Moran Rereads the Animorphs

Book 4: The Message

AKA “The PTSD squad gets a sixth member, the first named character gets dismembered, and whales are awesome”

  • Have I mentioned how much I love Cassie? She’s such a complex character. She’s a pacifist at heart, but she also believes it’s better to go down fighting than to surrender, and that’s SUCH an unusual combination, you NEVER see that.  Either you have your die-hard pacifist who goes full Ghandi and gives you a lecture about surrendering to prove your moral superiority (NO, God I fucking hate Ghandi, don’t talk to me about him), or you have…well, Rachel. And Cassie’s neither of those things. I’ll admit that my personality and views are more aligned with Rachel and Jake—you do what needs to be done to stop an atrocity, no matter what—so I get pretty frustrated with her at several points in the series (CHILD, I understand that you have issues and also Morals, but PLEASE BE REASONABLE), but like.  God.  I just love her so much.
  • AX.  THIS BOOK INTRODUCES AX.  SPEAKING OF CHARACTERS I BOTH LOVE AND WANT TO SMACK.  Honestly the Andalite superiority thing is just.  SO goddamn aggravating.  B O Y.  But also Ax is my blue mouthless son and I love him.  
  • Dolphin morph motherfuckers.  First of all, I think Cassie worries too much.  If a dolphin is smart enough to be aware that they’re using their DNA to morph clones, the dolphin is smart enough to understand ‘necessary for the ongoing survival of the world.’  Animal survival instincts are exceptional, I’m pretty confident about this one.  Second of all, dolphin morph seems like THE COOLEST SHIT EVER.  Like, goddamn, if I could morph any time I was particularly depressed or something I would morph dolphin just for the ability to play in the water.
  • That being said.  They really go straight for the dismemberment in these books, don’t they? Like.  Is it dismemberment if you’re kind of bitten in half?  I’m not sure.  I’m calling it dismemberment, though.  And I FORGOT somehow that up to this point they didn’t actually know that morphing would restore them to healthy status?  Like???  Marco is assuming he’ll die in his own body because his legs will have been ripped off from the knee down or whatever.  ELFANGOR THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD THING TO MENTION.  Andalites are so useless.  And also these poor children, someone please bring them a handbook or something.  Or an army.  (Then again, Doubleday et al….)
  • They basically fucking annihilate the sharks on behalf of the whale and that’s gratifying, I like whales.  I also love that they hang a lampshade on the fact that, with Hork-Bajir and Visser Three and the nightmare that is Taxxons in the mix, it was almost a plain, old, Earth tiger shark that got one of them first. And yeah, sharks are Earth’s perfect weapon, they’re pretty much unchanged because they’re such a pure killing machine—they’re very good at what they do, and what they do isn’t very nice—but you don’t think of them as being a player in a galactic war.
  • The whales.  At large.  I don’t even have more to say.  I just like the whales a whole lot.
  • This is fairly academic, but clearly Taxxons swim. Quite well, and quickly.  But I also understand why they’re…basically never used again for water combat.  They’re just too fragile, with their only real weapon being their mouth, and Earth’s oceans were a warzone before Yeerks ever aimed for our little blue dust mote. Honestly, Taxxon fragility is so interesting, because they’re largely such merciless eating machines, you’d think they’d evolve to support being able to take down big prey, but not so much.  Taxxons are clearly the apex…consumers on their planet, but they’re not much good in a fight—they managed that dominance by being able to eat whatever came their way, not by being able to take a lot of apex predators in a fight.  This has a lot of interesting implications for their home world, especially when you compare it to Earth where pretty much every dominant predatory species got that way by fighting tooth and nail (see: bears, sharks, wolves, lions, etc).  By the way, I’m super into the idea that the Taxxon home world was an inland sea a la North America during the Mesozoic Era, and then they suffered an extinction level event that rendered it the blasted desert we see in the Andalite Chronicles, which would also explain why the Taxxons have evolved to eat anything—massive lack of food options.  Actually if anyone wants an epic-length essay on this (or on Hork-Bajir, my poor spiky snake babies) they should ask because I’m realizing that this is SUPER INTERESTING.
  • Visser Three, as per usual, is a living nightmare. Also, Ax flips his shit about the Visser morphing the mardrut, from an Andalite moon (don’t Andalites name planets and shit????  I’m calling their home world Andal because fuck it, if creatures from Earth are ‘Earthlings’ Andalites are from Andal—I guess humans did call their moon ‘the Moon’ so I can’t bitch about that, though), but. Hear me out here. Alloran-Semitur-Corrass was a war prince and a soldier, even though Andalites don’t really use morphing for combat, it’s not impossible that he had that morph, like, kicking around in his system already.
  • FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT AX’S HUMAN MORPH IS NOT WHITE, THIS HAS BEEN A PSA.  Also I’m really committed to the headcanon that the reason they can figure out how to fly using a bird’s instinct or how to pounce using a tiger’s instinct but Ax can’t fucking walk is because he’s overthinking it.  He does better as a human when he relaxes a little.  But he’s also…look, a lot of Ax’s issues start to evaporate once he’s a little less stubbornly Andalite, okay?  He’s too focused on Andalites being the superior construction to let the human instincts help him balance on two feet, and then once he’s calmed down some, he expects to be off balance.  So obviously he’s off balance.  QED.
  • And because I’m a dick, I saved the best WORST for last. Ax’s response to his brother’s death is…really upsetting.  He’s all alone, guys, I just.  He’s ALONE, and it’s worse because when he crashed he must have believed that he wouldn’t be there for long or he would have sent out a distress signal sooner. He must have thought that his brother, his brother Elfangor, would come for him, and that if Elfangor hadn’t come yet it wasn’t safe yet, and he just had to wait.  He has some sense that something is seriously wrong, but he’s so desperate not to face the reality.  And even if Elfangor—Prince Elfangor, the war hero—was busy, his cousins would come for him—and do not even get me STARTED on the fact that Ax is a smart kid, if he’s calling to his cousins they’re not on the Andalite home world however far away, they were on the Dome ship.  And now…brother, cousins, home world…all gone, in one fell swoop.  He’s alone on a strange world, without even a comm link to his people, with no one who can know he exists except the five child soldiers his brother damned/saved with his dying breath.  
    • I wonder if Ax ever hates the Animorphs for bringing that reality to life. 

Tags: animorphs the great animorphs reread i'd like to recommend that if you read this one you read them all because i flatter myself that i'm funny i mean on my better days i flatter myself that i'm funny but in reality i just radically overuse all-caps and cursing cassie aximili-esgarrouth-isthill (is it sad that i know how to spell that off the top of my head) prince jake marco marco really gets the short end of the bludgeoning weapon he gets disemboweled and dismembered a lot even by their standards the message taxxons taxxons are actually real interesting once you get past the instinctive revulsion factor and i'm VERY interested in how they became the apex predator on their planet if they're that squishy i have a rudimentary evolutionary sequence worked out i think it's pretty interesting also in all future stuff i will be calling the andalite homeworld andal because THE FUCKING SHIT IS THAT KAA?