#ani 27

i love this thousand-year kindhip thing with the whale morphin as much as the next animorphs reader, but like her arms shouldve turned into flippers. not just been absorbed and regrown. the point wouldve been driven home just a little better if her fingers morphed to flippers. exhibit A:

also, when did Tobias get to read about whales and squid? did he stop by the library? borrow Ax's atlas or something?? i was under the impression that there wasn't that much time between when the group gave up on this mission and the news story about the whale. just odd i guess idk. had to throw in the animal trivia somewhere that bad?

wow such effective writing. really reminds me of when i was a kid racing down a dark hallway if i got suddenly spooked at night. except this includes the panic of a lack of oxygen. i half expected her to be dragged down to the depths by a tentacle as she was racing back to the surface tbh. loooottta callbacks to book 17

"...torpedoes across dead desert wastes, our jets kicking up clouds of sand and tiny rocks and the decayed remains of everything that had ever died in the three miles of water above us" is so sick wow. im still shocked every now and then at the awesome lines in these books, seriously.

cant say the pemalites make much sense, but i do love their whimsy. incredibly intelligent, lonely, and silly enough to make a submarine look like snoopy. sure. why not. i love it here

ax, dude, chill.. so much andalite pride for such a small body. this is book 27, youve learned so many times the way andalites are flawed ok? cool it about the extinct species my guy

well i do hate this guy but i didnt mind the jake insults in this book. is this the gimmick now? keep introducing new creatures Crayak sends over and over to stack the odds in his favor and not the animorphs? alien of the week style? I really never wanna see the drode again :/

Glad cassie figured the way out immediately. there was no tension between the threat and its solution lol

how many times will he *almost* remove his eyes? i feel like he should be at least a little dismembered by now.

this battle is so good, but i'm picturing it taking place in the first room of charlie's chocolate factory. and they don't update us on tobias after rachel charges in for him! with everyone fighting, surely the hork bajir has killed him already right? for V3 points??

well shit. that's never happened before. (and it happens in a rachel book, not a cassie book! take that, Jake, u asshole)

That's what im fucking talking about Erek! you just saved a life without being violent! now do it again :p

see i totally thought earlier that the battle wouldn't even have started because there would be some magic tech non-violent chee mcguffin but then i dismissed it because i thought the pemalites never engaged in violence because they never really conceived of it. not in a naive way like the hork bajir but in a sort of trusting way like 'why would anyone ever do that? there'd be no good enough reason' sort of thing. but here we are.

so that's fucked up. and it feels silly that tobias wasn't killed in all that. he was kinda helpless tbh. is this why they made jake so unlikeable in this book? so Rachel could be 'tempted to the dark side'? that's so silly and heavy handed. its book 27 and every reader knows by now that rachel would never do that, even if rachel doubts herself. ugh. guess we had to introduce the drode dramatically tho. blegh.

Then T.T. (why?) distracts her even further by shamelessly asking her on a date. And she's thrown because the rest of the world doesn't know about the insane Romeo and Juliet situation she's in. And she's 14. And this guy's actually pretty cute, which probably isn't really a thing she's used to noticing about people after a year of fighting a war. (For sure he knows he's cute and also must be so talk for a young teenager.) I gotta say, even as a firm Rachel/Tobias shipper from my very first animorphs book, I never hated T.T. It always seemed pretty rational that Rachel would be a little conflicted over a cute, normal guy asking her out. Seriously, girl, it's not like you said yes (that said, Tobias can demorph and remorph on a date. Sure it's mildly inconvenient but it's not like you're seeing a movie in a tux). T.T. also gives Rachel and opportunity to explicitly state to the reader that she's very loyal, and, even though he gives her some pause, she turns him down on instinct both times.

Loyalty is the main element of who Rachel is. She's not going to do something with someone else because Tobias can't. Throughout the book she very emphatically has Tobias and Cassie's backs, and checks in on Jake and Marco as well. Wow, Rachel and Ax really don't have a relationship the way everyone else in the team does.

(it's really funny that Rachel gets annoyed when Tobias shows the same reckless loyalty as her. Like yeah, the two most claustrophobic people are going to be the ones diving for squid. This happened because Rachel has a compulsive need to volunteer and Tobias would die for Rachel (and Ax) and doesn't care what the others think of that)

Rachel also possesses shopping superpowers previously unknown to mankind and an ability to bluff and act her way out of a situation that Cassie does not have at all. Cassie points out Erek is malfunctioning and while they're arguing with him about his sarcasm still working when the rest of him shuts down she decides exactly where the nearest practical place to camouflage him is and gets them there while tossing out the quip about majoring in mall knowledge at college. When Tom picks up instead of Jake, she manages to not sound too panicked and give the boys a cover story that's entirely believable and communicates that a gorilla would be a handy thing to have right now. Then just goes "finally, my moment has come" and dresses Erek in clothes that both fit him and would presumably belong on a magazine cover. What an absolute queen. No one is doing it like her. The way Cassie describes her as hunting in MM4? That is for sure how Rachel shops, just pure killer instinct.

Also, seriously, for how much weight the introduction of the Drode has, this is an unreasonably funny book. Rachel shopping her way out of disaster while Cassie has to lie in front of a crowd. Ax solving a life or death situation with a skunk morph. <Cassie, your mommy is shooting at us!> Escargot, Calamari, Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea (presumably partially due to Journey to the Centre of the Earth, that's actually a kind of valid mistake). Tobias vs Cetaceans 2: Electric Boogaloo. 6. Rachel's little sisters behaving like siblings. Tobias watching Rachel turn down a guy and saying you know what, he was cute. Oh and Rachel's whale morph with "an acre of hair" is my favourite weird morph moment.