https://darthserket.tumblr.com/post/793870998478979072
Was it a war crime? Yes, absolutely — they're noncombatants. Was it necessary? Depends on how you define necessary, and whether you're talking to Eva or to Erek at the time.
What would have happened if they hadn't?
It's hard to say, because that final plan is so convoluted. But my read is that Jake flushes the Pool ship, as much as anything, in a last-ditch effort to save Rachel's life. He knows their timing is super-delicate, that Visser Three firing on the Blade ship is a bad-but-acceptable outcome because it'll wipe out the morph-controllers and Rachel, but that Tom's yeerk firing on the Pool ship is a catastrophic outcome because it'll wipe out five Animorphs and the leadership that humanity needs surrender from if they're going to prevent the andalites from wiping out planet Earth. He has to stop either ship from taking out the other by creating a diversion, and finds a diversion that also becomes a show of power.
What does happen as a result of killing those 17,000 yeerks:
- Visser formerly-Three gets the abundantly clear message that he has lost control of his empire, and surrenders as a result
- On board the Blade ship, the morph-controllers are distracted long enough for Rachel to get in position and kill Tom
- Nonetheless, Rachel dies and the Blade ship gets away with at least a few living morph-controllers still on board
- The andalite Dome ship also gets the abundantly clear message that Jake, not Visser Three, is in control of Earth — that's part of why they're willing to negotiate with him
So if the Pool ship isn't flushed, how much of that changes? Hard to say. Maybe Visser Three annihilates the Blade ship, which is sad but a better outcome than we get in canon. Maybe humanity loses Earth to the yeerks, or the andalites, or both. But there are so many moving pieces to that final battle — Jake, James et al., Arbron et al., Marco and Ax, Tom's yeerk, Visser Three, the other morph-controllers, Toby et al., General Doubledday et al., Rachel, Cassie and Tobias, the Dome ship Elfangor, the Andalite Electorate, Visser Three's troops, Eva et al., freakin Alloran out of left field — that it's really hard to say what the final result would be. Humanity does successfully fight off the yeerks and form an alliance with the andalites in the version we get, but at a steep cost.
do-not-fold-spindle-or-mutilate:
thejakeformerlyknownasprince:
do-not-fold-spindle-or-mutilate:
thejakeformerlyknownasprince:
thekijs:
thejakeformerlyknownasprince:
thekijs:
thejakeformerlyknownasprince:
thejakeformerlyknownasprince:
hugintheraven:
The thing about war crimes is that they can only exist in a context where both sides agree to them. Fundamentally, you cannot abide by the standard rules of engagement when fighting Yeerks, such as using uniformed soldiers to fight uniformed soldiers and not targeting civilians, because:
The only times you can fight the Yeerks is when they are using a human shield
Your options are killing Yeerks in a pool when they can’t fight back, killing human(and alien) noncombatants the Yeerks are using, or surrendering. Fundamentally, there’s no option that isn’t either a war crimes or enabling war crimes. The better question is whether killing 17,000 Yeerks who couldn’t fight back saved more lives than it cost, and that’s a nightmare to figure out.
But it was a purely defensive war, and all the Yeerks who died were part of the invading force. While undoubtedly some of them didn’t want to be here, Jake was not the one who started the fight. The Yeerks could have left at any point and chose not to. The defenders have a right to defend themselves with all necessary force, and when that amount of force is hard to determine, that’s not the fault of the people who are just trying to survive.
That is such a good point - the alternatives to that decision are overwhelmingly worse.
@sarioripper
#my fave teen war criminals#unless UN world court is enforcing a treaty that the Yeerks and Andalites and humans are all signatories to it’s maybe not a war crime#technically because the Yeerk Empire isn’t a sovereign state of earth#like it’s not a massive leap of logic to apply international law to a sentient alien race#realistically that’s the moral and ethical (and empathetic) thing to do#but if my boy Jake has a good lawyer they’d be arguing that the UN has no standing to prosecute#okay but now I want to write this advice and seek input from counsel and see if this theory holds#on being a lawyer#suuuuch an interesting question that I hadn’t even considered#a cool adventure about the difference between regular ethics and legal ethics which are often more different than you’d think#…realising that Jake would think that lawyer was a piece of shit and feel even worse after getting acquitted
Yes — the letter of the law is probably on the Animorphs' side, for sheer lack of laws about what you can and cannot do to aliens. But also that lawyer has a point about Jake hardly being an authority on what constitutes just war, and thus being a questionable witness at best in this case.
I'm sorry I gotta stop this whole thing for a hot second because it's running on a faulty premise.
Flushing the pool ship was not a war crime.
Those yeerks were not non-combatants. They were helpless at that moment, yes, but they were enemy forces, on board a military vessel, that was actively engaged in invading Earth.
If Visser One had surrendered the ship already, or the Animorphs had successfully taken control of the ship and captured the controllers on board, it would have been a war crime: because then those are prisoners. But that's not the case. Just because the enemy soldiers couldn't get out of their 'barracks' to join the fight doesn't magically make them innocent victims, they're still soldiers serving on a ship that is, at that very moment, engaged in combat.
Now, we know that not all yeerks were willing participants in the war, but because of the long and unfortunate history of earth nations using slaves in their military, the Geneva Conventions cover the situation where enemy soldiers are only fighting you because they're forced to—and only the nation that forced them into the front line is considered at fault. If they end up on the other side of a battle from you, international military law says soldiers are soldiers, voluntary or not.
Okay, this is a whooooooole other ethical problem, but: I think it depends on whether you characterize the yeerks that ship as "reinforcement troops" or as "settlers moving to a new colony." Because I would a) put them in the "settlers" category, b) argue that settling can indeed be an act of war [gestures at entire U.S.], AND c) say that if they are in the "settler" category, killing them counts as deliberately targeting civilians and thus a war crime. But I also know we're in uncharted legal territory given that "move into occupied lands" also means "move into an occupied body."
That's a good point, but I think the big factor for me is that the pool ship is pretty clearly a military vessel. It's directly under a Visser's command, and had just been engaged in a military offensive (killing off the Auxilimorphs) at the time the Animorphs assaulted it. That puts them pretty solidly in the "reinforcement troops" category in my mind.
If I'm running the yeerk empire, my colony ships full of civilian settlers aren't the heavily armed ones ready to throw down with Andalite dome ships, and pools that only hold ~20,000 yeerks. That's a big expensive ship that I can probably only afford to make a handful of. The yeerk empire seemed pretty confident they could take proper advantage of billions of hosts once Earth was conquered, which says to me that a yeerk colony ship full of settlers is going to have a pool that holds millions, or tens of millions of yeerks, and not much else to keep costs down.
So this is my interpretation of U.S. space law (splaw?) and I'm definitely Not A Lawyer, but. If I were to apply existing legal definitions to yeerks, then I would at minimum describe any currently-unhosted yeerk as unarmed, and might even describe any currently-unhosted yeerk as a defenseless bystander. Mostly by virtue of them being blind, unable to navigate open spaces, having no natural defenses, and unable to directly inflict harm on anyone but (maybe) another yeerk.
Now, that also means that any hosted yeerk is currently actively involved in combat, currently committing a crime, and fair game for whatever means necessary (even death by starvation) it takes to stop further harm to the host. But under that interpretation, killing unhosted yeerks on purpose while knowing they're unhosted would still count as targeting civilians.
That logic introduces some really unpleasant grey areas. You could use the same principle to paint soldiers in a landing craft as noncombatants, provided they are strictly passengers until deployed. They can't see anything besides what's in the craft, they have no means to hurt anyone besides each other, and they can't leave the craft. Similarly, you could claim that sleeping soldiers aren't valid targets, or that attacking supply lines is indefensible.
The thing that makes flushing the unhosted yeerks an ethical quandary isn't the fact that they were unhosted. It's a matter of custody and control. If Jake had a reasonable expectation that he could maintain control of the pool ship, then flushing the pool is a mass murder, because while those yeerks were enemy combatants, they were contained, and therefore prisoners of war. If, on the other hand, he had no expectation that he could control the pool ship, then he was effectively attacking the enemy barracks, which is unpleasant but can't be considered a war crime because doing so would make attacking your enemy's base of operations illegal.
The third option is that Jake had a reasonable expectation that flushing the pool would result in a surrender, while not flushing it would result in mission failure. Once again, flushing the pool is like attacking enemy barracks in that situation, although he may have a moral duty (though likely not a legal one) to inform yeerk leadership that he has the means to flush the pool.
Ultimately, the law is obliged to ignore motives in this case and see only actions and circumstances, which were (as far as I can remember) fairly unclear.
There's also the problem of charging an actual, literal child with war crimes, but although that's relevant to the issue, it's also tangential. First you have to figure out if a crime was committed, which is probably unclear enough to warrant a hearing or two or two million. That judgment is going to be independent of the next step, which is, assuming the first step returns "there was a crime," asking whether anyone involved in the commission of that crime can be charged for it.
You could use the same principle to paint soldiers in a landing craft as noncombatants, provided they are strictly passengers until deployed.
I mean, yeah [gestures at entire U.S.]. The laws hold that the white Ingalls family is innocent of all wrongdoing while squatting in Osage territory, even if they're patrolling with guns to keep the land's rightful occupants away, but that the Osage have no right to do anything about the gun-toting invaders because those are just innocent homesteaders. That's how settler colonialism works.
But also: I fully agree that the question of intent would be where the messy legal battle would happen in this case. U.S. law does care a lot about motivation (e.g. 1st degree murder vs. 2nd degree vs. manslaughter) but also motivation is nigh impossible to prove after the fact. Jake tells Cassie his motivation at the time was anger and hatred, but since that's not written down anywhere then I think any halfway competent lawyer would argue he attacked (what he thought was) a troop barracks in order to (he thought) take the only action that would cause Visser One to surrender without killing any more human civilians.
Oh, yeah, fully agree that the way war crimes are conceptualized currently is a great big pile of horseshit, but you do still need a systematic set of laws governing what is and is not allowed in war, and most of the basic ideas behind what we use now is rooted in common sense. In principle, honest application of the standards should minimize loss of life on both sides. The acts and tactics that are theoretically forbidden are the ones that are most likely to reduce a battlefield to chaos. False flag operations, attacking civilians, torture, false surrenders, and the like are tactics that pretty much force response in kind, even from a superior force, so outlining what is and is not permissable provides a framework for telling the international community that one side has gone too far, leading to censure, sanctions, or even military action.
Unfortunately, that idea is more aspirational than practical and hasn't been updated to reflect the modern world. Influential or powerful nations like the US can act with impunity in direct defiance of statutes, protection under war crime laws is flimsy to begin with and highly dependent on both parties being recognized as sovereign nations, and the degree to which modern warfare can achieve assymetric balances of power is well beyond what existing laws were designed around.
You apply all that to the yeerks and you get some violently uncomfortable results. I'm gonna try to analyze more completely than I did above and see if I can come up with a remotely satisfying conclusion.
- Firstly, the double standard gets laid out really quickly and clearly. If the yeerks had landed in Uganda and been defeated with identical tactics by a bunch of Ugandan teens, the outcome for those teens would be very different.
- The war crime laws that Humans have drawn up only deal with what Humans can do. As we are incapable of slithering into someone's head and piloting them like a mech, that's a gap in our precedents. This makes for some horrific conflicts of legality where a host can only be treated humanely by treating the yeerk inhumanely and vice versa.
- The definition of a civilian is equally unprepared to handle the nuances of an obligate kleptoproprioparasite's (yes, I had to make up a whole word there. Klepto: stealing, proprium: selfhood , therefore kleptoproprioparasite: one who steals another's entire self for their own benefit) lifestyle. A Human doesn't have a state of being equivalent to an unhosted yeerk, all unhosted yeerks are intended to take hosts, all hosted yeerks are ostensibly active participants in the war, and unhosted yeerks are shown to be able to communicate within the pool and to computer terminals designed for the purpose, allowing them to potentially contribute from within the pool.
- I'm a little shakier on this one, but I think war crime laws don't usually deal in motives the same way US statutes do. It wouldn't be very sensible, given the way war and military training warp a person's worldview. US criminal law doesn't typically care about motive, either, actually except in determining hate crime or establishing malice versus negligence. The difference between first and second degree murder is similar to motive, but closer to being about state of mind and planning. If I kill someone, the amount of thought and effort that goes into the act is more relevant than if I killed them because they cut me off in traffic, because they ate my mom, or because I was bored.
All this, combined with the fact that the mass killing took place in space (outside of anyone's nominal jurisdiction) at the command of a non-government, non-military individual, means that there's likely no organization on Earth that has unambiguous authority to charge Jake. Even the UN would be in a very murky grey area, which is...
Yknow, another strike against the functionality of war crime laws.
There's a principle in criminal law, I don't know how formalized it is, that you can't make something illegal in response to a person's actions and then charge them for violating the law that didn't exist at the time. That works very well with the sorts of things you would expect it to apply to, like traffic laws and zoning, but very poorly in cases like this, where the crime is extreme.
This ends up being a bit like if a country never made murder illegal and then had to deal with someone doing a murder, only with even less precedent to lean on. At least in that hypothetical, people understand generally what murder is. With flushing the yeerk pool, you have to deal with defining what the unhosted yeerks' status was (civilian, active combatant, prisoner of war, noncombatant military personnel, etc), determining whether Jake's decision was strategic or personal, and figuring out who has the ability to bring charges.
If no one can determine jurisdiction, no one can bring charges, so that's step one.
Assuming it goes to the UN, which is the most likely outcome, there has to be a lot of hearings on how to define a yeerk civilian. Labeling the entire population as military personnel is... What's the word? Oh yeah, monstrous genocidal rhetoric. So there's a solid chance the UN would do that and that would pretty much kill any case against Jake. Iirc, that's pretty close to what happened in canon.
The more ethically acceptable ruling should take into account the demographics of the pool, concluding that the yeerks in it fit into a few broad categories. My guess is that yeerks with assigned hosts get designated as combatants, those with no assigned hosts but duties within the pool get designated as noncombatant military personnel, and all others are civilians. In that scenario, Jake is potentially on the hook for deliberately killing civilians.
Only after that can Jake be put on trial, and while his motivations have to be disregarded, his knowledge of the situation is very important. He had at least a fair grasp of his strategic position, which means that an assessment of whether flushing the pool was necessary is key. Absent the Andalite fleet, you could argue pretty easily that it wasn't necessary, and Jake's in hot water then, but with the Andalites complicating things, it's a bit muddy, since they're unlikely to believe the Humans are really in control. That makes the necessity of the action uncertain, rather than definitely unnecessary.
I, personally, would probably rule "in Jake's favor" on the grounds that he was 1: a minor 2: acting without formal training 3: under extreme duress and 4: with limited knowledge, but that ruling in his favor looks more like a formal censure, mandatory counseling, forbidding him from military activity, and parole than like being declared innocent.
I would also be likely to call for consequences for the Andalites. Their aggressive posture and threats against Earth potentially incited an atrocity
Realistically, though, a situation like the end of the yeerk invasion could just as easily kick off world war three as lead to the ending we got. These are legal and philosophical questions that don't have a good answer. The US or its allies controlling the only Human morphers is probably the only thing that would prevent massive upheaval, since if the morphers weren't from a polity that already has hegemonic power, the CIA or some equivalent to it would be sent to either steal the tech, kill the morphers, or both, and the animorphs do not go gentle into that good night. The resulting destabilization would be catastrophic and entirely the result of imperialist power hoarding.
In short: Jake did do something ethically inexcusable, but he's legally difficult to charge and his actions didn't take place in a vacuum. He needs help, not punishment, and he and his entire team need to be kept as far away from the levers of military power as possible.
Man, K. A. Applegate did not write a happy story.
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ariella_feed) wrote2025-09-05 04:21 pm
