#2: The Visitor

I really liked this book as a kid because Rachel was my favorite character and cats are my favorite animal. So Rachel turning into a cat = AWESOME! But while we're on the subject of kitties, here's something that always bugged me: what happened to Dude? Tobias's cat is acquired first and never mentioned again, even though a cat figures prominently in a mission which takes place almost immediately after he's trapped as a hawk, never to return to his abusive, alchoholic uncle's home. You'd think he'd see Fluffer McKitty and wonder what's going to happen to Dude without him. It's not like his uncle will be any less neglectful of the cat than he was of his own human nephew. That poor cat is probably going to starve to death.

In my headcanon, Tobias asks Rachel to take care of Dude, and she takes him home as a stray that she randomly found and tells her sisters, "I think we should call him Dude," and his sisters are like, "That's a stupid name! We should call him Gavin Xavier Pettingsworth." And Tobias is like, [Seriously?] but at least he's warm and safe and that's all that really matters. Or even better: Tobias tries to get Rachel to take Dude, but her mom's allergic to animals (which would explain why a house full of little girls has no pets whatsoever), and then Marco of all people volunteers to take him, because he thinks it'll cheer his dad up. (Not that he tells Tobias that.) And it does, because animals are excellent anti-depressants, and his dad re-names the cat Schrodinger because that's something he's wanted to do since grad school, and Marco is slightly less of an asshole to Tobias after that.

But enough about Dude. We open this book on Dude's former owner, Tobias, giving the rest of the Animorphs a flying lesson. They are enjoying it very much, until a couple of drunken rednecks start randomly shooting at them. This is the first of many books that open with Captain Planet-style mini-missions where the kids foil animal abuse. It is random and kind of dumb and best forgotten. I would eventually start skimming the first few chapters of every new book, knowing that they usually consisted of recaps for noobs and silly stuff like this. Anyway, Rachel drops the guy's rifle in the ocean and Marco drops the other guy's beer can in the garbage, and they demorph in an abandoned church tower by the ocean that we never see again, but really should, because it's an awesome location. If this was set today instead of 1996, the church would probably already have been renovated by hipsters and turned into a hookah bar.

Once they're all human again, Rachel heads off to her weekly gymnastics class. It's at the YMCA, which is across the street from the mall, so it must be pretty close to the abandoned construction site where they got their powers - if not literally next door. This construction site sounds like it's in a very convenient central location. Kind of amazing that it's been left vacant all this time. Anyway, they're walking past the site (not through it, because already it contains too many sad memories), and Jake mentions that they closed the entrance to the Yeerk pool in their middle school. Rachel suggests following Tom the next time his Yeerk needs to go back down there, but...

"No. We leave Tom out of it," Jake said firmly. "If we call attention to him in any way, the Yeerks may decide he's trouble for them. They may decide to kill him."

Marco gave me a sour look. "This is what you want to keep doing? Risking our lives and the lives of everyone we know? For what?"

"For freedom," Cassie said simply.

There's the Cassie I remember! Last book, I was a bit disappointed that she seemed to be primarily motivated by turning into animals, to the point where she seemed to forget that there was an alien invasion going on. Maybe being kidnapped by Racist Yeerk Cop and almost getting infested taught her something. To bring it back around to character motivation, I mentioned in the last post that all three boys are motivated most strongly by family. Cassie's motivation, and her viewpoint in general, tends to be broader and more abstract. She doesn't need a personal stake in this fight. She's committed to abstract moral values - to the point of distraction from real things happening right in front of her. Hmmm... on the other hand, maybe her characterization in the last book was fair.

Anyway, their only lead now is Assistant Principal Chapman. Jake knows that Rachel is (or was) friends with his daughter, Melissa. He doesn't actively suggest that she use her to get to her dad, but he does strongly imply it, waiting for Rachel to fill in the blanks. Rachel is deeply uncomfortable with this idea, but understands that the fight comes first and sometimes you have to do immoral things for the greater good. The line of how far a character is willing to go ethically to fight the Yeerks will be pushed further and further throughout the series, especially by Rachel. For now, it extends only to having ulterior motives for reaching out to an old friend.

So when she gets to her gymnastics class, she tries to engage Melissa in conversation. Melissa acts all weird and stand-offish, and blows Rachel off. That's when Rachel starts to suspect that Melissa herself might be a Controller. This makes Rachel so depressed she doesn't even want to go shopping (!!!), so instead of going to the mall and calling her mom when she's ready to be picked up, she decides to walk home. "Alone. With the sky growing dark as rain clouds moved in." And here's where things get weird.

In the last book, Rachel was deeply offended by Jake's suggestion that the boys walk Rachel and Cassie home for their own protection. Now she's walking home alone and she berates herself four different times for making such a stupid decision. This might be K.A. making sure that young readers know not to imitate the characters (the first book also emphasized how dangerous it was for a kid to cut through the abandoned construction site), but it also subtly hints at things to come. Rachel will soon earn a reputation among the group for fearlessness. But when she narrates, she explains that she's just as scared as anyone else: she just puts on a brave face and does what needs to be done. Her outburst at Jake early in the last book might have been the first example of her putting on that brave face. So that's the positive part of this scene.

A car pulls up just ahead of her. An older guy steps out of the car and says, "Hey, baby. Want to go for a little ride?" Now, already we're seeing that this is way more than just simple street harrassment. The guy parked his car and stepped out of it. He is serious about raping this girl.

I shook my head and clutched my gym bag close. What an idiot I was to be so careless!

"Now, don't be stuck-up, sweet thing," he said. "I think you'd better get in the car."

The way he said it didn't sound like an invitation. It sounded like an order. Now I was really afraid.

I clutched my gym bag close as I passed him.

"Don't ignore me," he hissed.

He reached for me and missed. I walked faster.

He was behind me.

I broke into a run.

He ran after me.

"Hey. Hey, there! Come back here."

I had been stupid going out alone. But fortunately, unlike most people, I wasn't helpless.

Rachel morphs into an elephant - just a little, just enough to terrify him. And it works! He runs away screaming, jumps into his car through the window like a Duke brother, and burns rubber getting the hell out of there. Unfortunately, Rachel shredded her shoes during the morph, and it's starting to rain. Luckily, someone Rachel knows pulls up to offer her a ride - Chapman!

She refuses his offer, worried that he saw her morph, but he insists. As he's driving her home, he and Melissa ask her about the rapist. Rachel makes up a story about him dropping something by the side of the road, then running away so he wouldn't get wet in the rain. It's a very tense scene, but apparently Chapman didn't see her morph because nothing ever really comes of it.

When Rachel gets home, we see our first glimpse of her family life: her parents are divorced and her mother, a lawyer, does as much work at home as she can so she can be there for her three daughters. It strikes me that all the Animorphs (except Tobias) have really good relationships with their parents. You don't really see any door-slamming or shouts of "YOU'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND!" Even Marco doesn't irrationally hate his father for falling apart after his mom died. I was way more emotionally unstable when I was the Animorphs' age, prone to sulking and exploding at my family for no reason at all, and that was without a part-time job as Savior of Humanity. Maybe I was a particularly awful teenager, or maybe the characters are so mature because acting like actual 13-year-olds would ruin their likeability. Anyway, we find out that Rachel has two younger sisters, Jordan and Sara, and an overworked single mom who's doing the best she can.

Rachel invites the gang to her house to "listen to a new CD." She tells them most of what happened, leaving out the ride home she got from Chapman, and Marco immediately goes ballistic:

"Oh, that was dumb! Dumb! DUMB!" Marco said. "What if that guy is a Controller?"

"He wasn't a Controller," I said scornfully. "Why would the Yeerks want to make a Controller out of a punk? They want people in positions of power."

"We don't know that for sure," Jake said. "Tom isn't in a position of power."

"And how about people driving by in their cars, or looking out of the windows of their homes?" Marco asked. "And what if he runs and tells someone about this girl who suddenly sprouted a trunk and tusks?"

"No one is going to believe a lowlife like that," I said.

"His friends won't believe him," Marco said poisonously, "but a Controller would believe him. A Controller would know what it meant."

It makes me uncomfortable to watch Rachel berate herself again and again for walking home alone, and then watch her friends berate her for doing what she had to do to protect herself. The simple act of walking home should not be a dangerous thing for a teenage girl to do, and I kind of wish at least one of the characters had pointed this out. Even though she wasn't actually raped, there's a strong air of victim-blaming about these two chapters. Rachel's narration seems to imply that getting kidnapped and raped would have been her fault for walking home alone. Her friends seem to imply that she should have allowed it to happen rather than reveal her powers to someone who, realistically speaking, almost certainly wasn't a Controller.

There's also the way in which the attempted rape occurred. First of all, most rapes don't involve strange men jumping out of bushes (or cars) to attack random girls as they walk down the street minding their own business. The typical rape is more like, "My friend Marco and I were hanging out in my room, and he started jokingly flirting with me like he does, and I was joke-flirting back, but then it got more serious, and I told him to back off, but he didn't. I tried to tell Jake, but Marco's his best friend and he started asking all these questions like, 'Well, why were you guys alone in your room?' and 'You guys are always sort of flirting with each other. Of course he'd think you wanted it.' He said he's known Marco for a long time and he knows he'd never do something like that. Cassie took Jake's side. Tobias understands, but he told me I can't leave the Animorphs over it because the fight is too important. And I can't demand that Marco leave because he's such a good strategist, and Jake's best friend besides. So I keep going on missions with them, even though being around Marco terrifies me - even more than the Yeerks. And he keeps flirting with me, and every time he does, it throws me off-guard because it reminds me of what happened."

On the other hand, this scene depicts as black-and-white an attempted rape as you can possibly get. Rachel is walking down the street. The attempted rapist - a stranger who is bigger and stronger than her - is driving. He pulls his car over and gets out. When she runs away, he runs after her. The whole thing is set up so that there could be no possible doubt or misunderstanding: this is a bad man who is trying to rape an innocent girl. Rachel's first reaction is to run away, avoiding using her powers to scare him off until she has no other choice. And yet, somehow it's still Rachel's fault. 12-year-old me, meet rape culture.

Moving on. The kids agree that using Melissa to get to her father isn't going to work. Rachel is tremendously relieved, and suggests morphing something small to sneak into Chapman's house and spy on him. They're all grossed out by the idea of morphing bugs, because they may be humanity's last hope, but they're still kids. Rachel's eyes wander to a picture of her and Melissa at Melissa's birthday party a few years back. In the picture, they are playing with the present Melissa's dad gave her: a kitten.

And so the Animorphs find themselves lurking creepily outside Chapman's house at night. Through a stroke of luck, the cat - Fluffer McKitty - happens to already be outside, and Tobias finds him by Rachel's description. And Marco acts like an asshole to Tobias again.

[There are rats everywhere,] Tobias said. [Rats and mice and all kinds of plump, juicy...] He fell silent, embarrassed.

"Get a grip, Tobias," Marco said. "Don't start eating rats, all right? I don't know if I can have someone who eats rats for a friend."

Sometimes Marco is funny. Sometimes he goes too far. This was one of those times. "Shut up, Marco," I growled.

"I ate a live spider," Jake pointed out. "Does that mean you and I can't be friends?" From his tone of voice I could tell he was angry, too.

None of us knew what Tobias was going through.

None of us had ever been in morph for more than two hours. Tobias had been a hawk for more than a week.

Marco realized he'd been a jerk. "Well, yeah, I guess you're right," he muttered. "Besides, I've been known to eat eggplant. So I guess I can't criticize."

That was an apology, or as close as Marco could get to an actual apology.

Hey, he's growing! Sort of. Anyway, Rachel and Cassie go find Fluffer McKitty so Rachel can acquire him. Everything goes according to plan. Rachel just scoops up the sweet little kitty and snuggles him and acquires his DNA, and enters Chapman's house disguised as a cat. Just kidding! This is Animorphs, so attempting to touch a housecat becomes an hours-long ordeal resulting in injury and emotional trauma. Fluffer is a tomcat in full-on prowler mode. When Rachel tries to pet him, he hisses, scratches her, and runs up a tree. So Rachel asks Tobias to find her a mouse to morph, so she can act as bait to lure him down. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.

Tobias brings her a shrew instead of a mouse, and Marco makes a sexist joke and seriously, fuck him. Fuck this guy. He doesn't want to be an Animorph? Give him what he wants. Anyway. Rachel morphs the shrew and its prey instinct is so strong, she freaks out and starts running all over the yard. She smells a dead body with maggots and her shrew mind is overwhelmed by the desire to eat it. Finally, Tobias scoops her up in his talons, reminds her of school to help her regain control over the shrew's instincts, and sets her gently back down on the grass near the rest of the group.

Fluffer leaps at Rachel, and Jake, Cassie, and Marco all have to work together to grab him and cram him in the cat carrier they brought. All of them end up with scratches. I can speak from personal experience that this is very realistic. Rachel morphs back into human form, completely disgusted and swearing never to morph a shrew again. Fluffer has already fallen asleep in the cat carrier. I can speak from personal experience that this is not realistic at all. Maybe if like fifteen minutes had gone by, but that would have to be fifteen minutes of near-endless yowling. Anyway, Rachel acquires Fluffer, who even purrs as she does it. Exhausted and bleeding, the kids decide to go home and do the actual spying another night.

That night, Rachel has her first-ever PTSD nightmare. They grow up so fast. Her sister Jordan hears her screaming and shakes her awake, and Rachel runs to the bathroom to vomit. Jordan is concerned, but Rachel lies and says she can't remember what the nightmare was about.

She looked at me solemnly. "I know I'm just your little sister by two years, but you would tell me if something bad was happening to you, right? I mean, I wouldn't tell Mom or anyone. You could trust me."

I smiled and drew her into a hug. "I know I can trust you. If anything bad was going on, I'd tell you." It was a lie, of course, and the lie made me feel even worse. I trusted Jordan. I knew in my heart that she was not a Controller.

Of course, that's just what Jake had said about Tom.

I hugged my sister a little closer. I hated the way suspicion had crept into every part of my mind. I hated the way I wasn't sure, not really, totally sure, that I could trust her.

Three nights later, they're back at Chapman's house. Rachel morphs Fluffer and enters the house through the kitty door. Immediately, she notices the Chapmans' odd behavior. Assistant Principal Chapman is sitting in the living room doing nothing. "No TV. No music. He wasn't reading a book or a newspaper. Just sitting." His wife is in the kitchen, chopping vegetables without listening to the radio or humming or talking to herself. Basically, they aren't acting like humans act.

I thought I remembered the series emphasizing that the Yeerk mimics its host so perfectly, you'd never know who was a Controller and who wasn't. But the Yeerks we've seen so far seem to do a pretty poor job of hiding their identity. Tom suddenly stops caring about basketball; the Chapmans suddenly stop caring about their daughter. People around them notice the change. They probably don't jump straight to, "there must be an alien in his head," but they notice. Maybe I misremembered.

"Chapman" walks down to the basement, and Rachel follows him down there. Turns out he's got a secret, locked door in the basement, and behind that is another door - "like the door to a bank vault" - with a high-tech fingerprint-reading thingy. Soon enough, a hologram of Visser Three pops on. This was before we found out that there were sub-Vissers. I know Chapman's Yeerk is pretty powerful, but it still seems kind of weird that he's reporting directly to the guy in charge of the entire Earth invasion. Visser Three really needs to delegate.

Anyway, "Chapman" introduces himself as "Innis 226 of the Sulp Niaar pool" and says what one assumes to be the Yeerk equivalent of "as-salamu alaykum": "May the Kandrona shine and strengthen you." So we get a few, intriguing glimpses of Yeerk culture here. Visser Three yells at Innis for not finding the Andalite bandits yet. (It's been, like, two weeks.) Then he notices the cat and tells Innis to kill it because it might be an Andalite. Innis argues that killing the cat might blow his cover. Visser Three briefly seems to consider eating him, but grudgingly agrees. Then he morphs into some kind of monster that can suck Yeerks out of their hosts heads and threatens to do that to Innis if he doesn't get him the Andalite bandits.

Back up the stairs, a visibly shaken Innis talks quietly with the unnamed Yeerk infesting Mrs. Chapman. They reveal that they hate Visser Three and think he's doing a horrible job of running the invasion, but they can't do anything or he'll eat them. See, this is where middle management comes in handy. I'm imagining a sub-Visser showing up on the hologram and being like, "Yeeaah, so the bosses really want those Andalite bandits? They've reeaally been breathing down my neck about it? You know how it is. So if you could just catch the bandits, that'd be greeaat. I know you can do it - you're a real team player. We'll show Visser Three that you're sub-Visser material. Also, just a reminder: we're putting covers on our TPS reports now? So yeah, if you could get on that..."

Melissa interrupts her parents to ask for some help with her math homework and they blow her off. She goes back up to her room and collapses on her bed in tears. Tobias warns Rachel that the real Fluffer is heading home and she should get out of there soon, but Rachel feels awful for Melissa, so she jumps up on the bed and cuddles with her, purring to try to make her feel better. Tobias warns her that Jake's going nuts, wanting her to get out of that house, but Rachel stays until Melissa falls asleep.

And in this scene, Rachel finds her long-term motivation to fight the Yeerks:

Next time Marco asked why we were fighting the Yeerks, I knew I would have a whole new answer. Because they destroy the love of parents for their daughter. Because they made Melissa Chapman cry in her bed with no one to comfort her but a cat.

It was a small answer, I guess. I mean, it wasn't some high-sounding answer about the entire human race. It was just about this one girl. My friend. Whose heart was broken because her parents were no longer really her parents.

Rachel's very protective of her friends. It probably comes from being the oldest child. Regardless, she's protective of Tobias, she's protective of Melissa, and now we see that her main motivation for being in this fight is her friends. She's in it for them.

So Rachel gets back outside and demorphs, and her friends are kind of pissed at her (again), but she doesn't care, and she tells them most of what happened (again), leaving out the part where Visser Three suspected her of being an Andalite and told Chapman to kill her.

At their next meeting, Rachel announces that she wants to go back in as Fluffer and do some more spying. And the other Animorphs are sort of okay with this because she never told them about the whole death threat thing. Tobias knows Rachel's real motivation is to help Melissa, and he tells her so privately. He sends her all kinds of private thought-speak messages in this book, and it's very, very cute.

When the kids show up again at Chapman's house that night (I think), Jake is missing - supposedly grounded for something. Hmm. Rachel morphs back into Fluffer, and Cassie pets her on the back while smiling mysteriously. Hmmm... Rachel follows Chapman down to the secret basement room again, and almost immediately Jake reveals that he is a flea on her back. Clever! He can't see or hear and basically has no idea what's going on except that Rachel is warm and full of delicious blood, but he can theoretically be of help if something bad happens.

Which it does. Obviously.

Rachel hides under Chapman's desk, but he kicks her, revealing her position. This confirms that the cat is an Andalite, and Visser Three orders Innis to take Rachel to "the nearest landing site," where he will interrogate her. The nearest landing site is apparently the abandoned construction site - the same one that's across a busy highway from the mall and the Y. I wouldn't think that was the best place to land spaceships on a regular basis, but I guess that's why I'm not a Visser.

Anyway, he traps Rachel in a cage and then Visser Three tells him to also bring Melissa so she can be infested. That's when Chapman - the real Chapman - starts fighting back against Innis 226. There's a lot of twitching and jerking and flopping around on the floor, but eventually Innis regains control of his host. However, the rebellion has convinced him that maybe it wouldn't be such a hot idea to piss off his host by infesting his daughter. He carries Rachel to the car, completely ignoring Melissa, who's freaking out about where he's taking her cat. Thankfully, Tobias chases the real Fluffer into Melissa's arms. Innis makes up some story about a stray cat getting into the house, and all is well except that Rachel's in a cage on her way to Visser Three and Melissa is once again emotionally destroyed by her parents' coldness toward her.

They get to the construction site, and a bunch of Bug fighters and Visser Three's Blade ship all land, and Rachel is prepared to die rather than give up her friends. Chapman wants to speak directly to Visser Three, so Innis lets him take over for a few moments. He instantly falls on the ground, having not used his own muscles for so long. Once he remembers how to talk, he reveals that he agreed to become a host only on the condition that Melissa be left alone. He threatens to fight as hard as he can if the Yeerks infest his daughter. Innis takes control again and tells Visser Three that he's telling the truth. Visser Three agrees to leave it be for now, happily distracted by his shiny new Andalite.

He takes Rachel and Jake aboard the Blade ship. But what's that? Marco and Cassie have started an earthmover, and they're plowing the ship! For some reason, this throws Visser Three and all his Hork-Bajir and Taxxon guards into total disarray. Jake takes advantage of the chaos to hop out of the cage, demorph, and morph into a tiger. Rachel demorphs just enough to give her the manual dexterity necessary to open her cage, then morphs back into Fluffer and runs as fast as she can.

But Visser Three has turned into yet another one of his horrible monster morphs - some kind of stone golem thing - and is chasing Rachel across the construction site. He picks Rachel up and is about to kill her, when Tobias swoops in and carrier her to safety in his talons. There's a loud BOOM: the earthmover crashed into a Bug fighter, making it explode for some reason. I'm suddenly reminded of that scene in Last Action Hero where Arnold Schwartzenegger shoots at a car and is amazed when it doesn't blow up. Because in action movies, all you have to do is nudge a vehicle and it instantly erupts in flames. Anyway, Rachel demorphs in a nearby tree, and watches the chaos from there. Tobias assures her that everyone got out okay. Presumably, the newspaper prints another article about teenagers setting off fireworks. Those damn teenagers. Every single week with those fireworks.

There's a one-chapter denouement just like in the last book, because now that the climactic battle's over with, who the hell cares what happens next? In the locker room just before their next gymnastics class, we see that Rachel has slipped a computer-printed note into Melissa's locker that says, "Melissa, your father loves you more than you will ever know. And more than he will ever show you. Signed, someone who knows."

Somehow, this makes her feel better. If I were Melissa, I'd be wondering:
1. Then why doesn't he show it?
2. But my mom doesn't love me?
3. Who in my gymnastics class knows this, and how?
4. Why should I believe them?

Whatever. It's a happy ending, sort of. The important thing is, there were kitties. And in the end, isn't that all that really matters?

Commentary:
In terms of quality, this book was much more consistent than the first. The dialogue is more relaxed, Rachel and Tobias's interactions are more subtle and realistic, and Jake expresses personality traits other than befuddlement. He actually seems like a pretty fun guy to be around! Marco continues his pattern of acting like an asshole (especially to Tobias) in the first half of the book before becoming more likeable in the second. You can almost hear K.A. realizing, "Okay, he's sarcastic, but I'm going too far, let's scale it back a little."

Even though this book doesn't really contribute to the arc of the series, I feel like tonally, it's a good choice for a second book. In the first book, K.A. introduced a lot: five main characters, four alien species, a secret alien invasion, the major villain, two human-Controllers that the main characters know personally, everything about morphing (the technology, how it feels, basic ground rules), and it all culminated in a battle at the Yeerk pool. It's a good idea to take a breather and consider what this massive invasion means for regular, everyday people on a day-to-day basis. I also like that the theme of this book is subtly mirrored in two different stories. Melissa's parents gave up their freedom for her, but can never tell her the truth, and meanwhile she thinks they don't love her. Rachel spends virtually all her free time fighting the Yeerks, but can never tell her family the truth, and meanwhile the silence opens up a rift between her and her little sister.

Melissa's story really breaks my heart. I really wish we'd seen more of her later on in the series. It would have been awesome if Melissa had caught Rachel morphing and confronted her, and found out what was really going on. Then, because in my headcanon the Animorphs took the blue box and hid it (because seriously, what else could have happened to it that would make sense), they'd give her morphing powers that she could use to spy on her dad and secretly relay information to Rachel every week at gymnastics class. She wouldn't be a full Animorph - going on missions would be way too risky with such a high-ranking Controller in her house - but she's in a perfect position to spy, and she could feel like she's doing something productive to help her parents.

...

There's a lot going on in my headcanon.

Anyway, since this is Rachel's first book, it might be a good time to talk about Rachel and Cassie and femininity and why the hell they're best friends when they apparently have nothing in common. There are two main female characters in this series, and each conforms to, and deviates from, traditional gender roles in different ways. Rachel conforms to female gender roles in her outward appearance: by being beautiful and loving fashion. But she deviates from it in her personality, which is bold, brash, and confrontational. Rachel was part of a trend in mid-'90s entertainment of butt-kicking women who nonetheless looked like models. Primary examples include Xena, to whom Rachel will frequently be compared, Sailor Moon, and Buffy. The Spice Girls popularized the term "girl power," which came to refer to a type of feminist empowerment that did not require you to stop wearing makeup or pretty clothes, and that kind of sums up the spirit of the time.

This all came out of third-wave feminism and its emphasis on personal choice: if a woman wanted to look and act in a stereotypically feminine way, that choice was just as legitimate as acting in a stereotypically masculine way, and her lipstick did not "hurt the movement." Third-wave feminism also suggested that the way second-wave feminists looked down on stereotypically feminine activities such as clothes-shopping, cooking, caring for children, and putting on makeup might actually stem from internalized sexism. (After all, is it really all that enlightened to value masculine activities while devaluing feminine activities?) It was a radical and subversive idea: that a woman who loved shopping and looked like a supermodel could also be the best fighter around.

It felt pretty liberating at the time: you can be anything you want! You can be a badass fighter and a girly-girl! Unfortunately, the freedom to be anything quickly devolved into an obligation to be everything. Much like how women are now expected to have a high-powered career and a perfect family (Rachel's mom knows what I'm talking about!), every female character now has to be a supermodel and a genius and a hyper-competent fighter, even if, realistically, ain't nobody got time for that. You can't put a tomboyish fighter in your action-oriented fiction, because that would suggest that fighting is inherently masculine and if a woman is good at fighting, she must be masculine in other ways too. And you can't have a female character who isn't a badass, because then people will complain that there were no Strong Female Characters. So every female character ends up having to be absolutely everything at once.

Which brings me to Rachel. She definitely feels the pressure to put on a brave face. Maybe her mom taught her that. Does she also feel pressure to conform to traditional gender roles? She downplays this in her narration, saying that her good looks are just genetic luck and she just likes nice clothes. But a woman's good looks are more than just her natural appearance: much of what our culture considers beautiful in a woman is just... paint. Even if Rachel has a perfectly symmetrical face, it's unlikely that she happens to also have perfect complexion (as she's going through puberty, no less!) and hair that naturally falls perfectly into place and eyebrows that never need to be plucked or shaped. Looking beautiful takes work. A natural beauty might look plain without makeup; a girl with average features might look stunning with it. Very few women are effortlessly stunning in the way people describe Rachel.

It also seems too coincidental that Rachel just happened to stumble into the most socially-acceptable outlets for her gender-deviant aggressive streak (gymnastics, the most feminine sport this side of figure skating, and shopping). I think that, regardless of what she says in her narration, she cares a lot about how she appears to other people. And she probably isn't immune to social pressure.

Cassie is the opposite of this: she maintains a casual, tomboyish appearance, but on the inside acts much like women are expected to act: kind, nurturing, largely nonviolent. In this way, K.A. presents two different ways of being female, and neither is implied to be better or worse than the other. But it does create a problem: how did two girls who are so different get to be best friends? Even Rachel admits in this book that it looks weird, but she doesn't provide any explanation.

This is where I remind myself that the Animorphs are in middle school. Very few girls are into fashion when they're in elementary school. It's the kind of thing that starts... well, around Rachel's age. When you remember that these kids are at an age when their identities are in flux, you can see more clearly why Rachel and Cassie are best friends even though they seem to have little in common. Rachel probably just started to care about fashion, like, last year. And her friends consider it an integral part of her personality because when you're that age, it doesn't feel to you like you're trying on a million new identities a year. You feel like each new identity you settle on is who you really are. At least, that's how I felt.

I remember feeling like, during the summer between 5th and 6th grade, someone sent out a memo to every girl but me, and the memo said: "Fashion and music are now the most important things in the world. Put down your American Girl doll; here's a free one-year subscription to YM. Here is what's fashionable this season, and where to buy it, and how to wear it. Here is how you apply makeup. Here is how to make your hair not-frizzy. This is the cool radio station to listen to; memorize this list of popular boy bands and their members, and pick a favorite member - and choose carefully because your choice will reveal your truest self." It was very disorienting, showing up at a new school and feeling like even the kids I'd known last year were suddenly completely different. Clothing I'd worn four months before without comment now attracted unimaginably vicious ridicule. I raced to catch up, buying a whole new wardrobe from Limited Too and tearing through my older sister's copies of Seventeen with the sole purpose of getting the popular girls to leave me alone for five goddamn minutes. All of 6th grade was just one big WTF tornado.

I wonder if Rachel was more of a tomboy back in elementary school, and if she became more traditionally feminine in order to gain power when she found herself in a social structure (middle school) where gender roles are everything. This may be my own personal bias talking, since I don't really get the innate appeal of shopping and makeup. But it could explain why Rachel and Cassie are best friends, despite their apparent differences: they became best friends when they had more in common, and now Rachel's just going through a phase.

Where do the Animorphs live?
This book doesn't provide too many clues.
1. Rachel mentions pine trees a couple of times. There are different species of pine all over the place, so that establishes nothing.
2. We do, however, find out what birds the kids have started using as flight morphs. Presumably, they acquired them from injured animals at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, meaning they're native to the area.
2a. Tobias morphs a red-tailed hawk, of course, which lives year-round everywhere the kids could possibly live except the coast of Maine. And even Maine sees red-tails in the summer.
2b. Rachel morphs a bald eagle - not the smartest morph for avoiding detection, but she's Rachel and she wants to look awesome - which has a much spottier range.
2c. Jake morphs a peregrine falcon, whose range is spottier still, although at least his bird is more common and less noticeable.
2d. Cassie and Marco morph the same osprey, whose migratory range, at least, covers almost the entire country.

The only place you'll see all of these birds at the same time is the Pacific Northwest coast. Both places I listed as possibilities in my last post - Tampa Bay, Florida and Williamsburg, Virginia - see bald eagles and peregrine falcons at different times of year. So it's highly unlikely that the WRC would have both birds at the same time, unless it was located in the Pacific Northwest. Or The Gardens could have a hawk exhibit, and the bald eagle and peregrine falcon could have been acquired there.

Come back next Monday for the weirdest love triangle ever when I review Animorphs #3: The Encounter! Until then, may the Kandrona shine and strengthen you.

#1: The Invasion

My name is Jake. That's my first name, obviously. I can't tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere. Everywhere. And if they knew my full name, they could find me and my friends, and then... well, let's just say I don't want them to find me. What they do to people who resist them is too horrible to think about.

I won't even tell you where I live. You'll just have to trust me that it is a real place, a real town.

I'm writing this all down so that more people will learn the truth. Maybe then, somehow, the human race can survive until the Andalites return and rescue us, as they promised they would.

Maybe.

So it begins. The first book of what would become a wildly popular middle-grade book series starts with the all-important origin story. As I mentioned in the introduction, I at first didn't much care for what I read of this book. I only went back and read the whole thing after later books drew me into the story. Luckily for me, almost every single Animorphs book recaps the entire origin story in the first chapter, so I didn't really have to read the first one.

Re-reading the opening scene, I can kind of see why 11-year-old me was kind of turned off by it. Two teenage boys - Jake and Marco - are playing video games, one of them (Jake) worrying about how he'll tell his older brother Tom that he didn't make the basketball team. Then they run into another boy, Tobias, whom Jake had previously met when he stopped two other boys from bullying him. The sci-fi stuff hasn't come up yet, so all we have are the characters, and so far it's all very guyzone. I think, despite Animorphs being recommended to me by a girl, I got the distinct impression that this series was for boys only. It was a fairly reasonable assumption to make after two pages of reading: I didn't yet know that K.A. stood for Katherine Alice, and most children's entertainment is pretty rigidly gender-segregated.

Of course, as soon as I stop reading, Rachel and Cassie show up. It's important to establish early on that Rachel is beautiful, because the contrast between her Valley Girl appearance and BAMFy personality is an important part of her character. Unfortunately, her cousin happens to be narrating the first book, so Jake has a bit of a Les Cousins Dangeroux moment where he mentions that she's really pretty, not that he thinks of her in that way because he totally doesn't, she's his cousin, I mean yuck, moving on...

Jake admits to having a crush on Cassie, Rachel's best friend, though he never knows what to say to her. Aww. There are a number of delightfully subversive things happening right off the bat here:

1. The author, without making a big deal of it, sets up an interracial romance, which in 1996 only about half of Americans approved of. That's sort of like if Diary of a Wimpy Kid gave the main character a crush on another boy. For the time, it's kind of huge. Even in progressive '90s entertainment, the black characters generally were either single or carefully paired up with other black characters. K.A. herself lampshaded this trope in her 1994 romance series Boyfriends/Girlfriends (later renamed Making Out): the black character Aisha resists dating the only black guy on the island for a long time specifically because all her white friends assume their relationship is inevitable. (They do end up dating. And yes, I read that entire series, even the ghostwritten ones. Nina+Benjamin 4eva.)
2. Cassie is Rachel's friend who is black, but she is not Rachel's Sassy Black Friend. "Cassie is quieter than Rachel, more peaceful, like she always understands everything on some different, more mystical level." She lacks every dimension of sass, and has her own stuff going on apart from being Rachel's friend. I really wish this wasn't so impressive, but it is. Still. After almost twenty years.
3. "For one thing, she's usually wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, or something else real casual." Cassie is not traditionally feminine, but she is presented as being romantically desirable - as evidenced by the fact that the main character of the series, this regular boy who likes regular boy things like basketball and video games, desires her. And not in spite of her butchiness; there is no makeover montage where Jake doesn't notice her until Rachel takes off Cassie's glasses and puts down her hair (metaphorically speaking). Jake likes Cassie for who she is now. "She had [her hair] longer for a while, but then she went back to short, which I like." (Emphasis mine.) If you have ever been a tomboyish preteen girl, you know how huge this is. If you haven't, I assure you: it is huge.

Jake, having already established himself as a bit of a white knight by saving Tobias from those bullies off-screen, doubles down on his Lawful Good alignment by offering to walk the girls home - for their protection. You know, 'cause they're girls and all. Big mistake to say that in front of Rachel, who gets ready to tear him a new one until Cassie artfully ends the conflict without hurting anyone's feelings. This exchange nicely illustrates several important personality traits: Rachel's independence, Jake's sometimes clueless good intentions, and Cassie's talent as peacemaker.

And so the five kids walk home at night, cutting across a highway and an abandoned construction site because they're thirteen years old and therefore immortal. Jake's parents have warned him not to take the shortcut through the old construction site, but for some reason they're fine with him crossing a highway. (I'm not even exaggerating: "So anyway, we crossed the road and headed into the abandoned construction site. It was a big area, surrounded on two sides by trees, with the highway separating it from the mall area.") I remember growing up in the sidewalk-less exurbs, where the furthest I could get without a car was a nearby convenience store, and my mom didn't even like me walking there for fear that I'd be run over. Either the Animorphs live in a much more walkable neighborhood or their parents don't pay too much attention to traffic patterns.

Anyway, instead of getting hit by a car, the kids see a spaceship land directly in front of them. Tobias sees it first, because he's looking up at the sky while he's walking, because he's Tobias. It's funny - I clearly remember the ship crashing, and yet in this book, it very slowly and deliberately lands. It's got scorch marks on it, and it's even a bit melted, but it's still functional, apparently. I'm not sure how Elfangor got so hurt when his fighter seems to still be in pretty good condition. He probably could've kept fighting, but then again with the Dome ship destroyed there's probably no real hope. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

Rachel suggests trying to communicate with whatever's inside, even though they all agree that the aliens probably don't speak English. Tobias tries anyway. The first words he ever speaks to his father are: "Please, come out. We won't hurt you." No, I'm not teary-eyed, why do you ask?

The alien could have said, [Duh, you're a gaggle of unarmed children and I'm in a goddamn Andalite fighter,] but instead he's all tactful and says, [I know.] The kids reel at the experience of thought-speak. Tobias again asks the alien inside to come out, and assures him that they won't be frightened. The alien steps out of the fighter, giving the kids their first look at an Andalite: blue centaurs with scorpion tails, eyestalks, and three vertical slits where a human mouth and nose would be. I've read that K.A. originally designed Andalites to look like your typical greys, to make it easier to adapt the series to TV. But Scholastic told her to be more creative, so out of spite, she designed the craziest-looking aliens she could possibly think of. I actually really like how weird the aliens are, and in fact feel like they could get weirder: considering all the diversity of lifeforms on this planet, why should life on other planets look anything like this one particular species of hairless ape?

Anyway, the alien (Elfangor) is clearly trying very hard to keep it together in front of the children (Andalite pride, yo), but he staggers and (despite Tobias's attempt to help him) falls into the dirt, revealing an awful burn covering half his right side. Cassie immediately goes into junior-vet mode, ordering Jake to rip up his shirt for bandages with no ulterior motives whatsoever, I'm sure.

CASSIE: Quick, Jake! Take off your shirt and rip it up!
JAKE: But... you're wearing a flannel shirt over your overalls. Maybe you could rip up your overshirt, and you'd still -
CASSIE: Dammit, Jake, there's no time to explain. It has to be your shirt.

But Elfangor cock-blocks her (vulva-blocks her?) and tells them all that the wound is fatal. Now, a lot of people criticize this scene: why doesn't Elfangor just morph into something else, then de-morph and completely heal? But I think it makes sense. He is very badly wounded, to the point where he's dying. Morphing takes a lot of concentration, energy, and time. He knows he doesn't have much time before the Yeerks follow him down to the planet's surface and kill him. He knows the Dome ship has been destroyed, so there's no point in continuing to fight anyway. And his little fighter's not getting back to the Andalite homeworld by itself. Basically, he can spend several minutes morphing and de-morphing to save himself, only to be immediately killed by Visser Three, or he can save what little energy he has left to tell this random assortment of mini-humans what the hell is going on on their planet, thereby possibly saving Earth. I think it's a pretty rational decision.

Anyway, Elfangor drops a hot, steaming load of exposition on the kids. Yeerks are evil, brain-stealing alien slugs who are invading Earth. Andalites like him are the good guys who fight the Yeerks across the galaxy. Elfangor gives Earth a year, tops, before the Yeerks have taken complete control. You know what kind of gets me about this scene? He tells them all this before he remembers that he has the Escafil device in his fighter. Which means that his plan was to warn them and then die, without giving them any tools whatsoever to fight this horrific war he just told them about. Kind of a dick move, Elfangor.

In any case, he does eventually remember, and sends Jake in to get the "small blue box, very plain." Or, rather, he wants someone to do it, and everybody kind of decides it's going to be Jake because he's the paladin. It's certainly not going to be Tobias, who wants to stay with Elfangor and comfort him and OH GOD THE FEELS. Jake works up the nerve thanks to Cassie's encouragement, steps into the ship, and collects the box. Then something catches his eye.

It was a small, three-dimensional picture - four Andalites, standing all together, looking like a strange gathering of deer with solemn faces. Two of them looked very small kids. I realized that this was a picture of the Andalite's family.

It filled me with sadness to think that here he was, dying, a million miles from his family. Dying because he had tried to protect the people of Earth. I felt a small flame of anger against the Yeerks, or Controllers, or whatever they were, for causing this.

Although the picture doesn't much make sense given what we'll later find out about Elfangor - his little brother is way younger than him, and he doesn't have an Andalite wife and family of his own - it's a very touching moment. And it establishes a theme that's going to be very prominent in this series: family as motivation. More on that later.

So Jake comes back with the blue box, and Elfangor tells them he can give them the power to turn into other creatures, which will help give them a slight edge against the Yeerks. He asks if they want to receive this power, and Marco's all, "HELL NO" and Cassie's all, "HELL YES" and Jakes all, "Let's take a vote" and then the Yeerks show up. Oops.

So really quickly, as the Yeerk ship is descending (can't they see what's going on down there? Whatever), the kids make a decision. Everybody but Marco wants to take the power, and Jake's waffling because he waffles a lot in this book, but eventually Tobias kind of pushes him into saying yes, so they touch the box and get the power and Elfangor warns them not to stay in morph for more than two hours or they'll be trapped, and then they all run away to hide behind "a low, crumbled wall." Except for Tobias, who gets a poke in the head from Elfangor and falls over. But then he joins the rest of them.

Notably, the book never mentions what happens to the blue box. The kids don't grab it. Elfangor's too weak to put it back in his ship (or, uh, carefully tuck it into a space between cinderblocks), and if he hides it in the dirt or something, Jake at least doesn't notice. It just kind of disappears. This will become a pretty major thorn in my side 20 books later. But I'll get to that when I get to it.

From their hiding spot, the kids see the Bug fighters land, followed by the Blade ship, with disintegrates an earthmover that's in the way. Hork-Bajir and Taxxons come out, and Elfangor  explains to the kids in thought-speak what they are and that Hork-Bajir are peaceful and good but Taxxons are total assholes. Visser Three steps out in his Andalite host body, radiating evil. Even as Visser Three approaches Elfangor to kill him, he continues explaining to the kids who he is and what's going on, which is pretty badass.

Visser Three provides more exposition via Bond villain gloating, then morphs into a horrible monster and eats Elfangor alive. Jake jumps up and yells, "You filthy-" but the other kids (including Marco) pull him down and tell him to shut up or he'll get them all killed. A bunch of Human-Controllers laugh, including a voice that seems familiar to Jake, but before he can figure out who it is, Marco vomits, which attracts the attention of a nearby Hork-Bajir. The fact that they've been talking more or less nonstop this entire time is not enough to attract its attention, but Marco's just that loud a vomiter, I guess. Also, Marco was apparently fine when Elfangor was being eaten, but the sound of human laughter is just too much for him. Whatever.

Anyway, Jake tells the others to split up, and he and Rachel lead the Hork-Bajir away from the slower, more out-of-shape characters. Rachel baits the Hork-Bajir with swear words because she's Rachel. But they all make it out alive and run home.

The next morning, Tobias shows up at Jake's house all psyched because he turned into his cat and it was awesome. Tobias's tragic home life is described to the reader, as though that were necessary to explain why a 13-year-old boy would be excited by having quasi-magical powers that let him turn into any animal he touched. Jake is still pretty sure he was a dream, because he's in denial. Tobias morphs into Dude (the cat) to prove it and Jake still thinks it might be a dream, but if it's not a dream, he wants no part of it.

Tobias, on the other hand, is super into this, and insists that Jake get onboard.

"But we'll need you, Jake. You most of all."

"Why me?"

He hesitated. "Geez, Jake, don't you understand? I know what I can do and what I can't do. I can't make plans and tell people what to do. I'm not the leader. You are."

I laughed rudely. "I'm not the leader of anything."

He just looked at me with those deep, troubled eyes - eyes I can now see only in my memory.

"Yes, Jake, you are our leader. You are the one who can bring us all together and help us defeat the Controllers. We have the ability to be much more than we are, to have the stealth of a cat, and... and the eyes of eagles, and the sense of smell of a dog, and... and the speed of a horse or a cheetah. We're going to need it all, if we have any hope of holding out against the Controllers."

Jake reluctantly admits that he is awesome, and morphs his dog Homer. Through Tobias and Jake morphing their pets, we see how morphing works: the time it requires, the concentration it requires, how disgusting it is, the ease of slipping into the animal's instincts. We also get some nice foreshadowing: Homer's powerful sense of smell detects something weird about Jake's older brother, Tom.

Jake arranges for everybody to meet up at Cassie's barn. Tobias takes off, saying he'll meet Jake there later. Meanwhile, Jake - now human again - goes into the kitchen to talk to Tom. They used to be pretty close, but lately Tom's been spending all his time with this club called The Sharing. Tom also doesn't particularly care that Jake didn't make the team, which is weird, because he used to eat, sleep, and breathe basketball until he joined The Sharing. He tells Jake basketball isn't important, not like The Sharing. Which Jake should totally join.

Because Jake doesn't care that Tom appears to have been brainwashed by a cult, he does his Saturday chores and then rides his bike to Cassie's farm on the edge of town. By this point, I'm getting seriously jealous of how easily these kids can travel around town on their own. They must live in one of those pre-1950's suburbs, from the days before pedestrianism was basically outlawed. But enough of my exurban resentment: Cassie lives on what used to be a functional farm, but which is now home to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, a place where her veterinarian dad heals injured wild animals before releasing them back into the wild. It's the perfect place to acquire new morphs and plan new missions because apparently, even though it's Cassie's dad's primary place of business, he is never there. Cassie's mom is also a veterinarian, but she works at The Gardens (basically Busch Gardens) with bigger, more exotic animals. Hurray for convenience!

Jake is the last person to show up, because he's the leader. Rachel shows him an article she found in the morning paper. Apparently, a number of people saw what looked like flying saucers around the abandoned construction site. Cops arrived on the scene to find a bunch of teenagers shooting off fireworks. The kids ran off. Police are offering a reward for any information on the random teenagers, like you do. Yep, the Yeerks have pretty clearly infiltrated the police, which convinces the kids that they've probably infiltrated every other powerful organization.

Marco kind of freaks out, pointing out that they could all die and suggesting that they all forget this ever happened and never use their powers. He alludes to the death of his mother about two years ago, which sent his dad into a spiral of depression, but he doesn't explicitly say that's why he doesn't want to risk his life, because he doesn't want the others to think he's weak. So instead, the others (except for Jake, who knows what's up) just think he's kind of a cowardly asshole, which is so much better. Oh, Marco.

Then a horse shows up. The horse is Cassie. She's been at this morphing thing all morning, and has managed to turn the hideous process into artistic expression, making herself look like an Andalite as she demorphs. She also found out how to morph tight clothing, even though spandex doesn't have DNA oh whatever just go with it. But while she's demorphing, a police officer shows up to reinforce the point that they are serious about finding these kids with the fireworks. I don't know why he decides to drive all the way to this random farm on the edge of town to look for teenagers; I assume Cassie's family is the only black family in town, so he shows up there regularly to intimidate them for no reason. Only thing worse than a Yeerk cop is a racist Yeerk cop. Anyway, they all block Cassie's demorphing with their bodies. Racist Yeerk Cop gets suspicious and tells the kids to stand aside, and luckily Cassie's fully human by that time, so there's nothing weird here but a black girl who loves gymnastics and being barefoot.

"We want these kids," the policeman said. "We want them real bad. See, it was dangerous what they did. Could have been someone hurt. So we want to find the kids."

Racist Yeerk Cop tells Jake he should join The Sharing, because he was being too subtle before, and once he leaves the kids reiterate that there are Controllers in the police department and this proves that they can't trust any authority figure, or anyone for that matter. They already knew that from the newspaper article, so this scene wasn't actually necessary, but whatever.

Anyway, they talk amongst themselves about what to do with this knowledge and this power, if anything. And here we learn some interesting things about these characters and their motivations. One thing that leapt out at me during this re-read was that the three male Animorphs are all motivated, in one way or another, by family. Marco is strongly against doing anything that might risk his life, because his father couldn't handle losing him. Tobias is strongly for fighting the Yeerks, because he doesn't have a real family: his home life is so terrible he has nothing else going for him. Jake will eventually catch on that his brother is a Controller, and so that becomes his motivation.

Cassie's motivation is strangely childish: she pretty much just likes animals, so she wants to turn into them. She's not really thinking about the Yeerk threat, or how they'll have to fight and kill other sentient creatures - including, possibly, humans. Knowing that in just a few books, she'll end up guilt-stricken over killing a termite queen, this is kind of shocking. She starts talking about how they could use this power to save endangered species, and Tobias has to remind her that, hey, there's a war on. She doesn't really respond to that. I find it ironic that the two characters who are most enthusiastic in the beginning are the gentlest, most peaceful ones: the ones who will be the most hesitant when it comes to the actual, nasty business of war.

Rachel and Jake haven't found their motivation yet. Jake waffles a lot, whereas Rachel bounces between fighting and not fighting, seeming equally passionate about each one until she changes her mind again. 

"Okay, rule number one," Rachel announced firmly. "We don't do anything to attract attention. We have to be secret about everything. Especially morphing." ...

... "Maybe Marco is right," Rachel said. "This is too big for us. We're just kids. We need to find someone important to tell this to. Someone we can trust."

Rachel's the one who calls for a vote. Already her take-charge personality is showing, although she seems strangely eager to take orders from Jake. (That won't last long.) Everyone is eager to take orders from Jake for some reason. He has no idea what to do, and seems as baffled as I am by this universal belief that there needs to be a leader, and it needs to be him.

One of the things I don't like about this book is how Jake's leadership abilities are told more than they're shown. It would have been more effective if Jake got onboard early (maybe Tom is at the construction site with the rest of the Human-Controllers, and Jake sees him there, giving him his motivation to fight right off the bat) and was shown uniting the rest of the kids, maybe with an inspiring speech or something. Instead, he spends half the book waffling, lacking any motivation to accept the call to action and instead being told outright by other people that he is The Leader, though there's little actual evidence to suggest that he'd be good at leading anyone.

I may be personally biased on this front, as I am an anarchist and I don't really see why a small group of kids with exactly the same amount of knowledge and experience with regards to Yeerks and morphing and war tactics require a leader to tell them what to do. Can't they just use consensus to make decisions? They seem to do that anyway, at least in this book, looking to Jake largely as a tie-breaker. But they seem to take it for granted that they need a leader, without really thinking about why. Even Cassie - the liberal idealist - and Rachel - the headstrong independent one - don't question it.

Anyway, when Rachel ultimately votes to fight, it seems to be primarily out of spite against Marco, who is being an asshole to Tobias for no reason. This shows that she's protective of Tobias (foreshadowing!) and prone to jumping into things without really thinking. Her long-term motivation for fighting won't develop until the second book.

Cassie notices that things are getting a little tense, so she suggests they hold off on making their final decision until they've given it more thought. Jake and Marco go back to Jake's house to play yet more video games. One of the few things the TV show did right was that they changed this scene from Jake and Marco playing video games to Jake and Marco playing basketball in Jake's driveway. It shows Jake's love of - and talent for - basketball, and also shows that the boys have more than one hobby. Anyway, back in the book, Tom shows up of course and talks about the teenagers and the fireworks and tells them to join The Sharing. Marco points out to Jake what is by now painfully obvious to the reader: Tom is a Controller.

Jake punches Marco because he's in denial. He spends much of the book in denial over one thing or another, and while I realize that most people would have a hard time believing that aliens were invading (and that your own brother was infested with one of them), it's getting rather tedious. Luckily, Tobias quickly shows up at the window in the form of a red-tailed hawk. Jake tells him to morph back, reminding him that he can't stay in a morph for more than two hours. (Foreshadowing!) Tobias hesitates - which could be more foreshadowing, but also could reflect his desire to not be randomly naked in Jake's room for the second time that day. He turns human again, borrows some ill-fitting clothes from Jake, and waxes rhapsodic about the wonders of flight.

"Tobias, how on Earth did you do a hawk morph?" I demanded.

"There's an injured hawk right there in Cassie's barn," he said. "There's this cool osprey, too, but I decided on the hawk."

"How did you fly if the hawk you morphed from was injured?" I wondered.

Marco shook his head pityingly. "Jake, do you pay any attention in biology class? DNA has nothing to do with some injury. The DNA wasn't broken. Just a wing."

YEAH, Jake, it's basic biology, like morphing spandex. Idiot. Jake reminds Tobias for the second time not to stay in morph longer than two hours. (Repetitive foreshadowing!) Tobias tells them he's already looking for the Yeerk pool, which Elfangor told him about in his pokey-forehead-infodump. He's already raring to go find this Yeerk pool and blow it up. Marco stops being an asshole to Tobias just long enough to point out that maybe, just maybe, this club The Sharing is a cover for the Yeerk invasion. He's a smart one. Marco dares Jake to investigate The Sharing and see that he's right, that Tom really is a Controller. "Let's see how much you want to [fight] when it turns out it's your own brother you have to destroy." Then, before Jake can get too mad at him, he brings up his mom's death again.

Marco will eventually become the joker of the group. I will love his jokes and his witty banter with Rachel, I will empathize with his pain, and I will love him. But so far, none of that is visible or even really hinted at. He's just acting like a jerk, especially to Tobias. In my headcanon, Marco's gay and secretly in love with Jake, and he's just jealous of how much time Tobias has been spending naked in Jake's room.

Anyway, they decide to scope out The Sharing. Jake tells Tom that he, Marco, Rachel, and Cassie are all interested in attending a meeting. Tobias will be there in bird form, to spy from above. Tom is super-psyched. They go to that night's Sharing meeting, which is a bonfire on the beach with volleyball and barbecue and people chilling out and having a good time. Tom tells Jake it's even better as a full member, but before he can offer Jake a free E-Meter audit, his face starts to contort into a look of terror. Then it changes back, and he says he has to go to the separate meeting for full members.

This finally convinces Jake that his brother is a Controller. He decides to spy on the full members meeting in Homer form, guessing that "they won't worry about some stray dog that's walking along the beach." He wanders around the beach trying to look inconspicuous, but with his sharp dog hearing overhears Tom and the other Controllers (including the assistant principal of their middle school, bearer of the strangely familiar voice Jake heard at the construction site) talking about how they need to find those kids who were at the construction site. Tom says: "[I]t might be the one who's my brother, Jake. I know he goes through the construction site sometimes. That's why I brought him here tonight. So we could either make him ours... or kill him."

Luckily, Assistant Principal Chapman tells Tom there won't be any killing at Sharing meetings, since that would draw too much attention. Instead they'll sit and wait for the kids to talk about what they saw, then make their move.

But Jake is still so horrified by this that he escapes into the dog's instinctive happiness for a while. (Foreshadowing!) But soon he hears Racist Yeerk Cop hassling Cassie for getting too close to the full members meeting. He lets her off with a warning, and she tells Jake she was just checking to make sure he was okay. Aww. They go back to the others and Jake fills them in. Everybody is now determined to fight the Yeerks, except Marco. Oh, Marco.

Jake decides to do some spying on Chapman. Cassie finds him a green anole who lives in her barn - not as a patient, just sort of there - and Monday at school, he crawls into his locker and morphs it. He instantly freaks out, overpowered by the lizard's instincts, runs around like crazy and eats a spider. Then Chapman steps on his tail, cutting it clean off. This is all very horrific and gross, but Jake manages to get it together and follow Chapman into a janitor's closet. And so Jake finds an entrance to the Yeerk pool: hidden behind a revolving wall in a janitor's closet in his own middle school. A little later on in the series, they'll find a second entrance in the mall. It's all a nice little dig at suburban conformity, which I appreciated as a suburban middle schooler.

That afternoon at the mall, Jake tells the rest of the group what he found out and says he wants to go down into the Yeerk pool and save Tom. Tobias and Rachel are in. Marco reluctantly agrees, just to rescue Tom, and then he's out. Cassie goes off on this weird tangent about shamanism. Rachel points out that they need more powerful morphs if they're going to fight, and suggests acquiring them at The Gardens. And this is where Marco provides the title of the series and the title of this re-read:

"Oh, I'm sure we could talk them into letting us in for nothing," Marco said. "Just tell them we're Animorphs."

"Tell them we're what?" Rachel asked.

"Idiot teenagers with a death wish," Marco said.

"Animorphs." I tried the word out. It sounded okay.

So they take a bus to the Gardens. Tobias says he doesn't want to acquire any battle morphs, because he's happy with his hawk morph and doesn't want to turn into anything else. Rachel says that's a bad idea, but no one else seems to notice or care. Cassie sneaks them behind the exhibits. Marco finally acquires his first morph, a gorilla, and starts getting kind of into it, suggesting that they head to the big animal exhibits for real firepower. Just then, security guards notice them and everybody runs like crazy and Marco hijacks a little golf cart and "Yakety Sax" plays in the background. Jake and Marco duck into an exhibit at random to get away from the zoo cops. Unfortunately, it's the tiger exhibit.

Jake acquires the tiger to put him into a trance, but when they try to escape, a second tiger attacks. Luckily, the boys manage to climb out of the exhibit and hide in a crowd. They meet up with Tobias and the girls near the front gates. Apparently, they'd "lost the guards easily, and had just gone on acquiring morphs while Marco and [Jake] were risking [their] lives in the tiger habitat," except that it seems Cassie never acquired a battle morph. Her battle morph ends up being a gray wolf, which everyone morphs in a later book. I don't know if this is plot convenience or an extremely subtle sign of her discomfort with violence. Let's be charitable and say it's the second thing.

Jake goes home for dinner and spends just enough time at home to remind his parents that he is alive, then immediately leaves again for the Yeerk pool. Tom is also going to the Yeerk pool that night. Cassie is mysteriously missing, and Tobias is already a hawk. So things are going swimmingly. They sneak into the school and soon see Racist Yeerk Cop dragging Cassie into the janitor's closet. There's no time for Tobias to demorph, so three of them head into the Yeerk pool pretending to be Human-Controllers and Tobias just... tries to look inconspicuous?

Turns out that the Yeerk pool is enormous, and horrifying. There's a gigantic lake filled with Yeerks, surrounded by cages for the unwilling Controllers and some nice couches and TVs for the willing Human-Controllers. Tobias uses his hawk eyes and assures Jake that Tom is in one of the cages, screaming at the guards. But RYC has dragged Cassie to the pier over the pool where the hosts are re-infested. And the kids are spotted.

Rachel turns into an elephant and kills a Taxxon and possibly a Human-Controller, and appears to love every minute of it. Jake and Marco use the tiger and gorilla morphs they acquired earlier that day to kill Hork-Bajir and release a bunch of free hosts - including Tom. At this point, none of them appear concerned about the morality of killing sentient beings, even though Elfangor specifically told them that Hork-Bajir are gentle creatures, enslaved by the Yeerks against their will. They're kind of on a power trip.

So Cassie's about to be infested and Jake, Marco, and Rachel are all too busy killing Controllers to help her. Tobias flies down and uses his talons to claw the eyes of the Hork-Bajir-Controller restraining her. Cassie morphs into a horse and they're all about to escape when Visser Three shows up. He figures that they're Andalites who survived the battle, and morphs into a different horrible monster from the one he morphed to kill Elfangor. This one has eight heads and shoots balls of fire.

Realizing that they're Level 1 heroes and Visser Three just morphed a Level 50 monster, the kids decide to run like hell. Rachel morphs back into human form because elephants can't climb stairs, and somehow Visser Three doesn't notice as he's hurling fireballs at them. Tom heroically/stupidly attacks Visser Three with his bare hands, Visser Three throws him off the stairs, Jake goes nuts and bites and claws at Visser Three, and then they all run up the stairs and escape.

Well, except for Tom.

And all but one of the other freed Controllers.

But all the Animorphs manage to escape!

Well...

[I hid in the cavern for a while,] he said. [They didn't see me. But I had to stay out of sight till I could get out. Jake... it took too long. Too long. More than two hours.]

I just stared at him. At his laser-focus eyes, at his wicked beak and sharp talons. And at his wings. At the broad, powerful wings that let him fly.

[I guess this is me from now on,] Tobias said.

I knew there were tears falling down my cheeks, but I didn't care anymore.

[It's okay, Jake. Like you said, we're alive.]

I went to the window and looked up at the stars. Somewhere up there, around one of those cold, twinkling stars, was the Andalite home world. Somewhere up there was... hope.

[They'll come,] Tobias said. [The Andalites will come. And until then...]

I nodded and wiped away my tears. "Yeah," I said. "Until then, we fight."

Also, Cassie kills a cop. Seriously.

And Cassie had gotten away clean. It had been the suspicious Controller policeman who had grabbed her. He was the only Controller to know her name, where she lived, and that she had been spying on The Sharing.

Cassie said we didn't have to worry about him anymore. She didn't want to talk about what had happened to him.

...'kay...?

Commentary:
Most series take some time to find their footing, and Animorphs is no exception. The first book felt pretty uneven. The author takes a while to hammer down Jake and Marco's characters in particular. Marco doesn't really settle into his personality until the second half of the book; until then, he kind of comes off as a whiny asshole who uses his mom's death as an excuse to bully Tobias. Jake spends much of the book befuddled and in denial. Presumably, he's meant to be a stand-in for the reader, but the result is that he lacks personality. He comes off as a kind of nice, kind of dense guy whom everyone looks to for leadership for no apparent reason. Cassie's character is generally consistent, but we see none of her trademark pacifism... and then there's that cop thing. Her whole subplot with being kidnapped wasn't really necessary to get the kids into the Yeerk pool; Tobias wanted to go blow it up and Jake wanted to save his brother, so the motivation was there without Racist Yeerk Cop. So that whole thing was just pointless and awkward.

A lot of the dialogue was clumsier than I'm used to with Animorphs. Like with this woman in the Yeerk pool: "You filth, let me go! Let me go! I am a free woman! You can't keep doing this! I am not a slave! Let me go! ... Help! Oh, please, someone help. Help us all!" Becoming a Controller is horrifying, as we'll see very clearly in book #6. But I wish our first glimpse of a human host's anguish and rage wasn't... that. It was just so wooden. Also, the relationship between Rachel and Tobias moves way too quickly for my taste. It seems like they go from barely knowing each other to basically being boyfriend-and-girlfriend in about a week. Jake and Cassie's shy, understated attraction toward each other feels a lot more authentic.

Sometimes in a work of fiction, there's a secondary character that you can feel is actually supposed to be the main character. This is Tobias, especially in this book. Who sees the spaceship first? Tobias. Who feels a mysterious, special kinship with the alien? Tobias. Who is the only one to get an extra mental infodump from said alien? Tobias. Who's the first to morph? Tobias. Who's the first to get onboard with the war? Tobias. Who heroically saves Cassie, by himself, in the book's climactic battle? Tobias. Who becomes a nothlit, setting up the single most compelling, heartbreaking storyline in the entire series? Tobias.

That's before we even get to the part where he's an orphan who's secretly the son of a prince and is mistreated and misunderstood until he is given special powers and his true destiny is revealed. I mean, come on. The guy practically has PROTAGONIST tattooed on his forehead. Whereas it feels like, for Jake, this whole intergalactic war thing is just a distraction from his true destiny as Associate Director of Human Resources for a mid-sized box company. He's a nice kid, but he doesn't feel like main character material, and he is not the right character to narrate this book.

Which brings me to the central conceit of the series. Each book is narrated in first-person by a different Animorph, in a tone that suggests that they're writing this all down and publishing it so that humanity can know the truth. Reading it as a kid, I enjoyed the immediacy this lent the story. The lack of geographic detail helped reinforce the paranoia (it could be my town!), and the way these characters entrust you with this knowledge, you can't help but feel closer to them.

On the other hand, it objectively doesn't make sense. Their big tactical advantage is that Visser Three thinks they're Andalite bandits, so outing themselves as human in a mass-market paperback series (or blog, or whatever) is basically self-sabotage. Even if they don't give their last names or where they live, the details they do provide are more than enough to track them down. It's the town with the giant Yeerk pool underneath, with the abandoned construction site where Elfangor died. They go to the school whose assistant principal is Chapman. The parents of one of them run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, which is also where they meet. So the story might have been better told without that gimmick.

Speaking of which...

Where do the Animorphs live?
I know that, towards the very end of the series, Jake finally gives up on the whole "we can't tell you where we live" shtick and reveals that the whole story took place somewhere in southern California. That disappointed me, because I'd figured that they lived near Washington D.C.: you know, one of those small towns in northern Virginia or eastern Maryland that had been gobbled up by sprawl and become bedroom communities for government workers. That explained to my satisfaction why the whole Yeerk invasion seemed centered around their particular town: it was actually centered on the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth, which also happened to be within commuting distance of the kids. So anyway, I thought while I do this re-read I'd keep track of hints the books drop as to where the story takes place. Is it consistent with southern California? Or northern Virginia? Or anyplace, really?

This book offers several clues as to the story's setting:
1. They live near an ocean, in a climate where the beach is still a nice place to hang out during the school year.
2. They live near a zoological theme park, of which there are vanishingly few in the country. There is one in Virginia, but not in the D.C. area (drats). But none of them are in southern California either - although one is in northern California, near San Francisco. Two of them are in Florida, and The Gardens is pretty obviously based on Busch Gardens, in Tampa Bay.
3. Jake morphs a green anole that lives in Cassie's barn. Its geographic range is limited to the southeastern United States. It has apparently been introduced to southern California, but only many years after this book was published and not in any significant numbers.
4. Cassie mentions that she "shredded" her coat trying to morph it and doesn't know what she'll do come winter.

Every clue except #4 is consistent with it being set in Florida. Though Cassie could have been describing a light coat. Seems like so far, the most likely setting is Tampa Bay, Florida, with Williamsburg, Virginia (home of Busch Gardens Williamsburg) also a possibility.

Phew! Well, that's book one, and I may have gone a bit overboard with the recapping. You can read it for yourself here. Come back next week for kitty-cats when I review Animorphs #2: The Visitor!

#0: The Introduction

If this blog post had a cover, it would depict the author morphing into herself as a 12-year-old.

I got into Animorphs relatively late. The first book came out in June of 1996, but I didn't get into it until early summer of 1998. By then, I was almost 12 - already on the outermost edge of the middle grade series' target age group. A friend of mine had previously tried to sell me on the series; I read the first chapter of the first book and thought it was boring and said the name Tobias (which I pronounced TOE-bee-us) was stupid. (It would eventually become - and remains to this day - my all-time favorite male baby name, largely because of this series.)

Some time later, I was sleeping over this same friend's house. To be more accurate, she was sleeping. I had insomnia for some reason. Her family had just moved into a new apartment, and the only book in her room was the recently-released Megamorphs #2: In the Time of Dinosaurs. Unable to sleep, bored out of my skull, and with literally nothing else to read, I decided to give Animorphs another shot.

I stayed up all night reading that book. By the end of the summer, I had devoured all the other Animorphs books and had become an even bigger fan than my friend. For the rest of middle school, Animorphs was basically my life. Going to Barnes & Noble to pick up the new issue became a monthly ritual. My online life revolved entirely around Animorphs fansites and message boards. My introduction to fanfiction and fanart was through Animorphs. Rachel and Tobias were my first OTP. And they kind of still are; to this day I've never been more involved in any fandom.

This book series had a profound, formative effect on me. It was for kids, but didn't talk down to its audience. It had three-dimensional characters, deep political and philosophical themes, and a complex universe that felt authentic and thrilling at the same time. I believe a good portion of my anti-war, environmentalist, and feminist beliefs can be traced back to this series.

K.A. Applegate took the cheesy, overdone premise of kids with superpowers and said, "You know, when you really stop and think about it, these kids are basically child soldiers." And then she ran with that. The Animorphs didn't go to school, save the world, then go to a diner and laugh about their mission over milkshakes. They had PTSD nightmares. They made hard moral decisions, each time wondering where the line was between good and evil, us and them. They gradually realized that there was no line, that their enemies weren't pure evil and their allies weren't pure good, and sometimes saving the world meant doing things that compromised their morality, their sanity - even their humanity. War changed them, and they watched it happen, and it terrified them.

I changed as well. The last Animorphs book came out the spring before I started high school. I finished the series and breathed a sigh of relief that it had ended before I'd gotten officially way too old for it. Because if I'd had to choose between not looking like an idiot at school and continuing to read Animorphs, I would have chosen Animorphs in a heartbeat. I put away "childish things," and started reading more adult fare, along with a few young adult series, like Harry Potter, that were generally considered acceptable for adults to enjoy. I donated my enormous Animorphs collection, along with my enormous Goosebumps collection. Too old. Time to move on.

Many years later, I was in the children's section of Barnes & Noble with my husband and I saw the new, re-released Animorphs with the fancy lenticular covers. I fell in love all over again. I guess a lot of people did, because lately there seems to be a wave of Animorphs re-reads in every format, from Cinnamon Bunzuh! to Opinionated Animorphs to the new podcast Thought-Speak. I eventually read/watched these, and then I discovered that Richard's Animorphs Forum had the entire series available for download.

So now I'm doing my own re-read. I'll see if the books hold up to the quality I remember, examining them with a more critical, grown-up eye. I'll be focusing a lot on political and philosophical themes in the books, as that was what drew me in as a preteen and fascinated me all over again as an adult. I can't promise I'll be as funny or insightful as other re-reads. And I will definitely spoil you, so if you haven't finished the series and don't want to find out what comes next, you probably shouldn't read this. But I hope I can provide a unique perspective on this series that shaped so much of who I am today.

Come back next week for my review of Animorphs #1: The Invasion. Thanks for reading!