#ani 47

One of those iconic Animorphs lines.

As a kid I thought Richard was a fool. As an adult rereading this it hits home more how Richard's mindset could allow him to avoid thinking of the real danger for so long.

They're told of the war by children who, when asking for help, bring along a group of "thirteen campers, ten kids and three adults" to fight alongside the Hork-Bajir instead of insisting that only the adults come along.

To the Animorphs this makes sense: They are kids fighting this war. They know if they only invite the adults then the adults are going to end up thinking they know better than the Animorphs. Even if they haven't realized this potential issue yet they also just don't really see the difference in letting the kids fight or not because everyone on Earth is a target anyway.

To a kid reader this makes sense: you've seen the Animorphs fight despite their age. You could project yourself onto any of the unnamed campers and imagine the Animorphs asking for your help in the war.

To an adult reader? I can see why not making the distinction lulls Richard into an entirely unintentional false sense of security. Adults underestimate kids as is, but he's a year 2000 American adult who can't fathom a war actually happening. Even less so if kids are the ones bringing him this news. Last book made a point about how Americans don't really understand a war coming to them and it holds just as true in this one (heck, it holds just as true when we bomb overseas countries. It's a war but it's not at home so it's abstract.)

The idea that he's still unaware after warning after warning from Jake makes sense. He's seen the fantastical side of the war. He's seen a kid turn into a tiger and another kid turn into a bird and met friendly aliens.

Okay, bear with me but I'm about to make a convoluted comparison to a meme in a way that was never intended.

You know that fairy or walrus thing? The question of whether you'd be more surprised to open the door to find a fairy or a walrus had rung the bell, and most people in the poll said they'd be more surprised by the walrus? It's kind of like that. A walrus - a war - is a real thing that can happen but it's so unexpected and improbable in the mind of the door opener/Richard that it would be harder to believe than the fairy/shapeshifting children. A fairy pops up and you just rewrite your brain to accept that what you knew of reality is not applicable and start going with the new flow. A kid turns up and turns into a tiger and introduces you to aliens? You think you've become the main character of your favorite show. Your living the dream.

But then the dream wears off when you see the hork-bajir next to you preparing deadly weapons has already lost an arm in the fight. The tension of the battle of Helm's Deep is setting in among all of the aliens and kids and you snap out of the "I'm living an episode of Star Trek" feeling and realize a very large walrus with very large tusks is actually right there at your door and it isn't friendly.

There's a couple of things that are...shall we say, Not Good about this book, but let's look at one of the less problematic ones! And that's, Writing Your Final Words As You Lay Dying, With Beautiful Poetic Drama And Prose.

You want to know what people write when they lay dying? Things like, "I love you, Mom." "I'm sorry," or "Goodbye, Fred." Short, quick, and to the point. After all, you're DYING, you don't have the time or energy to write 500 words describing how you "fell, fell", and using similes compare muskets to clubs and shovels, and adding dramatic parallels to the final lines. Bet you his friend Jacob was real annoyed as he last dying and Isaiah would take a moment to, you know, TALK to him instead attempting to write in a journal that, you know what, shouldn't be legible anyway after the curtain of rain and the mud and the blood gushing all over Isaiah's fingers! "Hold on, bro, I know this is your last breath, but I gotta get these words on the page! This is good stuff, I'm so inspired now. My nephews are gonna love it. You know, assuming they find my body and I'm not just tossed in a mass grave with you or something."

Honestly, I'd kind of love it if Jake lampshaded it? About how unrealistic that was, and how someone else must have written the last entry, and how sometimes war is just about who dies in the mud next to you, instead of any great cause, and it could have been a cool call-forward to what the future will be for them - the way you can lose even in victory.

But nope. It's just the extremely-over-dedicated journalist, and we're just meant to believe that he verbosely wrote the ENTIRE final battle in the few moments he had before bleeding out.

In the rain. In the mud. With at best a crappy charcoal pencil.

...Yeah.

Ow. This would be enough to hurt on it's own, of course, but it's immediately followed by this:

That depressing fact made me think back to the afternoon's meeting. Ax favored continued secrecy, at least until the Andalite fleet arrived. No one really believes the Andalites are coming. Not even Ax. But hope, even false hope, is better than no hope at all.

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Ominous bold text we've had since book 45 . . .

Belongs to?

idk whether the book wants me to interpret this as literal or not but I absolutely read this as Toby trolling Jake.

if I recall correctly the parallels between the civil war and the yeerk war were... clunky