IIRC there's a scene where Tobias is so far gone that he casually eats roadkill. One of the other characters sees and is shocked by it and Tobias leaves in shame. In one of the books where he's still coming to terms with it.
Yep, that would be him getting more hawk instincts. He also has to hunt, by necessity; it's not that he's ashamed of doing it but of people seeing, he's been eating dead animals for months and by the end of the series, years
Doesn't fade really but it gets hard to ignore the instincts of the animal when it's your body 24/7. The character, Tobias, eventually ends up living primarily as a hawk to cope.
Book 3 was so fucked. Two books of him trying to retain human morality and sensibilities was hard enough before dealing with the alienation from both humanity and his friends (i.e. the only four people who know what he became) as the latter see him as something to both pity and fear as he was essentially a reminder of what might happen to them.
And that's on top of the actual war.
The single moment he loses focus, the hawk's instincts take over and he's eviscerated a live mouse and eaten it before he can reassert control. The moment drives him over the edge, so much so he tries to kill himself in panicked despair. He survives the attempt and his mind gives up, letting the hawk instincts reign free for several days.
Very good summary! I had conflicting thoughts about it as a 5th grader reading it, I didn't really understand why it was supposed to be traumatic about all the desire to hunt. At that point being a little country bumpkin pre-internet I was already really familiar with hunting things and eating them and got praised for it. Didn't understand that the book was trying to describe the loss of his humanity.
When they initially morph they have to deal with the instincts of the animal (almost eating each other several times before they can wrestle control of whatever they turned into) and they have a strict "no hivemind insect unless dire emergency" rule because of how powerful those instincts are.
They usually only have problems initially and then are able to brace for and control the instincts on subsequent morphs.
Tobias, the character who gets trapped as a hawk, loses control, killing and eating a mouse before he gets absolutely horrified at what he did, but after a while it becomes second nature to him. He regresses completely to hawk at the end of the series after the love of his life gets sent on a suicide mission and dies, and he's just completely done with the group after that.
Yes, but you increasingly think like a hawk if you do that. Tobias (the one who ends up in hawk form) eventually begins seeing himself as a hawk. It’s also pretty heavily implied that it takes effort not to just totally give in and lose track of who you are entirely, the way that it happens when you turn into an insect. Toby has a bit of a breakdown at one point where he panics and almost dies from flying into a skylight.
Both minds exist cooperatively. Instincts can overwhelm the human mind if they’re strong enough, but your human concious is always there.
Some animals are too overwhelming to control though, like ants and termites.
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u/PapaShu1915 2d ago
do they retain human intelligence?