Hey guys! How were your weekends? Mine was pretty quiet. I just finished reading the third book in the Animorphs series, called The Encounter, which is Tobias's first book as narrator. So let's get right into it shall we?
The Encounter is really limited in the way the story can be told because Tobias is a hawk. And so, you don't get much screentime for the other Animorphs as a result. However, what you do get is alot about what's inside Tobias's mind since the story is from his point of view. And that's what makes this book so interesting. It's been weeks since Tobias was trapped in his hawk morph but he still struggles with that choice he made after the fight in the Yeerk Pool in the first book. There are even moments where he struggles with the hawk's natural instincts, something the Animorphs tend to gain control of as they get used to a morph. But because he's stuck as a hawk, Tobias ends up having the hawk's instincts become stronger than his human instincts because he's not a human anymore, he's a hawk. So that's something I hadn't actually considered when I was reading these books when I was a kid in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Plot wise, this book is pretty filler. I mean the Animorphs blow up a Yeerk water truck ship, which we never hear about again in any book after this, and that's all that happened. Visser Three is there, but Tom and Chapman aren't. Also, they only use one of the two morphs acquired in this book ever again, and that's the wolf morphs. Even then, only Cassie used the wolf morph often because that became her battle morph. The trout morph is never used again, as far as my memory of the series goes anyway.
I was going to save this for when I review the next book, The Message, since that's the first book narrated by Cassie, but she says something in this book that kind of made me remember why I didn't like Cassie as much as the other characters in this series when I read as a kid. On pages 27 and 28 Cassie says, "I halfway feel like we've done enough. You know? We attacked the Yeerk pool. We barely got out alive. We infiltrated Chapman's house and Rachel was captured. Again, we barely got out alive. I guess the question is, how many risks are we going to take? How many more times are we barely going to escape?" Which has always been my problem with Cassie.
She never fully commits to fighting the Yeerks the way the others have, because she's never had to. As I mentioned in my review of the last book, Jake fights for Tom, Rachel fights for the Chapman family, specifically Melissa, her best friend, Marco fights for his mom though he won't fully commit until book 5, Tobias fights for Elfangor, and Ax fights because he's an Andalite. Cassie doesn't have a personal stake in this war, and she tries to get out of it many many times over the course of the series. Her parents aren't Controllers and are never in danger of being infested by the Yeerks, and she has no siblings to protect either. So she has no reason to fight the Yeerks at all. Especially since, as Rachel pointed out in the last book, the Animorphs aren't superheroes.
While Tobias is often portrayed as being an early casualty in the Animorphs's fight against the Yeerks, I also see him in a different way. Whether you subscribe to the notion that Tobias deliberately trapped himself as a hawk back in book 1 to get away from the bullies at school and his difficult home life or not, Tobias is trapped as a hawk and so he doesn't have his morphing powers anymore and technically he's out of the fight. However, like Barbara Gordon, who became Oracle after the Joker shot her and paralyzed her in Batman: The Killing Joke and she couldn't be Batgirl anymore, Tobias honed the other skills that he had, like his increased sense of sight, and his flying ability, to help the Animorphs by acting as recon in dangerous situations, or carrying the Animorphs in smaller morphs to a site they're scoping out for a mission. So it shows that even if you don't have certain abilities, you can use the abilities you do have to do whatever you want to do.
I know Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant didn't intend for Tobias to be an allegory for disabled people, but that's how I see him. Which is funny considering they do mention disabled people in two of the books, in book 40, The Other there's a disabled Andalite and we learn why we don't see disabled Andalites until this book, and in book 50, The Ultimate, the Animorphs decide to bulk up their forces by giving morphing powers to disabled children since the Yeerks wouldn't infest them so the Animorphs wouldn't have to worry about there being any Controllers among those kids.
Like with The Visitor, the changes in the 2011 re-release of The Encounter are pretty minimal. I don't know if that's just because this is a Tobias book and he isn't exactly able to read books, play video games, or whatever else he did before he became trapped as a hawk, or if it's just because this book and the last didn't have any significant pop culture and tech references that are specifically 90s. In fact, I'd say you'd have to be really looking for them in order to notice the few changes made.
Overall The Encounter is a pretty skippable book in terms of the overall plot of the series. No new characters are introduced, and no significant events happen in this book. It's just an average, close call, mission for the Animorphs. However, if you're a Tobias fan, then this book is the one where he gains his territory in the woods near Cassie's barn, which is significant for him if not for the series itself. But that's to be expected for a series as long as Animorphs is. There's so much story that you can't always have big, major, events happening in every book. It's still a pretty good book though and like I said, the changes in the 2011 version are minimal. Especially in comparison to the changes made in The Invasion.
Alright guys that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back on Wednesday with another post so until then have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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