It’s been a little over a week since I finished Reading Every Animorphs Book, and now that I’ve had some time to sit with it I wanna get some stuff out of my brain about book 54, and specifically about the “One Year Later” section.
I’m not here to say things should have turned out okay. They shouldn’t have. It would have been really weird and unsatisfying for a series that spent 60+ books saying “we are going to look at the reality of this war unflinchingly” to suddenly start pulling punches in the last book.
But I think there is valid criticism to be made. Specifically, in the letter to the fans that KA wrote a year after the series wrapped, she said that she wanted to show different ways that war, and the transition from war to peace, affects different people. Which is a very cool thing to show! But I don’t think it’s really what we saw.
We saw three people (Cassie, Marco, Ax) who pretty much got on with their lives and two people (Tobias, Jake) who completely retreated into their grief and their guilt. I wish we had seen more of the unique ways that this war would have affected each of them, especially taking into consideration the arcs we’ve seen those characters take over the course of the rest of the series.
So here’s what I wish we had seen, or I guess my One Year Later headcanons for each character. (under the cut)
<Jake>
Jake’s motivation from the jump was to save/protect his family. After the war, we know he lives with his parents for a while. I wish we had seen him Trying Too Hard to be a Happy Family with them. Trying Too Hard to make it all have been worth it, and play the part of the Happy Son to fulfill the image in his head that he had been fighting for. If his breakdown at the Hague had come after a year of plastering a big fake smile on his face for everyone else’s sake it would have hit so much harder I think. The accusation that he should be on trial too, if it came after a year of him trying to convince himself and everyone else that “look it was all worth it we are all so much happier now!” would have been so much more gutting.
I would also have liked to have seen him dealing with the triangle he created between Eva, Peter, and Nora. Because that was extremely fucked up. I know it’s pretty safe to assume Nora didn’t make it through the war, but if she did.
<Marco>
It makes a lot of sense that Marco would be the most able to be The Face for the Animorphs in the aftermath of the war. His personality lends itself to it. But what we’ve learned over the past 60+ books is that Marco’s class clown demeanor is a thin veneer over a steely cold core. I wish that had come through in his scenes. I wish we had seen him putting on an act and goofing for the public eye but then coming home to a very different private life. I think he and Jake would lean heavily on each other and that Marco would teach Jake about the difference between public and private life; that he doesn’t have to put on the show at home, or with him. It would take some convincing to get Jake to recognize that he’s even faking anything, but it would help.
Besides which it seems wild to me that he would have moved out on his own so quickly after finally getting his mom back.
For Tobias specifically, he worked so hard to save his mom. I think he does continue to visit her and I think it’s Loren who finally starts to bring Tobias out of his grief because she starts asking questions about Elfangor. In trying to help her find answers he finds himself again. This is where it would have been really cool to see him bonding with Ax again and together, eventually, years down the line when he felt ready, becoming a human nothlit to leave the war fully behind him. More on that in Ax’s section.
<Tobias and Cassie>
I would have really liked to watch Tobias and Cassie develop a deep friendship and bond in their grief over Rachel. I liked Cassie’s One Year Later arc pretty well, and we know that she’s the only Animorph who knows where to find Tobias, but it would have been so good to actually see them bonding in the aftermath.
I think Ax becomes a figurehead on the Andalite homeworld for a cultural revolution that absolutely must take place after the war. Ax exposes their hypocrisies and instigates a lot of necessary change. And I think the culmination of Ax’s arc -- his being repeatedly forced to choose between his people of origin and his chosen people -- is him becoming a human nothlit, as a political statement.
<Ax>
It’s absolutely wild to me to think, after everything Ax has learned about the Andalite military and everything he’s seen them do, that he just falls in rank. I absolutely need to see Ax reckoning with all of the aspects of Andalite society, and specifically Andalite military society, that he now sees clearly as being deeply fucked.
I think he and Tobias make the decision years down the line. They morph to human and spend two hours doing something together. Something meaningful. Maybe they spend the two hours cleaning Rachel’s memorial or maybe they just spend it playing video games back in Ax’s old scoop near Tobias’ old meadow. But at the end of it they’re together, uncle and nephew, family.
Please don’t take this post too seriously. I’m not trying to say this is absolutely how it Should Have Gone or that I’m Definitely Correct. I’ve just been ruminating for the past week on all of this and needed to get it out of my head somewhere.
<The Animorphs>
The “morph therapy” scene at the Hague was amazing, but I wish anything had come of it. I wish that, in the moment huddled together on the beach, dripping wet in their morphing clothes, they had all realized that they need each other to make it through. It’s understandable that they splintered apart after the war, but I wish that that moment had bonded them back together. A lot is made of Tobias and Ax being each other’s shorm, but it seems like it in this moment they could realize that they are all shorm and they need to rely on each other. And I will recognize that this is largely selfish on my part, wanting to see these kids be happy for a MINUTE but. Well sue me I wanna see it.
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.
You know what I think is really fun and cool and makes me feel super chill every time I think about it? The fact that Rachel never heard Tom’s answer to “I’m sorry.”
this animorphs quote has been indelibly etched into my brain ever since i first read it, and i can't understate the impact it had on me
Rachel: Answer this, Ellimist: Did I . . . did I make a difference? My life, and my . . . my death . . . was I worth it? Did my life really matter?
Ellimist: Yes. You were brave. You were good. You mattered.
