YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS! Mosquito book mosquito book! I don't remember the PLOT so much as every time Ax mentions the fact that doing a tiny morph puts a helpless bag of guts and meat into zspace where it could, in THEORY, get hit by a space ship just always reminds me of this book. I remember it just absolutely side swiping me as a kid. Little plausible mission which obviously will spiral out of control turns into SPACE ADVENTURE. Man, I didn't even remember it was from Ax's pov. Makes sense tho. ~~~~ book book book book lets go!!! god what a hard opening. the andalites have been held up as these amazing heroes, these paragons of virtue who will Save Humanity once they finally get here. that reputation tarnished a bit, with ax's first book. with him finding out they preferred to cover up his brothers giving of the morphing technology to humans (what else have they covered up, he must be wondering?) then further, in the andalite cronicles, we see how flawed and , for lack of a better word, HUMAN, they are. how alloran was bitter adn wiling to do terrible things to fight an enemy, and how the "rescue" they were likely to give humanity might be death. and then here we are, flat out. some andalites are outright WORKING with yeerks. Not just "going too far to fight them", flat out, collaboration. i do wonder if he's right that no one will ever believe him. he has a... LOT of credibility after the war, iirc (though the government DOES like covering things up) (btw in THEORY the book club is back, but only a single book has been posted and no one read it) (it would just be too sad to stop my weekly read and i want to leave a record, even if its hidden away) ```I know it seems impossible even to conceive of Andalites as traitors. I know the very idea makes any decent Andalite sick inside.``` how much is that truth vs how much is that from ax being like, 13 years old and naive/weird even by andalite standards? is the average adult andalite absolutely caught flat footed by the idea of traitors? gotta love the confidence with which ax presents himself as being able to pass completely normally as a humanity and you know, i do genuinely love the fact that he's dutifully explaining all the alien concepts to folks back home. whats money. whats taste, etc. i love that his perspective is actually alien. "She took me into the eating place and made me sit on a chair. This involves bending the two legs and resting the weight of the body on a raised platform by pressing the fatty pads at the top of the legs against the platform. It’s hard to visualize unless you’ve seen it" yeaaaaaah, theres the good stuff. most upsetting description of sitting possible, baby oh neat, explanation for the whole "prince jake" thing. ax needs SOMEONE to be his boss. so. jake works out just as well. okay heres something i find funny about the fact that visser 3 is always @everyone. like, it helps that the animorphs can hear him? but right now he's in a HOSPITAL. if he @everyones, won't patients outside of this room, and staff hear? now, i can see him just not caring but. man. maybe its more like @here? "if you can see me i want you hearing me"? and then visser 3 turns into a fucking alien bird and attacks them. hasn't bothered to get a single earth morph. 0% stealth okay here is the thing. ax is all "impossible" that visser 3 has a morph from the andalite homeworld. but we KNOW from the andalite chronicles that all cadets get moprhing abilities and have to practice on a kafit bird (or i think there was one other option) you think ALLORAN never got a kafit bird? yall only have three bird specis and the kafit is the hands down best one. lol no wonder visser3 is scared to tail fight ax. he KNOWS this is elfangors kid bro and even alloran wasn't sure he could beat that guy in a fight plus like. he's probably assuming the other "andalite bandits" will demorph and outnumber him. his stupid stupid brain is probably assuming they arent already cuz ax has honor killing rights. literally EVERYONE but him knows the "andalites" are probably humans. god its so tragic that one of ax's cherished memories was dinner with cassies family, because he is so so alone and bereft of family "Tobias sighed. He floated down to a lower branch, then sailed over to a fallen log. " oh huh , i never realized the etymology of "stewing" over thoughts. yeah ax is just not considering that alloran could have acquired the kafit bird. like, i get it. he tries not to think of the member of his species trapped in there. the life they must have had before becoming a victim. but if i saw a human controller out in space, i wouldn't exactly think earth was under attack if they knew what a big mac was. im guessing this'll lead into the whole 'traitor' angle but ...still... god, sometimes i forget they've only been in this war a few months. honestly ? probably four. one week a book. "I was excited by Marco’s idea. But there are times when my human friends are reluctant to do whatever it takes to hurt the Yeerks. Sometimes so am I." yeaaaaaahh honestly, i have no clue what their plan is here. sure, they bite him as mosquitos but.... then they gotta demorph. p sure that blood is just. shunted back to zspace. so. how are they thinking they'll get the blood? are they gonna *purposefully* squash one of them? get a lil blood smear? tiny syringes? this is like that tme they planned to carry a crystal in their mouth as a bat while echolocating all over again. at the same time... if they spent a lot of time thinking big picture/ long term, they'd probably just give up and curl into a ball. they've gotten as far as they have by taking it one step at a time and ENDURING. "Obviously, I had not planned the diversion very well." anthem of the entire first half of the series. you know, marcos amazing description of andalites as horses with "arms coming out of their neck" seems like it might be more accurate than centaurs. because everyone seeing ax here, they're going "is that a horse" not 'holy shit centaurs' oh man i really like that when the humans talk about how weird morphing is, its just one of those things. when ax talks about it its more like someone complaining about a computer being glitchy. a technology with some rough patches. i like that a lot. ooo, even an implication that it was tested on andalite animals so makes more sense for those than entirely alien species so if my estimate of four months is correct, and ax says thats .7 of an andalite year, fascinating implications. okay the captain being like "i served under elfangor" is so weird to me cuz i thought he didn't spent a terrible amount of time back in his old life but i suppose memory is wrong fun fact, three times now its autocorrected wrong to WORKING. memory is WORKING instead of memory is wrong. v fun gaslighting. okay so leerans DO come back up i do love that a lot of ax's books are about how ....he doesn't fit in. too corrupted by Terrible Human Knowledge to really go back to andalite society , too alien to be human... he knows what cinnamon buns are. he knows how corrupt the government is. he Knows Too Much. i'm trying to remember if its the captain or the TO who is a SECRET TRAITOR. TO is all 'humans and andalites can't mix' so obvious evil. captan is all nice and compromisey. so its probably teh captain. he compromised so hard he switched sides. yup "T.O. Harelin was bleeding profusely from his severed tail. But I knew he would rather die than live without a tail. " why? ax. you KNOW morphing heals all wounds. aaaaaax. think i bet the elimist is behind this impossible coincidence... teh animorphs just HAPPENING to not just have impossible odds to get hit by a ship while in morph, but to be right ouside a pivotal battle about to start on a planet they know about "Captain Samilin had sold out to the Yeerks. Was I selling out to the humans? " don't worry ax, it runs in the family iirc tobias snapped back to earth. luckily time got fucky, cuz they have definitely been more than two hours here. "Dear Diary: another boring average day, till someone said ‘yanked.’”" correct. yeah okay i could see genuine arguments for ax being a Stranger but like. what destroys him is Knowledge, adn what he brings with him to destroy others with is knowledge, you know? eye with heavy stranger vibes. also, i do enjoy how bad jake is at humor and there we go. even with my rambling read it in a couple hours, no problem. before you know it this'll be a full on habit again. and, if i'm right in my estimate that its roughly a week a book (sometimes more, sometimes less), its a bit like dracula daily... letting me really sink into how LONG they fight this war.