is this the book where tobias gets tortured? ~~~ wow its already thursday and i haven't read it yet i have ten minutes before a thing, go go go you know.... we don't know how long its been, from book 1 to 33, but at this point tobias could be a whole year younger than rachel, in human morph ~~~ i think its interesting rachel is emphasizing her girl-self right now, in the wake of literally being split in two when "nice rachel" realized that tobias being a hawk wasn't doing it for her... that she wanted to go on dates be normal theres a part of her she's been ignoring that's been thrown into stark light... ~~~ "The clock was ticking down and I wasn’t even sure Rachel was on my side. In minutes I’d be trapped. Trapped as a person who was no longer me." there's something so tragic and cruel about this. being an animorph means accepting that anyone can be your enemy. and tobias HAS to be vulernerable to date rachel... he is too used to danger to do the thing where you go "yes this person could hurt me but i have to trust them" because trust is too expensive. she IS on his side, of course she is... but he has to worry, each time, each moment of vulnerability, if the worst will happen something that can't be taken back. i get that. ~~~ "The AMR. The ultimate weapon. A ray that could force us out of morph. Make us revert to natural form. We’d tried once to destroy it. We’d lost. " tried literally last book. to be fair though, this is basically the only multi book plot point we've seen so far besides david ~~~ "“Oh. don’t worry about me, I’m into catnaps. You know, like Napoleon did. Twenty minutes here, twenty there. Pretty soon you’ve slept eight hours and it hasn’t even slowed you down.” He stood up and leaned against the railing. " that suck with me from my childhood. the idea that when you're stressed and don't know when you can sleep you take what you can i remember a lot of cat naps in college thinking about jake and remember feeling so impressed he was doing research on generals so he could be better at leading the animorphs also..."i'm into x" is such a modern phrasing, but i guess people talked like that back then too ~~~~ "“I’m glad you made it Tobias. You’re our eyes. Our ears. Our air force. If we lost you we’d be nothing. Like Joan of Arc without her sword. Patton without his pearl-handled pistols …” We both laughed. It felt good to hear Jake say i was indispensable, but: with Jake you could never be sure anymore what was sincere. And what was just expedient. " that's so interesting. we get so few tobias books... and he just... does not TRUST the others. like, rachel will talk about jake using her as a tool. but she doesn't try to second guess him? she just... assumes? tobias though is just 'well he's nice to me but he might hurt me' and if that doesn't drive home that that was his LIFE even before hte animorphs, i don't know what will he has never in his life been in a situation where the people around him would prioritize him and had his best interest at heart. my only experience with the animorph fandom is the modern one, the things i see on tumblr, and i guess tobias is the favorite? tumblr has its explanations for why but i dunno man he's a mood. ~~~ "The Sharing is a Yeerk front organization. On the surface, a do-good, family-oriented gettogether. Beneath that veneer, the Yeerks used the wholesome enticements as a means of recruiting Controllers. " you know, as a kid i didn't think REAL organizations could do that, but i didn't know too much about how nazi's ACTUALLY worked "wholesome family values" are very often used as a way to slip in poison. this LOOKS good, so don't dig into it :) ~~~ "I watched Jake all this time. He was nodding. Like he bought what everyone was saying. But he was remaining quiet. So was Erek. Jake had another idea in mind. He was just waiting for someone else to suggest it. " ...yeah. ~~~ " Rachel kept her eyes down. She was biting her lip. Angry, sad: the two emotions are very close together in Rachel. " we see that especially in the previous book. how the two rachels react to the same stimulus. ~~~ "Jake made a face I see too often. It’s a look of disgust. Disgust with himself. He hadn’t wanted to single me out, make me go on what might be a suicidal mission. He’d waited till I could volunteer. " ~~~ 'If I was interested! I wanted so much to stay cool. To make it seem like I could take it or leave it. But this was something, finally, that I really did have a right to. I was part Andalite, even if not genetically. God knew how. Or at least The Ellimist knew how. But I was. And it excited me. " apparently tobias is the popular one. but i was adopted as a kid. and the idea of finding your REAL parents, suddenly understanding yourself? yeah that hit. there's a reason tobias was my favorite. it must be so wild to ax, to have a non enemy andaalite to look at, even if its a clone of himself ~~~ "If I had been human … looking into Rachel’s eyes, feeling her next to me, I might have … But she was a fly on my hawk body. Which was good. I could keep my cool. A hawk’s feelings aren’t exactly visible to others. " tobias masks so hard. no one can see his emotions by design. his guardians didn't exactly reward him for having inconvinient things like sadness or anger or fear, i imagine. mood. ~~~ i think its interesting that... how to put it. the yeerk do not KNOW about the chee. so when the animorophs have more knowledge than they should, theres two bits of assumption: 1: whatever meeting discussed that must have been literally bugged (they must be so paranoid all the time that animorphs are ALWAYS around, i remember in later books when yeerks could morph the animorphs realized that advantage they had discounted) 2: the yeerk peace movement is WAY more powerful/knowledgeable than they are also as i was falling asleep last night i realized that the chee/pemalites/howlers are such a good lense for the whole child soldier thing what do you do if you have an innocent being, one meant to be taken care of and protected someone vulnerable, who would be forever harmed by being forced into situations that necessitate actions that are inappropritate for their minds the chee are the side that says "no matter what, children should not participate in war" they were basically pets of the pemalites, who were themselves described as childlike and the pemalite made it so they were protected and safe from violence meanwhile the howlers, the monsters that literally genocided the pemalites, are revealed to be children themselves entirely innocent of the horrors of war, they think they're just playing a game and that everyone is a toy, or gets back up after its over, or whatever (very ender's game) and the animorphs are stuck right between. they are children, they are SUPPOSED to be protected. but they are also too aware that none of it is a game, that all of it has consequences, that they people they are fighting die forever and can make THEM die forever Erek is a robot, he has perfect memory of the few minutes of atrocities he caused when he became a soldier. and he has the option to put the genie back in the bottle, to undo his jailbreaking and go back to HAVING to be a pacifist. just about every animorph book starts with the nightmares, the trauma, the horror. it makes you wonder, how tempted would they be, if they could just opt out, forever, like erek could. like, yes, they'd be to blame for that decision, but once its made its out of their hands, "so sad, so sorry, but i'm not part of this tragedy anymore, not really..." i'm not saying erek thinks of things being irrelevant to the chee. he's part of a faction actively working with the animorphs to save humanity. or. well. at least. dogs. humanity is just kind of there too. BUT. i dunno, i hadn't considered before how MANY flavors of "are child soldiers EVER justified" there are. the howlers are child soldiers without the fear and trauma. "just raise them to think its normal and theres no problem" but we're horrified when we realize they don't undrestand what they're doing. the chee are children banned entirely from soldiering, and theres a horror to how they have to watch as everything they love dies. were they REALLY protected from anything if they had to lose it all? the animorphs are children who have the power to fight back against horror and the knowledge to feel every inch of trauma their minds are supposed to be protected from... was it all worth it? humanity ends up saved. was elfangor right to give these chilren power since it worked out in the end? was the ellimist right to manipulate time and space to get them to this moment, to stop the yeerks? was erek right to decide that avoiding the trauma of doing violence weighed more than the trauma of seeing even the remnants of the pemalites genocided? what even IS right, in the face of war? was jake right to give all those disabled children the power to fight back? what about the ones who didn't have morphing fix their disability? who were left even more vulnerable between morphs? theres so much fucking ethics in my 'cool animal books' ~~~~ it wild that their "we have to make this look like a real raid" plan is just a random andalite and bird charging into a tunnel no bug morphs, no stealth, just, leeroy jenkins that said: "I veered a violent right, just a few feet from the playground. Into the tunnel. Insane! Too fast! No way to control my speed! Wings and tail straining, straining, catching all the air I could catch, straining to absorb the energy of my own momentum. " aniorphs as a series always went so hard on "imagine what its like to fly" ~~~ "That was the plan. Ax risking his life for no purpose but to make it all look real, to make it all seem as if I’d been trapped in the midst of a genuine attack. Ax might die. For the sake of realistic drama." more than the others, tobias pays so much attention to the realness or fakeness of things... what fear did i assign him, way back when? web. yeah, i can stand by that. he's very aware of how people manipulate each other, and about how he's supposed to be perfectly in control of himself so he can manipulate others (to not hurt him) to say nothing of the whole elimist thing ~~~ "And a girl. A human. For a millisecond I thought … No, no, of course it wasn’t Rachel. This girl was a couple of years older. Tall, thin, blond. Sleek chinos, leather loafers. A knit top even Rachel would admire. Preppy. Supermodel. Yeerk. I was speechless." this is it isn't it? the reason the fandom thinks tobias is trans? he morphs this girl, doesn't he. and feels powerful doing it. i hadn't remembered/realized she was very much like his girlfriend ~~~ oh thats right. she was disabled too. became a voluntary controller to get out of bed? or... am i confusing it with a cauldron cape from worm? interesting how those merge in my mind. ~~~ thats right. thats right. the yeerk is human kin. it wants to BE taylor. to BE the pretty and powerful human its inside. just hearing her introduce herself as taylor reminded me of that, but probably mostly from tumblr her original book didn't stick with me much as a kid. ~~~ rachel, paralyzed (buried fear, trapped, powerless), could get trapped in morph, definitely losing tobias (she was there SO tobias would not be lost, so they could find him quickly and save him) meanwhile tobias is put in a suffocating, clausterphobic box. visser3 had been bragging about knowing andalite fears last book, looks like the plan is still to use this primarl terror to soften him up ~~~ "Was he just lucky? Or was he really smarter than we were?" jesus christ no visser 3 is an idiot the only reason you haven't soundly defeated him is he has MUCH smarter underlings working to contain the damage he does ~~~ " He searched the room. " "“I don’t understand,” one of them said breathlessly. “It is impossible for it not to be working. Impossible.” He ran toward me. Stood on tiptoes to peer at me in my cube. I was still a hawk. I had not demorphed. For the very excellent reason that I was not morphed to begin with. " "He uttered a single command. “No, Visser, no! You don’t understand. This must be some sort of Andalite trick. It is inconceivable that the ray should not work.” The other one held up a paper brick of calculations and shook it desperately. “Look through our work, Visser. You will see that it is perfect. That the work is valuable. That we are valuable.” “It’s not my fault,” a wild-eyed, weeping Dr. Sinegert cried. “It’s him! He … he’s a saboteur! A traitor!” Visser Three stared hard at me with his main eyes. I stared back. Did he suspect? Did he guess that this game was rigged? he said, disgusted. He walked leisurely toward the door. Hork-Bajir grabbed the scientists. The struggle was brief. A hatch opened in the floor. A grate I had not noticed. From it issued the snorts and sloshings of hungry Taxxons. “Nooo!” " and THIS Is why i say the visser is an idiot. the way he leads makes people attack each other, and the slightest disappointment makes him get rid of previously trusted adn useful minions. the minds that could have won them this war, TODAY are now literal worm food. just because of a bad demo. visser 3 is an idiot. (and reminds me of a certain other idiot running around making shit harder on everyone right now) "The sub-visser looked shaken. Maybe she guessed that she had just glimpsed her own future. But I watched her work to recover her strength. Her ruthlessness. Eyes that had held faint traces of pity hardened again" and isn't that just how it is we see time and time again that only a FEW yeerks are 'evil' everyone else is just doing their best to live in a system that kills anyone with a conscious. the ones who thrive are the ones best able to ignore the little voice in the back of their heads. it takes insanely brave people like the yeerk peace movement to decide to not move as the system demands. to the let the pain start building up. facism is primarily enabled by a lot of people doing tiny little things to prevent being hurt not by evil. ~~~~ "She looked at me intently for a moment more, as if she found my statement difficult to grasp. The resemblance to Rachel was disturbing. Same proud stance. Same natural, glowing beauty. But I knew the similarity was only skin-deep. Inside, she and Rachel were like night and day. Or at least night and twilight." it is so wild that they decided to have tobias tortured by someone so similar to his girlfriend in the same book where he wondered if she would deliberately trap him in morph for her own ends. ~~~ "I had to look strong. Seem unaffected. Tough. Unbreakable. But I could do nothing but lie there. Lie there and breathe. Breathe." tobias wants to desperately to not emote , it seems so dangerous to emote to him god i get that. ~~~ "I tried to answer. To appear in control, unaltered. But I still couldn’t move. Or summon the strength to conceal the soft, pathetic whimpers I’d never known my hawk voice could make. “Interesting,” mused the sub-visser, assessing my state. “This may be easier than I anticipated. Don’t give in too quickly, though. I wouldn’t want Visser Three to think anyone could do this job. Ready? One more time? Shall we?” She hit the red circle again. I screamed. Screamed and screamed. My wings trembled, uncontrollable. My beak jerked wildly. Talons clutched at nothing. My bowels failed and I fouled myself. Indescribable pain. Staggering pain. Pain that ate into me, chewed at my guts, twisted every nerve ending. Had to make it stop. Had to make it stop! Tell her! Tell her! Make it stop, tell her, tell her, tell her! Me, the human me, the boy inside kept screaming tell her, tell her! But the hawk … the hawk suffered dumb, helpless. The hawk had no way out. The me that was a bird, the body, the physical me didn’t know that there was a cause for the pain" barely made an impression on me as a kid (to be fair i was reading adult horror books too at the same time, like stephen king) but man yeah this is not kid shit ~~~ i remember now... its not that pain that almost break tobias. the hawk can handle pain. i thiink she starts making his brain feel different things. pleasure? love? the hawk doesn't know what to do with it... lets see how right i am ~~~ "I stood there at the foot of the stairs, unable to move. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Couldn’t show him that. I told myself, No big deal, Tobias. Just some dumb drawing. No big deal" he's lost in memories. ~~~ "I dragged myself upstairs to my room. Walked across to the window. I could cry up here where no one would see. Stupid to cry. " and we wonder why he hid eating mice for so long ~~~ "The young woman who said she was family. Who said she would give me a home. Care about me, even. Aria. In truth, nothing but a mask - a morph - for Visser Three. Visser Three, plotting my death. I was a dupe. Again. -" maybe he's spiral after all. he talks about masks a lot. and lies. ~~~ "The hawk in me tightened its hold. The human in me screamed. And screamed again. I don’t want to do this. A life extinguished in an instant. Agony. Death. So that I could survive. I looked down. There were no talons there. No. Only human fingers. Blood-covered fingers. Strangled by my human hands! " yeah okay. maybe spiral. he's been dissociating into the hawk this whole time to avoid thinking about or feeling about the things he needs to do to live, to fight the war he is not what he is and he is so afraid of that "How can you carry such a weight? All the pain I had inflicted. Seemingly inevitable. Perhaps avoidable. Strikes made by me. A hawk. A warrior. A ruthless kid. " ~~~ "“I’m a fool!” she raged suddenly, inexplicably. “Of course the pain ray can’t break you! You’re using your morph as a shield. Any sentient creature would long since have wilted from this much pain. Whatever ugly bird you are now isn’t sentient. It can’t be! You would never have lasted …”" "“It’s all about contrast, don’t you think?” Taylor asked. “That’s the way life is, eh? You don’t know pain unless you know pleasure. You don’t know what it is to be strong unless you’ve been weak, isn’t that right, Andalite?”" "“Pleasure, Andalite. Fun, isn’t it? Remembering happy days back on your filthy planet? Are you recalling happy times, running across the grass? Of course, you are. Up and down, Andalite. Pain and pleasure. I will take you into madness, Andalite.” " yeah i remembered right. ~~~ "“Ticktock, ticktock, the Andalite will be a bird forever, ticktock.” She was close by. I couldn’t see her, my eyes, red with my own blood, the veins broken. “Time’s almost up, Andalite. You’ll never run free again. Never use that fantastic tail of yours. You’ll die, so soon. How long does a hawk live?” Rachel? No, no, the sub-visser. I want you with me, to be part of me, my life, not to die a bird, not to die for nothing. Rachel? " what a fucked up thing, to deliberately make this parallel, to take this pressure and fear he has in his relationship and externailze it into literal torture tiny me missed all this entirely ~~ "Pain. Pleasure. Pain. Who was I? Where? I lay on my back in the cube, staring into an interrogation light. The sun. I watched it burn and shimmer. Intense and warming. ARE YOU HAPPY, TOBIAS? I remembered the Ellimist. The voice that came from everywhere and nowhere" and more than any of them, tobias has seen past the thing crack of reality. spiral. ~~~ "I felt the pleasure ray shutting down. I realized I was in the cube. “Your time is up. Do you understand that? You can never escape your morph. You will be a bird till you die.” Who said that? Rachel? Taylor, the sub-visser? Me?" ~~~ "“Your childish loyalty is amusing. But you’ll learn, Andalite.” She spoke the words bitterly and with emphasis. “You’ll learn that it’s foolish to protect your friends. Friends always betray you.”" its his own fear, also externalized. WOULD rachel trap him in morph, for her own selfish ends? ~~ "“Not like me!” she yelled, flying into a sudden rage. “I’m a voluntary, do you not know that? This girl, this human, chose this life, chose to invite me in to take control! Why? Why? Because she’d seen humans as they truly were. She chose us over her own people. Why? Because humans are weak and petty and stupid and we will rule them all, we will make them ours, all of them!” thats right. thats right. ~~~ "“Weak? Foolish? When I … when she walked down the hall at school, there wasn’t a boy who didn’t dream she was his.” She came right up to my cube. Her breath steamed the glass. “Not a girl who didn’t wish she were her. She was homecoming queen. Tennis champion. Student-body president. She was the princess, and the school was her court.” What was going on? I’d never heard a Yeerk talk this way. This was Taylor I was hearing. At least as much as the Yeerk inside her. " god the parallels here. boy and bird girl and yeerk both of them are two things and neither of them and both of them and can't keep it straight. ~~~ ```“Terrible,” she said. “Horrible. The pain. You can’t … well, yes, maybe you can imagine. We lost our left arm. Her right leg. And my face … some came to see me in the hospital, some friends. Never again, after that. Word went around. She’s a monster. She’s hideous. One day I was queen. The next day, nothing.” I chanced. “They held out friendship. Hope, in her darkest hour, they made me believe that her life wasn’t over. That I had a future. Then came the offer, if I … she … would enter their center circle - take advantage of everything they had to give me - they would repair her body. They had their own members’ hospital, they said. Incredibly advanced technology. I would be whole again. I would be what I once had been!”``` i remembered right. maybe its worm i get confused with. or maybe they do have two very similar characters. i think it was... alaxandria? maybe? in worm? who was bedridden and took the deal. ~~~ ```She’s crazy, I realized. She’s insane. The Yeerk. The girl. The line between them all confused. Hawk. Boy. Yeerk. Girl. ``` the book makes it clear. and he is deliberately saying he's crazy , too, by drawing the parallel. spiral. ~~~ ```“I took the deal.” Taylor laughed dryly. “Two Controllers helped me, in my wheelchair, I waited down in the pool, not knowing what host, I’d only ever been Hork-Bajir before. I allowed myself to be infested, she opened herself to me, willingly. Until that moment, until I was lying on my stomach, my head held over the surface of the pool, she hadn’t known, of course, how could she? How could I?” ``` everything so jumbled up. i love it. ~~~ ``` I asked again. “I am a sub-visser of the Yeerk Empire.” She hung her head. For a long time she said nothing. Looked at nothing. Then, at last, she raised her face to me and smiled. “Then join me in my madness, Andalite,” she said and sent my body and mind reeling into hell.``` ~~~ the fact that even cassie was willing to sacrifice the doomed bald eagle i mean, obviously you should. its dying anyways. but. so sad. "“Hear me, Andalite,” Taylor said to me. “You’ve caused me to lose the visser’s trust. You may well have destroyed me. And now, I will make you pay. Oh, yes. I’ve given you pain. I’ve given you pleasure. You’ve experienced them in succession. But never both at once. I will tear your mind apart!”" ~~~ "Marco shoved Taylor rudely aside. He had no way of knowing who she was. What she was. " ~~~ "“I don’t know what you are!” the sub-visser yelled to make herself heard over the shrieks of protestation from the involuntary controllers caged at the Yeerk pool’s edge, and the less horrific acoustic wash of the dome. “I don’t know what power you possess, that you can morph beyond the two-hour limit.” An inhuman hatred coated her words. “But I know that I don’t care. You will die! Die! Die!”" ~~~ rachel saving tobias from "looks like rachel and saying fucked up shit" and just after we got done with the two rachels book "For a split second, time froze. And I saw Rachel and Taylor face-to-face. One strong. Her morph a crazy manifestation of an inner strength and bravery. One weak. This girl for whom appearance had been everything, honor nothing. This poor girl whose weakness had made her easy prey for the Yeerks. And I felt pity. Pity for my torturer. " i feel like i KNOW tobias morphs taylor at some point, but i guess not this book. or maybe it was some other pretty girl who was an enemy. ~~~ "“Bad,” she said. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Real bad. I came close to, you know. Awfully close. I was so … I mean, I didn’t …” I took a couple of shaky breaths. “I lost myself. Didn’t know who I was. Not sure I do now.” “Tobias,” she said quietly, “I know who you are.”" that has always been the problem hasn't it? rachel says she knows who he is. she papers over his doubts and fears. and it doesn't HELP him. he's not the human she thinks he is. not even if you ignore him being a hawk nothlith. he was an andalite, sort of, all along. an alien. he says it himself right after: "Who am I? What am I? A bird. A boy. Something not quite human. Something more than human. "