#jakemarco

!!!!!!!!! yes you absolutely can :D

the thing is, to me, jakemarco is (partially) canon. of course ship and let ship, but my personal reading is that jake and marco are both in the closet (though marco is much closer to the closet door), in love with each other, and repressing it. it is also important, to me, that they both die before coming out. key part of the themes of the story. it is important that they are unrequited.

okay. so. jakemarco are in love with each other, unaware of/repressing that to various degrees, closeted, and… i don’t want to say “toxic” because that’s not what it is. let’s say “unfulfilling,” in that their relationship, you know, gets them through the war, but it doesn’t do things like… make them feel good about themselves or grow as people.

like, jake and marco are utterly devoted to each other. marco would kill and die (and has!) for jake, and vice versa (probably). but they don't speak for years after the war until jake shows up at marco's house to invite him onto a suicide mission, with certainty that marco will agree, and he is right. because their relationship started as best friends but it morphed into commander and soldier, partially because marco chose to change it, and partially because that was what they needed to survive the war.

the thing about jakemarco is that (to quote tumblr user exigencelost, one of the best animorphs analyzers out there), they are never done negotiating how much marco will sacrifice for jake. and, in addition to that, they are never done negotiating how much marco can make jake do. their mutual guilt relieves each other of enough responsibility that they’re able to live with themselves and keep going.

let’s take #19, when jake gives the order to kill cassie.

I was frantic. The battle had cost us time. Too much time. And now Rachel demorphing and re-morphing would cost us more time.  <Marco, go after Tobias. See if you can help. Keep track of the Yeerk - whatever body it’s in.> <You have some kind of instructions for me, oh, fearless leader?> <Yeah. I do. The Yeerk does not make contact with anyone. I don’t care if it’s in Cassie or that girl Karen. Neither of them gets away. No matter what.> Marco hesitated for a moment. <You mean … ?> <I mean, one way or the other, neither Cassie nor that girl gets away.>

here we see jake give marco the order to kill because he cannot do it himself. he cannot bring himself to do that, the guilt will destroy him. but he believes that marco can. very neat parallels to rachel’s arc in #22, when she realizes a) her cousin knows that she enjoys murder and b) her cousin is willing to use her for it. immediately after this conversation, marco basically speedruns his own version of that arc.

but! marco asks him for orders. this is after he’s spoken to cassie; he already knows what he may have to do. and he finds himself capable of doing it. but at this point he hasn’t reached what i like to call the matricide marco tipping point, wherein he’s able to convince himself to do some motherfuckerous stuff because it’s necessary for the war. he needs jake to tell him to do it (interesting parallels to cassie in the beginning of #19, who breaks down because she commits violence without jake’s order).

by using each other in this way, marco and jake turn the fucked up decisions they have to make into something survivable for both of them. they continue doing this for the rest of the war

also. i find it interesting that, in Book Fucking One, we see marco

"We could get killed!" he yelled. "Don't you get it? You saw what happened to the Andalite. This is radical stuff, Jake. This is for real! Real! We could get killed!" Tobias was looking at Marco with this sideways look, like he thought maybe Marco was some kind of coward. I knew better. Marco had his reasons. Marco shook his head. In a quiet voice he said, "Look, I think these Controllers are jerks. But if something happened to me . . . my dad. He wouldn't be able to handle it." Two years ago, Marco's mom died. She drowned. They never even found her body. Marco's dad lost it big time. He totally fell apart. He quit his job as an industrial engineer because he couldn't handle being around other people. Now he was working as a night janitor, making barely enough to support Marco. He spent his days sleeping or watching TV with the sound off. "You can all think I'm a weasel if you want," Marco said. "I don't care. But if I get killed or something, my dad will flat-out die. He's only hanging in there because of me.

understanding perfectly that this war carries a high risk that he will die and— and this is important, this is central to his character— kill his dad with him. he is already conceptualizing of himself as his affect on other people, his debts towards other people, his duty. and we also see jake know that (setting up, of course, his later-book willingness to capitalize on it)

i love marco and cassie’s dynamic 😭😭

Marco: Good. I didn't expect this much crying, though.

Cassie: Don't worry, it's normal for babies.

Marco: What? The baby is fine. I was talking about Jake.

OOH HII FUN QUESTION I’m honestly so fascinated by how distinct everyone’s relationships with each other are in these books and how they shift as the characters get more traumatized

(I’m like halfway through book 31 btw so ig spoilers for any books before that and pls avoid any after that)

Starting off, I love how Marco books are usually followed by Jake books because he’s the one who understands him the best. When Marco sees his mom, Jake’s the only who knows what it means and why he acts the way he does.

As the books go on, the more the “roles” they were put into get reinforced. Marco’s meant to take the seriousness out of situations while Jake puts it in. They cannot switch.

If Marco’s not cracking jokes, the whole team gets uneasy while, if Jake lets his guard down, the team falls apart (also if Jake tells a joke no one laughs which, although funny in itself, is kinda sad bc I do find him funny lmao)

Books 30 and 31 rn are veryyyy interesting because, despite all that, they do switch.

30 is all about Marco forcing himself to be serious. Taking out all the emotions out of unimaginably hard decisions, because he refuses to be a liability. He refuses to prove the team right when they think he’s “too close”. And he does, and he hates himself for it.

Book 31 has Jake crumbling, losing his cool, making dumb decisions, being “too close”. Saying all the things Marco wished he’d been saying the previous book and even claiming Marco’s enjoying seeing him like this after what they said to him regarding his mom.

I’m not sure how this book is gonna end, if the next book they’ll go back to how they usually are, but I’m not sure how they can do that. Marco doesn’t want to be funny all the time, Jake doesn’t want to lead.

Also, the “fearless leader” thing started off as a bit and evolving into almost an insult is doing hggdhhhh sad things to my brain

I really hope they patch up soon, it’s sad seeing them so tense around each other, especially knowing they mean their best.

word count: 2,721 | chapters: 1/1

Marco finds his eyes drifting towards Jake again. It’s fine. He loves him. He’s obviously going to stare, at his eyes, at his hair, at his lips. It’s fine as long as he doesn’t start wanting anything, because that might lead to something like acting on it — coming out and confessing and the like — and he knows he can’t afford anything like that. But staring, Marco tells himself, is fine. Marco tells himself a lot of things.

Just two happy teenagers to whom nothing bad has ever happened.