maybe this has bothered you too...

[captaincommiex.livejournal.com]

i'm home for the summer, and i just started to reread the invasion. this must be the tenth time rereading this particular book, but it just occurred to me: why didn't elfangor morph into another form to save himself from dying, and then demorph to heal his andalite body of the wounds? from what i've gathered, ax (or estrid, or maybe it was aldrea, i don't remember which of the andalites) had a kafit bird morph from the andalite home world, which he had to acquire to practice morphing. he said that young andalites often acquire a kafit bird and had to pass a morphing test or something. it stands to reason that elfangor, even before his convoluted trip as described in the andalite chronicles, had at least acquired a kafit bird, if not any other animal. why didn't elfangor give the animorphs the morphing power first, then morph into a kafit bird to heal his andalite body, then in his kafit bird morph, lead the animorphs to safety away from the approaching yeerks?

Comments

[frameacloud]

Well... it's true that Elfangor was always a very melancholic guy, even before the seriously freaked-out stuff started happening with time travel and being taken away from his wife right before she had a baby.

Andalite warriors throughout the series talk about giving onesself up for dead when not dead yet... just grievously injured, a nothlit, or whatever. As with the samurai and other warriors throughout history, Andalite warriors had this big thing about self-sacrifice. Although Elfangor rebelled against a lot of his cultural programming more than Aximili ever did, he was probably still very saturated with the idea that self-sacrifice was a noble thing to do.

In his hirac delest (memoirs) his last words were "hope" because he'd just recognized that his long-lost son was among the Animorphs-to-be. Although Elfangor was already dying before Visser Three killed him, it seems like he partly felt that things were finally looking up after all this time. If he'd figured out an escape plan as described (morphing into a kafit) instead of letting himself be killed, he could have been with his son, just like he'd always wanted.

They did figure out that he was heading to the construction site in the first place in hopes of getting the time-travel device... maybe he was planning to do that next but didn't get a chance to do it, or a chance to change his plans and do the kafit thing instead.

Then again, he was sending out his hirac delest right before Visser Three turned up. Maybe he was planning to die after all.

[amaronith.livejournal.com]

At east he went OUT fighting, which was good. Granted, it was half assed, but that's because he was injured, but he didn't just go "Okay, I've set up for rivals for the next 51 books, you can eat me now." He stabbed Visser Three in the face a few times. Thus dying on the field of battle and honorably and all that jazz.

...man, I missed having conversations like this.