Back in 2021 I wrote a blog post about Animorphs as an anti-war war story, based on my memories of reading the books as a kid. Then I decided to go ahead and reread the series to see if those opinions held up. Unfortunately, I kinda stalled out after the reread of the first two books, because writing the post for #3 took much longer than expected, and then I lost write access to the blog so I wasn't really motivated to finish the post. But it's finished now! If I'm lucky, I might have blog access back sometime this month or next. In the mean time, I'll just put it here. So:

Two down, sixty to go! This time I'm only covering one book, #3: The Encounter. Like before, I'll be spoiling the book under discussion pretty thoroughly, but I'll try to avoid spoilers for books I haven't covered yet.

The books aren't getting any less traumatic. There's an attempted suicide scene (I'll warn you when we get there) and, later, suicidal ideation. There's some animal death, including predation that's a bit gory in the book, and implied torture of an alien that the narrator refuses to describe.

There's not much new vocabulary. The Yeerk supply ship never gets an official name; the Animorphs call it the truck ship, but not consistently, so I'll stick with “supply ship.” I didn't mention them by name when they were introduced in #1, but Dracon Beams are the Yeerks' handheld and ship-mounted energy weapons.

The Synopsis

Tobias, still trapped in his hawk morph, encounters a cloaked Yeerk supply ship. The Animorphs plan to expose the invasion by hijacking the ship and disabling its cloak over the city. Distressed by his hawk instincts driving him to eat a rat, Tobias attempts suicide, then abandons himself to living as a hawk. He returns to himself when he helps a person escape a Hork-Bajir-Controller. The other Animorphs board the supply ship as fish, but are trapped in the water tank. Tobias takes refuge on the ship's vulnerable hull until he can steal a Dracon Beam, which he uses to destroy the ship and free the others. Everyone escapes, but the Yeerks are able to cover up evidence of the wreck.

The Website

A bit of fun before the story begins: The book opens with a shoutout to the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, including their website at www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu. That address still works, though it now redirects to the simpler raptor.umn.edu.

Archive.org's Wayback Machine doesn't record what the site looked like in August 1996, when the book was published, but it does have the version from December of the same year. The current site even has a red-tailed hawk activity book aimed a little younger than Animorphs' target audience. (Here's the activity book via archive.org just in case.)

The Discussion

And now for something less fun.

The story is not at all shy about its theme: This is a book about Tobias losing and finding his humanity. Two pages in, he admits, “It's only been a few weeks, and already I'm forgetting things about being human.” He can't remember his eye color; he later says he can't remember his face at all. He has to stop himself from referring to hawks as “we” rather than “they.” Musing that he'd have to ask the others what a morph is like leads to the intrusive thought, “Then you can ask them what it was like to be human. Maybe they can tell me about that, too.” (p.41)

While all that is weighing on him, his hawk instincts get away from him and he kills and eats a rat. This causes him to panic. He flies to the mall, where he knows Rachel will be.

This is where the discussion of attempted suicide begins.

Actually, calling it that might not be entirely correct. The scene isn't about whether Tobias wants to live or die, but whether he's a human or a hawk. He has three brushes with death, and while his intentions differ, he never actually wants or intends to die. (Then again, I don't know a ton about suicide, but I get the impression that not actually wanting or intending to die isn't terribly uncommon among those who attempt it.)

First, he dives at the mall door, intending to “end this right now” (p.88), but by that he means, “awaken [himself] from this nightmare.” He survives because a bystander (implied to be Marco) opens the door.

The second attempt, inside the mall, is much the same. He says he wants to “wake up” with his wings replaced with human arms and legs. He silently screams his name and that he is human. (p.89). He speeds toward a wall, but when Rachel calls out to him, he stops himself and avoids serious injury.

He falls, and Rachel catches him. The crowd presses in to try to shoo him away, and that leads to the third time he almost dies: The hawk brain panics and tries to escape, flying at top speed toward a skylight. Tobias doesn't want to die, or even to “wake up” anymore, but he's too tired to resist and resigns himself to the inevitable: “I couldn't fight it anymore. The hawk had won” (p. 91). Marco saves his life by throwing a baseball to shatter the skylight, but Tobias has still lost the battle.

End of suicide discussion.

“I let it go. I surrendered,” Tobias tells us. “Tobias, a boy whose face I could no longer remember, no longer existed.” (p. 91). He starts referring to “the human in my head” (p.93) as a separate entity from himself, the way he talked about “the hawk” in earlier chapters. By day, he lives as a hawk. By night, his human self halfheartedly haunts him, but mostly, “the human Tobias really just wanted to sleep. He wanted to disappear and let the hawk rule. He wanted to accept that he was no longer human.” (p. 93.) He mourns his humanity, but he's resigned to having lost it.

What finally pulls him out of it is finding something outside himself to fight for instead of fighting against the hawk.

Tobias the hawk tells us that he spots a squealing, two-legged creature being pursued by a bigger, bladed biped. He enjoys watching predators hunt, but when he recognizes the “predator” as a Hork-Bajir, he suddenly remembers his human friends and realizes that the “prey” was a human being, too, and his squeals are desperate cries for help.

Tobias the human tells us, “It was like opening your eyes after a dream” (p. 95). His much-desired awakening wasn't something he could beat into himself. It was the realization that he couldn't let the human fall prey to the Hork-Bajir and other Controllers chasing him. “I couldn't. Me,” he realizes: “Tobias.” (p. 97)

Having realized that his link to his humanity is in fighting to protect his fellow humans from the Yeerks, that's what Tobias spends the rest of the book doing. Small details cement that he's seeing himself as human: He refuses to describe or even watch Visser Three brutally punish a Controller, largely out of pity for the innocent Hork-Bajir host—a choice “the hawk” wouldn't have made. He describes himself as “a bird that was no bird” (p. 137) (which isn't entirely true, but I'll get to that).

Finally, there's the matter of Price-Cut Polly. In the opening chapters, Tobias and Rachel free Polly, a female red-tailed hawk, from a used car dealership that used her as a mascot. She appears a few times, tempting Tobias toward the hawk life. At the end, Tobias escapes after the destruction of the supply ship because the Yeerks mistake Polly for him and shoot her down. In the final chapter, Tobias tells Rachel that he knew he was human when he realized that the hawk's death made him sad: ‹That's a human emotion› (p. 153).

He realizes something else, too: He's human, but he's also a hawk. It's only in the last pages that Tobias's journey for this book concludes. After spending so long fighting the hawk for his humanity, he finally accepts that both his hawk and human sides are him.

So that's #3's theme, but what about the overall theme of the series? Like all the early books, it's about finding a reason to fight, so it's not overtly anti-war. However, Tobias makes an observation about the nastiness of this war when Visser Three executes that Hork-Bajir-Controller: The host is being punished for the Yeerk's mistake. “He had lost his freedom to the Yeerk in his head. Now, he was about to lose his life, for something that he had no real control over.” This “was one of the terrible things about our battle with the Yeerks” (p. 136).

It's also one of the terrible things about real war. Innocent people get caught in the crossfire. Sometimes noncombatants become collateral damage. Sometimes they're deliberately targeted. Some people are forced to fight against their will. Others are tricked into “volunteering” without knowing what they're signing up for. Most soldiers, to my knowledge, aren't puppeteered by brain-controlling parasites, so their actual culpability varies. Even so, they have a habit of being sent to grisly deaths they don't deserve.

How about that running motif of the kids not being action heroes? Tobias gets a cool action hero scene when he figures out that he can camp out on the supply ship's hull because the Yeerks won't risk damaging it by shooting at him. Taxxon-Controllers emerge to fight him on foot, but Tobias steals one of their Dracon beams and uses it to slice the ship clean open, destroying it and freeing his friends.

This is tempered by several things. First, while it's clever of Tobias to find that safety, it was temporary either way: The ship just had to to finish filling its tank and take off, at which point Tobias would either slide off or suffocate in space. Second, while Tobias is being clever, the others are trapped in the hold and giving themselves up for dead. Third, the only reason Tobias even tries stealing the Dracon beam is because he thinks his friends are as good as dead, so he has nothing left to lose. Sure, Tobias gets to look cool and have agency in the story, but everyone (except Polly) survives because Tobias got lucky. (Well, that, and Visser Three's impatience and lack of tactics, but Tobias can't really take credit for that.)

Sure, many action heroes get by on luck (or villainous incompetence), but they tend to win in the end. The Animorphs don't. They escape alive, and even inconvenience the Yeerks a little, but they also lose their only shot at exploiting the Yeerks' big weakness. The Animorphs are right back where they started, and the Yeerks only lose a glorified truck and a crew of cannon fodder whose lives mean nothing to Visser Three.

It's significant that the Animorphs' goal here still isn't to fight the Yeerks any more than necessary, but to expose the invasion and let the proper authorities take it from there. They're still not thinking of themselves as warriors.

On the other hand, Tobias does destroy the ship and everyone does escape despite helicopters and bug fighters and even the Blade Ship itself bearing down on them. It's part of the undercurrent of hope that runs through many of these early books: The Yeerks aren't invincible, so slowing them down until the Andalites arrive might just work. Survival can be snatched from the jaws of death.

This is relevant to the jus ad bellum analysis in that the Animorphs aren't picking an unwinnable fight, because the Yeerks can be fought.

Additionally, for what it's worth, the Animorphs are trying to explore reasonable alternatives to getting themselves involved in a war. Admittedly, that alternative is getting someone else involved in a war, but reasonable alternatives are scarce in a war of enslavement and genocide, and as far as the kids know, the combined might of Earth's militaries stands a better chance of stopping the Yeerks than five teenagers, one of whom is a bird.

What about jus in bello? Visser Three fails hard, obviously: The way he treats his own troops is bad enough, but Tobias makes a point to remind us that the Hork-Bajir hosts are innocent bystanders.

The Animorphs don't actually get into much combat. Tobias does attack the Hork-Bajir-Controller chasing the fleeing human and the Taxxon-Controller on the supply ship, which has the usual problem with fighting Controllers.

What's more troubling is what the rest of the Animorphs plan to do after they get stuck in the ship's hold. Once they accept that they aren't getting out, Rachel contacts Tobias and pleads with him: ‹Listen, Tobias, we can't be taken alive! Do you understand? If there's anything you can do…anything!› She asks him to try to destroy the ship. Failing that, she says, ‹We'll tread water here. We have to be ready for when we get to the mother ship. Then we'll morph into other animals and go down fighting.›

First, let's look at going down fighting. It sounds heroic, but it's really just senseless violence. They know it won't do anything to slow the invasion. Once on the Yeerk mothership, they'd need some kind of deus ex machina to have even a chance of escape. Killing in self-defense when necessary is justifiable (c.f. CCC 2263-2265), but the Animorphs have already given up on saving their lives. I don't think I need to work too hard to defend the assertion that killing people for nothing is bad.

Does it matter that the people they'd be killing are bad guys? No. Killing people just for being bad guys is not morally acceptable; you need an actual, practical reason. If being a “bad guy” makes a person's life so worthless that ridding the world of them is justifiable even if it makes no practical difference, then anyone who can be plausibly labeled a bad guy automatically becomes fair game for extermination. I really hope I don't have to explain why that's bad.

Besides, it's not even true. As Tobias reminded us just a few pages earlier, the hosts are innocent. So the Animorphs wouldn't be killing just bad guys, but also killing innocent people for no benefit. Admittedly, that's a bit of a gray area where Taxxons are concerned since they joined the Yeerks voluntarily, but it's not as if “voluntary” hosts have the freedom to change their minds after the fact.

Incidentally, the “it's okay because we're fighting the bad guys” attitude is exactly what I hated about the books toward the end of the series, and it's exactly what author K.A. Applegate says the whole series was supposed to be showing for the evil that it is. (If you don't mind spoilers, check out her letter to fans dissatisfied with the ending, and maybe also my blog post that kicked off this reread project.)

So that's it for “going down fighting” as an end in itself, but it would be disingenuous of me to leave it at that. Rachel is pretty clear about the benefit they expect from their acts of violence: They want to die rather than hand the Yeerk empire four more morph-capable Controllers. They have to fight to accomplish that, because otherwise they'd be captured rather than killed. Given the way Visser Three can singlehandedly turn a battle around with his monster morphs, it's a safe bet that whatever loss of life they cause (including their own) would be less than that caused by four new morph-capable Controllers.

I'm not going to get into the ethics of suicide here. There is, at least, a case to be made in favor of killing yourself in legitimate defense of another's life, and that keeping four morph-capable bodies out of Yeerk hands (or, uh, palps) fits that bill.

Just one little problem: They don't need to kill anyone to accomplish that goal. They're in a tank of water; they could just drown themselves. Even suicide isn't necessary, though, when they could trap themselves in morph. Sure, they probably won't live long after that, but they won't have to kill themselves or anyone else to avoid being taken as hosts. With that on the table, I don't see any justification for their plan to get themselves killed by murdering as many Controllers as possible.

I don't blame the young teenagers for not thinking of this, of course, but lack of culpability isn't the same as justification.

One more morality thing I'll mention in passing: Unless I missed something in the previous two, book 3 page 50 gives us our first “Oh my God.” One of my pet peeves about the series is the way this turns into the Animorphs' catch phrase later on. It's annoying, frankly, that a series that dances around even the mildest swear words by saying things like “a word Ax must have learned from humans” or “some words I didn't think Cassie knew” has no problem with outright blasphemy. You'd think, if nothing else, mid-90s Scholastic would have been leery of offending religious parents.

Something I'm much more fond of is the character writing. I won't attempt an in-depth analysis but there are a few interesting character beats that I'd like to mention here.

First, Tobias is reckless. In the opening scene at the car lot, he starts trying to free the captive hawk pretty much as soon as he gets there. Not only does he not wait for Rachel to be fully morphed and ready to go, but he doesn't even confirm that she's gotten there yet. And this is a risky stunt to begin with. That's impatience as much as recklessness, but at the climax of the book, Visser Three is the one being impatient. Tobias's exploitation of that mistake works, and I can't think of a better idea, but it's still reckless. The same goes for his earlier rescue of the other Animorphs when, in wolf morph, they get in a fight with some real wolves over a kill and Tobias distracts the wolves by stealing the prey himself. And while in-universe criticism of his actions while not in his right mind would be seriously unfair, I'd have a hard time arguing that Tobias isn't being reckless during the mall incident.

Since I recall there being at least one major example in the next book Tobias narrates, I'll have to keep an eye out to see just how much of a pattern this recklessness is beyond this book.

What's undeniably a pattern with Tobias is that the kid can't catch a break. It's as if he's punished for being happy. The rat incident happens when he's feeling good for a change, thinking of how his being a hawk can benefit the team. He makes this connection explicitly: “I guess it was because I was feeling good. Feeling relaxed” (p. 84). Daring to be happy for a moment nearly costs him his life. For a while, at least, it does cost him his humanity.

But of course we get a lot of Tobias characterization in a Tobias book. What surprised me on rereading, though, is how much this book gives us about Marco.

Probably the biggest deal is that Marco saves Tobias's life twice at the mall: First when he (unrecognized by Tobias) opens the door, and then when he throws a baseball to shatter the skylight on which Tobias is about to break his neck. It nicely illustrates Marco's ability to react quickly and think on his feet (as well as a powerful throwing arm I don't think is ever mentioned again).

It's significant that Marco was the one to break the skylight, because that kind of thing risks attracting attention. He could have been arrested for vandalism, and probably also shoplifting unless he just happened to be carrying a baseball with him to the mall that day. Worst case, he gets harassed by a Controller cop and forced into a Sharing-run community service program. So he's sticking his neck out pretty far, for a character largely defined in the earliest books by his desire to avoid doing that. All for Tobias, whom he doesn't particularly like and who definitely doesn't like him.

Perhaps even more significant is the plain fact that Marco sees Tobias in trouble and immediately jumps in to help. For a guy who makes such a big deal about not wanting to fight, Marco can be pretty heroic.

The exchange in the barn when the team debates whether to check out the Yeerk ship is also illustrative: Marco argues against it, but once the others decide in favor, he immediately shifts to figuring out how to keep the others from getting killed. Sure, his “No” sounds like a refusal at first—Rachel interprets it as such—but he follows it up by saying, “I meant no, not in the morning. If all of us skip school on the same day and later there's some trouble with the Yeerks, don't you think Chapman might put two and two together?” (p. 29). That's “all of us,” not “all of you.” That he will be with them is, to him, a foregone conclusion.

Tobias doesn't comment on this. What he does say is, “It bothered me that Marco was right.” He attributes this to the fear of what else Marco was right about. But I don't think it's an accident that he doesn't clarify this until after saying Marco is “a pain in the butt.” Even if Tobias didn't intend for his narration to imply that Marco's being a pain is why his being right was upsetting, I suspect Applegate did.

To be fair, Tobias is right. Marco is a pain in the butt. I didn't mention it last time, but in #2 (p. 48-49), Marco makes a rather mean crack about not being able to be friends with someone who eats mice. He walks it back with a self-deprecating crack after realizing he's gone too far, but that's “as close as Marco could get to an actual apology.” In #3, it's Tobias who makes a mouse-eating joke (p. 106) and Marco is the only one who laughs.

Just before that, there's an exchange in which Marco (“complaining as usual” as Tobias later puts it) gripes about the cave where they'll be hiding, Tobias makes a sarcastic remark about not being able to get them rooms at a pricey hotel instead, and Marco jokes that it's fine as long as the cave has cable.

I'm pretty sure Marco is just trying to cut the tension, but Tobias is finding him genuinely irritating. They both tend to use sarcasm, but where Tobias's is bitter and scornful, Marco's is usually just his style of humor. My impression is that Marco isn't generally trying to be mean, and when he is mean, it's often unintentional, as in #2. I also don't think Marco dislikes Tobias (and I'm just now realizing that the crack in #2 implies that he does consider Tobias a friend). Tobias, however, genuinely seems to dislike Marco. That's entirely fair, since whether obliviously, intentionally, or somewhere in between, Marco has been awfully unkind to Tobias.

This character conflict doesn't get a lot of focus in this book, and it certainly isn't resolved in the third of about sixty books featuring these characters. But Marco is the last of the five human Animorphs to narrate a book, so we spend the first four seeing him through the others' eyes, and each book leading up to his narratory debut shows us more about him than the last.

The Conclusion

This is another early Animorphs book about a child soldier finding a reason to fight, but it's also extremely overt about how horrible the war is, in so many words. It's the third book in a row where the kids get in way over their heads, fail to achieve their goal, and barely avoid getting killed or captured. So while I still think it's a stretch to call the early books anti-war, per se, its message is still pretty clearly that war is really, really bad.

It's also interesting reading the series in order, now that I have some decades of distance from reading them as a kid. I first read #1 and #2 in order, but after that, it was whatever I could get my hands on. It was a while before I borrowed #3 from the library. Reading in order, it's striking how much the Animorphs keep failing.

While they have a little more luck over (some of) the next few books, it's still going to be a while before they can take credit for an honest-to-goodness victory, and meanwhile it'll take some fortuitous outside interference to keep them alive. It becomes increasingly obvious that this is not a series about teenage action heroes kicking alien butt; it's about scared kids in way over their heads and just barely surviving. It's too early to say if the series is actually “anti-war” but it certainly doesn't trivialize violence like a blockbuster action movie might.

The overall outlook for the series is looking good. Maybe not for the characters, though.