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Soup du Jour posted:Our first Rachel book, finished! She’s got some of the best books in the first half of the series, and some of the worst in the second half, so we should appreciate these while we can. It’s interesting that Rachel now has her reason to fight (which is the main theme of these early books), but Melissa doesn’t really ever play much of a prominent role going forward. To the point where I don’t think we find out what happens to her or the Chapmans at all by the end of the series. Escaped? Vaporized during the destruction of the Yeerk Pool? Who knows! Probably mostly a victim of the sprawling episodic nature of the series. End-of-series spoiler: we know Chapman himself presumably survives, because Jake coerces Erek into participating in the final battle by telling Ax to kill Chapman if Erek doesn't cooperate. His wife and Melissa aren't mentioned, though.
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May 2, 2020 22:01
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I'm pretty sure either book 3 or book 7 is the book I re-read most when I was younger, so I'm excited to see this discussion.
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May 5, 2020 13:23
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Starsnostars posted:This re-read is making me appreciate Marco much more than I did when I initially read the books as a child. Yeah, I liked Marco as the comic relief when I was in fourth grade or whatever, then as I got older, I liked him more because he's genuinely a well-written character in addition to the comic relief. Unlike (apparently) most in this thread, though, Cassie started as my least favorite and then I liked her even less every time I reread the series when I got older. I think she suffers far more than the others from the lower quality ghostwritten books.
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May 9, 2020 16:42
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Cythereal posted:I liked Cassie and Jake a lot for being an interracial couple that no one batted an eyelash about. I grew up in the Deep South, and when I got old enough to start thinking about girls, my parents took me aside to warn me that I'd need to be careful if I liked a black girl: my parents were just fine, but my grand-parents, and many of my parents' friends, would lose their poo poo if they found out I was dating a black girl without some extensive prep work from my parents first. This is legit and is one of the things I don't think gets oversimplified and run into the ground as her books go on. Kchama posted:I'd say she's my fourth favorite. Fifth? She's above Jake. I'd probably also have those two at the bottom of my rankings, and yeah, they're both... fine. I don't think it was that her perspective was rarer (as you point out, she gets the same number of books as Jake/Rachel/Marco), it's that she had a lot of IMO dull and similar books. You may be right that she's a better character than Jake, but I'd say Jake gets better books while Cassie tends to ride the "look, she loves animals!/look, she's highlighting an ethical dilemma!/look, she's highlighting an ethical dilemma about animals!" carousel, and while the others also revisit their own themes a lot, it somehow feels less tedious for them. Even her masterstroke at the end of the series is kind of dulled by this to me.
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May 9, 2020 17:23
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I think my main problem with it, especially later in the series, is that the other animorphs argue for a pragmatic choice and Cassie argues for a more moral choice, and then later it turns out that Cassie's ethical plan is also the best strategically. This is exactly it, thank you. There's a formula for several of her books that's essentially, "here are multiple sides to this interesting problem, which has no right answer! But Cassie's right."
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May 9, 2020 20:52
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There's a reason I always told my friends "the first two books are surprisingly dark, and then... it takes a hard left turn into a darker place." And then book 4 is a breather, and then book 5 turns even darker and harder, and then 6, and then 7...
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May 15, 2020 00:53
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Epicurius posted:Marco says that, but is it really true? Marco and Jake are best friends, Rachel and Cassie are best friends, Jake and Rachel are cousins. It seems like they have a natural, easily explainable reason to hang out together. This might be them being overcautious. But they did make a point of saying that Jake and Rachel weren't especially close cousins beforehand, and Marco basically had minimal interaction with Cassie and only slightly more with Rachel. Yeah, they could have become closer as a group in the last few weeks, but if they get Chapman's or Tom's suspicions up, they're hosed. "Easily explainable" doesn't work when the probable consequence isn't "had to try to explain themselves," it's "were made into Controllers so the Yeerks could find out exactly why they were doing what they were doing."
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May 17, 2020 01:14
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Epicurius posted:I think this is Jake's emotional intelligence here. He knows there's something going on. I give KAA a lot of credit for trying to do so much "show, don't tell" in books with a fourth-grade reading level, but I don't think she always nails it quite right. This is a particularly good example, because even if Jake wasn't my least favorite, when I was younger I found him (as many others did, it seems) dreadfully boring, because one of his primary character traits is that he's exceptionally emotionally perceptive and intelligent, but that's really hard to get across through his actions in books written from the other kids' perspectives. Also, because of that trait, arguably his primary character arc is going from using that emotional intelligence to try to take care of his friends to using it to be a better strategist, and even though that gets spelled out later, it doesn't hit as hard when you're nine years old and the constant, subtle build has gone over your head. Epicurius posted:Oh, Tobias. Speaking of things that people didn't do in books with a fourth-grade reading level... Yeah, having the two incidents so close together really highlights the contrast and really makes you feel bad for Tobias. Jake was freaked and grossed out by eating the spider, but he was relatively easily able to associate the act with the lizard's instincts, not Jake's own, and fix his bad feelings on "failing to control the lizard brain" instead of on "being a spider-eater." Tobias can't. The hawk's instincts are Tobias's instincts now. The hawk's brain is Tobias's brain. Not only can he not rationalize it away, and not only is he already hurt by, as you said, his increasing distance from his human self, but this happens and simultaneously feels like slamming the door on that human self and emphasizing that Tobias's attempts to avoid giving in to the hawk were always doomed to fail. (and people wonder why this series was so popular with trans kids...)
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May 18, 2020 17:58
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disaster pastor posted:Speaking of things that people didn't do in books with a fourth-grade reading level... Not an emptyquote.
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May 19, 2020 01:33
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Epicurius posted:Maybe. He does stop and talk to her between suicide attempt number 2 and 3. I think he's just not thinking straight at all. He's in no place to decide whether he most needs to splat himself or to see Rachel, so he tries to splat himself on the way to Rachel. He tries to see Rachel because if anybody can convince him not to splat himself, it's her. But he also knows that if he's going to splat himself, he doesn't want Rachel to wonder why and what happened, so he has to tell her everything regardless. (and, of course, she doesn't convince him; good save, Marco)
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May 19, 2020 14:42
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Sjs00 posted:Huh, so does the book skip the segment where Tobias makes contact with the hunted human in the forest? It jumps from what felt like the middle of the sequence straight to Rachel's house. Yeah, it does. Don't need the story twice, and the way Tobias tells Rachel about it is much more important than the as-it-happens specifics.
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May 21, 2020 02:13
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Epicurius posted:See, they're doing the thing where they're all embarrassed by what happened with Tobias, so, instead of reaching out to him when he's asking for their help in dealing with it, they're choosing to ignore it. That happens more than you'd think when people cry out for help. It's a nice little bit of characterization for Marco, too. The other three have had more carefree lives, but it wasn't all that long ago that nobody knew how to handle interacting with Marco after his mother died. Of course he'd have no time for pity and avoidance, and of course he'd know neither would do Tobias any good.
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May 22, 2020 00:10
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The kids don't yet fully grasp the sunk cost concept. They had a bad plan to start with, it's now (always was, really) too dangerous to do, so instead of keeping out of sight and writing this one off, they're... sticking to the plan besides one equally dangerous change.
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May 25, 2020 02:28
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Another underestimated aspect of the series: I feel like any other elementary-school-audience author would have given the kids one successful plan in the first three books. Here, nope, this is a helplessly hosed situation and the best they can do is still well short of success.
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May 27, 2020 21:28
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:If you look at it from the Visser's perspective, his otherwise pretty successful invasion is getting stinging pinpricks. No serious blows, but for a third time he's been unable to pin down the culprits. Epicurius posted:And he thinks they're Andalites, which makes him substantially more nervous than he would if he knew they were human kids. Oh, yeah, and this one ends up hurting way worse than the first two, to everyone's surprise. It's just unusual for a kids' book to aggressively avoid even pretending the teenage superheroes have any advantages at all.
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May 27, 2020 22:58
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OctaviusBeaver posted:It's totally realistic for 13 year olds but it's still funny how they only plan for the best case scenario instead of the most likely one. I hope they get better later on. It's gonna take a while.
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May 28, 2020 01:28
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Epicurius posted:Cassie DID kill that human-Controller policeman, though. Yup, they want to preserve the host's life if at all possible, but when the choices are "kill a host" or "all of us are infested," well...
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May 28, 2020 17:40
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Radio Free Kobold posted:I mean there's nothing saying you can't morph into a bird mid-air The limiting factor isn't the morphing technology, it's its speed competing with gravity.
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May 29, 2020 18:40
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nine-gear crow posted:And I wonder if that’s a matter of the ghostwriters just not getting their characterization as well as Applegate and Grant did. Because I remember reading this one and going “Wait, why the gently caress does everyone hate Cassie? She’s kind of great.” The ghostwriters definitely did her dirty. Part of it I mentioned earlier in the thread: disaster pastor posted:There's a formula for several of her books that's essentially, "here are multiple sides to this interesting problem, which has no right answer! But Cassie's right." The other part is that once we're in her ghostwritten books, the subtleties are stripped from her characterization and she comes off as a self-righteous hypocrite who would, at her extreme, let the others die rather than risk hurting an animal or even a Yeerk. But since the books are always on her side, it almost always ends up as "welp, we should have listened to Cassie!" and nothing interesting ever comes of it; even Rachel calling her out on it is meant to show how wrong Rachel is. It's worth noting that both parts are less of a thing in the Megamorphs books (which were never ghostwritten) and, with one major exception, in the final arc (which had much tighter outlines IIRC).
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Jun 2, 2020 01:53
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:The worst book is the Rachel starfish book It's loving awful, and hilariously, even though it's in the ghostwriting period, Applegate/Grant wrote it themselves.
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Jun 2, 2020 18:05
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Epicurius posted:And Tobias is never happy, period. He thinks if he's ever happy, someone will just come along and take his happiness away. I mean, he's not wrong.
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Jun 6, 2020 00:23
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Epicurius posted:See, parents? This is just a chill thread about a chill series of books where your kids can learn facts about animals! Fun facts like how long a gorilla can remain conscious after getting disemboweled and stabbed in the heart!
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Jun 10, 2020 16:59
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Avalerion posted:He can just morph human then back to dolpin to heal, right? They did that bit about how it's DNA so injuries like that won't carry over in the first book. They haven't dealt with an injury this serious yet, and they're panicking. What if Marco morphs back and he's missing his shins and feet because their mass was in the severed tail?
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Jun 11, 2020 13:27
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Epicurius posted:It's something that'll get explored more later on in the series, but Marco is really smart. I think in some ways, he's the smartest of all of the Animorphs. I agree; Tobias is close, but Tobias is just a "good tactician" while Marco's secretly a master strategist. One of the best things about the series is that five teenagers are written with five different intelligences, and those come through in the text and in the characters' interactions. There are things others are "smarter" about than Marco (IMO: Jake and Cassie are more emotionally intelligent, Tobias is more perceptive, Rachel may be more perceptive and is actually the best strategist when under a time constraint of "we need something right now that probably won't get us killed"), but Marco is the only one who's nearly as good as everyone else in their strengths while he laps the field in his own, and the books manage to display that without making him an obnoxious know-it-all.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:10
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Soup du Jour posted:Marco is incredibly intelligent, something that really comes through as the series goes on. Especially once his dad starts to recover and we get to spend some time with Eva it becomes really clear how much of his parents’ child he is. He's also the best at keeping up with Ax, and also with the Yeerks; while the other kids tend to get understandably hung up on how they don't know how alien technology works, Marco can see more or less what it's supposed to do and go from there. Shame he's the worst driver.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:26
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Kchama posted:The problem with giving up on school to do this is that it gets them in trouble which makes it harder for them to do this (and also Jake's brother is a Controller who might get suspicious if Jake starts acting too unusual). And also their assistant principal is a high-ranking Controller who is definitely open to the idea that the Andalite bandits are humans.
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Jun 13, 2020 15:30
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Epicurius posted:
I forgot about this. There's an interpretation that kicks around the fandom from time to time that Cassie is, well, a tremendous hypocrite; that her priority isn't winning the war, it's keeping her hands clean, and all her moralizing and her passionate speeches are just her attempts to justify her actions to herself. There are parts in later books where one could argue that she's coercing Jake or Rachel into doing something she wants done but doesn't want to be responsible for doing. I can't believe at all that that's how we're intended to read her (for one, KAA admitted Cassie's her favorite). But the argument is certainly helped by the fact that in her very first book, when they're all but committed to seeing this mission through, she stops to say that she wants it off her conscience.
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Jun 16, 2020 01:36
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feetnotes posted:Also, Cassie was fine getting her hands dirty when she went all pro ice on that Cop-Controller in the first book. This is one of the better counters to that argument, but its weak point is that the cop wasn't a known high-ranking Yeerk and was only indirectly a problem for the rest of the team; he was a threat to Cassie specifically. If someone believes Cassie is a preachy coward, her killing this Controller, in the heat of the fight at the Yeerk pool where nobody would know for sure that she did it or how, doesn't necessarily convince them otherwise.
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Jun 16, 2020 12:11
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Epicurius posted:To me, I sort of take Cassie's hesitation in this book at face value; She's risking all their lives on a dream they had and a conversation with a whale, and she's scared she's going to get them killed for no reason, and she doesn't want the responsibility of choosing. She asks Jake earlier in the book to decide if they should go on the mission, and admits that the reason she's asking him is "And then if it's a disaster, it will all be on your head," I said. "You'll be the one who feels bad. You'll be the one to blame". In this book, I think you're absolutely right (and like I said, I really don't believe that's how we're supposed to read Cassie anyway). But it's the tip of an iceberg that we see more of later.
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Jun 16, 2020 13:03
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:If you don't like whales kicking the crap out of Visser Three why are you even here I love whales kicking the crap out of Visser Three. But whales kicking the crap out of Visser Three because Cassie called out to their innately kind and understanding souls is, wow, really dumb. On the other hand, even if it took some cetus ex machina, it's nice that they finally got to succeed at the exact mission they set out to do, without losing a fight and having to abort or having somebody get captured. Vague spoiler: it's going to be a little while before that happens again.
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Jun 23, 2020 00:21
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Cythereal posted:I do like the running gag throughout the series that Visser Three keeps turning up in monstrous alien gribblies... and almost always gets his rear end kicked by Earth wildlife. I remember one of the later books explicitly stating that Earth's ecosphere is unbelievably vicious by galactic standards, and that most aliens who know about Earth have humans on their radar for the simple fact that humans are the apex species of this death world. I also like the implication that he morphs specifically to win fights through brute size and strength, because if he has to actually fight using that body, it's not going to work well. He'd never let the morph's instincts take over like the kids do; "have 100% control over the body at all times" is an absolute rule for a Yeerk.
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Jun 23, 2020 13:29
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Epicurius posted:Cassie is the one who is least like me. If I'm comedy, she's poetry. She's a natural peacemaker. She's the one who knows when you're feeling bad and will find something nice to say that makes you feel better. And it's not like she's manipulating. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... Epicurius posted:I don't know about the rest of you, but I like Marco's narration. I think in a lot of ways, he's the most expressive of the narrators and the most honest about his feelings. if he's upset, if he's afraid, he'll tell you in a way that I don't know that the other narrations did. As I believe I've said before, I think Marco's flat-out the best-written of the Animorphs. His superficial qualities don't take away from his deep ones, and in his narration, he's direct and shameless whether he's being superficial or deep, because he's being Marco and he doesn't care what other people think about that. He's written as a totally believable "smart thirteen-year-old," a totally believable "ruthless guerrilla tactician," and a totally believable "hurt and traumatized boy," and that is not easy to do. Comrade Blyatlov posted:And he would be absolutely in love with Rachel completely, if he wasn't so obviously terrified of her. He probably is in love with Rachel, honestly; besides constantly talking about how hot she is, he quietly hints that, in his assessment, she's the only one on his level intelligence-wise (which, IMO, is why Marco seems to get extra angry when Rachel fucks up: she's the one of them who he really does think should know better). But he's smart enough to know that that would never go anywhere, partly, yes, because he's terrified of her. Besides, it's clear that his crush on Jake is stronger, even if it's never more than subtext. Maybe Ax, too, by the end.
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Jun 27, 2020 02:35
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:I honestly never picked up on Marco having a crush on Jake, it just seemed like a deep friendship to me. But, I'll be the first to admit I can miss cues It's probably not intentional (even though Marco being bi is now confirmed as canon), but Marco talks more in his books about Jake's looks than, say, Tobias and Ax do. Part of it is jokingly putting himself down by comparison, and if it only happened in this first book, nobody would think twice (well, maybe; he does compliment Jake's eyes here...). The quantity kinda moves it into "lol jk... unless..." memetic territory. If you wanted to make the "Marco was bi all along" argument, you might actually have better luck with Marco/Ax. Again, it's all just offhand comments and jokes, but there are quite a few of them.
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Jun 28, 2020 19:01
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SardonicTyrant posted:Everyone thinks Ax is attractive. Yeah, but not everyone pulls Ax into their lap and says "we're very good friends".
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Jun 28, 2020 22:38
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How to get extra-disturbed as a youngster reading Animorphs: 1) read about Jake's face splitting as part of the lobster morph 2) go online and find a close-up image of a lobster's face 3) try to imagine how a human face would have to split and sprout to become a lobster's face 4) nightmares Now, 20+ years later, you don't even have to imagine, there's probably a website that will animate it for you.
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Jun 29, 2020 23:57
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Krazyface posted:Not even the worst thing that happens in this book I was just about to say! People talk about "remember book 5? God, that was so hosed up" and they're not talking about this part.
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Jul 1, 2020 13:56
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Just a reminder that right up to the end, Scholastic marketed Animorphs as roughly fifth-grade reading material (ages 10–11 for non-US people). Edit: ha, it gets better. I checked Scholastic's website, and now they have more general ranges, which means most of the books are either grades 3–7 (this one included; imagine being given this at age 8) or 4–7. Some are grades 6–8 (small spoilers beyond book 17): the oatmeal book, the butterfly book, David's first book, and parts of the final arc (but not the last two books). disaster pastor fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Jul 1, 2020 |
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Jul 1, 2020 14:49
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Avalerion posted:Given with how the series seems to be going for sadfeels I guess she faked her death and ran off because she got tired of her family or something. Note that this is essentially what Tobias has done!
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Jul 3, 2020 20:16
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PetraCore posted:Chapter one of the Andalite guide to Earth: ANTS IN YOUR PANTS - AVOIDING EUSOCIAL MORPHS Chapter two. There's no way chapter one isn't "Taste: What it is and how to handle it"
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Jul 9, 2020 17:26
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SirSamVimes posted:I do appreciate the fact that adolescents don't make very good plans also applies to alien adolescents. Yeah. Unlike the others, Ax can build a transmitter, make it small enough that an eagle can carry it even though it uses alien tech, has the knowledge to program it with Yeerk frequencies, and knows how to send a low-priority distress signal. And none of that ability to do it makes the actual act of doing it a good idea.
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Jul 9, 2020 22:27
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