The Warning
Jake once again
Authors Warning1: It’s been more than a month. I had vacation, the hedgehog learned to walk, some other personal stuff, and generally I just haven’t been feeling up to writing so, in general, the pace of publishing may be slow.
Animorphs is at core a science-fiction war story. But it also functions as a coming-of-age story. And for Jake, the fearless leader, these books also are a lesson in how to be a leader. The last Jake book didn’t really happen for anyone but Jake. Though I didn’t spend much time on it, Jake spent a decent portion of that book fretting over decisions that led to his fellow Animorphs suffering. He is feeling the weight of being the leader.
This book is no different. Things go wrong, plans are botched, and the entire team is nearly wiped out even though they aren’t even going head-to-head against Visser Three. But I want to focus in on the climax - when they get to meet Bill Gates before the Yeerk left his head - uh, I mean Joe Bob Fenestre, not Bill Gates.
“There’s a way to process and refine Kandrona rays from another source. It can be made into an edible product. A food, so to speak, that I can consume with my human mouth and digest.”…
“The problem is the raw material. The raw material is my brother Yeerks. I must destroy and process and consume a Yeerk every three days to survive. I have become a cannibal.”…
“How am I getting the Yeerks from their human hosts?” His face was dark. His eyes empty. “How do you think I get them?”
That’s right, we’ve got a full-fledged cannibal serial killer on our hands. It’s a standoff. It turns out some Yeerks are just out for themselves and willing to kill their own kind. They’re just like us!
The Yeerk-Human pair of Joe Bob Fenestre got rich by exploiting alien technology. He is living the life of a rich man that is paranoid by enemies around him. He is also exploiting the technology to find and hunt a Yeerk every three days. This is at the cost of human lives, but Jake as leader of the Animorphs knows the calculus is in his favor. After all, anytime the Animorphs go into battle there are sure to be casualties of Controllers which include human hosts. Even back when they were able to starve some Yeerks out from Kandrona rays - those humans were killed when their Yeerks started dying. Any Yeerk killed is a human or other sentient life killed.
So, Jake makes a deal with this Yeerk. Fenestre will let the Animorphs go and as long as he doesn’t leave his bunker, they won’t harm him. They are essentially letting a cannibal serial killer continue to murder Yeerks and humans as long as they can get away.
Back in my first essay for this series I mentioned the principles of Just War. Over the next several essays I tried to illustrate they are good, but not particularly useful maxims. The last principle is as follows.
the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
Mostly what this is getting at is unrelated to this story - the catechism had in mind weapons of mass death, of technology that would result in non-combatants facing disproportionate harm. But there is another sense in which “the use of arms” could produce “evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”.
Cassie objects and attacks when she hears Fenestre is a cannibal who is murdering over a hundred humans a year. She represents an idealism that revolts at the very idea of allowing such an evil to persist even if it serves their interest in the broader war.
Or, perhaps she revolts at the idea of allowing such an evil for the reason of it serving their interest in the broader war. Maybe this exchange between Cassie and Jake in a tense moment near the end of the book can illuminate what I mean.
<Do you know what he’s doing? Do you understand?> Cassie cried.
<I know. I know. I KNOW!> I screamed in frustration. <But I told him he was safe. I promised. Besides…>
<No! Don’t say it, Jake. If you say that I won’t be able to deal with you anymore. So don’t say it.>
I felt like she’d punched me. In my own, real face. What had I been about to say? Was I really going to say it was okay for this creature to go on doing what he did, as long as he got the Yeerks?
Jake has reluctantly taken on leadership. In doing so, in fighting, in taking life, witnessing life taken, and ordering others to take life he is being shaped. The use of arms produces evils and disorders in the wielder of arms. Cassie, who is both the idealist and the romantic interest for Jake, is horrified that Jake may be starting to be shaped by the realities of war.
I return over and over again to my theme of is vs ought, and this is one of those unfortunately constant and horrible is. War is hell. The choices in war are often bad, and that Jake must make a decision to act or not, or how to act, is.
In some ways though, I want to also say that ought does come into play here. Or specifically, that it is bad that a choice must be made at all. Trying to make the correct choice, to be a good person in the face of facing entirely bad choices and bad outcomes in front of you is a constant tragedy.
Oona Eisenstadt
For the rest of this essay, I’m mostly going to be talking about some of the quotes of an analysis of the Hunger Games by Oona Eisenstadt- and honestly you should just go watch her lecture because it’s good and much of the appeal to young people of dystopian novels generally and The Hunger Games in particular have echoes in the morality explored in Animorphs.
Teenagers, people point out, have always had an ambivalent relationship to power. They are and aren’t ready for it, they want it and don’t want it, and they are starting to have it while at the same time starting to experience its limits and discontents.
This persists while at the same time we have a new situation by which increasingly we are all in a new position where paranoia is prudent…
Dystopian novels present a way to think through this difficult and multifold position. All this commonly said, I would add that the teenage reliance on technology intensifies the anxiety.
As a reliance on technology means reliance on a class of experts over whom we have no control. This- of course- is everyone's problem - but Western teenagers, most of whom have a very strong relationship with their phones and most of whom do not code, experience it more viscerally than adults and I believe are more aware of it. That is, more aware of themselves as being caught into a system characterized by an exciting and dangerous blend of mastery and being mastered.
Collins continually emphasizes the undecidability of her dilemmas. They are insoluble not merely in the sense that it's not clear what the right choice is, or even in the sense there is no right choice, but more than this - in the sense that they must not be solved it is awful wrong immoral to make these decisions. And yet Katniss must decide, and she does - at every moment - she decides.
Perhaps in another essay, I will circle back to this lecture which I have watched a few times over the years. Again, I’d recommend it. But I wanted to pull out these quotes of insight that Eisenstadt draws. These are the same themes I explored above. This is the sad tragedy of a coming of age, of learning leadership. As you are growing up you attain more and more independence, more agency, more power over your own life.
And yet, you also run into a brick walls of your own power, of those around you, of systems that you are always going to be reliant on and maybe should be reliant on. The Animorphs gain sudden power, and with it an immediate responsibility of an understanding of dangers in the world around them. As they face war - they are faced with moral dilemmas large and small, forced to make decisions slowly as a group or snap decisions in the heat of battle.
These decisions are beginning to shape who they are, and that is one of the big tragedies of the book.
This book’s climax is Jake’s snap decision to let this evil billionaire cannibal go. At the end we find out more about what happens to Fenstre that leaves the final decision in some doubt. The series is better for that uncertainty.
Hey that’s the name of the book!