Fans of the Animorphs

Not sure if we've done this yet but which character can you relate to the most? I find as I often do in my fandoms that I'm like multiple characters. I relate most to Cassie because of her love of animals (and questionable fashion sense lol)but also Tobias because I was a loner who was bullied through school. And I've always wanted to fly, ever since I was a kid, though maybe not stay a bird forever.

So not too long ago there was a discussion about if the ages of the Animorphs are believable. Well, I've been trying to read Stephen King's The Dark Tower series and am currently on Wizard & Glass. In that book (which is almost entirely backstory that they've hinted at in the first three books), the main character is 14. The oldest any of his friends may be is 16, including his love interest.

Really, it was just sort of a slap back to reality when I realized I'm seven years older than the main character in this story. (As it sometimes is when I remember i'm now a fair bit older than the Animorphs.)

Well, really it was just a bizarre realization- we have a Roland Deschain who is maybe a year or so older than the Animorphs. Which leads to the obvious question of- Roland's ka-tet versus the Animorphs? Who would win? Would the gunslinger be screwed?

Another question- that I've probably asked before, but my computer is so without internet it's painful and this post is coming from the on-campus computer lab- does anyone know if Take These Broken Wings is still up anywhere? That used to be my favorite fanfic of all time. I'm currently killing time before class reading another one (from a rec list in the community), but I sort of want to re-read that one.

edit: I fail at teh html early in the morning.

Hello, all!

First of all, I want to thank whoever posted all the books as text files awhile back. I downloaded the zip file at the time and kind of forgot about it, but in February I left for my Peace Corps placement in the Dominican Republic. I'm a little short on English-language books around here, but I rediscovered the Animorph books on my laptop and rejoiced!

I recently finished re-reading the entire series (including all the side books) and quite enjoyed the experience, although I had forgotten (and in some cases never read in the first place) some of the more ridiculous things that happened in the series. (Helmacrons, anyone?)

But I also enjoyed the books on a new level: painstakingly detailed cultural time capsule of the mid-to-late 1990s in America. It's all there. AOL, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Baywatch... even the way she always described every store that the mall contained. Amazing. Future anthropologists could probably reconstruct 1990s America solely from these books.

Since the regular poster doesn't seem to be back yet, I'll pick it up again. A story like this had to come eventually; a series involving aliens wouldn't be complete without a foray into a secret area that's obviously meant to be Area 51. Throw in yeerk-infested horses, a racetrack visit, and a battle at The Gardens to complete the fun.

I've heard mixed thoughts on this book. I'm not quite sure what my conclusions are at the moment. There were some fun parts, like someone-Cassie? I forget-saying it's a strange world when a woman called Crazy...Alice, is it? forgot again, sorry...is at least partly right. And some of the interaction at the base was funny, though risky.

For one question, I have to wonder if the yeerks ever infested any other animals besides horses and humans. And a bigger question, what do we think about what the secret turned out to be? Should it have been different?

I'm not able to come up with any prompts this time, sorry. But if anyone else can, feel free to post.

edit: d'oh I forgot the tag, sorry

We should all know the rules by now; I'm not a stickler for posting them each week like our regular re-read person but I do think it wise to at least remind people to follow them.

Next week: #15: The Escape

I was on my back porch, on the first floor of the house, and a skun kcame walking by really, really close. All I could think of was the Cassie book when she morphed a skunk. I just kept running the skunk warning signs (the tail facing you tip up... then tip down...) and the descriptions of how a skunk sprays someone. I just pictured that super-accurate rapid fire skunk urine hitting me in the face. You can bet I stayed very still... After a few minutes, he left, and so did I. If you think about it, a Skunk morph would probably be one of the best battle morphs on Earth.

Wasn't there a part in that book where a Hork-Bajir got sprayed in the face and ran away. A Hork-Bajir running from a skunk.

Viser Three probably had him killed.

I'd run too.

[43] Firefly (a lot of Inara, Mal/Inara), Firefly cast (Morena and Nathan)
[40] Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Adventures, Doctor Who cast (possible spoilers for Journey's End)
[7] Animorphs (Rachel, variations)
[21] Stock
[8] Jane Eyre, Ruth Wilson
[3] Ben Browder and Claudia Black
[5] Miscellaneous



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Was anyone else aware that The Andalite Chronicles was also released as three seperate books? I came accross it in the computer catalog, or the second one anyway. Alloran's choice. Amazon has only Elfangor's Journey available, Alloran's Choice is unavailable I think and An Alien Dies isn't listed.

Bigger question: What were the covers like? Anyone got scans? And were any other Chronicles books released that way?

title: A Waking Nightmare That Is Only Worse When I'm Sleeping.
author: seeyouupside (Rachel)
rating: PG-13 for some cursing
point of view: Jordan Berenson
spoilers: for #54 ''The Beginning''
disclaimer: Animorphs are the creation of Katherine A. Applegate as well as all characters seen in this story. And the title comes from a Jack's Mannequin song called ''Kill The Messenger.''
author's note:
I was looking at Animorph fan art and came across this. It's a made up fan cover of Animorphs and it's pretty awesome. Anyway, I was thinking who could that girl be on the cover? At first I thought it was Rachel but no that girl has dark hair. Then I was thinking, 'Maybe it's Jordan.' And then...bam, a fic idea!
I would also like to say that this was really hard for me to write. I've been toying with the idea of a Jordan!fic for a very long time (read: two or three years). This is not how I planned it. In fact, I hate the ending of this. So feel free to critique me. I want to make this a long postwar!fic, but I need to change some things first. And without further ado...
( Read more... )

We're discussing the first of the four chronicles books this week, The Andalite Chronicles. It tells some of the backstory that happened before the Yeerks came to Earth Animorphs got their power. We meet Elfangor as a young Aristh, and another Aristh named Arbon who we'll meet again later. We also meet War-Prince Alloran and the future Visser Three.

A couple good prompts might be Arbron's thoughts after getting trapped in morph (how exactly did it happen? I can't find it in the book) or Elfangor's thoughts after he saw what happened to Alloran. Anyone got any more?

I can't come up with any good questions...anyone else have any? Oh yeah...someone said they didnt think the Chronicles books were as good as they could have been. Want to elaborate on that? I forget who it was though.

Hopefully our regular poster will return next week, as he said he'd be gone two weeks. (she?) And we'll be discussing The Unknown, book 14

has anyone read "the host" by stephanie meyer?

is it as similar to Animorphs as it sounds?

eta: want to turn this post into a rant about how terrible twilight is?

Does anyone happen to recall a brief mention of Roswell (the TV show) in one Animorphs book? I recall it was something that was going on and someone said that people just thought it was a publicity thing "like for that show Roswell" or something like that. Spiletta, I brought this here so we wouldn't get dragged too off topic at the other board, I hope you don't mind :) And because I don't recall which book it is but thought someone else might.

Book one question (I know I should have waited and asked during Saturday's reread post but...)Why didn't Elfangor jut morph to heal himself? Did he not have time because of talking to the kids?

Did the Iskoort have any point whatsoever in the end to how the Yeerks chose to be, seeing as they got the morphing powers to choose a form anyway?

That was an interesting possibility that sort of just ended up being dust in the wind. I mean, I'm glad they were saved, but in the end it didn't really benefit the Animorphs or humanity at all assuming that the possibility for Yeerks to see another option just vanished into the wind when they were offered the ability to become something else.

Also - Mr. Tidwell and voluntary controllers dedicated to the movement against forceful enslavement of hosts. Where it was more of a symbiosis (Mr. Tidwell unable to really live after his wife's demise) than parasitic. That was another interesting possibility. They talked about morph therapy, but no one ever talked about Yeerks being used in the case of people like Mr. Tidwell who were in so much depression that enslavement actually ended up being more symbiotic and beneficial to them recovering and learning to live after being struck particularly deep by grief.

Arbron, Tobias, Elfangor when he was human - it seems to be Andalites over time might have figured out how to return them to their birth forms, or at the very least, be able to give a nothlit the ability to morph again. If Tobias could have become human and regained the ability to morph yet again in particular, do you think he'd have done it? I suppose after Rachel's death it didn't matter anyway. But I did wonder about that.

Mertil and the whole vecol business. Would Andalites not have had prosthetics or regeneration abilities despite all their technology involving genetic change and manipulation (morphing for one)? Currently humans have reached a sort of breakthrough with regenerative science that most people don't even know about (even without stem-cell research and cloning). Sixty Minutes a few months back did a segment on a powder they applied to someone who had lost the last third of their finger in an accident - the finger grew back in weeks (something involving pig liver, it stimulated cell growth in the area instead of the body's desire to immediately stop the bleeding, creating scar tissue). Granted, this can't be applied to something as large as a tail so far, but... if things keep going at this rate, who knows where we'll be in twenty years?

Lastly - opinion - do you think the Andalites were ever informed that Tobias was the son of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul? I personally wondered what the reaction would be to that... Elfangor having passed as a human before.

So, for many, many years now I've assumed that Jake was Jewish. I remember there being a quote from an Ax book about how Jake's family prayed before a meal but Cassie's family didn't. But even though I can't remember what propted this thought, I've just never questioned my brain when it told me he's Jewish. Surely there was something in the books that prompted this? Does anyone know what it was? Did anyone else think he was Jewish besides me?

Asking this because Michael ReynoldsGrant said he never thought of Jake as Jewish.

 Tobias and Ax - their friendship was a LIE! OH NO!

lol nah, this is just a cool video I came across....(am I the only one who when I see red-tailed hawk I immediately think Tobias?  No matter what the context? o_O  Yeah, so that's why I'm posting this here...weak connection to community topic, I know >_< lol)

Ax had a rattlesnake morph, right?

So, I vanished off the Earth mysteriously some months ago. It wasn't actually mysterious; I had a lot going on at home -- my grandfather was diagnosed with prostate cancer, my grandmother's liver problem is getting worse and worse... All that lovely stuff that makes one want to crawl into a hole and forget everything.

Anyway, I've been doing a lot better, and I have a funny anecdote from Saturday.

Well, I'm sort of becoming Jewish (half my family is Jewish, but not my mother, hence I am not Jewish by birth). I go to synagogue a lot; weekly when able. They especially need people on Saturday to get the minimum of 10 people required to create a minyan (if they can't get one, I don't think they can pull out the Torah and would be limited to prayers from the siddurim, but that's besides the point).

So, there we were, staving off things trying to give a chance to get that magical number of 10 - I don't count, not being Jewish technically (in Orthodox I wouldn't count being female, but we're not talking Orthodox).

All of a sudden, there's a tapping noise at the glass door right behind me.

I looked around, and there's a red-tailed hawk hovering right outside the door, tapping the window!

Rabbi looks over at the door, I meet his gaze with a pretty shocked expression, and then because he couldn't see what was making the noise he ignored it and went back to services.

Afterwards people were joking about the hawk trying to help make a minyan.



... And, well, it totally reminded me of Animorphs, naturally. Particularly book one where Tobias is trying to get into Jake's room...

Tobias is asked by the Ellimist to help the Hork-Bajir and demands payment in return. But will he get his wish?

Turning points:
-Tobias's morphing power is restored, though he remains a hawk
-We see the beginnings of the free Hork-Bajir

I'm curious about the "point on which a timeline may turn" or something along that line phrase. What do you think it meant? I know that idea will be repeated coming up but I'll hold off on that until next week.

A load of fanfic could be written about Tobias's thoughts re the outcome of this book.

Anyone have any prompts or questions of their own to ask?

You probably know the rules by now...stay civil, keep it to previous or current books, start on topic even though it's okay if you get off topic...

Remember next week is the Andalite Chronicles, not number 14. That one comes the week after.

I haven't posted to this community before, but like many of you, I loved Animorphs while growing up and still love the books, reread them, etc.  Lately my boyfriend has been reading them for the first time, at my urging, and we sometimes read them out loud together.  My boyfriend knows other series quite well (Buffy, Harry Potter, comic books, and some others) and he writes and draws comic books, so he tends to look at things from the standpoint of what does and does not make a good story.  Anyway, we just finished 19 today, which he said was creatively the best Animorphs book he's read yet.  But he also suggested something interesting which I'd never thought of before.  He thought that the loophole which allowed Cassie to demorph was pretty contrived, which I guess it is.  But he also said that he thought the book would have been ever greater and more powerful had she stayed in the butterfly form.  He said that given her character arc, it would have been a fitting (if highly disturbing) conclusion for her, and a truly beautiful sacrifice.  He even suggested that the last chapter could have just been Rachel meeting Karen at the mall.  Of course those of us who've read the entire series know how much that would have changed things, and he did say he knows why no one would actually do that in a "YA" series.  But I thought that was a really interesting idea.  I know I would have been very unsettled by one of the main characters living out her life as a butterfly, but at the same time it would have been really powerful.  Any thoughts on this idea?

Hanging out with the family this weekend and just had to run down to here to say...

My cousin is 13. I haven't seen him in about four years, so just the 'OMG, you're tall' was a bit of a shock but then I realized...he's 13. And I just thought 'hell no, 13 can't fight aliens. No. No, no, no.'

I was about that age when I first picked up Animorphs, and the age thing didn't bother me a bit. And since growing out of that age (and all my friends growing with me) I haven't had much occasion to hang out with young teens. Maybe it's more the family aspect making me go "NOOOOOOOOO! You're going to stay cute and five-years-old FOREVEEEEEEER!"

But did the age of the kids ever bother you in the books? Did it used to not bother and then later did? I know I tend to think of characters as ageless when I read. Did the same when I read Ender's Game. But faced with a living, breathing, soap-eating 13 year-old, I have to wonder...

this has undoubtedly been asked before but i'm still curious -- if they were to make an animorphs movie, who could you see playing the characters?

In a series this long, there are some absolutely brilliant books, and also some rather dodgy ones.

Which books are your favourites?  What do you guys think are the highlights (and the lowlights) of the series?