Author Topic: Things That Bug  (Read 5740 times)

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Offline LisaCharly

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #45 on: September 09, 2010, 10:25:58 PM »
Book 11 is pretty lame, as are MM3 and about half of MM4. MM2 is horrible but it fulfills every child-like fantasy of mine. nimorphs and dinosaurs and aliens and jokes about broccoli! I'm ten years old again!

Offline Nara

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #46 on: September 10, 2010, 05:17:15 AM »
Quote from: Darth Rosenberg (BroKit) [<3's Ash!!!
I normally know I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming... I hate it when I read something, or watch something, and then find out that NONE OF IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED!
I havent read the book you're talking about, unfortunately, but I gotta say that when I'm asleep I'm usually not conscious of the fact that the dream is not real. Just this morning when I woke up I had to reload my brain for 10 minutes to remember what parts of the dream really happened in real life and which didnt. Sometimes I'm not sure which is a real memory and which was just an event in a dream. Like I remember that a person I know said she might be pregnant and I'm still not totally sure was it a dream or not. >8/ And I'm not gonna ask her. It must have been a dream.
Other than that I too hate movies (and books too) which make you watch an utterly long scene, only to be revealed that it didnt happen. Makes you think that was the most pointless thing Ive ever seen.
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Offline LisaCharly

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #47 on: September 10, 2010, 11:11:18 AM »
As far as I can recall, Mulholland Drive is the only thing I've seen pull off a long dream sequence with the big reveal and not have it seem fake. And it actually captures dream logic fairly well. Not perfectly, but fairly well.

Personally, I usually either know I'm dreaming for the whole dream or stay oblivious the whole time. There's no point where I'm like "this doesn't make sense!" and I suddenly realize it's a dream.

Anyway, back to Aminorphs. I do wish we'd seen more of the parents, especially mid-series, and gotten a bit more of an explanation as to why they were so oblivious. Naomi and Peter I could understand - Naomi had two other kids to watch and was apparently very busy with her job, and Peter was just a terribly irresponsible parent from the get-go - but Jake and Cassie's parents seemed relatively attentive and close to their kids, and yet we see more suspicion from Rachel's dad than we do Walter, Michelle, Steve and Jean. A few more scenes of the kids and their homelives would have been nice, especially since the ghostwriters tended not to do them.

Also, in #47, the fact that nobody mentions that Marco "died" is a bit irksome. All Jean wants Jake to do is clean the basement? No mention whatsoever of "your best friend of nearly a decade was mysteriously gunned down I'm really sorry but you still have to do chores"? Really? The fact that AX saw the aftermath of Marco's "death" more than Jake is just downright weird.

Offline CounterInstinct

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #48 on: September 11, 2010, 03:00:11 AM »
Cassie-like in a sense that, you're into your dreams and all that mystic what not. :P
@LisaCharly:
Absolutely! A great filler plot would be Jake acting as if Marco had really died. Like he had to act the part, or the Yeerks would get suspicious and... fine, it's a bit lame. :))
I'm just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end. I've spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I've written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To th

Offline roguebluejay

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #49 on: September 11, 2010, 09:24:42 AM »
Actually thats an awesome idea for a fanfic. Being called into chapmans office or something, having to see a guidance councilor. I like fanfics without action (weirdly enough) because they explore the emotional depths rather than just ZZAAP! I cut off the Hork Bajirs leg!

Then again, I like that too!

Offline Coal Kropotkin

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #50 on: September 11, 2010, 12:21:30 PM »
Haha. I love dreams. Whenever I remember my dreams, I always immediately go look in my dream book. :P

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Offline Chad32

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #51 on: September 11, 2010, 12:27:54 PM »
I started to keep a dream book too at one point. Mainly because sometimes I have repeat dreams and it helped me remember the places I had been to before. I was also trying to get into lucid dreaming. I don't do it anymore, though.


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Offline Aluminator (Kit)

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #52 on: September 13, 2010, 10:41:36 PM »
Haha. I like where this thread's gone ;D

Most of the stuff that bugs me has already been stated- the repeated phrases are a big one. It seemed like every single ghostwriter, and even KA, was just recycling that stuff for most of the series. I don't think I even read most of the morphing paragraphs the first time through the series. They're easily spotted and avoided filler.

Lisa, I would have said it if you hadn't already brought it up, but yeah, we don't get to see enough of their home lives. Again, I feel like that's a bit of a shift as the series goes on. Early on, we have many small scenes of them at home or school or whatever, and we actually get to see how this story relates to the real world. Later, the books trended more towards just opening in the middle of a mission, focusing on what goes wrong, and then closing with them being successful, with no sense at all that these might be normal kids aside from that intro repeated for the fortieth time or whatever. Actually, Lisa, I agree with you about 30 being an excellent book, and I think a big portion of that can be attributed to the fact that it so effectively entwines Marco's personal life with the invasion.

I loved the direction Rachel was taking by the end of the David trilogy. I was looking forward to seeing where she'd go, how she'd cope, and how it would end up. But when the ghostwriters took over, she became scary inconsistent, lost all of her personality aside from brutality, and turned into a one-dimensional crazy person who wouldn't be fit for anything but war. That's not the character development I was hoping for. She may have been losing control or whatever, but it felt like the writers were doing the characterization equivalent of recycling morphing phrases.

Visser 3's decay is disappointing as well. He was scary at first, but by the time you've got the Animorphs giggling about him bathing in grape juice to get rid of skunk smell, he sort of loses that intimidation factor. I know if I were the Anis, he wouldn't have sent a chill down my spine or whatever just by walking into the room for the entire series. I might just start laughing by the 20th or 30th time I met him.

I dunno, I guess most of my complaints revolve around the decay of the series later on, and how formulaic it started to feel.

Most of things I can't stand revolve around some people's morphing theories that involve nanobots.

Aw. Haha. Ouch. I like our theory. I mean, I can see not agreeing with it, but "can't stand" seems a little harsh :P

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Offline Chad32

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #53 on: September 13, 2010, 11:34:55 PM »
I don't mind theories about nanobots, personally. I mean it is technology on a molecular level. Nanobots should fit in with it. Then again some things may be better unexplained, such as medichlorians. Or however you spell the word from Star Wars. I'd rather it be a mystical force than whatever medichlorians are supposed to be.


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Offline Gafrash

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #54 on: September 14, 2010, 06:54:14 AM »
Things that bug me:

How Cassie lived in a farm, but the only one mentioned to have a proper dog was Jake.
Why couldn't Cassie get a kelpie or something...

One thing that annoyed me was the lack of using dog morphs. And when they did use them it was pretty much fu n and games, whereas wolf form was used in battles often. Seriously, there are plenty of breeds that are superior in strenght to wolves and even leopards. And using a dog morph would have been quite practical in spying situations in public places, you just look like a stray dog, though a very muscular one.

Breeds that are able to kill a wolf and a human if controlled by an Animorph, go Google 'em up, see what I mean: German Shepherd (very common, easy to find, doesnt attract attention, possibly weakest of the breeds I mention), Bernese Mountain Dog (common as well, very strong but not naturally aggressive), Greater Swiss Mountain Dog (great strenght, a rare breed), American Bulldog (common in USA, rare elsewhere), Mastiff (common and a true gladiator breed), Bullmastiff (a bit smaller than Mastiff, common), Caucasian Ovtcharka (common in Europe and Russia. Very aggressive and powerful, used to guard sheep from wolves and bears, also used to guard the Berlin Wall), Central Asian Ovtcharka (a bit rare, closely related to Caucasian Ovtcharka), Kangal/Anatolian Shepherd (very savage, large but agile, these dogs eat wolves for breakfast), Great Dane (common), Rottweiler (very common) and the list goes on and on and on.
Thank you, Nara, I totally agree with this too. I would even add a Dobermann to your mighty canine list up there. David would have morphed a Dobermann, me thinks.   ;)
Being a 'dog person', I know enough about dogs to know that the Anis, a character like Cassie, could have exploited that a lot. Instead we get the good old Golden Retriever and Irish Setters (goofy fun) and Poodle (annoying temperament). Dogs and cats are like central to human dwellings, wish that could have been more explored.


I for one was really ticked off by some of the inconsistencies in onomatopeia throughout the series (ref. to animal, alien, tech sounds etc...). Let's all agree that the 'TSEEEW!' sound is trademark in the books. But it was typed different every now and again. And in the Andalite Chronicles, the Andalite shredder was applied as TTTSSSAP! or something. But in The Arrival, Gonrod's crew were using Andalite weapons that sounded an awful lot like TSEEEWWW! or something like a dracon beam. "GHAFRASH!" was sometimes "GAFRASH!" and so on.
 

If I had a dollar for every time I read, "Bird of prey don't exactly get along," or "Hawk eyes aren't exactly good for seeing in the dark, but are great for stargazing," I could probably pay to have a movie made >_>
Hahah!

The fact that Tobias was being set up to be this Andalite descendant of Elfangor's lineage, and then virtually NOTHING was done with him, post-The Illusion. The character got quite bland, whinny even, to me after a certain point.


anytime an Andalite was mentioned as having only one stalk eye or some awesome scars to increase his bad ass points, I couldn't believe he'd never morphed once after his injury to fix it.
THIS bugged me, too. By the same token, the fact that we were NEVER given any further cues as to what could have been that notorious 'lethal injury' that a Prince full of zeal such as Elfangor couldn't morph/heal himself out of.

On a similar note, also, the ambiguity about how one acquires the morphing power through contact with the blue cube. Does one need a conscious agent with the latent ability or does one touch the device and just go on random physical contacts and that's all that is required.


That whole thing with Helmacrons don't really 'die' and only enrich their colony or something, that really bugged me.


Something that always bugged the hell out of me, was the characterization of Rachel slowly becoming all crazy psycho warrior girl. When in the last book of the David trilogy, there is a passage near the very end that specifically states how Rachel herself sort of lost the exciting thrill she always had for the war and "grew up a little bit" after the trauma of the whole David situation. I don't know, I guess I thought it was a nice touch for her as a character that was just thrown out the window, and now Rachel is regarded as this dark warrior who loved the war just a little too much.
I really hate that portrayal too. she acted quite dark in the David trilogy, and two of the last things she did was say no to ultimate power and think about shopping just before the polar bear morpher killed her.
Yes she was the darkest Ani, but she never really lost herself. On TV Tropes someone called her a Blood Knight as soon as she took the grizzly bear morph, and that's just ridiculous.
:bow2: This is gold! Totally agree with yas.

The fact that nothing ever came of Erek's magical untraceable phone number at the end of #10. Would've been cool if they'd Chekov's Gunned it and brought it back when they couldn't find the Chee in the final arc, instead of being like "Marco tried, he didn't find them, so I was was like "try harder!" and he did". Even aside from that it just seems like it would have been handy....
HAHAH!  :rofl2:


(1). The fact that Visser Three seemed to suffer from an almost fatal case of Villain Decay as the series went on. Not that he was exactly brilliant in the earlier books either, but there was something about him that was freaky. It was probably from sheer lack of experience and the lack of knowledge I had as a reader, but the situations the Animorphs got into "back then" seemed far more compromising than what occurred later. Though they did quite a few silly things too, and it did get more thematically complicated as it went along...
Yeah, I share this feeling, too. You can only attribute this 'decay' to ghostwriters.
Visser Three creeped the far out of readers early on and maybe even through the middle of the series. He was chopping heads and bursting thoughts into the protagonists' minds. Later on, he's just this automaton, still doing these things to some degree, but resembling 'sizzle with no stake'.


The Varnax was a morph that intrigued me, but we got zero more than that scen in #The Visitor. Really wanted to see the Visser pull the Yeerkbane morph on one of his subordinates.


Offline CounterInstinct

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #55 on: September 14, 2010, 07:45:17 AM »
Another interesting thought is Cassie getting a Yeerkbane morph, the morph most effective to kill a Yeerk without damaging a host body. Will she kill a life to save another?  :angel:
I'm just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end. I've spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I've written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To th

Offline Chad32

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #56 on: September 14, 2010, 07:49:54 AM »
I doubt that the Yeerkbane evolved to take the Yeerk out without also ripping pieces of brain our as well. I dare think that the Yeerkbane may have started as a brain eater at first, but also ate Yeerks if they were inside the brain.


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Offline CounterInstinct

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #57 on: September 14, 2010, 07:53:34 AM »
Well, maybe the Yeerkbane already started out as Yeerk eaters before the Yeerks even learned to infest brains. Also, if the Yeerkbane lets the host live, for instance a Gedd, they sort of share a symbiotic relationship. A living Gedd would take on more Yeerks, thus more food for the Yeerkbane. If the Yeerkbane killed both host and Yeerk, then the Yeerks would eventually lose hosts, and the Yeerkbane would go hungry in turn.

I doubt Yeerkbanes could directly eat Yeerks from the pool; if that was the case, then the Yeerks would be extinct long ago.  ;D
I'm just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end. I've spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I've written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To th

Offline A ghost you know

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #58 on: September 14, 2010, 08:14:04 AM »
Quote from: Gafrash
Quote from: anijen21
anytime an Andalite was mentioned as having only one stalk eye or some awesome scars to increase his bad ass points, I couldn't believe he'd never morphed once after his injury to fix it.
THIS bugged me, too. By the same token, the fact that we were NEVER given any further cues as to what could have been that notorious 'lethal injury' that a Prince full of zeal such as Elfangor couldn't morph/heal himself out of.
I can probably answer both of those, actually.
In #7, Cassie shows Jake a scar she got from a raccoon, despite the fact that all the Animorphs were morphing quite regularly. I guess the scars existed before the Andalites (or Cassie, in her case) gained the morphing power.
Many, many times the Animorphs mentioned that morphing drains their energy. Someone dying from a lethal wound, who had presumably had that wound for some time, may not have the energy to morph, which appears to be what happened to Elfangor.

Quote from: Gafrash
On a similar note, also, the ambiguity about how one acquires the morphing power through contact with the blue cube. Does one need a conscious agent with the latent ability or does one touch the device and just go on random physical contacts and that's all that is required.
Per the "buffahuman" book, it looks like a random physical contact is all that's required.
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Offline Gafrash

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Re: Things That Bug
« Reply #59 on: September 16, 2010, 04:55:43 AM »
Another thing that bugged me, was the whole "perhaps we can 'turn off' the Leeran psychic probing thing"... WTH?! If I want to stop seeing, I shut my eyes, I use my eye lids to do that, yes. But psychic ability?! Really had to stretch to picture how exactly the morphs could simply switch that sort of thing?!
And then the fact that they never re-did a Leeran morph. The Anis could have fixed a significant number of issues by resourcing to them. Surely, towards those decisive stages of the war (ref. selecting new Animorphs, detecting Controllers in the armed forces) Jake would have thought of using the Leeran, inspite the whole no sentient morph rule.   

Quote from: Gafrash
Quote from: anijen21
anytime an Andalite was mentioned as having only one stalk eye or some awesome scars to increase his bad ass points, I couldn't believe he'd never morphed once after his injury to fix it.
THIS bugged me, too. By the same token, the fact that we were NEVER given any further cues as to what could have been that notorious 'lethal injury' that a Prince full of zeal such as Elfangor couldn't morph/heal himself out of.
I can probably answer both of those, actually.
In #7, Cassie shows Jake a scar she got from a raccoon, despite the fact that all the Animorphs were morphing quite regularly. I guess the scars existed before the Andalites (or Cassie, in her case) gained the morphing power.
Many, many times the Animorphs mentioned that morphing drains their energy. Someone dying from a lethal wound, who had presumably had that wound for some time, may not have the energy to morph, which appears to be what happened to Elfangor.
I always looked at that Cassie scar thing as a KASU. Cassie had to say something along those lines to do with the context at the time. Being the 'junior vet' and all, she was the only one who could have said this to cover the whole thing they were debating on the Ellimist's prepositions.

The Morphing Process doesn't take a 'snap' of the subjects physical conditions. It 'saves' the original, DNA. A scar is not a genetic trait. It is a genetic 'patch' up on a superficial injury.
I find it more plausible that those Andalite officers may well have been before the whole technology was made available, and perhaps Prince Seerow's tech was only viable for up-coming Andalites. Notice it was mostly the young ones who were shown to express interest and fully exercised morphing.


Quote from: Gafrash
On a similar note, also, the ambiguity about how one acquires the morphing power through contact with the blue cube. Does one need a conscious agent with the latent ability or does one touch the device and just go on random physical contacts and that's all that is required.
Per the "buffahuman" book, it looks like a random physical contact is all that's required.
Oh, man, that is just cheap! I'm sorry.
How many insects could have potentially touched the Cube when it was disguised as a photo album stickit thing in Cassie's bedroom?! And, if we go further down these lines, what about all the bacteria that inevitably comes in contact with it?!?!