Animorphs #24: The Suspicion thoughts (pt. 2):
This might be my favorite inside cover inset, because it does actually look like a science text illustration and the need to show multiple magnifications at once is hilarious.
I love picturing K.A.A. writing this book with a pocket calculator and a scratch pad on the desk next to her, forced to figure out if you start with a 0.0625-inch human, and then reduce that human by half, and then have that human turn into a proportional humpback whale (how many 4'3" humans in a 45' whale?) and you also have a 0.0625-inch red-tailed hawk who then turns into a proportional human (how many 20-inch birds in a 5'1" human?)... What is the relative size of the human morph to the whale?
Seriously, though, there are so many aspects of the physics of shrinking that this book gets into that I haven't seen in any other kids' book. Sure, there's lots of "small objects looked big" but the stuff about relative speed and strength changing, or how a larger animal would be more delicate but a smaller one would be more subject to physical forces... All of that is pretty technical, but in a really fun plot-driven way.
Ax, bby! Panicking about controllers potentially seeing him turn from an andalite to a human! Only to have Rachel point out that he's literally the only actual andalite on the team and that this will not, in fact, reveal anything about their identities. Poor kid. We've all been there.
On second thought, does the thing with helmacrons killing their own leaders... actually make sense? Because Visser Three says helmacrons are "a fungible species. Kill one and its mind... is absorbed into another. They never die" (p. 150). So like, is there an actual logic to Elect Wise Leader => Kill Her => Receive Her Wisdom => Discuss in Committee What She Would've Done? Okay, I was not expecting that absurdist detail to have that much fridge logic to back it up.
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