#cassie loses just as much of her old self as jake and rachel don't tell me she doesn't

[myhyperfixationisiforgot]

animorphs was like yeah what if you (child soldier) promised your best friend (also a child soldier) that you would save him, and that you would kill him before letting the body-snatching parasites take him. what if you realized that you can't ever do both. you can't save him without the yeerks. you can't kill him because if he dies everyone you've ever known dies.

what if you literally have to cut him open while he screams and pleads for you to stop and kill him. he hates you for saving him. he hates himself for hating you. you hate yourself for doing it, and you hate him for making you choose. all you can do is wash the blood off and go eat dinner with your family. you will wonder if what you did was worth it for the rest of your life.

#cassie sort of wants to die and also wants to be saved and also wants to save someone and wants there to be a right answer so badly #she bounces between ruthlessly killing people and ruthlessly saving people as she tries to find a middle ground #cassie loses just as much of her old self as jake and rachel don't tell me she doesn't #cassie animorphs #ax animorphs #animorphs #cw gore #book 29 the sickness

[myhyperfixationisiforgot]

Cassie was such a wild character to put into the Animorphs. She's a prodigy. She's genuinely kind. Her parents are veterinarians, and it's given her a wildly complicated relationship with empathy and mercy. She is one of the very few people who sympathizes deeply with the yeerks, to the point of becoming both host and yeerk, often to the detriment of her own position within the team. She routinely performs what's essentially magic (even to the Andalites) to get herself out of impossible situations. Out of all the Animorphs, Cassie's probably the closest one to suicidal. She won't die because she desperately wants to help others but it's destroying her. She bounces between ruthlessly killing and ruthlessly saving people because she hates both. Her entire narrative is about horrors of seeing the enemy as individuals with full lives and diverse opinions, and her frustration with how the rest of her team can just ignore that. She's viscerally aware of and angry with the way the others think about her - both as a naive child who won't do the hard things and as some gentle prophet offering absolution. Jake and Rachel end the series as monsters but Cassie views herself as beyond redemption from the very beginning.

#listen I am a massive cassie fan #she's my favorite animorph by a mile #i was also a kid who grew up on a farm with a weird relationship with death and kindness and cassie just fit when i was very small #cassie's arc is about knowing you are a monster and trying so hard not to be that you accidentally destroy your sense of self #cassie loses just as much of her old self as jake and rachel don't tell me she doesn't #animorphs #cassie animorphs