#I'd be way down to chill with a bro and talk lay-dies

[king-of-ice420]

Hello again, Ice King! (It's me, your secret super fan)

I wanted to ask for your opinion, since you're an expert on love and junk. What do you think defines a romantic relationship? Like, what would you say makes it different from a friendship?

I guess it's mainly the smooching and stuff, but if you wanna get all sappy about it, ya can't really describe the feeling. It just sorta happens yknow? I get the feeling all the time when I kidnap princesses to marry!!😁😁

[lilacsolanum]

am I correct that you once mentioned being able to talk forever about the breakdown of Animorphs team dynamics at the end of the war? please... if so... i'd love to hear your thoughts...

YES, YOU ARE VERY CORRECT. HERE WE GO.

Cassie and Ax are the only ones whose books straight up lay down the law on this. The Sacrifice has Ax straight up talking shit about, like, everyone but Marco. Marco he’s cool with, because Marco’s clear headed and not worried about getting his hands dirty. Marco’s like “Man, drop a nuclear bomb if you GOTTA, like I don’t LOVE the idea but what’s an intergalactic war without a ‘lil nuke here and there? Makes it EXCITING.” But he starts getting disenfranchised with Jake - “I wished now not for Jake, but for an Andalite commander. An experienced soldier. Someone who better understood when to fight and when to watch.” He is OVER how Rachel is terrifyingly violent and should have been removed from fighting a while ago (the scene where Ax chooses to forgive and free a Yeerk-moprhed-bird who is just trying to become a nothlit — only for Rachel to thoughtlessly murder the Yeerk on a rampage — is one of the most chilling moments in Animorphs. I gasped and had the set the book down when I first read it, and I first read it as an adult.) While He even straight up calls Tobias out on getting trapped in morph on purpose - “He stayed in red-tailed hawk morph for longer than two hours. I suspect he did it on purpose.  It was his way of escaping the complexities of human life. Although he exchanged them for a new set of complexities.” When he finds out Cassie gave away the morphing technology, he says “I could not stop looking at Cassie. I was not exactly sure what I was feeling. But I was sure it was very close to hatred.” Later he says “Perhaps the real menace lay at the other end of the continuum - represented by Cassie. Humans who were softer. Kinder. Well-meaning. And, ironically, infinitely more dangerous.” He eventually does forgive Cassie and start to understand her choice, but it takes him a MOMENT. Ax is TIRED in this book. The Sacrifice is just Ax talking shit about everyone, it’s amazing. “My hatred for Cassie began to extend to them all. They were fools. They would never prevail. They were too soft. Too sentimental. Too childish. Too stupid and ignorant.” - Aximili in The Sacrifice, pouring out some tea.

Ax ends up in this really sad place at the end of the war where he’s resigned to dying on Earth, to dying with his human friends, and he sees honor in that but he does not want it. Ax is easily the least developed characters in the series, especially once he’s given to the ghostwriters. He’s either The Funny Alien Bro or he’s the writer’s voice of political commentary. VERY RARELY is he treated with respect. Because of this inconsistency, it’s hard to say what Ax does immediately after the war. Does he just peace out to Andalite immediately? Does he take time to decide what he truly wants? Does he decide he truly wants to stay on Earth with humans but goes back to Andalite out of duty? Does he reach out to Tobias? Does he quietly accept Tobias’s decision to isolate himself and feel secretly relieved that he no longer has to care for this neurotic bird? Does he feel guilty about being secretly relieved? Does he not care he’s relieved? There are a ton of ways to interpret Ax and view his post war decisions. The only thing we know from The Sacrifice is that he’s pretty fucking DONE.

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Cassie talks a ton of shit, too. (”The truth was, and it hurt me to admit it, Jake just wasn’t Jake anymore.” - The Ultimate. “Rachel’s voice, on the other hand, was firm and unhesitating. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m thinking it’s time to explode a big ‘ole bomb.” “And you couldn’t be happier,” Cassie said bitterly to Rachel. “Could you?”” - The Sacrifice.) Cassie always has sweetly-snide things to say about everyone in her narration (homegurl is always like “Marco is funny, but only to cover up his own fear.” “Yeah Tobias DEFINITELY trapped himself in morph.” “Rachel is a mess.” Cassie is a southern church lady and a master at shade and I love her.)

Cassie and Ax are basically just. Done with everyone. Cassie has already realized all her friends are way too war-touched to ever be healthy, and knows, on some level, that she’ll retain enough stability be able to elevate herself past the PTSD. In her last book, she makes this sad, desperate last chance grab at retaining what was left of Jake’s humanity. After that, we don’t see many people really connecting with Cassie and honestly, it’s not because she gave away the morphing cube. It’s because the Animorphs agree to blow up the Yeerk pool. I think that is a defining point for Cassie, the equivalent of Jake losing his parents. Her fate is sealed when she is forced to participate in destroying the Pool. She doesn’t like herself and she doesn’t like these people. She completely gives up on Jake and knows they have no future, which you see plainly in her reaction to Jake’s proposal (I don’t know what I expected her answer to be, but I didn’t expect her to start crying. And not tears of joy, either. “I would like that … eventually,” she said. “ But. But what?” She sighed. “But, Jake, what are you going to be? What are you going to do?” “Guess I thought I’d go to college,” I said. “And study what, Jake? Me, I’ll go to college, I’ll become a doctor. never forget what’s happened, I’ll never even try, but I’ll be able to slip back into a normal life. But you, Jake?” ) She is straight up aggressive toward Rachel in The Ultimate (”“Why do you have to be so horrible?” Cassie exploded. “You are, you know. And you get worse every day. Your own mother can’t even stand you.””) Cassie is maybe not consciously aware that she is the only one who will truly survive the war, but she knows SOMETHING, and she starts to distances herself and gives up on her friends at the end of the war. It’s another one of Cassie’s bright clear lines.

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Marco doesn’t really comment on things falling apart, but I also don’t think Marco approaches exactly HOW falling apart things have become in the same honest way Cassie and Ax do. Listen: homeboy has abandoment issues. Which I guess is extrapolation, as I can’t really think of any example where he’s directly like “Everyone Leaves Me Eventually Fuck ‘Em And Their Little Dog Too”, but the text DOES tell us 1. Marco’s mom died when he was 11, which is a very big thing to happen to a very tiny child; 2. His dad mentally checked out immediately after and 3. After the war, Marco awkwardly tries to keep the band together. He admits to spying on Jake in his free time in The Beginning, AND I MEAN. “Marco lived half a mile from me, in a house about seven times bigger than mine. We’d started hanging out again. And after awhile he’d given up arranging dates for me with whatever starlet happened to be willing.” (Jake, The Beginning). Some of that is Jake giving back to Marco, but one can ONLY ASSUME from Marco’s weird spying that Marco pulled every drop of Jake’s friendship out by sheer force of will. He also apparently invites Cassie AND HER BOYFRIEND to his Hollywood parties (I spoke to Cassie every couple of months. She was seeing some guy … actually, a good guy. I had met him at one of Marco’s parties.) and is in general all up in her shit. He does this crazy detailed run down of every step Cassie has made post-war in Chapter 10 of The Beginning. Like bro why do you even know Wal-mart tried to get Cassie to sign a deal with them? Because you’re not as cool as you think, and you miss the fuck out of the Animorphs. His defining character trait is also “Cares about no one unless he adopts you as as family, in which case he will walk right into hell and personally bitch slap satan to ensure your safety.” I honestly don’t think it OCCURS to him that they won’t all be friends after the war. He comments a bit on people falling apart, but I swear he thinks they’re all going to fall apart together. Marco is arguably in a better position when the war ends than when it started. He brings his mother back from the dead, his dad is functioning, he is rich and famous, everything is great (save for the inevitable trauma of his parents and the existence of Nora and the fact he deliberately put her in harm and all the other terrible realizations we’ve all had about that family). But I can’t help but feel that his abandonment issues are part of what lead him to The Rachel. He sacrifices a pretty bomb life to go on a suicide mission without question, because Marco doesn’t have much family, and he adopted the Animorphs as a family, and now the only way to get that family back for even a moment is to go on The Rachel.

Basically, at the end of the war, Marco is something close to happy and hopeful. The last book he narrates is a fucking romp with tanks and ducks and bondage jokes (”” ICONIC). He’s focused on his parents, and he’s not really seeing the looming aftermath of war.

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Tobias is sort of in the same situation. He’s dealing with a lot. He’s got a Loren now, and he’s awkwardly morphing human for her. He has been disenfranchised with Jake ever since Jake manipulated him into volunteering himself for torture. He’s kicking it with Marco and Ax and they have this sort of unofficial club going on, but he never mentions particularly connecting with Marco on the same level he does Rachel or Ax or even Cassie. Which, don’t get me wrong, I am 100% a huge believer in Team Finesse as disgruntled roommates who care for each other deep down, but it’s ultimately not enough of a connection to keep him around after Rachel’s death. That’s the thing with Tobias. He was always sort of detached from everyone but Rachel and Ax, and Ax was somewhat circumstantial. We all love the shorms, shorms are real, but there’s definitely a reading where the two of them bonded because they had to. I also definitely think Tobias never truly believed in Ax’s love for him. That’s the thing with Tobias, he can joke and he can bond and he has a nice time with the other Animorphs but he doesn’t believe in a universe where they hang out without the Yeerks, ya feel? He can go on a tank joy ride with Marco, but underneath it he’s thinking “This hilarious class clown wouldn’t give me the time of day if it wasn’t for Elfangor.” He can listen to Ax call him shorm, but ultimately he’s going to feel “Ax is only here because he has no other option, we wouldn’t be friends otherwise.” That’s why as soon as Rachel dies, Tobias is out. When Cassie says, “He doesn’t hate you, Jake. He never did. His heart was broken, that’s all. And you know, Tobias never had anyone. No one before Rachel. No mother, really, no father he could ever know. Rachel was the first and only person who ever loved Tobias.” (The Beginning), I think she’s speaking from Tobias’s POV, because she knows of all people that Tobias was loved and loved fiercely by many. It’s just that when Rachel said it, he actually believed her. (This is a line I’ve been sitting on for a minute and will use in a fic, so anyone who reads it again later, act surprised okay?)

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And Jake and Rachel have isolating incidents that are pretty clear on the page. Rachel’s descent into extreme violence addiction isn’t super well done, but these ARE children’s books. As dark as these books are, there’s something so incredibly disturbing about watching a child find joy in a shower of blood that it’s not really well touched upon. All we know is that she’s out of control, to the point where when confronted by an armed but currently peaceful group of soldiers, she ignores orders from Ax and attempts to ram through the human shield by physically stomping on her mother’s foot and forcing the gas pedal. No one wants to hang out with Rachel by this point, not even her family, not even Cassie. Well, we can assume Tobias is still kicking it with her, but we never get a scene of them together which is a SHAME. And Jake is, you know. I’ve rambled enough, but anyone who has read the series knows that Jake withdraws from his friends when he loses his parents in The Diversion. Marco and Tobias are too preoccupied to help, Cassie tries to the point where she hands their only leverage over to the enemy but eventually gives up on EVERYONE, and Ax is too exhausted to care. I don’t think it would have mattered much if Jake had gotten a ton of support though. He’d given up by then.

ANYWAY you asked for my feelings on the kids drifting away from each other and I gave you 2K because I am extra.