Haters to the left

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

This is from that scene in The Extreme where they have to eat dead seals.

"Cassie?" Rachel said.

"What?" she replied, a hint of anger in her voice.

"What should we do?"

"Why are you asking me? ... It's obvious what we
have to do. And not just to the bear's leftovers, but to any live seal we can find. What I don't understand is why you're asking me for permission. Do you guys think I'd put an animal's life over yours? Or mine, come to think of it? ... When did you start thinking I was some kind of fanatic? We're freezing, we're starving, and I'm going to go all tree-hugging, never-eat-anything-with-a-face on you?"

"Well, I can never tell what you'll think," I whined, taken aback and feeling like I'd insulted Cassie.

"Here's a clue. Don't kill a sentient creature except in absolute self-defense, try not to wipe out endangered species, and if you're going to raise animals for food, treat them as well as you possibly can. But when you're a wolf, a starving wolf wandering around the frozen
Arctic, and you see a meal, eat it."

Or how about from The Solution:

David hadn't asked who the mastermind of the plan was. Who it was who
had so accurately appraised his emotions, his need to build his ego, the
fact that he would choose me to be his "companion." Cassie, of course.
Cassie had worked it out, step by step, after Jake and I failed to come
up with anything.

Megamorphs 2:

"We adapt," Cassie said grimly. "That's what animals have to do in order
to survive. Our environment is massively different. No civilization to rely on, surrounded by brutal predators. So we adapt. Or we get eaten."

"Great. Robinson Crusoe meets Jurassic Park. Look at us. We have nothing," Marco said. "No homes. No food. No tools. No weapons. We don't even have shoes!"

"Well, we're going to have to make all those things," Prince Jake said. "And we do have one big weapon: We can still morph. Maybe we can't fight a T-rex, but we can fly, and we can escape."

"We have food and shoes right here," Cassie said. She was looking at the dead Tyrannosaurus. "Ax has his tail. We can use the hide to make sandals. Skin from the lower leg there looks pretty tough and thick. We cut out some skin, remove the meat and eat it. Then we use ligaments and tendons to lace up the sandals."

I believe Prince Jake and Marco were shocked. Humans are strangely squeamish at times. I can never predict when.

"Wow," Marco said. "Wow. You're kind of getting into this, aren't you, Cassie?"

Cassie walked up to the dinosaur and placed one hand on its leg. She tested the skin with her fingertips. "Look, Marco, my best friend is gone. Tobias is gone. I don't want any more names added to that list. We need food. There's no Burger King anywhere nearby, okay? We're not big
or mean enough to be predators in this environment. We've moved way down on the food chain. The best we can be is scavengers. Here's thousands of pounds of protein. We eat some now, and we smoke some for jerky so we can eat later."

If anything, Prince Jake and Marco appeared even more shocked. And I felt the same. This was an aspect of Cassie I'd never seen. But then, Cassie is more involved than the others in the facts of environment. She had sized up the situation and realized that in this new world she and her fellow humans were no longer masters.

Finally, this is what happens when people don't like Cassie:

"How did you do that?" the man with the southern accent demanded. And then, like some vile punctuation, he added a word I won't repeat.

It was like a slap. I couldn't answer. I just gaped. ... This small battle was all mine. I didn't want any help.

"You don't like black people, Mr. Davis?" I said pleasantly. "No problem. I can turn white. Watch me."

Most of the time I'd probably have let it go. I'd been called names before. I'd run into racism before. Mostly I figured people like that were just sad, weakminded fools. So most of the time I just avoided people like that. But I had been in three wars since breakfast. I had seen Jake shot down. I'd just learned that Rachel, my best friend, was gone. I was sad and ashamed and filled with rage, all at once. So this wasn't "most of the time."

White fur began to grow from my face. Actually, it was clear fur, hollow needles of fur that were designed to keep the polar bear warm. But the fur looked white, taken altogether. My hands swelled, big as dinner plates. Long, raked claws extended from the fingertips. I was growing whiter. And bigger. Much, much bigger.

"It's some kind of voodoo trick!" Davis wailed.

Tobias was back on his feet, arms crossed over his chest, looking on calmly. "You two guys may want to step back out of the way because I don't think Davis here is going to be having a very good day."

I loomed larger and larger. Davis began to back away, pressing against one alley wall. But sheer amazement and disbelief kept him from running until it was too late. Finally, he broke and ran. I slammed a pile-driver front leg into the wall and blocked his way.
[Don't you like me?] I asked.

In conclusion: Cassie kicks it all over town.

This post was brought to you by numbers 22 and 25 and the letters character bashing sucks.

Comments

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

yeah, I get it. And I think with those three especially, there are probably some anti-feminist undercurrents, like boys doing boy things is AWESOME but girls doing girl things is just annoying and petty. This argument isn't coming out right, but I agree with you on principle.


I think it came out perfectly, and I think that a lot of that is probably why I kneejerk pretty badly at the Cassie stuff. As someone was saying above, there's often a character who everyone in a fandom dumps on, and to me it seems like there's often that kind of anti-woman, internalised misogyny bullshit going on and it just makes me want to scream. So Cassie seems to fit a bunch of those patterns to me and I get all sensitive.

That's a rare thing on this here internet. It just makes me kind of sad and mad at myself that you didn't feel like you could do that, idk

Oh no, I didn't really mean to do that. I just, you know, people seemed to be having fun in some of the other posts! With MS Paint! And I personally love fun with MS Paint and I wanted you guys to be able to keep doing that I guess, but simultaneously really wanted to be like "But! Cassie! She's my homegirl!"

Also I guess because it's not like there was actual discussion or stuff that I could disagree with going on?

IDK IDK IDK. Maybe I could have handled my kneejerking better. But I do/did just want a post to go yay! Cassie!

[anijen21.livejournal.com]

lol idk I look at every lj post as a discussion in-the-making. I mean they can get troll-infested and flame-baity pretty quick, but that's one thing I really like about the framework of LJ is that conversations can pop up anywhere and it's all very user-friendly. There is no such thing as going "off-topic" in LJ.

and I'm ngl I love comments like I love reviews, JUST KEEP 'EM COMING I DON'T CARE THE FLAVOR LOL

yeah, I'm actually kind of wondering if Cassie had been a guy, like every word she uttered, character description, action and detail the same except she was a guy, if we'd hate him as much. It's an interesting question, and an aspect I never really thought about. I may hate Cassie, but I do love the way gender was handled in this series. I STILL THINK SHE'S AN UNBALANCED CHARACTER with rare moments of awesomeness that you did a good job of mentioning above, and idk. It's not so much her character I didn't like--I think she played a necessary role in the series--I just hate how she was never wrong. Everyone else gets shit on, fuck, Rachel dies, Ax gets assimilated by the Borg, Jake tailspins into depression, Tobias runs away to live in the wilderness, and Marco I guess is okay until HE DIES TOO and Cassie gets to go live in the Hork-Bajir valley with her hot boyfriend happily ever after :')

idk, considering authors who are so sadistic and ruthless to their main characters, why did Cassie, who I don't really like anyway, get off so easily? idk I'm just repeating myself though and ruining your post, so I'll stop :)

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

LOL well OK I'll remember that for next time! I'm usually really NOT shy, but.

re: everyone dying but Cassie, or even Cassie being the only one to really live through the war. When Marco was still alive, I actually felt that that sort of made sense, especially because Cassie had been so tough about her code - you're right that that sometimes made her inflexible, but I do think it got her through the war with more of her conscience intact. Marco is almost the opposite but with the same basically-OK-ish end result. But even with all that being true, and the line about them being the only survivors, in some ways I thought Cassie and Marco were really exaggerating how fine they really were. Like they looked OK but really, deep down, were either of their lifestyles really all that sane and healthy?

[anijen21.livejournal.com]

if we maybe got some more details about that, I probably wouldn't hate her so much

[cork118.livejournal.com]

(Not meaning to butt in, but YAY discussion and stuff, so here I go. Be forewarned that I'm hungover, so uh. Not at my grammatical or logical best.)

I LOVED that Cassie and Marco were the only two who made it out of the way with some semblance of sanity. It makes so much sense to me. Like... each Animorph had one coping skill that they used to get them through the horrors they faced every day during the war. Rachel's was her ruthlessness-- she labeled the Yeerks as one-dimensional Big Evil Dudes, which left her able to justify the violence she was forced to do. Ax used his sense of honor, in that it was perfectly justifiable by Andalite standards to fight them, because they 'stole' technology or whatever, and he needed to avenge Elfangor. Jake's coping skill was hiding behind his leadership role-- he was able to make the hard calls because SOMEONE had to do it. Tobias coped alone; when the going got tough, Tobias very often got going.

I think it's easy to see how all these primary coping skills can lead to some serious brain fuckery post-war. It didn't take long in the series for all the characters to start wondering what would happen to Rachel post-war, which I think is chilling as all hell. Ax's sense of honor could never be truly satisfied, so he had to keep fighting and risking his life. Jake's all sorts of PTSD, and Tobias sinks deep into Bird Boy territory to escape from everyone.

But Cassie and Marco, who relied on moralizing and humor respectively, were much better prepared to return to a post-war lifestyle. Of course, like with any coping style, what works occasionally becomes problematic when we overuse it, and we can see that in their cases too. Marco's living an unfulfilling playboy lifestyle, and Cassie is essentially cut off from her closest friends and romantic interest. I mean hell, her and Jake talked about getting MARRIED for god's sake. But her defense mechanism-- moralizing-- made her fundamentally incompatible with Jake, who will forever struggle with the morally-questionable calls he was forced to make. It makes me so sad for the both of them.