Moran Rereads the Animorphs
Book 5: The Predator
AKA “Marco learns about dramatic irony, the PTSD squad meets the big boss, and we encounter the reason I hate lobsters and think ants are the devil”
- First things first: this book has some fucking nightmare morphs. The goddamn lobster morph, good God. Kill. Kill and eat. Excuse me while I deal with the lifetime of deep disgust inspired by that morph, I hate lobsters with my whole soul. I’d be having some nightmares about that shit too, Marco, I feel that. Even if I wasn’t allergic to shellfish, I wouldn’t be willing to get close enough to a lobster to eat the thing. And I live in Maine! Lobster capital of the world! There is a Lobster Festival in my town! I am so disturbed by New Englanders, what are you guys doing.
- Speaking of nightmare morphs, ants get their own fucking bullet point. Because fucking damn. I have seen some impressive horror movies et alii, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so permanently given the screaming meemies by anything fictional as I was by this book’s ants. With a possible caveat of the termites in Book 9. I remember the first time I read this and I was just like blown away by that. I mentioned in the last recap that it was almost a normal Earth shark that killed the first one of them, but it was the plain old ant that killed them all. At least…I don’t know, at least a shark is dangerous to humans, too, you know? It’s rare, but people do die from shark attack. The shark could have killed Marco in his human body—it probably wouldn’t, because despite what Hollywood would have you believe sharks are pretty nervous about the people infesting their home and therefore prefer to avoid us, but it could have. Plain, mundane, black ants…they can’t hurt a human. There’s something uniquely terrifying about the kids almost dying at the hands of something that seems so harmless.
- I think I internalized Marco more than I thought. Like, Rachel and Tobias are my forever loves, they will always be my favorites, with everyone else in fluid order below them, but Marco’s sense of humor? Cracking jokes at the worst times because what else are you going to do? The fine art of gallows humor? Yeah, you could do worse as a coping mechanism. Honestly I think I would fight with Marco constantly just because that’s my experience with people like Marco, but it would be, you know, affectionate fighting. And also, Marco is so much the strategist, he can see the bright clear line from A to Z, and this book is the first time we really see him commit to it. He walls up his emotional response to his mother’s presence, he pushes it away, and he helps them break out, because that’s what needs to happen. They are at point A. They need to get to point Z, back on Earth. And in order to do that, Marco can’t be the scared, mourning thirteen-year-old kid who wants his mother back. He has to be a soldier, a tactician. And he does it.
- I am still 100% a wreck about Ax being all alone on Earth and being so determined to get home. This book is before he’s really resigned himself to the reality and come to terms with it, and he’s still so hopeful and homesick and he’s just a visitor, not a resident. Also, he holds himself so much apart from the human Animorphs in this book, before his home world rejects him and he claims Earth as his new home. It kind of aches, because he only holds himself so much apart because he really believes it’s going to be as easy as stealing a Z-Space transponder, stealing a Bug fighter, and packing himself off home. Oh kid.
- So. Visser One. Um. That happens. This book gives you a lot of insight into the fact that Marco’s kind of barely holding it together under the humor, you get to see his nightmares and his anxieties and the fact that he is planning to stop, and then… Yeah. I don’t have a lot to say about that. I don’t know what there is to say about that.
- Except this: Marco starts this book saying that, well, it’s Jake’s family on the line. Not his. He has to protect his dad by staying out of the war, he has no one to save, and if he dies it will kill his dad. So he has to stay out, because it’s not his family on the line. Oh kid.
