Let's Read Animorphs! The Whole Series! Ch-ch-ch-chaaanges

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Jazerus: May 24, 2011

HisMajestyBOB posted:

It's been interesting going through these books now after reading them as a kid. I read the first 13 or so repeatedly so I remember them very well. However, while I remember the plot outlines of this book and the books through about number 28, I don't remember many of the details. I was probably aging out of them at this point in the series and while I still read them, I was starting to read adult fiction by this point.

Fake edit: Yeah, I just looked up the publication order and I had started 6th grade (middle school) when book 11 was published. My language arts teacher pushed me to read more mature books at that point.

so...did you actually manage to find more mature books than these at that age? i feel like everything else targeted at your grade level would have been less mature, although i'm sure your teacher couldn't see past the cover like every other adult at the time

anyway folks i have been catching up on this thread and while i don't have a whole lot to say about 1-14 or the andalite chronicles that hasn't already been said, 15 has so many little things i feel the need to tackle. this is probably one of the most complex books in the whole series and while i remembered most of it before rereading here, the nuance of these characters is something else. marco as a narrator is incredible in a way i hadn't remembered at all. sorry for tons of quotes, but there's a lot to talk about here.

quote:

Erek laughed with his chrome dog�s muzzle. Then he was instantly serious again. �I need to talk to you privately, Marco.�

�Well, I don�t have any secrets from Jake,� I said. �I think that�s the basis of a good marriage: openness, honesty.�

gaaaaay

this is the kind of line that really hints at marco's bisexuality while also being perfectly in line with his 90s smartass act and i appreciate it a lot. "spout some poo poo i heard from dr. phil" is extremely marco but he's also being sincere.

quote:

See, I�ve always believed that to some extent you get to decide for yourself what your life will be like. You can either look at the world and say, �Oh, isn�t it all so tragic, so grim, so awful.� Or you can look at the world and decide that it�s mostly funny.

If you step back far enough from the details, everything gets funny. You say war is tragic. I say, isn�t it crazy the way people will fight over nothing? People fight wars to control crappy little patches of empty desert, for crying out loud. It�s like fighting over an empty soda can. It�s not so much tragic as it is ridiculous. Asinine! Stupid!

this is cspam as hell and really resonates in 2021 in a way that it never could have at the time of publication

quote:

Reggae. Some good old classic reggae. Bob Marley. I�d bought the CD at a point when I was considering growing dreadlocks. Never mind why. Okay, it had to do with this girl at school.

�Bob Marley, mon,� I said. �Help me out, mon.�

so this is something i really appreciate about marco. marco is a fan of the classics, and while this is partially so michael grant can write about things he knows, it contributes to your perception of marco as older. i feel like marco books are maybe intentionally written a grade level or two higher than everyone else - not that anyone else is stupid, but their books are accessible, while a marco book is almost like a challenge to precocious kids. are you smart enough to "get" marco? and yet it still works even if you aren't.

quote:

I had homework to do when I got home. Tons of it. I was supposed to do a book report, among other things, and I had to have it in by Monday. Five pages. And my English teacher doesn�t respond well to five pages of babble and baloney.

callbacks like this really help the series hold together, because it was only a few books ago that marco tried his luck with five pages of babble and baloney. apparently his paper, "the use of rhetoric to obscure lack of content", didn't go over so well.

quote:

It was a nice offer. My dad�s a nice man. I�d like to grow up to be as good a man as my father. But you know what? Right then, dark suspicion was seeping into my mind. Why was he interested?

What did he suspect? Was my father one of them, too?

this is the kind of passage i mean when i say a marco book is written at a higher grade level. "i'd like to grow up to be as good a man as my father". "dark suspicion was seeping into my mind." i feel like jake, rachel, or cassie would be more like "my dad's a great guy, but this felt kind of suspicious."

quote:

Animals go limp when you acquire them, I told myself. Except when they don�t. Like Tobias�s dolphin.

so this is a tiny thing, but it's really good writing. the kids rely on acquisition as an animal-taming tool a lot - like, a lot, to the point that there was starting to be very little tension in their encounters with animals. oh, look, rachel fell into a zoo exhibit again - guess she'll just acquire a thing and be fine. but now, as readers, we can never rely on this again. KA and michael might bust out "this animal doesn't trance, good luck" at any time, so now it's tense when they reach out for an animal, every time.

quote:

�We are doing this,� I said forcefully. �But I�ll tell you right now, this whole thing is insane. Insane! Morphing sharks to infiltrate some underwater Yeerk complex? What has happened to our lives?�

As Jake and I walked back to the others I muttered, �Happy now?�

[...]

See, I was doing my job. Playing my part within the group. Teasing. Joking. Exaggerating. That was my role. Like Jake had pointed out: A Marco not making jokes just worries people.

the depth of these kids. they're so fully realized it hurts. see, i feel like none of the other humans in the group would appreciate the way jake approaches marco here. "play your role" would upset them all. but marco gets it, even as he hates it. this reveals a lot!!

this is how jake is now. he knows exactly what button to push to make you the biggest asset to the team that you can be, even if you hate it, and he will do it. marco gets it. he approves of it. he still resents it.

quote:

I nodded. �Yes, Visser.�

�You must learn to control your host more completely. My own host is in here creating an awful racket,� she said, tapping her head. �But I do not let her weeping and wailing disturb me.�

�No, Visser,� I said in a whisper. �I will try harder to control my host.�

marco is so hardcore. he's having a breakdown and he's still able to bust out his best "chapman groveling before visser three" impression.

quote:

Then, through the massive round porthole, I saw something large and sinuous. Like a snake. But a snake that was fifty feet long and thicker than a Taxxon.

It was the yellow of poison. With a mouth that looked able to swallow a small boat.

It was coming straight for the facility. And on either side of it, like an honor guard, were a dozen Hork-Bajir in bizarre red diving suits, propelled by small water jets attached to each ankle.

[...]

�Look, it�s him, okay? I saw it through the porthole. A huge yellow sea snake with Hork-Bajir alongside. Who do you figure that would be?�

<He cannot have had time to hear about a battle down here,> Ax pointed out. <It�s too quick to be a rescue mission.>

�I don�t think it is a rescue mission. I think it�s a coincidence. I think he happened to be on his way here.�

can we stop and appreciate for a second that visser three transforms into a sea dragon just to visit a lab? with a ridiculous honor guard of hork-bajir in diving suits with jets strapped to their feet?

quote:

I couldn�t believe I was standing there so calmly while Jake, Rachel, and Cassie were probably fighting for their lives. But I guess I�d had a good look at the ruthlessness of the Yeerks.

i think this is the first time that any of the animorphs have stood around and accomplished a slow mission objective while knowing that the other half of the group really needs back-up. it speaks to their increasing sophistication as a military force, but also the creeping emotional numbness that is starting to hit these kids hard.

quote:

<Hah hah hah hah,> Visser Three laughed. <Water rushing in, and you�re stuck in that weak human body, Visser One. Is that my promotion I see coming?>

Visser One was red with rage. But she turned and ran toward the office building.

<Yes, you�d better hurry and turn off your computer!> Visser Three crowed. <If you are able! These Andalites are devils with computers, you know. Hah hah hah!>

visser three. what a lad.

but, you know, i feel like visser three's showmanship is an interesting trait. comically dramatic evil is, i think, one of the main things people remember about the yeerks in general, but that's not really accurate. most yeerks are pretty serious and no-nonsense. for all that visser three mocks visser one for being "half-human"...doesn't it feel like visser three is half-andalite? we know that alloran as a cadet liked to show off and joke around. even as a jaded war-prince, he likes flashy ships and dramatic standoffs. most yeerks hate the andalites, sure, but visser three is the only one that really exudes that certainty in superiority, a perfect mirror of andalite xenophobia.

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Feb 17, 2021

# ¿ Feb 17, 2021 05:11

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:29

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

nine-gear crow posted:

The ultimate beautiful irony of the situation in their coming together is that Esplin shamed and chastened Alloran into a much more repentant and redemptive figure that he otherwise would have been without him, meanwhile Alloran absolutely hosed Esplin up right to his core.

every time one of the visser's underlings screws up, alloran's brain whispers "kill the yeerk" and esplin says "why not?"

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Feb 17, 2021

# ¿ Feb 17, 2021 08:37

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Epicurius posted:

While cable internet is a great thing, its less of one when a storm hits and my internet access is unstable and SA decides to give me Cloudflare errors. Hopefully, before I go to bed in an hour and a half, I'll be able to post the beginning of book 18. Otherwise, blame the weather. (Also, do you think Andalites have weather machines? I could see them doing something like that.)

andalites used to wear coats, but they've had weather machines for so long they've forgotten the concept of clothing

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 04:44

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

Seriously this is now the most unbelievable thing in the books to me. You cannot take down the number 2 USSS without eating 50 bullets, or facing a squillion years in jail. You just can't.
If Chapman walks from that, the Yeerks already control so much of government as to have effectively won already.

erek says it right in the chapter, tho. nobody knows that it even happened because a controller cop showed up to the scene of the "accident" with controller paramedics and took him to the controller hospital. by the time the FBI even gets wind of it his yeerk will be on the phone reassuring them that he's fine, no investigation needed, just a drunk driving hit and run

in other news, this made me think of seagull morphs

https://twitter.com/pelhambluefund/status/1362939555876245505

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Feb 20, 2021

# ¿ Feb 20, 2021 15:03

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

freebooter posted:

Being the first Andalite in maybe centuries to engage in an actual, serious tail-to-tail fight makes this even better. (Although... do they not have crime? Mutinies?)

ax's perspective on his own people is always very interesting, because you're sort of left wondering how much of it is even real. ax has never known life before the war put the military in charge of society, and we already know that if there's one thing andalite high command really loves, it's cover-ups. how deep does their information control reach into andalite society? with their complete lack of population centers even so big as a town, i'd imagine that anything criminal tends to have few witnesses.

is andalite society genuinely idyllic, or is ax unwittingly feeding us a load of poo poo designed to assure cadets of their moral superiority?

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 05:19

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

freebooter posted:

Very good point.

The fact that he's facing off against Andalite Enemy #1, even if he's only Yeerk General #3, also raises the fact that it feels a bit weird Earth seems to be considered a bit of a side theatre of the war from the Andalites' point of view, as far as we can tell? (I think?) From memory, reading them as a kid, it wasn't until the Visser Chronicles that it gets explicitly spelt out to the reader that Earth's a pretty critical prize for the Yeerks, and I'm not sure if we ever get an idea of how much time the Andalite strategists devote to thinking about it. But I guess the broader scope of the galaxy and the war is always kept deliberately vague.

earth is not yet the critical prize for either side...i mean, the yeerks really want it eventually, but they already seem to have the population advantage over the andalites; the andalites, on the other hand, don't seem to know how densely populated earth is. it's not even clear how long ago they (setting aside elfangor) last visited, although the andalite toilet tells us that at least one visit was quite a long time ago, since it had to have been jettisoned inside our solar system. leera is the main front at the moment because a few leeran-controllers in a base can totally eliminate the andalite espionage advantage by detecting morphs, and, well, telepathy is just sort of generally useful

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 09:01

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

based on elfangor's experience, the kafit bird is not a standard morph acquired in training; many cadets pick it up because obviously flying is cool, but it's a practice that their officers tolerate but don't endorse. alloran was already a war-prince when the morphing technology was developed, so it's pretty much impossible to know whether he picked it up before or after his infestation; either is equally likely.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 07:17

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Rochallor posted:

I'm wondering if the Andalite higher-ups can recognize that the Animorphs are basically Ax's age, rather than full-grown adults. I assume by exploits, it's more along the lines of "they blew up the Kandrona" rather than "one of them burped an alligator that almost ate Jonathan Taylor Thomas."

andalite high command never misses an episode of the barry & cindy sue show. must-see TV, you know

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 17:00

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

it was clearly by happenstance that an andalite ship on the way to a very important moment in the war, with a traitor captain who needed to be dealt with before a second andalite controller emerged, ran over their extruded mass (despite earth's z-space neighborhood being semi-impassible at the moment, which is what's cutting off andalite reinforcement of earth) while they were on a mission that turned out to be easily resolved and non-critical

# ¿ Mar 5, 2021 05:18

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

from a certain point of view, it's entirely reasonable to align with the yeerks. that is, if you are capable of ignoring the genocidal feudal nightmare that the yeerk-in-exile society has become, and instead orient your ideology around the events of first contact. the andalites did not handle things very reasonably, and are continuing to inflame tension by maintaining a blockade of the yeerk homeworld - which has been up since the first yeerks fled the planet, years and years before the war started. obviously at this point there is strategic value to the blockade, but at first? i wonder.

plus, the captain was (supposedly) a close friend of elfangor, and you have to wonder how much elfangor's xenophilic attitude, as well as his low-key skepticism about andalite society because he lived as a human for a long time, rubbed off on his buddies. maybe the yeerks showed him a nice video of voluntary human and taxxon controllers eating cinnamon buns together in the yeerk pool cafeteria

# ¿ Mar 5, 2021 20:06

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

WrightOfWay posted:

I think one of the Ax books mentioned that Andalites used to fight among themselves, though it seems to be in the distant past and they've probably been united as a species for as long as they have been an interstellar civilization, if not longer. I don't know what the Taxxons were like before the Yeerks, but the decision to join them sparked some conflict, as seen in the Andalite Chronicles.

i don't think it's ever resolved whether the taxxons were a singular hive before contact with the yeerks, or fractured into many.

i've also always gotten the feeling that the andalites didn't really know anything about taxxons before the yeerks showed up one day in taxxon bodies, and if they knew they existed at all, probably dismissed them as sub-sentient.

sometimes the kids just have trouble explaining poo poo to ax because they don't really understand it themselves, not because it would be hard for ax to understand if he read it in a book or listened to a lecture or whatever. i think the incoherent nature of their explanation also probably reflects KA's opinion that the usual justifications for the continued existence of nukes are inherently incoherent.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2021 03:29

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

the way to fix the screw-up would have been to double down and have one of the kids take a cut to the arm or something and retain it after going in and then out of a morph, instead of making it only tobias. then have ax say something about z-space distortions and extruded mass

# ¿ Mar 10, 2021 17:37

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

freebooter posted:

They seem oddly averse to morphing at the moment. I get that Tobias wants his wing to heal but they have no reason to think the others are dead. He has morphs that wouldn't leave him "helpless" while Rachel goes to look for them; or he could go fly and cling to her. And even if they're not going to do that, surely he could just as easily ride on her as a bird if she morphs wolf or horse or bear and saves her feet?

KA wanted to write a scene where rachel and tobias make quasi-romantic sacrifices of their own well-being for each other and logic was not going to get in the way. i think all of the kids are pretty spooked and not thinking straight, being, uh, in the time of the dinosaurs and all

except cassie, who is finally having a genuine animal expert moment that isn't "my dad has this thing in the barn and i've been taking care of it"

# ¿ Mar 11, 2021 07:05

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

e X posted:

I admit that I didn't know that KA actually considered Cassie so close to her own mindset. Maybe it is a ghostwriter problem.

A lot of media had environmentalist/pacifist characters in the '90 and a lot of them share the same problems I think Cassie has, so I always figured it was due to the authors not actually sharing their character's ideals and struggle to get into their heads.

i think it's definitely a ghostwriter problem. KA's cassie is pretty reasonable...it's the ghostwriters that make her a caricature. which i think is the case for basically everybody.

i can't really blame them for turning things over to ghostwriters as i understand the process for writing these books so quickly month after month was very stressful for KA and michael, but in hindsight i'm not sure that everworld and remnant were worth the decline in quality of animorphs

# ¿ Mar 11, 2021 17:53

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

not gonna lie, crab people broccoli planet is the best planet we've heard of yet

all of this does raise a question, though - just how destructive is the game between the ellimist and crayak? if there were space-faring aliens 65 million years ago, and yet there's no indication that they even left a mark on the galaxy at all...it doesn't paint a pretty picture

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Mar 20, 2021

# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 05:46

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

Spoilers chief, and very.

uh...i was talking about the mercora homeworld. you know, the homeworld they already mentioned like a chapter ago? where they are crab people and have broccoli? i'm trying to figure out what you considered a spoiler there and i'm coming up completely blank

# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 14:46

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

The war between Crayak and Ellimist. Beyond the glimpse of Crayak at the end of The Capture, I don't think it's even come up yet.

i'll put spoiler tags just in case, but i'm 99% sure we've already gotten a good idea of what the deal is with them. i'll spoiler my original post tho

# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 18:26

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Pwnstar posted:

Cassie is right in that accidentally killing a Triceratops was tragic but my dudette can you please have a breakdown after we get Back To The Future(tm)? Narratively its frustrating because you are all geared up for some T-Rex action, we are going to finally get to the fireworks factory but then Cassie stops the car and turns around because we gotta talk about our feelings ugghghgh come ooooon.

it's like a page of text. maybe two since the print in these things was pretty big. in general i think it's narratively valuable to have a team member pushing back against marco's cold pragmatism, and it's rare to have a book - other than those from cassie's perspective, i guess - where this kind of thing takes up very much time at all.

plus, i guarantee you that cassie saw the land before time at least twenty times as a small child

# ¿ Mar 22, 2021 05:02

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

freebooter posted:

I've never been in the military but I imagine she's going to be in a lot of trouble with her CO for immediately fronting the media!

I like the first one a lot more than everyone else seems to. I dunno... this one is fine, but clearly a gimmick book to capitalise on the dinosaur craze, and weirdly a lot shorter than I remember - they wash up on shore, encounter some T-Rexs/Deinos, meet the Mercora and the Nesk, go grab a nuke and... that's it?

The thing that really sticks out to me now is the paucity of morphing. If I were writing a book about teenagers with the power to turn into animals and blasted them 65 million years into the age of dinosaurs, I'd feel obligated to make them acquire more than just two fairly similar dinosaurs. It feels like a missed opportunity to not have any morphing of pteradons or ichthyosaurs or sauropods. Especially when there's six of them, this book's just a bit of silly fun, and none of their morphs end up being canon anyway.

i agree, megamorphs 1 is a better book than this. but then i have a soft spot for the wacky teenage antics side of the early books and a gorilla driving a truck is peak wacky antics for this series

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 20:22

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

i think it's interesting how cassie is so often dismissed as a moralizing wimp yet her first thought here is "there are a million ways to kill this yeerk without any suspicion whatsoever and an equal number of reasons to do so". that she's not going through with it doesn't meant she's blind to the expedient course of action

# ¿ Mar 29, 2021 20:57

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

does visser 3 have small morphs? he doesn't seem to, and in fact seems to exclusively favor very large ones aside from the kafit bird, which might have been the one non-taxxon morph that alloran already had. it's hard to use morphing for escape purposes if you're in a small room and all you have available is poo poo like The Sea Dragon of Talaxias Beta, and they probably sedate him every time too.

it's a good point though that visser 3 must have somebody working for him that's so loyal he can safely leave his host without them killing him. either that, or there's simply a yeerk cultural taboo on violence against the unhosted

# ¿ Apr 1, 2021 01:34

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Fuschia tude posted:

We saw in Book 2 that he's acquired a "Yeerkbane" morph, capable of sucking out an actively-infesting Yeerk and eating them alive. He even plays a recording of him doing exactly that to the last subordinate who failed him. So, if there is such a taboo, it's plainly not universal.

esplin...is kind of hosed up. i suspect that he gets a bit of a high off of alloran's satisfaction at yeerk death; he's just too gleeful about murdering his subordinates, and, well, we all know that alloran didn't have a very high opinion of the rules of war. it seems pretty clear to me that all of the other yeerks think he is a huge weirdo, so i wouldn't necessarily draw any conclusions about yeerk culture from how he behaves. in fact, i'd say that the visceral disgust of his subordinates at the idea of using - becoming - a yeerkbane supports the idea that killing the unhosted is some deeply weird serial killer poo poo to a yeerk

# ¿ Apr 1, 2021 02:49

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

rollick posted:

Is this when the rot starts to set in with the series?

no, but i do think it's a moment that the ghostwriters will misunderstand over and over again as a fundamental part of cassie instead of essentially temporary psychosis due to PTSD, and which over-informs their depiction of cassie once we get deep into the ghostwritten stuff.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2021 16:20

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

not to distract from the chapters but i just found this great panel from the graphic novel for book 2:

rachel went a little more elephant than i thought

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Apr 5, 2021

# ¿ Apr 5, 2021 05:36

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:

That leopard must be mighty hungry to keep pursuing Karen even when she�s surrounded by strange-smelling people including an alien.

leopards can always identify members of the "leopards eating people's faces" party and frankly that fits the yeerk empire pretty well

# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 04:51

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

obviously it was just the andalite bandits tricking them into being eaten by a leopard

as far as karen's memory goes...i've got nothing. we know yeerks can replay memories, maybe they can erase them? but you'd think they would just turn people into voids if they could do that, at least for hosts that don't need to maintain cover like hork-bajir.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 23:56

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

i feel like this is 100% a KA book which means it can be pretty sloppy with the sci-fi aspects like the technological basis of morphing and yeerk logistics, but it's really strong on the themes and emotions. i guess that means that either #18 or #20 is mostly from the pen of michael grant, and i could see either of those being the case. i'm leaning toward #20 since it's a marco book and marco is very much michael's character in the same way that cassie is KA's, but #18 was a big star trek adventure that i could see coming mostly from him, too.

i can forgive a plot hole after so many solid books without any big ones, honestly. they've been going for two years straight at this point doing a book every month and are about six months away from burning out thoroughly enough to turn the bulk of the writing over to ghostwriters, which i don't think either of them really wanted to do.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 06:38

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Fuschia tude posted:

I'm not sure we can make that assumption. Grant says that out of all possible ways to divide the work (across, I assume, all their series), they've tried them all. "I write a book, you write a book"; "I write the first half, you write the last half"; "I write a chapter, you write a chapter"; "I write descriptions, you write dialog"; whatever. So the chances that any given book will happen to have been 100% the work of him or her seem pretty slim.

i agree in general, but have you ever noticed that cassie and marco books are in the line-up side by side? i suspect that the "i write a book, you write a book" method that he's talking about is referring to the division of cassie and marco between them, while they used other methods for the other characters to give each of them a distinct voice. clearly they did author books separately at some point, why not these books, right now?

anyway i wasn't really asking anybody else to "make that assumption". somebody says that every time i speculate that a particular book might be mostly katherine or michael, as though simply speculating about it is somehow incorrect, and i'm not sure why; this is my opinion and you don't have to share it. to me it feels like KA, to the extent that you can discern their separate authorial voices in this series at all (and i think sometimes it's pretty clear who's doing what, but you might not think so and that's okay!)

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Apr 8, 2021

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 07:44

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

dungeon cousin posted:

That might be what happened to the leopard if there was no mention of it getting captured. Human-Controllers are probably instructed to eliminate any out of place animal they come across.

I guess one way that Karen can be free without drawing attention from the Yeerks is if she's still going to the pool every three days to not seem suspicious. Yeerks somehow know when their host is being dipped into the pool, maybe through sound or smell, so other Yeerks wouldn't go to Karen if Aftran already has dibs. Aftran could pretend to infest Karen though that part is trick as it really depends on how far in hosts are submerged and what the other Controllers on the pier can see.

the yeerk pool is described as a dark grey sludge and hork-bajir, the standard escorts, have poor vision. it could work as long as aftran pretends to be somebody else in the pool and karen can sell the "infestation" every time, but karen would still have to pretend to be a controller in order to report on her dad...seems a bit much for someone so young, but maybe.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2021 20:11

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Epicurius posted:

Keep on mind that's Aftran's argument, which both Cassie and Marco push back against. Aftran is clearly making a false and self-serving argument here.

aftran is indoctrinated. i get the impression that she's...fairly young? certainly of the generation that has grown up in space, knowing only the empire. "we're no worse than the sapient predator species" is probably something you learn in yeerk kindergarten, on yeerk president's day where all the kids make banners of the emperor and visser three.

this is really what makes the yeerks genuinely morally ambiguous - probably only a few yeerks made it off of their homeworld on the ships they stole from the andalites, and these impatient, arrogant bandits were the ones who declared an empire and molded its ideology. some of those yeerks may still be at the top of the government, and certainly some of them are still around - chapman's yeerk was born on the homeworld, as were visser one and temrash, tom's original yeerk. esplin also, most likely, considering that he was able to accurately envision the yeerk homeworld when he used the time matrix. to what degree can you assign moral responsibility to the average citizen of the yeerk empire? how many yeerks sit on the homeworld in the stone age, blamed for the actions of a few and under eternal blockade?

# ¿ Apr 9, 2021 02:28

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

freebooter posted:

Love to fit in at my first week in a new school by carrying a weird blue cube around with me

cube kid cube kid!!! watch where you're going, cube kid *stuffs ur head in a toilet*

# ¿ Apr 9, 2021 15:53

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

WrightOfWay posted:

lmao that the snake is named Spawn. David is such an edgelord.

cat: megadeth
snake: spawn
notebook: absolutely full of drawings of six-barreled shotguns and sick guitars with spikes on them

# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 07:19

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

david knows the blood code for mortal kombat on sega

# ¿ Apr 14, 2021 22:24

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Mazerunner posted:

the regenerative capabilities of morphing on it's own is a huge boon, let alone everything else

yeah, it's certainly a force multiplier for any military force. i think the calculus of the war remains unchanged no matter how many humans are given the morphing ability on the down-low though - exposure leads to open war and eventual yeerk victory without an andalite fleet in the region to intercept reinforcements, and even if you generously guess that a year has passed since elfangor's death at this point, the andalites are still a year out if they're even coming at all.

marco isn't really thinking straight here, he (unusually for him) is so off-balance that he hasn't considered all of the angles yet. CUBE is important but it's not war-changing for the kids to have it; the yeerks, on the other hand...

# ¿ Apr 18, 2021 01:09

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Shwoo posted:

That was (vaguely) addressed in one of the letter columns on the Scholastic site.

I guess Dude was Tobias's cat, but his uncle either kept him after Tobias disappeared, or sent him to a sibling?

i do like this response to one of the questions:

quote:

Ax has only attended human school for brief periods. He goes for a period at a time, then leaves to demorph. Kind of wish you could do that sometimes?

mostly because i deeply enjoy the idea that ax, who was so inattentive in andalite school, would view going to human school as a casual entertainment activity he does once a week or so; and that since he probably just picks a random classroom to join, every teacher in the school is completely confused about what the deal is with "jake's cousin, philip ip-ip"

# ¿ Apr 19, 2021 10:01

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

they have to take him along. he's a flight risk and they've kitted him out with enough morphs for him to escape and operate independently already. they just plain don't trust him, which is actually fair - in retrospect, they shouldn't have trusted themselves in book 1 right after they discovered that tom was a controller and it's genuinely a miracle (i.e. ellimist bullshit) that none of the original kids are reckless enough to expose their whole operation. it might be possible to integrate david eventually but right now they have to treat him as a conscript. it sucks and it's not something any kid thrust into this situation would like or even understand, but they're not making all the wrong plays here - just some of the wrong plays.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 21:59

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

disaster pastor posted:

The fates of everyone they love are in the hands of a kid who's already proven to be the dickhead everyone dreaded getting paired with in science lab.

now this, this i don't agree with. it's like marco says himself: the extent of what they know about him is that he has a cat named megadeth and a snake named spawn. and his dad is NSA. the crow thing is a bit sus but 13 year old boys kill animals for reasons much less solid than, say, practicing to use a morph in battle while also working out frustration about his entire life being destroyed. which is, as far as we know, what david was doing. do they think tobias hasn't killed birds he considers a bit shifty, for no reason other than to clear his territory? because if so they really haven't been paying enough attention to mr. strong-opinions-about-birds

yes, david was kind of a dick to marco at the beginning. so what? marco isn't exactly mr. smooth himself.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 03:41

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:

Fair enough, I guess again we encounter the problem between V3's leadership style and the conditions under which he's working. V1's slow cultural spread plan has established the pool on the American West Coast, which means V3 can't make someone as powerful as the President into a Controller due to his inability to trust his underlings, which is exacerbated by his sociopathic management style.

while it's a tertiary source of information at best, KA & michael say in the letter-responses that were posted a few days ago that visser 3 does have some vissers under him that he trusts to work independently in other nations. since the president isn't already a controller, but one of the other heads of state is, i suspect that that leader (who is totally tony blair imo) is infested by a trusted visser. esplin might be loving crazy, but he does seem to have a few friends that he dragged with him up the yeerk hierarchy after he infested alloran.

visser 3's plan here is probably to be the president full-time; he just doesn't want to give up alloran's body, for obvious reasons. if he succeeds, then probably he would appoint a visser to oversee the california pool and deal with the andalite bandits while he fucks off to be bill clinton

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Apr 21, 2021

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 18:20

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

freebooter posted:

Anyway, this chapter does a real good job of making David say stuff which isn't wrong or incorrect, per se, but is just... off.

i'm sorry but i still don't see it

i understand that the characters are reacting to him like he's weird and edgy - that as a kid, i perceived him the same way because of how the other kids were reacting to him - but to my eyes now he just seems...like a 13 year old boy? the other kids are saints where david is just...normal. who wouldn't think of the criminal possibilities for morphing, even if you never follow through? who wouldn't think that tobias being bird-speciesist was kind of funny (we do, here in this thread!)?

the original animorphs are the weird ones, here, for reacting to david the way they do. they're taking absolutely everything he says at face value even when, if one of them said something similar, they would perceive it as a joke or banter about it a bit instead. is david's speculation about ripping off a jewelry store really very different from marco's fantasies about using morphing in movies or getting on letterman or whatever? i feel like if david said "hey, we could be on letterman with this!" all of the kids would glare at him and say "that would expose us all to the yeerks you moron", when that was not how they responded to marco.

this is just basically an extension of their failure to understand what integrating a new member means. they are trying to get him to act like they do now, after a few dozen battles, instead of remembering what things were like at the beginning of their involvement in the war and understanding why he's behaving the way he is. they've lost touch with the perspective of "normal" kids and are holding him to an unreasonable standard.

Jazerus fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Apr 22, 2021

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 17:15

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:29

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Epicurius posted:

They did acquire their DNA, so they were at least alive (although probably dying in agony) then, since you can't acquire DNA from dead things.

...have they ever actually tried to acquire a fresh corpse? it takes a while for all of your cells to die

# ¿ May 2, 2021 02:04

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > Let's Read Animorphs! The Whole Series! Ch-ch-ch-chaaanges

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