Very indulgent ask: you’ve talked here and there before about animorphs and unreliable narration, and I always love your insights. Do you have any passages or quotes from the books that you feel showcase biases in narration particularly well? Any favorites?
Oh man, how could I ever begin to answer? This is the best part of the series, and in some ways it's in every book! But I'll do my best.
David Trilogy:
In #22, Rachel characterizes Jake asking Ax to "get" her as Jake knowing what a violent monster she is, and using that monstrousness against a kid their own age. She obsesses over the idea that she's a terrible person who is barely worthy of being on this team, and the idea that Jake is basically puppeting her into atrocities.
But in #21, Jake asks Ax to get Rachel because he's scared. And because he wants the biggest baddest person he knows to protect him, if he's about to go into a battle he doesn't think he can win. Jake sees Rachel as his protector — in #11 he says that he never gets really scared until he sees Rachel get scared, and in #26 he trusts her to draw lines he can't. (Between this dynamic and how much Rachel dismisses Jake as a leader at first, I do headcanon Rachel being a few months older than him.)
In some ways Jake is right that she's his badass big sister — Rachel does see him as someone who needs protecting, maybe more than anyone else on the team does. (See: her sheltering him in #2, her pity for him at the end of #37.) In some ways Rachel is right that she's his red right hand — Jake asks Rachel to do the hard jobs, the dirty jobs, and he buys into her posturing about always being eager for battle, far more than Tobias or Cassie do. (See: him asking her to do all the hard parts of dealing with David #20-#22, his willingness to use her in #32.)
