child soldiers v. bodysnatching aliens: ANIMORPHS

!!! fuck! an animorphs thread! how did i never notice this thread????

i've been wanting to re-read the series lately. they have a really special place in my heart, because i first read them when i was the same age as the kids. and then i re-read the books as an adult and not only do they hold up, they're really really good and deal with some hardcore heavy issues. and i didn't appreciate how great that was when i was 13.

 

daemorphing pokes at a bunch of the canon WTFs and puts it in terms that adequately explain the canon not going there with a side of "but we're fucking doing it now"

i'm not sure i'd enjoy reading the books as much, since i'd never gotten through the full series and. well. so many things.

 

I don't think i ever read all of the books but now I'm sort of regretting giving away my milk crate full o animorphs

I started reading them in probably grade 6?

 

https://wtfanimorphs.tumblr.com/masterlist

ive been thinking a lot about animorphs recently, partially because of this liveblogger, who's pretty great.

 

I think my friend and I picked them up sometime between grades 3 and 5? I was definitely not borrowing books from her in grade 7, we were in different middle schools at that point and it got a bit harder for me to be friends as easily (because exdys and the sorts of various issues that come of being an autistic child who doesn't actually have a single dang clue how to make or maintain friends). I do wish I'd been more willing to speak up and ask for that series, though; it would've been a significant improvement over getting Xanth books as gifts.

 

Does anybody know where I can epub or kindle download the whole series - preferably in omnibus format - for cheap/free? I always liked the concept and I remember working through the first few books on some online site with great interest, but books that thin just weren't worth the money for a kid who read Lord of The Rings when I was eight years old, could chew through a Narnia book in a few hours, and read The Goblet of Fire in one day XD

(Aka I definitely had an interest, and read one or two books here or there when whatever libraries allowed, but my parents didn't see the point in spending money on something that might last me two hours at most ^^;;; Book-fu was too stronk :P)

Also also, is there a audiobook version of this series?

 

http://animorphsforum.com/ebooks/

 

i read a fic where Jake was a Controller from the start...with a peace movement yeerk. He was still the leader of the Animorphs.

Other divergences included Tobias acquiring Elfangor (and using the morph to freak out Visser Three), the Animorphs getting the Escafil Device really early, Tobias not being trapped in morph, and Jake having a jaguar morph instead of a tiger morph.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9386750?view_full_work=true

 

you know what's weird?

that there was only Ax in the Dome

wouldn't there be like, others

a landscape engineer or computer tech or...basically anyone else who doesn't have any business being on the combat area of the ship during a fight?

 

...man but combining those two AUs could get interesting

an AU where Jake's a controller from the start, with a yeerk who doesn't side with the Empire

and all the divergences from that

running into the animorphs rescuing, not one andalite, but several-maybe some of them don't even have morphing at first and so the animorphs have to bring them the Box to escape

and all the divergences from that

 

but what if: instead of jake being the controller, having it be tobias? he'd then, instead of being the recon guy, be the spy

 

so



what happens if a yeerk gets a morphing controller body and the body becomes a nothlit

 

presumably it either ends up starving to death, or is kept fed by morphing tech weirdness and stays alive

it really depends on how the nothlit's brain is kept fed, since iirc a morpher's brain goes to zspace when they're in morph even if it's a bigger morph

 

yeerks that themselves morph and become nothlits dont starve to death

so presumably theres some way of sustaining the conscious parts of a nothlit that are trapped in z-space

but there was no measurable extension of a yeerk's feeding period when people who morph get infested and use their powers repeatedly

so like

????????

 

apparently in the andalite chronicles elfangor at one point mentions, in a kind of boasting way, that the ship he's on has seventeen species of grass in 30 different flavours

andalites canonically have little to no sense of taste so that actually contradicts other canon

also UK lawns are about 100 different species of grass, i found that out in like 2 seconds of googling, there are 11,400 species of grass total, if the andalite 'lawn' grass types to andalite total grass types ratio is the same as earth's there's around 2,125 species of grass on the andalite home planet total

 

maybe andalite version of flavor is like... texture? some quality of how they grow? which isn't really like taste but is a close equivalent.

 

maybe we should make a list of Things the Chee Could Do Without Reprogramming in potential AUs

current ideas:

• Kandrona for Yeerk PoWs
• Rogue Pool
• Getaway Driver
• Holding Controllers Hostage (we know they can do this because of Erek)
• Keeping the Blue Box Safe
• Homework Help
• Driving the Animorphs to/from places
• Making the Animorphs Invisible on Recon
• Ruining Yeerk Paperwork
• Recon
• Spying
• Info on Who Is/Isn't a Controller
• Property Damage
• Filling in for the Animorphs at School
• Faking Deaths (of Controllers or Animorphs or their families)
• Therapy?
• Researching Possible Morphs
• Helping the Animorphs get morphs
• Messing with Yeerk Security Systems
• Info on who Is/Isn't Peace Movement, maybe?
• someone can take in Aftran, maybe, and solve the Karen plot hole

ETA:

• Forcefields? Like they could maybe, if the Animorphs were attacking a Yeerk truck or something, stick forcefields up so that the Controllers present couldn't Dracon the Animorphs so the Animorphs could capture the truck more easily?
• Driving lessons for Marco or the other Animorphs so they stop running over all the trash cans when they have to drive on a mission

 

wait i just realized something

elfangor can send images, emotions, 'datadumps', etc via his thoughtspeech
why is this...never mentioned anywhere else

 

Didn't book 1 also have Jake use thought speech at Tobias while Jake is human? The rules were still being worked out back then, or something else unsatisfying for narrative cohesion.

 

yeah but the other thing he does is have a constant aura of a feeling and visser three does that too, it almost seems to be the same thing but...constant?


daemorphing had it be thoughtspeak singing and one of the characters offered up the idea that the visser was just constantly singing the imperial march from star wars inside his own head to do his aura of fear