Dethroning Moment of Suck

[Darth Zakryn]

Well, each of the characters had them. Which was the Dethroning Moment of Suck for the characters in your opinion?

1. Jake - Can't think of one... I'll add it soon.
2. Rachel - When she thought suicidal people were stupid.
3. Tobias - When he pierced open the Controller's eye in #9. The Secret.
4. Cassie - When she erased John Berryman from existence.
5. Marco - When he wanted to kill Karen.
6. Ax - Whenever he derides human technology.

And Visser One is just one big long DMOS in my opinion.

Your thoughts?

[Aquilai]

Jake <- Flushing 17,000 unslaved Yeerks

Edit:

Actually, I sympathized with him, and even thought it was completely justified. I also thought he had every right to enjoy it. It's amazing, but I can't really think of a Dethroning Moment of Suck for Jake.

For me that was the most disgusted I ever got with Jake. How many Yeerks in that pool were with the Yeerk Peace Movement? Sure he regrets the decision later but 17,000 unarmed lives were lost on a whim. Do you know how many 17,000 is? 9/11 cost 3000 lives? That's more than 5, 9/11s for a distraction!!

I only wrote the one line (unedited) because for the others nothing stands out quite as much as Jake's decision.

[Darth Zakryn]

Actually, I sympathized with him, and even thought it was completely justified. I also thought he had every right to enjoy it. It's amazing, but I can't really think of a Dethroning Moment of Suck for Jake. Aqua, do you have any for any other characters?

[Noelle]

I can't think of all right at this moment, but I do have a few that stand out.

Ax: The closest I ever came to hating Ax was when he was on his vecol kick in book 40.  He was seriously, outright cruel to Mertil, and even called him useless to his face.  For the vast majority of the series I <3 Ax, but I seriously wanted to drop kick him in the face for 98% of that book.


Cassie: Letting Tom get away with the blue box.  Hands down.  I'm sure they could have found another way to win the Yeerk war without giving them morphing technology.  I'm sure Arbron would have known to ask for morphing technology for the Taxxons without finding out the Yeerks got it.  And fair enough if she's all squicked out about Jake killing Tom, but I'm sure she could have worked out a capture with Jake instead of "omg I lurve the Yeerks...lets give them our only weapon!"  Because she revealed to Ax that was a big reason of why she let him get away with the box, not just the prevention of death, because like I said, I'm sure a wolf and a tiger can knock out a human, drag him back to camp, and starve out the Yeerk for three days.


Jake: Sacrificing Rachel.  Again, I just couldn't help but think there was some other way to win.  I really didn't see anything wrong with him flushing the Yeerks, peace movement or no.  Whether or not you want to be peaceful with your slave, you are still enslaving someone.  Stockholm/Lima syndrome doesn't make it right.  They were parasites, and we had every right to deworm the human race.


I'll post others if I can think of them.

[Darth Zakryn]

Flushing Yeerks: Do you know how many died because of them, suffered horrifically? Sure, their goals may be morally ambiguous, but that doesn't make their actions any less wrong. Rape, slavery, death, mental torture, physical torture - need I go on? In war, anything goes. I think that was the point of the series. I agree the part could've been done a little better, but I think it was a totally justified decision. I subcribe to the eye for an eye philosophy, and that was keeping in tone with it.

Cassie: Really? So just letting someone get away with the cube isn't worse than totally erasing someone and annihilating his soul?

[Noelle]

Cassie: Really? So just letting someone get away with the cube isn't worse than totally erasing someone and annihilating his soul?

Like I said in my post, they could have easily captured him and starved the Yeerk out.  The yeerk was a warrior fighting in a war, so erasing his soul is part of the war. 

As for Cassie, she was always the one that came up with all the creative ideas for avoiding casualties and killing.  In my opinion, there is no way she didn't think of just capturing him, especially since they've done it before with Jake.  She confirmed it later to Ax, she WANTED him to have the cube.  She took a huge risk in the war that, in my opinion, ended up killing Rachel and Tom.  If the Yeerk was starved out of Tom, Rachel wouldn't have had to suicide to kill him later.  She made a dumb decision without consulting the rest of the group, and even admitted to it.



Oh, you were talking about Visser Four.  Yeah, I think it was worse than that.  The thing was, that guy was probably going to have to die one way or another.  That was one casualty.  With the morphing cube thing, she caused, in my mind, three.  Jake, who was never right again, Tom, and Rachel.

[Darth Zakryn]

John Berryman never existed. What if there IS a heaven? What if his soul never existed? What if it was destroyed? How would God feel about that, assuming there is a God? How could Cassie ever explain THAT to the big man?

"Sorry to destroy a person's soul, God, but it was war. We were desperate."

In my mind it wasn't even necessary since they had a freaking time machine!! They could have prevented the Yeerk from stealing the Time Matrix and at least killed him, rather than erased his existence. You think abortion is murder, correct? Well, this is the same thing.

[Noelle]

1) I never said abortion was murder, I said it was sad, but it was not murder.  (Except for the third trimester, needless abortions.)
2) If there is a God and a Heaven, then his soul was probably not erased, and he would be born into a new, probably better, circumstantial life.
3) In this circumstance, he never suffered. Cassie caused a lot of suffering with the morphing cube decision.  Preventing a pregnancy is not murder.  Causing the death of your friends IS.  Arguing that this is murder is like saying using protection is murder.  Well if you didn't, a life COULD have happened.  Well, due to the Time Matrix, this time it didn't.  I'm not saying that this was Cassie's most shining moment, but it definitely pales in comparison to her indirectly causing the death of her friends.

[Terenia]

So the following is a poor defense?

"Sorry to destroy a person's soul, God, but it was war. We were desperate."

But you said just one post previously, in reference to Jake:

In war, anything goes

This seems somewhat contradictory.

In reference to the 17,000 Yeerks...let me point you to this quote: "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Can't remember who said it, but I think it is quite eloquent. People bemoan Rachel's death because they were attached to her. Or even Berryman's erasure from existence because they sympathized with his plight.

But out of those 17,000 Yeerks....you don't know how many Rachels and Berrymans were among them. A number that large is hard to comprehend, but each of those Yeerks was an individual, with hopes, dreams, goals and ambitions. They weren't all evil Imperial Visser Three clones.

So yeah, I'd say Jake's biggest moment of suck would be flushing 17,000 helpless lives down the drain when they had no possible way to defend themselves.

[Aquilai]

@Noelle_Winters
Ax is my favourite Animorph. This is the only time that I was disappointed with him. Disapproving of Mertil because he was a vecol (crippled/didn't have a bladed tail). This is due to his Andalite upbringing; the way Andalite society is. If Ax did become friends with Mertil early on then he might show a kinder side to vecols like Gafinilan did but that's not how his history went. Really though, if this is Ax's worst moment it's barely anything. Everyone has their prejudices and it's not like Ax actually harmed anyone either.

The Yeerks may have been born to be good at enslavement but that doesn't mean they all deserve to die. Imagine an ecologically loving advanced alien species who see humans as parasitic beings because we violate our planet by pollution, excessive deforestation + mining, eating other lifeforms, killing animals for our own fashion.  Does that mean we ALL deserve to be wiped out? Say we develop a spaceship to transport 17,000 humans to live on another Earth-like planet does that mean this tree hugging alien can blast the ship as a warning to the rest of us? Feel free to ignore this as hypothetical but it is a rough approximation.

Of course, your opinion of letting Rachel die is valid as a big no no but Jake seriously lost respect with me big time by mass murdering 17,000 defenceless sentient beings.

Cassie causing John Berryman to not exist is a debatable one for me. On the one hand erasing someone from existence because they are an inconvenience is bad. On the other hand, if you change history (and those who know me, know I love the idea of time travel) you're bound to affect people anyway. Another out of context example might be just going back in time knocking on the door of a couple trying to reproduce. This relatively harmless action could affect which sperm meets the egg etc producing a completely different person with a different set of genes. Does this new person have the same soul as the alternate timeline one?

I'm not too good at recalling all the bad Cassie situations but I'd think setting up the situation to imprison David as rat is probably one of Cassie's worst. Even she should have nightmares about that.

[Noelle]

While I don't agree with the argument that Yeerks are evil, I do believe that they were antithetical to the existence of humans.  They are the invaders.  We never asked them to come here.  We have every right to kill them and get them off our planet, whether it's one at a time or millions at a time.  Now, I agree, there may be some innocents on there, there may be some that didn't want to enslave or be in the war, but that is on Visser 3's karma tab, not Jake's.

If the humans decided to start a war with another planet, mixed a bunch of civilians in with all the warriors and sent them to the planet on a ship, and the inhabitants of that planet killed the ship in self defense...is it the other planet's inhabitants fault that civilians died?  Nope, that's humans for being stupid and cruel enough to put civilians in a war zone.  Jake had every right to defend his planet and win the war.  It's not his fault Visser Three had civilians on that ship.


While the argument can be made that some people liked having a Yeerk in their brain, they were still enslaving us.  Like I said above, if I develop a case of stockholm syndrome, it doesn't make it right for you to enslave me.  I know some Yeerks had a change of heart WHILE on earth, but that doesn't give them any more right to be here.  That's like a burglar coming in, setting up shop in my house and forcing me to be his slave, then him going.  "Man, that kind of sucked.  My bad.  Well, I'm gonna stay here, but maybe I'll try to get some burglar convention together to try and get all the burglars to be nice to the people they rob of their lives."  Um...yeah...that's nice...but GTFO of my house...lol.

[Alic]

Sorry, I would have done what Jake has done.
I'd rather destroy 17k of the potential enemy rather than chance that 17k being controllers.
I am with "anything goes."
You do what you have to do to protect your own.

[Aquilai]

Sorry it was my fault for starting to get you off topic but well argued! +1

I can definitely see your point of view with Lima or Stockholm syndrome. Your analogy is better too (specifying mixing soldiers and civilians). I'll still stress the fact they're unarmed, not in any position to harm anyone yet and Jake simply ordered their deaths with no significant tactical benefit. His decision (explained also later in the book) was based on anger. Using your burglar situation, it's more like shooting an unarmed burglar for approaching your house when they're not even inside (on Earth) yet.

[DinosaurNothlit]

If the humans decided to start a war with another planet, mixed a bunch of civilians in with all the warriors and sent them to the planet on a ship, and the inhabitants of that planet killed the ship in self defense...is it the other planet's inhabitants fault that civilians died?  Nope, that's humans for being stupid and cruel enough to put civilians in a war zone.  Jake had every right to defend his planet and win the war.  It's not his fault Visser Three had civilians on that ship.

While I do like that analogy, it isn't entirely accurate.  Keep in mind that the Andalites quarantined the Yeerk homeworld.  Basically, any Yeerks who got off-world had no choice but to stay that way.  And given that most of the Yeerks invading earth were second generation, and it was their parents who had decided to leave their planet in the first place, you can't really blame the Yeerk empire completely for putting civilians in harm's way.  I'd say in this case the blame is probably a four-way split between the Yeerks, the Andalites, Jake, and Cassie for making the situation desperate enough that Jake felt he had to do what he did.

. . . Oh, wait, make that a five-way split.  Forgot that it was Ax who actually pushed the button to flush the Yeerks.

[Chad32]

Jake: Flushing 17k for a distraction, and using the auxilaries as bait seems pretty bad. Using Erek I'm kind of on the fence about, since I can't think of another way to bypass his programming. Maybe if he didn't spring it on Erek suddenly, or just bluffed about it. Yeah we've got these people somewhere that we won't tell you where. Though that would kind of bite too.

Or how about in 31 where unless I'm mistaken it didn't even cross his mind to rescue Tom when the Yeerks were expecting that Yeerk to die?

Cassie: Letting Tom get away with the box, and trapping David as a rat are both pretty bad.

I'm not sure if the others have any really big ones.