Group Re-Read: #29 The Sickness

[Chad32]

Oookay. Guess I was wrong.

[dolphin4077]

Did Cassie ever tell Tidwell and by extension the rest of the YPM that Aftran became a nothlit?  If yes, then shouldn't the YPM have asked about using the morphing cube for the rest of them?  Or do you think the Animorphs lied or let the YPM assume Aftran died of Kandrona starvation?     

[Chad32]

I don't know. It seems the authors didn't care much about the possibilities for the YPM, and for the most part they just faded out. Except near the end when one of them saved Jake, but was likely just a plot device.

[Gafrash]

Did Cassie ever tell Tidwell and by extension the rest of the YPM that Aftran became a nothlit?  If yes, then shouldn't the YPM have asked about using the morphing cube for the rest of them?  Or do you think the Animorphs lied or let the YPM assume Aftran died of Kandrona starvation?     

It would be in character if she did, me thinks.
Though the YPM going from there to asking about turning voluntary nothlits is a bit of a stretch. From the episode where David gets turned nothlit, and now Aftran here, I remember it still hadn't quite clicked in me that that was salvation, the solution to the war, at that stage.
Personally, KA can actually get away with this one.

[yunyun]

Summary

Questions
1) Why do you think that Cassie does not contract the Yamphut?

1)i think it's because Cassie works with animals and gets all those vaccines

[Terenia]

So a normal vaccine like one for rabies unknowingly also prevents Yamphut?

Possible, I suppose. It's a better explanation than I have. *shrug*

[Chad32]

I don't know if it's been said in this thread, but there's an idea going around that it was more in their heads than anything else. Jake was the first to get sick, but he didn't come down with it until after ax mentioned it was contagious. Cassie never got sick, and she was the one that had the most to worry about.

I've said that it would be funny if she got sick right at the end, which is what I expected to happen. That would have left us asking fewer questions, and the others could comically run from her in fear of catching it again.

[Gafrash]

Interesting.

[Terenia]

Maybe, but I'm not sure that a comedic ending would have fit this particular book. Unlike #14, which was a walking punchline, this particular Cassie book was more along the lines of #19. It was trying to portray a deeper message.

Now, I think they completely messed it up in some parts. I still hate that they wrote Aftran off at the end, and would have loved to see a more meaningful solution - like allowing her to take on a morph that would have been useful to the war.

Still, I don't think a comedic ending would have quite...fit.

[Chad32]

Maybe. It was a serious book, so a last comedic part wouldn't fit well.

I hate that they wrote her off too. She could have joined somehow, and have been the inside member with connections to the Peace Movement. Not that the Peace Movement panned out much either, unfortunately. The only times afterwards that they were mentioned is the second Taylor book, and one point in the last arc.

[Terenia]

Yeah, that's another irritating point. They go through all this trouble to set up the YPM and then basically ignore its potential. There were a lot of unexplored possibilities there, and I blame it primarily on the fact that AppleGrant were busy with their other series at the time. If they had given Animorphs their full attention I think we would have had fewer filler books and more books that dealt with those types of things.

[Chad32]

Yeah. KA is an excellent writer, but only when she's interested in something. once she loses interest, it goes south. Many peripheral characters weren't fleshed out nearly enough.

[Zero_Messiah]

Sorry to bump this up, but I noticed something weird.

Cassie takes Ax's temperature and says she can't confirm if Ax has a fever since she doesn't know the normal body temperature of an Andalite; Ax tells her it's 91.3 degrees, as in degrees Celsius.

Biologically speaking, this is an extremely high body temperature. For reference, pure water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Ax's temperature while in a fever was 95.5 degrees; that's pretty frickin high. Shouldn't the animorphs have been burned the moment they touched him?

Also, that was his temperature after he has 30 seconds of water drinking, which would presumably cool his body down a few degrees or so. Wouldn't the water in Cassie's trough (which Ax was drinking from) have started boiling or turned to steam? It isn't likely that the water was a pure sample, and with the impurities, it could have led to a lower boiling point.

Also, four books earlier, when Ax and the Animorphs were stranded in the North Pole after escaping from the Blade Ship, Cassie asks him how he's holding up.

Cassie: "Ax? How are you holding up?"
Ax: <I am holding nothing up. I am slowly freezing to death. I doubt I can maintain brain function for more than a few minutes.>

This wouldn't have made much sense, since Ax would have been very warm. Yes he would have lost heat, but nowhere near his body shutting down from hypothermia. Furthermore, his core body temp would have been enough to melt the venbar upon touching them. At the very least.

Any chance this is a KASU, or just a handwave as "aliens can have higher temperatures than biologically feasible"?

[Chad32]

I guess she meant to say feranheight, not celsius.

[Zero_Messiah]

That would mean Ax's temperature should have been [95.5 -32] x 5/9, or 35.2 degrees Celsius (while fevered). Would make a lot more sense. Normal andalite body temperature would be 32.9 degrees Celsius. Humans have a normal body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (more or less depending on where it's taken; orally, etc.)

That explains a lot. I find it a little strange that Cassie had a farenheit thermometer (degrees Celsius are more commonly used), but it's not impossible. Thanks for answering.