Cassie’s choice to let Tom have the cube is contentious for some, and certainly a complicated decision. But when reading book 30 again, I noticed Jake makes a very similar choice. At that point in the story Visser One has already figured out that they aren’t all Andelites, but Jake intervenes to stop Marco from killing her. Sure she falls anyway but I’ve never seen the fans who drag Cassie for her choice say anything condemning about Jake’s similar one. Seems like a double standard to me.
I think part of the frustration with Cassie’s decision in #50 is that it has major, clearly visible consequences for the Animorphs themselves and also a bunch of other humans. Not only that, but the books themselves draw out the negative consequences, creating a rift in the team that definitely lasts through #53 and arguably never fully heals at all. Whether it was a good call in the long run is pretty up to debate, because a) it doesn’t ultimately prevent Jake from having to kill Tom, b) it potentially becomes a contributing factor in the Blade ship getting away, and c) its odds of screwing the Animorphs over are a lot higher than its odds of helping them out.
Jake’s decision in #30, through no action of Jake’s, ends up having somewhat positive consequences for Marco and Eva in the long run. It creates tension between Jake and Marco one book later when Jake’s family ends up in a similar situation, but by the end of #31 Jake and Marco are hugging and forgiving each other like it never happened. I completely agree that the fandom is often harsher toward Cassie than I would like, but I also think that the series’ framing of Cassie’s decision is harsher than its framing of Jake’s.
I think there’s also some frustration with the way that Cassie’s choice is handled in the books because there’s sort of a post-hoc thing in #53 where the text tries to suggest that Cassie knew all along the morphing would back to bite the Yeerk Empire in the butt when Tom’s yeerk rebels. It’s a cool idea, if Cassie did figure out that that would happen, but that’s not the justification we get in #50. Instead, all we really hear from Cassie in the moment is that she loves Jake and she’s scared for him, and that that temporarily blocks her view of the bigger picture. I like the interpretation that Cassie did figure out that letting the yeerks morph would be showing them another way out, but it really does feel like a ret-con when it’s brought up.
By contrast, we don’t get any further discussion of Jake kind of doing the same thing when he sort of accidentally saves Visser One’s life because in that moment he loves Marco more than he fears their strategy going to hell. If there was a line in #45 about how Jake knew all along that Visser One would be helpful in discrediting Visser Three, or that Eva would be such a huge source of insider intel once rescued, then that would be similarly irksome. Instead it’s treated in Marco’s narration as Jake making an illogical but compassionate decision, because Jake’s the only one who actually understands what Marco’s going through in that moment.
Which is, I think, yet another reason that fans are more annoyed with Cassie for protecting Tom than with Jake for protecting Eva: Jake gets it. He’s literally seconds away from killing his brother to protect his dad in the very next book, so he knows that Marco’s probably right to kill Eva and that Marco’s going through hell over killing Eva. Jake tells Marco that it’s okay not to be the one to pull the trigger, but Jake also knows there are other people there — Toby, Rachel, Visser Three — who will gladly pull that trigger if Marco doesn’t. Cassie decides that she knows what’s best for Jake better than Jake does, against Jake’s explicit wishes, and she doesn’t have a contingency plan. Her narration gets stuck in the idea that there are only two ways out of this situation, and both end in fratricide. She doesn’t alert any of the other Animorphs to come help. She doesn’t try to go after Tom herself, even though she could probably just break his leg again and then take the cube back and then everyone’s happy. Cassie genuinely does not understand where Jake’s head is at during that moment, whereas Jake understands exactly how Marco feels and correctly guesses what Marco is thinking.
So, to be clear: I completely agree that Cassie gets more crap from the fandom than she deserves. I think that she’s a well-written human character who makes mistakes, just like the other five are also well-written human (or andalite) (or hawk) characters who make mistakes, but that her mistakes are sometimes amplified by certain commentary. I think that there are times and places where some of that commentary edges into misogynoir. I also think that there isn’t quite a perfect apples-to-apples comparison to be made between those two moments, with Jake getting a pass for exactly the same decision that earns Cassie so much criticism.
