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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

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i saw the nyc au ask and wondered, what do you think animorphs would have been like if the series had been set in the midwest instead of california?

Bless. (For anyone wondering, this is the NYC AU.) Based solely on my experiences with living in central Iowa…

The selection of battle morphs would be a heck of a lot more limited. The local zoo would probably have a large cat, maybe two large cats of the same species, and that’d be about it for ginormous predators. Clearly, the only recourse would be for Marco to use domestic goat morph, Jake to find a coyote through the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, and Rachel to kick butt as The Only Giant Cat in Fifteen Counties. Tobias would have no shortage of raptors to choose from, given that there’s practically a hawk on every telephone pole, and the rabbit overpopulation problem would also keep him quite well-fed. Cassie to go for something that that destrier morph Jake gets in MM3, and knowing her she’d be surprisingly good at fighting as a giant pissed-off horse. Ax would have the largest and scariest-looking cow morph one can imagine, and would be quite happy with its superiority over mere bipedal humanity.

Obviously, there’s no ocean.

All five human kids would have to spend an entire week going on a massive adventure where they search corn fields, soy fields, wheat fields, and the occasional field-of-cows field to try and find the source of the mysterious andalite voice. Presumably by the time they finally find him, Ax will have already made several attempts to communicate with the local cattle, and will have concluded that if these locals aren’t even sentient then there’s probably no hope at all for communication with the silly primates.

Rather than going through the trouble of building a secret underwater base, Visser One would simply construct a fake biodome. The resultant airtight super-controlled environment might be even harder to penetrate than the underwater base, and would be guarded by a large pack of mind-controlled cougars.

Presumably the pemalite ship will be hidden in plain sight, perched on top of a truck stop and disguised as a giant metal dog that is advertising the local Kum and Go, or possibly an off-brand Fast ‘n Go, or else an off-off-brand Kwick & Go. The password to access it will be to ask for the key to the bathroom like you’re some kind of rube from New York who thinks that all truck stops have locking bathrooms.

Visser Three would get a lot of conflicting information about whether armadillos and opossums are native to the area or not. The human-controllers (presumably some of whom would have to be shipped in from elsewhere) would be known to emit occasional shrieks of terror while insisting that “no rat is EVER supposed to be that large… Hang on, it just dropped dead, never mind I guess.”

Instead of Jake complaining about rainy days, Jake would be complaining about any day when the wind is greater than 30 MPH. Actually, Tobias would have a lot more to complain about on those kinds of days. But either way, the windchill would be brutal for the poor Animorphs any time they’re birds.

The Sharing would either have to unite with FFA, or else die by FFA’s hand. There is no third option.

Which outcome we’d see would probably depend on how much the Council of Thirteen allowed Visser One to intervene in the invasion plan. If Visser One did get involved, then the Sharing would probably do some joint recruiting events, the yeerks would infest the FFA’s senior leaders, and there’d be plenty of cross-promotions.

If Visser Three was allowed too much oversight, on the other hand, then the Sharing would probably challenge the FFA to single combat for the minds and bodies of the local youth. The Sharing would, of course, lose spectacularly. The only way to save them would be through an alliance with 4H, which even then might not be sufficient.

In a small town in the Midwest, there’s no way that Marco’s whole “that controller cop knew Tom and so Tom must also be a controller” hypothesis would hold water.

Because of course the cop would know Tom; Tom’s the top scorer on the local high school’s basketball team! Over half the county would know Tom. Probably most local cops would be able to list Tom’s name and age and height and weight and jersey number and average points per game. Tom scores points for a local team! More points than any other player! It wouldn’t be that unusual for his face to be on posters and novelty shirts and coffee mugs.

Assuming the Sharing could actually get a toehold in this town, Tom’s level of influence would then be fucking terrifying.

When it comes to protecting the local land from environmental pollutants and extraterrestrials alike, Southern California hippies got nothing on people whose livelihood literally depends on the continued quality of the land. So expect all the civilians to be automatically on the side of whoever isn’t invading. Maybe the Animorphs couldn’t go so far as to trust random strangers in the area — a decent percent of them are probably controllers — but woe betide any yeerks who get caught unnecessarily cutting down trees or shooting skunks. There would probably be a lot more people like Derek and Polo who are like “I dunno what’s going on here, but if you’re local animals who are sometimes humans and you’re trying to do something about the guys in spaceships destroying everything in sight… How can I help?”

Either the Animorphs would have to learn how to morph more clothes, or else they’d spend way more time morphing to get rid of frostbite and hypothermia the way they do in #25. It’s really only warm enough to be outside barefoot in leotards for about four months of the year in most places in the Midwest. It would be miserable the rest of the time, but then being an Animorph is already like 85% relentless misery. They would also stand out a heck of a lot more any time they ended up having to go into a public establishment like a McDonald’s wearing nothing but their morphing clothes, because everyone else in there would have on 15 layers of flannel.

The veleek would go almost totally unremarked-upon. It probably wouldn’t make the news (it’s just a minor tornado; no one actually dies from it) and the Animorphs would probably take way longer to realize that it’s not behaving the way a normal wind storm does.

Infesting actors would be way more difficult (probably no Jeremy Jason McColes or William Roger Tennants in the area) but the number of politicians in the area would more than make up for it.

There are, at minimum, two or three presidential hopefuls per year at various events in Des Moines. Most of the time their security is less than it would be in Washington D.C., because of the fewer vantage points and less-charged political atmosphere there. It would be terrifyingly easy to infest the future president if the yeerks were based out of central Iowa.

Not only that, but there are always dozens of congress members at every single Iowa State Fair, usually because they’re angling for something political. Given that politicians are a bunch of greedy power-hungry bottom feeders who definitely don’t have souls, the Sharing would just have to offer them powerful political connections and they’d practically be lining up to become controllers.

If the yeerks have less control of the media and also more control of the government, there’d probably be a lot more social conflict in the U.S. and less faith in Washington overall. However, they also might be able to get martial law declared in the U.S., at which point suspension of the First Amendment is semi-legal…

What would probably be the yeerks’ downfall in a Midwestern town is sheer lack of bodies. In the greater L.A. area, the yeerks can produce hundreds of thousands of controllers in a matter of weeks when desperate enough (#52) but they’d never be able to achieve that kind of army if they were working out of Kansas or Iowa or Nebraska. Given that one Animorph can take on like seven controllers in open battle, and that it only takes about two dozen Animorphs (and several other intersecting factors, but still) to take down the whole Yeerk Empire, Jake wouldn’t have to recruit that hard to get enough of an army to face down maybe 400 controllers in total.

#animorphs #animorphs au #au #iowa #american midwest #asks #smallsith

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