#animorphs 22

WOAH OKAY WOAH WHAT THE FUCK. JAKE WDYM something is wrong with RACHEL, wtf is wrong with you that you'd say that to her???? wow wow wow i know theyre both highly emotional and overtired and fucked up over the Saddler shit rn (how tf did david get rid of the real one?!), but that was so so far over the line and off base that Jake is like my least favorite animorph right now what the actual hell. i thought he and cassie could commiserate over being able to read people and figure out how to make the group function well but he's just analyzing their sports stats and looking at them on the surface level like theyre video game characters he has to use well for mission to go right. like shit thats a horrible thing to have to practice especially since he's friends with them all and i feel so so bad for him but like.....dude. how could you believe all this about her and then also use it to your advantage anyway? and Say it to her?? so fucked. at least he knows he's doing it and kind of apologizes but like. it's not real. he's not going to stop doing this. and i know rachel knows theyre both left with little choice in all this but he didnt deserve a hug over it. i guess it was a good display for david who was glad to see them fighting but like. fuck. and im only on book 22!!

so this was another staged conversation obviously but i still wonder where and when they planned what they would actually do because of how paranoid they were about where David can be at any time.

oh okay next chapter answers that nvm. weird that david would dismiss a hawk flying so close over Cassie's barn though, even if he thought he'd killed him. like he's not particularly witty but he's certainly not dumb.

this is. so casually horrifying. (Do i ship marco and rachel rn? she really grabbed him by the neck in that staged fake plan scene. they really know how to push each other's buttons.)

are they gonna give him a fake escafil device?? or some kind of mcguffin rat trap that will force him to nothlit or something? idk but sorry rachel you guys are all killers. like i know it feels different to kill a human being but you all have killed hork bajirs and all kinds of people-adjacent beings in this actual genuine war youre in and you know just how sapient they are. you guys all killed the dinosaurs and the people living in the cretaceous period. youve been killers for awhile.

lmao i know this had to be public but it's hilariously insane that this conversation with david is in a taco bell.

i love that rachel can cry on command. i know it must not have een too difficult considering everything she's been through in the last 72 hours or so, but i know she must have been seething to have to act like she was scared and hopeless in front of David like that.

and then actually be helpless in rat morph jesus fuck. *After* he says that creepy shit about going with him ugh it makes me wanna throw up he's so awful

shit Rachel you should have just had someone in or out of morph pull you both out or something that's horrifying! and apparently somehow doesnt take that long? fuck

well im glad he gets trapped as a rat. suits him. but of course cassie would think of this. she knows how to make an effective rat trap and exactly how it feels to go past that 2 hour mark and lose your whole life to it. honestly this kid deserved this i think. i mean maybe death would have been nicer, but it would have been harder on the animorphs. he wanted to live by the rules of nature or whatever. just not as prey.

anyway here's Rachel again, protecting everyone from anything she can because she loves so fiercely.

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.” 

And then we just get an emotional whiplash summary fot he rest of the night?! omg i thought we were going to get a play by play of this insane battle royale! i mean im so glad everyone is alive and okay but please play hooky from school when you're being systematically hunted down FUCK

Woah what a charged lunch room conversation omg that was so good. How Rachel and Jake immediately knew by the way he moved that it wasn't Marco. How Cassie made sure she would have an excuse to sit closer to him and make him lean in and Listen, the way Rachel gripped her fork like a weapon. oooo im having so much fun with this.

im going so insane (at least i got a little satisfaction from the little amount of power she got to own over him for now) i know she doesnt want to confront this but i want her to express this to Jake so so badly. the tension here is so strong i dont know when it'll snap but it's going to be Bloody when it does. fuck Rachel the powder keg is going to be incandescent isn't she? i hope this doesn't burst for a few books at least. it's going to be wild.

i love tobias/rachel but sometimes the way rachel and marco are so in tune with each other and sharp-tongue near-flirting with each other all the time makes me wanna read fanfic about them too at some point

okay so no more breaks for the animorphs i guess. on top of the Everything in this book, they also have to brave a thunderstorm on the ocean god these poor babies i just wanna scoop up their little seagull bodies and fix everything for them. at least they get to be dolphins for a bit.

hoo i forgot i was typing things about this book i was just sucked into it. "an honor to meet u sir" lol

while the image of V3 shaking his fist and yelling at an elephant in the rain is funny, it wouldve taken like exactly 1 swipe of her trunk to kill him. it would have been pretty perfect too considering how bone deep exhausted and injured rachel is to just. swat him like a fly.

Anyway

How the fuck did this kid get a killer whale morph??? how did he know the plan well enough to have stopped by seaworld and gotten one? ugh please tell me this gets answered. -_-

"you know how it is. basic mall architecture." i love her, your honor. planning and quipping while her cousin is actively dying, noticing a foot locker sale. huge fan

let's go gymnastics barbie rachellll!!! maybe don't threaten him so loudly while there are police investigating the silently alarmed mall though, love you that was so cool

Rachel against the use of weasel words like 'sewerslide, grape, unalive' etc. she is consumed by this she just keeps mentioning it. but i'm glad she stays by Jake's side instead of going after him.

oh good! delicious!! examine it when you get a chance Rachel i sure hope you call him out for this omgs yes! She does know how she feels though right? like theyve near-confessed in enough near-death experiences to be pretty clear, right? i hope im not confusing them with cassie and jake but like. cmon girl. you know.

oh im barely 15 pages in and i have so much to dig into!!! poor cassie has had a rough night of hearing about likely-jake the tiger is bleeding out in the mall from her parents, hears from rachel upon arrival that yes it's jake she sees in a puddle of his own blood and that tobias is probably dead and that she just has to stay here while her best friend and her good friend ax go looking after her dying crush's killer. absolutely way too much to wake up to still knowing they have to save the world again tomorrow when the world leaders meet up. god this arc is going so hard on these kids.

and that little line about Rachel still, on top of all of this, having to fight the fly urge to drink her cousin's blood on the way out.

im reading as fast as i can folks fr.

oh man the animorphs catch a break for ONCE oh thank the lord these two yeerks decided not to mention dying tiger to V3 god. the one time the animorphs get lucky PHEW

oh it just keeps turning in her over and over doesnt it? can't think too hard about it all but simultaneously can't stop thinking about it because it fuels her rage and she needs that and can't stop it and wasnt even sure she wanted to hear the answer when cassie asked her mother if jake would live fuck these kids are so perfectly deliciously well written and human

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Marco almost always chooses to save the world. Cassie usually chooses to save either the Animorphs or other individuals. (This is why Cassie and Marco butt heads all the time and why they work so well as twin foils to Jake, who is “in charge” and therefore expected to balance all three.)

(Sidenote: Cassie knocking Eva off the cliff in #30 falls into save the Animorphs, I think, rather than save the world. We never hear from her about it, but I’m convinced she didn’t kill Eva to kill Visser One; she killed Eva so Marco wouldn’t have to.) 

Rachel and Tobias generally choose to save the Animorphs, but Tobias fundamentally understands Cassie’s impulse to save other individuals, whereas Rachel I think understands that Jake has to save the world. (“It was a war, after all. A war had to win.”) Rachel understands that Jake has to save the world even at the expense of saving the Animorphs including her, which we see more clearly in #22 than we ever have before, when Jake acknowledges he used Rachel’s violent impulses as a tool, and Rachel realizes that she’s willing to live with that. Which of course sets us up for #53.

Ax is more complicated because he might have a different set of three categories, which articulated more as questions of loyalty and identity than who-to-save, and I’d splice them as: A) the Animorphs/Jake specifically, B) the Andalites/Andalite principles of honor, and C) Ax’s own nascent individual not-quite-Andalite not-quite-human sense of right and wrong. Ax is running a fundamentally different program from the rest of the team, and his dilemmas are perpendicular to theirs. I think this is why he so often abstains (or tries to abstain until ordered to participate, as with the David vote) from voting on big Animorphs questions. The vote usually hashes out a question of the humans’ ethical trichotomy, but for Ax all three of the conflicting human concerns, up to and including the fate of planet Earth, fall into his category A, loyalty to the team.

3) I think you’re at least half right about Rachel being a motherfucker so the team doesn’t have to (something that also shows up a lot with Marco.) But I hedge about it, not because it isn’t true, but because I think there’s a risk to overstating that, and I sometimes see people overstate it, at the expense of acknowledging that Rachel Berenson likes to fucking hurt people. (Also true of Marco! It’s not all an act. He is fundamentally Like That.)

Applegate set out to tell some gruesome truths about war, and one of the truths about war is that some people like it, because some people like to hurt people. And I love that that person was Rachel. I love that she picked a girl for that role, and that of the two on the team she picked the girl with big aspirations to “belong”: to be popular, to be beautiful, to be well-dressed, to be an athlete, to get good grades, to be a successful and integrated member of society.

Rachel’s canonically the only one on the team who takes decent notes in class! She keeps a B average at least far as book 12. Rachel’s trying determinedly to perform humanity and to perform upper-middle-class white femininity. And it’s falling to pieces beneath her because she’s not any of those things anymore, not fundamentally, not at her core. Not as her main identity. What she is is a killer. Not just by circumstance. She loves danger and she loves violence and she loves being a hero and she loves feeling powerful and she likes to win and she likes to hurt people. She’s a warrior, and she doesn’t belong in the safe clean insulated world that she was so successful in before.

I don’t like to reduce that evolution, or devolution, down to a simple act of altruism or heroism. I think it does disservice to Rachel’s specific tragedy and the story Applegate was using her to tell about war.

That said, yes violence and protectiveness were profoundly mixed together for Rachel, as they often are for people who engage in violence, and #22 did great work with that. A lot of later Rachel books...fucking did not. Weirdly Tobias books seem to be better at it, maybe because Tobias consistently looks to Rachel for protection and security and comfort.

You’re also right that Cassie ignores the degree to which Rachel is making a sacrifice for her (and for the team.) And I think that Cassie has to ignore that, or it won’t work. The whole deal with Cassie is that she doesn’t just hate the violence the team participates in; she hates that it’s necessary, and she hates having to acknowledge that it’s necessary. She does not want to believe that the world is structured in such a way that violence and brutality are the path to an acceptable future. All the Animorphs (except possibly Ax) struggle with this, but Cassie’s the one who almost breaks under the strain. In #19 she becomes, I would argue, actively suicidal in her desperation to not live in a world where violence is the only option. Acknowledging Rachel’s bloodlust as something that’s necessary to preserve what’s left of Cassie’s innocence (which let’s be honest, isn’t much) would be devastating for her. Acknowledging that the team requires Rachel’s bloodlust in order to function, that the path to the world Cassie wants to create requires someone to be Like That, would be devastating for her.

3.5) Okay I’ve now had a piece of toast and had another thought about Rachel and saving the team, which is: yeah, sometimes Rachel being aggressive and reckless and brave protects the team from having to shoulder a moral burden. But a lot of the time, Rachel being aggressive and reckless and brave forces the team to engage in a dangerous or bloody/haunting mission, or at the very least makes space for people who were hedging to get on board. Rachel leads the way. Rachel says “Let’s do it.” And she has to, because in almost every case those missions were necessary, and the danger and the trauma and the guilt that resulted from them was a necessary cost. But I think it’s an oversimplification to say that Rachel protected the group from trauma or from moral repercussions. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she led them straight into the fray.

3.75) You’re absolutely right about the staying-for-two-hours-with-David thing specifically, though. That was 100% an act of altruism and sacrifice for her team, and honestly a pretty grim choice on her point considering her very recent argument with Jake about him using her for exactly this purpose. Her volunteering to stay with David reads to me as a follow-up to that argument, a change in her answer. She’s saying: yes, okay, I accept this role. Which is uhhh not foreshadowing at all.