#the sickness

[mr-malumm]

Cringetober day 28: mascot horror!!!!!!

I love springtrap hes my wifes wife BEHDHSHSHAHAH

[emeraldmew]

Reading The Sickness and I am just struck by how instantly these kids go from being kids at a school dance to well-oiled machine in a crisis. There's no hesitation, no second-guessing. Ax is in trouble and they are on the move. Cassie's a vet's kid so she's on the ball about how to treat him, alien or not.

It's just so instant. I really wonder about how scenes like these read to kids who picked up the books out of order. Like seeing the hyper-competent child soldiers move like this first and then reading one of the earlier books where they're still getting their feet under them must have been pretty whiplash-y.

Also struck by how there is absolutely no sugercoating about the stakes. No euphemisms like "destroyed" over just plain saying that the consequences will be death if they can't cure Ax or if Tidwell's setting a trap like the earlier books would have used.

It's just so immediately upfront about the stakes. I love it.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

so thanks to the jake-as-nothlit post i now imagine what everyone else could be stuck as and i can’t stop thinking about what an absolute horror show cassie getting stuck as a yeerk would be

Horrifying, I love it, I have no idea how to write it. Anyone else have ideas?

[happy-radio]

I don't wanna work I don't wanna work I don't wanna work ugh

[kismates]

yall mind if i slop it up again.

yeah.

[jackelated]

Do you guys think Obi-Wan ever blames himself for Anakin's growing and eventually homicidal distrust of the Jedi order. Do you guys think he thinks about when he faked his death with the help of the Jedi order and deceived Anakin and then was involved with the vote to kick out Ahsoka whether he voted for it or not. And the several times he's had his hands tied by the council or Republic and the final nail in the coffin when he persuaded Anakin to spy on Palpatine. What if I become violent

[davidcgc]

Ah! Now I could feel it. The neurons were connecting to me. Making me a part of this strange, wondrous new body. I felt the Yeerk's jolt of awe and pleasure at its new mobility. At its new size, and strength, and power. It was a visceral, nonconscious, nonintellectual, animal pleasure. I touched the brain's center of hearing. Ahhhh! It was like being alive again. The sound of water dripping into the sink sounded beautiful. Then, I touched the centers for sight. It was lights-on after being forever in a mine shaft. Overwhelming! Joyful! It was dazzling, dizzying delirium.

Cassie knows what it is to see and hear. She’s been doing it essentially all her life. She was able to do it five minutes earlier. These are reactions that are intrinsic to yeerk biology, nature as opposed to nurture. They’re spawned with a craving for stimulation and sensation that their own bodies are unable to fulfill.

It’s not some kind of covetousness for another kind of living that leads yeerks to take hosts, they’re internally compelled to do so. At first I thought this was a weird, almost cruel evolutionary turn, but if using Gedd bodies was a strong advantage in allowing a yeerk to multiply, that makes sense as a selection pressure.

But there’s also the later line about Cassie feeling almost as elated by entering the yeerk pool. And the Hork-Bajir Chronicles talks about yeerks who had a rich culture in their own bodies and didn’t necessarily care to leave their pools, so it’s possible there’s a founder effect going on, too; if the yeerks that escaped their homeworld were the ones most motivated to be in a host (and they would’ve have to have been, even given their success, it was a small group and the actions they took were brutal and guaranteed reprisals by the Andalites, they must have been extremists to not let that stop them) then the Yeerk Empire would be made of generations of only the yeerks with the strongest desire to take another body.

If Seerow was even close to right in his understanding of the yeerks he knew, it’s possible the yeerks back home might disdain their space-faring cousins as sensualists or even addicts, going to unacceptable lengths to get their “fix.”