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Even more of the crossover AU!

Got impatient waiting for the Chapter 3 and 4 sprites to release, so i just spent a few hours manually copying them instead

The Missing Scarf IX - part 41

Legacy

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#undertale #undertale au #undertale comic #undertale comic au #sans #mel #utmv #utmv comic #the missing scarf #underfell #uf sans #asgore #the underground

there's something to be said about the standards rachel holds herself to and what she thinks her role in the team is.

like, yes: she's the "let's do it" person and most of the time it is because she really does want to do it, but here in #17 she's just forcing herself to go through with it even though she's very much uncomfortable with the mission. she can't let the cracks show, she knows, so she says "let's do it" almost subconsciously. especially when they were all about to dig the tunnel as moles and marco (teasingly) nominated her: she very much did not want to do it but she said she did — for her own sake and for the team's.

to me it's most evident in the marco books, but the rest of the team does see her as this sometimes crazy (insane, some might say), almost suicidal, almost enthusiastic, very ruthless girl who isn't afraid to go on the missions. it's a separate post why this is most evident in marco books (and the central point to that argument would be his description of her in #5), but the point is how they see her, and how she thinks they see her, and how she truly feels and what she doesn't want them to see.

there's another bit in #17 specifically. rachel saying that she needs cassie on a much deeper level. she needs cassie to hold up the morals and be the "good" one so that rachel can be "ruthless." i'm avoiding any spoilers for future moments in the series but this is, has been, and will be a recurring theme. rachel "hiding behind" her fellow animorphs, trying to pass herself off as just another one of them. rachel holding herself to those standards. rachel discovering who ("what") she is and deciding, right then and there, that no one can ever know the extent of it.

she's just rachel. the "let's do it" person. that's all that anyone can know.

#animorphs book club #yeah. I am already loving the book club. I never would have put this much thought into any character other than Marco otherwise #mind you I love all the animorphs. I understand and love all of them and none of them deserve the hate that they get #((this is not me dismissing their various war crimes and the multiple things they did wrong. they ARE flawed. they are not “good guys.”#they are just mischaracterised very often and they do not deserve any of that.))#animorphs #rachel animorphs #rachel berenson #ani 17 #the underground #animorphs analysis

Alfred Leete (1882-1933) The Lure of the Underground (1927) Source

#Alfred Leete #The Lure of the Underground #the underground #british poster #£6000

Animorphs #17: The Underground thoughts (pt. 2):

I love the Gleet BioFilters and hunter bots getting introduced in this book directly in response to the Animorphs' raids on yeerk facilities. Visser Three says it himself in this book: they're terrorists. What they lack in manpower, they make up for in unpredictability, and in forcing the yeerks to expend massive resources trying to keep them out.

"«If you're scared, I'll go in,» I said. «I'm scared,» Marco confirmed. «Help yourself.» There must be something kind of liberating, just being able to say 'I'm scared' like it's no big deal. I can't do that. I don't know why" (p. 97). I mentioned it back in the first book, but: I love this motif. That one character will accuse another (often Marco, sometimes Tobias) of fear, and the accused will just go "Yes, I'm afraid." Thereby completely destroying their accuser's argument. But I also love how Rachel recognizes that her inability to be that vulnerable in front of her friends can become a weakness in its own right, when it backs her into a verbal corner.

"Everyone in the group has a role to play. At least that's how it always works out. My role was to say 'let's do it'.... But I was tired. And I'd had a really, really bad few days digging down to this stupid cave. So I said, «Let's do it.»" (p. 108). Ugggghhh this moment gets me every time I read it. Because Rachel is registering how scared and tired her friends are, and she's only too aware of how easy it would be just to give up, to not do the hard thing. So she digs in, she decides to be the team's protector, and she chooses to force them forward.

"The other [hunter bot] was just twenty feet away when it fired. I swept my good wing over Tobias, trying to shield him" (p. 113). Rachel, I hate to say it, but I'm pretty sure you're in the role of team protector because you're really dang good at it.

Also: I love the sheer relentless effort it takes the team to try to fight the war right in this book. It'd be easy as cake to batch-poison controllers with oatmeal by just putting some in their school's cafeteria or slipping some to Tom then relying on him to tell them who to dose next. But they don't do that; they spend hours on end for an entire week doing something they find viscerally horrifying to dig into the yeerk pool so that they can feed it directly to the invaders, leaving the POWs out of the equation.

Animorphs books can be read here | Book Club schedule is here

#animorphs #the underground #animorphs book club #rachel berenson #17 #animorphs meta