#ani 40

[emeraldmew]

I love the unhinged friendship these two have.

[imperfectskeleton]

Animorphs #40, The Other — notes

I still really want to know what kind of fraud Gafinilan had to commit to get an identity and a house that included a pretty sweet greenhouse setup

As a little kid I only got Very Important Friendship from Gaf and Mertil (because I was 7) and even understanding the intended read that's still how I feel about it because I'm Not Attracted. In other news one of my platonic friendships caused a married friend to cry over the weekend cos apparently it meant a lot to her that we care about each other despite a limited scope of shared interests and belief. I am not the target audience of relationships that are forced to be oblique.

Marco and Rachel as Jake's most loyal soldiers

#27 vibes

I'd forgotten the list of possibilities Marco starts out with. Ax? No. It's none of the guys we just met either. Trap.

Jake vs. Andalites is a degree of enmity that can be so... Look at our boy all grown up scary and bitter.

Andalite ableism! I would be happy to never see you again!

[emeraldmew]

<This is not about Marco,> Tobias said. <This is about Mertil. Mertil is Gafinilan's shorm, Ax. Can't you understand . . .>

Tobias is just so patient in this book.

Also this bit earlier:

Tobias's hawk eyes are perceptive indeed. Even Marco is able to pick up what he's implying.

(Context: Applegrant wanted to make these andalites in-text gay but Scholastic said no. Tobias noting their relationship and his comment on how <Loyalty is all there is.> when the others are suspicious of Gaf getting rid of Mertil are also interesting in the context that Tobias is the one to first bring up gay people in the series back in.., 23 was it? when he was lamenting how the Scouts couldn't even accept a gay kid so how would humanity accept Hork-Bajir. Tobias is consistently the one aware of this stuff.)

[emeraldmew]

Unless... A ladder rung is part of a ladder. Ladders lead to places where you are not.

Truly excellent Marco quote.

[emeraldmew]

Come a little closer, like into my home, and you'll see that I'm also a son. A friend. And, on a very rare day, a decent dog-sitter.

There's something to be said for how Nora is already a status-quo changer after marrying into the family in 35. Marco's mentioned her more-or-less offhandedly back in The Mutation too. She's there now. She's part of Marco's life in a way that now he's mentioning her and Euclid as casually as Jake might mention his mom or Rachel might mention her sisters.

The status quo just includes Nora now.

She stuck around. She was a major change for Marco but he had to adjust to her permanency rather than treat her like the many one-and-done encounters of Nartec or Venber or Garatrons.

It's interesting that she gets to be mentioned like a permanent fixture in Marco's life here in 40 when the next upcoming largest status-quo disrupting event in the series is... well, if you know you know.

[emeraldmew]

40 also adds a bit of context to Aloth-Attamil-Gahar's... er... enterprising before his arrest and assignment to Unit 0.

Considering the andalites who would be in need of organs are presumably the ones that cannot remorph healthy tissues themselves I imagine vecols pretty much have to rely on the black market if they want to survive rather than wither away out of sight the way andalite culture demands.

It doesn't make Aloth a good guy by any stretch but it's an interesting peak into the andalite homeworld.

[emeraldmew]

<Of course, I did not know he was morph incapable. I was under the impression the academy did not admit vecols.>

Putting aside how smackable Ax is for a moment, this is actually pretty interesting. We know the morphing tech has only been around for 30-ish years and that andalites are capable of making it to at least two hundred. It's entirely possible Mertil enrolled in the academy before the technology was widespread.

But man, this also really says a lot about how centralized morphing must be on the andalite homeworld, doesn't it, if the inability to use it is considered a disability. Like, we talk about how it's hard to function in the 2020s without a cell phone or email address but imagine if that was so ingrained in life that not having one was a "shameful" disability (leaving out how economic hardship is viewed in our society for half a second for this comparison. If we swap out vecol with poor there's not really much to be shocked at here. Just disappointment.).

I also wonder how common an allergy or disease or disorder that prevents the morphing tech from taking is for andalites. We know anyone in the military is expected to morph but what about among civilians? Is it something that most andalites would never know they had an inability to use or something that would be obvious over time?

[emeraldmew]

"D'ya think? Really?" I said, rolling my eyes. "Okay. Listen. We don't have time to wait around for the rerun or to send a check to the station in order to buy a copy. We just can't risk waiting."

Okay, more than The Internet Book, 40 is the one that has me marveling at the speed technology changes the game on this weird blue dot we call Earth.

It shouldn't surprise me. I lived through the transition from VHS to DVD. I should know that the way we can access pretty much anything instantly online now wasn't even on the radar in the 90s.

But man, it'll never stop impressing me how rapidly technology changes.