I'm literally just like Eva Animorphs

Doylistically (out of universe): The mentor who dies passing along his power is a classic SF trope, and Animorphs does a classic job of both playing that trope straight and subverting it. Elfangor becomes the emotional motivation for the team, because now they can't not fight the war — he literally died to give them a chance to save humanity. Given how much the series is baked on the idea of kids having no guidance at all when tasked with saving the world, he cannot stick around to mentor them. He has to die.

It's also not clear that Applegate et al. committed to the idea of morph-healing before #4, because it doesn't come up until then, and the rules of morphing are pretty fuzzy in that first book.

Watsonian (in-universe): Various explanations include:

When the Ellimist re-andalite-ified Elfangor, he never gave his morphing power back (X)

Elfangor has to let Visser Three kill him, or else Visser Three will tear the planet apart looking for him (X)

Elfangor lets Visser Three kill him in order to give the kids a chance to get away (X)

Elfangor is injured with some kind of weapon or radiation poisoning that causes an injury morphing can't heal

Andalites aren't aware that morphing can heal injuries to one's base form (X)

There are a couple of questions about Elfangor that are never directly answered in animorphs. Firstly, after the time matrix shenanigans, why does the Ellimist sit around on his hands and let Elfangor live on Earth long enough to get Loren pregnant, then pull him away before he can meet his kid but be sure to let him know he'll have one? Weird timing. It would make sense if he needed Tobias for some strategic reason in the future (Marco's relationship to his mother becomes very strategically relevant, for example), but aside from possibly helping with Tobias' bond with Ax, this never comes up. If anything, it just puts them in more danger when Elfangor goes looking for him. There's no reason for the Ellimist to go out of his way to make sure that Elfangor has an Earth kid. (It's *possible* that the Ellimist left Elfangor there because he wanted Elfangor to help humans build computers, which he did, but that doesn't explain the incredibly specific timing of the retrieval.)

Second, why the fuck is he carrying an escafil device around on his little ship? That makes ZERO sense. This is a device that you only need to expose someone to once, it has no combat use. And andalites are forbidden from sharing technology, so it's not like they're taking these things to other planets to grant other species morphing powers in the field. The only thing that taking this cube to Earth does is risk it being picked up by the yeerks. There's simply no reason for it to be on his ship.

Unless he knew he'd need it.

Tobias is bait. Tobias being in danger, doomed to infestation along with the rest of his world, is the Ellimist's leverage to convince Elfangor to do what he needs him to do -- bring this tech to Earth and give his son (and friends) the means to fight back. And the price of this, probably demanded by Crayak, is the clever wildcard of a war hero's life.

1. canonically female (no variation)

2. canonically the protagonist of her story (if it’s an ensemble cast you have to say you can legitimately see her as The main character)

3. your personal #1 favorite character in that story (ties are acceptable)

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

4 August - "But I am captain, and I must not leave my ship."

location: moss oasis, endless barren waste

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN EARN THE LOVE OF MY CITIZENS!

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN ADEQUATELY PREPARE MY SUCCESSOR!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Nemoy’s voice is PERFECT in this!