#ani 45

In the glow of the car headlights, I began to demorph. To slowly transform from beast to boy right before my father's eyes. Dad stood still as a statue, eyes wide. As my body took shape, I saw tears start to well in his eyes. "It's me," I said as soon as my human mouth formed.

— #45 The Revelation (Marco)

I have so much respect for this series for lines like this. It refuses to have done the simple thing here by letting Marco's dad just never move on and never fall in love again but instead it introduces Nora and reminds us at every turn that, yes, Marco's dad had every right to move on with the information he had. He thought Eva was dead. It destroyed him and left Marco parenting his own father for two years. And then he processed his grief and fell in love with another woman.

He's not been the most responsible adult in the series (understatement) but everything about this? It's wonderfully messy and human. He and Marco both, I mean. There's no simple answer and the yeerks taking Nora isn't treated as an out for Marco's conundrum but rather as a further wound, a further sign on how the war hurts people and changes them.

Even claiming Nora was a Controller the whole time in an attempt to smooth over the suffering doesn't actually remove the suffering or make the situation easier. Not really. It just gives us more insight into Marco and the feelings he hates to share.

... Dad aimed a look of resentment at a far-off tree. An alien race of parasites had played god with his freedom. A bunch of kids had co-opted his free will. His life had been totally taken over. he understood his new reality, but he didn't like it.

And the reversing of power is fascinating. The kids are fully the ones in charge and rather than being the clueless adult we actually have the adult being protected by the kids and technically at the mercy of their plans in a way I can't remember seeing in just about anything else. Like, the closest in vibes to this was Digimon Tamers when the parents can just support the kids' efforts from the sidelines but they're never directly in the kids' power the way Peter is in the Animorphs'.

book 20...

I let him walk across the gravel parking lot to the pay phone. Let him dial the numbers. "Honey, it's me," he said. "Yeah, I'm okay."I could hear Nora on the other end. Yelling, worried, scared. "I'm with Marco," Dad said. "Where? We're at the . . . " I cut the connection and grabbed the receiver from Dad's ear. Slammed it down angrily. He glared at me. "What was that?" he demanded.

book 45.

well, honestly, since Tobias got his morphing back.*

Like, there were things in between (The David trilogy, Visser, etc) that changed the status quo of the overarching plot. The Animorphs gained control of the Escafil device. Visser One's fall was pretty huge in terms of the actual war. Major changes on Leera and the Hork-Bajir homeworld start putting pressure on the Yeerks across planets. We saw slow but steady development of the characters that set up their choices as we enter the endgame as well.

But this was the biggest shake up in the formula.

Marco's no longer schoolkid by day guerrilla by night. There's no returning home or using a secret identity for him anymore. His family is reunited at a high cost.

Yeah, Visser Three's impending promotion is a dread on the horizon, but what stuck out as a kid was that I no longer had quite the same "safe" feeling that I could expect things to turn out well. In some ways I think the "filler" books added to the impact of the game-changing one because I was so used to the "everything resets at the end of the episode" feeling I'd read as a kid who focused more on the six main characters than the progress of the overarching war.

It hit at the right time for me, I guess. I was just starting to get old enough that the not-quite-resets had begun to bore me but I hadn't hit a wall with it yet when this shook everything.

And man, did it scare me to realize the next book was breaking the narrator pattern by going from Marco to Ax instead of to Jake.

"The Yeerks must move on as a race," she continued. "The time has come." She got up again and opened the ancient refrigerator. "We need to make a civilization with the hosts we have." She glanced at me. "Many of us realize that the eternal wars have to end and that the loss on Leera, the stalled offensive on Earth, and now the apparent bungling on the Anati planet have discredited the current leadership enough that it cannot survive."

We're seeing more of that continuity we got a lot of in the earlier books again! Remember in Visser this was the mission the Council sent Edriss on to stay her execution...

<Visser One has returned to Earth. But for a grim purpose. She is being held at the Yeerk pool. She is to be executed as a traitor.>