child soldiers v. bodysnatching aliens: ANIMORPHS

a sudden realization

so some andalites have battle-scars, right

and iirc rachel has pierced ears? and they stay pierced

and the animorphs don't lose their bellybuttons

also, they're able to morph clothing

morphing clearly is based at least in part on a mental image, as the animorphs morph strong healthy animals and not really weak animals with infant-style muscle mass, plus the stuff above


anyway what i am saying is that it makes sense in the context of canon for it to be possible for loren to stay blind and scarred after morphing, if she considered the blindness and scars as Just Part of Being Loren as opposed to Something To Be Cured

possible au?

 

i just saw an au where the animorphs all survive the war

and when some of them have kids later the kids come out with animal traits and always able to tell who their parents are

like, rachel's kid is clearly like...partially hawk, and fully feathered

 

Like... all the time?? Why?

 

it was an au a guy came up with due to misreading someone else's post

 

new animorphs headcanon: you know how it's stated that the number after a yeerk's name is like...'birth order', right? but in book 6 temrash claimed that he'd been promoted to a lower number


well, what if there was some yeerk belief that yeerks born earlier in the grubsplosion were superior to yeerks born later, and so there's a known service where the records of the birth can be 'examined' and a yeerk 'discovered' to have 'really' been born earlier or later in the grubsplosion than their original number, in accordance with their deeds

like, you screwed up really badly? your superior might get your birth records 'reexamined' and have you shifted to a higher number

did really well? you, or your superior, might go get your birth records 'reexamined' to shift you to a higher number

of course, you can also pay a lot of money to have your number, or someone else's, changed, and genuine mistakes occur often enough that number shifting is just A Thing that might happen because the birth record examiners found a genuine mistake (finding mistakes and fixing them came first, fabricating mistakes for promotions/demotions came later)

 

thinking about the andalites-used-to-live-in-cities thing:
andalites could probably invent a 'step here for nutrients' device, right? meaning they wouldn't need to run around on grass to eat if they had one of those. the city-dwelling andalites probably used something like that; it could also possibly allow for them to eat more energy-rich foods than merely grass, such as fruit concentrate or whatever, allowing for a much higher population.

this seems plausible for the andalites living in the cities; rather than eating direct from live grass they'd eat prepared food that wasn't necessarily ever grass.

they also lost their major predators at some point before the series began. they have no competition or anything, and only three species of birds-but at least seventeen species of grass, probably more as the seventeen confirmed species were all growing in the same climate and so on (on-board a spaceship) and the other climatic zones likely have their own species of grass. (for comparison, earth has somewhere around 9,000-10,000 species of birds and 12,000 species of grass).

if the andalite homeworld had the same ratio of grass species to earth grass species as it has with andaliteworld birds :: earth birds, there'd be 3 or 4 species of grass. that's a huge difference! that's deeply disproportionate! and all those 17 confirmed grass species are ones andalites eat.

ecologies with more species are more stable. the andalite homeworld's ecology is in a deeply unstable state that is not likely to be natural and includes nothing that competes with or harms andalites as well as a disproportionate amount of species the andalites consume. there is gardening, but nothing they'd actually term farming.


it can be assumed that the city-dwelling andalites occupied roughly the same amount of homeworld, but with areas of much higher density, and so likely a higher population. they also were, iirc, space-travelling at that point? also their homeworld has like exactly the ecology of their spaceships, the dome gardens are considered to be an accurate emulation of the andalite homeworld ecology despite being, well, a combination of food gardens and recreational/artistic parkland

so we have a planet whose ecology is in a deeply unstable state that appears to be strongly skewed towards species actively cultivated by the local sapients, who are a herd-dwelling species that a. extincted their top predators, b. used to be a lot more numerous, c. isolate their ill and disabled, d, live in a nuclear family structure except in space, and e. seem culturally much less adverse to genocide than humans are.

conclusion: they killed off their keystone species, had a total ecological collapse, only saved useful or beautiful and easy-to-cultivate species, massively restructured their society to feature a heavy emphasis on farming those useful species (framed as gardening) as well as on living in unnaturally tiny and isolated groups that abandon culturally undesired andalites to, presumably, die, covered it up, and potentially genocided their own people who did not agree with this course of action.

despite the strong cultural emphasis on living in small groups, however, andalites herd together in space, forming the groups of hundreds that they naturally would live in-but potentially only really in military or colonization vessels, with strict rules and a hierarchy enforced that they could point to as required to live in such large groups.


basically roach's meta about andalites but with a bit more fridge horror.


similarly, the hork-bajir homeworld has an entirely constructed ecology that requires constant cultivation by the hork-bajir to remain stable. in this case, it's caused by a meteor just kinda smashing into the planet and wrecking things and the ecology having to be recreated from gene banks-presumably it used to have large oceans that served important ecological purposes, but not so much anymore.

the andalites consider how the hork-bajir ecology got there an interesting anomaly, but don't seem to consider it needing constant maintenance even slightly unusual. they seem to think that the planet's ecology needing constant artificial intervention to avoid total and potentially irreversible biosphere collapse is normal.

this, of course, leaves a question: the andalites do not make any notes either way about the yeerk homeworld's ecology, but specifically note that earth's ecology is 'very diverse'-aka much more stable. which raises a question: we know what happened to the hork-bajir, and we can infer what happened to the andalites, but what happened to the yeerks?

 

a really good andalite biology headcanon/visualization: http://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/177724321798/ok-so-as-ive-mentioned-in-the-past-ive-never

 

(my Andalite headcanon is now almost like that, but the tail is slightly longer and the blade folds back, somewhat like a switchblade, when not in use)

 

i had a weird dream last night that included like, an actually really interesting animorphs AU, once you remove the Dream Nonsense that had Aftran living in a plantpot of beans and being cared for by an army of identical chee that all looked like my bio of plants teacher

the basic idea was this: Tobias (who incidentally is shortsighted) didn't get trapped in morph, and the chee are both weaker and liars.
They're not nearly as hardcoded pacifists as they appear. Like, the Pemalites were apparently carnivorous (being described as doglike), and the dogs they became are definitely carnivores-the Chee were able to feed them without resorting to hidden meat cloning or whatever the heck they did.
They're also able to forget things. The Pemalite Crystal would allow them to make new Chee, not to reprogram their memories; in the time they owned it before the Animorphs threw it in the ocean they a. copied its design and data into their memory banks, and b. broke it.

Erek is a triple agent, probably 'really' working for a Chee faction but also a bit for the yeerks too. Whatever side he's on, he's a terrible ally and is using his influence with the other Chee to get them not to aid the animorphs any more.

The really, really major divergences started around about book 19-ish in the timeline. Aftran infested Cassie in her sleep, with the goal of 'morph bird, find where the heck home is'. Cassie doesn't nothlit herself as a butterfly but Aftran sees that she would. Instead of just mysteriously being able to let Karen go free for no apparent reason, Aftran comes back with Cassie as a voluntary and Karen is just taken to her house, her parents keep a close eye on her and so she can't go to the yeerk pool every 3 days and the yeerks don't even bother trying to reinfest her.

Aftran joins up with the peace movement, and gets the animorphs information. A lot of information. A lot faster and more completely than Erek did. She also pushes for getting hork-bajir and humans out of the yeerk empire and into the Valley, like actively raiding, alongside being an extra voice against Terrible Plans like the original plan for the david trilogy world leader conference.

Also, because by the time they find David there are already humans living in the Valley, David ends up going there instead of becoming an Animorph. Instead Aftran becomes an animorph.
Lacking the experience of David betraying them, the Animorphs proceed to give the morphing power to Toby and a few other people of the Valley.

They eventually figure out that Erek isn't trustworthy. Aftran organises efforts to create a rogue pool-Ax turns aquarium lights and other bits and pieces into full-spectrum-including-Kandrona lights, the Peace Movement supplies the location and pool slime. Aftran also experiments with temperatures etc in a mini pool and discovers that the empire pools are too cold. (A lot of the Yeerk dissastification with life in the pool was due to the pools being deliberately poor enviroments-wrong lighting, wrong temperature.)

Also there was an effort to find out how to create closed ecological life support systems with various kinds of ecologies, including the Taxxon-world aquatic ecology; the project was cancelled as the Empire wanted the Taxxons to remain desperate for Yeerks to control their hunger and the project revealed that eating fish helped (and also resulted in a firmer skin). Some of the Peace Movement safehouses ended up hosting a bunch of taxxons and giant fish tanks, and the hork-bajir held a vote on whether to let the Taxxons in to the Valley (result: yes, good idea).

Oh and Cassie and Aftran stole some andalite grass etc from Visser 3 and planted it in giant plant pots for Ax.

Unsure what else happened but the eventual result was much better than the canon timeline.

 

(note that that is after the Dream Nonsense was removed, which included such things as Yeerks switching wildly between looking like earthly slugs and looking like animate raw sausages, randomly names from Daemorphing but not always the right ones, Taxxon fish looking like canon Yeerks do except neon or like a fusion of a bony fish and a nudibranch, and random diversions to unrelated nonsense like Randomly We're At The Library except it is basically a supermarket but all the goods are books)

 

So, I saw a post on tumblr about Animorphs, and part of it stuck out to me: "And all this exists in a series that also has plots like, “I turned into a starfish, and a random little kid chopped me in half (because kids are jerks), and then both halves regenerated into a separate me, except one is good and one is evil, weirdly, for some reason, and we need to recombine ourselves by electrocuting each other.”" (The post is here: http://limesparrow.tumblr.com/post/179451381496/thejakeformerlyknownasprince-kh-info-block .) And I'm just. That's....an over-simplification of that plot at best? It wasn't that the two halves were good and evil, it was that one half was all the battle lust and executive function and the other half was all the tactical and strategic planning and empathy.

 

i've been re-reading this series from the beginning lately (found all my ebooks, as well as the paperbacks i still have from 20+ years ago!) and man. i knew that Animorphs went hard, but i forgot just how fast it goes that hard. like. the kids are having ptsd symptoms in book 2. Tobias tries to kill himself in book 3. in book 6 Jake gets taken over by a yeerk... and then gets to listen to that yeerk fucking starve to death. and the big ethical questions exist from the beginning too! Cassie worries about the ethics of using animals' bodies in book 4, Ax starts to doubt some of the rules Andalites put in place in book 8... i knew these books dealt with real hard shit, but i guess i had forgotten that it STARTS with the hard shit. and stays hard. and all this from a time before YA, before people thought of books for tweens and teens as a format to explore real social issues!

basically,

https://xkcd.com/1380/ (the alt text is really cute)

 

for real though, this series is just begging for a big budget Netflix (or HBO/Amazon/whoever) series. like:
-cgi is there
-tv gets good budgets now
-each book is a mission-of-the-week thing that is already structured like a 45 minute tv episode
-so you've already got 4 or so seasons pretty much planned out
-YA: adults care about stories with teens now
-diverse cast
-really good ethical message
-90s nostalgia is just hitting its 30 year cycle (it would have to be set in the '90s, it would be impossible to do a modern Animorphs)

someone get Scholastic or whoever owns that IP on the horn, because we're in a perfect cultural moment for an Animorphs series!