Animorphs - Blog Posts
K.A. Applegate, author of the Animorphs, Remnants, and Everworld book series:
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.
I will forever respect Animorphs for tricking kids who are just really into animals to read a book series by going “Hey you, you daydream about what it’s like to be a dolphin or a bird or a wolf? Have I got a book for you!” and then slowly radicalizing them with 50+ books of “There are no winners in war. Whatever ‘victory’ you perceive comes at the cost of sacrificing your own morals and killing the part of you that is human. In the end you will resort to murder, torture and war crimes and the knowledge of what you have done will haunt you for as long as you live.”
aximili-esgarrouth-isthil is living the fucking nightmare though tbh
and I don’t even mean the thing about how he got trapped in a crashed ship miles under the ocean only to be informed upon rescue that while he was down there his big brother got eaten alive
I mean imagine you got stranded on an alien planet
and all that stood in the path of galactic annihilation
was your PERSONAL ability to remember perfectly the contents of the class you had at 7:35 your freshman year of high school. the one you passed with a C. the one you mostly spent goofing off in the back with your best friend because it was the only class you had together. or, alternatively, the class RIGHT before lunch (so you were always hungry) that you had with your crush (so you were always kind of distracted watching her)
Your name is Aximili you have Space ADHD and every week you have to take a pop quiz about your high school theoretical physics class and if you ever get a question wrong everyone you know dies.
Also, while you were trapped in a crashed ship miles under the ocean slowly running out of air, your big brother got eaten alive.
For as much as I love Animorphs, I’ve never actually read it in order all the way through. It was always scattered entries, whatever I could find at the library or buy at garage sales. There’s even a small handful I haven’t read at all. That’s why, for my New Year’s resolution, I plan to reread the series in its entirety. However, I know how my brain works, and I’m afraid I might lose motivation and quit too soon. That’s why, after each book, I will add to this post with, in my opinion, the most fucked-up part of the book, as well as the silliest part (because anyone who’s read these books knows that those are the two main tenets of the series). That way, I’ll have a publicly available record to hold myself accountable to if I start slacking, plus a nice thread of propaganda to hopefully suck more people in. I plan to read one mainline book a week, starting with:
Somebody mentioned in a tag on one of my posts the scene where Marco Animorphs is showering after antmageddon and he finds an ant stuck to his hip by the pincers where it presumably was trying to bite him in half when he was an ant and then it died from him becoming very big very fast and I feel like that scene, and the scene where Cassie finds a sliver of a sentient person’s flesh between her teeth while she’s flossing and then flosses until her gums bleed, really deserve recognition in the literary canon. Applegate deserves an award. There should be a TV Trope named after whatever the fuck that is. Like fridge horror but diegetic. Bathroom horror. Your bedtime bathroom routine as an opportunity for personal confrontation with the violent detritus of the dead which lingers in and on your body even after you have ostensibly stripped yourself of weapons and healed over all your wounds.
Michael Dickman, (2011), Copper Canyon Press, Killing Flies, Flies
animorphs is funny because the kids spend almost the entire series turning into birds of prey to fly in virtually every scenario while complaining about how they have to space themselves out so it doesn't look suspicious that all these rare raptors are grouped together, about how birds of prey often have to do a lot of hard flapping work to fly in some situations they're not meant for, about tiring out easily, etc. to the point where it starts getting weird and confusing that they literally always use those bird morphs instead of thinking to turn into e.g. migratory geese for certain situations as per their general capacity for pragmatism. and then in literally one of the last books in the series some of them turn into geese to fly long distance and spend the entire time going "wtf this is great why the fuck didnt we do this earlier holy shit." and also the answer to that question is at least in part "one of the animorphs is just literally on all levels including physical a hawk that gets snooty about bird species he thinks suck and would have been really annoying about it"
there's something to be said about the choice to use "prince" as the main signifier of military rank for the andalites. because it kinda obscures the truth of the situation, doesn't it? a group of kids getting magic powers from an alien prince sounds whimsical and delightful. a group of kids getting pulled into a war by an alien colonel sounds tragic and horrible. the slow reveal of what "prince" actually means over the course of the early books is perhaps the most underrated twist of the entire series, because it fundamentally recontextualizes the entire premise of the series without the reader even consciously realizing it.
Cassie Animorphs really spoiled me for all future pacifist characters. Like, I didn't love her when I read the series as a kid, but as I've gotten older, I really appreciate that she's the moral center of the group, the one who's always trying to find non-lethal solutions, AND she regularly kills her enemies(and their human shields). Because she understands that if violence is going to happen, then keeping HER hands clean doesn't stop the violence. That sometimes, the only way to keep an attacker from hurting others is to attack them yourself.
And so she does the right thing. Always. And sometimes the right thing involves violence. And she regrets it, but if she's the only one who can save lives and that requires killing, she will. And she'll go right back to arguing that they should be looking for a path to peace while standing in the pool of blood.
Compared to how some series will have a pacifist character who relies on their friends to do all the violence while condemning them for it, or a series will find a loophole/change the rules to allow the pacifist to not kill when it would otherwise be 100% necessary, it was a nice practical situation to have Cassie dedicated to peace while being willing to kill to achieve it.
The dynamic of Cassie and Rachel is making me insane. What if someone was your conscience but also you resented them for making you feel like you were a bloodthirsty monster? What if your friend had the courage to do what you couldn't but made you feel weak and stupid for sticking to your morals? What if you went shopping at the mall together about it?
Animorphs really has a way to turn every scifi trope on its head. "Why do alien invasions always start in America?" Actually the body snatchers first landed in a Middle Eastern farming community where they kidnapped the first guy they saw, read his mind, and concluded that, since he was terrified of the US soldiers who had brutally destroyed everything he knew and loved, the US would be the ideal place to center their invasion. This is revealed in the spin-off "Visser" which is an excellent stand-alone book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Animorphs. And you can read it for free and with the author's blessing right here:
https://files.animorphsfanforum.com/ebooks/pdf/Visser.pdf
so like, what if you were the last surviving animorph but it's been canonically established that you still had your best friend's DNA in your body
had to see it giffed
The head of a frog morphs into the head of a person. Colored etchings by Christian von Mechel after Lavater, 1797.
Welcome Collection
I FINALLY got to play through Below Zero and the Precursors (Architects?) give me SUCH Animorphs vibes.
I mean the Andalites resemblance is obvious -- they’re telepathic deer centaurs with no mouths, and have a part of a tail and horns that resemble the tail and eye stalks of Andalites. They also have a really interesting connection to nature that reminds me of some of the Andalite culture we got to see, especially in The Andalite Chronicles where we got to see the Andalite homeworld.
And then there’s some resemblance to the Arn (the creators of the Hork-Bajir) in their mastery of genetic engineering -- just the comments from Al-An and scannables talking about how the Precursor’s original form was swapped out for something better over the millennia, a combination of DNA from all sorts of different creatures to make them as efficient and useful as possible.
AND OF COURSE how could I neglect to mention my very favorite most Animorphs species the Ketran? I wish we got to see more of them, I really do, they’re so cool. But anyways, even if the Network as Al-An describes it is way, way more involved than the Ketran Uninet (it gives me very vague Control Brain vibes from Invader Zim, lol), I immediately thought back to the Uninet -- especially like, in the cases where Ketran are memming each other and all. And the Ketran naming system where they have their assigned names, chosen names, and gamer tags -- I wonder how individuality works to Architects. Al-An can clearly distinguish himself from others and even went against the Network at one point, but also comments how interconnected Architects are, being able to sense each other, etc. etc., so I wonder if they have the concepts of names/pronouns since we kind of just assign both to Al-An on our own?
In short I have THOUGHTS and I am now going to reread the Ellimist Chronicles goodnight
the atla gaang in the animorphs universe (‘cause i can)
sokka - the leader, jake/marco mashup [battle morph: arctic wolf]
yue - the nothlit, tobias/cassie mashup [battle morph: barn owl]
toph - the tank, rachel/marco mashup [battle morph: bull moose]
aang - the pacifist, ax/cassie mashup [battle morph: olive baboon]
zuko - the andalite, ax/rachel mashup [missing the left eyestalk]
katara - the lieutenant, tom/rachel/cassie mashup [battle morph: jaguar]
jet - the traitor [battle morph: spotted hyena]
the yeerks
long feng - edriss/visser one (with kya as host)
ozai - esplin/visser three (with ursa as host)
zhao - temrash ; azula - visser seventeen (with katara as host)
ty lee - aftran (with aang as temporary host)
others
mai - estrid
suki - toby
lu ten - elfangor
notes --
maybe ursa returns from war a little sharper, a little crueler (to do recon on andal) ... and just when she (he, ozai) is finished and just about to depart, finds an excuse to publicly maim her son -- before he is even old enough to join the warriors’ academy -- and it’s a shellshocked iroh (grieving for a distant son) who collects the pieces ...
does this mean yue is lu ten’s daughter and therefore zuko’s niece? yes? yes. but i thought yue being trapped in owl shape as a nothlit was too good of an idea to pass up.
hakoda, having to stand in for both peter and mr. berenson, would react a little better at the “death” of his wife i think -- and sokka would likely react better to his dad dating bato than marco did with peter dating nora.
obviously sokka would stop at nothing to get katara free from the yeerks, so we can assume that at some point they kidnap katara and spirit her away to the woods with zuko and yue to starve the yeerk out (sorry azula), and then katara of course immediately volunteers (demands) to join the animorphs. so, please imagine the following two scenarios:
ozai, yelling: there’s another andalite bandit?! whatever hapless lackey du jour: it would seem so, visser :(
and
azula talking through katara, surrounded by the gaang in their battle morphs: so where is he? the real andalite scum? visser three told us all about him. oh come on. you know. [miming a single stalk eye] “i must defeat the yeerks to regain my honor.” it’s okay. you can laugh. it’s funny.