seems to be drawing it way too close, with KAA's blessing. 

On the other hand, what I consider wrong is leaping to the most destructive action first, without considering alternatives.  That's basically what Jake did in the end.  When they took the pool ship, he could have had Ax stationed at the pool, ready to flush it on command, while he used it as leverage against Visser 3, and it would have turned out the exact same way.  Once they had that console, the battle was basically won.  But he didn't.  He lost sight of everything else, and ended up wasting a lot of lives to accomplish a few simple tasks, just because he was stressed out and pissed off.  Being a darker hero isn't really self-sacrifice, it just means that you're willing to sacrifice what isn't yours more.  Granted, you have to live with the guilt, but that's subjective.  Jake tore himself apart, while Marco pretty much enjoyed his life.

In the end, you have to be out to save lives.  Every action you take should be worth something towards that ideal, even if you can't get a perfect solution.  Acting purely out of vengeance just creates more blood for no real reason. 

Aaaaand now we're officially off topic.  XD

[Chad32]

I'm not even sure why flushing the pool would do anything. There's already been a situation like this with the oatmeal, and v3 didn't care until he was thrown in. I think this part was just thrown in because KAA wanted Jake to do a very bad thing. Something less justifiable than what he did to Eric, since if he really wanted eric to help there weren't many alternatives to work around his programming. Not to mention that he probably wouldn't have killed Chapman anyway. It was an odd moment to me, and seems like it was thrown in there just to show how far Jake has fallen. Why did he think flushing Yeerks would cause V3 to rush to the bridge?

[Shenmue654]

Why is it that self sacrifice, like taking a bullet for someone, is considered virtuous, but becoming darker due to a need to save Humanity is considered wrong? Isn't becoming the dark hero that's willing to disregard the few to save the many a form of self sacrifice? If they hadn't blown the pool up, they couldn't have won. If they had stayed exactly the same, or as close to possible as Cassie insisted on, do you really think they would have saved the world? This is part of the reason Cassie annoys me. She comes off as selfish, willing to leave the group and abandon humanity because she doesn't want to change, and apparently KAA is ok with this.

I think the reason the former is considered "good" and the latter is considered "bad" has to do with the after-the-fact moral changes that occur in one's heart. And your comments here somehow bring me back to why a show like "24" was popular in the early 2000s, but a story like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs worked in the 1930s-1950s but not now. We have become a cynical culture that tries to create stories that reflect real life, rather than stories that help us escape it. But that's less on-topic and more an interesting side-issue. What's more on-topic is:

Is sacrificing one's own soul in order to save people ever actually a good thing to do? A lot of people say, "Yes it is--- The ends justify the means in a brutal enough situation." Cassie's a person who thinks the ends don't justify the means, and never do--- Even in war. Jake was getting to the point where he was willing to justify more and more heinous actions for himself in order to save the human race. In other words, he was turning into Alloran. And the thing is....K.A. Appelgate notoriously dislikes the idea that you have to turn into a monster in order to save the world from monsters. She seems to believe there's too much of a chance you'll start doing those things for their own violent sake rather than doing them to save lives. Just like Alloran did, and in a weird way so did Visser Three. (If his younger self is any indication of what he was like before those factors began to corrupt him completely).

In my own personal opinion....You have to strike a balance between being unwilling to change and thus implicitly abandoning others for your own moral values (Like Cassie, apparently)...And letting the expediencies of an inherently messed-up situation turn you into a twisted shell of your former self (See: Jake himself, Alloran, the Visser, and a few major characters of mine). This is a really trite phrase, but "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

[Chad32]

Yes we are a more cynical people. leave It to Beaver is actually derided nowadays, and I doubt it would go anywhere if they remade the series. I know this kind of stuff isn't ideal. War itsself shouldn't be though of as ideal, though people who grew up with it will think it's fine. Of course going to the extreme one way or another is bad. Unfortunately part of Jake's downfall is the author's fault. Why did he rush into battle, but save rescuing his family last? Neither was smart, but that's just how the ghostwriter or KAA wanted it to go in order to get Jake to the point where he threatened Chapman to work around Eric's programming, and flushed a pool of Yeerks. It seemed really forced, which I think is part of the problem. Just like how Cassie let Tom's Yeerk get away with the box, even though she and Jake should have been able to capture him regardless of the dracon beam he had.

Cassie was pretty far extreme to the side of "I'd rather everyone die or be enslaved than do something I find uncomfortable", but Jake was veering to the other extreme of doing damage that didn't really need to be done. You do have to find some middle ground, and it's good to have someone like Cassie to keep you balanced. The thing was that I feel she was too close to the other extreme. Comparing morphing a sentient creature to infesting the person is ridiculous.

Cassie just doesn't feel moderate enough to play the role she's supposed to have. An anchor between extremes.

[NothingFromSomething]

I think it's a bit excessive to say that Cassie was willing to sacrifice humanity and lose the war in order to maintain her moral code.  By the end of the series she's pretty much accepted the compromise, and is in-line with the rest of 'em with the exception of still being upset/disturbed by the whole   

Marco: I know what you thought. Die, you filthy worms. Feel the fear, Yeerks. Feel the helplessness. They were suffering and dying and the thought of them suffering and dying made you thrilled. You were happy. You were high.

Jake: Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty much it, Marco. Word for word.

exchange.  Even the times she screwed everyone over with things like sacrificing the cube, she was making a three-or-four-steps-ahead play, the long game.  Not exactly being unwilling to make the hard call, more the opposite, even though it was admittedly a messed-up thing to do.

Cassie's code evolves pretty evidently throughout the series, it's just a bit less dramatic and tragic than, say, Jake's, who goes from decent stand-up guy to pretty much "I'll kill you all painfully and horribly if it means humanity survives, just the way the world works" in a couple of years.

[Chad32]

It's not excessive. She spelled it out in book 19 when she quit.

I don't see it as playing the long game, because there was no previous build up. Where was the thought process that this was what would happen if she handed over the cube? Why is it that in the last book she narrated before 50, she said them getting the cube would be the worst thing ever? Where was the foreshadowing? I don't buy that Cassie somehow knew this would happen. It was just the author trying to redeem her.