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tfw-no-tennis · 3 years

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ani....morphs.....

ok so picking up after the david trilogy, which hit hard as FUCK, we have book 23, which basically was a semi truck that ran over my corpse, jesus christ, they really followed up the david trilogy w/all that....

23 was so so good and also painful. its the culmination of a lot of tobias’s characterization in the series thus far and also we finally get the reveal we’ve been waiting for about elfangor....ooooh man

and there was a lot of painful stuff in this book but the worst imo was tobias wondering if it were possible that somebody wanted him and would take care of him, only to have it all come crashing down in the worst way when it turned out aria was visser three in morph, ouch.

that was so brutal augh. and when he figured it out and just crash landed and kept thinking about how he wanted to die and how he was stupid to think he could have a home...bro get these kids some THERAPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so yeah that book was absolutely brutal but also so good...and it further fleshed out the animorphs working as a near-flawless team, w/the whole setup of tobias meeting w/the lawyer being so airtight and well-planned

also more free hork bajir!! its cool that there's stuff happening w/them offscreen, I like that

I literally had to take a break from reading the books bc the david triology + 23 was like so much, and also bc the olympics were on and all my time got dedicated to watching those, but then I opened 24, not sure what to expect, and BAM it was the helmacrons lmaoooo

I don't even remember the helmacrons but ig a lot of people hate them? lmao so that whole reputation preceded the book and I was like oh wow time for a change in tone

which wasn't wrong but also I liked that book?? I was never bored, even tho the whole thing was patently ridiculous and also had very little bearing on the overarching story

but I think it would be a standout if it were a TV episode w/a good budget - the visuals were amazing even in text, and I can imagine all the cool shrinking/growing/cellular stuff would be WICKED cool visually (ideally 2d animation but an ant man-esque live action adaptation wouldn't be terrible if they had the budget for it)

whatever let me dream. so yeah I didn't hate the helmacron book even tho the helmacrons themselves were...sure something. lmao I think they come back? that should be interesting

next book is the arctic one, we have yet another alien of the week style adventure - I liked this one too, it felt like more plot-y stuff happened since they destroyed the base, and marco’s POV is always fun

I do find it funny/interesting how sometimes when the animorphs do something - like in this book, destroying that base in the arctic - it doesn't really seem to impact the yeerks much/it doesn't get brought up much after that. and then other things like them destroying the ground-based kandrona get mentioned a lot (that example is understandable tho bc that WAS a big deal). its just hilarious to me how blowing up entire building complexes has become so routine that it isn’t even worth mentioning at this point

Also I adore when they meet other random people/kids and are chill w/them, like w/that kid they met in the rain forest earlier on w/the time travel

the descriptions of the brutally cold weather were great. I hate the cold so I was like oof this is a nightmare lmao

also ig that was the first ghostwritten book and I did kinda notice it was slightly different than usual? maybe? I could be imagining it tho

okay but book 26 tho...BOOK 26. bruh

that was SO good and I really didn’t know what to expect - but when we finally revisited Jake’s dream w/crayak I knew it was gonna be good (but I didn’t expect it to be a chess game war epic..!)

basically I loved it. SUCH a good Jake book - I really appreciate his character now as opposed to when I was 10 and often overlooked him (sorry jake).

similarly, when I was a kid and read these I sympathized a lot w/the chee and felt bad for them towards the end of the series when they had to get more involved in the war (genuinely don’t remember what they even do but ik I felt bad)

but now I've basically 180′d and I'm like damn those chee sure are hypocrites huh.

like they could solve So many of the animorphs problems but their stringent adherence to nonviolence leads to them actively getting in the animorphs way sometimes? and obviously pacifism is a complicated topic, but in this case it also intersect w/the whole ‘child soldier’ thing, and as beings who are insanely old and wise, the chee probably shouldn't just leave all the dirty work to a bunch of literal middle schoolers

aaaaanyways. there’s so much I love about this book. the iskoort! they were sure something. and the ‘plot twist’ that they are actually 2 beings, the Isk and the Yoort - and the Yoort are essentially Yeerks - that slapped. the symbiosis of it all!

I loved the part where they all realize what this means, that this is why Crayak wants the iskoort destoryed - because someday the yeerks might come across them and realize parasitism is not the only way. I love it!

alas I don’t recall the iskoort returning in the story (but also my memory is terrible so who knows?) but still that would be cool

basically I feel like this is the book where Jake Truly comes into his own as a leader, in every sense. he outmaneuvers Crayak, and even the ellimist, who’s yanking them around in his own way

the scene where jake shoves the howler off the cliff and jumps off and morphs and acquires the howler...that was fantastic and tense.

also the murder is definitely becoming more overt. I mean, it has been for a while, but it isn’t really pointed out as much anymore. oof

more on the chee - as Jake points out in this book, and other characters point out in other books - the chee could have saved the pemalites, but instead just stood by while their creators were slaughtered. on the other hand, jake says, what do the chee do AFTER they’ve killed the howlers - where to point them next? when is the end of their violence?

buuuuut also standing by while atrocities occur is pretty damning, as is frequently mentioned in this series - from the very beginning, when marco initially doesn’t want to get involved in the war at all, and the other animorphs basically tell him that turning his back on the war and acting like he doesn’t even know it’s happening would be immoral and cowardly (which imo this reaction helps to push marco in the direction he ends up going, but I digress) - this topic comes up again in 19 when cassie quits the team and rachel is upset bc she sees it as cassie elevating her own feelings above the greater good (as in, as long as cassie feels good about how she acts, it doesn’t matter how much preventable evil the yeerks are committing while she turns away). etc etc. but that’s essentially what’s happening w/the chee - even tho they help w/intel, the lack of any sort of Action on their part means that they’re essentially allowing awful things to happen when they could prevent them. this is rambly but basically...animorphs deals so much in grey areas, and the chee are noticeably black and white in their actions, despite falling, in a meta sense, in an extremely grey area. its such good, thought provoking writing!

anywayssss I keep talking about the chee lmao what else was there. oh YEAH jake and cassie kissed for the first time awww that was super cute

and ofc immediately marco teases them as asks jake if he’s gonna kiss him next, and all I can say is...marco is a bicon

also I love the background worldbuilding w/the iskoort, how they have all these groups and guilds and stuff - its not dwelled on much, which actually works really well to give the world/species a sense of lived-in realness

okay oh man and the reveal at the end that the howlers were just like...children who thought the whole thing was a game...AUGHH man that’s sooo fucked

like, when jake morphs the howler and has rachel ready to knock him down in grizzly morph if he gets out of control due to the howler’s murderous instincts, and he morphs to find that the howler is...playful, like a dolphin morph. SUCH a good fucked up sense of dawning horror there

and the fact that as far as I can tell the chee KNEW this, but wanted revenge anyways, so they let the animorphs assume that the howlers were Evil On Purpose

also I love smaller moments, like jake seeing that ax is ashamed for briefly running away during one battle w/the howlers, and then entrusts him w/an important task bc he knows that ax will see that as redemption - and when everyone thought jake was dead and were so happy when he wasn't (they all love each other so much im gonna cry about these child soldiers augh)

basically that book was so good

man one thing I absolutely love is that the longer the series goes on the more obvious it is that andalites, despite inventing morphing technology, barely use it themselves

like, most of the andalite characters we see barely morph. its kind of a last resort to them, as they’re already plenty dangerous in their regular forms

meanwhile for the animorphs, that’s all they have to fight with. that’s their only weapons against the yeerks, and its so fun to see them use the power in so many varied ways, and so creatively, while the andalites have barely scratched the surface of their own technology

its also interesting to contrast against the yeerks who start out w/absolutely no technology, and the andalites share some but not all of their technology w/them...its too bad that morphing technology was just starting out cause that would’ve been interesting

like imo a lot of the conflict w/the yeerks could’ve been avoided if they could just nothlit into better forms - of course, there’d still be plenty of yeerks who want to go start wars or w/e, just like pretty much any species in the series, but a lot of yeerks would probably be like ‘yeah I'm good’ and just chill out as nothlits

also people online love to talk about how humans are alienfuckers and would definitely have sex w/sentient aliens and whatnot, and while I'm not saying that's untrue, its just funny bc in animorphs the truest alienfuckers are definitely the andalites

as of the hork-bajir chronicles, we now have a second instance of an andalite morphing another species to be in an inter-species alien romance (and eventually have kids)

speaking of, I don’t think I’ve talked abt the hork bajir chronicles yet??? even tho I read it a while ago lmao

HBC was great...I honestly haven’t really run into an animorphs book I’ve actually disliked at this point, I’m sure it’ll come w/all the ghostwriting and whatnot, but I’ve liked at least some aspects of every book

anyways HBC was great, and it’s funny bc I remember that I read this book as a kid, and yet rereading it now I didn’t remember a single bit of it lmaooo

I really liked the framing device of the free hork bajir telling this story to tobias. I also liked how we know from the beginning that this story wont have a happy ending - we know all the hork bajir end up enslaved by the yeerks, but it’s still somehow hopeful at the end? I think this is largely due to the framing device tbh.

also I love toby, and I love that the First free hork bajir named their kid after tobias ;_;

and oooh mannn I LOVED the different POVs from this book. all the characters were so interesting! aldrea was fascinating - I really like the increasingly negative view of the andalites that the readers are getting, all while maintaining the sense that they aren’t like, actively evil, just that they have their issues - like aldrea’s arrogance, and the general andalite arrogance which lead to the loss of the hork bajir. also, who knew andalites had their own brand of sexism? Ls

I did like getting a female andalite tho, that was cool. and dak was really cool, he was such a good, compassionate character who was able to maintain his morals in an interesting way throughout the story

and VISSER THREE...or should I say esplin 9466, because he’s not visser 3 yet...getting his ‘origin story’ was excellent - I really like how we’re learning about visser 3 backwards - we start off the series w/him as the main villain, and he’s campy and menacing, and then we see him in the andalite chronicles as a power-hungry sub-visser trying to climb the ranks and eventually getting alloran as a host, and then back even further here, w/the start of his focus on the andalites and the beginning of his ambition. its been very cool and interesting to see

plus, the beginning of the yeerks as we know them! seerow! alloran! it’s a party and nobody is having a good time, except for some of the yeerks.

I like how it’s pretty obvious that the andalites are well-meaning with their interactions w/the yeerks, but go about it the wrong way - they give them enough technology that the yeerks realize there’s a whole world out there to experience, and then they blockade the yeerks on their planet and tell them they can’t leave. nnnnot the best approach imo

again, as I said above, I’m interested in how things could’ve gone if the andalites had given the yeerks morphing technology early on - could a lot of the conflict have been avoided, or would it have been worse? the yeerks seem pretty evil in this book, immediately jumping to enslave anyone they can. otoh we hear from esplin that not all yeerks like having host bodies, and find it overwhelming, preferring to swim around in the yeerk pool as a slug - I assume as host bodies became more available this type of thinking was probably stamped out in yeerk society or w/e, but there are a lot of interesting what-ifs in the situation

I loved the scene where esplin first experiences having a host, and immediately knows he can’t go back. there are a bunch of great sensory descriptions, and it’s a nice scene to pinpoint as a foundational moment for the visser three in the current story, who spent a lot of time and energy getting what he sees as the best possible host body, an andalite

I find it interesting how much visser three clearly respects the andalites, even while constantly deriding them. and you can see the origins of that here as he immediately focuses in on the andalites, working to become an expert on them in order to make himself useful enough to move thru the ranks

another thing I like is how esplin seems a lot more crafty and ambitious than the visser three from modern times - I would guess that reaching his goal (andalite host body) and being given all that power was detrimental, playing on his weaknesses instead of his strengths. basically, I don’t think it’s ooc or anything, I can see how HBC-esplin became animorphs-esplin, especially w/TAC in between

as for seerow...poor dude. you really do have to feel for him, because you get the sense he really did just want to be kind to the yeerks, but it was borne from a place of pity, and he (and the other andalites) consistently held too much power over the yeerks for the species relations to ever be truly equal and functional

AUGH I have so many thoughts about alien space politics. omg. I need to talk about the actual story lmao

so yeah I also feel for aldrea, she had a rough time, watching her entire family die and being thrown into a hopeless war

and then the andalite council or w/e not listening to her bc she's a girl AND seerow’s daughter...oof

also, I really really liked the running theme of the andalites - specifically aldrea - looking down on the hork bajir as ‘simple’ and constantly underestimating them, especially dak

and I like how this is portrayed as a bad attitude for aldrea to have, and she still remains and interesting and sympathetic character even while having obvious flaws. it’s about being 3-dimensional baby!

and oh man I love that dak realizes that aldrea looks down on him, and his entire species, but he can see that that’s how the andalites are, and it all connects back to the beginning of the story w/the yeerks, bc the andalites looked down on the yeerks and treated them with pity and kept them pinned under their proverbial thumb ‘for their own good’ and look how that turned out

but dak is wise and kind enough to not hate aldrea for this, even acknowledging when she’s using him, but not pushing her away because he recognizes good in her too - and she ends up changing, partially because of his faith in her

and I feel like it can all be compared to that scenario of like - a hypothetical creature that lives in a 2D world suddenly being thrust into a 3D world, and comprehending what its seeing, and understanding that there’s so much more out there outside of the flat lines of its world - and then its dropped back into 2D-land with the knowledge of all the stuff its missing out on, and no way to get back to it or explain it to anybody else

I loooove that ‘trope’ or w/e you wanna call it, and it’s done beautifully here w/the yeerks - whos the say they wouldn't have been fine in their pool swimming around; as esplin said, a lot of the yeerks were terrified of having a host, it was only from the andalites’ perspective that their lives were sad and pitiful, and the andalites showed them what the world could be like, and then said ‘no, you can’t travel the stars like we do, you have to stay here on your planet and do what we say.’

and then again, w/the hork bajir - dak talks about how, even though he drinks up the knowledge that aldrea gives him, in the end it might have been better to just have lived peacefully, not knowing what was in the sky or the Deep - as aldrea says: “It was too late for Dak: he knew that the stars were not flowers.”

plus the hork bajir having to go from a completely peaceful species who don’t even understand the concept of violence, to a bunch of soldiers fighting a war...oof

basically everyone in this story uses the hork bajir. the yeerks use them as hosts, the andalites use their planet as a convenient place to dump seerow and then take their sweet time coming to help, and the arn created them as means to stabilize the planet, but block them off from their society and refuse to help when the yeerks come

like, the arn modifying themselves to be un-infestable by the yeerks and then being enslaved for physical labor instead? oof guys. if they had teamed up w/the hork bajir resistance things might have gone better, but probably not

more on aldrea - throughout the story I was always thinking ‘how am I supposed to see her? as a good person, or as a bad person?’

as a POV character, especially a ‘good guy’ andalite, you just start off automatically thinking of her as a good person, but as the story goes on, she starts getting lost in revenge and begins using dak and the hork bajir, and you’re left wondering if this is a story about her slide into darkness, and then towards the end of the story her character development culminates in her making the decision to stay w/the hork bajir, and the be with dak, and that’s about when I went ‘ohhh right this is animorphs so every character is pretty much gonna be grey’

I feel like that moral grey-ness was on full display w/aldrea, and I really enjoyed that. I love so much when characters who are good do bad things, for good or bad reasons, especially in media like animorphs that’s aimed at kids. it’s so compelling.

oof, and the ending when aldrea convinces dak to mobilize the hork bajir and teach them violence...and dak asks her if she’s ever killed another andalite, and she’s horrified, and says of course she hasn’t, and he says that that’s what she’s asking him, and all the hork bajir, to do - to kill their own people, even if they are being controlled by the yeerks. biiiig oof. I love that dak can keep up w/aldrea and her andalite supremacy attitude - it seems that the non-andalite characters who get along best w/the andalites are the ones who wont take their bs

what else happened....oh my god how could I forget about alloran, and his quantum virus. oooof. I like how we find out about alloran in parallel to visser three, in the same backwards way - in animorphs he’s the tragic host of visser three, in TAC he’s the disgraced but still semi-respected war-prince who becomes the first ever andalite controller, and here he’s the guy who decides to commit some war crimes because, hey, we haven’t tried that yet

but yeah that was fucked up, I love it. I’ve said it before I think but I like that alloran isn’t some perfect martyr tragically taken by the yeerks - it’s a lot more compelling that he’s a very flawed person who was taken as a controller partially due to his own bloodthirstiness.

but yeah, the part where aldrea morphs alloran and ‘sneaks’ into that room was great. aldrea’s dedication to disposing of the virus is a great indicator of her character development - it really feels like the straw that broke the camels back w/re: to the andalites not being what she thought they were, w/their tardiness coming to help the hork bajir planet and the way her father was treated being the precursors to this realization. it all culminates nicely in aldrea saying ‘fuck this actually’ and nothlit-ing into a hork bajir.

and it’s really tragic but realistic that even though aldrea and dak end up seeing eye to eye at the end and getting together, the virus ends up being released anyways (and fails in its objective to stop the yeerks from using the hork bajir - the whole thing was p much a lose-lose situation oof), and aldrea and dak still die fighting a hopeless war

but then we have the free hork bajir on earth, including toby, who, like tobias, has andalite ancestry, but no DNA to show for it - I like that they have that connection as well as tobias being her namesake

so yeah I enjoyed that one and its many-layered themes

WOW this got long uuuuuhhh ok I think i’ll leave this one off here. at the time I’m actually finishing the writing and editing, I’m on book 35 lol so I have some backlogging to do. never fear, I have a lot to say....

#lj reads animorphs #animorphs

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thenixkat · 5 years

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Animorphs notes: 20

Book 20

A Marco book

Marco strikes out with a probably Black girl at the school, who has probably been insulted about her name before

And frankly she’s got good instincts to not trust a class clown

Marco is still a fuckboy, ‘females’ really

Marco’s just shit at pickup lines

The general refusal to make a distinction b/w enslaved peoples and the yeerks controlling them.

So either the Animorphs never checked the spot where Elfangor died to see if there was anything left they could use, that the yeerks didn’t go through shit for anything they could use (I’m just going to assume there was no attempt to make a grave marker) or Toomin put the block there for David to find

Yeah Toomin put shit in places (won’t stop me from using it in a fic if I feel like it)

Have I mentioned that the whole litteral deity who does whatever he fucking feels like means that there are absolutely no stakes in this series? I don’t like that.

Yeah, weirdo stranger that ignores “I don’t want to interact with you” signals would get on the nerves

Ya know. It doesn’t feel like the Animorphs are all that hard up on getting the box if they wait that long to start to do anything about it

I still feel sorry for Ax. He is but a jock forced into the role of the one who knows shit.

Wait. Why can’t the chee just steal the box. Just ghost David, see where he puts it. Take it. And ghost out?

STill not fan of aliens having any sort of roll in building the pyramids in particular and non-White historical structures as a whole

There’s some yeerk plans involving the President and the UN afoot

The chee piss me off for so many reasons. SO many

Again, it really doesn’t feel like the box is all that important

Jake attempts to pass of a half bird morphed Marco as his deformed little brother

Very lucky those weren’t Controllers

Why exactly did they not decide to have Tobias the most experienced flyier there do it? Right these characters are dumb as fuck and don’t really care about retreiving the mnorphing cube

I mean its perfictly reasonable to shoot a big fuckoff bird trying to attack you

I am reminded of all the shit Cassie talks about Marco being perfictly willing to end innocent bystandars. Of course Cassie is not a trustworthy source of information.

They were not able to retraive the box through a fuck lot of incompenence and some bad luck

David is def one of those spoiled edgy kids

But the trained birds is not an out there theory given the behavior of the animorphs

Well he’s not that reckless, but Marco would be shit help in a dangerous situation as far as David knows. Dude’s tiny.

David is also very paranoid

Again, why can’t they ask the Chee to help?

Ax: Have you considered unplugging the computer?

Listen, Ax, do these kids look like they have that much common sense?

Oh, I see alarm systems exist again

A cobra living under teh bed in a cardboard box would be so unhealthy

The writers really hate nonavian reptiles

Ok. The writers have no idea what a cobra actually is.

According to these writers cobras have heat sensing pits like pit vipers and like to eat spiders

Ah yes, cobras do a threat display towards food they plan to eat b/c the writers know jack shit about anything that isn’t a thermal Those are hork-bajir controller not hork-bajir warriors

Slithering pretty well for a snake with 2 bullet wounds

Aww, David tried to get his pet snake out of danger

You’d think David’s dad would be taking his kid and fucking fleeing

Got damn how does Marco still have venom? Snakes don’t regen that shit instantly and he’s used a fuckload already

David’s dad and snake were captured by the yeerks. I’m going to assume that the cat is either dead or also captured

David was knocked out of a second story window, and def landed hard enough to lose consciousness so very lucky he’s still alive

David’s mom is also captured

So yeah lets recruit this kid who’s just lost everything partially due to our incompetence instead of trying to send him out of town or seeing if he has any other family he could go to.

I will give points to Ax for ya know thinking about recruiting help, this just isn’t necessarily the best time

You could go places and prove shit right now, you just don’t want to risk yer own necks

I feel like you should really be asking David before decding this shit or seeing if he has any intrests in fighting this war the way you do

Ax… proposes adding people to the group and then votes against the idea. There are multiple ways in which this doesn’t work.

SO why exactly does Marco hate David? B/c he’s edgy, a bit paranoid, and doesn’t like his humor?

Like you should ease someone into the yer parents are being tortured and enslaved thing after receiving a huge blow like you are now homeless and have to be on the run

Apparently visser rhymes with kisser

So yall really didn't ask him whether he wanted to join yer team and fight along side you. You decided that he was going to. That can’t end well. And given these writers it won’t end well in the way that it should

of course i know that later David does things like murder animals and try to kill the animorphs but like, how much is that just the writers going... oh, shit um quick how to we make it more clear that the Animorphs are better than this kid?

David whent home with Marco, sure why not

Marco catches him trying to call his parents and leads him to a payphone to use

Ah yes, the Animorphs unnecessarily causing hosts harm once again

Nice way to win him over to yer side guys

So they waste a perfictly good chance to rescue David’s dad

??? They move David… to jake’s house. Who’s brother is a controller…

Oh yer trying to get the kid captured. I see

Tobias get the fuck over yerself, Cassie can release her patients whereever the hell she wants. If you have a problem stop living in the fucking wilderness when you don’t fucking have to

David has very good points. Also you can aquire fucking both of the birds. You are not limited to one of each kind of morph.

Cassie, Marco clearly doesn’t like him and Jake’s trying to boss him around and you all forced him to join you

Like David makes very valid points. You’ve done nothing to show you’re trustworthy individuals not trying to use him to your own benifit

Isn’t there a big yeerk thing happening soon? SHouldn’t yall also be working on that too?

Ya know the controller at the meeting is probably a local, given i assume they have a portable kadrona machine and if that shit breaks or need maintenance they’d probably want to be close enough. And i know there’s no global pool network just from the stuff in like book 7?

And they’re taking the new recruit, in his first morph on his first flight on a damn recon mission. Nothing can go wrong there.

Oh look the other shoe i was waiting to fall. Ya know this would be a lot more interesting if the writers didn’t decide to make David an asshole and he still decided to leave/betray the team

So the yeerk forces on the blade ship are wearing their uniforms. But the ones on the ground? Nudists

ya know goading people into doing shit for the first time in a litteral life and death scenario ()b/c who needs things like practice() by calling them a pussy is not going to build any kind ill will

I don’t think this is a well thought out plan from the yeerk side if what’s happening is what the Animorphs think is happening

I wonder if the Animorphs will remember that roaches can fly

Ends on a too be continued

#nix reads animorphs #animorphs #david trilogy

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tfw-no-tennis · 3 years

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animorphs!!!

ok I read animorphs when I was 10 or 11 I think? and I only read it once, along w/the spinoffs and stuff, and I've always meant to revisit it...SO HERE I AM....

and oh MAN I forgot how good this series is. like I knew it was good but some things from your childhood don't hold up yknow? especially books aimed at younger audiences

but oh boy does animorphs hold up. they're easy to read and perfectly balance the line between dark/adult topics and more kid-friendly lessons. excellent

so yeah I'm loving it so far. I forgot how fast some stuff happens lmao, like I forgot that tobias gets trapped as a bird in the FIRST BOOK

also I just adore how realistically disorganized/confused the animorphs are. like, they got the elevator pitch version of the conflict from elfangor before my mans got eaten, and also they're middle schoolers. of course they’re always just like ‘wtf do we even do’

so like...their plans mostly don't work. and even when planning they run into tons of logistical issues w/morphing, traveling, communicating etc.

and I love how they clearly need to maintain their normal lives as well in order not to raise any suspicion

and I like the little details like them not spending all their time together at school because they didn’t before so that would be suspicious

oh man and I love the different family dynamics in the series. you have jake, whose family seems pretty normal until we find out that tom is a controller, and rachel, whose parents are divorced, and who has to deal w/the complications of that. and then cassie, who is an only child (I like that we have a mix, with rachel and jake having siblings), and of course marco...

iirc marco was one of my favs (if not my fav, but its hard to choose) back in the day, and I forgot how reluctant he was to participate in the animorphs thing...and the fact that he was about to quit the team and then runs into visser 1.....

another fucked up little moment I liked - when they morphed dolphin and marco had to morph back to human bc he gets injured and he was like ‘I cant swim, and my mom drowned, I don't want to die like she did’ I was like oooof

also on that topic I adore how little the animorphs know about how anything works. like they once wondered if there's a limit to how many morphs they can acquire and they were basically like ‘idk guess we’ll find out’

and then when marco got injured as a dolphin and they were like ‘morph back I guess and hopefully you'll be okay?’ like damn luckily that worked

basically these books do The Most Excellent Job showing that these are just kids. like they're literally in jr high which is 90s speak for middle school....they're like 13???? at most???

and the narrative reflects that perfectly!! all of them, even rachel who is pretty much the most gung-ho about fighting and stuff, have nightmares and all these terrible experiences bc they don't have basically any guidance

and even with ax, it’s immediately obvious that he’s also just a kid, even though he’s this deadly alien....

also oh mannnn I love so much how we’re introduced to the andalites as this heroic race and how that slowly changes over the course of the story

like, when elfangor introduces himself as ‘prince’ you assume he’s part of the andalite monarchy - but later we find out that ‘prince’ is a military rank, and the andalites are a lot more militaristic than we would assume at the beginning

its so fantastic how it starts off as a fairly black and white conflict of andalites = good guy aliens and yeerks = bad guy aliens

and you even have some background stuff going on w/the taxxons being controllers by choice, and the hork-bajir being enslaved

but as the story goes on, all of those lines get blurred in different ways...

also ooof the poor hork-bajir. I always felt so bad for them. it’s crazy that even in the first book, the animorphs are killing their enemies - at least I inferred that in book 1, but it becomes way more overt later on...the tough situation of them knowing that the hork-bajir are unwilling hosts but that they’re so dangerous that not killing them could be fatal to the good guys

and ngl this time around I have a lot more sympathy for the yeerks, even tho they don't really deserve it (at least in the early parts of the story where I am rn)

like...they're just these blind helpless slug creatures, but they're also fully sentient and intelligent? like, that's so fucked up. imagine yourself as you are now, but you're just a sensory deprived slug swimming in a pool. that's pretty fucked. and then the fact that the yeerks are biologically made to be parasites...its kinda no wonder that they ended up the way they are (and it also makes stuff like the yeerk peace movement really compelling)

also wow I kinda forgot about all the body horror w/the morphing. like ik that's one of the things that animorphs is known for but like. I forgot how much it happens and how creative the horrifying descriptions are. I love it

and omfg so when I first read this series the ellimist stuff confused me a lot bc I didn't read the books That closely (I mostly wanted to see what would happen next) but I loooove time travel bullshit so I’m really enjoying it so far

even tho tbh I think even if I had paid more attention as a 10 yr old I still would've been confused bc the ellimist stuff is kinda just inherently confusing lmao

ok and I just love the characters,,,I love that the books switch perspectives, and KAA did such a masterful job of portraying differing and realistic reactions to their situation....like, all the animorphs react so differently to their circumstances, but their reactions are all so grounded in realism and also their personalities

like man I love rachel. she was one of my favs as a kid too bc I always loved female characters and she was just so cool. and she still is, and so excellently written too

liiiike the fact that even though she’s so tough and brave, she’s still a kid and has plenty of moments when she’s scared or uncertain...

and I just really like the fact that she out of all of them is the one who’s tough and loves to fight...and the fact that she also unapologetically loves shopping and stuff like that...its about the multifaced characters

just like how marco is the ‘funny guy’ but they make it very clear from the beginning that this is his way of coping w/shit like his family falling apart, and then alien BS

and also marco is really smart? I kinda forgot abt that (sorry marco) but I like that bc that's uncommon to see with ‘funny’ characters

oh mannnn and ax. I love ax. I forgot a whole bunch about the early stuff w/him and how conflicted he was w/keeping secrets from the other animorphs

KAA did such a fantastic job w/ax - he really comes across as the perfect mix of ‘fish out of water alien’ and ‘young teen/tween’ and ‘alien from a strict militaristic society who is in training to become a soldier like his famous older brother’

n that was so sad n fucked up when he called the andalite home world and had to tell everyone (including his parents) that elfangor died, and then the elders or w/e forced ax to take blame for elfangor breaking their laws in order to preserve elfangor’s postmortem reputation, even at the cost of ax’s career/life :(

and man I loved the part where ax is like ‘well, we didn't help the hork-bajir even tho we could have and now they're all enslaved. I'm not letting that happen to the humans’ and the council or w/e is like ‘well you should let it happen, don't interfere’ and ax basically realizes oh shit sometimes adults are wrong

basically I love the conflict there, where the andalites are the ones who gave the yeerks the technology that led to them spreading across the galaxy like a disease, and now fight to stop them due to their guilt, but also refuse to directly help the less advanced species who are being invaded by the yeerks for fear of making a similar mistake like w/the yeerks....

ooooof and the part where ax is like ‘guess I have to go fight visser 3 and die’ :( he’s just a babyyyy

and augh when alloran asks them to kill him....geeeez there’s so much fucked up stuff already and I'm not even in the double digits yet

oh my god and the brutally awful fact that any freed controller will just get tracked down by the yeerks and murdered so the secret invasion stays secret...and the animorphs think that by destroying the kandrona they've freed a bunch of controllers but really they just signed their death warrants - what a catch 22

oh and I love how even early on the yeerks aren't a completely unified force - we have the obvious rivalry w/visser 1 and visser 3, with visser 1 even arranging the animorphs release from visser 3′s prison bc of this, and that yeerk who told ax where to find visser 3 because he was pissed that his yeerk gf got killed by visser 3 - even though the reason she was killed was due to kandrona rationing, which was caused by the animorphs...i love the layers

ok what else. oh yeah I love tobias sm, he was one of my favs as a kid too, his whole story is so deeply tragic but also interesting and we haven't even gotten into all the stuff w/his parents yet

the part where he’s freaking out as a hawk and he’s gonna fly into the windows even tho he knows it’ll probably kill him...christttt

also tobias and rachel are so romance aughhhh

ok also jake - he was never my favorite when I was younger bc I felt like he had Basic Protag Man Syndrome but now I can appreciate his character a lot more. like, he basically got elected the leader and he’s kinda like ‘guess I have to do this now.’ and that of course ends up fucking him up majorly in the long run bc even tho he’s more serious and responsible, he’s still just a kid too

and I loooove the horror of finding out that tom is a controller, and jake having to contend w/the fact that it’s very likely that he’ll have to fight and/or kill his brother someday

also the book where jake gets infested w/a yeerk was one of my favs and still is. so fucked up and interesting. the fact that that yeerk was previously tom’s made it even more fucked, w/the yeerk taunting jake the whole time

and then the yeerk dying in jakes head...so messed up

omg and cassie too. I love cassie. I didn't appreciate her as much when I was younger bc I was a straightforward kid who liked action, and cassie is all about pacifism when possible and compassion, which I love a lot now that I Get it more.

cassie being such a gentle person but still fighting in this fucked up war bc doing nothing would be worse is super compelling. plus the conflicts with her having to figure out where she and humanity fit in the circle of life and whatnot is great

I loved the contrast of her being very aware of how nature works bc of working w/her parents and all these injured animals, but also being so compassionate that it still bothers her to see death and especially participate in it

like her feeling awful about killing the termite queen even tho its ‘just a bug’ and stuff

basically what makes the series great isn't that it’s got all these fucked up moments and horror elements and is overall quite dark - it’s that all of it comes together to make the point that war is hell, and child soldiers are gonna end up traumatized pretty much no matter what happens

it’s a very strong message, and the story never feels like it’s being dark just for the sake of being dark, but rather never letting the reader forget how awful things are

TL;DR: anirmorphs is to the YA genre what hunter x hunter is to the shounen genre

in animorphs, the heroes of the story are kids who get cool powers and get to fight aliens - in any other YA story they would have a bunch of fun adventures and come out on top most/all the time - things might get darker towards the end, but good would prevail. the evil yeerks would be stopped, and the main couples would get married and have kids and live happily ever after.

however, war isn't like that, especially when the soldiers are kids. so instead we get animorphs, and it’s brutally realistic. they barely ever get to enjoy their powers - on the rare occasion that they get to, something usually goes horribly wrong

compare to hxh - it seems like a regular shounen story about kids participating in a fantastical mostly-adult world and being able to match the adults bc they're Special - but as the story wears on it becomes clear that the kids are just very traumatized. this all leads to gon’s berserker collapse in the chimera ant arc, which is led up to masterfully w/a bunch of adults treating gon as an adult even though he’s a child.

essentially the same thing happens in animorphs - with jake being shoved into the leader role and becoming a military general as a kid, which leads to him committing horrific war crimes because he’s been put in a position no child should ever have to be in

similarly, kurapika has what would be a very straightforward revenge plotline in any other story - but this is hxh, so the bad guys aren't just 2-dimensional evil caricatures, and the road to revenge just leads kurapika to ruin. we root for kurapika to win bc they’re a character we like, but it becomes clearer and clearer as the story goes on that getting revenge is not the path kurapika should be taking

nothing is ever as straightforward as we want it to be, basically. and the same applies to animorphs. so many times they're faced with conflicts that seem to have an obvious answer, only for it to be revealed later that the choices they made led to other unforeseen awful consequences

ok i need to stop rambling this is already super long. basically: animorphs good. I’ll probably do another post like this semi-soon as I continue reading (I'm partway thru book 10 now)

#not me doing another liveblog that i probably wont finish #animorphs #lj reads animorphs

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

Text

What if Ax joined the team in the first book?

[Someone asked me what would happen if Ax joined the team at the same time as everyone else. Whoever it was: sorry that I lost your ask; drop me a line so I can credit your idea.]

When Aximili asks to come along for the fight, Elfangor — against his better judgment — relents. «Stay close,» he says, and «Don’t touch anything.»

«Yes, Prince Elfangor,» Aximili says.

Elfangor flashes him a quick smile, stalk eyes only. The use of the title shows that Aximili understands the seriousness of the situation. This is no driftball game where they can argue over the rules. This is combat, and thus Elfangor’s word must be law.

Elfangor knows he made the right call. That Aximili is mature enough to be cabin boy (as the humans would say) for the GalaxyTree. He was right to insist to his captain that his little brother is ready for combat, aristh or no. And he proves to be right in letting Aximili come along in his fighter. Otherwise, Elfangor is reasonably certain, Aximili would have perished along with the rest of their crew.

It’s mere seconds into the battle that the Blade ship’s dracon cannon strikes the Dome ship square in its broadside. Mere minutes that pass between the T.O. first spotting the yeerks and a thousand warriors crying out in a single thought-speak shout of despair, only to be horribly silenced.

In that moment, Elfangor’s mind races in a dozen directions at once: Andalite fighters aren’t equipped for planetary landfall. The Time Matrix is down there on that planet. The G-force of attempting to reach it could kill them both. There’s an Escafil device stored in his fighter’s center console. The yeerks are on Earth. Loren is on Earth. Tobias is on Earth. Aximili is right here in the fighter with him, sharing the risk and the blame if anything goes wrong. The Time Matrix... The G-force... The Blade ship... The humans...

Elfangor makes an impossible choice, because all the choices are impossible. «Strap in,» he tells Aximili. «Brace for impact.»

Aximili doesn’t ask. Doesn’t point out that Elfangor’s out of his mind. Instead, he scrambles for the crash harness.

A nudge of the controls. Almost slowly, almost gently, the little fighter surrenders to the planet’s gravity well. It tilts. It slides. And it starts to accelerate.

Elfangor yanks back on the thrusters with all his strength, even as the hydraulics scream at him and the craft judders with hull-cracking force. They are become a meteor, arcing across Earth’s sky in a jet trail of flames.

Bracing all four hooves against the floor, Elfangor struggles for fast calculations of half-remembered geography. That’s North America... That’s the west coast... No, no, further south, struggling to force the craft to obey... That patch of light must be Los Angeles... That satellite is San Diego...

Aximili is whispering the oaths to prince and people and honor, the oaths repeated before death. He does not have to do it so that Elfangor can hear, and yet he seems to want to share this small comfort before the end.

Elfangor slams the secondary braking system into place. The craft goes from thousands of miles an hour to mere hundreds in half a second. Gravity flips sickeningly.

Aximili, safe in the harness, gets jarred but nothing else. Elfangor, who had no time to join him, slams into the far wall with a breath-destroying crunch. He staggers to his feet, weak gasps of pain escaping without his permission. He’s bleeding internally, ribs broken, his lower heart sending out horrible judders of pain with every beat. He remains hopeful, however — until he looks down and sees a wasteland of concrete and half-finished buildings where an empty field should be. «No,» he whispers, helpless. «No.»

«Elfangor...?» Aximili’s voice is so tentative it verges on inaudible.

Elfangor is staring at the nav screen showing a familiar set of coordinates and also at the fifteen feet of solid cement between him and the Time Matrix. Still, a part of him refuses to believe.

He lands anyway. Stumbles out, just to be sure — and finds himself face-to-face with five human children. Five children on a planet on the brink of subjugation. Five children surrounded by threats on all sides and yet unknowing and defenseless. Five children, one of whom has Loren’s wide grey eyes and soft yellow hair and the round-shouldered build of a long-lost human named Alan Fangor.

«Aximili,» Elfangor says. The yeerks are coming. Visser Three will kill him, either now or after the kind of hunt that will tear this planet apart. Better to let it happen now. Better to use these last moments to give Earth a fighting chance. «Come out here. Bring the Escafil device.»

Ax is reeling, spinning, too far into shock to take it all in. Elfangor is dead. Dead because of Visser Three, the Abomination. Dead partially by his own choice, as well. Because when Ax tried to insist that they stay and fight, or that they morph and run, Elfangor held up a hand to stop him.

«Aximili, I can’t explain everything right now, but this is what has to be done.» His private thought-speak was rushed, harried. «I need you to go with Tobias and the others. They’ll keep you safe. And they’ll need you to guide them.»

«I can’t do this,» Aximili had whispered. «I don’t know enough, I don’t know how...»

«Aristh Aximili, formerly of the GalaxyTree, formerly of Mother and Father’s awful lopsided scoop they’ll never get around to fixing.» There had been a catch of emotion to Elfangor’s voice, thought-speak letting more leak through than the words alone.

Aximili felt himself go cold all over, knees locking, breath struggling with unshed tears. He understood a field promotion when he heard one. He knew what was coming.

«I hereby relinquish my command to you, Prince Aximili. I do so in utmost trust that you will serve our cousins faithfully, both on the homeworld and here, though we are far from home.» Elfangor bowed his head. «I am the servant of the People. I am the servant of my prince.» He lifted his eyes to look straight at Aximili, leaving no chance that he could be referring to their captain. «I am the servant of honor. My life is not my own, when the People have need of it. My life is given for the People, for my prince, and for my honor.»

It went against everything they’d been taught, but Aximili allowed the tears to fall then. He’d listened, one last time, when Elfangor told him to take the humans and run. To flee this place and not look back. To avoid knowing what was going to happen next.

They take Ax (they call him Ax; he doesn’t care) back to the house of the human called Jake. Ax staggers along, awkward on two legs. He acquired the human called Tobias, for now. Later, he will have to make himself a properly unique human morph, but for now he’s too sick at hearts to perform a proper frolis maneuver.

The humans were very concerned with putting artificial skins on Ax’s human shape; the two females refused even to look at him until he wore a windbreaker from the human called Jake and the human called Rachel had fashioned him a sarong of sorts from her overshirt.

“My parents are going to think that Tobias is a raging nutjob, but that’s okay because they’ve never met him before,” Jake says, by way of apology.

“Nutjob. Nut. T-t. T-job.” Ax understands most of the words, but for those two. It’s comforting, even in this strange shape, to allow the dual click of his human tongue: once at the very front of his mouth for T, once further back for J. “T... Tuh. Juh. T’Juh.” The repeated motion calms him, keeps him from thinking.

“Yep, you’re really proving my point right about now.” With a sigh, Jake pushes the front door open.

Jake shepherds Ax up to his room after a bare minimum of interaction with the rest of the family. He offers a padded tube known as a sleeping bag (Ax declines) and assures Ax more than once that they’ll work out a better solution tomorrow. Ax finds the human dwelling strange and uncomfortable; it is all blocky angles and enclosing walls. He cannot even see the stars, and the thick fabric covering the floor proves to be inedible. After demorphing, he folds himself into a corner to try and sleep.

At first Jake asks many questions: about Elfangor, about morphing, about yeerks and controllers. Ax does his best to answer without giving too much away. Finally Jake’s voice tapers off, his breathing becomes slow, and he starts to make a steady noise that Ax will later learn is called snoring.

Ax tries to sleep. He lists z-space theorems in his mind, breathes slowly, tries to think of nothing. He recites the ritual of death. Recites it again. Continues to turn the phrases over in his mind. Hoping that soon they will take on meaning and cease to be mere words.

They are both awakened the next morning by a staccato tap tap tap against Jake’s window. Jake sits upright, rubbing at his eyes. “What the...?”

There is a small quadruped balancing on his windowsill, batting at the glass with one front paw. «Let me in, would you?» says the quadruped, in a voice that Ax recognizes as Tobias’s. «I’m still learning how to balance as a cat, and it took me forever to get here.»

With an ease startling to Ax, Jake rolls to his feet and shoves the window open with strong human arms. “How are you doing this?” he asks.

«How long have you been in morph?» Ax says over him, alarmed. Elfangor told the aliens about the time limit last night, and Ax emphasized it again after they left the construction site. This kind of behavior — morphing unsupervised, using an untested animal, failing to track the time — is shockingly careless.

«Not sure.» Tobias drops lightly to the ground. «This is hands-down the coolest thing I have ever experienced. I don’t know how you andalite types ever get anything done, with this kind of fun to distract you —»

«Demorph immediately!» Ax speaks so sharply that both Jake and Tobias stare at him.

«Okay, but I’m kinda naked—»

«It is imperative that you demorph! Do you wish to become a nothlit?»

«Fine, fine,» Tobias says. To Ax’s enormous relief, he is resuming his human form as he speaks. «What’s a nothlit?»

Jake removes some artificial skins from the much smaller room adjacent to his desk and hands them to Tobias.

«A nothlit is a person who has become trapped in morph and cannot resume andalite shape,» Ax says. «The process is irreversible. Fifteen percent of andalites in the first generation ever to morph suffered this fate. It is the terrible price of this gift.»

“Huh.” Tobias finishes pulling one of Jake’s garments over his head. “And then what happens to them?”

«They are trapped. Unable to demorph. Forever.»

“Yeah, but I assume you, like, accommodate them as animals or whatever, right? You said fifteen percent of some groups. So there’s probably a lot of people like that, and you probably have some fancy tech to help them do stuff, right?” Tobias’s eyes are wide in what Ax is beginning to recognize as a human expression of hopefulness.

Ax shifts position on the carpet. «No. Not really. They are usually secluded from society.»

“What, just because they’re stuck as cats forever?”

«They are vecols.» Seeing Tobias’s confusion, Ax clarifies, «warriors who are permanently wounded. It is best to allow them their privacy, apart from mainstream andalite society.»

“Separate but equal, huh?” Jake says, a darkness to his tone that Ax does not understand.

«Yes, exactly,» Ax says.

Tobias and Jake look at each other. Tobias makes a wordless sound in the back of his throat.

“So much for the superior alien society coming to enlighten us,” Jake mutters.

«It is for their own good,» Ax tries to explain.

“Oh, so you polled every single one of them, and they prefer the ghettos to —” Jake cuts himself off. “Okay, this is not what we need to talk about. Aliens. Yeerks. Let’s go get the others, yeah?”

The next few days are... overwhelming. All of them assemble near the home of the human called Cassie, in a space filled several other species of Earth animal. They have questions for Ax, dozens of questions, and they talk over each other in their eagerness to learn about andalites and thought-speak, interstellar travel and dracon beams. Marco and Cassie want to recuse themselves from the war entirely, while Tobias and Rachel want to throw themselves headlong into the fight with an eagerness that shows they don’t truly understand how hopeless the fight will be.

Ax does his best to tell them what he can, while keeping state secrets to himself. He reminds them time and again to be careful when morphing, because it’s the only thing he knows that they must be told.

He doesn’t know how to lead them. He’s not qualified to be a war-prince. He has no idea how to balance Seerow’s Kindness against their demands to understand why their home is being invaded and destroyed.

In the end, Tobias helps Ax set up a scoop in the woods. Jake’s appalled at the idea of Ax being alone out there with no human domicile, but eventually Ax succeeds in impressing on him that this is what he wants. Finally he wins them over. It’s a relief, to be out in woods that are not quite familiar but nevertheless closer to what he knows from the homeworld. It gives him the chance to be alone, away from the aliens and the infinite answers he doesn’t have for them.

All of the humans come by with gifts for his scoop: books, a small television, magazines and newspapers, a material called plywood that keeps out the rain. Marco provides several cans of a delicious substance known as Spam, and an even more delicious condiment known as kerosene. Their worry is... touching. But Ax also suspects it is not right. A prince should look after his warriors, not the other way around.

At their next team meeting, Ax walks in to find an ongoing argument between Marco and Jake.

“You don’t have any proof,” Jake is saying.

“That cop knew him.” Marco crosses his arms. “That cop, who was definitely a controller, was like ‘oh, you’re Tom Berenson’s brother? Never mind then.’ Not to mention the fact that you said yourself he’s been acting weird. And yeah, him deciding to give us the ninth degree about UFOs and how we know Tobias was really fucking weird. So you just don’t want to admit that your brother —”

Which is when Jake hits Marco across the face with a closed fist. Marco staggers back a step, cursing and cupping his jaw.

“Stop!” Cassie shouts.

Marco presses the heel of his hand to his swelling lower lip. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he spits. “Tell me the Sharing isn’t sketchy as hell. Tell me the way he talks about it is totally normal. Go ahead. Look me in the eye and tell me you actually believe that.”

Jake is gasping for air, face flushed, staring around himself as if lost. His knuckles are bleeding. “Ax,” he says. “Ax, I’d know, right? I’d be able to tell if — If —”

They’re talking about Jake’s older brother. Ax briefly met the human in question on that first night, and didn’t get much of an impression one way or another. “I don’t know,” he says at last, very slowly. “I have not known... nnnnooonne... any controllers. Oll-lers. The yeerks can access all the memories of their hosts, so it would be possible... ssssib-bble...”

“Possible.” Jake takes a breath. “Possible. But not guaranteed. So we... we use this morphing thing. We go to a Sharing meeting, and we prove that there’s nothing wrong with the Sharing, because Tom would never get involved with a yeerk organization. In the process, we prove that there’s nothing wrong with Tom.”

It occurs to Ax that he shouldn’t allow his team to take this kind of risk, especially not for the sake of a single human who is likely lost to yeerk control already. He knows, too, that Jake may even be right about his brother being unlikely to join the yeerks willingly, but that it makes little difference if so.

Only, the thing is, it occurs to Ax as well to wonder what he would do if it was Elfangor who’d been taken.

“We can do this,” he says aloud. “Th—ssssss. But we must be careful.”

Ax’s suspicions about Marco’s suspicions prove to be correct. Tom, and most of the Sharing’s other full members, are in fact controllers. Jake proves to be right as well that Tom isn’t voluntary, sparse consolation though it is. Ax doesn’t like Jake’s plan to go charging down to the yeerk pool to free Tom and the other hosts, but this is a human affair and perhaps a human decision. So he goes along with them to acquire DNA — and when Cassie gets taken, he commits fully to leading his first-ever battle.

“Tobias has been in morph for kind of a while, right?” Jake asks Ax as they walk to the middle school.

Ax has warned Tobias already about timing; he doesn’t feel capable of doing it again. “I am sure that Tobias knows how to be safe,” he says.

Ax has read about battle. Studied it extensively. Listened to Elfangor’s stories, asking incessant questions. Learned all the theories. Even watched holos of famous fights. In short, he is as prepared as it is possible for an untested aristh to be.

He knows nothing of war.

The battle happens all at once, from more directions than even he can watch with stalk eyes scanning frantically all around him. Humans and animals and hork-bajir and taxxon clash and scream, shoot and claw and die. Blood slicks the floor, spilled kandrona slopping over the sides of the pool as bodies crash down among the yeerks. He doesn’t know who is a controller, who is a host, who is a friend or an enemy.

Hork-bajir charge him, dozens of blades at the ready. He bashes them back with frantic graceless tail swings. A taxxon is already down, intestines spilling across the floor, before he has time to plan the strike. No time to think. No time to feel. Exhaustion and foreign gravity drag him down.

He’s going to die down here. He’s going to die like his brother, slaughtered on an alien planet and devoured. He’s going to die, and his parents will never learn what happened to either of them.

«Ax! Ax!»

He strikes at the shape. Luckily fatigue slows his swing. Luckily Jake ducks with cat reflexes. Too late he registers blood-matted orange fur.

«We’re losing ground,» Jake says, gasping for air. «Time to get the hell out of here while we still can.»

«But...» Ax is crazy; why is he objecting? «But we haven’t saved anyone... We haven’t...»

«This is— Ax, we stay, we die.» He’s right. He’s right.

«We go, then,» Ax says. He’s a failure. A coward. He’s running from his duty. If Elfangor knew— «Everyone! We have to go!» Ax shouts.

Rachel raises her trunk, bellowing. She shoulders aside controllers and hosts alike, clearing a path for the rest of them. She’s not going to make the stairs, not with that bulk. Marco is loping behind her, but Cassie is pinned down by three hork-bajir clear across the room. There’s no sign of Tobias.

His warriors are dying around him. He doesn’t know what to do. All the choices are wrong. Enemies are on all sides, far too many to fight.

«Help Rachel and Marco!» Jake calls. «I’m going for Cassie.»

Ax doesn’t question. He leaps, clearing the heads of a dozen human-controllers, and lands next to Marco. Together they brutalize their way forward, cutting down or shoving aside anyone that gets too close.

The battle swells and screams and roars around Ax. It’s too much to keep track of. He loses Jake and Cassie, still hasn’t found Tobias. All he can do is keep swinging, keep yanking his tail back bone-sore and flinging it gore-slick into yet another hot sick piece of flesh.

He stumbles over a small protrusion in the floor. Marco steadies him roughly. It’s the first stair. He struggles up the first several too-small steps, hooves sliding on the blood-slick stone.

Rachel is shrinking, half-crushed by the crowd of fleeing hosts. She goes down. Marco and Ax haul her upright. They pull her forward with unforgiving speed in spite of her many injuries, trying to keep the mob from eating her whole. Ax feels the strange sizzling non-pain of a fourth-degree dracon burn along his left hind leg. His collapse halted by the press of the crowd, he shoves onward.

Ax bursts into the bizarre empty quiet of the high school hallway. Marco is just ahead of him, carrying Rachel with her face hidden against his dark fur.

Half a dozen hosts are fleeing in every direction. «Godspeed,» Marco murmurs, looking after them. His thought-speak is shaky with unshed tears.

It’s nearly a half an hour — long enough for Ax to show Rachel how to morph to be rid of injuries — before there’s a clatter of hooves. Cassie, still in horse morph, bursts through the doorway. Jake is slumped across her back, clinging to her mane with the arm that isn’t severed at the elbow by a hork-bajir blade. His right side and Cassie’s entire flank are soaked with blood. He slides off the moment they’re safe, green-white with shock. Ax rushes to his side to tell him to morph.

When Jake has morphed and demorphed, he slowly sits up. He looks from where Rachel is punching a locker door repeatedly to where Marco crouches over the custodian’s sink to vomit. Finally, he looks up at Ax. “Where’s Tobias?” he asks, soft and hoarse.

Rachel whirls away from the locker she was abusing. “We thought he was with you!”

They all stare at each other in silence for several more seconds.

Jake curls forward to bury his face in his hands. “We have to go,” he says into his palms. “If... if I don’t get home before Tom does...”

There’s another long moment of silence. Marco becomes the first to turn and walk away.

Tobias finds Ax, later that night. He’s not dead, anyway. And he’s not a controller, not in that form. Ax knows better to voice such sparse consolation. He can’t offer hope, not really. Instead he does his best to listen, and to let Tobias say what he will.

Their next meeting in Cassie’s barn is... tense.

“How could we let this happen?” Jake demands. “How could we have done this? I should have known—”

«Jake...» Tobias says.

“Anyway, I’m out.” Marco stands up.

“Fine, then get out!” Rachel shouts. “What are you waiting for? Go run home to Daddy!”

“What I’m waiting for is to see if I can convince any of you people to come with me!” Marco says. “Because, for the record, we should all be out.” He takes a breath. “Ax... Jake... I know you both have more of a stake in this. But...”

“It’s your call, dude,” Jake says.

“Okay, but back to the real problem,” Rachel snaps. “How do we fix Tobias?”

Ax takes a step back. She didn’t look directly at him, but both Jake and Cassie did. «I... I wish that I had more answers... Escafil’s paradox of zero-space delay...» He has no answers. No words.

«In short: we don’t.» Tobias jerks his head. «So. Guess I’ll be hanging out with Ax a lot more in the future.»

“But even if we can’t demorph him...” Cassie is definitely looking at Ax. So is everyone else. “There has to be something we can do, right?”

Ax’s tail hits the stall door behind him. He’s been backing away from them the entire time. His chest heaves with panic, eyes skittering from one target to another. Except Tobias. He can’t look at Tobias.

“Ax?” Jake says, and then, “Hey, Ax, hey. Just, just, take a second, okay?”

“Take a second?” Rachel crosses her arms. “He’s the one who got us into this, and now Tobias—”

«I’m a fraud!» Ax bursts out. He’s shaking, still gasping. «I don’t know what I’m doing — I’m just a stupid incompetent kid. I ran last night, like a coward, and I left Tobias to be killed. I’m not a war prince, I’m a fake! A stupid, useless fake!»

Tobias flutters down to land on the stall door across from him. «There’s a big difference between being inexperienced and being a liar, Ax-Man.»

«You don’t — You don’t understand.» Ax wraps both arms around himself. «I can’t lead, I can’t do anything right. I have less than four months of training from living on the Dome ship, and even that was only because of being Elfangor’s brother. I never should have tried to pretend to be a war-prince, because I’m not. I’m not even a warrior.»

“And, what, you think any of us are?” Jake asks quietly. “We’re all dumb kids with even less training than what you have. But we all went down there anyway. Not because you told us to. Because I asked for it.”

«I still had responsibility for you all,» Ax says miserably. «And I failed you.»

“You screwed up, yeah,” Rachel says. “So do better next time.”

“Next time?” Marco demands. “You saw that place— You heard— Are you out of your mind?”

She rounds on him. “You’re right. I saw. I heard. There are little kids down there right now, Marco. My cousin is down there. And so are thousands of other people. If you’re too much of a coward to do anything about it, that’s your problem, but I’m not letting that stop me.”

«I’m still gonna do what I can to help,» Tobias says. «So count me in.»

“I’m in too,” Jake says. “Ax?”

«I can’t lead you,» Ax insists. «I can’t. It wouldn’t be right. It’s not my place.»

“Hate to say it, but we need a leader,” Cassie points out. “Ax, we can’t make you do it if you don’t want to. Tobias, should you lead us?”

«What? No! I’m nobody’s leader.»

“Okay, okay.” Jake looks around. “We don’t have to decide this right now. We’re all tired, so let’s just take a breather and meet back here tomorrow when we’re clearer headed. Yeah?”

None of them argue. Cassie and Marco murmur agreement. Rachel’s already turning away, asking Tobias where he plans to stay tonight.

Interesting, Ax thinks. The vote isn’t until tomorrow, but he suspects he knows already who they’re going to choose.

Jake is not what Ax would’ve expected from a prince. He calls for a vote any time there’s a major decision to be made. He always explains himself to his team, after the fact if not in the moment. He becomes the first one to admit when he made a mistake, and sometimes even when a mess wasn’t his fault at all. He asks Ax questions. A lot of questions.

But he leads them. He makes the calls in the battles. He takes responsibility for them all, and he carries it well enough to get by. Unless, of course, the situation calls for an official chain of command.

«Prince Elfangor asked me to lead in his stead,» Ax tells the andalite commander on the long-distance call. «I accepted the honor, and was humbled by it.»

«Very well, Prince Aximili.» Ithileran’s expression is stiff, but he doesn’t argue. «We would like to discuss the nature of your strategy for leading the Earth resistance.»

Throughout the conflict on Leera, Commander Galuit seems to be almost bemused by the Animorphs. «I’ve heard a great deal about you, Prince Aximili,» he says. «What do you suggest we do about these explosives?»

«I wouldn’t dream of making such a decision without consulting my warriors,» Ax says diplomatically. It’s Jake’s cue to make a polite suggestion, but that Marco can also be expected to weigh in with an opinion.

«Yes,» Galuit says, as much to himself as anyone. «You’re an interesting one, indeed.»

“You’ll have to forgive him,” Tobias says loudly to the security forces. “He’s visiting royalty, you see. Extremely important prince. From a place you wouldn’t have heard of.”

Ax has consumed what is, perhaps, slightly more than a typical quantity of mini quiches at what is supposed to be an all-you-can-eat banquet. He fails to see why this is an occasion for law enforcement.

“Anyway.” Tobias is now shepherding Ax out of the room, which is unfair because he has only made it halfway through the platter of crab rangoon. “It’s considered a compliment where he’s from. And if you even think about filing a report, you will be hearing from the rest of his majesty’s security team.”

“We will not be falling in line,” Jake tells Arbat, chin lifted, eyes narrow. “We will not be deferring to your command. We will do what Prince Aximili tells us, and I suggest you do the same. Because you can either help us, or you can get out of our way.”

Standing on the bridge of the Blade ship, hand resting on the pad that broadcasts footage of the Animorphs to the entire Andalite Electorate, Ax does his best to look confident. «We have won a great victory this day, but now is the time for peace. Now is the time to work with the humans to help them rebuild. Now is the time for forgiveness, for yeerks and taxxons alike.»

«Who are you?» the Technical Officer demands.

Marco opens his mouth to make a smart comment, but refrains.

«I am War-Prince Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill,» Ax says. «And as of this moment, I am officially ceding my position to Prince Jake Berenson, Commander in Chief of the Earth Resistance.»

Jake steps forward. Grieved but unbowed. Nervous but resolute. All eyes are on him.

So no one notices when Alloran nudges Ax gently in the side. When he says in private thought-speak, «I can say with utter certainty that he would have been proud of you.»

#au #animorphs #animorphs au #Ax #Aximili #precious cinnamon bun #oh look there's ax #aximili esgarrouth isthill #oh look there's elfangor #canon character death #gore #violence #ableism #shorms

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thenixkat · 5 years

Text

Animorphs notes 52

Book 52

An Aximili book

Don’t most of Jame’s crew have pigeon morphs? That is an animal that often flies together in flocks and wouldn’t be out of place anywhere

Aaaand the whole andalite bullshit returns, you really gonna let ableism get yall killed?

Also there’s litterally 2 other andalites living on Earth. You know where they fucking live. Why not hang out with them

Also why don’t Gaf and Mertil fucking help? You don’t have to fight to help. That fucking forcefield tech they’ve got would be very useful for the resistance

The yeerks are rounding up people in mass, finally

Why does Ax call the morphing cube blue box, he knows teh actual thing it’s supposed to be called

Parasitism is a form of symbiosis.

Right now I remember, Ax’s narration fails at being xenofiction.

Motherfucker, the writers really did forget one of the disabled kid's names

And they replaced it with something more ethnic

I really hoped that if Ax called James or one of Jame’s friends a vecol out loud that they socked him in the face

Only Ax gets to ge competent of sensible today. James you’re better than this

James dipped out played dead, de and remorphed and going to attack from teh rear

More Rachel is bloodthirsty bullshit. Yer in a fight, she’s angry and using that to help keep her side alive while yer standing over there pulling a Cassie

An andalite does not have the upper body strength to hold onto a struggling medium sized bird of prey

Also Ax, THE YEERK’S FUCKING HOST DOES NOT CONSENT TO BEING TRAPPED IN THE BODY OF A FUCKING BIRD YOU CASSIE

And the yeerk would still starve to death in the host’s body b/c teh yeerk still needs to fucking eat

Congrats you all accomplished absolutely nothing but death of hosts

This is litterally the same level of “doesn’t think ahead” that ALL of the Animorphs has shown throught the books

So the escaped blind girl’s name is Elena

Wait, why is Elena at the camp? SHe slipped away when no one was looking and the yeerks didn’t particularly know about her? How did she get here caus she didn’t leave with teh Animorphs either?

Marco wants to give everyone in the surrounding area radiation poisoning when regular explosives would probably work just fine

Oh pls since when did yall give a shit about the captives/slaves

Here’s a plan, stop the supply lines, free the captives, evacuate as many as possible and then blow shit up.

Ax teh reason that the horks definately lost was cause the andalites decided to fuck them over for no other reason that being specist asshats

Cassie you can’t say shit with all the innocent blood on yer hands

The chee could be sabotaging things and freeing people nonviolently, but no

Yeah Cassie, its almost like there’s consequences for your dumbass actions

Ax you are risking everyone’s security making those calls, especially so close to the camp

So Ax has been a traitor for awhile, b/c everyone and their momma knows that teh andalites are genocidal cowards

b/c again the andalites don't give a shit about anyone other than themselves and making themselves look good

Wow Cassie it’s almost like actions have concequesces. Own up to yours

Ax you say like you haven’t been helping people who you know are genocidal asshats get into position to commit genocide

Also how the fuck does a ‘sorry’ get everyone’s sympathy? Some things cannot be forgiven

Also no fucks given for the hork-bajir and other alien hostages

Why the fuck would u trust Cassie’s instincts? I’ve been reading this series and she has never been right except for the whale shit

… Cassie really isn't actually sorry is she? She was just upset that people would be upset with her…

she was just upset that she looked bad and now that the others have assured her that she didn't do anything wrong she doesn't actually give a shit about all the extra blood on her hands

Also Ax being specist judging the whole of humanity based on the actions of a handful of assholes

Ax: genocide is ok if at least 5 members of the species were dumbass dicks

Cassie is lying out her ass

Also I’m still going with my Cassie is actually psychic headcanon

Nigga you don’t actually know Elfangor b/c he has a secret life from a different timeline

Have I mentioned the very obvious ableism in this series is not canceled out by the characters saying “Respect the differently abled”?

If only the parents other than Eva were allowed a turn with the competence hat

i'm really supposed to belive that a lawyer (and of course we don't get any specification on what kinda law) would be shrill and irrational under pressure and have terrible arguments?

Also its common sense to not take people who can’t follow fucking orders on a fucking life or death mission

Also too bad yall never gave the fucking adults morphing, leaving them much more vulnerable

Who the fuck is Jolphimee Celpik? If they’re a hork than that’s the longest hork name yet.

So yeah, horks can move through the trees fast enough to keep up with cars

The horks consistently showing more care for hosts than the Animorphs

Once more the andalite truth is shown, they look more like deer/horses/antelope than centaurs

Oh yay Rachel deliberately hurts her mom

I wonder how much is this hyping up of ‘Rachel is dangerous’ is just writers trying to justify killing her off later? Cause that is really fucking ooc for someone who was the only person to give a shit about Marco and Tobias trying to harm innocent bystanders last book

So Naomi is a criminal defense attorney. Why the hell are the writers making her a useless whiny little bitch then?

Naomi finally gets to wear the competent and useful hat

Why not ask the fucking soldiers to fucking come along and fight?

And yet another White blond character. What teh fuck

The soldiers do go along but take orders from teenagers

but rachel is the one in the wrong for not wanting to give the enemh the time to kill her friends

also note the use of 'shrill'

jake is just a really shit leader

you are litterally fighting a war

and you already decided you don't give a shit about things like war crimes Mr. false surrender-false flag opperation-murder captives-boil yeerks alive fuckface

but this is where you wanna fucking draw the line fuckface?

... bitch you know for a fact that Cassie's gut can't be fucking trusted

I must keep strong and finish this pile of horse shit

...jake wants to loose is the only thing that makes sense

Marco may be shit but he def knows better than to trust Cassie with important shit

So Cassie should have b/c a controller there b/c you can’t just get yeerks out like that

Yall keep mentioning the Yeerk resistance but none of yall actually try to communicate with them and coordinate shit

They did actually release people. At least, they released the human hosts. Can’t tell if they released the hork hosts too b/c fuckers don’t care and don’t distinguish a difference b/w yeerks and the captives

Cassie was not fucking right assholes

Its less Ax decided to not help with teh genocide of the humans and more he refused to make a decision and commit and just whent along with what was going on in front of him

#nix reads animorphs #animorphs

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

Note

peggy sue AU but only Tom remembers, and he’s sent back to the day before he was infested

Okay I’m trying to write fewer fatalistic AUs, but I seriously think based on what we know about Tom that that scenario would go like this:

Tom immediately quits the Sharing.

Tom prevents Jake from going to the mall the day he would’ve taken a shortcut home through the construction site.

Without Jake there, none of the Animorphs shortcut through the construction side.

Elfangor dies alone. (Sorry Elfangor.)

Using Whatever Means Necessary, including taking hostages at gunpoint, Tom drags his entire family into the apocalypse bunker we all know Grandpa G has hidden somewhere under his cabin in the woods. He locks them all in, and then does a lot of “See? I TOLD you!” when the Bug fighters start burning down the world around them.

The world ends.

The Berensons all survive, so yay?

Until Jake’s spectacular inability to follow orders rears its head, and he goes outside anyway to try and rescue Cassie or Marco. At which point he promptly gets taken by the yeerks.

So then I guess the yeerks would know where the other Berensons are, so never mind about them surviving.

And then… Ax ascends from the depths of the ocean like an avenging Aphrodite and saves everyone!

#animorphs #tom berenson #asks #anonymous #animorphs au #jake berenson #happy endings #i apologize for everything

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

Note

How do you think beginning of the series Ax would respond if his rescuers were actually trained child soldiers expected to go into combat at their age?

[Sorry that this is a little off-base from what you requested; I just didn’t feel qualified to write about child soldiers and so opted to write about child fighters instead.]

• Aximili has seen photographs of humans before, of course he has. He studied the single chapter of his xenobiology textbook that covered them (Yuri Gagarin, the text said, Neil Armstrong, and he did his best to remember) when he found out that he’d be accompanying Elfangor on the upcoming mission to Earth. Nonetheless, he startles when the five strange creatures emerge from the Dome ship’s airlock, firing his dracon beam in quick succession until they have all collapsed on the floor.

He takes a moment to study them before they awaken. They have artificial skins covering parts of their bodies, which he knew to expect, but some of them have decorations on the skin itself that are strangely beautiful as well: one of them with long yellow hair has dozens of tiny lines, arranged in groups of five, marked on the skin of its shoulder and upper arm. Another alien with a larger build and a darker shade of golden hair has what must be thousands of feather etchings covering its arms from wrist to wrist, the pattern continuing across its back as if it is permanently in the earliest stages of a morph to some kind of tan-and-brown bird.

The smallest one, whose skin is the darkest shade of brown, becomes the first to sit up. As it does so, Aximili registers the words written on the inside of its forearm: no peace without justice. The alien’s companion (long dark hair, perpetually suspicious eyes) name-drops Visser Three so casually that for a second Aximili panics, nearly taking the alien’s head off with his tail blade before he gets control of himself again.

• Slowly they all relax, and Aximili learns their names. The big one with the dark hair and just one tattoo—of a tiger sitting calmly looking out at the viewer—is Jake, or Big Jake as the others call him. His cousin with her dozens of tiny hash marks, her claw-shaped fingernails, and her metal-lined teeth is named Rachel, called Xena. Tobias, or “Hawk,” is the one with the wings and the shy grey eyes that almost disappear when he ducks his head enough for dirty-blond bangs to fall over his face, and Cassie (“Gaia”) is the small one with the words on her arm. Marco, or Mars, has the most, and the most beautiful, ink of all of them: words and shapes and images crowd his shoulders, his legs, his knuckles, the back of his neck. Dios no dio alas a los alacranes, his left forearm says, and James 2:13 splays across his ankle.

“Ax,” Marco says, when Aximili tells them his name. “Yeah, let’s call you Ax. Kinda violent, very edgy, I like it.” Ax sees another tattoo rolling up his left shoulder: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.

“You need a second name,” Rachel (Xena?) explains. “Otherwise no one will take you seriously.”

• And then they give him the news about Elfangor.

“I’ve lost a brother too,” Jake says softly. “He was killed a few months ago. Got caught in the crossfire of some random drive-by on his way home from work.”

“We found them,” Rachel says. She taps the first three tally marks on her arm in a gesture that Ax doesn’t understand at the time. “We got our revenge. You want help getting yours, pretty sure Jake’d be happy to take you on.”

«You are their prince, then?» Ax asks Jake.

All of them look around at each other in sudden uncertainty.

“My brother was the one who made sure we had somewhere to sleep, enough to eat, clothes to wear, the time we needed to stay in school,” Jake explains at last. “If anyone hurt us he’d hurt them, and if any of us got killed he’d wipe out as many people as it took to even the score. I inherited all that from him, and I’ve been doing my best to do the same. That what you mean by a prince?”

«Yes,» Ax says. «That is exactly what a prince does for his warriors. Very well then, Prince Jake, I will do my best to serve your mission until such time as my cousins arrive.»

• The six of them spend nearly an hour touring the Dome ship, asking Ax questions as they recuperate and as (he can admit to himself) he delays leaving the only tiny piece of home he has left in this strange world. He tells them what he can about the ship and how he came to be on it, and in exchange they tell him their stories.

Jake and Rachel were both orphaned three years back, all four of their parents killed when the plane they were taking home from vacation went down in the Caribbean Sea. All five of them—Jake and his brother, Rachel and her sisters—ended up shipped off to their aunt Ellen’s house, at least at first.

“And then Saddler broke Jordan’s arm,” Rachel growls, voice so hard with anger that Ax takes a step back in fear. “And Aunt Ellen believed that little twerp when he said it was an accident, that it’d never happen again. Accident my ass.”

The very next day, Tom had stolen their aunt’s minivan and run away with the lot of them to downtown Los Angeles. He’d worked three or four jobs while Jake and Rachel got in the habit of shoplifting what Sarah and Jordan needed, and together they’d been able to afford a basement apartment in South LA. He’d never wanted Jake and Rachel to get caught up in the violence the way some of the kids in their neighborhood did, but then no one planned on him getting killed either.

Marco still technically lives at home with his dad, but it’s not like his dad knows what he gets up to all day, and he and Jake started traveling together because they’re safer in a pair than alone. The two of them brought first Rachel into the group, then Cassie after Rachel realized Cassie had no one else to go home to at the end of the day. “I’ve been all over,” Cassie says, “or I was until my one foster sister started drowning chipmunks for fun. Then I punched her a bunch of times. Ran away. Settled down.”

Rachel jokes that Tobias followed them home after Jake made the mistake of feeding him. Ax later learns the real story of how they met, and it’s not nearly that cute: it involves Tobias being cornered by three larger boys in an alleyway. It involves Jake firing two shots from the gun he inherited from Tom, one into the air, one into someone’s leg.

The story of how Tobias ended up as a runaway in the first place is complicated as well. “My aunt wanted a niece,” he explains with a wry smile. “Wanted me to wear dresses and makeup, to have nice long hair, to pretend to be a girl so she wouldn’t have to tell the neighbors about my abnormality. There was this little typo on my birth certificate, see, and everyone’s been real confused about what to call me ever since.”

«I see,» Ax says, blatantly lying.

• They make a run for it, not too much later, and together they survive their first fight against the yeerks. Over that afternoon Ax’s respect for this odd group of alien children grows steadily: they never leave one of their own behind, they’re very good at hiding fear under anger, and they know how to scan constantly for danger and respond with a second’s notice. Eventually, with the help of an enormous sentient creature that lives in Earth’s waters, they wash up on the shores of Los Angeles Harbor.

«With your permission,» Ax says, «I would like to take DNA from each of you. With the frolis maneuver, I can create a human shape that is a unique mixture of your attributes.»

“Then again, maybe you should just take from Tobias and Rachel.” Marco smiles, but his eyes are colder than ever. “The cops’ll give you a lot less hassle that way.”

Ax looks around at each of them. «Human law enforcement will pay less attention to me if I have yellow hair, pale skin, and light-colored eyes?»

Marco laughs. “Now you’re getting it. Welcome to Earth, man—you’re gonna fit right in.”

“Just take DNA from all of us,” Tobias says, seeing Ax’s confusion and taking pity. “We’re all a bunch of rejects anyway, so you might as well.”

• Ax becomes closer to this group of aliens over the next several missions than he could have ever imagined. They open their home to him, even if that home is a nearly empty room in an otherwise abandoned building that contains a few sleeping bags and hotplates. They teach him to defend himself as a weak little human, using switchblade and semiautomatic when he doesn’t have a tail blade or claws.

Cassie walks a mile and a half to the nearest yeerk-owned convenience store to shoplift him a dozen cinnamon buns the day he finally contacts his family with news of Elfangor’s death.

Tobias takes Jake and Rachel’s gentle-but-firm scolding about his carelessness with time limits (which has already resulted in half a dozen close calls), but he also asks Ax to teach him how to be better at keeping track of time.

Jordan and Sarah—who know about everything, to Ax’s surprise—don’t know what to make of him at first, but pretty soon they’re bringing home backpacks full of grass clippings so he’ll have something to eat, while he’s teaching them the basics of andalite dance.

• Every time they go out on a mission, they follow the same routine. Jake solemnly hands Jordan a gun—the only time she’s allowed to handle one—and makes her go over the rules again. She and Sarah are not to leave, no matter what happens. She’s not to shoot anyone unless someone tries to attack her, or unless one of them comes back alone without explanation. If anything happens short of a direct attack, or one of them coming back as a controller, she’s to run to the pay phone down the street and call 911 instead. If three days pass and she doesn’t hear back from any of them at all, she and Sarah need to get on the next bus to San Luis Obispo and they need to go back to Aunt Ellen’s house.

• “We don’t kill unless we have to,” Rachel tells Ax, after he watches her tear a controller’s throat out. “But if we have to, we kill. Got it?”

He learns that that’s their blanket policy: the Animorphs (as they call themselves) don’t mess with other gangs in the area, but other gangs better not mess with them. They don’t kill randomly, and they don’t escalate, but if they get hurt they will find the perpetrator and hurt him back.

They don’t like killing—well, he’s not sure about Rachel, but the others certainly don’t—but they are nonetheless very good at it. If caught out of morph, Marco can shoot a hork-bajir-controller’s head off at 200 yards. Cassie can take down a human-controller with a single jab of an inch-long penknife.

• Each time they make it home alive, Ax watches in fascination as Rachel tattoos two, three, sometimes as many as eight fresh lines onto her rows of tally marks, which by now reach two inches past her elbow and wrap around her forearm. He’s learned by now that only the first three are pure black, and every one since then is black with a narrow white shadow.

“Black’s for enemies,” Rachel explains. “White’s for the innocent hosts that get caught in the crossfire.”

Ax assumes at first that they must be a form of penance—each one involves jamming a needle into her soft skin dozens of times and injecting foreign substances underneath the surface to create an off-colored scar—but the longer he knows her, the more he suspects they’re a boast.

• It takes him longer to find out about the row of raised bumps along the back of Cassie’s calf, or what they mean. “It’s cultural appropriation, probably,” she says with a self-deprecating smile, “but I got it from something they do in Ethiopia to signify growing up.”

She doesn’t make one for every kill, unlike Rachel; her system is more complex. Ax knows that she does it after all three occasions where they blow up a Sharing location during a meeting, and once after they dump poison into a yeerk pool. But she adds them at other times as well: when she finally demorphs in the long aftermath of her encounter with Aftran, when Aldrea nearly gets her killed.

“I could show you how to make them, and how to make them stay while you morph,” she offers to Ax. “It’s not that hard, or it wasn’t after Rachel figured out how her ears stay pierced every time she morphs.”

Eventually Ax agrees to just one mark, encircling his tail where it meets the blade. The symbol is simple—a curling series of lines whose ends intersect to form a circle—but its meaning is complex. «The placement’s about mourning, but specifically about respect for the one who is mourned,» he explains awkwardly. «They meet at the bottom to signify family, and the curl at the top is for a peer, but a peer from whom one has learned much… It’s not the kind of thing that translates well into words.»

“What you said makes perfect sense to me,” Jake says, bright-eyed. With Ax’s permission he imitates the pattern around his own left wrist.

• It’s Jake who keeps them all in line, Jake who insists they only shoplift from yeerk-owned businesses and give back the cars Marco steals once they’re done with the mission. Jake won’t let Rachel kill the girl from their class who called her a white trash bitch, or the boy who wolf-whistled her on the way home, but he shepherds the rest of them outside as she shoots David precisely between the eyes.

Ax catches him sitting on the roof of the abandoned building they inhabit, one night after a raid on Joe Bob Fenestre’s house goes wrong in about eighteen different ways. L.A. is far too light-polluted and smoggy to see any stars, but Ax knows that Jake is looking for them all the same because he’s done the same thing himself.

«I think he would have been proud of you,» Ax says softly.

“Your brother?” Jake asks, seeming to shake himself out of a daze.

«And yours.»

“You ever wonder if…” Jake looks down at the concrete of the roof, thinking for a second. “If every other kid our age trying to hold down a job, or a family, or, hell, an entire freaking gang… If they don’t know what they’re doing any better than we do?”

«Maybe they don’t,» Ax says. «But most of them find a way to survive anyway, don’t they?»

“Thing is, I’m not sure they do. Seems like every time I turn around there’s someone else I know getting shot, stabbed, hooked on heroin, thrown in prison…” Jake smiles faintly, the expression tired. “We were never supposed to live past twenty-five. That was half the reason we got involved in this fight in the first place, you know that? We all knew how to fight already when Elfangor found us, and we all figured that if we were going nowhere fast we might as well take down some aliens along the way. I don’t think anything’s changed since then.”

«You’ve hurt them,» Ax points out. «You’ve made Visser Three afraid. We have. Six kids, no real training, and we’ve killed more yeerks than most andalite warriors do in a lifetime.»

“But does it solve anything?” Jake asks. “If the war ends tomorrow we’ll still be a bunch of dead-end trash with no prayer of ever getting a real job between us. Tobias’ll still be stuck in a body he hates for the rest of his life, Marco probably won’t have his mom back, Rachel… I mean, god, you ever think about what Rachel would do if the war ended right now?”

Ax doesn’t have an answer.

• And as it turns out, he’ll never get one. Because, turns out, Rachel doesn’t live to see the war’s end.

• Ax knows what to expect when the press gets ahold of their story, or at least he thinks he does. There are nearly twelve hours of lag time between the yeerks’ official defeat and the first chance to land the Pool ship on Earth, during which time his teammates give him a crash course in all the nastiest sides of the American media. Therefore, he’s saddened but not surprised the first (or the tenth, or the hundredth) time someone refers to them as thugs, as superpredators, as hoodlums or delinquents. He understands in advance that when reporters call Eva an “alien” they’re not talking about extraterrestrials, that there’s a reason Cassie and Marco are “un-American” in a way Jake and Tobias are not, and that no one is going to bother to learn Tobias’s real name as long as they can use the one on his birth certificate instead.

However, as cynical as the Animorphs are, even they cannot anticipate just how awful people can become. No one anticipated the calls for Marco to “go back to” a country he’s never visited. They didn’t foresee that the baby pictures Tobias’s aunt sold to the press, and his subsequent misclassification, would mean that people suddenly had opinions about Rachel’s “lesbian influence” over future generations.

Just when Ax thinks he’s learned about every type of prejudice that could possibly exist, a heckler asks Jake a question (something about religion and money that Ax doesn’t understand) that causes Marco to punch the man so hard he breaks his own hand, and the lessons in all the ways humans suck start all over again.

• All five of them get a number of offers of adoption from concerned citizens, even Ax and Marco, which is weird because both of them have living parents and perfectly good homes already.

Most of the offers from concerned strangers are horribly condescending, the letters or introductory emails filled with phrases about how these self-righteous souls want to “get these children off the streets,” give Marco “a real home for a change,” help Tobias sort out his “confusion” about gender, and so on. Marco takes a great deal of delight composing extremely rude responses on his and Ax’s behalf.

Jake’s the only one who shows interest right from the start, but only because he’s got more people than himself to think about: Sarah and Jordan are his responsibility now. The way Jake approaches the whole process is somewhat off-putting to most prospective guardians, exactly the way it’s meant to be. The caregivers who expect to meet a helpless war orphan or a traumatized child instead find themselves confronted by a self-assured young man who approaches the contract negotiation process (which is exactly what it is, at least once Jake’s done writing the paperwork and getting a child advocacy lawyer to approve it) with more demands than concessions. Anyone who wants to have Jake absolutely must adopt Jordan and Sarah as well. Jake does not consent for their images or any personal information to be shared with the media or the general public. Any guardian who violates these terms can expect Jake to file immediately for emancipated minor status, and sue for sole custody of his cousins. The first thirty-seven candidates Jake interviews all leave shouting, sometimes in tears.

Tobias turns down all offers—not exactly hard to do, when half the letters aren’t even addressed to him—and is on the verge of simply becoming homeless again when Ax passes along his parents’ wishes to meet their grandson. There’s nothing left for Tobias on Earth anyway, so together he and Ax board the first shuttle they can find to take them to the andalite home world.

Cassie delays making a decision for as long as she can, but then one day she receives a letter from a local veterinarian. The vet, whose name is Michelle, talks about how Cassie is an icon for all African American women, one with whom it would be an honor to share her home. She and her husband Walter don’t have children, but they do have horses and birds and an entire clinic of wild animals, and if Cassie’s willing to be patient then they’re willing to do whatever it takes to learn how to care for a girl as well… Cassie accepts on the spot.

Candidate thirty-eight is a single woman in her fifties that Jake, despite himself, likes almost right away. He relaxes a great deal when he finds out she was an involuntary controller during the last months of the war, which means that even if she doesn’t understand what they’ve been through she can come close enough. The first real glimmer of hope comes when she approves of the contract (mentioning that his aunt would doubtless be proud of the good work he’s done with it) and even suggests a few clauses of her own. They talk frankly for nearly three hours, during which time the woman agrees to set aside tuition for the highest-quality (and highest-security) private high schools and colleges for all three children. Jake learns, too, that she had a son who like her was taken by the yeerks during the war: Rachel killed him on the deck of the Blade ship, and his body was never recovered.

• Ax returns to his homeworld, where he is made a war-prince almost before he sets hooves to grass. Where he isn’t treated as a “controversial figure” and no one whispers about how he is a psychopath and an animal who should be put down. Where celebrations in his honor are uncomplicated and never met by protests. Where he and Tobias can be themselves and no one tries to simplify their complications into a story that makes for a good headline.

• Global War I, the history textbooks on Earth call it a hundred years later. The parallel to World War I is deliberate: just like then, the writers say, there was no reason for it all. There might have been bad guys, but there were no good ones. There were no thanks for the people who ended it all, only thanks that it came to an end. Some kids had something to do with hurting the Yeerk Empire, but their names have since been lost to time.

#animorphs au #animorphs #oh look there's ax #transphobia #homophobia #racism #sexism #classism #antisemitism #cultural appropriation #seriously this one is about how americans suck #would you look at that: i managed to take an entirely unrelated post and make it ALL ABOUT TOM #so unlike me #long post #au #child abuse

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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Sorry if you've been asked this before, but is there a particular reason why you don't capitalize the names of most of the alien species? Like, why you write andalites instead of Andalites?

Actually, no one has ever asked me that before, and I’m glad someone noticed! It’s nothing huge, just an eensy pet peeve on the part of my inner grammar snob. Technically, the common names of species (human, platypus, blue-footed booby, etc.) are not supposed to be capitalized in written English, whereas it’s only the names of nationalities (French, Argentinian, Bangladeshi, etc.) that get capitalized all the time.

So if a new species arrived on this planet, then teeeeechnically their common name would be written as “hork-bajir” and their binomial nomenclature would be Hork bajir, or H. bajir for short. If a new group of humans arrived in the U.S. from some previously-undiscovered nation known as Hork Bajus, then we should call its residents “Hork-Bajir.” I have a B.A. in Writing, and there are strange places like that where it tends to manifest itself against my will. There are a handful of ways that I deliberately depart from Our Lady and Goddess K.A. Applegate in my fic writing, and my intermittent grammatical neuroticism means that that’s one of them.

On a related note, I also don’t capitalize the word “controller” even though in the books it’s usually “Controller” because I kind of like the way that the lowercase makes it look more like slang. We don’t really know if it’s a formal term, a translation of an andalite term into English, or something else (Elfangor just says it in the first book and all the kids pick it up from there) but I sort of like the idea that it’s andalite slang that has been back-translated into human languages. The biggest aspect of the books that makes me headcanon it as slang is that we pretty much never hear actual controllers using the word “controller;” they always talk about “our people” or “us,” which implies to me that “controller” is an andalite term.

(I also suspect that K.A. Applegate capitalizes the names of alien species for the sake of clarity so that when you’re a kid and encountering all these unfamiliar words they do come off like proper nouns, but that’s purely speculation on my part.)

#grammar #writing #personal #asks #answers #anonymous #eleutherophobia #about the blogger

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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What don't you like about #47? Not hating. just curious.

Short opinion: I’m just gonna leave this here.

Long opinion:

Seriously, though, Isaiah Fitzhenry’s journal cuts off mid-sentence. Because we know he died in the act of writing it. Oh, and by the way, he’s lying in the middle of a battlefield, bleeding to death, while writing those words. This book clearly didn’t think things through nearly well enough, or perhaps assumed that its child readers wouldn’t notice. Trust me, I noticed. When I was eight years old* I had this ridiculous mental image of this dude lying there in the middle of a freakin’ Civil War battle writing in his notebook with his pen. Now that I know a little history I have this EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS mental image of this dude lying there in the middle of a freakin’ battle with a quill pen, an ink pot, a sheet of non-waterproof wood-pulp, a pen knife, an ink blotter, and some kind of writing surface AS HE BLEEDS TO DEATH IN THE MUD.

There are several other utterly ridiculous leaps of logic that this story is forced to make in order to achieve the journal at all. Why the heck even bother adding in a character named Jacob? Given that he died before meeting anyone from the Fitzhenry family who actually survived long enough to procreate, one can only assume that Jean Berenson has read her grandfather’s great-aunt’s dead brother’s journal enough to go want to name a kid after this dude, and yet she has never once mentioned that fact to Jake. Otherwise it’s just a weird coincidence, one which violates the One Steve Limit.

On the subject of dead brothers and Berensons (too soon?) it’s interesting to note that this book continues the motif of eldest siblings kicking the bucket that runs throughout the series. Rachel and Tom are the obvious ones, as I’ve noted, but there’s also Elfangor, Saddler, Arbat, Aldrea, and now Isaiah Fitzhenry. If I had to guess the fact that Isaiah has a younger sister and then dies tragically is no accident. (Although that all could have been avoided if he’d just gotten to a friggin’ medical tent instead of whipping out his complete set of writing supplies in the middle of a battlefield to continue his vaguely-racist memoirs…) It’s also a nice connection to that chilling moment at the beginning of the book where Jake dumps a box of Tom’s things in the trash because he has pretty much given up on the idea of saving his brother at this point in the war.

However, even the way that Jake ends up with the journal is kind of weird and logic-defying. His Grandpa G tried to leave it for him as a gift (which makes sense, given how obsessed that kid is with military history) but somehow or other it got lost in the mail because Jake is only now finding it mis-labeled in some box in the basement. Which makes sense how? Why the heck didn’t it come up during that whole sequence where Tom and Jake were looting all their great-grandpa’s stuff looking for medals and daggers? For that matter, why didn’t Jake’s grandmother just give it to him after the funeral, given that #31 specifically mentions she made sure to pass along everything that her father wanted Jake to have? Assuming it did get lost amidst the chaos of the funeral and the Attack of Moby Cassie and Tom ending up in the hospital and all, how on earth did it end up in a box in the basement among a bunch of Tom’s old school papers?

It also has to have traveled a heck of a ways to make it into Grandpa G’s possession in the first place. Someone has to have found it on the battlefield, presumably delivered it to Isaiah’s sister, who then passed it down to her children’s children, who then thought it would be a good thing to hoard and only pass on to the one great-grandchild who happened to prove himself worthy. For that matter, did Jake read the whole thing sitting there in the basement? If so, why does he only react to the first chapter? If he didn’t read the whole thing in one go, does that mean he’s carrying it around in bird morph until he reaches the hork-bajir valley? Again where it defies logic, and all to achieve a plot device that could have been conveyed so much more easily with good old-fashioned flashbacks.

And, well, as Cates has pointed out, no discussion of this book would be complete without commenting on the GLARING RACISM in the parallels between the past and present day. The idea of escaped slaves fighting back against the people who once disenfranchised them in both the 1860s and the 1990s would be interesting and all… But in the process this book compares hork-bajir, who Marco says have “the intelligence of your average second grader” (#51) to African American individuals. Not only does it draw a parallel between white individuals and humans while also drawing a parallel between black individuals and non-human characters, but it does so in a way that suggests that the black individuals are comparable to simple tree-dwelling primitive aliens with no written language or ability to comprehend complex ideas. If I think too much about this accidentally horrific metaphor (which I try not to) then it could arguably even re-cast the hork-bajir, with their simple but intuitive reliance on “head voices” (#13) and “Mother Sky’s flowers” (Hork-Bajir Chronicles), as Magical Negro stereotypes.

The racism is far and away the biggest problem with this book, because RACISM, but there are also a ton of flaws in the characterization and plotting that just bug me. Jake’s personality is all over the place in this book, most especially when he acts like a total jerk to Toby when Toby (very logically) points out that sixty-odd walking Salad Shooters can’t just duck and run every time the going gets tough the way that six morph-capable kids can. One of Jake’s great strengths as a leader is his decisiveness, and he spends huge chunks of this book quibbling about the right course of action in an utterly unJakeish way. Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that during the final battle HE FORGETS THAT TIGERS KNOW HOW TO SWIM. Exactly how hard did you get hit over the head by Visser Three’s tentacle-morph, man?

Toby herself has a couple of downright bizarre lines in this book, including “The trees whispered something about new friends who would take up our cause. Human friends who would join our fight… I see things, Jake. Many things” (#47). Say what? I thought it was Aldrea who was secretly an andalite, not Toby. The hork-bajir like their trees, sure, but they also view the trees as a natural resource that needs to be carefully cultivated, not as sentient whisperers sent by the gods to warn about impending Trekkies. Also, no offense to the assorted Carpenters (Did Richard Carpenter have a younger sibling? I bet he did.) but why the hell do the trees consider their arrival important enough to bother telling anyone about it? It’s not like three civilians with no natural weapons are exactly going to turn the tide of a battle that is otherwise being fought by battle-hardened shapeshifters and walking razor blades. In fact, I’m kind of disappointed in Jake and Cassie for not simply morphing polar bear and herding the dumbasses back to civilization by force before someone could get killed. I’m 99% sure they contributed nothing to the battle outside of distracting the poor schmucks who had to worry about saving their sorry butts from the aliens.

Frankly this book feels like it accomplishes with a sledgehammer what #31 already did with a scalpel. It’s about how Jake is descended from this long line of badass warriors. It’s about how war is never pretty and the reality has no room for glory amidst the unspeakable horror. It’s about realizing that you have no control over who lives, who dies, and who tells your story (X). It’s about struggling to be a good person amidst cosmic events where there are no real clear answers. It’s a story about families and countries tearing themselves apart over the fight for freedom. All of which were already covered thoroughly in #31, in a book that actually advances plot, character, and narrative arc.

Part of what’s so frustrating is that, unlike #48, this book actually has several moments of decent writing. I love the image of Jake starting to write “Tom” on that box of his brother’s things only to cross it out and write “trash” instead. The sense of impending catastrophe is huge in this book, because even before the yeerks find the kids’ identities there’s building suspense around the idea that war, children, is just a shot away (X). The scene with Raines firing four shots in the length of time it takes Samson to reload is freaking powerful. The parallels between the American Civil War and the Yeerk-Human War are right there when you look for them. There’s some great social commentary on the fact that in reality the Union was almost as racist as the Confederacy because that was the poison everyone was drinking back then. There’s the most epic open battle in the whole series, one that is decided through the Animorphs’ home team advantage rather than the yeerks’ shock and awe tactics.

If only the author had decided to leave out the Logic-Defying Journal of Racism, this might have the makings of a really good Animorphs book.

*Side note: when I was eight years old and reading this book for the first time, I had no clue what a “Trekkie” was and could only assume at the time that it was some type of specialized camper, since the book never actually specifies what the term refers to and never even mentions Star Trek by name. Reading it as an adult, I cringe at this condescending portrayal of sci-fi fans in a novel written for sci-fi fans.

#asks #answers #anonymous #animorphs #animorphs reviews #the resistance #47 #animorphs negativity #racial slurs #freezing gif for people on mobile #racism #jake berenson

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