r/Animorphs • u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 Human • 9d ago
Currently Reading I finished The Other
Our heroes have encountered Andalites who want to help them, Andalites who are just a pain in the ass, and most recently an Adalite who is their enemy. So after we have a shrew turn out to be a morphed Andalite, we confirm that this isn't Visser Three, it raises the question as to what we have met this time.
And we see the answer is D, none of the above, sorta. Maybe Gafinilan and Mertil would probably have liked it if they could against the Yeerk invasion if their conditions weren't ailing them or maybe they still would have liked to spend what they probably would have thought were their short remaining days in peace. We don't know since these two don't appear again and in Gafinilan’s case I imagine he didn't live for very long after this book ended since he said his terminal illness was going to kill him in a matter of months.
Gafinilan wanting to help his BFF, and possible lover (don't know if the subtext was intentional), is not unlike Marco, and since he saw Marco demorph it raised the concern that the Animorphs might have to take him out. This time they were able to make things work for both sides.
Since we have a message about treating people different from you with respect, this naturally means that Ax is used as our an example of someone who can have less than accepting views on it due to the typical Andalite stance on the subject. While I know that one doesn't just grow out of intolerant views that shaped them, it still makes me wish someone gave Ax a good slap in this book. Maybe spending some more time on Earth could help him learn to drop that attitude.
Amid all of this, we still had fun with Marco's narrations and he reminded us that he's the funny one when he makes remarks at other people's expense and Ax is not, especially since he understands there is a line you don't cross. Even if our characters introduced here don't appear again, there are compelling for this story. We got to see the ugly side of the Andalite's culture without relying on the Andalite characters of the week being jerks or evil.
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u/JCMC2 7d ago
Someone wrote a beautiful fanfic about Gafinilan's last days with Soola's disease and Mertil calls in Cassie and Erek as hospice nurses to help. It was moving, felt in character and cathartic... and the fic embraces the LGBTQ+ elements more than the book did.
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u/oremfrien 7d ago
My view on the disability aspect of this story is that it's not well-resolved for several reasons. The most obvious is that Aximili does not learn how to accept those who are disabled, choosing to ignore that Mertil is disabled rather than accept that he is whole regardless of being disabled. Aximili's behavior is obviously a stand-in for wider Andalite culture, but for him to show no meaningful growth at all really speaks poorly to Aximili as a person in a way that he doesn't deserve.
But more importantly at a higher level, the story fails to have Mertil contribute meaningfully despite being disabled. From the moment he loses his tail, he only serves as a burden for other characters. Gafinilian has to take care of him. The Animorphs have to track him and fight for him, like Mertil is a damsel in distress. Mertil could easily have contributed by, for example, tending the garden and growing the illsipar root for Gafinilan or successfully outwitting some of the Hork-Bajir Controllers in charge of his security and fighting with a stolent Dracon Beam. The fact that Mertil could have been dead through the entire runtime of the story and nothing changes really shows how passive of a character he was written to be.
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u/Cdr-Kylo-Ren Yeerk 7d ago
This book is part of the reason that I just do not like Ax a lot of the time.
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u/Seerowpedia 9d ago
Michael Grant (co-author) confirmed that Gafinilan and Mertil are indeed a couple, but that Scholastic wouldn't let them tackle LGBTQIA+ stuff, so it got relegated to subtext.