#animorphs 39

And later in #19, Marco shows up to kill a small child and Cassie takes drastic action to prevent it because she doesn’t want to be party to that act of violence, but I can’t remember any line of her narration or dialogue that condemns Marco in any way for what he plans to do. She can’t bear to do it. That doesn’t mean she thinks less of him for doing what he thinks needs to be done. Cassie is afraid of Marco in #19 but she is not angry at him and she does not observably pass judgment on him. 

I’m having a thought that goes something like: Rachel and Marco (who refuse to say out loud that they hate themselves) have recurring problems with Cassie (who constantly verbalizes her struggles with self-hatred) which they frame as them defending against Cassie’s unfair moral reprobation; but Cassie doesn’t have any discernible problem with them. 

Whereas Tobias (who has achieved personal moral self-acceptance), understands Cassie possibly better than anyone, and Ax (who has a lot of issues but none of them are revulsion at his own capacity for violence) gets along fine with her until the endgame when she materially betrays the team’s objective. Like. Ax doesn’t have a problem with Cassie being passively angst-ridden. He doesn’t take that as an attack on himself. They’re not close but there’s not friction in the way there’s constant friction between Cassie and Marco. 

Marco sees Cassie’s moral hangups as a personal attack, and partly that’s because he feels like she’s making his boyfriend think less of him, but it’s mostly because he thinks so little of himself and he’s compartmentalizing that so aggressively that he can’t stand being in the same space as someone who refuses to compartmentalize. The entire team (with the possible and significant exception of Cassie) has accepted the premise that Cassie is a better person than Marco; so if Cassie is disgusted by her own sins, by the transitive property she must be even more disgusted by Marco. But I really don’t think she is.