There's just too much to chalk up to her being perceptive. Just the examples I listed had absolutely no possible way for her to know that they would work out. Besides, I don't actually buy that she's that perceptive or a very good people-person, when most of her actions are fairly shortsighted. Her defining characteristic is that she runs on raw unfiltered emotion, and tries to dictate everyone's actions based purely on what
she feels comfortable with. It comes into play over and over.
When she was in the woods with Aftran, she had no reason trust that a Yeerk with everything to gain would not waltz back home with a brand new morph-capable host. Cassie just didn't want to see someone get hurt in a time that totally necessitated any measures that would keep their identities safe. She put her cowardice and half-baked morals before her friends' lives, giving herself up to a Yeerk that was still ranting to that moment about how hypocritical humans were, and that invasion was morally justifiable. The fact that Aftran ended up being sympathetic and tired of the war was just a stroke of luck.
When she stopped Jake from going after Tom, the thought in her head wasn't that the Taxxons and various Yeerks would rebel or desert once they had the morphing technology. She was only thinking about Jake and herself. She didn't want to see Jake hurt Tom (which I don't think he actually would have at that point--he got that desperate
after the stress of what Cassie did), and so she kept him from doing something that she knew was necessary because she wanted him "to be able to face himself in the mirror" (yeah, and he was
totally fine afterwards).
Jake turned and began to stalk away. I trotted alongside him and grabbed his sleeve.
He yanked it out of my grasp and faced me. His face was white with anger. His lips were shaking. “How could you do it?” he cried, his voice breaking. “Why?”
I choked. “I was trying to protect you!”
“Protect me?” His brows lifted in amazement. “How?”
“You were wounded. He might have killed you.”
“Then why didn’t you go after him?” Jake demanded. “You weren’t hurt. With the trees for cover and the wolf’s speed, you could have taken him down!”
I couldn’t explain. Because I didn’t understand it myself. All I knew was that letting Tom take the morphing cube had seemed absolutely the right thing to do.
And something still told me I was right.
That's not how a calculated risk works. Either she was working on mindless, selfish emotion, or that was the Ellimist making his move to save the Taxxons from being completely wiped out in the final battle. I find myself not wanting to hate Cassie overly much, so I lean towards the latter.
We know the Ellimist like to bend rules and play subtle games. He lies constantly, providing people with a completely false scenario in which they think they're sure of what they're seeing, unaware of the second layer he's working. Think about #7, where the whole show he put on was just to lead them to the Kandarona. The deal he made with Tobias in #13 was a complete scam; if he really wanted Tobias to have what would make him happy, he would have given him his human form, removed the time limit, told him Loren's address, and returned all her memories. But no, the Ellimist didn't need a happy kid, he needed a soldier with complete mastery over his hawk form. #26 wasn't really about the Iskoort, it was about removing the Howlers from the playing field. The Iskoort solution to the war was too long-term to be at all relevant to the Animorphs, and the events in #54 have diverged from that potential future enough to make this outcome kind of unlikely. The Ellimist just wanted to get rid of the pawns that were wreaking so much havoc on unsuspecting species. He knew that the Howlers couldn't be beaten in combat, and the Animorphs would have to find a better way of taking them out. So he challenged Crayak to a battle of champions and made sure to include Erek on the roster, magnificently playing everything into his hands. So yeah. The Ellimist is already a cheating scumbag (although, he is doing it to save as many lives as possible, so maybe not a scumbag in this context). It wouldn't even have to be desperation, this kind of thing is just in character for him.
I wouldn't say that the cosmic game makes the actions in the Yeerk War any less significant. It's all about perspective. Someday, our sun is going to expand and swallow up everything up to Mars, and then burn itself out. Earth will be completely gone. Humanity will most likely be extinct long before then. That doesn't make the day-to-day struggles of people around the world any less important. They're both set values that are completely irrelevant to each other. Two sides of a larger coin. The Animorphs still suffered and struggled for everything, it's not like the Ellimist just handed them victory. They're still heroes in their own right, even if he gave them the occasional nudge through Cassie or other means.
Besides, it would make for a great moment for any character to learn that their entire life was as much of a sham as any of the Ellimist interactions above. It's only cheap if you make it nothing more than a hand wave. It becomes real if you actually bother to explore it in depth. Example, look at Inception. Everyone hates when a story ends with,"it was just a dream all along," because it's almost always done with nothing to back up the literary device, making it fall completely flat and negate the whole story. Inception made it matter by making the entire story about dreams from the get-go. When the,"or is it?" moment happened in the end, it wasn't just sprung upon you. There were hints all the way throughout the movie calling reality into question, including the entire premise of the film itself. It forces you, as a viewer, to start asking yourself questions and wondering. No one called that ending cheap. Frustrating maybe, but not cheap. And in Cassie's case, how do you even react to the revelation? How do you go on from there with that knowledge? It also kind of parallels the Hork-Bajir Chronicles, when they discovered that the Hork-Bajir are an artificial species and it rocked Dak Hamee to the core, so that's something.
The last thing I want to do is just hand-wave all her actions away. She did stuff, and she needs to
face it. My idea of the Ellimist's involvement is just to provide purpose to it all, whether it was right or wrong. Besides, if Cassie is part of the Ellimist, then it's still all her own action.
