y'know we've talked plenty about David Animorphs lately but I'd like to emphasize something that I don't see people talk about enough:
He's a bad pet owner
Having any kind of illegal pet should dock you some points.
He had the venom sacks removed from Spawn, the cobra. Now on the one hand I understand that's necessary in order to have a pet that's not deadly. On the other hand, if an animal needs to have body parts surgically removed in order for it to exist safely in your house, it's not a pet you should have. That's like the extreme version of declawing a cat.
Why is Spawn not living in a terrarium with a heat lamp? When Marco morphs Spawn, the snake brain's first thought is "I'm cold", probably because it's in shadow under David's bed. The real Spawn apparently slithered out of a cardboard box under there when Marco acquired him. That's not an environment that a cobra should be in. As far as we know Spawn just roams the house and does not have a dedicated terrarium (much less a heat lamp) like he should.
David also has a cat. The cat and the cobra are both allowed to just roam the house freely. That's a recipe for disaster. The sight of a snake slithering around will trigger a cat's hunting instincts - that's why cats like to chase string. You might as well let your pet rodent roam the house freely where the cat can get to him. And since Spawn no longer has venom to defend himself, there is a good chance the cat would've killed that snake sooner or later (and if Spawn did still have venom, then it's the cat who would almost certainly end up dead). It's not safe for these two animals to be interacting with each other.
And in a series called ANIMorphs, I feel like poor handling of animals should've been a red flag.
It’s not surprising that Rachel resents Jake for letting her take the fall for David. If Marco is the right hand, she’s the left, but it’s such a huge sacrifice for her to live with that so the others don’t. Maybe in a universe where the two of them stayed with a watch they could have lived with it. This is the last time Jake lets someone shield him - freezing up in 31 doesn’t count - but it’s also the worst thing the animorphs do.
But the conversation in the hospital combined with Jake letting her lie and say she can take it, that she is the thing she fears the others see her as, mean that Rachel becomes ‘the violent one’ in a way she might not have otherwise.
And just like Jake wasn’t lying at the end of 21 - Rachel lived nearby, and who else could take a lion in a fight? Rachel isn’t wrong about him needing to leave. Their family is going to lose it, and they’re actually in his house. Rachel being gone is still potentially weird but Marco is probably the only other option to stay, and he won’t throw himself under a bus that someone else is already holding back.
All six animorphs battle with logic. Rachel and Ax were the ones who voted for David when Marco was sure they would vote against. They’re responsible for this. And they have to stay. Rachel because she can wait. Ax to keep time. Both with the knowledge that they would have killed him if they had had to, and instead being forced to listen to him beg and rage. He would have been aware if they chose to kill him in those two hours. If they had dropped him in the ocean flying out to the island. But at this point they’re still young enough to think letting him live is mercy, even when it is so immeasurably cruel. It is possibly what makes Ax so angry at the thought of torturing Chapman later on. It is certainly a dark cloud over the rest of the series. I don’t like book 48, I’ve only read it once or twice, but I’m not completely certain that Rachel kills David then. It may just leave both of them as burnt out shells living with the consequences of their actions.
anyway i hope this shitstain kid dies a horrible death i dont care anymore. good on applegrant for taking his sexism to a logical near extreme but uh. yeah fuck him up, Rach. Any chance you get. i know youre a kid and youll feel things about it but remorse doesnt really need to be on the list anymore.
WOAH OKAY WOAH WHAT THE FUCK. JAKE WDYM something is wrong with RACHEL, wtf is wrong with you that you'd say that to her???? wow wow wow i know theyre both highly emotional and overtired and fucked up over the Saddler shit rn (how tf did david get rid of the real one?!), but that was so so far over the line and off base that Jake is like my least favorite animorph right now what the actual hell. i thought he and cassie could commiserate over being able to read people and figure out how to make the group function well but he's just analyzing their sports stats and looking at them on the surface level like theyre video game characters he has to use well for mission to go right. like shit thats a horrible thing to have to practice especially since he's friends with them all and i feel so so bad for him but like.....dude. how could you believe all this about her and then also use it to your advantage anyway? and Say it to her?? so fucked. at least he knows he's doing it and kind of apologizes but like. it's not real. he's not going to stop doing this. and i know rachel knows theyre both left with little choice in all this but he didnt deserve a hug over it. i guess it was a good display for david who was glad to see them fighting but like. fuck. and im only on book 22!!
so this was another staged conversation obviously but i still wonder where and when they planned what they would actually do because of how paranoid they were about where David can be at any time.
oh okay next chapter answers that nvm. weird that david would dismiss a hawk flying so close over Cassie's barn though, even if he thought he'd killed him. like he's not particularly witty but he's certainly not dumb.
this is. so casually horrifying.
(Do i ship marco and rachel rn? she really grabbed him by the neck in that staged fake plan scene. they really know how to push each other's buttons.)
are they gonna give him a fake escafil device?? or some kind of mcguffin rat trap that will force him to nothlit or something?
idk but sorry rachel you guys are all killers. like i know it feels different to kill a human being but you all have killed hork bajirs and all kinds of people-adjacent beings in this actual genuine war youre in and you know just how sapient they are. you guys all killed the dinosaurs and the people living in the cretaceous period. youve been killers for awhile.
lmao i know this had to be public but it's hilariously insane that this conversation with david is in a taco bell.
i love that rachel can cry on command. i know it must not have een too difficult considering everything she's been through in the last 72 hours or so, but i know she must have been seething to have to act like she was scared and hopeless in front of David like that.
and then actually be helpless in rat morph jesus fuck. *After* he says that creepy shit about going with him ugh it makes me wanna throw up he's so awful
shit Rachel you should have just had someone in or out of morph pull you both out or something that's horrifying! and apparently somehow doesnt take that long? fuck
well im glad he gets trapped as a rat. suits him. but of course cassie would think of this. she knows how to make an effective rat trap and exactly how it feels to go past that 2 hour mark and lose your whole life to it. honestly this kid deserved this i think. i mean maybe death would have been nicer, but it would have been harder on the animorphs. he wanted to live by the rules of nature or whatever. just not as prey.
anyway here's Rachel again, protecting everyone from anything she can because she loves so fiercely.
She doesn't want to be a weapon, she never did. She wants to be a shield. And she has all my respect for that.
I really wonder how David thought the Saddler plan was going to work long-term. Like, even if he could pull off all the private morphing required for it, he still has several very angry Animorphs who know where he moved.
Like even assuming he never intended to let them out of the bottle, he only came up with the bottled roach part of the plan after he met them to get the box (because they planted it). He went into that meeting without a plan for containing the rest of the group.
But none of these things meant anything to me. Tobias was dead. Jake might still die. And I was going to have to go after David. I was going to have to hunt him down.
I was going to hunt him down and destroy him.
No, not destroy. That was a weasel word. It was vague, meaningless. I was going to kill him.
p. 20
I wonder how much of Rachel clarifying that she is going to kill David because David has been saying that he hasn't murdered anyone when he has and she wants to be nothing like him.
She isn't going to sugarcoat what she is going to do when she gets her hands on him. Because that is something that David would do.
my heart is like racing right now this is absolutely insane why is him hunting them down one by one actually working? why did she have to fly so far to get to high voltage power lines (good and fucked up plan rachel i love you)? oh why do we have to get every iota of detail on him literally tearing into her body to kill her fuuuuck
THANK APPLEGRANT FOR TOBIAS ToT oh the way she was giving it her all to avenge him and how he's so freaking cute when he saves her!!!! im sobbing <I am? Who, me?> he's so perfect
And then we just get an emotional whiplash summary fot he rest of the night?! omg i thought we were going to get a play by play of this insane battle royale! i mean im so glad everyone is alive and okay but please play hooky from school when you're being systematically hunted down FUCK
Woah what a charged lunch room conversation omg that was so good. How Rachel and Jake immediately knew by the way he moved that it wasn't Marco. How Cassie made sure she would have an excuse to sit closer to him and make him lean in and Listen, the way Rachel gripped her fork like a weapon. oooo im having so much fun with this.
im going so insane (at least i got a little satisfaction from the little amount of power she got to own over him for now)
i know she doesnt want to confront this but i want her to express this to Jake so so badly. the tension here is so strong i dont know when it'll snap but it's going to be Bloody when it does. fuck Rachel the powder keg is going to be incandescent isn't she? i hope this doesn't burst for a few books at least. it's going to be wild.
i love tobias/rachel but sometimes the way rachel and marco are so in tune with each other and sharp-tongue near-flirting with each other all the time makes me wanna read fanfic about them too at some point
okay so no more breaks for the animorphs i guess. on top of the Everything in this book, they also have to brave a thunderstorm on the ocean god these poor babies i just wanna scoop up their little seagull bodies and fix everything for them. at least they get to be dolphins for a bit.
hoo i forgot i was typing things about this book i was just sucked into it. "an honor to meet u sir" lol
while the image of V3 shaking his fist and yelling at an elephant in the rain is funny, it wouldve taken like exactly 1 swipe of her trunk to kill him. it would have been pretty perfect too considering how bone deep exhausted and injured rachel is to just. swat him like a fly.
Anyway
How the fuck did this kid get a killer whale morph??? how did he know the plan well enough to have stopped by seaworld and gotten one? ugh please tell me this gets answered. -_-
weird that Cassie would morph humpback for this. i know she can read people really well but she told jake that she could take him before she morphed and then still chose the whale without teeth banking Heavy on the fact that David doesn't know that.
I'm just glad Rachel was saved again. I'm sure it'll grate on her that the plan she was thinking of was interrupted by Ax and that No one defended her to David when he tried to divide them. you guys can't let him cause infighting on top of real fighting pleeeeasse.
Now David has evolved into an active threat, seeking out the Animorphs for battle. He's gone from scared to angry in a way that as a kid I was pretty shocked by: I was caught off guard by how fast he escalated things.
Rereading now, though? I can see the path from fear to anger as this kid and his easily wounded ego try to reclaim control. That's also why Rachel becomes his point of fixation: she's the one who threatens his sense of being in control of the situation the most by threatening his parents.
He'd gone from feeling like he had the upper hand to on the back foot instantly from that alone. His sexism doesn't help him any, but I'd find it hard to argue he's really much worse about it than Marco's been. He's fueled by a toxic need to be in control of things but he's not entirely the raging, Toxic-Masculinity-Incarnate dudebro I've seen sometimes in the fandom...
... until <Cool. Now, hey, go ahead and enjoy your shower.> where his creep level rises to a billion.
I'm honestly not sure whether that's intended in a sexually creepy way in particular or in a standard threatening creepy way of being able to be anywhere, hidden as anything the way Rachel herself comments on earlier when she understands why Visser Three hates the Animorphs so much. I know when I was a kid I only took it the latter way but now that I'm older I can see why the former would be present in mind too.
(Not that Marco hasn't made window-peeping jokes...)
I guess that level of "just how bad is David?" is a reader-by-reader interpretation.
Most of his escalation seems like it's trying to one-up whatever he's been dealt, though. Jake threatens him and then Tobias tails him, he kills "Tobias" and then fights Jake because he feels things have become life-and-death. Rachel escalates by threatening his family, he shows up at her home to threaten hers. It's about regaining his sense of control and it escalates as quickly as it does because he's knocked so off-balance so quickly.
Given a slower start, he'd probably have had time to deal with his being easily offended and his need for control and the others would have had time to learn his limits. As it is, his escalation mirrors the speed at which his life was ripped away, and the Animorphs have to respond in kind to survive. Like a lot of the tragedy in this series David's arc isn't fated by the stars or anything but there also isn't a lot he or the Animorphs could do differently without a massive change in circumstances.
