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antagonistchanremade · 5 years

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There’s a story I was working on for a while called Future Magia.

Future Magia was, at first glance, a Fantasy story that takes place in an alternate universe with magic and monsters and strange mythology and politics. There are no humans, but a race that’s functionally (and visually) identical to humans called Allorans. The main gimmick was that it was a modern Fantasy- unlike other Tolkienesque worlds, it wasn’t Medieval or something similar, but, well, modern. They had the internet, they had cars, etc. Just, it’s still a Tolkienesque Fantasy setting- magic is common knowledge, and there are multiple dominant races.

But, there was ultimately a plot twist: it doesn’t take place in an alternate universe. Not quite, anyways. It takes place in our universe, except billions of years after a huge, reality-shaking event that completely changed our universe to its core. It might as well have been an alternate universe, it was so different after this event.

Specifically, the power of godhood changed.

Now, I’m not a Christian. I am, as I’ve said in the past, passionately agnostic. I personally feel like it would be arrogant of me to say that any religion (including atheism) is either right or wrong. But Future Magia operated under the assumption that our universe, before this event, was... maybe not necessarily Christian, but definitely either Christian or Muslim. Or some other offshoot of Christianity.

But, of course, it specifically operated under my personal favorite interpretation of the Abrahamic God- that God isn’t a person or anything, but rather, some kind of sentient force that exists everywhere in the universe at once. And the way the universe worked was that God had total omnipotence, as far as our universe was concerned.

But then, something happened. In a fraction of a second, seven other God-level beings were born, and God suddenly had to share His power with them, equally. These other God-level beings were very different from God- they all had physical forms (unlike God, a sentient force), much more defined personalities (unlike God, who was kinda beyond things like personality), and they didn’t have full control over their own power (unlike God). And their mere existence created Magic- a system that lets people borrow the power of Gods. This transition was not peaceful- the universe was very suddenly rocked by the rules of nature suddenly and drastically changing, and humanity was largely wiped out, with only a few exceptions remaining.

Anyways, the seven Gods were called the Colored Gods, due to the fact that each was associated with a color. There’s the Pink God, the Yellow God, the Blue God, the Green God, the Orange God, the Purple God, and the Brown God. In the setting, the existence of the Gods is considered fact- “religion” is still a thing, but differences in religion are mostly about differences in interpretation of the Gods- only a few radical cults believe in other Gods. Kinda like the differences between the Abrahamic religions, or the different varieties of Christianity. Anyways, it’s known that there are eight Gods- the seven Colored Gods, and the Colorless God, or the Void God. It’s not common knowledge that the Void God was once the only God, or that it has no physical form, but it is common knowledge that the Void God is distinct and wildly different from the Colored Gods despite sharing power over creation with them, and that the Void God has no connection to magic (at least, not as far as most people know).

The Colored Gods all have different forms (the forms are not common knowledge). The Pink and Yellow Gods looked like humans or Allorans. The Blue God is a sentient cave on the moon. Yes, seriously. A sentient cave on the moon. The Green God is a giant sea serpent living under the ocean. The Orange God is a non-euclidean monstrosity, and truly comprehending its appearance would drive someone mad... simply because it’s impossible to comprehend its true appearance. If you look at it, it’s gonna look like a glitched-out video game character that’s constantly shifting into other things. The Purple God looks like an Angel. Do I mean a biblical one or an Evangelion one? You decide, they’re both equally monstrous and could both be compared to the Purple God! And the Brown God was a sentient cloud.

The way Magic works is that, when you cast a spell, you tap into the power of a God. Each person has a different “Patron God”- the God that their magic draws power from. They’re largely the same, but some spells have different effects depending on the Patron of the caster, and there’s also the color of the magic itself- there’s a lot of fancy light shows that go along with magic, and the light is colored like the caster’s Patron. And, of course, Gods can have children. Not with each other, but with mortals. These children (labelled “Demigods”) are born unable to use magic (which is one of many reasons why someone might be unable to use magic), but their Divine parent can unlock their power later in life. The longer their Divine parent waits, the more powerful the child is... but in return, the longer their child has to spend unable to use magic. This means they are less experienced once they do get access to magic, and also, there is bigotry against people who can’t use magic. Not racism, like in Harry Potter, honestly that’s kinda silly- rather, it’s more like ableism.

The world is built for magic users- when you can’t use magic, you’re effectively disabled. And in the past, there were a lot of crazy religious beliefs around people who can’t use magic- and while they aren’t as prominent anymore, their impact still lingers (for instance, one formerly prominent belief about people who can’t use magic is that they couldn’t use it because they had no soul, which still lingers in the form of an ableist slur- “Empty”).

Anyways, Jesus Christ was retroactively determined to be a Demigod, hence why Judaism isn’t a possibility here. And also anyways, a Demigod’s patron is always their parent.

There was a lot I liked about the immediate worldbuilding, too. This post is all stuff that eventually gets discovered by the protagonists, but the stuff that the protagonists already all knew by the time the story starts because it’s common knowledge? That’s also all really fun worldbuilding. Like, the five prominent races, and where they’re from, and what their culture is like... Faeries come from a giant continent-sized library, and because their species evolved in a library, they are incredibly communist. Meanwhile, Dragons are very solitary, and there are also only around a hundred of them at any given time, so there is no real “Dragon Government”- each Dragon is considered a solitary nation, a sovereign of themselves. And there’s a ton of other fun stuff like that.

#oc posting

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thenixkat · 5 years

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Animorphs notes: Andalite Chronicles

Andalite Chronicles b/c I want that juicy taxxon info

Elfangor is the narrator

This is my hirac delest — my final statement.

Culture

I still dont get why Visser 3 vored him instead of capturing him

21 years before start

How and why would they be annihilating entire planets?

This doesnt gel with HBC. blatant andalite propaganda

Elfangor is not great at school

Arbron kicked lightly at the grass with one hoof in a gesture of contempt. Then he said the insult that went with the gesture. <Elfangor, when are you going to get your hooves back on the grass and out of the air?>

Culture

Arbon is interesting

The Electorate has voted to allow more children to be born since we're in a war now. They say if the war goes on for long and there are lots of battle deaths, some families may even have three and four children.

Population control measures

Warriors working on the battle bridge often used hand signals between themselves so that the thought-speak noise wouldn't become a jumble.

Sign Language makes sense but I’m giving a flat what to the second part of that.

Earth is a level six planet according to the andalites. Earth is a level 2 world according to the Plumbers.

Also fuck da police, which in this case means andalites

“The Skrit Na don't care what anyone else in the galaxy thinks about them. They don't belong to the Yeerk Empire. They aren't one of our allies. They don't care about laws or customs or anything. All the Skrit Na care about is collecting things and owning things.

“The Skrit Na are unusual in another way: They are actually like two different races. The Skrit look like huge insects, almost as large as an Andalite. They have fourteen legs and six sets of antennae, and aren't really very intelligent. But the Skrit each eventually weave a cocoon and a year later, out of the dead Skrit there pops a Na.

“The Na are a whole different story. The Na have four very slender legs. Sometimes they rear up and walk on just two legs, using the other legs as hands. They have large heads shaped like Andalite heads, only they have just two huge eyes.

“Skrit Na are constantly going to peaceful planet sand kidnapping the local species. Sometimes they perform medical experiments on them. Sometimes they just fly around with them and then let them go. But often they carry local creatures away to add them to zoos on the Skrit Na homeworld.

“Like I said: a weird species. No one understands the Skrit Na. Personally, I don't think they understand themselves.”

The skrit-na

The fuck was that? Why does the lack of a tail make you a primitive.?

Elfangor is a weak ass bitch who thinks bugs are ugly

Andalites think red blood is creepy

Is this the same Chapman as the other Chapman? Maybe

Andalites apparently don’t bother to try living/exploring places that aren’t comfortable

Andalites described as having 2 hearts

Elf is a car fucker

Alloran is built

The andalites erase the memories of primitives not ready for aliens

Is that comment sexist? It might be

Alloran defends his whole genocide the horks for getting themselves enslaved plan

Listen book, yall aint ready to tackle time fuckery

Alloran has a single point about vets

Uh, Chapman and David are similar kinds of kids

who the fuck hid a time machine/reality warping device on Earth?

Actually, it might have been the skrit-na, they’ve been around for awhile

Chapman has a point

Unless its a BDSM thin you can’t really be enslaved by choice?

CHapman was a fuckboi

Hey kids ready to do some real war?

The Taxxon home world has 3 moons

Alloran is specist towards taxxons too

Alloran, Arbron, and I pressed close to the hatch, waiting for it to blow open. We carried handheld shredders on setting three. There are six power levels on a shredder. Level one delivers a mild charge that will stun a small creature for a moment or two.

Level six will blast a hole through ten feet of solid alloy. Level three wouldn't kill most creatures, but it would certainly knock them down so hard they wouldn't get up for hours.

Shredders

If you've never faced a Taxxon, let me tell you: They are shocking things to see up close. They are tubular, like a monstrously thick, ten-foot-long hose. They have rows of needle-sharp, cone-shaped legs. The upper third of their body is held upright, and there the rows of legs become smaller and form tiny two- and three-fingered hands. There is a row of dark red eyes, each like congealed liquid. At the very top is the mouth, a round, red-rimmed hole circled with vicious rows of teeth.

Taxxons

Alloran seals 3 injured taxxons in a room to kill eachother

Apparently teh dead cannot be aquired

Why did they leave the tied up hork with the wounded taxxons? That’s cruel

Alloran commits more war crimes

That’s still a war crime Alloran

A djabala is a small, six-legged animal, maybe a third the size of a young Andalite. It has a mouth and a tail and no natural weapons. It lives by climbing trees and eating the highest leaves.

You have to morph the djabala in order to pass the morphing proficiency test. So I did. But then, like a lot of arisths, I morphed a kafit bird. I have heard that some planets have many types of bird. But since we only have three, and since the kafit is the best species of the three, it's popular with young cadets looking for fun.

Thgat lack of biodiversity has to be artificial

That’s not how bugs or compund eyes work

Orange and green acid clouds on the taxxon home world

The first thing I noticed was that the sky was a pale gray-brown. The color of dust. The bright clouds were too high up even to be seen. The second thing I noticed was the smell. Everywhere, warm, living hearts were beating. Hork-Bajir hearts. Gedd hearts. Taxxon hearts. Blood rushed through veins. . . .

We get it, taxxon’s are vampires

Below the maze of cradles was bare, orange-red dirt. Not a blade of grass, just dirt. There were primitive magnetic levitation rails running through the massive forest of cradles. Train cars, some open, some enclosed bubbles, raced back and forth along the tracks.

So a desert?

Elf you just failed being a spy

SubVisser 7 who will be Visser 3

At the top of the Yeerk Empire is the Council of Thirteen. One of those thirteen is emperor, but no one knows which one. It's a closely guarded secret. The Yeerks fear assassination.

Guess teh emperor

Mountain taxxon rebels

Yeerks feed rebel taxxons to loyal taxxons

Taxxons see better in the dark

Why would a yeerk use any of the hork-bajir language?

CHapman is an asshole. Fuckboi supreme

WHat do you gain? You don’t even know how yeerks treat quislings yet?

Nope, no. Either the space ships only work best in space or the ships can be used deep underwater. Not both series.

Highspeed chase

Three thousand five hundred miles an hour. The ground was a blur. We were a blazing meteorite. We were an arrow of flame as we shot across the Taxxon world at impossible speeds. The scruffy bushes and stunted trees of the Taxxon world burst into flame as we passed over. We were drawing a line of fire around the planet!

So there is vegitation

Arbron is a damn good shot

There’s grass on the otherside of the montains

Andalite stalk eyes apparently don’t blink

Skrit-Na use green emergency lighting

The time matrix is 10 ft in diameter

Elfangor is driving a car he found in the skrit-na ship

With this and Ax, I’m going to have to assume that andalites are just incapable of getting singing.

I was in a vast underground cavern. Dominating the center of the cavern was a sort of hill or small mountain. It was this mountain that glowed. It glowed a dim but unmistakable red.

From this irregular glowing hill came tendrils, each perhaps three or four feet in diameter. As my

eyes adjusted I could see that there were a dozen or more of these tendrils, and that each one extended to the edge of the cavern and then kept going into the rock itself.

The tendrils, too, glowed a dim red. I realized that I could see things moving inside the tendrils.

The tendrils were hollow! They were tubes, each about as big around as ..

The living hive?

The living hive can communicate telepathyicly

The mountain taxxons did not eat the wounded arbron

He waved one Taxxon claw back toward the massive, glowing mountain. <The Living Hive. Light of the Taxxons. Mother and Father of the Taxxons. The Hive has lost many of its children to the Yeerks. Many of its servants have betrayed the Hive and made an alliance with the Yeerks. But the Living Hive is still the Mother and Father of the species.>

Huh

huh

Arbron is thinking a lot more like a taxxon, cause from what I’ve seen andalites are quitters

Taxxons regenerate limbs very quickly

Its a blood bath, but taxxons don’t give up easy

Alloran needs to get a fucking life

Really you should assume that anyone captured by the yeerks is probably got a yeerk in them now

CHapman is a little bitch

A quantum virus is a sort of disease of space-time. You see, it slowly breaks down the force that holds subatomic particles together. It slowly disintegrates whatever it affects. Living creatures affected with a quantum virus find their very molecules breaking down. It can take days, weeks of agony.

Well, fuck you extra hard Alloran

Elfangor is not ok with the amount of luck going on

Elfangor finally figured out that everybody is yeerks

Ya know what? I’m going to make it a point to never refer to Visser 3 as the abomination b/c fuck the andalites

SubVisser 7 you really shouldn’t be an ass towards someone who decides not to murder defenseless prisoners, that’s an attitude you should want in yer enemies

Elf impersonates Subv7 and gets the yeerk fighters on his tail while he gets away with the time machine

Oh hey look at that, you don’t have to starve yer prisoner to death in this situation.

Yeerks can be frozen to put them into hibernation

Dambnit Elfangor!

Chapman needs to shut the fuck up

This is flatworld

No. Elfangor what Alloran chose to do was def wrong.it was absolutely wrong

There’s spaceship eating asteroids in Graysha Nebula.

Spaceship eating asteroids attracted by energy

Elfangor doesnt belive in psychic things

Visser 2? Did he get demoted at some point?

Oh, the asteroids prefer to eat the energy

Visser 32? Someones isn’t being consistant

Ah yes lets have someone go outside and get the time machine with no space suit

SUre, tie a bag of air over yer head, that’ll prevent depressurization

Why don’t andalite ships have airlocks? Do they not have fuckin safety regulations?

Book is going with Visser 32 for now

Its too bad yall don’t have space suits with magnetic boots that could help with that

The andalite brain has 4 visible segments

The last memory I had, as the cold collapsed my consciousness, was of someone vast and incredible. A being like nothing I could have imagined. It saw me. It saw us all.

And it laughed.

Now which cosmic entity is this?

I stared at a therant tree. The trunk. The branches. The vines. Impossible! It was Hala Fala! The oldest of the therant trees in the woods near my home. My father had shown me this tree when I was just a very small child. It was my Garibah. My Guide Tree.

Right, Andal trees can talk

The Garibah could not change what had happened. And it could not tell me that I was forgiven, or that all would be well now. I knew the ritual of forgiveness. <I have made right everything that can be made right, I have learned everything that can be learned, I have sworn not to repeat my error, and now I claim forgiveness.>

Culture

Hala Fala has been alive for 7 thousand years

There it was: the scoop. The bowl dug out of the ground by my great-great-grandparents and planted with every delicious variety of grass and flowers. And there was the lodge, the blue-plex awning that covered the south quarter of the scoop and kept our things out of the rain.

Architecture

The Andal sky is red and gold

A nightmare patchwork of 3 dif worlds b/c the gods of this universe are cruel

“And on the other side everything turned brown and muddy gray and a red so dark it was almost black.

On the other side of the line, wild, tall, spiky grass and trees that rose only a foot tall before spreading out horizontally for thirty or forty feet. If you could even call something like that a tree.

I was startled by something that reached up out of the ground with a soft SHLOOP! It was like a Taxxon tongue, almost. Ten feet long and dark red, it shot up from a hole in the ground. It seemed to lick the air in a slow, circular pattern, as if it was searching blindly for something. Then, after a few seconds, it SHLOOPED! back into the ground.

Ten feet away, another such tongue. This time it reached for a beast that walked past, hunched over. The beast had four thick legs toward the back and two turned-in legs forward, with no discernable head. This lumbering creature wandered straight toward the flickering tongue and suddenly, fast as a tail, the tongue reached out and wrapped around the beast's hind legs. The beast let out a groan, although where that sound came from, since it seemed not to have a head, was a mystery to me.

The tongue drew the beast toward its hole. But it could not suck the animal down, so it simply held it prisoner as the beast groaned.

The sky directly over that dark, unnerving landscape was dirty green and veined with silent lightning.”

Actually the yeek home world sounds pretty cool

“And on either side of him stood a creature like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. They were

each about three feet tall and four and a half feet long. They were mostly a dark, dirty yellow with irregular black spots. But the head and shoulders were the deep red of the Yeerk plants.

The heads were tiny for the bodies, elongated, almost needle-sharp. The mouths were long and

narrow. Hundreds of tiny, bright red teeth stuck out, jagged and wildly different in length and shape. But what struck me as strangest was that the creatures did not have legs in the usual sense. They had wheels.

Yes, wheels. Four of them, to be exact. The wheels were located where legs should be.

Each was sloppy and irregular in shape, not perfectly round.”

Visser 32’s pets, Jarex and Lerex. Who are Mortrons. Visser 32 saved a pair as pets the rest are extinct due to their sun going nova. Yeerks cant infest them

“Suddenly the creatures each split into two parts! The bottom portion, the yellow part with the wheels, swerved away. The dark red upper portion simply rose from the body, unfolded leathery wings I'd never even suspected, and flew straight at me!”

Heh

And they multiply when cut! Nice

Elfangor is strong enough for a human kid to ride on his back

Elf doesnt know what books are…. Did andalites invent books later than his childhood?

Wait, no he’s explaining them as primitive computer files… inconsistancies

Lauren is finally upset about all of this

I guess Chapman is just fuckin dead

Huh, andalites had cities and stuff but decided they like more space and nature better

Andalites can close their hooves

Time fuckery is making them age

Binch that’s just conjecture, you aint got proof

Elf had decided that no, andalites cannot be trusted with a damn time machine

He also does not wanna go home

Why can’t she imagine that she’s back at her original age?

I knew it, Elfangor is done with war doesnt want to get dragged back

Elf knew Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

This very probably isn’t the orginal timeline from the start of the book

And then the Elimist goes and rips this man out of his life and tosses him back into war, at a point he knows he’ll die just to set up the next group of pawns in his game.

B/c the gods of this universe are cruel

...the ellimist reprogramed Chapman as a tool in his damn game

….the ellimist chose to hurt Loren the way she was all for a damn game, as part of stacking a deck to cheat in a game

Dick

Lying motherfucker

And then we never see Visser 3 serch for Loren and her kid b/c the ellimist is a manipulative sacki of birdshit

“But not the only one of his kind” too bad noone bothered to expand on that

More time fuckery

Elf realizes that the andalite millitary is crooked af

Tobias’ fucked up family situation is directly the ellimist’s fault

#nix reads animorphs

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words-writ-in-starlight · 7 years

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The Great Animorphs Reread, Part 8

Book 8: The Alien

AKA “Ax is not to be trusted in public, the PTSD squad learn how Andalites eat, and we meet Alloran-Semitur-Corrass”

We’ll get the lighthearted stuff out of the way first: Ax in his human morph is a delight, oh my God, it’s so funny. Someone help them, they are trying to manage this shit ALL THE TIME, it’s such a good thing they never teach Ax to drive or they’d never keep him out of the mall. I didn't talk much in the fifth book about Ax in human morph because...well, beyond the fact that overall that's a pretty grim book (goddamn ants, goddamn Visser One), I was just having a shitty day when I wrote the recap. I was cranky. So now we're talking about Ax's human morph and how much I love it and how, even though cinnamon bunzuh aren't really my particular thing (they're SO MUCH FOOD, I can't finish a whole cinnamon bun), I get really excited whenever I see a Cinnabon. Because I am a seven-year-old and still low-key convinced that humanity's great gifts to the galaxy will be the cinnamon bun and the M&M. Like. Just saying. Also, it's hilarious to me that it apparently never occurs to Marco's dad—having raised Marco, of all people—that 'No' might be fucking with him.

Relatedly, these books are so serious, so heavy, but they’re never grimdark the way, say, the Dark Knight or (hissing) Supernatural are. They have these moments where it’s like Yes, these are children, so they are going to act like GODDAMN CHILDREN and smuggle their new alien buddy into a movie because that’s what they’re going to do. And I love it, I live for these moments where the Animorphs get to be kids, where they get to complain about the fact that Ax tried to eat cigarette butts rather than about the fact that they almost die on a regular basis. Jake even calls it out explicitly, says that they almost died against the Visser's Veleek (and yes, I will eventually do a recap of the Megamorphs, and probably the various Chronicles) and they deserve a damn break. YOU ARE CORRECT, JAKE, perhaps you should do a movie night? I'm committed to the movie night thing. Like. They do a movie night. When Cassie's parents are out or something. Otherwise I can't live with this.

My third and final light-hearted note: the dinner with Cassie’s parents. Like. Oh God. RIP Cassie’s parents’ respect for Jake. I mean, on the one hand, hard same, speaking as someone who believes that hot sauce is a blessing to us all, I too would probably blow through three bowls of Cassie’s dad’s chili with total enthusiasm. But on the other hand…like…can you imagine the conversation between Cassie and Jake where she goes, “hey, heads up, next time you see my parents you might be expected to eat a whole bunch of five-alarm chili” while Jake, who I imagine does not so much live for spicy food, winces in advance. Also, I’m convinced that the reason Cassie’s parents are convinced by Ax’s shaky Jake impression is because Jake is usually so stressed about being around his girlfriend’s parents that he doesn’t even speak. They have no comparison point whatsoever.

Well. Now that we've done the fun stuff. This book is very depressing. Because, first of all, AX GODDAMNIT I LOVE YOU BUT WHAT ARE YOU DOING. And yeah, yeah, the Prime Directive, less-evolved species, blah-blah-blah, but THIS IS A WAR. Like, I love him, he is my blue alien son, but he also needs to pick a goddamn side. Through the whole course of this book, when you really get a look at his thought processes and the sheer amount that he's hiding from them and the way that he almost...disregards the lives of the Controllers who will die as the price of 'striking a great blow against the Yeerks', I really want to smack him.

Now that I’ve gotten THAT off my chest, let me clarify again that I would die for Ax in a heartbeat. Like, he is a small baby alien who’s lightyears away from his home and his family and his entire life and like I just want to hug him and let him talk sadly about his moons and his brother and his family. But also. See above. And then of course this is the book where he DOES pick a goddamn side and that's even MORE distressing because Andalites are dicks and basically excommunicate him for fighting to save Earth. This poor kid. I don't think Andalites hug, do we ever cover that? Regardless, this kid needs a hug. Maybe the lot of them can cuddle at that movie night. I am 100% sure that Jake gives great hugs. And Cassie can probably cuddle like a motherfucker.

Ax tells the Andalites that it was him and not Elfangor who shared the morphing tech because he can’t stand the thought of Elfangor’s name being disgraced. If you, dear reader, want a quick peek into my reaction every time I read that part, picture a dark-haired woman clutching her phone to her chest and going Nooooo my blue boy my poor loyal baby you’re too good for them. In other news, I am a shell of a person.

Sooooo. Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, War Prince of the Andalite fleet and unwilling host of Visser Three. This is where we first meet Alloran, and it is terrible. Like, yes, I get it, Alloran was high-key a war criminal before the whole...possessed by the battle-leader of the Worst Aliens Ever™ thing, but then again none of the Andalites are exactly clean-of-hand in this whole thing, and Alloran at least acted with good intentions—although, good intentions, road to hell, et cetera. (Oh also buckle up for when I talk about the goddamn Hork-Bajir and spend, like, All My Time kicking Alloran around like a soccer ball). And being infested by a Yeerk is a punishment worse than death as it is, never mind being infested by a Yeerk who habitually gloats about killing and infesting your whole planet by using you as a weapon. Like, no one deserves that. No matter what he’s done. Alloran is such a damn tragedy. It always kind of breaks my heart that he asks Aximili to kill him (speaking of LOOK AT YOUR LIFE moments for Ax, because...like...I get why he doesn't, but it would be a mercy to kill Alloran, and Ax's whole voiced logic is 'but you're an Andalite' and that's...not the issue here, kid, although to be fair Ax is alone on Earth and Alloran is the only other one of his kind, I’m so sad). And it always REALLY breaks my heart when Alloran tries to bring his tail blade to his throat and he's too weak to manage it. So, basically, TL;DR: I am perpetually fucking distraught about Alloran-Semitur-Corrass.

Fuck the Andalite home world. All of them are dumbasses. That's all I have to say.

Seerow's Kindness. So, the law of Seerow’s Kindness is the Prime Directive, its text goes something like “thou shalt not share technology with [insert culture here]”. The Prime Directive focuses on noninterference generally, whereas Seerow’s Kindness is about technology, but that’s just semantics. The critical difference here is in how the culture views breaches of the edict. The Prime Directive is treated more like a suggestion, to the effect of “hey, maybe don’t hand a warp core to a species that’s still figuring out the internal combustion engine or that shows some megalomaniacal tendencies.” EVERY Fleet captain breaks the Prime Directive at least once, and many of them more than once, when it seems necessary to save lives—as long as a case can be made for their actions being intended to help people, Starfleet tends to let it slide. On the other hand, you break Seerow’s Kindness? You get fucking excommunicated, and the Andalites have used it as an excuse to be totally hands off the galaxy. And I get it, the logic behind both of them is pretty sound and based around situations exactly like the Yeerks. But…look. Out of all the species in the universe, none of them are without violence and war—even the Pemalites doubtlessly had a messy history before they evolved past it. Seerow just had the tremendous misfortune and ill-thinking to offer his great kindness to parasites—not symbiotes, parasites. The host gets little to nothing out of being infested. And those are the creatures that Seerow just…handed faster-than-light travel. My point is a lot like Marco’s, in the end. It’s a failing of the Yeerks that they’re inclined toward empire, not of the generosity that Seerow offered them. “Your boy Seerow wasn’t wrong. He just helped out the wrong species.”

Finally: fuck the whole bullshit superiority trip that this whole race is on. My precious blue boy Ax too. He kind of gets it beaten out of him by prolonged exposure to a bunch of angry young human soldiers, but the other Andalites are just. A bunch of dicks. They believe that they’re the commanding center of the universe, that of course they have to keep their technology out of the hands of other races too primitive and foolish to handle it. There is a level of astounding narcissism inherent in the belief that they are singularly responsible for the Yeerk threat. Are they responsible for Yeerks spreading like a virus through the galaxy? Um, yes. Are they so universally powerful that it’s their responsibility to protect the galaxy from itself, and their right to judge who lives and who dies for the greater good? Um, no they are not. And that’s the thing. The Andalites, when informed that the Yeerks are on Earth and threatening an unprepared population, throw humanity to the teeth of the Yeerk Empire as a stopgap, because they are so married to their grand plan and their law of Seerow’s Kindess. So just fuck that arrogance straight to hell.

OKAY BUT ON A STILL-EMOTIONALLY-RUINOUS BUT SOMEWHAT LIGHTER NOTE, that last call between Ax and the Andalite homeworld is so fucking upsetting, oh my God, bury me. He tells Head Councillor Lirem about Alloran’s message to his family (wreck me) and he talks about how the Hork-Bajir might have been saved if the Andalite forces (including Lirem) had fought for them, and honestly kind of gives him a very stiff and polite dressing down (MY SON I AM SO PROUD). And Lirem goes <You’re just like your brother> and of course Ax is very proud of that and anyway, I’m dead, just put me off to the side where I won’t get in the way.

#the great animorphs reread #aximili-esgarrouth-isthill #animorphs #the alien #*croons fondly* my boooooooy #i love him #let the animorphs have a movie night 2kforever #honestly my feelings about the andalites are a little complicated but they are well summed up by #andalites would probably have much more success against the yeerks if they weren't so histrionically xenophobic #but like tbqh ax/tobias friendship is my j a m i love them so much #give me all of the weird outcast friendship #my shit #idiot teenagers with a queue

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bubbleskat · 7 years

Text

Book Four: The Message

Maybe I'll aim for two books a week since that's what I seem to be doing right now...we shall see. On with the book! --the squirrel POV is fantastic and exactly how I imagine squirrel minds work --the scenes where they almost get caught in morph tend to be amusing. Or just imagining the ends of the morphs, like Cassie with a huge squirrel tail --Because Rachel had a bulletin board with quotes, I made myself one back in 5th grade. It was pretty cute, though with very different quotes than Rachel. Maybe I should do one again... --paranoia is starting to show up, but not nearly as strong as it will become --the Marco/Tobias dynamic is amusing. Really every member of the team has a great dynamic with each other, but that's one I don't see a lot and so I'm intrigued. --yay first sign of Ax! Lil stupid of him to be calling out when he doesn't know the territory but he's also a wee stupid teenager so he gets a pass. --maybe hindsight is 20/20, but wouldn't it be an easy guess that the voice was an Andalite considering the footage Jake saw with Andalite writing? Who knows. --awww the first time they're unanimous is the time they're going to go rescue Ax --The Sharing really intrigues me because there are so many reasons people might become voluntary and the Animorphs don't recognize any of them. Eleutherophobia is great for this, as are some other fics, and part of the reason I'm rereading is because I've had an idea of writing a fic about controllers for a long time and still really want to do that. --Yeah you might want to remember the constraints of sand and footprints --KTVH! Aka Keep the Visser Happy. Another great thing from the Eleutherophobia series. And it shows up so much. --"We do have lives beyond being Animorphs, after all." For now at least. Small innocent middle schoolers. --Cassie being forced to make decisions seems to always turn out really well (Ax) or really badly (the whole Karen incident...). Well that still turned out well but it could have been bad. --man morphing a sea lion would be fun too. The sea lion at my zoo is so chill even though he's blind. But dolphins were the right choice for this, since sea lions rest fairly often. --they've mentioned having to pay to get into The Gardens, but like for real why haven't they bought a membership yet? Like especially since Jake mentioned in the first book it was one of his favorite places. Okay then again they're 13...but couldn't their parents get one? Idk. I give up lol. --hahaha all the dolphins are named after Friends characters that's brilliant. (Is that because of the new reboot? Idk. Either way great) --Tobias is basically playing the parent to a bunch of 5 year olds when they're dolphins and it's brilliant --the drama of Marco losing a tail. At least now they're learning they can morph away injuries. --lil preachy with the whale bit but still fun --why didn't all of them demorph and remorph to reset the timer? Use analytical skills lil 13 year olds...then you could have gone further instead of going back home. Saves time and all. Alas. --ya know maybe I should also write an AU where they're aged up like 3 years--old enough that they're smarter, but young enough to still be daring about it --"Marco, you know, for a guy who's always joking around and being annoying, you're awfully smart." Good description. --you know the stakes are about to raise when the yeerks show up randomly in the middle of wilderness. --Aximili! --aww Ax is trying so hard to follow Andalite customs but these humans are messing everything up. :') so cute. --Yes Prince Jake! I can't believe I forgot about that. But it is brilliant and bring on all the "don't call me prince" "yes prince jake" --right Ax would have a lot more information about yeerks. That would be how they finally start learning more. --the first "don't call me Prince!" And kicking taxxon butt. Do they know yet about taxxon hunger? I don't remember reading about it yet so I don't think they do. --Ax automatically jumps to the conclusion that Visser Three went to one of the Andalite's moons to acquire the Mardrut, but couldn't it have been Alloran? Honestly that seems a lot more likely to me, that Alloran had a bunch of the morphs already when he was infested. --yay whales! They really are awesome and super sentient. No wonder Aftran wanted to be a whale. They would be cool to morph. --welp this became very hippy again. But it's still interesting and fun. --Man Tobias is really turning on the snark. I didn't remember him being this sassy but it's brilliant. --Ax morphing a super attractive mixed human is great. Along with attempting to put on clothes lol. And mouth sounds! Brilliant. Overall thoughts: This book definitely has its moments of weirdness regarding dolphins and whales and that communication, but it's very Cassie and still enjoyable. Of course, seeing Ax is great! The Animorphs are complete now, aside from the David debacle and later war events. And it was definitely fun to see them out of place in the water. And like I mentioned for the last book, we see why Cassie is fighting. She doesn't have a solid epiphany moment like the last 3, but it's very clear throughout the book.

#laurel's animorphs reread #laurel's post #animorphs #the message #long post

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 1 year

Note

What if David did successfully ransom for the cube from the Animorphs at the end of The Solution (#32?)? How soon before he ends up giving himself away to the Yeerks, or even the Helmacrons?

Assuming David does get the morphing cube (and assuming Rachel doesn't kill him 10 seconds after they hand it over) then the question becomes: what's the next step in his plan?

We know what he wants. He wants this all -- the war, the upheaval, the loneliness -- to stop. Overnight he goes from a stable and comfortable home situation to being a refugee in a war he didn't know existed when he woke up that morning. And the only help he's getting to cope with it are a clique of six other kids who make no secret of the fact that they don't really want him at their lunch table. But does the morphing cube allow him to solve any of that?

Presumably David knows after how it went last time that he can't just show up in person, hand over the box, and expect Visser Three to hand over his parents. He could try hiding the box, going to Visser Three and refusing to disclose its location until he sees his parents. That might work if David can keep from getting grabbed and forcibly infested (maybe through showing up in roach morph and hiding in a wall before he announces his presence) although David doesn't have the means to confirm his parents aren't controllers when he gets them back. Unlike the Animorphs in #22, Visser Three does underestimate David -- because most people think kids are stupid, because Alloran thinks humans are stupid -- and I could see David being able to use that to his advantage. For instance, David could tell Visser Three he knows where all of the "andalite bandits" live, but that he won't reveal that information until he's had three continuous days with his parents during which no yeerks popped out of their ears.

Thing is, that's all super-tenuous. David has to count on Visser Three keeping his word, on no one bug-spraying the meet up, on Visser Three actually wanting the morphing cube enough to let hosts go (doubtful), on the Animorphs not intervening at all, and on any yeerks inside his parents not simply infesting him when his guard is down. All of that is nigh impossible given David has zero allies. There are more ways that can go wrong than go right, and that's before we get into the question of where they'd even go afterward, with an entire planet-stealing empire after them.

So. I think David is backed into such a corner by the end of #22 -- heck, by the midpoint of #20 -- that there's almost no way out for him even if his plan in #22 does come off perfectly. There are only six people on the planet who can save him from the yeerks, and his personality clash with them starts basically from the moment he first opens his mouth.

#animorphs #david animorphs #i constantly vacillate between being really sympathetic to this poor kid and hating his misogynistic guts #which i think is the whole point of david

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

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I'm not sure if you've ever been asked this but (and this is totally ignoring all ethical questions)- do you think a yeerk could bring back Loren's memories from before the crash? They seem to have far more control of their host's memories than the hosts do...

First question: does Loren want her memories back?

Maybe this seems a little odd to ask, but… she’d be remembering a lot of pain and fear, maybe a few good-ish years where she’s with Elfangor or raising baby-Tobias, and a shitton of trauma. Losing your (traumatic) memories can actually be good for you. Psychiatrists are developing therapies using drugs and/or ECT to help patients with PTSD and phobias deliberately remove certain memories. The minuscule number of participants who have successfully completed the still-experimental versions of these therapies have seen considerable upticks in quality of life.

Setting aside the science for the sci fi, it’s also notable that Loren does not regain her memories when she morphs. We don’t know how morphing tech works precisely, of course, because it sometimes heals long-term damage and sometimes doesn’t. But my headcanon has always been that it has to do with user motivation and self-image. A couple examples:

Alloran still has battle scars even after morphing because he’s Mr. Old School Warrior Code, and considers them a point of pride.

Ax doesn’t develop battle scars during the war because he grows up in a constant state of siege as part of a team with a whatever-works mentality, and has little time for outdated conceptualizations of honor.

James’s nervous system starts working again after morphing because he wants to be nondisabled and sees himself that way.

Collette’s nervous system doesn’t start working again after morphing because she identifies as disabled and is happy that way.

Tobias can’t heal his broken wing with morphing in MM2 because he’s still new to morphing and struggling to break away from the predator mentality of “you get hurt, you tough it out or you die.”

Etcetera, etcetera. If we take that explanation as given for the moment, then it’s pretty striking that morphing heals Loren’s eyes but not her memories. She says outright that she didn’t want to take care of a kid, and doesn’t feel up to the responsibility of being a mother (#49). She’s also had 95% bad experiences with aliens, between being abducted by everyone from skrit na to Chapman and being dragged into some intergalactic war multiple times. Healing her eyes helps her get away from the ableism and underemployment facing most blind Americans; healing her memories doesn’t necessarily get her shit. She may or may not make a choice somewhere in there. And even if she doesn’t, there may simply be nothing left to find.

Second question: What would a yeerk know that Loren wouldn’t?

Yes, we see that yeerks read hosts’ memories. And it’s true that (at the very least) Temrash 114 can choose which of Jake’s memories Jake will focus on at any given time. However, we see no evidence whatsoever of yeerks having insight into hosts’ minds that the hosts themselves lack. In fact, the opposite might even be true; there are several moments with Eva pointedly using knowledge about Edriss that Edriss herself lacks (Visser) but Edriss simply doesn’t get Eva, nor does Temrash ever start to understand Jake. So if Loren doesn’t consciously remember these events, then there’s no sign that the yeerk would be able to do so either.

To swerve back into science: there’s also the fact that brains don’t “hide” memories that they’ve successfully stored. If you can’t retrieve it, usually there’s nothing left to retrieve. You can have a “feeling of knowing” about a test item and later have the answer come to you with no further prompting, but if you don’t even have that feeling, then you probably don’t have the answer stored anywhere in your noodle. Contrary to media depictions of amnesia (*cough* MM1 *cough*), there’s no such thing as a cure for traumatic amnesia. (Dissociative amnesia is another story, but I digress.) Loren sustains a blow to the head, either through a car crash or a violent controller or a violent controller-caused car crash, and that’s where her memories go. She tells Tobias that she had to re-learn how to swallow and brush her teeth afterward (#49). Re-learn, not remember. That’s a pretty accurate summation of traumatic brain injuries. Once the skills are gone, they’re gone. It turns out brains (probably) do grow new cells even through adulthood, and even hints of neurogenesis are SO FUCKING EXCITING for people like me who study brains. But the fact remains that memories destroyed through trauma are usually, well, destroyed.

Quick personal example: when I was 16, I got a concussion. How? No idea, because the concussion itself caused me to forget how it happened. I know I was skiing at the time — waking up on a ski slope with a dented-in helmet was a pretty strong context clue — but I’m never going to know if I misjudged a turn, slipped on ice, collided with a person, hit a tree, got struck by lightning (okay probably not that) or what. My brain went into emergency shutdown mode after I did the equivalent of spilling a soda on its keyboard, and the Microsoft Word document I had open at the time (AKA my working memory) didn’t have time to convert to ROM (AKA go through my hippocampus into long-term storage) in the process. What happens to Loren isn’t the equivalent of spilling a soda on one’s keyboard; it’s the equivalent of throwing the whole computer off a forty-foot building into the ocean. A skilled IT tech and a hell of a lot of work might get that thing running again, but if you think there’s a chance in hell that the family photos stored on your hard drive are gonna be found and restored, then you’ve got another think coming.

Tl;dr: Given what we know about real brains and about Your Brian on Morphing, I’m not convinced that a yeerk could help Loren if she even wanted help.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #loren fangor #ableism mention #neurology #morphing #asks #anonymous #please don't fucking at me about the electroconvulsive therapy #if all of your information comes from hollywood bullshit #if you're a trained practitioner well versed on the controversies then i'd love to talk #but i don't have time to debate with ignoramuses who have seen 'one flew over the cukoo's nest' one too many times #read the literature and then get back to me

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thenixkat · 5 years

Text

Animorphs notes 8

Book 8

Ax finally gets a fucking book

Lit, Jake and Rachel got at least 2 fucking books b4 Ax got a single one

Has a prologue

Captain Nerefir

“aristh like me, a warrior-cadet,”

B/c of nepotism Aximili gets to go on the bridge

Ax accidentally rammed the captain

Ax specifically says people tolerated him b/c they like Elf

Can andalites live to be 200 yrs old?

Z-Space is white and empty

Ax got caught talkin shit

“Slowly Nerefir turned his two main eyes to ward me. He was a frightening old Andalite. A great warrior. A great hero. Elfangor's idol. <Ah, it's the ruffian. The wild brat who knocked me over.> He nodded. <Old Hoof and Tail, is it? Well. I kind of like the name.> He slowly winked one eye at Elfangor. <I suppose we'll have to let the ruffian live.>”

Heh

Ax is mad that babies arent allowed to fight

Blue-green grass

Huh, bout a hundred warriors on the main ship

The DOme has emergency engines

The implication that tailless bipeds are very very rarely encountered by andalites

The kids take Ax to a movie

A scifi movie instead of anything else that might represent humans better

Ax has 3 hearts, narrow shoulders, thin arms and legs

Ax’s human morph has clothing, sure it’s dna based totally

“Prince Jake is large and pale in color with brown hair. Cassie is shorter and darker in color, with darker brown hair. Marco is also shorter and medium color, with long brown hair. Rachel is taller and pale and has yellow hair.”

Marco is not pale or light skin

Marco does not think taking Ax into public spaces is a good idea. Last time whent terribly so he’s got a point.

Jake insists on the team needing to take a break

These binches are apparently too good to rent some movies

There is disagreement over teh outfit Rachel picked

Ax is shit at pretending to be human

Also video rental was a much better idea

Ax could easily be killed with antifreeze, he’d just chug the whole bottle

Also Ax has a separate diary/travel brochure he’s writting

Ax is a bad spy

Oh hey! Its like that half thought out plan from book 7 gets a lot of people killed like I thought it would

Jake is really bad at considering some shit like maybe the aliens doing a secret invasion and controlling a decent amount of the police force might just murder the fuck outta the witnesses

Rachel’s the only human on the team to consider that maybe the yeerks have ways to prevent the truth from getting out

Ax and Rachel the only people on this team with fucking foresight

Ax there is need to know info that helps people fight, keeping info is a good way to get people killed

Ax thinks the rituals are pointless but does them anyway

“<From the water that gave birth to us,> I said, and dipped my right forehoof into the water. It was the beginning of the morning ritual. <From the grass that feeds us,> I said, and moved back to crush a small tuft of grass beneath the same hoof.>

<For the freedom that unites us.> I spread my arms wide. <We rise to the stars.> I looked with all four of my eyes at the rising sun.

I bowed low. <Freedom is my only cause. Duty to the people, my only guide. Obedience to my prince, my only glory.>

I hesitated. Tobias had landed in the tree above. <The destruction of my enemies, my most solemn vow.>

I straightened up again, then assumed the fighting stance. <I, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, Andalite warrior-cadet, offer my life.>

With that, I drew my tail blade forward and pressed it against my own throat. Then I relaxed my tail. This was the part of the ritual that called for contemplation. You were supposed to think about the parts of the ritual and ask yourself if you were living up to all of it.”

Fuck the law

Ax acquires a rattlesnake

A rattlesnake strike is faster than what an andalite can perceive

Jake thinks Ax can be taken to school with no problems

Shorm=tailblade, true friend

Jake… you have relatives at that school who’d spot that lie in a heartbeat

No, andalites are just fucking nudists

Ax is really bad at passing as a normal human, very very bad

Mr. Pardue is controlled by a yeerk, the yeerk is dying of starvation

Rachel and Marco don’t really like or pretend to be friendly with Aximili

Jake tasks Marco with getting info from Aximili, Marco would rather the sneaky route but Jake wants to make it honest and friendlike

Have these middle schoolers never watched like crime movies? What did they think would happen to the witnesses.

Marco moved back into the suburbs after his dad got his shit together

Marco’s dad is working from home b/c he sprained his ankle

Aximili just fucks around with someone else’s computer without asking

Aximili does not seem concerned that he’s potentially gotten Marco’s dad in trouble with teh yeerks

“There are always at least two moons in our sky. And when all four moons are in the night sky, it is nearly as bright as day.”

Andal moons, also probably the reason why andalites have shit night vision

Ax is gonna give people some weird impressions about Jake

Cassie’s dad is balding and wears glasses

Cassie’s parents are dorks and approve of Jake

Cassie’s family doesn’t pray before eating, Jake’s does

Got Tobias to help on his solo mission to send a message home

“<Who is this?> the Andalite demanded. <This is a high-security link. You are not an authorized sender. State your name and location.>

<My name is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. Brother of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. Son of Noorlin- Sirinial-Cooraf and Forlay-Esgarrouth-Maheen.>”

Names

“Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss. Head of the Council. Veteran of more battles than I could count. His appearance on the screen would have made me lose concentration, but I was too awed to dare.”

An important deer

...the war started like 26 yrs ago? I’m gonna go with the Chronicles Books on that

Well at least we have another name to pin on the fucked up hork situation

Also Ax is coerced into taking the blame for Elfangor’s crime

“<Aximili-kala,> my father said. It was his nickname for me.”

That’s cute

A yeerk cuts off Ax’s communications

Eslin, Derane, yeerk names

Eslin is pissed off at Visser 3 for the death of their friend and in revenge is fucking up plans and getting people killed

Gives Ax the location and time of where Visser 3 feeds his host for an assassination

Rachel is not about to be an andalite’s pawn

Andalites do have distinctive hoof prints

Andalites have a distinctive scent

Hork-Bajir are warmblooded

So a rattlesnake can slither away faster than an andalite can react to a bite

Ax’s suicide mission is interrupted by the rest of the kids

Visser 3 bailed from Alloran and escaped

Alloran begs to be killed instead of morphing and escaping, b/c as we know, andalites are quitters

So there’s yeerks invading the homeworld

None of the kids try carrying Alloran away or killing him

I’m pretty sure the Nahara never come up again, which means I can ignore that

Ax finally answers teh question of how he eats to the kids and decides to be more open with them

This book has an epilouge

Does Eslin 359, controlling Gary Kozlar, friend of deceased Derane 344 ever come back up again?

#nix reads animorphs #animorphs

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 6 years

Note

If you're still doing them, have you done a book review on Visser?

Short opinion: Have I mentioned recently that Eva deserves her own novel series? Because Eva deserves her own novel series.

Long opinion:

Seriously, I find Eva so fascinating as a character. She goes through utter hell in this series and allows that fire to forge her into steel rather than finding herself broken down the way that Chapman and Tom and Alloran are. I think a lot of it has to do with her certainty about who she is as a person and where she stands in the world before she gets taken — she knows what makes her herself and she uses that knowledge to protect herself even as a different being is using her body to pretend to be her. By contrast, pre-infestation Chapman is very willing to change as the situation calls for it, pre-infestation Alloran is Not a Good Person thanks to living a life unexamined, and pre-infestation Tom is just some kid who hasn’t had the chance to figure out who he is yet. Eva knows who she is: to Peter, to Marco, to herself. She knows what her principles are, and what she is and is not willing to sacrifice for them. She knows that the world is an ugly place where usually one’s dreams do not work out and good does not triumph over evil. That knowledge allows her to know Visser One as well.

Visser One, by contrast, is a self-deluding egoist who cannot see and acknowledge her own flaws. In many ways Edriss 562 is the worst kind of abuser, because she’s the abuser who not only falls in love with her victims but also genuinely believes that her victims love her back, in spite of Allison Kim trying to commit suicide to escape her control and then later going to heroic lengths to keep their children away from Edriss. Furthermore, given how much Eva ends up helping Edriss throughout this book (keeping her from blurting out too much about Madra and Darwin, figuring out that an Animorph attack will discredit Visser Three, correctly assessing how much the Council does and does not know about the Earth invasion), I actually wonder if Edriss 562 would have been able to maintain her position as Visser One for very long at all if she didn’t have Eva as a host.

Anyway, I could gush about Eva all day. But let’s talk about what excellent foils Visser One and Marco are instead.

Marco is the Animorphs’ chief strategist, just as Visser One is the chief strategist for the Yeerk Empire’s Earth invasion. Jake and Visser Three respectively might be the ones out front and visible, but they’re both too impulsive and too self-confident to manage long-term battle plans without the subtle influence of their strategists’ big-picture thinking.

Visser One gets described in this book as “addicted” to humans, relating back to not just Marco’s close connection to human technology but also his human-like battle morph. They both embrace and use humans’ uniquenesses on a scale we don’t see with anyone else except maybe Elfangor.

Most of the plot of this book is about Visser One desperately, compulsively denying how much she cares about her own family — Marco does exactly the same thing (#15, #30, #35) throughout the series. But also witness the INSANE lengths both of them will go through to protect said families (Edriss sabotaging her entire empire for Madra and Darwin, Marco risking his whole team to protect his mom) both in this book and in the series as a whole, which gives the lie to their alleged ruthlessness and refusal to care for their close others.

They also have some awfully funny ways of showing that love. Marco never goes to the extreme of holding four humans hostage while lying to himself about how said slaves are just like family, but he does deliberately sabotage his dad’s relationship with Nora in order to rekindle his parents’ marriage, which is still machiavellian as hell.

Neither one of them particularly wants to be in the war at all, except for said families; Marco nearly quits for his dad’s sake and only doesn’t for his mom’s sake (#5) and Edriss nearly quits for Essam’s sake but only doesn’t for the twins’ sake (Visser).

Which leads to both of them having the same Achilles heel: Marco has no chill at all about his dad. Edriss nearly gets herself killed when reacting to Darwin.

All of which makes it fascinating to watch the rumors about these two mortal enemies working together become a straight-up self-fulfilling prophecy in this book. Visser One only lets the Animorphs go in #5 to spite Visser Three (and we finally learn in this book exactly why she hates him so much), but as of MM1 and #8 there are already whispers that she released them as part of an agreement. The events of #15 incriminate Visser One when the Animorphs let her go to save Eva, but in #30 the Animorphs actually are trying to kill her for real... but they don’t succeed, which makes her look guiltier. All this forces her into a corner in Visser where she has no choice but to (briefly, grudgingly) gang up with the Animorphs for real. Without the severely damaging rumors that Visser One has some kind of secret alliance with the “andalite bandits,” there would never be a secret alliance between Visser One and said bandits.

Well, less an alliance and more of a hostage negotiation. With Eva playing the part of The World’s Worst Hostage, in that she both refuses to cooperate with her captors enough to keep herself alive and also refuses to cooperate with her rescuers enough to escape the situation.

Because Eva’s the missing link between Marco and Visser One in more than one way. She loves her family but understands that the big picture has to come first, just like Marco and Edriss both, but she also doesn’t lie to herself. She doesn’t give in to Marco’s pipe dreams of their family being reunited as if nothing ever happened to come between them, instead outright expressing her approval of Peter’s decision to remarry. She doesn’t buy the bullshit Edriss peddles about how Allison Kim and Hildy Gervais were “happy” or “in love” in a relationship that pushed them both to the brink of suicide with the severity of its abuse, instead offering outright contempt for Edriss’s idea of what family is supposed to look like. She accepts that there are fates worse than death — and she accepts one of those fates at the end of this book. Because as much as Edriss and Marco are both stone-cold killers when it comes to protecting their loved ones, neither one of them can hold a candle to Eva for sheer badass nerve and willingness to endure hell itself for the sake of her family.

#visser mom #animorphs reviews #visser #edriss 562 #the one and only #animorphs #eva #visser one #abuse tw #suicide tw #Anonymous #asks

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 6 years

Note

If you are still doing book reviews, could you do one for the departure?

Short opinion: I admire the hell out of #19: The Departure, and I’d put it on every summer reading list in the country if I could. I also find it unbelievably annoying.

Long opinion:

I agree with all the people who point out that K.A. Applegate does something incredibly daring and complex and real-world important with #19, through showing that the Evil Empire of Evil can still have a ton of residents who just kind of ended up in Evilstown through the bad luck of being born there and can’t really be held responsible for (initially) believing the poison they’ve been fed their entire lives. Aftran 942 is arguably the most important character in the series because her greatest sin is simply not questioning the beliefs that she grew up with—and as a result, she horribly enslaves and violates at least three or four people (including children) and commits at least one murder. We come to understand that what Cassie asks her to do—to reject everything she was raised with and believes and cares about—is not only incomprehensibly difficult, but nearly ends up being deadly. Applegate deconstructs the idea that entire groups or belief systems can be “evil” and simultaneously shows that the actions of an entire group can be so evil that the only moral choice is opposition. She makes it clear that many of the yeerks fighting the war against humans are doing so because of false or distorted beliefs, and also shows that rebellion against those beliefs is possible.

But in order to accomplish this effect, #19 awkwardly uses everything from an enraged black bear to a fucking random-ass leopard to herd the characters around the plot. How about just a bear, but maybe one that is humanized or has rabies? How about a more straightforward survival story with no random-ass leopards, maybe one in which Cassie’s major moment of saving Aftran’s life is instead giving up all of her found mushrooms so that Karen can eat?

Regardless of how it happens, Aftran and Cassie together make this incredible, radical choice to trust each other, and they do so specifically because of their forced empathy for one another. Cassie thinks of yeerks slugs and slavers, but never as individuals, until she and Aftran end up forced to spend two nights sitting around in a cave whining about their respective difficulties with the ongoing war. Aftran dismisses gedds, hork-bajir, and other non-yeerks as “lesser” species in need of domination for their own good until she ends up unavoidably forced to take Cassie’s perspective as she is literally seeing through Cassie’s eyes. It’s not that Cassie is anything all that special; it’s just that Cassie is a unique individual with fears and dreams. Cassie’s a scared kid thrust into a war too big for her to handle, just like Aftran. Cassie’s an animal nut and an only child who thinks shopping with her best friend is silly and has a crush on her CO. Cassie deserves to live her life free from controllerdom, even if that means Aftran isn’t allowed to use her eyes.

However, in order to have that moment of empathy, CASSIE FIRST HAS TO BECOME A FUCKING VOLUNTARY CONTROLLER. Just to be clear, I am 100% with Marco: once that happens, the other Animorphs have a duty and an obligation, albeit an unpleasant one, to kill Cassie and Aftran. Forget letting Tom have the morphing cube; that decision right there is the most unforgivable thing Cassie ever does to her team. Letting the yeerks morph is a bad idea. Letting the yeerks know the names, addresses, faces, and personalities of every one of the Animorphs is a far bigger betrayal. Worse still, it’s one that Cassie commits out of sheer carelessness: she seems to be suffering from temporary amnesia because she genuinely does not realize she is dooming all of her friends and her entire family to the same fate when she lets herself become a controller. It is canon (according to Tom, Eva, Chapman, Allison Kim, Alloran, and John Berryman, all on different occasions) that being an involuntary controller is LITERALLY a fate worse than death; if not for Aftran, Cassie would dodge that bullet while allowing everyone she loves to take it in her place. The only alternative would be forcing someone she loves (Rachel or Marco) to kill her in order to save the other people they love. I cannot think too hard about this moment without despising Cassie as a human being. Anyway, would it have been that hard just to have Aftran abandon Karen and infest Cassie one of those times Cassie was sleeping next to her?

However, Applegate does an absolutely amazing job of showing that the moral choice—to give up on having a host—is the unbelievably difficult choice for Aftran. She explains the rhetoric of “look out for oneself” and “fight to get what you and your group need” very clearly—and then utterly takes it down, not just on a societal level, but also on an individual level. Cassie and Aftran draw strength from one another, saving each other’s lives several times until there’s no doubt that each one would be dead without the other. Cassie’s whole character arc is about the importance of drawing on others for strength and about the power that comes from vulnerability, and her willingness to rely on Aftran to save her is an even more important part of her development than her willingness to save Aftran. The lesson that Aftran takes from Cassie’s dependency as a form of strength is also really important: that it doesn’t have to be either-or, a matter of the yeerks having the humans’ strength or the humans having the humans’ strength. It is possible for the two species to work together, and the moral solution to the power imbalance is definitely not one in which the yeerks punish the humans for the andalites’ bad choices and their own bad luck through using children as livestock.

And yet this lesson gets somewhat lost in that Cassie’s whole oops-I’m-a-controller fuckup miraculously works out for her. She does not allow Aftran to infest her in the hope of changing Aftran’s mind; she does it because she’s unwilling to get Karen’s blood on her hands. And then she not only avoids consequences for her mistake but ends up being better off for having made it. I’d be less annoyed with Cassie doing something stupid and then the universe rearranging itself to make that stupidity okay if she didn’t do it four or five other times in this same damn book (quitting the team, using a horse to attack an angry bear, allowing a controller to see her morphing, becoming a nothlit) and if the universe didn’t accommodate her every damn time (Jake being way too understanding that she’s leaving her friends to die, the horse fending off the bear, the controller being one of the few on the planet who is wavering about the idea of involuntary hosts, caterpillars resetting as butterflies). I’d be even less annoyed if the series as a whole didn’t demonstrate this pattern again and again and again. Cassie risks her life to save some baby skunks, only for the skunks to become the key to stopping Visser Three from destroying Ax’s forest (#9). Cassie thinks that the gang should trust George Edelman (#17) and Mr. Tidwell (#29) only for them both to prove to be trustworthy; she doesn’t think that they should trust Taylor (#43) but still manages to come out of nowhere to save their butts after she proves to be right yet again. Cassie stops Jake from killing Tom because she doesn’t want Jake hurt; that decision ends up working itself into the morph-capable yeerks rebelling and Cassie claiming she knew it all along (#50). Cassie just “knows somehow” that stopping John Berryman from ever being born will bring Jake back (MM3), just like she “knows somehow” that the Animorphs can trust Ax but not Tom (MM4). It’s sloppy characterization, it’s awkward plotting, and it’s just bad writing.

AND YET this book is also incredibly important as an SF* story in general, because (I will be the first to admit, as a huuuuuuugggee SF geek from about age six on forward) SF specifically has an ethics problem. No other genre promotes ideas such as “they were urgals so it’s okay for us to slaughter several thousand of them and then go have a party,” “we often shoot/stab/torture humans to hurt the demons inside them because, dude, they’re demons,” or “my dad being mean to me is a valid excuse for destroying a planet.” The yeerks get a raw deal right from birth—but being born without eyes isn’t a valid excuse to steal someone else’s body in order to use their eyes. Cassie is only trying to defend her home and her family from invasion—but defending one’s own isn’t a valid excuse for cruelty or capricious murder. Applegate doesn’t allow the reader the luxury of an easy story with a simple moral; she shows how the right choice is neither easy to find nor easy to make once one finds it. She also shows that the “heroic” gestures SF worships are often as harmful as they are helpful, and that making the truly right choice to care for others and avoid harm is a years-long commitment to exhausting and unrewarding selflessness. In the process she also heroicizes both Cassie and Aftran for making that choice. There are not enough SF stories that humanize the alien villains, and there are definitely not enough SF stories about strength that doesn’t come from fighting ability.

Nonetheless, I’d like to count off the freaking plot holes in this freaking book. The leopard’s presence is never properly explained, and its behavior doesn’t make much sense: sometimes it’s frightened enough of a wolf to run away, and sometimes it’s willing to fight a wolf and a gorilla in one go. The yeerks just let Karen go at the end for no really good reason, when they go through heroic lengths to kill other ex-hosts who know too much in #8 and #31 especially. Cassie picks up the Idiot Ball at a couple different moments in a way that is frankly uncharacteristic of her. Aftran manages to hunt Cassie down and follow her home while in the body of a seven-year-old child without morphing and apparently without using any public or private transportation, when none of the other yeerks succeeded in doing this with any of the Animorphs after any other battle. A panicked horse, an angry bear, a flooded river, and a badly-placed rock manage to conspire to get Cassie and Karftran stuck out in the woods in a string of bad luck worthy of a Charles Dickens novel. While they’re out there, five super-competent teens who can (among other things) see for miles, track scents, and run at 30+ MPH remain unable to find them for days. Ax doesn’t feel the need to mention the whole “metamorphosis resets the nothlit clock” thing during the several days that Jake et al spent worrying about Cassie.

NONETHELESS, this book shows the awe-inspiring degree of courage needed to face down one’s entire society and systematically reject every aspect of it and its damaging beliefs. It also shows that the Karens of the world need the Aftrans of the world to make that radical decision, because although it is heroic to choose to act in the face of one’s society committing atrocities, it is equally reprehensible to choose not to act in the face of those kinds of atrocities. #19 is a clear example of what makes K.A. Applegate a writer like no other, in that it rejects the easy choice of writing YA SF with all-bad villains or all-good heroes in favor of the right choice of writing an emotionally exhausting but deeply thought-provoking war epic with no simple answers. The fact that Applegate does so in a book that also has gutwrenchingly accurate descriptions of depression (Cassie feeling unable to care about anything, even her loved ones), uncontrollable-giggle-inducing moments of humor (Marco announcing that he has to be excused from class to go buy a nicotine patch because he feels the urge to become an adolescent smoking statistic coming on), and stick-in-your-brain imagery (Aftran struggling to describe blindness as she and Cassie stand in a field of wildflowers) is just another credit to her freaking amazing ability as a writer.

So YOU’D THINK she could come up with a better way to get this plot moving than a fucking random-ass leopard. Le sigh.

*SF ≈ speculative fiction ≈ science fiction, fantasy, horror, modern myth, etc.

#animorphs #animorphs reviews #mama nature #aftran 942 #cassie #the departure #19 #yeerks #asks #answers #anonymous

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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Why were we allowed to read Animorphs as kids, anyway?

It’s a question I see come up in this fandom again and again: How the heck did Animorphs books make it into school libraries and book fairs across the country to be marketed to eight-year-olds when they feature drug addiction, body dysmorphia, suicide, imperialism, PTSD, racism, sexism, body horror, grey-and-black morality, slavery, torture, major character death, forced cannibalism, and genocide?

To be clear, I don’t actually know the answer to that question. It is, admittedly, a little odd to consider, especially in light of the fact that Bridge to Terabithia gets banned for killing one character (much less several dozen), The Witches gets banned for having a character trapped in the body of an animal (without even going into issues of predation or body horror), The Chocolate War gets banned for having moderately disturbing descriptions of violence between teenagers, Bird gets banned for dealing with the realities of drug addiction, Winnie the Pooh gets banned for having talking animals, Harriet the Spy gets banned because the main character lies to her parents, and The Secret Annex gets banned because Anne Frank describes normal teenage puberty experiences throughout her diary. And yet Animorphs was marketed to children as young as six nationwide, and (despite selling better than even some classics like The Chocolate War at its peak) no one ever bothered to burn those books or cry that they would rot children’s minds.

If I had to take a wildly inexpert guess, knowing as little as I do about the publishing industry and the standards parent groups use to determine whether books are “moral,” I would venture to speculate that there were several different factors at work.

Grown-ups judge books by their covers just as much as children do. For proof of that phenomenon, just scroll through the Animorphs tag on tumblr, any relevant forum on Reddit, or any old post that uses that stupid meme. The book covers suggest that the stories inside will be silly, campy adventures about the escapist fantasy of turning into a dolphin or a lizard. People don’t look too closely at the books with the neon candy-colored backgrounds and the ridiculous photoshop foregrounds, especially not when they imply a promise that the novels themselves will be the most inane form of sci fi.

There’s no sex. To quote the show K.A. Applegate most loves to reference: "I guess parents don't give a crap about violence if there's sex things to worry about." The large majority of books that get banned from schools are thrown out for having sexual content: the freaking dictionary was banned from California schools for explaining what “oral sex” is, And Tango Makes Three was removed from shelves because apparently married couples are inherently shocking if they happen to be gay, and the list of most-banned books in the U.S. is full of books which explain in perfectly child-appropriate terms what puberty is and where babies come from. Animorphs, by contrast, never gets more explicit than Marco calling Taylor a “skank” or Jake and Cassie’s few stolen kisses. The only mentions of nudity are implied (and even then only when the kids are first coming out of morph), and the most explicit thing we ever hear about Rachel and Tobias doing is staying up late in her room to do her homework together. It becomes unbelievably obvious in retrospect that there’s a decent level of queer representation in the books (Marco repeatedly describing both Jake and Ax as “beautiful” or “handsome,” Mertil and Gafinilan, multiple characters casually morphing cross-gender), but it’s also possible to overlook the queerness if you don’t know it’s there. There might be explicit autocannibalism in this series, but at least it never uses the word “nipple.”

There’s no profanity. Again, there’s a strong implication of profanity—Rachel and Jake especially often “use certain words to describe things” in a way that makes it incredibly obvious what they’re saying, and context clues tell us Ax says “fuck” at least once—but given that the strongest expletive that comes up with any regularity is “good grief,” this can act as an obvious (if dumb) heuristic for parents that a book is appropriate for children. People love to count the swear words in Catcher in the Rye when describing why it should be banned (generally without, heaven forbid, reading the goddamn book). Other works such as To Kill a Mockingbird have been banned for using a single word, regardless of context. If a parent is looking to object to a single word or set of words as grounds that a book is inappropriate, the worst they’re going to find is half a dozen instances of “heck” and maybe a dozen of “crap.”

Some of the worst content is context-dependent. As I pointed out above, at least five or six different characters (Tobias, Arbron, Alloran, Tom, Allison Kim) attempt suicide over the course of the series. At least three or four species that we know about (Hork-Bajir, Howlers, Nartec) get largely or entirely annihilated. However, in order to understand that any of that occurs, you actually have to read the books. Not only that, but you have to read them closely. Cates pointed out that some of the most disturbing passages from #33 are, in a vacuum, just descriptions of blinking diodes and weird hallucinations. The description of Tobias attempting suicide is just a long list of mall venues that flash by as he zooms full-speed toward a glass wall. Even the passages with Rachel threatening David (or carrying out those threats) don’t make much sense unless you know how a two-hour limit on morphing works. For the parent skimming these books looking for objectionable content, nothing jumps out.

The books are, in fact, appropriate for children. This quality is what (I believe) prevented parents like mine from taking the books away from us kids even after reading several entire novels out loud to us before bed. The books contain violence, but they sure as hell don’t condone it. They touch on subjects such as drug addiction and parental abuse, but they do so from the point of view of realistic-feeling kids and don’t fetishize that kind of content. Most of the lessons contained within are tough—that there’s no such thing as a simple moral code, that people with the power to prevent atrocity also have the obligation to do so, that members of the hegemony aren’t actually all that special, that the world is a scary and violent place for most people who have to live in it—but they’re also important lessons, and good ones to teach to children. I would be comfortable with my own children (assuming I had any) reading these books at the same age I started reading them, in first and second grade.

You have to understand the fictional science to understand (most of) the horror. Trying to describe some of the most horrifying passages in Animorphs is like “and then they flushed the pool for cleaning, but the pool was full of slugs!” or “but she explained to her son that she had to have a parasite in her brain so the parasite’s friends wouldn’t be suspicious!” or “and then the hawk ate a rabbit, as hawks are wont to do!” while one’s non-fandalite friends stand there and go “... so what?” The laws of Applied Phlebotinum in the series turn those earlier moments into a war crime, an assisted quasi-suicide, and a loss of identity, respectively; however, you have to understand the laws of applied phlebotinum in order to know that. For anyone not reading closely, the horror can be overlooked. For those of us who are reading closely, phrases such as “host breeding program,” “fugue state,” “eight minutes too late,” and “the howlers are all children” (or any mention at all of people being injured while taxxons are in the vicinity, for that matter) are enough to chill your blood. But again, for that to happen, you actually have to read the books. Which we can assume most of the people skimming for curse words do not.

Some of those exact same premises wouldn’t be horror at all if handled by a different author. K.A. Applegate subverts the “wake up, go to school, save the world” trope; normally premises that feature teen superheroes fighting aliens are considered appropriate for all ages (e.g. Avengers Assemble, Kim Possible, Teen Titans) because they feature bloodless violence and gloss over the question of whether aliens are people too. The utterly arbitrary standard that kids should be allowed to see violence but not blood allows for justification of movies like Prince Caspian, Night at the Museum, and Ghostbusters to feature characters getting murdered in all kinds of ways in PG-rated movies. “Violence” and “sci-fi violence” are two different categories according to the MPAA rating system; guess which one gets a lower rating. Of course, there’s a crapton of science showing it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference to kids whether or not they see blood, they’re still gonna learn violent behaviors and potentially be traumatized, but again where the arbitrary standard persists. Therefore, if most of the premises of Animorphs books don’t sound horrifying, they must not actually be horrifying. Right?

The books are almost as light as they are heavy. Part of the reason I have comfortably loaned my copies of the early books to friends with ten-year-old kids is that it’s not primarily a downer series. Animorphs aren’t R.L. Stein books, which always end on (the implication of) the protagonist’s death. They’re not uniform horrorfests like Dolls in the Attic or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Applegate doesn’t fetishize violence the way that Cassandra Clare and Ransom Riggs do. The most-quoted passages from these books are the ones that are funny, not horrifying. These are stories about the joy of aliens discovering Volkswagen Beetles, about the wonder of being able to fly away from one’s life, about friendship and the power of love being enough to make the gods themselves sit up and pay attention. The whole saga tells the story of six kids sacrificing more than their lives to save their families, and of how that sacrifice brings down an empire. I suspect that many parents were either paying so little attention they didn’t realize these stories could be classified as battle epics or as kiddie horror, or else were paying so much attention that they concluded that this series is a battle epic worth reading.

Then again, maybe there was a whole other set of market pressures which accounted for the lack of censorship which I don’t know about. If so, the economics side of tumblr is encouraged to enlighten me.

#animorphs #marketing #body horror #kiddie horror #censorship #seriously tho WHY WERE THE SIX-YEAR-OLDS READING ABOUT AUTOCANNIBALISM IN THE 90S #what even was that

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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I just read your post on Jake as a non-classic YA hero (which was wonderful), and noticed you listed "My Teacher is an Alien" series with a "dumb jock" as a villain character, which is totally true as of the first (and second?? I can't remember) books, but if you have more thoughts on Duncan's development as a character, or that series as a whole, I'd be super interested to hear them! That was another series I loved dearly as a child. :)

Yeah, as I mentioned in this post, I really appreciate YA SF heroes that aren’t traditionally intelligent or otherwise talented who nonetheless make important contributions to fighting off alien invasions. Ergo, you are exactly correct that I have a soft spot for Duncan. I also absolutely LOVE a good redemption arc done right: Alloran, Chapman, Luke Castellan, Xanth, Septimus Heap, Edmund Pevensie, Jill Pole, Diggory Kirke… (This also explains why I have a Thing for C.S. Lewis. Sue me.) So yes, I really like Duncan Dougal as a character.

Anyway, I do really like Duncan… but. But I also really dislike that his redemption comes about so artificially. Duncan’s role in My Teacher is an Alien is really great, since I love how a) even at his worst the narration has sympathy for him and b) he drops the whole “dominate the nerds” idea the instant he realizes their school has MUCH bigger problems than who is at the top of the social pecking order. I feel like Bruce Coville had the groundwork right there for Duncan to come to the realization all on his own that there are more important concerns in the universe in general than the strong dominating the weak, BUT that’s not how it plays out. Instead, it takes Kreeblim “frying” Duncan’s brains with her intelligence-enhancing machine for him to start to question whether there’s another way. (By way of contrast, look at Edmund Pevensie realizing of his own accord “holy crap, what have I done?” or Boy 412 gradually admitting 90% of the way through Magyk that deep down he has been rooting for the wizards for quite a while now.)

There are still elements of the way that Duncan’s shift plays out that I appreciate. It’s heartbreaking and telling that he has to fight against the teachers’ negative expectations and assumptions that he must be cheating once he starts acing tests. He also doesn’t stop having a delicate temper so much as he gets better at controlling it. But I’ve always thought that Coville could have accomplished the same effect with a lot more power through just showing Duncan realizing of his own accord that sometimes class material is useful or interesting, and that using aggression never works out well for him in the long run. The groundwork for an “organic” shift is all there, given that Coville has already established that Duncan doesn’t so much like hitting people as he doesn’t know another way to relate to people after growing up in a household where physical aggression is the norm rather than the exception. Nonetheless the shift, when it comes, is artificial.

That sense of “like it overall, have some strong objections” actually sums up my feelings toward the series as a whole. I love that there aren’t just a bunch of nuclear families, nor is it taken for granted that nuclear families are some kind of default (contrast Peter’s and Duncan’s complex family situations with the number of super-traditional families in Goosebumps, for instance). I also get my shoulders up around my ears around the gender dynamics: Peter jokes that Ms. Schwartz must be living “every woman’s dream” to be frozen in time and thus not aging, Susan spends most of the first book being awesome and that descends into her spending most of the last book unconscious, etc. However, I also love the way that the aliens treat gender, Broxholm very casually mentioning that of course there are like 700 different possible genders and that some of them translate as genderless pronouns. However, I also also find myself frustrated that so many of the aliens so closely resemble humans, which (especially after K.A. Applegate spoiled me rotten) looks a little like a failure of imagination on Coville’s part.

On the one hand, I really love how the series looks at humanity from the outside in a way that is UTTERLY unflinching, as in “shows explicit scenes of torture, starvation, infant mortality, and physical oppression in a book meant for elementary schoolers” levels of unflinching. On the other hand, it disappoints me that the aliens are portrayed as actually being a lot more uniform than the humans in their culture (despite being from hundreds of different species) since none of them have any idea at all about concepts such as paranoia, defensiveness, or even fear. On the third, mutant, hand, the series is freaking awesome at vacillating between humor and horror without losing sight of either mood or allowing them to dilute each other.

Maybe what I really want for the series is for it to be republished in a post-Harry Potter era where children’s books are actually allowed to be long and plotty. This series is genuinely brilliant and insightful, subverting the traditionally Western idea of FREEEEEEEDDOOOOOOMMM as the be-all end-all virtue which is so important that it can come at the price of safety or equality (sorry fellow fandalites, but that’s where Animorphs always loses me) and instead showing that “freedom” for some at the expense of others’ ability to live full lives is its own kind of travesty. It has such great moments as Gurk very casually asking Peter whether he’s comfortable with touch and casting this as a standard etiquette question among most aliens. It resists the temptation to show tit-for-tat Revenge of the Nerds the way that a lot of YA SF does, instead showing that Peter needs to learn to forgive Duncan once Duncan is genuinely trying to make amends. IT HAS SO MUCH POTENTIAL, and it is also so short that it poses deeply troubling questions and then (partially by necessity) offers oversimplified answers.

#my teacher is an alien #my teacher flunked the planet #duncan dougal #bruce coville #my teacher fried my brains #asks #answers #cyan-013 #nothing to do with animorphs

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