Ellimist Chronicles Revisited

[Chad32]

Crayak's acension was barely gone over. It was like "I don't see how it could happen twice, but it did. So now Crayak is the same as me."

Why the Ellemist didn't just destroy Crayak right then and there, instead of just saving Earth, I don't know. It's morally acceptable for the Hero to kill someone if they are a Complete Monster.

[AniDragon]

I think Ellimist didn't kill Crayak for the same reason Crayak didn't kill Ellimist. Deep down, he knew he needed him. He was bored with his ascended life, and needed someone, anyone, to talk to and challenge him.

I loved the Ellimist Chronicles, personally. It's one of the books that I've re-read over and over. The Ketran society is fascinating, and I could really identify with Ellimist as a gamer.

Yeah, I would have preferred to hear more about Crayak and the Time Matrix, but what we DID get was awesome enough that that's forgivable.

[Chad32]

Crayak didn't kill Ellemist because when he tried, he couldn't. At first he didn't see him as a threat. The second time, he tried to kill Ellemist in a sneak assault, but Ellemist was too strong. Neither of them need each other. Either one could just do what Ellemist did on the Andalite world. Just live with the locals for a while, and move on.

[wotw2112]

Crayak's acension was barely gone over. It was like "I don't see how it could happen twice, but it did. So now Crayak is the same as me."

Hahaha!  Well said.

Why the Ellemist didn't just destroy Crayak right then and there, instead of just saving Earth, I don't know. It's morally acceptable for the Hero to kill someone if they are a Complete Monster.

Good question.  But Batman wouldn't agree with the second part.  He never killed anyone no matter how evil (or so the Dark Knight version of Batman claims).

I think Ellimist didn't kill Crayak for the same reason Crayak didn't kill Ellimist. Deep down, he knew he needed him. He was bored with his ascended life, and needed someone, anyone, to talk to and challenge him.

Maybe, but there goes any claim to moral highground.

[AlothAssassin]

Batman's morals are stupid.  Seriously, what's the Joker's bodycount nowadays?  I think I read somewhere it was close to a thousand, or even exceeding that.  Batman not killing is selfish BS, it's not based on morality.  He's just scared he's going to go some dark place he doesn't want to.  

Really, Gotham's clown wouldn't get 30 seconds into a conversation with The Punisher, let alone be let hanging around for a decade or two in continuity slaying dozens of people in one citing for fun.  Freakin' Frank would pull his head off.  Locking someone like Joker up is ridiculous, he's smarter than the people incarcerating him and is always going to find a way to break out sooner or later.  Bruce is a misguided dummy.

[/necessary rant]


Chad, what's your logic there, man?  Why is it difficult to believe that Toomin's the only living organism to have ascended into the space-time net?  The book wasn't telling Crayak's story, that's why we never delve into his origin.  But there's absolutely nothing to say Crayak couldn't have had a similar background, a mortal who finds himself in unusual circumstances (not necessarily a giant fungal organism capturing him, it could be anything) and transcends that boundary into Godliness.

I mean, of course on a practical level he was put in the books to flesh out the Ellimist.  But there's no reason to say it's stupid for him to exist.  I mean, Ellimist exists, right?  There aren't many occurrences in history or science that are absolutely unique and never to be repeated.

[Chad32]

Ascension into the kind of thing the Ellemist became after defeating father is one thing. But becoming a possibly invulnerable being capable of amnipulating time just because you went through a black hole, real space, and Z-Space all at once? And that happening on two occassions? If that's how Crayak did it. It's just not within my willingess to suspend my disbelief.

And I know it was more about the Ellemist than anything else, but I would have enjoyed background on Crayak too.

[AlothAssassin]

Okay.  But if the Ellimist did all of that, there's no reason to say Crayak and The Big Bad, and I guess even The One on a perhaps less-powerful scale, didn't experience similar development processes.

They're all more or less immortal (maybe The One excluded), not all-powerful but close enough to it from a biological organism's perspective, and they all operate outside of our 4-dimensional understanding.

Why does it have to happen the exact same way it did for Toomin?  If they were all more significant characters in terms of the influence on the main story of the 5 kids, I'm sure we'd probably find out their origins.

As it is, though, we just have to assume that Toomin isn't some unique anomaly throughout this vast crazy universe, and accept that if a writer's going to pull some crazy crap with black holes and the fabric of space itself, that the universe is probably vast enough that it's happened someplace else before, with different details.

[Chad32]

I guess so.

[ThinkAgain]

I agree that it's not impractical.

Even today people think that we're alone in the universe. The universe is a big place. If life can come about in different circumstances, I'm sure ascension into a higher dimension is certainly possible in different circumstances, it just likely occurs less often.

[AlothAssassin]

We're pretty obviously not alone in the universe, but we'll never come into contact with anything sentient.  At least not until we're advanced enough and stupid enough to go looking.

Nothing that has technology advanced enough to travel lightyears is going to be dumb enough to make contact with us.

[ThinkAgain]

AlothAssassin... You forget. We have cinnamon buns.

On a more serious note, I'd say that anything intelligent enough to travel light years would have a naturally strong sense of curiosity, which even we mere humans can claim to have. Curiosity is enough to make smart people go exploring, even if it's in stupid places.

[AlothAssassin]

Any being who can make it here from so far away has enough intelligence to know that we're unpredictable dangerous panicky looneys who would try to blow them right out of the sky, or capture them and poke them with sharp stuff in crude medical experiments.

If they're gonna come here, we're not going to know about it.

[ThinkAgain]

If they're gonna come here, we're not going to know about it.

I agree. But they would likely observe us out of curiosity, and likely perform experiments on humans, who would probably be wiped to not remember a thing.

[AniDragon]

So the Skrit Na, essentially.

Speaking of the Skrit Na, anyone else notice them being mentioned in the first part of the Ellimist Chronicles? Those guys have been around for a WHILE.

[AlothAssassin]

Yeah.  Slow evolvers, I guess.