Annoyed that Jake’s off-the-rails speech in Animorphs 53 bopped so hard. Man has no business becoming interesting T-1 installment from the finish line.
Okay also @prettyboysdontlookatexplosions responding to this as a separate post because the other one is like, no longer earthquake-safe. You wrote in this post:
(i do think tobias would have thrown the war away to save rachel’s life, but i don’t think he would have forcibly interceded in her decision-making the way cassie does to jake.) (i honestly don’t know if jake and rachel would let cassie and tobias respectively die. interesting bummer thought experiment!)
I agree 100% that Tobias might have thrown away the war to save Rachel’s life but would not have sabotaged her to do it. At some point on mobile I incoherently typed something that was supposed to communicate this but: I can see Tobias consenting a priori to Rachel’s death, but only if she was the one who brought the plan to him, and told him that it was what she wanted and was super stubborn about it, but that even then he would try to insist on going with her. I am basing this largely on vibes but also on #27 (squid book), when they have more or less exactly that exchange, except it’s not Rachel getting definitely killed it’s just her taking a typical insane risk.
(Your point that Tobias basically reaches self-acceptance and a functional life philosophy but he loses it the second he loses Rachel is also exquisite.)
Meanwhile, final-battle Jake would absolutely have thrown Cassie’s life away. He sent her down to the Yeerk pool in #51, or whichever the pool bomb book was, the endgame books all blur together for me, and that was almost as much of a suicide mission as Rachel’s last stand, it just happened to turn out differently. And he said in that meeting that Cassie, specifically, had to go, because he considered her moral compass essential to the mission. Which is not that different from sending Rachel to the Blade ship because her aggression and determination are essential to that mission.
Also, Jake loves Rachel. I wouldn’t assume that he loves Cassie more than he loves Rachel. If the symbolic dead Animorph was going to be Jake sacrificing the person he can personally afford to lose, it would probably have been Ax or Tobias. He sent Rachel because Rachel was the woman for the job. I think it’s also relevant that at that point his parents have been taken and he’s already had, and brusquely compartmentalized, a nervous breakdown about losing the ability to protect his family. He sends Rachel to die killing Tom pretty shortly after he gives up on saving his parents, and it is a brilliant conclusion to both Rachel’s arc and Jake’s. Rachel’s for all the reason I’ve already yammered about, and Jake’s because it drives home that Jake’s no longer in a space where he’s making any effort to protect his family. He’s ready to win at any cost. He gives a speech to James to exactly that effect. And I think that includes any of the Animorphs, and Cassie’s not an exception.
(Hm. Arguably Jake demonstrated his willingness to write off Marco, Cassie, and Ax with the pool bomb mission, and his willingness write off Rachel and Tobias in the final battle, because to kill Rachel at that point is to destroy Tobias, or at least to discard his needs completely. He’s making good on his promise to James: “at the end of this the casualties will be piled high and some of you standing here will be dead and I don’t care because we’re going to win.”)
Tobias’s anger at Jake for Rachel’s death is really interesting because I actually think killing Rachel and leaving Tobias alive (and unable to fight with her in her last moments) is the only way Jake could have gotten an Animorph to really truly not forgive him for the sacrifices of the final fight. Any of the Animorphs would have given their own life without argument at the end, and everyone was more willing to accept sacrifices of other team members’ safety or well-being than Tobias (throughout the series), and honestly, I don’t know that anyone of the Animorphs loved each other with quite the same force of loyalty as Tobias and Rachel.
Whether Rachel would have accepted Tobias’s death as a necessary sacrifice, I don’t know. I do think she wouldn’t have blamed Jake for it the way Tobias did. Jake sacrificing Rachel culminates an, oh, 40-book arc of Jake betraying or throwing away things that Tobias thinks are important in service to a fight Tobias doesn’t always agree should be fought this way. Tobias hates it when Jake plays chessmaster; Rachel more or less doesn’t mind. But it’s hard for me to really imagine what she would have done if her and Tobias’s roles were reversed because that final scene was such a perfect tragic microcosm of their roles all through the series: that Rachel went down outnumbered and outgunned in a brilliantly violent blaze of glory while Tobias was forced to give her battle surveillance tips from a bird’s eye view on a camera. Tobias pulled it together long enough to give Rachel that final round of advice because that was what he knew how to do, and it was what she knew to ask him for. If their roles were reversed, I don’t know what Rachel would have done. Probably nothing as poignant or productive.
Like! Okay! How fucked up is it that Tobias spends 52ish books watching Rachel’s back, seeing the full perspective of a fight she’s in the middle of and finding ways for her to escape the fight intact, and the last thing she ever says to him is to ask him for help, and he says “I can’t” because he can see the whole fight and there is no way out, but what she means is “help me do as much damage as I can,” and he has to pull himself together enough to do that instead.
