One thing I love about the late series switch to a Marco/Ax/Tobias team is that each one of them thinks that they're the straight man in the group and they're all so very much not (Tobias probably comes closest but, uh, "look at my butt" for one example.) It's such a fun development that I wish it was made earlier.
That is such a good point. I hadn’t even considered that perspective before, but you’re exactly right that each one of them thinks that he’s the only sane one keeping the other two from going totally off the rails… and in a way they’re all kind of right.
Like, Tobias and Ax are wildly incompetent at everyday human interaction without Marco’s influence. Tobias is a precious bby birb and also an utter dork who doesn’t get how social norms work even BEFORE he becomes a feral child who lives in the woods and eats rats, and obviously it only gets worse with time. Ax ironically will sometimes pick up on nuances about human society that even Tobias misses, but he also misreads human communication badly enough to think that motor oil is food. The shorm-kids need Marco’s social canniness to pass unnoticed around civilians.
Whereas Ax and Marco get up to the dumbest shit imaginable any time Tobias isn’t around to exert enough influence. Those two try to run down a group of humans as mice, concoct a “brilliant” plan to escape Visser Three that’s literally just “jump out of a spaceship in midair and hope for the best,” advance human communications technology by a decade or so on accident, and hack the CIA’s private databases to steal top-secret government information BECAUSE THEY’RE BORED. Tobias, as you said, is the closest thing that team has to an actual voice of reason, in the sense that he actually thinks about the consequences of his actions on occasion.
And don’t get me started on Marco and Tobias without Ax. If Marco and Ax get too much done, these two get nothing done without Ax. Instead, they stop in the middle of super-urgent missions to bicker about topics that include (but are not limited to) whether Cassie has ever played hackysack, the viability of Marco’s idea for a Star Trek spinoff, Tobias’s alleged dolphin-riding potential, what to put in their hypothetical memoir, how to dispose properly of a stolen tank, which Teletubby is which, and the definition of the word “diurnal.” Marco and Rachel can bicker-flirt and fight yeerks at the same time; Marco and Tobias cannot. They need Ax there to remind them that their debate about Sega systems can wait for a time when they’re not actively being shot at by yeerks.