#animorphs 5

Animorphs 5 gave us so much. They fit so much into that tiny little book. Two kids getting almost boiled alive for dinner in a regular human kitchen in a scene that had sort of nothing to do with the plot. Ax going completely insane at radio shack and almost dooming the Earth by virtue of total inability to behave normally in public for ten seconds. A disillusioned teenager making a desperate attempt to abnegate his duty for what would turn out to be the last time in his fucking life, then realizing twenty minutes later that he's incapable of that. A gaggle of teens experiencing ego death and getting ripped to pieces by completely normal ants before blindly bursting out of the suffocating earth and running home in leotards, only for one of them to find an ant pincer in his hip in the shower later and have a brief but thorough nervous breakdown in his bathroom. The same gaggle of teens catching a glimpse of their home planet from the window of a spaceship sent to consume that planet, struck by its beauty and by the weight of the duty of care for it that's been placed on their shoulders, moments before they are brought to believe they have failed that duty irrevocably and will die before they reach their home again. And all of that was before Eva came back from the dead.

I love Animorphs 5 because it’s the last time Marco really questions his duty, it’s where he makes the transition from the least to most committed member of the team and he never looks back, and it would have been so easy to reduce that down to one glimpse at Eva at the end, but really the damage is done before he ever sees her, because he meets a complete stranger who despite his fear despite his youth despite his grief despite his longing for his broken family is willing to fight with his life for people he doesn’t even know, and Marco cannot look away from that, and his need to repay that favor brings him onto the Blade ship and he looks out the window and he sees the Earth. The deal is sealed for Marco before he sees Eva, because he has already seen the Earth, and putting it in that order wasn’t an accident. He looks at the whole world and understands that he has to win and he never looks back. He wants so badly to be someone who's only looking out for himself and the people he loves the most because that's the only way he can imagine keeping those people all alive but he cannot be that person.

The other thing about Marco saying to Jake “You’re not getting me killed to save your father!” which is one of a total of like, two times in #31 that Marco loses his temper, which is fucking miraculous given the stakes and the way Jake is acting, is that it illustrates how completely he has internalized the mentality that the team—not just the war, but the team— is all of their first responsibility and everything else they love is secondary; and how much Jake has not. Marco threw a fit about that concept very early on, before anyone else recognized that it was going to come down to that. But he’s worked through it and reached the conclusion by the end of #5. Jake doesn’t really get there until #53.