#leading to things like the blow ups at achilles as he grapples with himself to feel like hes in control

[angle0fthegourd]

If you think Connor is boring, I'm sorry but you're objectively wrong. This dude is the funniest bitch out there.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

For each of the Animoprhs, which book would you consider the best for showing their characterization? Best book for understanding Jake's character, best for Rachel, etc.

If I can give a very me answer (i.e. verbose and bad at choosing things), I’m not sure there are any books that don’t advance the character arc of the narrator in a meaningful way.  Going down the list:

Jake: Starts the series as a somewhat naïve, privileged kid who wants to save his big brother but isn’t sure why he’s in charge.  Ends the series as a highly competent but also ruthless general who defeats the Yeerk Empire at the expense of his big brother.

#1: Establishes his antebellum family life, and his casual certainty that everything’s going to work out once the andalites come to help.

#6: Forces Jake to confront the simultaneous realities of the controllers’ helplessness in the face of trauma and the dangerous realities of their bodies becoming weapons, cementing his convictions about the war.

#11: Features Jake’s first real crisis as a leader and forms much of the basis for his incessant rumination on alternative outcomes.

#16: Establishes Jake’s biggest Achilles heel as a leader: that he consistently fails to secure his own oxygen mask before helping others.  The plot also punishes indecisiveness and rewards recklessness.

#21: Causes Jake to have to define his role as a leader in response to David presenting the first real challenge to Jake’s authority.

#26: Gives Jake the chance to be his most awesome and competent as a leader, from managing Ax’s emotions and skillfully deploying Rachel and Erek to the Gordian-knot-cutting gambit that makes Crayak himself sit up and take notice.

#31: Confronts Jake with the slow-burning crisis he’s been struggling to ignore within his own family, causing him to (largely unsuccessfully) deal with the threat presented by Tom’s continued existence.

#36: Gives us some heartwarming moments of Jake expressing his love for his team while throwing himself between them and danger.

#41: Features Jake grappling with the realization that he can’t — and shouldn’t — save his own loved ones at the expense of someone else’s.

#47: Largely inconsequential, but does involve the only instance of Jake leading an army against invading forces in a “traditional” battle.

#53: In which Jake applies everything he’s learned to take over the U.S. Air Force, recruit the taxxons, manipulate multiple yeerk vissers, and strategically use all his allies in ways that are effective but brutal.  Also, he FINALLY does something about Tom — and it comes at the expense of Rachel’s life.

Tobias: Starts the series as a dreamy-eyed idealist with no clear-cut identity who eagerly commits himself to the first cause that comes along.  Ends the series as a pragmatic survivalist who values self-sufficiency but also his connections to his hawk and human and andalite and hork-bajir sides.

#3: Acts as the comedown of Tobias’s idealism following his somewhat-impulsive, somewhat-forced decision, as the reality of predation and nothlitization sinks in.

#13: Establishes Tobias as the kind of guy who (literally) looks higher powers in the eye and calls “bull,” but also the eyes in the sky for the team.

#23: Further complexifies Tobias’s already-complex species identity, but also gives him the chacne to be badass and self-reliant in a world that used to stuff his head in toilet bowls.

#33: Puts Tobias through the kind of pressure test that allows him to realize what’s really important to him, from his andalite family to his love for Rachel.

#43: Gives power back to Tobias through showing him — both in flashbacks and in the present conflict with Taylor — embracing the power not to decide (X).

#49: Leads Tobias to the realization that he may never have a nuclear family like Jake’s or Cassie’s, but that his crappy upbringing imbued him with a level of resiliency that Jake frankly lacks.

Ax: Starts the series as a kid who knows exactly who he is (a proud aristh in The Greatest Military in the galaxy) and where he’s from (andalite culture) and just wants to get home.  Ends the series identified as “Aximili of Earth,” with a relentless wanderlust and a reputation for undercutting traditional andalite power structures.

#8: Establishes Ax as a lonely kid under enormous pressure to conform to two different cultures in two different ways, and sets him on the path to balancing those conflicting demands.

#18: Probably the apex of Ax’s embracing andaliteness at the expense of humanity, forcing him to realize that people are people and there’s no rank-ordering entire groups.

#28: Confronts Ax with the nastiest sides of humanity — animal testing and factory farming — to cast him as a witness to whom his human friends must justify themselves.

#38: Allows Ax to measure himself and his team against the andalites’ standards for competency and morality alike, and to find it is the andalites who are wanting.

#46: Probably the nadir of Ax’s embracing andaliteness, with all his prior experience culminating in deep longing to be human in light of the Air Force’s unflinching nobility and the craven imperialism of the Andalite Electorate.

#52: Culminates the conflict between Ax’s cultures through leading him to conclude that his friends specifically and humans as a whole don’t have to be perfect to have fundamental rights and dignity.

Cassie: Starts the war deeply uncomfortable with major decisions but nevertheless convinced that there’s a single “right” answer to every situation, largely only involved at all for love of her friends.  Ends the war as a “one woman army” (emphasis on one) with a nuanced morality system and a willingness to go her own way rather than setting herself on fire to keep others warm.

#4: Forces her out of her comfort zone and into making decisions for the entire team, causing her to discover that she’s braver and stronger than she ever realized.

#9: Crystalizes Cassie’s willingness to embrace and protect the Earth in spite of fully recognizing its inherent brutality.

#14: Undeniably inane, but gets some great humor out of Cassie being a sweet straightforward kid and a terrible liar.

#19: Establishes Cassie’s Achilles heel: that she functions brilliantly with no one to watch out for but herself, but doesn’t play well with others.  Also knocks her off her high horse through forcing her to realize that many enemy soldiers are just as clueless as she is.

#24: Acts as a check-in after the events of the David trilogy, showing just how jaded the kids have become that Cassie and Marco find violent alien abduction to be little more than a minor annoyance.

#29: Plays to Cassie’s strengths — working alone, developing her unusual allies, taking care of her friends, remaining focused under fire — to show her at her most awesome and draw out her competencies.

#34: Gives Cassie a glimpse of what it means to be a compassionate but still powerful leader.

#39: Sets up the end of the series through using the wolf morph to show Cassie’s ability to keep running and changing and being many things at once (both figuratively and literally) after all her friends have fallen behind.

#44: Foreshadows Cassie’s breakup with Jake through contrasting her ability to get by alone in Australia with his “zombielike” state of lost dependence while she’s gone.

#50: Drives a wedge between Cassie and her team, with the consolation prize that she makes a compassionate and discerning move which ultimately sets the Animorphs up to win the war.

Rachel: Starts the series as a restless “mall rat” who enjoys risk and challenge for their own sake, and has casually absolute faith in her own abilities.  Ends the series by telling the reader outright that she’s scared, but that she must do what’s right for her team; uses her last minutes to apologize to Tom for killing him and to seek reassurance from the Ellimist that she made a difference.

#2: Establishes that she’s cocky and fun-loving even after being confronted with the realities of war, but also that she’ll gladly die for love of her friends, from Tobias to Melissa.

#7: Brings out Rachel’s truly reckless side through backing her into a corner — which is when she’s most dangerous.  Also serves as maybe the biggest blow the Animorphs ever inflict on the yeerks with minimal loss of life, crystalizing Rachel’s sense of self-righteousness.

#12: Shows the struggle hidden under her role as “the strong one,” both for her team and for her sisters.

#17: Involves Rachel interrogating how her friends see her, including her awareness that this team would never be able to talk itself into continuously reentering the hell of war without her.

#22: Confronts Rachel with the darkest depths of her own brutality, but also establishes that she’s willing to be the one to do the hard jobs of the war if it keeps the others from having to listen to David’s pleas for help.

#27: Fully cements Rachel’s relationship with Tobias through allowing her to realize what’s really important to her.

#32: Uses one of those awesome SF identity premises to give Rachel the chance to literally argue with herself, and — by showing how much each of her halves relies on the other — shows how all the facets of her identity, ugly and pretty alike, make her who she is.

#37: Contains a couple different truly awesome moments with Rachel realizing that her strengths are not Jake’s, nor are they Marco’s, but that the team will carry her through at the end of the day.

#42: A little silly, but gives Rachel the chance to out-bluster even helmacrons and to force the hard decision that Jake hesitates to make — that they need to sacrifice Marco to save their own lives.

#48: Frustratingly inconsequential, but brings together the disparate threads of her conflict with Crayak, her conflict with David, and her conflict with Jake, and culminates with Rachel confronting Cassie with the reality that if Rachel herself doesn’t do the awful things (kill David, kill Tom) then no one else will.

Marco: Starts the war as a never-serious kid who is nevertheless familiar enough with the reality of death to try and hit the brakes before inevitable tragedy gets too close to his loved ones.  Ends the war as a ruthlessly machiavellian strategist who believes in the necessity of matricide and even war crimes to keep the planet spinning on its axis.

#5: Contains the hilarity of Ax-wrangling and the utter horror of Marco realizing that Visser One thoughtlessly destroyed the lives of his entire family as an incidental aside on her rise to power, establishing early that he’s willing to burn down the world to protect his family.

#10: Gives Marco the chance to call bullshit on the chee’s moralizing about their own nonintervention in the face of massive injustice, delineating his own code of ethics.

#15: Forces Marco to confront his own trauma and becomes the first time that he must make a major ethical choice with no good solutions — and, by no coincidence, is all about him turning into a shark.

#20: Brings out the worst in Marco through emphasizing his mistrust (and lack of compassion) for strangers, his possessiveness of his friends, and his willingness to be a bully when David fails to see the big picture.

#25: Becomes the book where Marco calls himself “Mr. Ruthless” and also sees himself in a motherless pair of baby seals, where he expresses admiration for Jake’s growing manipulativeness and successfully distracts everyone from waiting around for their own deaths with really bad “dumb blond” jokes.

#30: Involves Marco giving an account of himself (as Cates would say) through justifying his decision to the reader as he plans his mom’s execution.

#35: Acts as some much-needed comic relief because of Marco’s refusal to take himself seriously, while continuing arc of his coming apart at the seams when he can’t define himself by his family.

#40: Has a deeply troubling after-school special vibe that culminates in Marco discovering that *gasp* disabled people are people too, and... Sorry, I can’t come up with anything nice to say about this book.

#45: Shows that (unlike Jake) Marco can find the balance between protecting his family and protecting the planet, and also that Marco’s brilliance has a very very dark side when it comes to manipulating Peter.

#51: Again acts as much-needed comic relief during one of the bleakest points in the war, while also showing that Marco may have overcome his intial mutual hostility with Tobias but that he’s also whistling as the world burns at a time when Jake and Rachel could both really use fewer jokes and more emotional support.

Anon, I promise I will do my best to narrow this list down, but your ask sent me off into rapturous enumerations about the tightly-woven character arcs in this series and the fact that even the ghostwritten books are remarkably consistent in light of the big picture for each of the six kids.