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Epicurius posted:The Invasion-Chapter 2 The biggest flaw in Animorphs is that it makes no sense for Jake and friends to be writing all this down. Basically all first-person narration raises plot holes of some sort, but it's annoying in Animorphs because the beginning of the first few books calls attention to it. They can change their names and avoid mentioning the name of their town, but Visser Three and Chapman know which town the Andalite landed in and which school Chapman works at! It's probably best to think of the first-person narration as internal monologue introduced by the way the Animorphs would hypothetically introduce themselves to someone they trusted but only to a point, I guess. Despite this, the books (at least the first 3 or so books, which I reread recently after they were put online with Applegate's permission) hold up better than I expected. The characters are a bit more complex than I remembered, at least. I suspect my opinion will change if and when I get to the ghostwritten ones, though... Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Mar 18, 2020 |
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Mar 18, 2020 03:50
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OctaviusBeaver posted:So this is really nitpicky but since we already discussed plot holes a little, I had never noticed this: In the case of Tobias, It’s probably psychological. He must have imagined himself still injured when he transformed back. As for Elfangor...we’re expected to believe he’s in too much pain to morph, I guess...but not too much pain to deliver exposition. Edit: Or maybe he didn’t want to be taken alive and turned into a Controller. Even a healthy Elfangor probably didn’t have much chance of winning in that situation. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Mar 26, 2020 |
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Mar 26, 2020 01:11
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Epicurius posted:Well, at least it ends on a cliffhanger. I have to be honest, I don't like this chapter. It's one of the longest of the book, but not much actually happens. They go to the Gardens, get into the employee area, Marco acquires a gorilla, and they get chased by security. It's long, but not substantial, and a lot of it is broken up by dialogue. Almost half of it is Marco and Jake having a wacky golf cart chase, and the humor there is that Marco isn't very good at driving a golf cart. I think Applegate wanted to add some challenge to the process of acquiring powerful morphs, so it wouldn't feel like she was making things too easy for the protagonists. But yeah, the tension is a bit artificial and doesn't really work. Arguably if Jake got caught sneaking around a zoo, and one of the "Andalite bandits" morphs an animal Jake was sneaking around near, Tom might put two and two together. Though IIRC the Yeerks tend to be pretty bad at putting two and two together like that.
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Apr 4, 2020 01:41
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redcheval posted:One of the most hosed up aspects of that is all of those aliens and people are totally innocent regular folks who happen to be body-snatched, so every single time the animorph crew murks a horde of bad guys, they’re slaughtering helpless innocents. From my reread of the first 7 or so books, I don't think they unambiguously kill any humans, or even Hork-Bajir, most of the time. I mean, they knock a bunch of them out and never get the chance to check if they're still breathing afterwards, and sometimes they chop off arms, so they've probably killed some people, but nothing confirmed aside from one instance where they knock a Hork-Bajir out the window during a fight in a skyscraper. The death toll depends on how far you apply comic book logic vs. real world logic, I guess. Edit: And of course they killed lots of Yeerks and Taxxons, who aren't as inherently evil as they initially seem, but they're at least clearly invading soldiers. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 20:22
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quote:Visser Three did not look happy to be disobeyed. But he was not a creature who made impetuous decisions. This strikes me as untrue, but I'll admit that so far he isn't as impetuous as my childhood memories of him. Or maybe he was just written as less intelligent in some of the ghostwritten books.
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Apr 26, 2020 18:48
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The Mighty Moltres posted:Now I can't remember if this actually happened in the books, or if it's something I made up, but do they ever do something like tie a controller up and basically starve the Yeerk out of them? Yes, they do.
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May 4, 2020 21:07
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Khizan posted:The part that gets me is that they never realize here that, while the Yeerks may have some difficulty infesting Earth by stealth right now, they could almost certainly take Earth over by force quite easily. Anybody with that level of technology has the ability to just sit in orbit and hammer Earth with kinetic energy weapons until Earth gives up, and there's nothing Earth could do about it. In general, Yeerk technology (aside from their FTL travel which an Andalite gave them) seems surprisingly bad. They don't even really seem to use security cameras, IIRC. It's not clear to me that they actually have decent kinetic energy weapons.
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May 17, 2020 18:10
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Avalerion posted:One of my favorite series (codex alera) started out because someone challenged Jim Butcher to write a mashup of lost roman legion / pokemon as part of a bet. It doesn't really live up to the potential of the concept, though. For one thing, Furies aren't really Pokemon, so much as a source of Avatar: The Last Airbender style elemental powers; they don't even take coherent forms for most of the characters, and they don't have much personality even when they do. I guess they're supposed to be "deconstructed" Pokemon, not in the TvTropes sense but in the hipster restaurant sense, but the result is pretty generic.
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May 20, 2020 17:30
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Epicurius posted:Part of the problem with that, as far as they're concerned is, sure, that would kill the Yeerks, but that would also kill Tom, the Chapmans, etc. They still are trying to find a way to get rid of the Yeerks without getting rid of the people who are infested. (They kill Hork-Bajr and Taxxon controllers, but one's a 7 foot tall spikey dinosaur chicken and the other is a giant centipede that spits acid, and it's a lot easier to see them as not "people".) I don't think they've even outright killed any Hork-Bajr at this point in the story. And the Taxxons, as far as they know at this point, are all willing allies of the Yeerks.
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May 28, 2020 17:09
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Radio Free Kobold posted:There's a few books we won't see for quite a while (but i think have been mentioned once or twice?) that show us that the Yeerks had a bit of a task just understanding Human society, even on such basic things as "People watch the news to gather information about current events". I mean, brain slugs don't have evening news and I bet Visser Three doesn't even watch the silly human talkbox. It's entirely possible that they don't yet understand how to (or have the means to) control the flow of information. The books like to paint the Animorphs as coming into the game halfway through and desperately trying to figure out what to do and how to do it, but I don't think the yeerks are much farther ahead in the game at this point. The Yeerks with human hosts understand this stuff pretty well, because they have access to the human hosts' memories. It's more Visser Three and the ones with Hork-Bajr and Taxxon hosts who don't quite "get" human society. Which makes Visser Three a questionable choice to lead the invasion, come to think of it.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:35
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nine-gear crow posted:It's incredibly telling that there is a metric fuckton of Tom POV fan fiction out there and it usually comes in one of three flavors, 1) what a hypotheical post-Yeerk Tom would be like, 2) Tom's struggle against his Yeerk Controller parallel to the Animorphs journey through the series, or 3) speculative pieces where either Tom is an out-and-out Yeerk collaborator or is paired up with a Good Yeerk that explores a similar but less hostile dynamic to #2. I haven't read Applegate's Everworld books, but I remember reading that they had a twist like that, where one of the POV characters was working against the others.
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Jul 18, 2020 15:52
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Radio Free Kobold posted:"I realized then that there is a very basic difference between Yeerks and humans. A human will fight even when he knows he can't win. Maybe our species is just a little crazy. But human history is full of cases where a handful of guys would fight an entire army. They'd get stomped, but they'd fight anyway. That's not the way it is for Yeerks. They are ruthless. They will do anything, absolutely anything to win. But when the situation is impossible, totally impossible, they stop fighting. They figure that other Yeerks will carry on the fight for them. Different ways of looking at your world." It's kind of a weird trope when you think about it, because while humans are capable of struggling against all odds, they're also capable of giving in to despair and giving up, which animals, I believe, generally never do. So the idea only makes sense in a fictional setting with intelligent nonhumans who are more prone to giving up than humans are. And yet the way the trope is used (maybe not so much in Animorphs, but in other stories, e.g., Fullmetal Alchemist) often implies that writers see it as a profound observation about real life, rather than something that happens to be true in the setting they've created. Edit: It's something that occurred to me when reading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, in which the whiskey priest, encountering a starving animal, reflects that “Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.” And yet when the subjects of hope and the uniqueness of humans come up in genre fiction, it's usually framed the other way around! Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 04:08
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Epicurius posted:I kind of like Ax's frustration here with the Animorphs coming to him and saying, "You're the alien, so you must know alien stuff!", when of course, Ax doesn't know everything. He knows a lot about the Andalites and the Yeerks and stuff that the kids don't, but they also know a lot of stuff he doesn't. So I can see how it must be frustrating here to be stuffed in the "alien" box. Then again, in a lot of cases (though probably not in this particular case) Ax would have known what the Animorphs were asking him about if he'd paid more attention in school. I remember liking Megamorphs #1 as a kid, but reading it now, I guess it is a bit padded. ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:I think as a function of their super-serialized nature the Animorphs books can be extremely repetitive - especially the beginnings which cover familiar ground for anyone reading the series in order and the morphing descriptions which while fun at first continue despite being mostly unnecessary. The beginnings are a bit irritating because they repeat the biggest plot hole in the series (Why are they writing this down? Isn't concealing their town and last names pointless, since the Yeerks know what town Elfangor landed in, the names of Melissa's classmates, etc.?). Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 15:00
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quote:I felt my hearts stop. It was more than I could stand. After years of being controlled by Visser Three, the mind of the Andalite host was still alive. Still aware. That makes it sound like Ax believes that someone who's been a Controller for a few years would normally undergo irreversible ego-death. I don't remember this coming up in later books. I'm tempted to speculate that this is Andalite military propaganda to make them feel less bad about killing Controllers. But maybe I'm just reading too much into it?
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Sep 8, 2020 18:38
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Synesthesian Fetish posted:2. This always bothered me as a kid but KAA seems to make it very clear that morphing can take several minutes. I'm not sure if that's literal or she meant it more figuratively like "it's not instantaneous". The reason this bothered me is there are several instances when they only have what appears to be 10 or 20 seconds before someone comes across them mid-morph or like when during megamorphs one when Marco and ax fall 2 miles above the ground out of the ship. That would mean ax and marco would of have 4- 6 minutes to morph from flea/gorilla to andalite/human to birds and Marco barely made it. Maybe morphing takes longer in the first few books because the protagonists are new to it? And/or you can morph a bit faster if you're really desperate?
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Sep 26, 2020 04:16
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Rochallor posted:The Yeerks should really start proofing their buildings against intrusions by small animals and the like. Multiple Animoprhs have already been discovered morphing small animals. They did a decent job in this one, but really, no security on the vents or anything? Yeerks are kind of bad at security in general. They never seem to use security cameras, for instance. I guess the lack of security cameras in the Yeerk Pool could be due to worries about footage leaking and completely blowing the Yeerks' cover, but it's interesting that there seemed to be no security cameras monitoring the prison cells on the Blade Ship in "The Capture."
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Oct 16, 2020 23:03
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Rochallor posted:Y'know, I don't know who the Animorphs are writing these for, but I think they may have hosed up by leaving out their last names but mentioning things like their parents' jobs, that they live near the ocean, not far from forests, in the city where the Yeerk Pool was, and probably pretty close to the place where Visser Three got sprayed by a skunk. I mean, we've established that Visser Three is hopelessly incompetent, but I just imagine him poring over these paperbacks being like, "Kansas City? Could it be Kansas City?" This is the biggest plothole in the series, and it's repeated at the start of almost every book. If you want to rationalize it, maybe they're dictating these to Erek with instructions to make further redactions and release them at some point in the future when he deems it appropriate, or they're using the same memory-recording technology Elfangor used and the I-can't-tell-you-who-I-am stuff is a sort of unintentional transcription of their apprehension about creating a permanent record rather than something they deliberately included with the narrative. I don't think the books themselves are ever actually mentioned in the series, beyond a few phrases like "as small as the period at the end of this sentence" that imply the existence of a physical manuscript.
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Dec 8, 2020 23:12
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freebooter posted:Speaking of, gotta say I haven't really been feeling a lot of chemistry between them throughout the series, and having the most beautiful girl in school develop a thing for the outcast nerd feels a bit pandering. Cassie and Jake feels a bit more solid but even then not hugely natural. If I had to guess at who'd develop into a romantic couple without the exposition already explicitly pairing up Rachel/Tobias and Cassie/Jake, it would honestly be Rachel and Marco. I always remembered a lot more romantic tension between Marco and Rachel than between Tobias and Rachel.
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Mar 12, 2021 08:40
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Chapman didn’t actually see the eyestalk. I misread it the same way at first, but the actual meaning there was that he would have seen it if it wasn’t covered.
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Sep 26, 2021 15:22
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Is this the first time the series has acknowledged that security cameras exist?
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Oct 27, 2021 04:32
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