Moran Rereads the Animorphs, Part 10
Book 10: The Android
AKA “Dogs are literally too good for this world, the first main character dies for a bit, and we learn about the motherfucking Chee”
- All right, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way so that I can dedicate this whole thing to an epic tirade about the Chee. Motherfuckers.
- Bats. Spiders. Except for the roaches, it’s a superhero extravaganza. The plan to get the Pemalite crystal is so beautiful and intricate…right up until that critical moment of “how the fuck do bats carry anything” at the end there. SPOILER ALERT KIDS, BATS DON’T CARRY THINGS. These fuck-up children are too cute, I love them so much. And then they murder a bunch of dudes and they’re still too cute. My dearest kids.
- It’s hysterically funny to me that K. A. Applegate looked us all straight in the eye and announced that dogs are literally so great that the only explanation is that they are actually the merging of wolves with the souls of a race of aliens so highly evolved that they knew only joy and love and light. Like. That’s literally her mission statement with this book. “Appreciate dogs because they’re better than you.” I know little to nothing about this woman, but I guarantee that she is a dog person.
- I think this might be the first time they’re all a heartbeat away from being massacred in their battle morphs, but that kind of depends on how you want to split the hairs of ‘almost dead.’ Marco, as usual, gets the worst of it, and is all dead, so there’s nothing left to do but go through his pockets and look for loose change. No, wait, wrong childhood obsession, nothing left to do but electrocute him back to life.
- Marco has issues, Ax is a mess and someone should take his human morph away because the boy is a hazard, Rachel in her grizzly morph is everything I want to be, Tobias is my own predatory sweetie, Jake is great, Cassie has morals and stress, yadda yadda yadda, okay that’s all now time for the rant.
- Radical statement: I don’t like the Chee. At all. Fuck the Chee. And I’ll tell you why.
- The Chee aren’t into violence: okay. Sure. They’ve been around a long time and we should probably all be grateful that they aren’t into violence, because wow that would be alarming. Forget the Yeerks—the Chee Empire, coming soon to galaxies near you. I honestly don’t have a problem with the fact that the Chee aren’t into violence, they can live their lives—or rather exist their existences—and I’m not going to fuss with that.
- Although as long as we’re on the subject of the Chee living their lives, it’s pretty fucking rich for a race whose code is total and complete pacifism to be keeping Yeerks prisoner in their craniums. Like, far be it from me to make any defense of the Yeerks, but that. That is pretty ice cold. And it’s just pretty hypocritical to me for a race to preach utter pacifism while holding a living creature—Yeerk or otherwise—imprisoned within their own body. That is just pretty rich.
- Here’s my ultimate hangup, the bitter dislike I’ve held on my tongue since I first read this twelve years ago. The Chee watched their creators slaughtered by the Howlers, and they couldn’t lift a hand to protect them. The Chee watched their creators waste away from a quantum virus, and they could only preserve some scrap of them. They have doubtless watched crimes and cruelties that would make a human slip over the precarious edge of sanity thatfast. And after all that, after all that life and with all that purported wisdom and perspective, they are choosing—choosing, because they have the crystal—to throw Earth to the Yeerks to preserve their own comfort.
- Look, I’m sorry, I know this is going to sound cold-blooded, but one single Chee who was willing to sacrifice their peace of mind and ease of living in order to stand beside the Animorphs and do battle could have turned the tide of the war. They could have preserved countless lives, saved untold numbers of people from infestation, ended the war so much more quickly. One Chee. I’m not even saying all of them have to take up arms, I’m saying one Chee could have taken it in the teeth and said, “Yes, this will be horrible and it will be bloody and I would have screaming, weeping nightmares for the rest of my life if I slept. And I will do it anyway because it must be done, and if I can’t live with what must be done, that’s something I’ll handle down the line.” And yeah, it would have been awful and traumatic and bitter to swallow. But ultimately the Chee are choosing their own peace of mind and ease of sleep (metaphorical sleep) over the lives of the entire human race, the entire planet. Over the lives of the six child soldiers who have to shoulder an entire war, completely and ruthlessly, because there is no one else.
- The Chee are at fault for that. They bear some of the burden of the lives lost, both to death and to infestation. They have blood on their hands because they had the power to do something and instead they chose to stand back and let the Animorphs carry that crushing weight. They are not a bastion of morality, they are not the final redoubt of ethics. They have a choice, the exact choice that the Animorphs are offered—and I don’t care to hear about how the Chee can’t forget. The Animorphs are six children who will have to carry the memory of murder and pain and blood for the rest of their lives, and I don’t see the Chee harping on that. The Chee and the Animorphs face the same choice: fight to save the Earth by doing things that will make them scream and cry and throw up for years to come, or stand back and do nothing and watch the world fall while they sleep safe. The Chee choose to stand idly by, and in my book there are few greater sins.
- And the Animorphs offer Erek sympathy, and understanding, and they don’t shout at him that he swore that he would help them, that they are all alone fighting a war far too big for them, that they need help and there is no one else. So I feel like at the end of this book, the Chee definitely do not come off with the moral high ground. It’s the Animorphs, who habitually do all the things that ruin Erek so completely, who kill and bleed and do terrible things, who walk away as the example of how to not be shitty.
- Even if they’re NOT willing to take violent steps, the Chee could do something, anything, they have MASSIVE amounts of information about the Yeerk invasion force at their disposal and presumably they’re the best hackers on the planet, in addition to being incredibly strong and durable and being able to project any hologram they want. They could definitely do more than just. This. Jesus.
- TL;DR: Fuck the Chee very much, thank you, and I understand Jake’s move at the endgame. Desperate times call for nuclear measures, and the Chee are definitely that.
