If this is your first time dipping into the Animorphs Re-Read, I strongly suggest you head back to the beginning and start there unless you’re already familiar with the books. Alternatively, check out the Animorphs Re-Read tag page for a list of every post in the series.
We’re finally back to the main series! It’ll be a while before I tackle the next Megamorphs or Chronicle book, so you can look forward to a few months of weekly original-flavour Animorphs. Today’s entry covers #13: The Change, which inclues some major developments for Tobias and is thus the most important book in the entire series. I’m not even kidding here.
BE AFRAID...of Tobias' weird half-bird face in the second image. Yikes.
The Change kicks off with Tobias being his usual woobie-but-we-love-him-anyway self: he flies to the school and watches the other Animorphs for a while, then discovers that Rachel has been chosen to win an award for outstanding achievement in the field of School. It’s a Friday, and the award ceremony is on the next Monday, which means Rachel would have invited all of the others to go already…but not Tobias. Because he’s stuck as a bird.
LIFE, WHY MUST YOU BE SO CRUEL?!
Anyway, that’s our ‘B-plot’ for this volume. It’s a pretty compelling one, and not just because it involves Tobias and is thus fascinating by default. There’s always a danger that Tobias’ situation will lose some of its impact if it seems like he isn’t conflicted about being stuck as a hawk; reminding the reader of everything he lost reinforces his status as the groups’ “first casualty’ in the war against the Yeerks.
The main plot involves Tobias using his keen hawk vision to track hidden entrances to the Yeerk Pool so he can identify more Controllers. He flies over to some of his usual stalking spots with Rachel and tells her not to keep things from him just because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings:
<No big deal,> I said. <The only thing is, don’t hide stuff from me because you think it will hurt my feelings, okay? I can’t handle you feeling sorry for me.>
<l don’t feel sorry for you,> Rachel lied.
<Good. Because, you know, how you think about me is sort of important.>
I was going to do The Face here, but I can’t seem to find the image in our media library and my internet connection is so slow right now that I’m sick of looking. So here, you’ll have to make do with my clever facsimile.
face.jpg
WHOOOOOOOOOOO!
Seamless.
On the way to the first secret Yeerk Pool entrance (which is hidden in a car wash, of all places), Tobias spaces out and ends up flying over the forest near Cassie’s barn. He gets back on course, only to end up in the same spot again. Something is afoot! Or atalon, even!
But before they can investigate Tobias’ internal GPS breakdown, they notice something even stranger: a tree nearby slides aside as though on wheels, revealing what seems to be yet another entrance to the Yeerk Pool. Two Hork-Bajir come up through a hole underneath the fake tree, but they’re not on a mission for the Yeerks – in fact, an alarm goes off as soon as they’re above ground. They’re quickly pursued by thirty armed human Controllers.
Now, up to this point in the series we’ve only seen the Hork-Bajir as the Storm Troopers of the Yeerk army: they’re the omnipresent cannon fodder of the Animorphs world. But you have to remember that they didn’t join the Yeerks willingly. They were enslaves, which means that the Animorphs are wounding (and potentially killing) unwilling pawns of the Yeerks when they fight the Hork-Bajir. Thankfully, the series doesn’t shy away from exploring the moral complexities inherent in this situation, and this book is where it really kicks the ethical quandaries into high gear.
Tobias and Rachel guide the Hork-Bajir to safety from the air, at least until one of them gets knocked into a ditch. It turns out that the two Hork-Bajir are a couple, and that the one who fell in the ditch is the other one’s wife.
Now, this is where I’m officially obliged to go off on a mini rant about how alien species wouldn’t necessarily form family units that are identical to our own and heteronormativity and blah-de-blah, but let’s be realistic here: this is a kid’s book series, and I’m impressed enough with Applegate for not just using the Hork-Bajir as endless Stormtrooper stand-ins that I’ll give the other stuff a pass.
Stormtroopers are inherently funny.
Speaking of such things:
“How exactly do you tell a man Hork-Bajir from a woman Hork-Bajir?” Marco asked. “Do the women put makeup on their wrist blades? Do they use nail polish on those big nasty toes of theirs?”
[...]
“I mean, do female Hork-Bajir cry at ‘chick’ movies?” Marco went on, talking mostly to himself. “Do they get all goo-goo when they see a baby?”
MARCO.
They decide to go back to the free Hork-Bajir, who they left hiding in a cave, to see what he wants to do. It turns out that his name is ‘Jara Hamee’, and he decides to prove that he isn’t a controller by…uh, slicing a gash into his head so deep that his brain is visible. Naturally, everyone is a bit shaken after witnessing this.
<Did you see a Yeerk in there in his head?> I asked Ax shakily. <No,> Ax said, just as shaken as I was. <No Yeerk.>
<Did that scare the pee out of you, Ax-man, or doesn’t that kind of thing bother you Andalites?>
<l am as peeless as you, Tobias, my friend.>
Heh.
A bunch of Controllers come to retrieve Jara Hamee, so Tobias comes up with a distraction plan: someone can morph into Jara Hamee and lead the Yeerks away with aerial support from the rest of the Animorphs. Rachel volunteers, which puts Tobias in an awkward position seeing as how it was his idea; if she gets injured or killed, he’ll feel responsible. (And in case it wasn’t obvious by now, Tobias has kind of a Thing for Rachel. I imagine Ax would be devastated if he found out. Although they’re technically uncle and nephew thanks to Elfangor’s inter-species multiverse philandering, so I guess I have to stop making bromance jokes now.)
(Ah, who am I kidding? BROMANCE FOREVER.)
Tobias gets ready to help Rachel flee the small army of Controllers coming after her, but his plans are cut short when he unexpectedly teleports to the meadow where Jara Hamee’s wife is trying to escape from Visser Three and a second gang of human Controllers. And since Red-Tailed Hawks aren’t usually endowed with the ability to warp space-time, that can mean only one thing: the Ellimist is back. I mean, Tobias doesn’t figure it out until later, but it’s kind of obvious. Dude just loves screwing with the laws of physics.
He's been finding it increasingly difficult to get work since The Next Generation ended.
He manages to save the female Hork-Bajir (aka ‘Ket Halpak’), then brings her to the cave where they’ve been hiding her husband. Rachel floats the idea of just showing the two Hork-Bajir to the media, which, again, is something the series never completely gets around. I mean yes, there are probably tons of newspapers and TV stations controlled by the Yeerks, but it would be very difficult indeed to cover up a pair of real-life sentient aliens and a bunch of people who can turn into animals – not to mention Ax.
They decide to find a safe place for the Hork-Bajir couple. Tobias immediately suggests a pristine and secluded valley he knows about…despite having never been there in his entire life. What could be going on??
That night, Tobias goes to see how Ax is doing on guard duty in front of the cave. He has a brief conversation about Hork-Bajir language, during which it is revealed that Ax is pretty snobbish about how Andalites are superior to the Hork-Bajir in pretty much every way. Tobias asks why the two Hork-Bajir seem to distrust him so much, given that the Andalites tried to save their species from the Yeerks. Of course, we know from reading The Andalite Chronicles that the whole ‘defend the Hork-Bajir homeworld’ thing wasn’t quite as clear-cut as Ax seems to think. Complexity!
Their bromantic sojourn in the moonlit woods is interrupted when Tobias suddenly becomes aware that a dozen ‘tracker’ Taxxon are coming right towards them. Of course, he has no idea what a tracker Taxxon is and can’t actually see them approaching; he just knows they’re out there. Because the Ellimist is involved.
Tobias leads the Hork-Bajir to his magical mystery valley, where he is accosted by (wait for it) the Ellimist. Or I guess I should say THE ELLIMIST, since that’s how he talks. He offers to not-interfere with human affairs again so as to not-save the free Hork-Bajir, which naturally prompts Tobias to ask ‘why me?’
“Thanks. That really cheers me up,” I said. “Why me? Why stick me with this job? What am I, some kind of hero?”
The Ellimist didn’t laugh. “Tobias, you are a beginning. You are a point on which an entire time line may turn.”
Tobias is not only Elfangor’s son thanks to some crazy time shenanigans, he’s also ‘a point on which an entire time line may turn’, which I am going to interpret as THE CHOSEN ONE. Hell yes.
The Ellimist vanishes again after some more cryptic mumb-jumbo, and we learn that the Hork-Bajir actually use their terrifying wrist blades to eat bark. Yes, their natural diet consists of tree bark.
There’s another Yeerk attack, this time involving helicopters, and Tobias ends up on the verge of being eaten alive by a raccoon. (Man, these books don’t paint cute animals in a particular positive light.) The Ellimist reappears to offer him a totally free and not-coerced decision: to do what the Ellimist wants and become human again, or…uh, get eaten alive. Yeah. Naturally Tobias accepts, but there’s a catch: he gets his morphing power back, but his default form is still a hawk.
There’s some more plot-related stuff here, but it boils down to ‘they save the two Hork-Bajir and give them a permanent home away from the Yeerks’. This remains a major plot point for the rest of the series. (Oh, and the Hork-Bajir couple are going to be parents soon, d’awww.) More importantly, Tobias’ timeline gets even more screwed up when the Ellimist sends him back in time (in bird form) to communicate with his old, human self. He tells himself to go through the construction site with Jake, thus ensuring that he will eventually go on to become stuck as a bird.
Because he’s secretly happy that way, do you see!
But wait, it gets even more insane! Tobias’ default form is now a hawk, but he never got a human morph. He can still acquire while in hawk form, though, so he acquires himself while time travelling, thus giving himself the ability to ‘become human’ for two hours at a time…or he could stay that way permanently. Which he doesn’t, because hawk 4 life, yo.
Obviously, this is a major development for his character, while also giving him a way to participate more fully in the gang’s missions from this point onwards. It’s the book’s ending that really gets me, though. Tobias goes to Rachel’s award ceremony thing (remember that?) and this happens:
And then she was right there in front of me. I saw her eyes sweep over me, indifferent, and then look past me toward the door.
She stopped walking.
She turned to me. Her eyes were wide.
“Hi, Rachel,” I said, with a human voice.
:’)
And that’s all for this week! Come back next week for book #14: 404 Error The Unknown!
Wow, that’s some extra-scintillating dialogue this time around. And seriously, do they even LET you put inter-species multiverse philandering in MG books anymore? WHOOOO, indeed!
(Also, I want you to know I always picture your face as The Face, even though I’ve technically seen your face. Let’s just pretend that’s not creepy.)
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This is now the happiest day of my life.
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Oh Marco haven’t Arnold Schwarzenegger movies taught you anything?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQvnZOR_oIk
On the subject of Stormtroopers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV7Ha3VDbzE
Also, I think there’s an Animorphs novel where the Animorphs steal a plane and fly it into a yeerk controlled building… um… WHOOOO?
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The one major ripoff of Animorphs?? We only get half the number of Tobias/Ax books compared to the rest of the characters…
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