#animorphs endgame

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I love that as everyone’s relationships disintegrate toward the end Marco is the only one who stays on good terms with everyone because he just does not care. Who irrevocably betrayed whose essential values yesterday? Not my problem we’re gonna win.

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Hi I’m still crazy about animorphs and I’m currently feeling crazy specifically about Jake Rachel and Marco all coming independently to the conclusion that Rachel had to be on that ship. Barely checking in with each other about it and being simply and silently on the same page.

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I’m back on my bullshit! I think it’s just so cool and fine that Rachel died cleaning up the detritus of Cassie’s stubborn hopeful merciful gamble but that same gamble did, actually, win the war. I think that’s super chill and it doesn’t resonate with the long established chords of the series in any way that might make me crazy at all.

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The other thing about #39 hellish ant-Cassie scene (where Cassie kills an image of herself that’s screaming in existential anguish) is that Cassie tries to tell the rest of the team about it later, to explain why she’s so shaken, and no one picks up what she’s putting down. Jake and Rachel (the people who love her the most) both try to connect with her in that moment and they both fail; Jake talks privately about his relief that she’s okay (which she’s not) and Rachel tries to make a joke to lighten the mood (which Cassie doesn’t laugh at). No one else tries at all, and no one really hears what she’s saying. 

I had a conversation awhile ago about how the team fails to see Cassie clearly a lot of the time and I’m thinking now also about the #19 line “You’re saying the whole world can go to hell as long as you, Cassie, don’t have to turn into me,” and how Cassie has no rebuttal because it’s true, but also, even though it’s true, Cassie doesn’t actually have a problem with Rachel. Like, I’m struggling to think of a time Cassie is actually judgmental of, or frightened of, or disapproving of Rachel. Cassie could not live with herself if she was like Rachel, but Cassie can easily live with Rachel, and those things don’t seem to conflict for her. 

And later in #19, Marco shows up to kill a small child and Cassie takes drastic action to prevent it because she doesn’t want to be party to that act of violence, but I can’t remember any line of her narration or dialogue that condemns Marco in any way for what he plans to do. She can’t bear to do it. That doesn’t mean she thinks less of him for doing what he thinks needs to be done. Cassie is afraid of Marco in #19 but she is not angry at him and she does not observably pass judgment on him. 

I’m having a thought that goes something like: Rachel and Marco (who refuse to say out loud that they hate themselves) have recurring problems with Cassie (who constantly verbalizes her struggles with self-hatred) which they frame as them defending against Cassie’s unfair moral reprobation; but Cassie doesn’t have any discernible problem with them. 

Whereas Tobias (who has achieved personal moral self-acceptance), understands Cassie possibly better than anyone, and Ax (who has a lot of issues but none of them are revulsion at his own capacity for violence) gets along fine with her until the endgame when she materially betrays the team’s objective. Like. Ax doesn’t have a problem with Cassie being passively angst-ridden. He doesn’t take that as an attack on himself. They’re not close but there’s not friction in the way there’s constant friction between Cassie and Marco. 

Marco sees Cassie’s moral hangups as a personal attack, and partly that’s because he feels like she’s making his boyfriend think less of him, but it’s mostly because he thinks so little of himself and he’s compartmentalizing that so aggressively that he can’t stand being in the same space as someone who refuses to compartmentalize. The entire team (with the possible and significant exception of Cassie) has accepted the premise that Cassie is a better person than Marco; so if Cassie is disgusted by her own sins, by the transitive property she must be even more disgusted by Marco. But I really don’t think she is. 

Idk. I’m forever thinking about #30, where Cassie yells in the planning meeting “we can’t do this, he’s in denial, it’s his mother,” and then she ends up pushing Eva over the cliff. Like. She tried to throw down against Marco’s plan but she expressed it very clearly not in moral terms but in terms of Marco’s well-being, arguably even in strategic terms: He Cannot Take This. This is a mistake. It will backfire. We will lose a functioning team member. And she loses that argument and so she shuts up and plays her part and then in the end she is the person who does the actual deed, which, again, protects Marco from doing it, falls in line with her thesis statement that he can’t survive doing it, but like. Are we really going to pretend that Cassie is sitting in moral judgment over everyone else? The only person on the team that Cassie Animorphs doesn't know how to live with is herself. The only thing Cassie Animorphs ever thought the word “abomination” about was a creature that was in the process of transforming into her. 

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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.

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I've finished Animorphs #37. In a shocking development, a ghostwritten scholastic series has some poorly written installments. Such is life. Some highlights:

1) I love the law against continuity that these books seem to be under. "Is Visser 3 the better opponent to be facing than our available alternatives" the team debates, in #37, two books after Visser, in which they immolated Marco's life based on the premise that yes, he is. (Edit: wrote completely the wrong thing here. They decide in Visser that V3 is not the opponent they want; this argument in #37 woulda been a great opportunity to rehash that choice, make some guesses about what happened at the trial of V1 after they went home because somehow V3 is still running the show but Earth isn't on fire, which doesn't match Eva's predictions. But no! We can't discuss that because continuity is forbidden.)

2) Just gonna say this the once but Rachel's not stupid and this book does her a disservice and it's very gender.

3) You want me to believe Marco apologizes for scaring a child? Marco?

4) Love how much Cassie hated ripping up a bookstore.

5) This book does go on my list of times the Animorphs completely blow their cover and the plot just scurries merrily on like it didn't happen. They hit a sequence of known controllers publicly and there are zero human casualties? They have conversations with controllers where they clearly position themselves as defenders of earth and humanity in particular? Not gonna get too worried about this tho because it's clear the ghost writer just hasn't read most of the books.

6) So, Tobias woulda voted for Marco. Would Cassie? Inquiring minds (me) want to know.

7) Marco as a snake getting carried in the talons of a bird of prey to save the day—is this me? Am i the weird one? Or is this the Mexican flag?

8) i know i said this book wasn't good but it is good actually because they hijack a plane which is exactly the kind of behavior i want from the Animorphs.

9) In my imagined version of Animorphs where the story engages seriously with the politics of captivity and imperialism, and also there's emotional continuity and all the characters get richer treatment, this book gets merged with the hamburger book, it's an Ax POV, the question of whether to follow Marco or Rachel fails to be cleanly resolved in the meeting and Ax has to make difficult decisions about whose orders to follow in the absence of a clear commander, and also the Animorphs hit a prison in their sequence of random local attacks and Ax (an Andalite! a species that values physical freedom and open space! to the point of putting open fields inside their spaceships!) faces the question of "how can humans do this to fellow sentient beings" from the hamburger book but it's about prisons instead. And also Marco meets a guy in the prison who talks about his kid at home and there's an explicit parallel; and Marco, recognizing the parallel, insists on not killing the bystander and it's remarkable to everyone and a character moment. This opinion brought to you by the Animorphs in this book considering and dismissing an attack on a police station because they don't want innocent cops to get hurt. Cowardice.

10) the whole thing with the old guy having a heart attack just fell completely flat for me. This late in the game? One innocent bystander? In such a clearly accidental death, not even a real act of violence? I don't believe anyone but Ax and Cassie would even really care. I don't even believe Tobias would have announced what he saw to the group. He'd have sat on that info.

11) Marco telling Rachel they have an hour and ten minutes to save Cassie from the Yeerk Pool and he can't do that because he's not buckwild enough was good and the book really went uphill from there. I have notes on his wording but they're minor.

12) this book's obsession with a specific version of leadership, and the uncontested necessity of having a maximum leader, was weird and out of place. Do not believe this writer read #31. They do seem to have read #29, though, so i guess that's something.

13) this whole book might be worth it, actually, for the fact that Rachel and Jake have this conversation, in which, this close to the finish line, this close to the ending that i now know is coming, I get to hear Jake express his criteria for good leadership in these terms, to Rachel:

He walked in silence beside me in silence for a while. “How many Animorphs were there when you started?”

“Six.”

“And now?”

“Still six.”

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I’ve had another thought which is that when Jake says “when this is over 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,” the two people he knows will be dead are not standing there. Because he’s already pulled that trigger. 

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“Two of your family members are dead and you’re friends with a hawk” mm don’t worry about that Emily, jake and tobias are not friends after that