penwalla | Animorphs Reread #4

Enter Axmili.

Tobias's personality as a hawk is already starting to be distinctly different from the way he acted as a human. I honestly wish we'd gotten some POV from him before he was nothlit'd, though I do think having him be stuck in hawk form in the first book is a strong choice, narratively--really drives home the risk these kids are taking. We do get some human Tobias POV later in the series during one of the Megamorphs books, as I recall--I think he gets recruited into the Sharing. But I digress. Tobias the human was sensitive, dreamy, bullied. But as early as this book, we see Tobias cracking jokes, displaying a lot more confidence than he did previously. We also start to get hints that Tobias is more than he seems, that he has some connection to the aliens that the others do not--later we'll find out the truth, but it's significant that he and Cassie are the ones who receive Ax's message.
I also love that the Animorphs cope with Tobias turning into a hawk by gently roasting him about it. Again, you can see the way Tobias being a bird lets him step outside his role as bullied loner boy.
If Visser Three wasn't so obsessed with Andalites the Animorphs would have been caught so much sooner. Truly these books would be very different if the Yeerk invasion wasn't being run by this lunatic. This could feel like a convenience but Applegate really sells it as like, the Yeerk government and command structure are as flawed as any other large organization.
The Animorph's insistence that morphing sentient beings is wrong is fascinating to me (though this does get bent throughout the series) because like, it doesn't affect the person being morphed in any way. Like even if dolphins are sentient, they don't experience harm from being morphed, so what's the issue? We also have multiple examples of the Animorphs morphing into humans and while there seems to be some personality in those morphs, there doesn't seem to be an actual consciousness present that they are fighting. To be fair these are literal children.
Cassie and Marco are often presented as foils, the ruthless pragmatist versus the naive idealist, but in her way Cassie is equally pragmatic. Like Tobias, her understanding of the world is shaped by a view of nature as amoral.
This scene where Cassie psychically communicates with a whale is bonkers but also incredible.
It is so funny that these guys have bird morphs that are objectively better for most of the things they are morphing bird for, but they still always choose to be birds of prey, in part because Tobias is a bird snob and in part because, once again, these are literal children.
Ax saying his brother would have been mad at him for sharing tech with the humans when Elfangor canonically married a human and had a child with her is so funny.
The tragedy of Jake constantly trying not to be the leader and taking votes and abdicating responsibility whenever he can, only to end in a position where he ultimately makes the call that will destroy his life and arguably break up the Animorphs forever. :(
Ax's ability to tell time is clearly just there so they don't need to constantly carry a watch lmao. But also it makes sense that the morphing tech works the way it does if the species who invented it have a super accurate internal clock.
Visser Three's obsession with eating his enemies versus Ax's obsession with eating human foods...both of them species without mouths...the parallel of it all.
Overall I think this is another really solid book, introducing Cassie to us as the team's heart, the person most concerned with right and wrong. The tension between Cassie's ideals and the reality of war is kind of the point of Animorphs, and in that way I think she's a really important character.