Reviews with content warning for War - The Discovery

Book one of three in the David trilogy - three books that detail a specific plot where the Animorphs invite a new human into their group of guerrilla child soldiers.

Spoilers: it doesn't end well.

Throughout all this, David had just stared at me. But slowly, without me noticing at first, tears had begun to well up in his eyes, and now I jerked myself away. I was panting. Feeling like...

I could see it all happening in my imagination. As I'd been talking, it wasn't David's mother I was seeing, it was my own.

The plot at hand is split in two. In the background of everything, Erek comes to the kids with the information that some major world leaders are planning to convene in [insert whatever city the kids live in here], one of these leaders is already a Controller, and the Yeerks plot to enslave the remainder. In this, the Yeerks would end up with some very powerful human sock puppets to play with, giving them way more control over the world's nations.

But that's not the important plot point, actually!

The main plot point, the most important thing, the plot that ends up having an echoing effect on the kids and will be brought up over and over in the coming books:

See, there's a new kid in town. His name is David. And one of his first actions upon coming to town is to take a trip through a certain construction site. Wherein he comes across a mysterious blue box... and Marco just so happens to be the one to notice. When the kids go to try and get the box back, they find David has already tried to sell it online... and before they can stop it, David ends up drowning in consequences he could have never foreseen.

I really love the David trilogy for what it gives us - though the kids internal personal plots developing in each of their books is absolutely fascinating, the David trilogy gives Marco, Jake, and Rachel an interesting mirror to look into. In each of their books, David forces these three to look at parts of themselves, dealing with it in a way that they wouldn't have been able to do with an alien enemy or even each other. Since this is Marco's book, I'll focus on him.

David comes into the story incredibly reluctant. He's a snarky, skeptical kid with a darker side than most would guess at first glance. However, the whole idea of being a part of the war, of joining the kids in the first place, is something he initially rejects outright. He wants to believe it isn't real, that it's just a dream...

but his parents are slaves to an alien race, and his whole life has been uprooted, and he can't go back anymore, he can't.

He's afraid when he first starts to morph, he gets frozen between morphs...

but Marco has no sympathy for this mirror of him. Marco is someone who's also complained, tried to leave, tried to pretend everything was a dream, who's own mother is in the same boat as David's... and he recognizes it. But he still hates David pretty much from the first moment. He's cruel and harsh towards David: first voting on leaving David to become a Controller himself rather than out themselves to him, distrusting him, finding his complaints childish, growing furious when David desperately tries to reach out to his parents (all of these reasonable, Marco's always made it perfectly clear that he has a very limited number of people he cares about, and David risks getting those people killed or captured). While he shows a begrudging respect for David when he stands his ground or contributes to the group, it's Marco who sees through David's own cruelty first.

I think this book, from Marco's point of view, is meant to show how far Marco's come from his own first book*.

*Marco obviously isn't a 1:1 mirror to David. The comparison is limited to their reluctance to The Call and having parents they want back no matter what, which is what drove the internal plot of Marco's own first book.

NOW. There's an interesting argument I've seen and I'd like to work it out: is David's "betrayal" of the other kids the reasonable result of someone who was... um, essentially kidnapped and told to abandon the only people he cares about (his parents) because they were now The Enemy? Or was it that David was always going to betray them, no matter what, from the beginning.

My thoughts are: both, it's both.

K.A.A. pretty clearly meant for David to be hated from the beginning, and so by the basis of the narrative, he was always going to betray them. She threw in some massive red flags even before he officially turns on them in the next book. The biggest and most obvious: the golden eagle. David, in the morph of a golden eagle, purposefully murders a crow in front of everyone. He excuses this to the others as "the morph taking control", but Marco's narrative suspects differently. Marco describes the "excited", "more keyed up" tone David takes right before he does it and afterwards thinks to himself that he has "an instinct for lies" and that David did kill the crow in deliberately.

Now, it isn't like the kids aren't unreliable narrators who sometimes mistake other people's internal thoughts. We see them mistake each other's internal thoughts: the easiest example I can point out is the way everyone believes Rachel was "born" for war and "enjoys" the violence of it, but whenever we get in Rachel's head we see how terrified she is.

However, David's characterization as someone who's down for cold-blooded murder (and petty revenge) spans four books (his trilogy and the final book he shows up in near the end). Plus his actions show very little guilt the further he gets.

He's also a generally selfish person (though, the examples are pretty normal for a shitty teenage boy) and his first reaction to seeing some random birds in his room is to grab a (BB) gun and start shooting.

I think his dad had something to do with this ftr, acab.

But, by all means, I feel like if left alone (and never made into a Controller), David might have just remained a shitty teenage boy who may or may not have become a shitty adult. Instead, he was put through an incredibly traumatic situation that, you know, Made Him Worse. The kids didn't help, being complete strangers who knocked him out, took him from his home, and told him he had no choice but to become a child soldier - additionally allowing him little to no sympathy when he tries to struggle to maintain some independence. Their reactions are understandable, they have their own lives and the lives of their families to think about, and they're also teenagers. They don't realize that, uh... forcing someone to be a child soldier is incredibly fucked up yet. They're doing okay with it, right!?

But as an adult stepping back and looking at the events that unfolded, I have to wince. David's reaction to suddenly being homeless, essentially an orphan, and drafted into war somewhere between the ages of 13-16 is a pretty realistic one. He doesn't want it, he's self-centered but he's also a teenager and teenagers are self-centered, he can't grasp the gravity of the situation he's in now. He has no real support system anymore.

However, David was, as the kids say, "doomed by the narrative". His fate wasn't the fault of the Animorphs kids, nor was it really his own fault. He accidentally came across the blue box. Him trying to sell it online? how would he know it would end up with aliens raiding his home and kidnapping his parents? And the Animorphs kids tried to avoid it, but they were ultimately too late, and in the end they had a choice: let the Yeerks have him (let him become enslaved) or take him in themselves (which they did). A rock and a hard place.

I'd like to compare him to Chapman, but I might wait until Rachel's book to do so. So, for now, take my only "David defense".

What he does from here on out is inexcusable so this is probably where it ends.

Other things I liked a lot:

a) Cassie. Cassie Cassie Cassie. This book comes right on the heels of the book where Cassie develops a friendship with a Yeerk and nearly becomes a nothlit as a promise to that Yeerk. It's Cassie who is David's primary defender in this book, she's the only one who acknowledges the legitimacy of his reluctance. She tries to see the good in him. BUT ALSO, this book shows us Cassie's darker side. She's an empathic presence who can generally read people and their relationships well... and in this she sees David panicking, trying to demorph in the middle of a situation that could get them caught, and uses his antagonistic relationship with Marco to needle him into continuing the mission.

"Besides, we've all done it. Marco has done it. He's not screaming like a baby, is he? Aren't you as tough as Marco?"

And Marco says "alright, bro's gonna hate me more now, but you made the right choice, respect for my manipulative queen". I love it. I love it.

b) The Marco/Rachel isn't exactly strong but it's got a really good undercurrent. I really enjoyed Marco pointing out that, while Rachel likes Tobias and Cassie the best, she most often agrees with him when it comes to more callous decisions. Though... Rachel does end up agreeing to let David into the group in the end, because why the hell not take a chance?

She'll regret that.

c) Though, this scene made me really wish that Tobias had gotten to form more of a relationship with David. During the scene where they're arguing for whether David should be let in, Tobias argues that they were all strangers before Elfangor joined them...

to which Rachel is the one who points out this isn't true. I've mentioned before that Rachel, Jake, Marco, and Cassie have likely all known each other since they were very young, with Rachel and Cassie/Marco and Jake being best friends, and then Rachel and Jake being cousins. Rachel points out they have no connections to David, ergo it's harder to trust him. Which... I would have loved to see Tobias's reaction to that, because I don't think Rachel realized she was also pointing out the similarity between him and David. I think it would have made him initially more sympathetic to David, because he was also the weirdo loner new kid before he... became a bird. I think it would have made David's later relationship with Rachel and... what happens between them and Tobias... interesting in a different way.

d) Oh there's also a scene where Marco swallows Ax whole in morph, which makes me regret again not having a "times the kids almost got eaten" counter.

Things I didn't like:

Some weird American nationalism/propaganda in this one. Like maybe twice, but it was still Weird and felt a little out of place.

Next time... Jake and David.

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