Not great? This is actually going to be in the next chapter of Effort but here’s an excerpt because you sent this ask roughly 100 years ago and you’ve been so patient and supportive.
…
“Is it actually inevitable?” Newt said steadily, “or are you just trying to prove your hypothesis rather than taking the data,” he gestured frantically to himself, “at face value. It’s bad science, Hermann. You’re being a bad scientist.”
“How dare – this is not a science exp-”
“EVERYTHING is science Hermann! What can I do? What further data can I provide for you, man? I love you! I’ve been busting my ass to prove it this last year! And you’ve just been, what? Wringing your hands? Driving yourself crazy with this, like, operatic downfall you’ve made up? What can I do? Tell me!”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
Newt stood and approached Hermann so fast that he didn’t clock the movement until Newt was right there in his face. “So just leave then!”
“I can’t! I can’t just leave!” Hermann hissed. It was as though Newt was being purposely obtuse. “I love you, and that complicates things, rather a lot.”
Newt looked like he was about to give a biting retort but stopped mid-breath, “Oh.” He said instead, visibly deflating. “Do you know you’ve never said that?”
“Said what?” Hermann blinked, “That I love you?”
“Yeah that.”
“Have I not?”
Newt grimaced and shook his head.
“My goodness…” Hermann mumbled, his defensive venom cooled by the distraction, “I let that go on a bit too long then didn’t I?”
“Yeah you sure did, bud!” His voice carried all the inflections of joviality but his face was utterly unamused.
Short answer: Absolutely yes! Hermann would have fallen too had he gone through the circumstances Newt did instead.
I have a little bit of a unified theory for this that I’ve been itching to express somewhere so buckle up, buttercup.
The first time Newt Drifted with the Hive Mind he basically caught them completely flat-footed. Like, holy shit suddenly there’s this new mind in the room and it’s watching them and figuring out all this information and then suddenly it’s gone??
It was a bit like a radar ping.
(Thanks, Tumblr, for coming through with the random gif assist)
They had no idea wtf just happened, so they sent Otachi and Leatherback to investigate that area specifically. One could even argue, they sent Otachi pregnant in order to bring a brain that Newt could handle Drifting with without dying and left it on his doorstep (whoops, fell for that one hook line & sinker, Newtsters).
That’s because they needed a second Drift to target-lock on him in order to begin influencing him and drawing him into the Hive Mind.
Except that second time, you had Hermann too. Sure Hermann balanced out the Drift and definitely kept Newt alive, but it’s interesting that Hermann’s reaction to his first Drift is pretty violent, a lot like Newt’s first Drift with vomiting instead of a seizure. But Newt just kinda shakes off his second one. Very suspicious. He’s probably not influenced yet, but he’s definitely working towards the point we see in Uprising where he’s actively enjoying the experience. Which I also found very suspicious: Drifting with a non-compatible partner (and you don’t get much more non-compatible than an ALIEN SPECIES) should be painful and possibly lethal. My suspicion is, as the sophisticated bio-engineers that created the Kaiju, the Precursors have figured out a way to ping Newt’s pleasure centers and load his brain up with endorphins every time he Drifts with them. This smooths the Drift and has the added benefit of addicting Newt’s body to the process.
My suspicion is that Newt had a third Drift sometime after the Breach closed. I don’t think the Precursors were able to deliver the mind control payload after only two Drifts, but now we’re getting strictly into fanon and background plotting I’m doing for The Prisoner’s Dilemma. I do think though it was enough to get them whispering to him, and maybe it was those whispers that prompted the third Drift, or maybe it was the PPDC asking him to do it again to make sure the Precursors were really gone. Either way, he did it, and he did it without Hermann, and gotcha that’s when the Precursors had enough control over him to start directing him to Drift regularly on his own (what probably ended up being thousands of times over 10 years).
To go back to Hermann, there may have been a slight element of Newt being sympathetic to the Kaiju that made him a better host that Hermann didn’t have, thus making him a less compatible host, but I honestly doubt Newt was even terribly sympathetic to them by the end of PR1. He has his Mako shoe moment with Hannibal’s shoe and seems in general pretty freaked out and chastised in his regard for them, which makes his being taken over all the more tragic, he had matured from his previous view of Kaiju as “cool” and seemed pretty actively against them now having suffered personally.
Basically, I think anyone who Drifted twice, or three+ times as I suspect, like Newt did would have been subverted. Newt just had more access to Kaiju parts to make another brain or find one. I actually even doubt that Newt’s the first person to consider Drifting with a Kaiju, but my theory is the other ones just died or went braindead. So the Precursors saw these little radar pings, but couldn’t really do anything about them until they could triangulate the location with further Drifts.
Better fanfic authors than me have explored how they would have gotten to Hermann. Perhaps just overall disgust at the world, perhaps curiosity to expand his knowledge of Breaches by opening one himself, maybe making him think he’s creating wormhole travel on humanity’s behalf before he realizes that all roads lead to the Anteverse. But I don’t doubt for a second that anyone linked to the Hive Mind would fall, Newt was not uniquely weak or vulnerable in this.
the mood is newt coming out of a twenty minute sustained seizure and, despite barely being able to string words together or hold a cup without shaking, somehow scraping together the energy to argue at the top of his lungs because hermann said he was wrong
Hermann should have spent less time reminding Newt he was a good man in Uprising and more critiquing the stupidity of his plan.
realistically: early on, to newt’s delight, unrealistically: not until they drift and newt sees all of hermann’s WILD ELABORATE fantasies about him and he’s just like “holy shit dude”
Stacker isn’t a character I’ve got a firm lock on (the one headcanon I have for him is that his larger than life attitude is also in imitation of someone else, that it’s a mask he can put on or take off, or at least he could, but now he’s worn it so long it’s basically part of him).
That aside, there’s a fine balance for Stacker that I do not envy. On the one hand, he must be deeply aware that everyone sticking with him at this point in the Hong Kong Shatterdome is basically a volunteer, they’re being paid peanuts if that, definitely below what they could command elsewhere as experienced scientists. He owes everyone who stuck with him a lot and he knows it and treats everyone with respect (though I think he’d do that anyway, but there’s an added layer here).
But we need to remember his moment chastising Raleigh Beckett. Respecting the people who follows him still means he has to impose discipline as a leader, which is what makes his task so unenviable and why he’d have to walk a careful line between not scaring off the people who stuck around, but not letting them run wild too. And there’s plenty of reasons people in that scenario, even as volunteers, might run wild including but not limited to: they’re under a monstrous amount of stress which tends to freak even the most level-headed people out (which K-Science IS NOT), in general there’s a lot of big personalities there, which tend to clash (K-Science but also the Jaeger pilots), probably everyone who stuck it out has a sense of their own importance in doing so to some extent, and may even expect special treatment which is resource-wise impossible, and finally: managing people is tough! Even with the best of intentions, organizing a bunch of people towards a single goal is a full time job, even if they’re very smart and able to self-organize as well.
Stacker probably has to crack the whip on occasion (to Hermann: You! Shut up!) so that things don’t spiral. I think he does so respectfully, but he can’t be seen as easy to sway given that so much is at stake.
So all of this applies to the K-Science team but to be more specific I’d say this: he is always short but scrupulously respectful with them. He calls Newt “Newt” which is his preferred name, and he calls Hermann “Dr. Gottlieb” which is his preferred form of address. He probably has to be short with them because both given the chance would just ramble for hours and he doesn’t have the time, literally. But he’s up front and honest about this fact, which is important for communicating with subordinates, he doesn’t snap unless they step out of line first (like Hermann when Stacker’s trying to talk to Newt). You’ll notice that even though he goes with Hermann’s research over Newt’s, he doesn’t put Newt down, he listens to everyone involved and makes a decision. Time is precious, and he doesn’t have the time to listen to the ins-and-outs of what might or might not work.
As for his opinion on them? I think he respects them. I think he’s aware they’re brilliant, and he’s aware that they’re giving up a great deal to help him. I think he’s aware they’re eccentric and will talk for hours if given the chance, but they will deliver the results he needs and then some, because they’ll look for unusual solutions, which is also what he needs, since obviously the past studies have not been enough to figure out a way to close the Breach.
I’m sure they can be exasperating too, but that just requires a firm hand so they don’t run amok. They’re a managerial nightmare but they can be managed and I’m sure, if Stacker ever had the opportunity to drop the mask and spend time with them as people, they wouldn’t necessarily be the first ones he’d seek out just for funsies and down time, he would always walk away having learned something and would probably politely excuse himself before the urge to strangle one of them set in (and just leave them to strangle each other, what they do on their down time is their own business ;P)
Avelera 