Animorphs Re-read 2020 The Invasion
Mar. 30th, 2020 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
obsidianwolfAnimorphs 2020 re-read Book One: The Invasion
So I’ve finished the first book in my 2020 re-read and well it reminds me why I originally fell in love with this series and why at times I’m incredibly frustrated by it. Since Jake is the first narrator we get his view of the others and a brief glimpse of their pre-animorphs lives. It is very apparent that most of their initial relationships were family and school yard friends based on proximity. They weren’t old enough yet to really drift away from the friendships they’d formed in earlier years and start basing them on things other than proximity and initial meeting. Jake and Marco were clearly childhood friends and so where Cassie and Rachel. Family ties then had Rachel and Jake hanging around each other enough that Jake had time to form a crush on Cassie and Rachel most likely had one on Marco.
The only one who didn’t fit into that mold of family or school yard friends was Tobias and he was quiet clearly the bullied kid who gravitated to the kid who stood up for him. Though the first book still shows how utterly broken he is since it very heavily implied he got himself stuck as a Hawk on purpose. Now it’s possible he didn’t mean to do it but on some level he wanted to be a Hawk forever but didn’t really think it through.
I said in my before the re-read post that Jake ended up the leader because he was slightly more mature than the others and I still feel that way. The most telling about that is his interactions with Marco in this book because while Marco is far more world wise and aware of how bad things can go he’s still immature enough to think he can ignore the problem. He is the only one that really gets what they are risking not just for themselves and their families but he refuses to grasp that the Invasion is on going and ignoring it won’t make it go away. For all his if Tom is a controller you might have to kill him gotcha was meant to make Jake back off. Jake was mature enough to eventually accept it and agree with Marco. He like the others was very much a kid but he was the only one actually weighing the risks in any capacity outside of just emotional response. So it isn’t that surprising that the others pretty much made him the leader by default.
Moving onto to the girls Rachel often gets pigeon holed as gung ho eager for combat but I suspect it was more that Rachel has a need to be needed. You don’t see it as clearly in this book but in the next few it is obvious that Rachel is very popular but tends to be very loyal and tries to be what her friends need. I imagine it had a lot to do with her parents being divorced so she had to be the good girl picking up the slack as her parents were fighting. She got into the habit of being what folks needed her to be and unfortunately the other Animorphs need someone to be the aggressive one, the gung ho one, the violent one.
Cassie in the first book shows a lot of her major issues as a character. She decides she knows better and follows Jake to the Sharing Members only meeting and gets herself noticed. There was no reason for her to do that it wasn’t like he was gone long enough for it to be worth the risk and I doubt she told the others were she was going. She acted unilaterally. She also most likely killed the Controller who targeted her or at the very least set back while he died. The fact it’s never brought up again is a major disappointment. She also very clearly romanticizes their struggle as if they are fighting for Mother Earth. Cassie being naturally gifted at morphing at first seems like just a way to avoid the naked kids/teenagers problem but in hindsight feels more like an early warning sign of her creator’s pet status. It probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just her starting out with a higher natural aptitude and the others get better in time but instead it was a rare and special talent even among the race that created morphing.
You also very clearly see the conflicts that each of them should have had to face moving forward start to form. Some of them will face moving forward. Rachel and Cassie should have had to come to grips with the reality of war. Rachel does and Cassie most assuredly does not but the narrative rewards Cassie and punishes Rachel. Marco had to find a reason to fight and eventually does. Jake had to deal with being the leader and dealing with the very real fear of never getting Tom back and lastly Tobias had to deal with being no longer physically human and finding his new place in the world. Jake does and even makes the hard choice to end his brother’s life. However, Tobias never really does and it’s sad but thematically appropriate unlike what happened with Cassie and Rachel.
My absolute favorite sequence in the book is Elfangor’s arrival and the aftermath in the unfinished construction site. It works absurdly well for establishing things in a way that makes sense to the reader while also bringing an actual sense of urgency. It does a very good job of establishing the mood of the series and the nature of the enemy. The fact it’s followed up on with the cop and Tom bits works very well.
The biggest disappointment of the book well it has to circle back to the cop. It’s partially hindsight talking but it’s pretty clear that Cassie had something to do with his death. However, it never comes up again and Cassie will later care more about a freaking termite queen then she did this human being enslaved against his will. It does fit the pattern I mentioned in my before the re-read post about how Cassie places value on others by how much she empathizes with them. She felt for the bug because she’d been a bug and pictured herself in it’s role. The cop was just a threat to deal with. Which if she’d had an actual arc could have been great but it’s just the earlist example of her hypocrisy and knowing where it leads in later books bugs me.
I suppose I could talk about the errors but I’ve long sense learned to ignore the errors in mid grade books churned out by scholastic. I can either fan wank it or just ignore it. So I mostly ignore the little errors and fan wank the others away to my satisfaction.
All in all I still really enjoy the book.
So I’ve finished the first book in my 2020 re-read and well it reminds me why I originally fell in love with this series and why at times I’m incredibly frustrated by it. Since Jake is the first narrator we get his view of the others and a brief glimpse of their pre-animorphs lives. It is very apparent that most of their initial relationships were family and school yard friends based on proximity. They weren’t old enough yet to really drift away from the friendships they’d formed in earlier years and start basing them on things other than proximity and initial meeting. Jake and Marco were clearly childhood friends and so where Cassie and Rachel. Family ties then had Rachel and Jake hanging around each other enough that Jake had time to form a crush on Cassie and Rachel most likely had one on Marco.
The only one who didn’t fit into that mold of family or school yard friends was Tobias and he was quiet clearly the bullied kid who gravitated to the kid who stood up for him. Though the first book still shows how utterly broken he is since it very heavily implied he got himself stuck as a Hawk on purpose. Now it’s possible he didn’t mean to do it but on some level he wanted to be a Hawk forever but didn’t really think it through.
I said in my before the re-read post that Jake ended up the leader because he was slightly more mature than the others and I still feel that way. The most telling about that is his interactions with Marco in this book because while Marco is far more world wise and aware of how bad things can go he’s still immature enough to think he can ignore the problem. He is the only one that really gets what they are risking not just for themselves and their families but he refuses to grasp that the Invasion is on going and ignoring it won’t make it go away. For all his if Tom is a controller you might have to kill him gotcha was meant to make Jake back off. Jake was mature enough to eventually accept it and agree with Marco. He like the others was very much a kid but he was the only one actually weighing the risks in any capacity outside of just emotional response. So it isn’t that surprising that the others pretty much made him the leader by default.
Moving onto to the girls Rachel often gets pigeon holed as gung ho eager for combat but I suspect it was more that Rachel has a need to be needed. You don’t see it as clearly in this book but in the next few it is obvious that Rachel is very popular but tends to be very loyal and tries to be what her friends need. I imagine it had a lot to do with her parents being divorced so she had to be the good girl picking up the slack as her parents were fighting. She got into the habit of being what folks needed her to be and unfortunately the other Animorphs need someone to be the aggressive one, the gung ho one, the violent one.
Cassie in the first book shows a lot of her major issues as a character. She decides she knows better and follows Jake to the Sharing Members only meeting and gets herself noticed. There was no reason for her to do that it wasn’t like he was gone long enough for it to be worth the risk and I doubt she told the others were she was going. She acted unilaterally. She also most likely killed the Controller who targeted her or at the very least set back while he died. The fact it’s never brought up again is a major disappointment. She also very clearly romanticizes their struggle as if they are fighting for Mother Earth. Cassie being naturally gifted at morphing at first seems like just a way to avoid the naked kids/teenagers problem but in hindsight feels more like an early warning sign of her creator’s pet status. It probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just her starting out with a higher natural aptitude and the others get better in time but instead it was a rare and special talent even among the race that created morphing.
You also very clearly see the conflicts that each of them should have had to face moving forward start to form. Some of them will face moving forward. Rachel and Cassie should have had to come to grips with the reality of war. Rachel does and Cassie most assuredly does not but the narrative rewards Cassie and punishes Rachel. Marco had to find a reason to fight and eventually does. Jake had to deal with being the leader and dealing with the very real fear of never getting Tom back and lastly Tobias had to deal with being no longer physically human and finding his new place in the world. Jake does and even makes the hard choice to end his brother’s life. However, Tobias never really does and it’s sad but thematically appropriate unlike what happened with Cassie and Rachel.
My absolute favorite sequence in the book is Elfangor’s arrival and the aftermath in the unfinished construction site. It works absurdly well for establishing things in a way that makes sense to the reader while also bringing an actual sense of urgency. It does a very good job of establishing the mood of the series and the nature of the enemy. The fact it’s followed up on with the cop and Tom bits works very well.
The biggest disappointment of the book well it has to circle back to the cop. It’s partially hindsight talking but it’s pretty clear that Cassie had something to do with his death. However, it never comes up again and Cassie will later care more about a freaking termite queen then she did this human being enslaved against his will. It does fit the pattern I mentioned in my before the re-read post about how Cassie places value on others by how much she empathizes with them. She felt for the bug because she’d been a bug and pictured herself in it’s role. The cop was just a threat to deal with. Which if she’d had an actual arc could have been great but it’s just the earlist example of her hypocrisy and knowing where it leads in later books bugs me.
I suppose I could talk about the errors but I’ve long sense learned to ignore the errors in mid grade books churned out by scholastic. I can either fan wank it or just ignore it. So I mostly ignore the little errors and fan wank the others away to my satisfaction.
All in all I still really enjoy the book.
