#animorphs 5

[exigencelost]

Animorphs 5 gave us so much. They fit so much into that tiny little book. Two kids getting almost boiled alive for dinner in a regular human kitchen in a scene that had sort of nothing to do with the plot. Ax going completely insane at radio shack and almost dooming the Earth by virtue of total inability to behave normally in public for ten seconds. A disillusioned teenager making a desperate attempt to abnegate his duty for what would turn out to be the last time in his fucking life, then realizing twenty minutes later that he's incapable of that. A gaggle of teens experiencing ego death and getting ripped to pieces by completely normal ants before blindly bursting out of the suffocating earth and running home in leotards, only for one of them to find an ant pincer in his hip in the shower later and have a brief but thorough nervous breakdown in his bathroom. The same gaggle of teens catching a glimpse of their home planet from the window of a spaceship sent to consume that planet, struck by its beauty and by the weight of the duty of care for it that's been placed on their shoulders, moments before they are brought to believe they have failed that duty irrevocably and will die before they reach their home again. And all of that was before Eva came back from the dead.

[animemangasoul]

Tim: Ahhh! Ohh! Oh, oh, oh, what? What? What is that?!

Dick [swivels his head back and forth, looking for some danger]: What?

Tim: A new sense. It... I cannot explain it. It is... it comes from this mouth. [points at his mouth] It happened when I drank this liquid. It was pleasant. Very pleasant."

13 year old Tim when he first tries coffee

[exigencelost]

I love Animorphs 5 because it’s the last time Marco really questions his duty, it’s where he makes the transition from the least to most committed member of the team and he never looks back, and it would have been so easy to reduce that down to one glimpse at Eva at the end, but really the damage is done before he ever sees her, because he meets a complete stranger who despite his fear despite his youth despite his grief despite his longing for his broken family is willing to fight with his life for people he doesn’t even know, and Marco cannot look away from that, and his need to repay that favor brings him onto the Blade ship and he looks out the window and he sees the Earth. The deal is sealed for Marco before he sees Eva, because he has already seen the Earth, and putting it in that order wasn’t an accident. He looks at the whole world and understands that he has to win and he never looks back. He wants so badly to be someone who's only looking out for himself and the people he loves the most because that's the only way he can imagine keeping those people all alive but he cannot be that person.

[exigencelost]

The other thing about Marco saying to Jake “You’re not getting me killed to save your father!” which is one of a total of like, two times in #31 that Marco loses his temper, which is fucking miraculous given the stakes and the way Jake is acting, is that it illustrates how completely he has internalized the mentality that the team—not just the war, but the team— is all of their first responsibility and everything else they love is secondary; and how much Jake has not. Marco threw a fit about that concept very early on, before anyone else recognized that it was going to come down to that. But he’s worked through it and reached the conclusion by the end of #5. Jake doesn’t really get there until #53.

[exigencelost]

I really do love the scenes where Rachel goes minorly ballistic in school in some socially unacceptable way because it’s like, sure, layer 1 #girlpower and the catharsis of the monstrous feminine, but like. I don’t know. Cue in depth contrastive analysis between the Buffy the Vampire Slayer scene where they have to do some kind of bizarre self-defense training in gym class and Buffy is supposed to pretend to not be badass but fails/refuses to do so and flips the school bully hard onto his back and Willow gently chastises her for endangering her cover but the scene is in every other way framed to show us how cool Buffy is and how the facade of high school normalcy can’t help but crack in the face of her extreme coolness, VERSUS the Animorphs #5 scene where honestly very early in the Animorphs’ self-discovery as child soldiers, Rachel shoves a girl against a table in the cafeteria on almost zero provocation and grinds out “Don’t. Touch. Me.” in what is pretty unambiguously a PTSD trigger moment and Marco immediately scans the cafeteria to see if any other Animorph is close enough to get involved because he is very genuinely afraid that Rachel is going to expose them all, not as superheroes who are too cool for school, but as children who have been forced to learn instincts that no child can compartmentalize. 

TL;DR Rachel Animorphs' outbursts of anger and minor physical violence at school help demonstrate that kids can't be involved in violence without the trauma of it impacting their behavior.

[anidragon]

My liveblog reread of Animorphs book # 5, The Predator, is bellow the cut. As before, there will be spoilers up to this book, but I’ll make every effort to avoid spoilers for later books. (Except for really minor shit like “They morph such-and-such an animal later”)

Ax discovering taste. Bless his heart. XD

“Cassie was shivering like she was cold, only it was about seventy degrees out.”  I used to think phrases like these were exaggerations. Eventually I learned that Fahrenheit was a thing, and seventy degrees is actually a fairly normal temperature.

You know, it would make a really interesting fic to explore how things would have gone down if Marco really would have quit in this book. Like if he’d quit before this mission, or if Visser One had a different host and thus didn’t give him a reason to stick around. Just an interesting AU plot-bunny for you all. Maybe he’d come back later, like if he discovers something about the Yeerks that he needs to share with them, or something. I dunno, run wild with it, fanfics writers!

And then the big reveal about Marco’s mom. This is another moment that really made me wish I’d read the books in order, back in the day. (I read book 15 before reading this one) I just... I try to picture what it would have been like to read that scene without already knowing, but it’s just not the same. *sigh* I actually think every major reveal in Animorphs was spoiled to me. (In the early books anyway. But there weren’t all that many in the later books) Most by having read them out of order, and one from finding a spoiler online. It makes me sad. I wish there was a way to selectively forget books that you’ve read so that you can experience them for the “first” time again.