#animorphs 21

[lochnessie]

Liveblogging The Threat (Animorphs #21) pt 3

you guyyyyyssssss......that kills people! i mean i know action media in general assumes head wounds are much less severe than they could be in real life and that the kids have killed controllers in the past but damn! instant kills with weights is a new one.

ah, well that explains it. Cassie sees humans, Jake sees Yeerks.

Ooooh so did David sell them out? Told the yeerks the plan because he figured the animorphs are the losing side? no wonder he was compared to teen chapman.

oh maybe not, he's wailing about being about to die.

GET HIS ASS GET HIS ASS GET HIS ASS. KILL CASSIE KILL

Loyal, ride-or-die Cassie, Jake. She was suspicious of him too even if she couldnt quite get a read on him. YES. this is gratifying.

oh shit it was a fakeout? still, if david got to be the one to kill V3 (i know he won't but it was a cool plan) i'd be pissed. this book really is giving me whiplash geez.

Ax gets so many opportunities with a tail blade against this bitch-ass yeerk and every time he fucking hesitates. I might cut him some slack because of this particular situation and cassie being in the line but still! Im starting to think he doesnt really wanna avenge his brother. like i know he's a kid and he doesnt do a lot of killing but. come on dude. he's right there. and now he's a naked man. doesnt even have a morph suit pfft

great okay great we're back on. get him get him get him get him! Should've brought cassie tho.

banger Ax line: <That is a highly unacceptable number of maybes>

you're so right my guy. im worried about Tobias though, what did this punk ass do to tobias? cuz he's definitely not joining the yeerks from his house. maybe he's headed to Saddler? Was i right??

NO baby bird boy!! NOOOOOO

cue the superhero music. this kid always uses the most dramatic entrances i swear.

he says get rachel twice. so im thinking he knows Rachel will want this kill because she would most want revenge for Tobias, who i assume will make a miraculous recovery but still.

Still.. i know he wants backup but. is this the first time Jake is handing Rachel a kill instead of having to do it himself or am i overanalyzing.

so you fall on top of him and he dies right? disney villains like to die falling from great heights. or rachel shows up to finish the job or whatever. honestly im kind of pissed that Jake lost. David has less experience using a human brain in morph, less experience dealing with pain in general and less experience fighting. There's no reason he should have won, besides from the luck of falling through the skylight but still. I wish the fight had been a little longer, a little more skewed to Jake's side.

im also getting annoyed at these 'to be continued' endings. i know this is a high stakes mission but i got so used to the episodic books. i guess this serves the plot better but i wonder if AppleGrant keeps using these in the future post-David. Guess i'll find out next week *sigh*

[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]

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.”

[austinendstheworld]

[lochnessie]

Liveblogging The Threat (Animorphs #21) pt 2

Cassie is a genius. 'you need the dragonfly visual cortex to interpret the dragonfly's eyes' I also want a scene of her trying to catch a dragonfly in a jar in the backyard while her parents watch her through the window, utterly perplexed. How does she keep catching these bugs lmao. Ive worked with animals and it's really hard to catch a flea alive. congrats i guess lol

Also, i know this wont get explained i just dont think it makes sense to have the mosquito morph be too small to do because of z-space mishaps but the flea is fine. like.....what?

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER SHOUT OUT?! IN MY ANIMORPHS?!?! HUH?! omgs i just looked it up and the final animorphs books was apparently published in May 2001. WILD. i guess 9/11 didn't happen in the animorphs universe lmao. though i suppose what did happen was much much worse

haha he ate a mosquito. guess he's long over the trauma of eating something in lizard morph lol

genuinely laughing aloud at my computer screen this is so absurdly funny. 5 fleas try so hard to land on a dragonfly, finally latch on, have a hawk fly the whole bus to the beach and then drop em off. incredible. no notes hahahaa

RACHEL WHY ARE YOU WATCHING TAPES FROM DESERT STORM. this book is insane

welcome to animorphs david it's like this all the time hahahaa (I KNOW YOU KNOW WHAT A HAT IS AX STOP LYING)

this book is giving me whiplash

that's gotta be one of the worst ways to die. in flea morph via artery pressure. fucked. UP.

oh marco, oh marco...baby boy. dont cry you're hurting my heart oh you poor traumatized horrified kid. oh marcoooo

jake, im assuming youve since regretted boiling a jacuzzi of slugs alive in the hospital that one time, but you once had no problem with killing them in their pool before. and no one had issues driving them crazy via oatmeal. but sure, it would let them know youre on to them i guess.

this kid is such a creep. Also, probably a tiger. male lions dont spend much time hunting.

Jake is being real heavy handed with the foreshadowing. Did David acquire Jake when he bit him for dragonfly transport? Wtf is David planning? is he going to try to replace jake or saddler???? I hope he has no idea where the animorphs put the escafil device

[lochnessie]

Liveblogging The Threat (Animorphs #21) pt 1

Possibly strange? that's what you call the kid who killed a crow in cold blood for no fucking reason? Okay Jake i know you don't dislike him as much as Marco but...idk that strange is the right word.

I know these questions are mostly for comedy in the books, but i wish his unintentional jokes would evolve or increase in specificity or something because i know this kid has read atlases and encyclopedias and talks to Tobias often. surely some of the bigger questions have been answered by now. I like the jokes he makes on purpose though, more of those please

But it's so silly that they spend more than one line of dialogue on the fact that his replacement clothes are stolen. like guys.. priorities. a little outfit theft is not the end of the world here hahahaha.

So Jake wants to treat David like any other animorph to keep it equal right, but he can't. it's an equity thing. i know they're kids but he has way less experience. Couldn't they give david a less risky job like surveillance or something? Besides, if these books had good continuity, David would be exhausted after one morph like all the other kids were back in earlier books when they had less practice.

dracon beam sunglasses?! sick. how much we wanna bet those are never coming back after this book lol

oh geez poor Saddler. but mostly poor Jake. Every Jake book is about how much is on his shoulders. All the animorphs feel the weight of responsibility and the pressure of their mission but it's really emphasized in Jake books. He feels it Constantly and gets reminded of it every time he looks at his brother. It doesnt feel like there's any respite for the leader at all.

lmao the fate of world rests in the presence of 2 french chihuahuas. youre so lucky his wife is even traveling with him for this conference my guy. this'll be fun

aww what a sweet moment between happy dog jake and cassie. im glad that she was also trying to work on the plan to get into the resort so jake knows it's not always on him to come up with plans. at least he gets a little morph break to feel okay. maybe they should morphs dogs more for therapy lol

oooooo i want soo badly to know what he would have saiiiid!!! i'm glad david came around enough this time that he didn't need it but he still had to threaten him and im surprised he isnt more terrified. he almost died yesterday, felt the pain of a dracon beam and then while knowing that yeerks are everywhere and how dire it is that they think the animorphs are only andalites, he still breaks into a hotel in a highly suspicious way. like cmon kid i know youre not that dumb.

[exigencelost]

i think you could argue that rachel does take a lesson from the david trilogy about saving people, but it’s a more limited lesson and it is: rachel’s job in this war is to save the other animorphs. she (the only older sibling on the team) takes that on from the construction site onwards and it comes up repeatedly in her early books, but i think 22 cements the fact that rachel sees herself not just as the heavy in terms of being the hardest fighter, but as the one who’s there to protect the others morally, protect their sense of self. staying on with david for those last two hours is a sacrifice she makes as much as her ending. (i also think that shift colors her relationship with cassie as much as 19 does - it’s not just that cassie doesn’t want to become rachel, but that cassie never really sees rachel’s warrior persona as coming in part from a place of intense and very personal care, including care *for her* - it never really clicks for her that rachel is the way partly so the others, including cassie, don’t have to be - and it kind of works, right? of all the main characters, cassie is the only one unambiguously saved)

I could talk for hours about the Cassie-Rachel implications of the David finale, so I’m gonna tiptoe around that because there’s a lot else to love here.

1) I think you’re right that Rachel sees herself as responsible for the team, more than for bystanders, more than for victory, and as a side note that’s something she shares with Tobias which is an element of their relationship I hadn’t articulated until now. Not that Tobias has that same sense of personal responsibility to the team, but he is loyal to the team, sometimes more than to the cause, in a similar way. It’s super interesting that this trait is what leads Rachel to so readily accept Jake’s call about her in #53, but makes Tobias treat that same call as anathema.

2) My David trilogy post was specifically about saving bystanders, so I still think the point holds. I feel like a lot of strategy/ethics decisions in Animorphs split the world into three groups: A) the Animorphs, B) the world, and C) literally every individual person in the world who isn’t an Animorph. A huge proportion of the Dilemmas they face are about choosing one of those three things to try to save.

Marco almost always chooses to save the world. Cassie usually chooses to save either the Animorphs or other individuals. (This is why Cassie and Marco butt heads all the time and why they work so well as twin foils to Jake, who is “in charge” and therefore expected to balance all three.)

(Sidenote: Cassie knocking Eva off the cliff in #30 falls into save the Animorphs, I think, rather than save the world. We never hear from her about it, but I’m convinced she didn’t kill Eva to kill Visser One; she killed Eva so Marco wouldn’t have to.) 

Rachel and Tobias generally choose to save the Animorphs, but Tobias fundamentally understands Cassie’s impulse to save other individuals, whereas Rachel I think understands that Jake has to save the world. (“It was a war, after all. A war had to win.”) Rachel understands that Jake has to save the world even at the expense of saving the Animorphs including her, which we see more clearly in #22 than we ever have before, when Jake acknowledges he used Rachel’s violent impulses as a tool, and Rachel realizes that she’s willing to live with that. Which of course sets us up for #53.

Ax is more complicated because he might have a different set of three categories, which articulated more as questions of loyalty and identity than who-to-save, and I’d splice them as: A) the Animorphs/Jake specifically, B) the Andalites/Andalite principles of honor, and C) Ax’s own nascent individual not-quite-Andalite not-quite-human sense of right and wrong. Ax is running a fundamentally different program from the rest of the team, and his dilemmas are perpendicular to theirs. I think this is why he so often abstains (or tries to abstain until ordered to participate, as with the David vote) from voting on big Animorphs questions. The vote usually hashes out a question of the humans’ ethical trichotomy, but for Ax all three of the conflicting human concerns, up to and including the fate of planet Earth, fall into his category A, loyalty to the team.

3) I think you’re at least half right about Rachel being a motherfucker so the team doesn’t have to (something that also shows up a lot with Marco.) But I hedge about it, not because it isn’t true, but because I think there’s a risk to overstating that, and I sometimes see people overstate it, at the expense of acknowledging that Rachel Berenson likes to fucking hurt people. (Also true of Marco! It’s not all an act. He is fundamentally Like That.)

Applegate set out to tell some gruesome truths about war, and one of the truths about war is that some people like it, because some people like to hurt people. And I love that that person was Rachel. I love that she picked a girl for that role, and that of the two on the team she picked the girl with big aspirations to “belong”: to be popular, to be beautiful, to be well-dressed, to be an athlete, to get good grades, to be a successful and integrated member of society.

Rachel’s canonically the only one on the team who takes decent notes in class! She keeps a B average at least far as book 12. Rachel’s trying determinedly to perform humanity and to perform upper-middle-class white femininity. And it’s falling to pieces beneath her because she’s not any of those things anymore, not fundamentally, not at her core. Not as her main identity. What she is is a killer. Not just by circumstance. She loves danger and she loves violence and she loves being a hero and she loves feeling powerful and she likes to win and she likes to hurt people. She’s a warrior, and she doesn’t belong in the safe clean insulated world that she was so successful in before.

I don’t like to reduce that evolution, or devolution, down to a simple act of altruism or heroism. I think it does disservice to Rachel’s specific tragedy and the story Applegate was using her to tell about war.

That said, yes violence and protectiveness were profoundly mixed together for Rachel, as they often are for people who engage in violence, and #22 did great work with that. A lot of later Rachel books...fucking did not. Weirdly Tobias books seem to be better at it, maybe because Tobias consistently looks to Rachel for protection and security and comfort.

You’re also right that Cassie ignores the degree to which Rachel is making a sacrifice for her (and for the team.) And I think that Cassie has to ignore that, or it won’t work. The whole deal with Cassie is that she doesn’t just hate the violence the team participates in; she hates that it’s necessary, and she hates having to acknowledge that it’s necessary. She does not want to believe that the world is structured in such a way that violence and brutality are the path to an acceptable future. All the Animorphs (except possibly Ax) struggle with this, but Cassie’s the one who almost breaks under the strain. In #19 she becomes, I would argue, actively suicidal in her desperation to not live in a world where violence is the only option. Acknowledging Rachel’s bloodlust as something that’s necessary to preserve what’s left of Cassie’s innocence (which let’s be honest, isn’t much) would be devastating for her. Acknowledging that the team requires Rachel’s bloodlust in order to function, that the path to the world Cassie wants to create requires someone to be Like That, would be devastating for her.

3.5) Okay I’ve now had a piece of toast and had another thought about Rachel and saving the team, which is: yeah, sometimes Rachel being aggressive and reckless and brave protects the team from having to shoulder a moral burden. But a lot of the time, Rachel being aggressive and reckless and brave forces the team to engage in a dangerous or bloody/haunting mission, or at the very least makes space for people who were hedging to get on board. Rachel leads the way. Rachel says “Let’s do it.” And she has to, because in almost every case those missions were necessary, and the danger and the trauma and the guilt that resulted from them was a necessary cost. But I think it’s an oversimplification to say that Rachel protected the group from trauma or from moral repercussions. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she led them straight into the fray.

3.75) You’re absolutely right about the staying-for-two-hours-with-David thing specifically, though. That was 100% an act of altruism and sacrifice for her team, and honestly a pretty grim choice on her point considering her very recent argument with Jake about him using her for exactly this purpose. Her volunteering to stay with David reads to me as a follow-up to that argument, a change in her answer. She’s saying: yes, okay, I accept this role. Which is uhhh not foreshadowing at all.

4) This is mostly unrelated to your point but I intensely dislike Cassie’s ending and feel she should have been much more fucked up and in fact find her being “okay” in the epilogue so non-credible that I seem to have actually scrubbed it from my memory because when I read your last sentence I blinked and was like “what are you talking about.”

[exigencelost]

What i love about the David trilogy is that "newest addition to the superhero team turns out to be evil and must be neutralized" is a trope as old as superhero teams but David isn't evil. He didn't have a sinister plan all along. He's a kid and he's scared out of his mind and he didn't ask for any of this and beat by beat the trilogy plays out the exact plot of like, the Blackfire episodes of Teen Titans or something, and you feel sick and uneasy the whole time because you've seen this story before and you know how it ends. You know when you meet the new kid that he won't stick around. And you know that the team won't be defeated and they probably won't kill the bad guy but they'll do something awful to him, something that puts him in his place, something that stops him from being dangerous anymore, something he'll never escape, and it's exactly the same as the stories that made it feel fun except this doesn't feel fun, this sucks. Which is like, the Animorphs theme song.