A certain point in space...

I had to wait quite a while for the doctor to see me, but fortunately the nurse who was helping me had an excellent bedside manner and went out of her way to distract me. She expertly did this by getting me talking about books I'd read recently.

I went all in on criticizing the last book I'd read. I don't remember what it was, but I really hadn't liked it, and I denigrated it as "Misery Porn". And she was like "Hmm, that sounds interesting, tell me more". So I gave a general plot synopsis. As I was telling her that most of the characters were immigrant miners, she interrupted me to say "That's interesting, I didn't realize that there were mines in Missouri".

And at that moment time stopped for me and I realized that the entire time I'd been talking about the book, she'd been assuming I was talking about porn set in Missouri. I had just assumed that she had understood from context that when I said "Misery Porn", I meant "A story that is gratuitously depressing so that readers will think it's deeper than it really is".

Nerds (affectionate): Actually, Missouri has many lead mines.

Health care professionals: This is just what working with patients is like.

When I first started watching Babylon 5, I had the idle thought, "I wonder what the Centauri would make of a mohawk haircut?"

Oh man, how could I ever begin to answer? This is the best part of the series, and in some ways it's in every book! But I'll do my best.

David Trilogy:

In #22, Rachel characterizes Jake asking Ax to "get" her as Jake knowing what a violent monster she is, and using that monstrousness against a kid their own age. She obsesses over the idea that she's a terrible person who is barely worthy of being on this team, and the idea that Jake is basically puppeting her into atrocities.

But in #21, Jake asks Ax to get Rachel because he's scared. And because he wants the biggest baddest person he knows to protect him, if he's about to go into a battle he doesn't think he can win. Jake sees Rachel as his protector — in #11 he says that he never gets really scared until he sees Rachel get scared, and in #26 he trusts her to draw lines he can't. (Between this dynamic and how much Rachel dismisses Jake as a leader at first, I do headcanon Rachel being a few months older than him.)

One of my favorite-ever uses of rotating narration in the series involves that moment when the veleek corners Cassie and Rachel midway through Jake and Marco's attempted game of keep-away, while Ax is forced to watch the whole thing on livestream. Specifically, the gap between Cassie and Marco.

What actually happens: the veleek is hovering over three Animorphs, hesitating. Cassie and Marco are both mid-morph; Rachel is fully elephant. Marco continues morphing, Cassie stops morphing, so the veleek goes for the "movement" and takes Marco.

The way Cassie tells it, she makes this unforgivable decision out of cowardice, deliberately choosing to sacrifice a friend to the tornado beast because she's too much of a self-centered wimp to make the hard call. Her narration says that she might have even had better odds of survival than Marco, since she's the better morpher and she was mostly in a very small morph (squirrel) sitting on the neck of a morph (elephant) they knew the veleek couldn't lift. And Marco apparently dies as a result.

It is, literally, her worst nightmare come true. In #4 and again in #9, Cassie expresses a visceral horror at being asked to choose who lives and who dies, and Marco even taunts her for it in #4 because he sees her as naive. That moment goes on to haunt Cassie, in some ways, for the rest of the series. The following day she explains to Jake that she has to be the one to nearly get killed baiting the veleek, because she can't live with herself if she doesn't. In #19 she cites it as a reason she can't be an Animorph anymore. When she dumps Jake in #53, she cites his willingness to trade lives without guilt as the reason.

Obviously Jake has imposter syndrome throughout the series, but the last two books are some of the most interesting examples of the gap between his perspective and everyone else's. Jake characterizes his own lack of caring as he flushes the Pool ship as a sign of his moral bankruptcy, and he tells Cassie outright in #54 that he's less bothered by his own decision to kill 17,000 noncombatants than he is by his own lack of caring in that moment. Jake takes this emotional numbing as proof that he has lost all ability to care about other people, and become only a war machine.

For a lighter example, I love all the comedy around Ax confidently assuring the reader in his own books that he can flawlessly pass as human... interspersed with all the others going "look, if you just follow Ax around every millisecond he spends in human morph, and you have a friend on standby to create a diversion, then the odds of someone calling a 5150 drop way down." Part of what makes all those sequences so funny is Ax's condescending attitude toward the human species — he is so certain that his superior intelligence is the source of all misunderstandings, and meanwhile the other kids are like "you couldn't watch someone else discard a coffee cup first, then decide whether to throw it across the room when you're done?"

Loads of aspects of #8 follow the same pattern. Ax is certain that the other Animorphs recognize his superior intellect and treat him as an authority, and that he has a duty to serve that role faithfully. Meanwhile Tobias and Jake and Cassie are all like "that poor kid? Not only is he exactly as lost as the rest of us, he's also stranded on an alien planet without his mom and dad just after losing his brother." When Ax finally decides to break the rules and let the others in, he's expecting a bunch of questions about how to use andalite weapons technology to win the war, and what he actually gets is "how do you eat?" In #8 Ax thinks of himself as an ambassador between species — and the humans all think of him as their weird friend who they want to help feel less out-of-place while he's stuck here.

Last big one that comes to mind for me is the gap in how Tobias sees Jake's family, vs. how Jake sees Jake's family. From Tobias's point of view, Jake's living in a 1950s sitcom: he has two parents, one sibling, one dog, and they all get along! They live in a McMansion, off two white-collar salaries — one a doctor's salary! — and they go on vacations together every year. They eat fresh salmon, and spinach, and homemade tiramisu (#16), as they sit around their kitchen table every night and talk about their feelings.

Which is all literally true. But the other thing that's literally true: Jake is the only Animorph with no safe place to retreat to in between battles, because he's the only one cohabiting with a known controller. Part of the reason Tobias can be under the impression that Jake's home life is picture-perfect is that the Animorphs spend the least time at Jake's house: most meetings are at Cassie's, Tobias and Ax's scoop is their go-to backup location, and occasionally they spill into Marco's or Rachel's bedrooms. Because Jake's home is fundamentally unsafe in a way none of the others' are. When Rachel has a nightmare, she gets Jordan's incompetent but well-meaning comfort (#2); when Marco or Cassie does, their dads come to offer hugs (#10, #19); Tobias and Ax are alone, but at least it's private (#33). Jake describes jamming his face into his pillow so he can cry himself to sleep as silently as possible in #1, #6, #26; he also has raging insomnia by #26 that is still an issue as of #47.

And Jake's family being so enmeshed makes the controller thing so much worse, because he can't get away from it. In #31 Tom's yeerk almost has to resort to murdering their dad to get out of attending a family event to support their mom. In #21 the ongoing emergency forces Tom and Jake to spend more time around each other. In #37 Jake can't get out of traveling with his family for over a week (I assume for the High Holy Days?) because Tom's yeerk has refused outright and so Jake is completely unable to refuse as well. Meanwhile, Tobias's perspective on all this is semi-amused bafflement that "Tom" (or Jake) can't just go "screw this!" and walk out of the house, expecting their parents to take that as a valid answer.

In many ways, both Jake and Tobias assume that Jake has no problems and Tobias has all the problems. The other four Animorphs are way more balanced in their perspective. Marco especially feels for Jake because he knows how hard it is having yeerks corrupt your family. Ax understands Jake's complicated grief over losing Tom (years before Tom actually dies), and Ax understands that Tobias is the way he is partially by choice. Cassie and Rachel both see how Jake is being worn down to nothing by sheer exhaustion, and are also both copacetic about how eating roadkill isn't the worst lifestyle choice.

Oh man, how could I ever begin to answer? This is the best part of the series, and in some ways it's in every book! But I'll do my best.

David Trilogy:

In #22, Rachel characterizes Jake asking Ax to "get" her as Jake knowing what a violent monster she is, and using that monstrousness against a kid their own age. She obsesses over the idea that she's a terrible person who is barely worthy of being on this team, and the idea that Jake is basically puppeting her into atrocities.

But in #21, Jake asks Ax to get Rachel because he's scared. And because he wants the biggest baddest person he knows to protect him, if he's about to go into a battle he doesn't think he can win. Jake sees Rachel as his protector — in #11 he says that he never gets really scared until he sees Rachel get scared, and in #26 he trusts her to draw lines he can't. (Between this dynamic and how much Rachel dismisses Jake as a leader at first, I do headcanon Rachel being a few months older than him.)