#marco has a bit of that too but rachel is the absolute queen of it

[lifeattomsdiner]

I was gonna make a jokey post about how Rachel Animorphs is a great character because "what if the most fashionable it girl at your school discovered a passion for war crimes" is just inherently interesting to watch, and you know, that's true

But I think the real thing that makes her interesting is that while the other Animorphs have the "what if you were in a situation where you had to do violence and it was hard" thing covered from a variety of angles, Rachel's arc is "what if you were in a situation where you had to do violence and it was entirely too easy?"

[rays-animorphs]

So guess who finished book 19 last night! Woot!

Some thoughts (spoilers):

I think the ending works. Cassie quit the Animorphs because she got overwhelmed with the death and destruction and senselessness of it all, she came back when she got an injection of hope, it absolutely parallels book 9 where she looses her cool over killing the termite queen but is OK again after chilling out as a momma skunk for a bit. For Cassie it isn’t about moral purity, it’s about balance, she just needs the death and destruction to not overwhelm the protection and peace and love and so on.

And I think part of that is her decision to quit Animorphs came from a bad place. It wasn’t really thought out and it wasn’t for instance based on an interaction that reminded her that Yeerks and/or their hosts are sentient life forms who matter or something that put her in touch with her core values, it was her killing a Hork-Bajir Controller when she didn’t have to. The books strongly imply that Cassie is the first of the Animorphs to kill, back in book 1. Cassie can handle killing — when she figures it’s justified. Which is not that weird for a wildlife rehabber. The center has probably had to put down animals before, and it’s definitely had animals they couldn’t save. (Plus, whenever they have a carnivore, guess what those guys eat.) Cassie is familiar with death, her inclination to value all life coexists with knowing that sometimes death happens and you can’t avoid it.

Anyways, so Cassie’s decision to nope out wasn’t actually coming from a place of moral clarity, in fact it was coming from the opposite, a place of numbness and overwhelm. It was less “this is the right decision” and more “I don’t think I know what is right any more, so I’m defaulting to inaction.”

It’s possible that returning to the Animorphs was also not coming from the best place either, “life is beautiful let’s max out the credit cards” doesn’t exactly sound healthy either. It’s also possible a sense of obligation played into it, her friends came to bail her out so she felt she owed them, or maybe she just didn’t want the continued conflict that reaffirming the decision to leave would bring.

It also parallel’s Marco’s “I’m gonna leave/nope I’m in” turnaround in book 5, although Marco’s reasons for returning are a lot clearer. And when Rachel was considering noping out to live with her dad. Or even Tobias’s turn to the suicidal in Book 3. Or Ax’s “yeah I gotta get revenge even if it kills me”, or Elfangor going AWOL…anyways, there is a theme here is what I’m saying, this is not a story about heroes who never have second thoughts about the path that they’re on. And yes, there’s only one character so far who’s genuinely gotten to leave for good, Erek.

Cycling back to the inciting incident, my read is Cassie is upset more that she was out of control and was acting out of accordance with her values than it being about killing under orders vs under her own initiative — it wasn’t a decision, she describes it as the wolf’s instincts taking over. Cassie does have quite a lot of “ooh that sounds like a sticky ethical decision I’d rather that someone else made it”, but that doesn’t strike me as her main problem in this case. And I mean, if I’d killed a sentient being (two really) in a moment where I felt like I wasn’t even in control of my actions, and then realized there wasn’t even a good reason to, I’d be losing my shit too.

Back to the caterpillar thing: I know “everyone is Jesus in purgatory” is a TV Tropes page and it’s possible to read too much into this stuff, but 3 days? When it’s made explicit in the book that normally metamorphosis takes longer? (In connection with self sacrifice and peace overcoming war and specifically sacrificing yourself to ensure someone else’s redemption and all. And the leap of faith aspect, at no point is Cassie sure Aftran will go through with her side of the deal.) It’s not quite as hammeriffic as say the Narnia chronicles or the Deathgate Cycle, but it’s there.

The characters are generally describing Cassie as “giving up her life”, which is not an unreasonable description. It’s not literal death, but she is giving up all the human things like family and meaningful work and I don’t know, cinnamon buns. And we have a highly symbolic transformation, and she comes back to life.

And butterflies are I think not usually a symbol of peace or a “swords to plowshares” thing, but I think that’s a thing here, with Cassie’s transformation connected to Aftran retiring from active participation in the Yeerk invasion. Butterflies are about as harmless and indeed vulnerable as it gets.

We’ve had butterfly symbolism before, in the book where we meet the Ellimist. Book 7. I don’t think it’s exactly the same thing (in book 7 it was this chaos theory imagery, the idea that very small changes can make a huge difference, which is about hope, and maybe miracles or things that seem miraculous, and I don’t see a chaos theory thing here, but the hope and miracles thing is.

And all of them, every single one of the Animorphs, actively decides to support Cassie’s decision to not kill Karen/Aftran in the end. Any single one of them could have gone “no this is ridiculous, there is too much at stake, you can’t fight a war without breaking a few eggs” and not one of them did. And there were all 5 remaining Animorphs there. They could have done the 3 day thing and killed Aftran without killing Karen.

I’m counting that as a miracle.