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High Warlord Zog posted:I figure most of the "how did they get away with this" moments were down to a punishing release schedule made possible by a lack of editorial oversight. Also why the most of the books never rise above rough draft quality, which the series compensates for with wild rough draft ambition Yeah, their turnaround time was straight up like probably 3 weeks because they had to get them out on a monthly basis. It was the primary reason Applegate and Grant hired all those ghostwriters, aside from them starting a family. Even with the two of them working their asses off, they were just barely keeping ahead of the train laying the tracks. Also I think the base premise played a huge role in the deflection of suspicion. “90s Kids turn into animals and fight aliens” is all that most parents heard and they didn’t read the books themselves so they never got to all the physical brutality and psychological horror. It was the ultimate literary Trojan horse. Though as Applegate and Grant diverged and began their own separate careers the twin strands of Animorphs’ DNA pulled apart from each other. Applegate wrote emotionally gripping stories about animals, and Grant wrote wrenching books about teenagers being horribly violent and the mental scars that violence leaves.
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Mar 22, 2020 23:58
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Epicurius posted:I haven't really gotten into it so far, but I think that the trigger for the ghost writers was that, in 1999, Applegate and Grant, entered into another contract with Scholastic for another book series called "Everworld", about these teenagers are sucked into an alternate world and forced to fight the gods, especially the god Loki, who's trying to take over our world. That series started in 1999, which is when Animorphs started being ghostwritten. But you're right that the publication schedule for Animorphs was crazy, when you consider they published 64 books over the course of five years, or an average of about one a month. Having read the first Everworld, you can tell right off the bat how much more their hearts were in that universe than they ever were in Animorphs and you can easily see the DNA of what would become Gone all over it. I might be wrong but I think to this day they’re both still pretty burned that Everworld (and Remnants for that matter) never become anything more than an also-ran to Animorphs.
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Mar 23, 2020 01:22
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Epicurius posted:How was Everworld, or at least what you read? Pretty good, honestly. It’s clearly aimed for an older audience than Animorphs, as its over all tone is much darker than even Animorphs gets at its worst. It tackles a lot of very mature poo poo right off the bat like racism, toxic masculinity, sexual abuse, violence for the sake of survival. It’s very un-Animorphs in terms of its character dynamics. There’s still the witty banter, but a couple members of the core group literally hate one another, in some cases for very petty reasons, so there’s always this uncomfortable tension that grinds the group dynamic even when they make progress. Moreover, one of their core members is basically like Xellos from Slayers in that they are being actively evil and corrosive to the goals of the group and there’s not a drat thing the others can do to stop them. If you’re expecting it to be More Animorphs, you’re in for one hell of a whiplash, but I think it stands on its own really well and it was kind of a shame that it basically got kneecapped by Scholastic when it was clear that it was never going to be More Animorphs.
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Mar 23, 2020 01:49
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Epicurius posted:Do you think it was partly a marketing thing? Scholastic sells a lot of their books through their Scholastic Book Clubs, which market pretty heavily to elementary schoolers, even having book fairs and mail-order opportunities in schools, and if this was aimed for an older audience, it cuts off an easy sales opportunity. Perhaps? I suppose there's any number of factors for why it didn't take off as well as it could have. This exchange from an AMA is incredibly telling: quote:Q. The Everworld series was probably my favorite thing to read as a teenager. It seems like it would be the perfect material for a movie and or series. Has there been any interest shown in that regard? Another big factor in Everworld imploding was it was just too much for Applegate and Grant in terms of workload. Between Animorphs ending and Remnants starting, it was just kind of... there, and was the messy collateral damage between those two gravity wells colliding.
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Mar 23, 2020 08:30
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Tom is a perfectly fine upstanding young man and I won't have his name besmirched in this thread. Clearly Jake is just biased because he sucks at basketball while Tom is awesome at it.
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Mar 25, 2020 02:58
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One of the things Michael Grant said in interviews lately was that in his view Marco was bisexual. Though I think he caveated that with "I probably should have wrote him that way then" so as not to stray into JK Rowling territory, but still it does colour a lot of his interactions with Jake in a much more interesting light if you keep in the back of your mind that Marco probably has a very confused and very repressed teenage crush on Jake through the whole series.
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Mar 28, 2020 01:58
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Daikloktos posted:I like that they used up all the impressive morphs by the end of the series so when poo poo starts heating up towards the finale the covers are like duck, beaver You forgot the most impressive of animals: Navy Pilot 
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Mar 28, 2020 06:37
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von Metternich posted:It's very 90s YA to have the assistant principal be a controller, but it gets ridiculous later on when Chapman is doing EVERYTHING...he's running over people with his car! He's trying to take over an aircraft carrier! You end up with the impression that there aren't really that many Yeerks after all.  <Innis, I need you to go to Bangkok for me. Don't ask questions. Your flight leaves in an hour. You'll be briefed when you arrive.> "I... uh... Yes, Visser."
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Mar 30, 2020 08:22
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Kchama posted:Yep. Even as a kid I would have been like "Wait..." if Marco had been black. But nope, he's not. He's described pretty consistently as being olive-skinned and Hispanic. Pretty much:
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Apr 4, 2020 10:22
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That was something that always struck me as odd too was how few human collaborators were shown across the scope of the series, and inversely how few symbiotic Yeerks there were as well. The only proper examples we're given of that line blurring are shown to be utter monsters.
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Apr 9, 2020 23:03
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Epicurius posted:I will say, in general, he's very much a children's book villian. I love how in regards to Visser Two the whole series is one giant unspoken "well what about Visser Two? What's their deal?" question. And then the answer is ultimately "Oh he's just some dipshit and then he dies." It's either and amazing long bomb joke, or the biggest dropped ball in the whole drat series.
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Apr 11, 2020 03:59
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Radio Free Kobold posted:That was a pretty good read all told. I thought Tobias got hawk-locked later on, in book 3 or something. Still, this is pretty out there stuff for kidlit/young adult fiction. I'm diggin' it. Book 3 is Tobias's first POV book. And it's all about dealing with the repercussions of locking himself forever in the body of a hawk and what a really stupid loving idea it turns out that was in hindsight.
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Apr 12, 2020 04:12
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chitoryu12 posted:Tobias being morph-locked is implied as an accident in the last chapter of the first book, but did he do it on purpose? It's a debate that to this day has never been settled because it somehow reads both ways. I think it falls into that "accidentally on purpose" territory. Where he, at the time, didn't care if he did mode lock himself, but he wasn't aiming to do it 100% intentionally, and it's only afterwards (like Book 3 afterwards) that he realized the full extent to which he has hosed himself over, again either by choice or by negligence.
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Apr 15, 2020 03:58
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Radio Free Kobold posted:I don't know if I'm just being weird, but I always thought the mid-morphing stuff was more "heckin cool!" than body horror. I've seen various fan comic adaptations of the series (speaking of which there's an actual professional adaptation dropping later this year!) tackle the morphing process as described in the books, and even in the ones done by good artists, it's always been weird and gross as poo poo to me.
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Apr 15, 2020 04:10
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cptn_dr posted:I can't remember if it's something you said or if it's a thought I had independently when I was reading (I'm rereading the series now thanks to your thread), but I thought it was interesting to note that that the first Animorph to wilfully go out of their way to kill someone was Cassie (who killed the cop who brought her to the Yeerk pool). It kind of becomes a throughline for her character as the series goes on. Rachel gets all the attention because she turns into a bloodthirsty murder enthusiast but Cassie is much more subtly ruthless despite her role as the mother hen and peacemaker of the group. This is not going to be the last time she up and murders someone off-screen because it's what had to be done.
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Apr 20, 2020 03:28
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Epicurius posted:Are you talking about the time she burns down the house of the cannibal Human-controller who runs AOL? Yep 
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Apr 20, 2020 04:27
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MonsterEnvy posted:Is Iniss 266 the first Yeerk name we have heard? Yes. Visser Three (Esplin 9466) and Visser One (Edriss 563) aren't named until much later in the series, and even then learning Actual Yeerk Names is an incredibly rare event. Also that's an interestingly telling slip by Iniss at the end of the chapter, obliquely referring to Melissa as "my" daughter before catching himself.
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Apr 25, 2020 06:30
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:This makes the Andalites' eventual plan to largely ignore the conflict on Earth before deciding to let the Yeerks congregate there and then glassing it from orbit make even more sense from a realpolitik perspective. It kind of makes you wander what would happen if the Yeerks were mildly smart and went the V 2009 route of just blatantly rolling up to Earth and presenting themselves as “Hey, we’re your cool new alien companions, here’s a Power Point presentation on all the benefits having your very own Yeerk Companion* in your head has to offer. Step right up! Be the first family on your block to become a Yeerk Family today!” And also painted the Andalites with the blackest tar black brush they could and united humanity against a “common enemy”. A legitimate human/Yeerk cooperative alliance would be honest to god terrifying because they’re functional the same thing in their ability to just rip through stuff like a buzz saw in terms of expansion and cooption. It would be the perfect distillation of all the best and the worst both races have to offer all at once.
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May 5, 2020 21:40
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disaster pastor posted: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 this is just the start of Tobias's mental breakdown in this book 
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May 15, 2020 00:55
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Epicurius posted:Gladly. Is this something I can do myself, or do we need a mod? PM Hieronymous Alloy, he can do it for you. He can also change the thread tag so it's no longer the Shitpost one too. Given the content of the series and this book in particular the Falconry one is the obvious choice.
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May 15, 2020 03:56
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Avalerion posted:What did happen to the morphing cube they used to get powers anyway, did the yeerks accidentally incinerate it with the andalites ship? That's going to be revealed in about a dozen books' time, ...and you're gonna wish that drat thing just stayed buried 
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May 15, 2020 12:04
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https://twitter.com/MichaelGrantBks/status/1261327166244974593
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May 16, 2020 00:14
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Avalerion posted:Open war would lead to a lot of dead humans, while they could bomb earth easily that would destroy the main resource they are after. Also if I recall correctly, the Yeerks also have no real counter for if humanity manages to deploy nuclear weaponry against them. One of the later books sees Visser Two try to engineer a nuclear exchange between the US and China because it will cause maximum global chaos AND deplete the total number of nukes humanity has available to use against the Yeerks when Visser Three's "let's warm up this cold war" plan kicks off in earnest. To the Yeerks, humanity is a rhino stuck in a pit while they're a dude perched on the high ground with a .50 caliber rifle. They can shoot the rhino and more or less kill it at their leisure, but if the rhino somehow manages to get out of the pit, or if they fall into the pit with the rhino, then they are loving dead and they know it. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 06:55 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 06:48
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Apparently she actually wanted to write a young adult series about what it would be like to be animals and she went what would make that possible and it basically grew from there It was a combination of the two things, actually. Applegate wanted to write a story about kids turning into animals, and Grant wanted to write a story about kids fighting back against an alien invasion, so they smashed their two story ideas together and the rest was history.
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May 20, 2020 02:56
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Khizan posted:One thing I was curious about, can they morph into other humans? Them being teenagers in school I could definitely see a "somebody has to pass as somebody else" thing happening. Yes. That is going to come up. A lot. And it’s a giant can of worms that the series still only scrapes the surface on with both its practical and horror potential.
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May 21, 2020 09:57
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Ednamamame posted:It's also interesting, because Marco and Tobias are the least friendly Animorophs at this point. Tobias clearly doesn't like him that much in this book (though I can't remember how Marco acts towards Tobias in his first book, and if that's mutual). But Marco still gives him that, and he was also the one who saved his life when Tobias tried to splat himself. I've seen people reason that, especially in light of the "Marco is bi and has a crush on Jake" revelations that Marco's hostility towards Tobias prior to and shortly after the start of the series is purely born of jealousy that he was trying to move in monopolize Jake with his glommy hero worship after Jake saved his rear end from those bullies. All of this poo poo going down forces Marco to grow up fairly quickly and drop those catty schoolyard views of his follow Animorphs.
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May 22, 2020 08:07
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Epicurius posted:The Encounter-Chapter 20 "Visser Three is there. ...Visser Three is always there."
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May 24, 2020 02:00
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Daikloktos posted:The poo poo he doesn't delegate in later books... the best part is he sometimes shows up in a limo to these clandestine operations in remote areas That's part about what I love about Visser Three. The dude has the ultimate infiltration, subterfuge, and espionage ability at his disposal, and through a combination of ego and idiocy insists on being as absolutely blatant as possible. And the one time he DOES try to do any kind of morphing skullduggery, he's outted instantly because he can't sell an act for poo poo.
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May 24, 2020 03:28
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Please, god, someone tweet that at Michael Grant. He has to see this.
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May 26, 2020 00:07
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Avalerion posted:They shot that deer, figure they were told to assume any animal is a potential andalite at this point. Also deer, Andalite, you're about 75% of the way there already, just saying...
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May 26, 2020 07:08
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Epicurius posted:My name is Cassie. WOOP! WOOP! BAIL OUT! BAIL OUT! ABANDON THREAD! (J/K, this is a Good Cassie Book.)
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Jun 2, 2020 00:16
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Soup du Jour posted:Both Cassie and Rachel get shafted with some of the worst books in the second half of the series but it averages out since they have some great ones in the first half. 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.”
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Jun 2, 2020 00:34
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Safety Biscuits posted:Before anyone complains, yes, I know dolphins aren't fish, ok? This is the best I could do. Time to raid Pet Island’s supplies of thread tags.
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Jun 2, 2020 10:28
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I do appreciate that for as adept as Cassie is at the actual physical act of morphing, being able to control it to an almost artistic degree at times, she’s kind fo garbage at keeping the morph’s animal instincts in check. It’s a nice little balance.
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Jun 3, 2020 00:49
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Silver2195 posted: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. Well, good news, we’re T-minus 1 book away from the arrival of the Best Yeerk.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:41
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Grant, meanwhile, has been spewing non-stop righteous fire. The two of them together are a great one-two combo.
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Jun 7, 2020 19:52
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wizzardstaff posted:Hey, remember SeaQuest? Star Trek: The Next Generation had a throwaway line about there being a “cetacean ops” lab on the Enterprise, with the implication being that the Universal Translator had managed to decode dolphin communication and it turns out they were fully sapient and could get into Starfleet. When they later published a full book of blueprints for the Enterprise-D you could find the dolphin tanks on one deck plan as well as a dedicated dolphin escape pod. Also yeah anything dolphin related in the 90s is by default reaping some big Ecco energy.
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Jun 12, 2020 04:39
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ENEMIES EVERYWHERE posted:Reading these books for the first time as an adult, thanks to this thread. Everything everyone has said here is true. These kids are very good, and very thirteen, which means that they are also very bad, and I love them. <...Goddammit, Iniss.> 
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Jun 13, 2020 02:14
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Daikloktos posted:Eventually they do get the Kandrona technology down to jacuzzi size Smaller than that even. There's one that's about the size of a basketball for singular use.
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Jun 15, 2020 03:51
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Fuschia tude posted:I wish people would at least mention what books they're referencing in their spoiler tags (outside the hag) so I would know if I would know whether I can safely check them For what it's worth, I might also be misremembering the scattered glimpses of the TV show and its interpretation of the Kandrona light, which I seem to recall was about the size of a small countertop vanity mirror, for production practicality reasons.
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Jun 15, 2020 06:19
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