Why all the Cassie hate?

[Dylan]

While Cassie isn't my favorite character, I feel like sometimes the fans over sell how bad Cassie is. I will debunk some of the reasons why Cassie is so sh!t on:

1. Cassie's books are mostly filler.
I don't like the fact that Cassie's books are mostly filler. I feel like this is more of a strike against K.A than Cassie. K.A couldn't come up with better plots for her.

2. Cassie didn't sacrifice anything and got the happiest ending.
First of all, read The Departure. Secondly, I feel like Marco got a happier ending. He got his parents back together and he got  famous.

3. to quote poparena "Cassie is a moron".
Cassie did make some dumb decisions. But war is hard. Not everyone can do it. Cassie wasn't meant for war.  I sympathize with Cassie, because I feel like I might of the same choices. If I was in her place in The Departure, I wouldn't be sure if I could kill a small yeerk child. 

4. Cassie is static.
While Cassie didn't go threw the same level of development than other characters, she still grew. In The Test, Cassie was scared to hurt the yeerk pool. Only ten books later, Cassie was riding a subway train to blow up the yeerk pool. Read The Secret, The Departure, The Sickness, The Ultimate, and The Sacrifice, and tell me she didn't learn anything from those books.

5. Cassie is KA's favorite and is a marysue.
First, In this reddit AMA KA says Marco's her favorite. (http://www.reddit.com/comments/gzhau/iam_ka_applegate_author_of_animorphs_and_many/ ). Next a marysue is a person who can do the roles of all the other characters. Cassie obiviously can't fill the roles.

[NickDaGriff]

1. Cassie had a plotline (the YPM), but unlike the other characters' arcs, it was just glossed over and only used as a cheap "get out of jail free" card in #50 because we had to be reminded that it was still a thing that existed.  That is an issue on KAA's part, but it's still a Cassie-centric problem.

2. The Departure?  The only thing she sacrificed in that book was her own circle of friends.  She basically handed them over to Aftran on a silver platter, when Aftran was literally right in the middle of a rant on how much humans sucked.  Cassie had no reason to trust Aftran, and Aftran had no reason to not turn in Cassie.  It was just pure luck that she got trapped in the woods with the one nice yeerk in the pool.  That was no better than what happened in #50.  And as for the ending, she was the only one who wasn't ambiguously killed off, so yeah.

3. I really hope you wouldn't be the kind to sell out your friends because the going got tough.  Cowardice and foolishness are not an excuse for outright treason.  If she were in any real army, her actions would be met with capital punishment.  War demands loyalty, if nothing else.  If you can't continue to stand by your fellow soldiers, the least you can do is not fork them over to the enemy.

4. Her development doesn't make any kind of sense from a reasonable standpoint.  In#9, she's kind and compassionate... except to Tobias, whom she hurts by acting aloof, insensitive, and judgemental towards his personal crisis on the deepest, most personal level she possibly could right when he's opening up to her and offering to be best friends (and considering Tobias is my favorite character, that doesn't exactly endear her to me).  There's a reason those two never had a conversation after #9.  At the end of the book, she acts like she learned her lesson about it, but then in #19 she goes and does the exact same thing to Rachel in the name of "kindness and compassion," prompting her leave the group and sell them out to the Yeerks.  Then, she does it yet again in #50 towards Jake and hurts him even worse than anyone else by not only having a total lack of faith in him, but undermining and betraying him with physical violence when he has a shot at getting his brother back.  After the war ended, instead of trying to help Jake get over his issues, she just poured salt into the wound by actively ignoring him and dumping him for someone else when he finally voiced what was plaguing his tortured conscience.  See, there's a bit of a pattern here...

My issues with Cassie arise because her actions are in stark contrast to the kind, compassionate, understanding people-person she's painted as.  She's got no impulse control whatsoever (which I think might be the reason she's the one who always loses control of her morph), and manipulates people into doing what she wants if she feels like she doesn't have enough control in a situation.  She gets uncomfortable if she passes up an opportunity to keep the others under her thumb using moral double-standards as a vehicle.  That's why she guilts everyone all the time.  At face value, her actions make her a total monster. 

That, or she's got bigger objectives in play.  Check out this thread in its entirety.  http://animorphsforum.com/index.php?topic=10495.msg848341  I present a theory and we get way in depth on her character, covering all this and more.

[Chad32]

I might take a look at that thread. Mostly I dislike Cassie because in 19 and 50 she did some really stupid stuff, and the only reason it turned out ok was because the narrative was with her. Not because of something she did herself. It's like a worse version of seerow's Kindness. Seerow did something nice to people without taking precautions, but the Yeerks were not openly his enemies. Cassie is doing things for people who are openly her enemies.

She's not the only author avatar in the series, but Marco is done well. Cassie isn't. I remember her comparing Yeerks to a disease after 29, I think it was. She knows about the YPM, and she compares studying the Yeerks to studying a disease.

As has been mentioned above, she's not the people person she's painted as. being rude to Tobias because he killed and ate a widdle baby skunk. Abandonign the group while saying her best friend is somehow a horrible person for enjoying the good fight. Turning on Jake at a crucial moment, and giving up their one advantage for no clear reason, and latching onto the first silver lining in her mistake that she could find.

I think I understand what KAA was going for with Cassie. Someone to anchor them down so that they didn't go over the moral event horizon. She just should have been done better.

[Dylan]

I get why Cassie's hated. But, don't you think she's over hated? When I reread the series, I didn't feel like she lived up to her hatedom.

That, or she's got bigger objectives in play.  Check out this thread in its entirety.  http://animorphsforum.com/index.php?topic=10495.msg848341  I present a theory and we get way in depth on her character, covering all this and more.

Ooooh, that was interesting. I like the theory

[Chad32]

I get a lot of people saying Rachel was a psycho that couldn't hendle post war life. There was even a poster that said Marco crossed the moral event horizon when we find out he...threw a candy bar into a pool and said it was a turd. Then of course there's emo hawk. Different people dislike different characters, whether they deserve all the vitriol or not.

[Dylan]

I get a lot of people saying Rachel was a psycho that couldn't hendle post war life. There was even a poster that said Marco crossed the moral event horizon when we find out he...threw a candy bar into a pool and said it was a turd. Then of course there's emo hawk. Different people dislike different characters, whether they deserve all the vitriol or not.

guess so, that reminded me of this post: http://animorphsforum.com/index.php?topic=11191.0

[Chad32]

I'm not sure I've heard any real dislike for Ax. Jake is iffy, unless you count that he doesn't seem to stand out as much as the rest of the group.

[Dylan]

I'm not sure I've heard any real dislike for Ax. Jake is iffy, unless you count that he doesn't seem to stand out as much as the rest of the group.

Jake and Ax are the most straight forward characters . It took a while for the ball to get rolling for Jake's character. From TV tropes:Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Not hated persay, but in it's heyday, Jake was the most criticized character of the group for lacking the depth that others like Marco, Tobias, and Rachel had. Character Development kicked into high gear during the second-half of the series. and these complaints disappeared.

[Chad32]

Yeah, I can understand that criticism. It's not quite like saying he's a bad person. He just had standard leader syndrome, or whatever they call it when a character is more or less a blank slate. that way you can pretend you are Jake, somehow. To some it might help them get into it more, but to others you just have a flat boring character that's hard to empathize with.

I suppose the fact that we don't see Ax a whole lot means we don't get tired of him when he is there. He's hilarious without really meaning to be, and pulls his weight in combat. One good example is him demorphing first after they infiltrate a place. There was at least one notable time when he demorphs, there's silence, then a sudden loud thus before he says the place is clear. Because sometimes there really is an enemy in the room that they didn't detect when they were bugs.

[Dylan]

As far as 'author favorites' go, sure Marco may come up with an elaborate plan to eliminate some important people closest to him if they're posing a threat to their victory over the war, he rightfully gets seen as ice cold for that at times. But Cassie is willing to plan someone's fate to one that is worse than death, leave someone else to deal with doing the deed, and make others feel bad for it! Cassie can be quite the politician, in my opinion.

I think it was KA's reddit ama, where she that Marco was her favorite. Also on that ama, she said that one of the things she would have given Cassie's character more edge. Atleast, KA acckongled the fact that Cassie could have been better.

I suppose the fact that we don't see Ax a whole lot means we don't get tired of him when he is there. He's hilarious without really meaning to be, and pulls his weight in combat. One good example is him demorphing first after they infiltrate a place. There was at least one notable time when he demorphs, there's silence, then a sudden loud thus before he says the place is clear. Because sometimes there really is an enemy in the room that they didn't detect when they were bugs.

I see Ax more as the comic releif than Marco. IDK why

[Chad32]

I see him as mostly comic relief too. He does fill some roles that the others can't do themselves, but a large part of his character is being a goofball. Part of the problem is that he insists on being a follower. Whatever Prince Jake says, he does. If I changed the characters any, I might have made ax the ruthless one instead of Marco, helped by the fact that he isn't Human and doesn't give intrinsic value to them like the other Humans of the group might. Marco could still be the funny guy, and only sane man.

The main way Ax stands out is when he's being unintentionally funny, so yeah he's mostly comic relief outside of combat.

[Dylan]

Am I the only person here who loves The Departure?

[Chad32]

Not sure there's much to like about #19. Aftran's arguments are kind of weak, saying that enslaving a sentient person is better than eating a domesticated animal. Yes, people mistreat animals in factory farms. That needs fixing. That doesn't mean we somehow deserve to be enslaved because some people hold animals in pens so small they can't turn around in them.

Karen being free at the end, despite what we see happen in #8, is so unbelievable that people had to come up with a theory that she'd being controlled by a member of the YPM instead.

What exactly is there to love abotu this book?

[Dylan]

[spoiler]Cassie's interactions with Karen are positively mesmerizing. Up until now in the series, we've been led to believe that it's exactly as you're likely to see in pretty much every other MG novel or TV show in existence: all the yeerks are evil, they're all irredeemable, and they all need to die. But for the first time, we see that it isn't like that, that it's actually so much more complicated. This is the first time we see that Karen's yeerk is a person too. Let me tell you, after 18 books of seeing the yeerks as evil, this was tough for me to wrap my mind around as a kid. But now, I couldn't be more grateful that Applegate decided to include it in the series. I personally think it's a horrible message to send to kids that an entire species can be pure evil; how does that bode for them when they get into a real war? How does it bode for them when they think it's good that the other side is dying in mass numbers, because they're all evil? This is the kind of attitudes that caused the Holocaust, people. But Applegrant is so much better that. The situation that the yeerks are in is completely explored, and poignantly as well; by the end of the book, we're not completely sure that the Animorphs are the good guys anymore.

This is exactly the kind of thing that kids need to read. Kids need to understand from an early age that morality isn't black and white, that there's no such thing as pure evil or pure good. Kids need to read thought-provoking things like this; that's what makes them smarter, what helps them learn how to think for themselves. How could you justify giving a book to kids that makes them think that the enemy is evil, and the enemy is always evil? That sends the message not only that pure good and evil exist, but that all evil needs to be vanquished (again, that's basically what the Holocaust was), and that the protagonist - and by extension the reader - is always good. It makes kids less likely to consider that they're wrong, and God knows, it's already hard enough. But Animorphs is the antithesis to all that; like a lot of series, it presents a complicated conflict, but unlike most, it actually explores what makes that conflict so complicated. For the first time, Cassie, (and by extension the reader) is forced to look at things through a yeerk's perspective, and once you do that, you can sort of see why they want to take over the world.[/spoiler]

[Chad32]

Yes it does show that they're not all evil, and it's good that they did that. I'd just prefer it was done differently. It didn't make me doubt that the Anis are the good guys. They're kids just trying to save the planet. It sucks to be a Yeerk without a host, or to be under the thumb of someone like V3, but that's not really the kid's problem. That's a Yeerk problem. Throwing all this on Cassie, or any kid, is a cheap move. As if she really has any ability to change that without the Yeerks trying something too?

It was poorly done, had a bad framing device, and in the end didn't have much payoff because the YPM was never developed.