#animorphs 19

[timetravelingkayak]

"I guess sometimes you have to choose between smart, sane, ruthlessness, and totally stupid, insane hope," I said, not even realizing I was speaking out loud. "You can't just pick one and stick with it, either. Each time it comes up, you have to try and make your best decision. Most of the time, I guess I have to go with being smart and sane. But I don't want to live in a world where people don't try the stupid, crazy, hopeful thing sometimes."

[imperfectskeleton]

Cassie persuading Aftran to admit Seerow was a good Andalite as far as the yeerks are concerned brings up the question of how do they think that he died?

The way Jara tells Tobias in HBC implied the story has been told many times in feeding cages, to Hork-Bajir outside the Hamee bloodline and their original tribe. And even if the hosts take more from the fact Andalites and Yeerks brought war when they did not know it before them, the Yeerks remember Seerow.

Elfangor wasn’t murdered because this is a war and killing the enemy isn’t murder in war, but what of Seerow? Shunted away to be harmless only to be obliterated, unsuspecting.

If seems the yeerks only consider Andalites as equals instead of hosts - we certainly don’t see them respect or interact with host species in typical interactions, and presumably they’re as dismissive of the Skrit Na as Andalites are.

So if Seerow was right and he had met Yeerks that weren’t intending to wage war, and only wanted to see the stars, were they ever told what became of him? Sure, there were Yeerks that considered him to be as much a fool as Alloran did, but there must have been others who were grateful to him. Do the Yeerk Peace Movement see him as a martyr? If he was considered to have turned on the Yeerks, Aftran would tell Cassie as much. So why has nobody considered that they killed the Andalite who freed them from their pools?

[exigencelost]

listening to the walking away from the war playlist and specifically to Deserter's Song by radical face and thinking once again about Animorphs because of my personality traits and also flaws, and experiencing specifically the line ''to fall was not my fear, to make one fall was'' and thinking about the fact that cassie animorphs was terrified of killing and marco animorphs was terrified of dying and in book 19 cassie said ''i'm never killing again, i'm done,'' and marco snarled at her ''when i said i didn't want to fight this fight, you all called me a selfish coward'' and cassie met his eyes and said ''so i'm selfish. so i'm a coward.'' what's a coward.

[hatingfromacrackedscreen]

One of my favorite things about the Animorphs rotating pov is how you get to see character development happening so subtly but from so many different angles. One of my favorite examples is with Cassie & Marco’s relationship, from when she left the team to the David Arc (books 19-22), and how it explains so much of their dynamic for the rest of the series.

Marco and Cassie have one of the most interesting dynamics out of the Animorphs because of how often they disagree over conflicts/strategy, but also because of the fact that they usually end up being the de facto strategists of the team (They also both are like, in love with Jake, which also leads to really interesting moments but this isn’t about that). Naturally this puts them at odds with each other often, especially during Book #19. Cassie quits the team and voluntarily infests herself so she doesn’t have to kill Karen, something that Marco doesn’t understand and also is upset about, because now he may have to kill Cassie. After book’s end Cassie makes it back to the team and Aftran begins the peace movement. There’s a lot of threads that contribute to spiral from the book, and Cassie and Marco’s relationship is one of the subtler ones. What’s important to note is that the next book, book #20, is a Marco pov. We get to see his thoughts, and all is not forgiven. He reminisces about the recent Cassie-related events, and says something along the lines of “yeah I’m not really chill with her after the shit she pulled with Aftran.” Which I support Cassie fully, but fair enough! Not only did Cassie voluntarily cause their biggest security breach at the moment, but also he thought he, a 14 year old, was now going to have to kill his friend, another 14 year old. I would be pissed too. (Also this is another great subtle narrative thread leading into the David Arc, which derives its most central tension from this same dilemma)

However the culmination of the Cassie Marco tension comes not from either of their own pov, but from the next book, book 21 which is a Jake pov. The Animorphs all morph bugs to break into a hotel that has a Yeerk conspiracy involved, and they come close to the 2 hour limit. They all morph back successfully except Marco (the weakest morpher) who is stuck as a several foot tall giant grotesque flea. Everyone’s freaking out, but it’s Cassie who’s comes forward, places a hand on Marco, and soothingly guides him through his sheer panic, and into demorphing back to his human self. After Marco breaks down and sobs on Cassie, and Jake even notes he’s never seen Marco cry like that. Which is significant since Jake has known Marco grieving through his mother “dying”. Jake doesn’t note it, because it’s a situation he doesn’t even know about, but in this moment Marco forgives Cassie. Marco never gives her shit for the Aftran situation again, either in his narration or in others. And I love that it’s something that’s not explicitly said by Jake in this book, or Marco or Cassie in later ones, but all of the resolution of that tension between them beautify resolves in a book that’s not either of their povs and doesn’t even explicitly mention it.

Not only is that a knack to Animorphs’ character writing, but it sets the foundation for their relationship going forward. It’s why Cassie still goes to talk to Marco in Book #35 through his issues with his dad remarrying, and he ridicules her a bit but hears her out. And then by series end, when Cassie gives the morphing cube away to the Yeerks, and Jake tells everyone. Is Mr. Marco “ruthless bright line from A to B” pissed at her? No he’s over it and back to being chums with her. Because that’s Cassie his bestie now❤️ And I love that no matter how often they’re at conflict later in the series, after the flea incident it never gets as serious in Marcos narration as it was to him before, in book #20. Animorphs’ character writing amongst multiple povs is just so so soo good.

[exigencelost]

Back on my bullshit! It was only ever a matter of time. I think it’s interesting that Marco Animorphs who can only really conceptualize himself in terms of what he owes to other people flat out cannot comprehend Cassie in #19 who is operating on her own desperate desire and gut moral instinct and hope and love and is not factoring duty into her calculations at all. But in #20 he makes eye contact with her, thinks about what she’s done that he can’t understand and struggles to forgive, and then does forgive her, because he puts it back into terms of debt and loyalty and decides he owes it to her. “Cassie’s saved my life more than once. You cut a person a lot of slack when they’ve saved your life.”

[exigencelost]

The other thing about #39 hellish ant-Cassie scene (where Cassie kills an image of herself that’s screaming in existential anguish) is that Cassie tries to tell the rest of the team about it later, to explain why she’s so shaken, and no one picks up what she’s putting down. Jake and Rachel (the people who love her the most) both try to connect with her in that moment and they both fail; Jake talks privately about his relief that she’s okay (which she’s not) and Rachel tries to make a joke to lighten the mood (which Cassie doesn’t laugh at). No one else tries at all, and no one really hears what she’s saying. 

I had a conversation awhile ago about how the team fails to see Cassie clearly a lot of the time and I’m thinking now also about the #19 line “You’re saying the whole world can go to hell as long as you, Cassie, don’t have to turn into me,” and how Cassie has no rebuttal because it’s true, but also, even though it’s true, Cassie doesn’t actually have a problem with Rachel. Like, I’m struggling to think of a time Cassie is actually judgmental of, or frightened of, or disapproving of Rachel. Cassie could not live with herself if she was like Rachel, but Cassie can easily live with Rachel, and those things don’t seem to conflict for her. 

And later in #19, Marco shows up to kill a small child and Cassie takes drastic action to prevent it because she doesn’t want to be party to that act of violence, but I can’t remember any line of her narration or dialogue that condemns Marco in any way for what he plans to do. She can’t bear to do it. That doesn’t mean she thinks less of him for doing what he thinks needs to be done. Cassie is afraid of Marco in #19 but she is not angry at him and she does not observably pass judgment on him. 

I’m having a thought that goes something like: Rachel and Marco (who refuse to say out loud that they hate themselves) have recurring problems with Cassie (who constantly verbalizes her struggles with self-hatred) which they frame as them defending against Cassie’s unfair moral reprobation; but Cassie doesn’t have any discernible problem with them. 

Whereas Tobias (who has achieved personal moral self-acceptance), understands Cassie possibly better than anyone, and Ax (who has a lot of issues but none of them are revulsion at his own capacity for violence) gets along fine with her until the endgame when she materially betrays the team’s objective. Like. Ax doesn’t have a problem with Cassie being passively angst-ridden. He doesn’t take that as an attack on himself. They’re not close but there’s not friction in the way there’s constant friction between Cassie and Marco. 

Marco sees Cassie’s moral hangups as a personal attack, and partly that’s because he feels like she’s making his boyfriend think less of him, but it’s mostly because he thinks so little of himself and he’s compartmentalizing that so aggressively that he can’t stand being in the same space as someone who refuses to compartmentalize. The entire team (with the possible and significant exception of Cassie) has accepted the premise that Cassie is a better person than Marco; so if Cassie is disgusted by her own sins, by the transitive property she must be even more disgusted by Marco. But I really don’t think she is. 

Idk. I’m forever thinking about #30, where Cassie yells in the planning meeting “we can’t do this, he’s in denial, it’s his mother,” and then she ends up pushing Eva over the cliff. Like. She tried to throw down against Marco’s plan but she expressed it very clearly not in moral terms but in terms of Marco’s well-being, arguably even in strategic terms: He Cannot Take This. This is a mistake. It will backfire. We will lose a functioning team member. And she loses that argument and so she shuts up and plays her part and then in the end she is the person who does the actual deed, which, again, protects Marco from doing it, falls in line with her thesis statement that he can’t survive doing it, but like. Are we really going to pretend that Cassie is sitting in moral judgment over everyone else? The only person on the team that Cassie Animorphs doesn't know how to live with is herself. The only thing Cassie Animorphs ever thought the word “abomination” about was a creature that was in the process of transforming into her. 

[exigencelost]

Christ. I love the shifting POV of Animorphs but I’m thinking about what the quartet of #19-22 would be if the whole thing was told in one go from Cassie’s perspective, or Marco’s, or Rachel’s. (I’m omitting Jake from this post because he still irritates me.) 

Marco walks into the David trilogy with the memory of Jake giving him the order “Cassie and Aftran don’t make it to the Yeerk line, no matter what,” and Marco saying, in effect, "copy that,” and flying off to make it happen. When Marco says “we shouldn’t let David join this team,” he’s saying it because he knows what happens when an Animorph can’t be convinced to follow the Animorphs’ rules. What happens is that Jake orders that person’s death. And Marco already knows, as Rachel does not yet know because she won’t learn this about herself until #22, but Marco knows at the start of #20 that that’s an order he personally is willing to obey. 

So when Marco says “leave David to the Yeerks” he’s, as usual for Marco, speaking with a preemptive understanding of the fail conditions that almost everyone else in the group doesn’t have yet and won’t internalize until they ignore him and it all goes to shit. By the time the David situation deteriorates to the point where we see Marco’s right and that David might have to die—by the time the Animorphs are once again combing the skies hunting down one of their own—we’ve moved on to Rachel’s POV, and I have no criticisms of #22 which was a masterpiece but the fact remains that Rachel is late to get this memo. Rachel doesn’t know what went down between Jake and Marco (or even briefly between Marco and Cassie) in #19, and the idea that she and her friends will hunt and murder a teen is news to her. It’s not news to Marco! Marco saw this bullet coming, but because of the POV switch he didn’t see it land. 

Meanwhile. What Cassie does, and pulls off, with David, is what she tried and (halfway) failed to do to herself in #19. Cassie sees Marco coming for her in #19 and knows what he may do when he finds her (she half-denies it to Aftran, she thinks he’ll avoid it, but she heard him tell her in blunt terms “now it’s you who might have to die,”) and she averts that PVP death by nothlitting. That’s what she does to David. She “saves” David from the team’s ride-or-die-and-we-mean-the-die-part mentality the same way she “saved” herself: by destroying his body and his future. And we hear one piece of commentary on that from her, which is “may I be forgiven for what I’m about to do,” but if we got to hear her watch this whole thing unfold and draw actual connections to what just happened to her. All I’m saying is I would like to see it.

Meanwhile the second. Rachel is the only person with a POV in #19-22 who as far as I can tell is never aware that Cassie’s life was in danger from the Animorphs in #19. She doesn’t hear Marco’s threat to Cassie and she doesn’t hear Jake’s order to Marco and I can’t imagine that anyone told her after the fact; she would not react well. Rachel votes to bring David onto the team from what’s visibly a “you’re right this is nuts, but what the hell, let’s do it” mentality and also because it’s what Cassie wants to do and, as Marco complains in #28, Rachel usually backs Cassie. Rachel backs Cassie! Rachel backs Cassie even when it violates her every operating principle: #19, Rachel says as she walks away from an unscathed helpless Aftran, “Cassie was my best friend. I’m not going to be the one to call her a fool.” 

Rachel backs Cassie but Rachel doesn’t know, because no one told her, just how far into the deep end Jake and Marco were ready to go to keep Cassie contained. She doesn’t know the stakes of Cassie’s brand of idealistic risk-taking. She doesn’t know how close the Animorphs came one book ago to eating their own. So it blindsides her, in #22, in a way it can’t possibly have blindsided Marco and probably didn’t even blindside Cassie, when they end up back there again. And again I am saying that I would like to see it, where “it” here refers to “Rachel finds out sometime in #19-22 what exactly went down in #19 and how similar it is to what she does to David.”

[exigencelost]

In re Marco angrily telling Rachel “You always back Cassie” in #28 (cows book) and Jake telling her “You and Cassie just egg each other on” (idk what book) and also Rachel agreeing with Marco that it’s a bad idea to save David but voting with Cassie to do it anyway in #20, and also Rachel saving that guy in #17 (oatmeal book) which frankly deserves to be included in my Can We Save Bystanders Midseries Introspective analysis, and Cassie lunging at crazy cannibal guy in #16 (online chatroom bill gates is an alien cannibal book) in a frankly Rachel-esque unsanctioned fit of rage, which maybe also deserves a place in the Bystanders Introspective: what holds Cassie and Rachel’s friendship together despite their enormous differences is that they both believe in their hearts that the rescue of the individual person in danger in front of you is an uncompromisable moral imperative. What holds Jake and Marco’s friendship together is that they don’t.