Can we also talk about how Jake refuses to assign Cassie to Team Finesse because he feels he can’t trust her, but he DOES assign Ax, despite Ax also betraying him in book 46?
There’s two things here: (1) They both betray Jake because of a divergence of moral viewpoints and (2) they both betray Jake because they want to protect him from making a difficult and compromising moral decision.
In book 46, Ax decides that Jake won’t be able to bear the burden of threatening to drop a nuke on tens of thousands of people, but convinces himself that because he’s an alien, he will be able to bear it. So he betrays Jake by knocking him out and taking command of the animorphs. Ax also believes it’s worth it because it will be for the greater good, whereas Jake can’t see beyond the potential harm.
On the flip side, in book 50 Cassie decides that Jake won’t be able to bear the burden of killing Tom, and makes the decision to sabotage Jake. The end result of this is that Tom gets away with the morph cube, and now countless controllers can morph. Jake, on the other hand, was of the opinion that killing his brother would be worth it for the greater good, even if it would harm him irreparably. Jake saw the greater good, but Cassie couldn’t see beyond the potential harm.
Now pair this with Jake’s refrain throughout the series that everyone draws their own moral line. Ax’s is in one place, Cassie’s is in another. It seems like Jake’s is somewhere in between. In the endgame of the series, it becomes clearer and clearer that you can’t have a cohesive unit if everyone is drawing their own moral lines and willing to do whatever it takes to enforce them independently. But more interesting to me is that despite Jake repeating that it’s okay if everyone has their own moral lines, it clearly isn’t okay to him. He and Ax never talk about Ax’s betrayal, and when it comes down to it, Jake says he can trust Ax, while clearly implying that he can’t trust Cassie. And it’s just interesting to me that Jake is more willing to forgive the more morally questionable transgression that the morally sound one. Or perhaps more accurately, Jake will forgive a betrayal if in hindsight he knows it helped win the war, but not if it’s at the expense of winning the war. That at the end of the day, winning becomes more important than personal morality. Which, come to think of it, is probably one of the theses of the entire series.
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