Animorphs Reread #1-3

[penwalla]

Am doing Animorphs reread with my friends and wanted to record my thoughts. 

The Invasion -- Jake POV
The Message -- Rachel POV
The Encounter -- Tobias POV

It's fascinating in these early books to see what will become firm team dynamics get laid down. Animorphs is about how war is terrible, and each of the six main characters embodies this in a different way.

Some thoughts:
 

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• Their plans in these early books are so haphazard. Their first Yeerk pool excursion is a disaster that ends with Tobias becoming a nothlit, their plan to spy on Chapman nearly gets Rachel killed for minimal gain, and their plan to turn into fish and take over a giant spaceship almost kills all of them and only succeeds because Tobias attacks the ship with an alien ray gun.
• Also fun to see the early weirdness of no one knowing how to handle Tobias being a bird, and treating him as much like a human as possible (letting him live in Jake's attic, feeding him meat). 
• Rachel and Tobias have complimentary and opposite character arcs where Rachel becomes pigeonholed as the warrior of the group, the one who is willing to enact violence the others won't, the one who is always ready to fight--this is often described as in contrast to her appearance as a conventionally pretty blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl. You start to see this in these early books, but in The Message Rachel is still motivated mostly by concern for her friend Melissa. Tobias, on the other hand, becomes more and more concerned with retaining his humanity--not his physical human body, which he never regains permanently, even though he regains his ability to morph and could nothlit himself into his old human body if he wanted post-war. A significant portion of Tobias's arc in the early books is making peace with the idea of hunting to survive. Tobias's life as a human was not great, and no one would blame him for becoming jaded, so I think it says a lot about him that he tries so hard to retain the best of himself.
• Also worth noting at this point in the series that Tobias really has no personal beef with the Yeerks, other than the fact he's now a hawk. He doesn't have personal ties to any Controllers. Later we will find out that Tobias has arguably the most personal tie to the war, but Tobias won't find that out until later in the series--he commits himself to the cause out of a genuine desire to help. Of course you can also argue that out of the group, Tobias is the one who has the most to lose by quitting. The Animorphs are all he has. Either he's going to be a bird in the woods or he can turn himself back into a human permanently and go back to living the life he lived before the war. But Tobias himself doesn't frame it that way.
• I think it's a really interesting choice in The Encounter to have the whole "turning into fish and swimming into the Yeerk spaceship" think happen essentially offscreen, since Tobias can't morph at this point and is just an observer. The plot of this book is really just Tobias trying to cope with being a hawk, constantly telling himself he is fine with it even as he clearly is not fine with it at all. The terror of the book isn't being trapped as a fish or being almost killed in a horrible battle against aliens, it's in Tobias's helplessness as an observer. 
• It will take these children like 40-something books before it occurs to them to morph geese. Instead they will struggle to fly long distances in their bird of prey bodies and constantly worry about looking weird because birds of prey don't form groups. This is in part because Tobias is a bird snob.
• I'll talk more about this when we get to that point in canon, but also Tobias's fate at the end of the war is also one of the saddest to me--it really feels like without the war to tie him to the group, and without Rachel, there's nothing left for him. I like to think that the others tried to keep up with him, but honestly? With Ax going back to his homeworld and Rachel dead, I think he was alone. Cassie probably tried, but I think Jake was lost in his own shit (and the guilt of Rachel's death divided them) and Marco just wasn't that invested. And you can see that dynamic even this early on--Jake and Rachel are the ones who do the most for Tobias, and you get the sense that only for Rachel is it more about Tobias himself than about the guilt of him being a bird.
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