Lotta people commenting in the tags of that post that Animorphs book 6 specifically fucked them up as a kid. Cannot relate. Nothing is more reassuring than Animorphs #6. The idea that your body could be taken over completely by an entity specialized in impersonation and infiltration, instantly cutting off your ability to call for help or warn anyone, and your friends would immediately clock it and work together to successfully free you against all odds? That the people you’re closest to know you well enough to instantly spot the difference between you and a perfect copy, and are committed and competent enough to rescue you from its grip over the course of three days while you watch? That all the responsibility that’s been pressing down on you can be ripped from your shoulders for three days and thrown into free fall and your comrades will simply snatch it out of the air and carry it for you? Beautiful. Animorphs #6: the Capture is the most comforting book in the series.
Hi! I saw some of your animorphs posts while I went trawling in the tag, and I was wondering if (if you had time and interest obvs) you could talk about why Jake's books didn't resonate/work well for you? I remember liking him, but I have such a vague memory of the books that I don't think I can even remember Why so now I'm curious about other people's thoughts on the character.
I don't think I have a problem with Jake's books per se. Some of them are whack but that's just true about the series. Book 6 and book 31 are among my absolute favorites. I also don't have like in-universe criticisms of Jake as a human person or child or combatant. My problem with Jake is that I think giving the team a consistent single absolute leader makes their decision making processes and internal power struggles a lot less interesting than they could be, AND that it is boring to have a character whose defining value to the team (in the way that Rachel brings courage and aggression, Marco brings cynicism and tactical analysis, Cassie brings empathy and insight, Ax brings a literally alien body of knowledge and an understanding of military discipline, Tobias brings the concept of being cool about anything for ten seconds, etc) is just being objectively correct about almost everything most of the time.
It's relevant that Jake is the only (non-bird) white boy on the team. The show Leverage does a similar thing from what little I've seen of it. You have a group of people with highly specialized skillsets and then one (coincidentally white male) person who, instead of having his own specialized skillset, is simply in charge. This doesn't match any of my own experiences with resistance movements or in fact any kind of group endeavor I've ever participated in, unless some external authority was imposing such a leader on the group, which is not the case in Animorphs.
I'm interested in Jake the same way I'm interested in all the kids on the team: I'm interested in his courage, his resilience, and his fallibility. I am interested in the story of children trying their best to take on an impossible task that they are not really equipped for, but that they have to do anyway because no one else is offering to take it off their hands. You might notice my two examples of Jake books I love are a book where he gets taken out of commission and has to trust the team to act without him, and a book where just about every decision he makes is wrong and the team is forced to basically stage a coup. I wish more of his books involved that kind of failure of leadership that ends up forcing the team to work on less hierarchical terms and coming out victorious, because I think that kind of messy resourceful teamwork is the beating heart of the story. I think it makes some sense for this group of kids to anoint an absolute leader to get them through their gauntlet of high pressure decisions, but I think it's a flawed approach and I wish the story had paid more sincere attention to its flaws and its consequences, and offered more moments where the group realized that they had to tackle a problem differently.
They never talk about it again after book 6 but the fugue is such a great mechanic. You cannot beat this shit for sci fi tragedy. You build up the villains as being almost impossible to escape from except via this one act of extraordinary grueling prolonged violence, and then it turns out that at the end of that protracted act of violence, when your captor dies, they leave a part of themself inside you forever. You destroy them to escape them but destroying them pulls the last fragment of them deeper into your spirit and then there’s no untangling them from you all the way, ever again. And you get ghosts from the other victims of your captor. Forever. Like what the fuck. This is a Scholastic series.
Okay so now I’m thinking about the fact that Tom changes Yeerks in #6 and Jake’s like, personal enmity with the Controller named “Tom” continues relatively uninterrupted. Whereas Visser One is a character. You could never sub her out. Like yes Edriss is Eva and Eva is Edriss and it’s a horrible unconsensual oroborous but at the same time Edriss is Edriss and can’t be anyone else. When Marco tells Edriss “I’ll kill you for what you’ve done to my family,” he means it very personally. Versus Tom, who is the victim of a faceless nameless institutional violence, to the point where the Animorphs spend an entire book slowly brutally killing Tom’s captor while arguing with him about empire and more or less winning the argument, and it has no impact on Tom at all.
Like. They beat the bad guy. Quite violently. They won. But it wasn’t a rescue. It didn’t make Tom even slightly more free, because the footsoldiers of empire are basically interchangeable as long as the structures remain in place. And after #6 no one ever really tries to save Tom again. This for the record is also why Aftran’s promise in #19 doesn’t make any sense.
My liveblog reread of Animorphs book # 6, The Capture, 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”)
Ooohhhh, boy. Okay, going to try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but holy shit. Jake dreaming about stalking Tom in tiger morph? Yikes. Talk about MASSIVE (probably unintentional) foreshadowing for a way later book.
So to this day, I still haven’t seen The Fly. Every time I read this book, I think to myself that I should watch it to get some context, but always ultimately decide not to because it REALLY doesn’t sound like the type of movie I’d like, even if we’re talking in any sort of “so bad it’s good” sort of way. On the opposite end of the spectrum, any time I see any references to this movie outside of this book, it always makes me think of Anirmophs.
“It’s enough to gag a maggot”? Really, KAA? Where did you even come up with that line, lol.
So I should definitely mention Jake’s decision to boil the Yeerks in this book. I’m not going to compare it to some similar instances later on yet, because spoilers, so let’s talk just this one instance.
Tactically, it’s a good plan. This isn’t the whole pool, it’s specifically selected Yeerk that are clearly part of the invasion force. Yes, they’re unarmed and helpless, but they aren’t innocents, not by a long shot. And you have to consider the fact that to kill an armed Yeerk, you have to go through a host. Does that make Jake’s decision right? Hard to say. It’s definitely one of the more morally grey questions of the series, and one we’ll explore more in later books.
Crayak makes his first appearance! Okay, yes, the name is KIND OF a spoiler, but not a huge one. Not telling you WHAT he is, just what his name is. Although I will talk about how that scene was received by fans back in the day. It’s quite a few books before we discover what Crayak is, so for a while he was just known as “The Big Red Eye”. And there was a TON of fanmail to KAA asking what it was. Eventually, at some point after he made his next appearance, KAA revealed that they actually had no idea what “The Big Red Eye” was at the time they wrote that scene. Apparently they liked to plant “seeds” in their writing, characters or monsters or plotlines that they thought sounded cool at the time, but didn’t know much about, that they could come back and explore at a later date if they wanted to. “The Big Red Eye”, aka Crayak, was one such seed. This kind of explains why there are still some unanswered questions or mysteries by the end of the series.
That end scene is really sweet, but I do have to wonder why they used Cassie’s dad’s cellphone for it and not a payphone? That was a slightly stupid move on their part, which luckily the Yeerks never exploited. I’m pretty sure Caller ID already existed in the 90s. Heck, didn’t Jake use his home phone’s call back the previous number function right at the start of this very book? Gonna have to check if that was fixed in the rerelease, at some point...
