#animorphs 20

Just fresh off the departure and being reminded of Erek makes me feel real bad for the yeerk just half-living in his body somewhere. (nonviolent my ass but whatever ive covered that).

oh Tobias!! oh man what the series would be like if you simply had. you shouldve taken initiative this time my beautiful baby hawk boy. goddammit. fuck. if only!!

you missed buffy for this? so sad, marco you could have scratched him on the arm or something. teach the kid not to mess with wildlife in a nonlethal way jesus. i hate bbgun kids.

uuugh. of fucking course he named his cat Megadeth. what a lameass. and an illegal snake? omg i wonder how he got kicked out of his old school. bring a bbgun to class? i hate him already.

there should be a lot more mentions of cursing than this given what these kids go through on a regular basis lmao.

oh man the onomatopoeia is really something in this book. never wouldve thought to describe a snake's tongue wiggle as "tweedle-tweedle-tweedle" but okay here we are.

Marco and Cassie have one of the most interesting dynamics out of the Animorphs because of how often they disagree over conflicts/strategy, but also because of the fact that they usually end up being the de facto strategists of the team (They also both are like, in love with Jake, which also leads to really interesting moments but this isn’t about that). Naturally this puts them at odds with each other often, especially during Book #19. Cassie quits the team and voluntarily infests herself so she doesn’t have to kill Karen, something that Marco doesn’t understand and also is upset about, because now he may have to kill Cassie. After book’s end Cassie makes it back to the team and Aftran begins the peace movement. There’s a lot of threads that contribute to spiral from the book, and Cassie and Marco’s relationship is one of the subtler ones. What’s important to note is that the next book, book #20, is a Marco pov. We get to see his thoughts, and all is not forgiven. He reminisces about the recent Cassie-related events, and says something along the lines of “yeah I’m not really chill with her after the shit she pulled with Aftran.” Which I support Cassie fully, but fair enough! Not only did Cassie voluntarily cause their biggest security breach at the moment, but also he thought he, a 14 year old, was now going to have to kill his friend, another 14 year old. I would be pissed too. (Also this is another great subtle narrative thread leading into the David Arc, which derives its most central tension from this same dilemma)

However the culmination of the Cassie Marco tension comes not from either of their own pov, but from the next book, book 21 which is a Jake pov. The Animorphs all morph bugs to break into a hotel that has a Yeerk conspiracy involved, and they come close to the 2 hour limit. They all morph back successfully except Marco (the weakest morpher) who is stuck as a several foot tall giant grotesque flea. Everyone’s freaking out, but it’s Cassie who’s comes forward, places a hand on Marco, and soothingly guides him through his sheer panic, and into demorphing back to his human self. After Marco breaks down and sobs on Cassie, and Jake even notes he’s never seen Marco cry like that. Which is significant since Jake has known Marco grieving through his mother “dying”. Jake doesn’t note it, because it’s a situation he doesn’t even know about, but in this moment Marco forgives Cassie. Marco never gives her shit for the Aftran situation again, either in his narration or in others. And I love that it’s something that’s not explicitly said by Jake in this book, or Marco or Cassie in later ones, but all of the resolution of that tension between them beautify resolves in a book that’s not either of their povs and doesn’t even explicitly mention it.

you silly kids, this isn't worth arguing over. he can acquire both birds and then decide which one he wants to use whenever, just chill good grief. WHY dont any of you have more than one bird morph?!

you definitely should have warned him about all of the morphing details *before* he started morphing. it could not have taken that long.

oh okay hopefully now it gets real. i want to know the inner monologue of all the animorphs watching a new member join their ranks, i want to know what's going through all their heads because cassie kind of wanted to make a ceremony of it and now here Marco is comparing this kid growing wings to his mother acquiring american citizenship--which is something i didnt think he'd have witnessed and been emotional about.

oh fuck he just killed a crow. dude those are my favorite what the fuck. Cassie, fuck him up!!

yeah cassie pull his strings like a freaking puppet. wild that marco is only just now realizing this is something she can very easily do

For as long as it usually takes to morph anything, and how long it's described, one would think it makes you pretty vulnerable. which is why the animorphs don't morph in the middle of battle. but for some reason V3 thinks that's wise? and the animorphs let him get away with it? ugh, marco just try biting him *again*. if at first u dont succeed, try try again and all that. weird that the bullet hole in your body is bothering you less than being briefly stepped on.

also they all keep calling it the blue box, but surely the yeerks know what it's actually called since theyre so desperate to get it right? so why not just call it what it is? oh right, kids book. i guess.

WDYM enthusiastically! CAssie!! just last book you were almost a permanent caterpillar because of this war and you want to subject another child to this horrid soldier life? WHAT. i feel like this whole book is an OOC crack fanfic or something. Also, Rachel's right, you need trust and the war has scaled up a lot since the animorphs became animorphs. just let him be another melissa seriously. *sigh* but i know he won't be. booooooo

you'd think that for a book starting a whole arc and introducing a whole new animorph that they'd take the actual plot a bit more seriously. i guess marco jokes in order to not take things too seriously, but the set-up and goofiness of everything + the crazy world leaders mission thing makes it all feel clunky and poorly done. i thought that the david thing would feel inevitable and like the animorphs didn't have a choice at all but to recruit him in some well executed mission or idk something cool but this just feels a little dumb.

So when Marco says “leave David to the Yeerks” he’s, as usual for Marco, speaking with a preemptive understanding of the fail conditions that almost everyone else in the group doesn’t have yet and won’t internalize until they ignore him and it all goes to shit. By the time the David situation deteriorates to the point where we see Marco’s right and that David might have to die—by the time the Animorphs are once again combing the skies hunting down one of their own—we’ve moved on to Rachel’s POV, and I have no criticisms of #22 which was a masterpiece but the fact remains that Rachel is late to get this memo. Rachel doesn’t know what went down between Jake and Marco (or even briefly between Marco and Cassie) in #19, and the idea that she and her friends will hunt and murder a teen is news to her. It’s not news to Marco! Marco saw this bullet coming, but because of the POV switch he didn’t see it land. 

Meanwhile. What Cassie does, and pulls off, with David, is what she tried and (halfway) failed to do to herself in #19. Cassie sees Marco coming for her in #19 and knows what he may do when he finds her (she half-denies it to Aftran, she thinks he’ll avoid it, but she heard him tell her in blunt terms “now it’s you who might have to die,”) and she averts that PVP death by nothlitting. That’s what she does to David. She “saves” David from the team’s ride-or-die-and-we-mean-the-die-part mentality the same way she “saved” herself: by destroying his body and his future. And we hear one piece of commentary on that from her, which is “may I be forgiven for what I’m about to do,” but if we got to hear her watch this whole thing unfold and draw actual connections to what just happened to her. All I’m saying is I would like to see it.

Meanwhile the second. Rachel is the only person with a POV in #19-22 who as far as I can tell is never aware that Cassie’s life was in danger from the Animorphs in #19. She doesn’t hear Marco’s threat to Cassie and she doesn’t hear Jake’s order to Marco and I can’t imagine that anyone told her after the fact; she would not react well. Rachel votes to bring David onto the team from what’s visibly a “you’re right this is nuts, but what the hell, let’s do it” mentality and also because it’s what Cassie wants to do and, as Marco complains in #28, Rachel usually backs Cassie. Rachel backs Cassie! Rachel backs Cassie even when it violates her every operating principle: #19, Rachel says as she walks away from an unscathed helpless Aftran, “Cassie was my best friend. I’m not going to be the one to call her a fool.”