I blindly taught myself to fight

'As if!' Cassie protested. 'You’d have to catch me first. And I could still be running long after the three of you were worn out and fast asleep.' - Book #5: The Predator, pg. 109 (by K.A. Applegate) *Blog Title from "Shadow man" by Noname...

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

But the heart which blazes with volcanic fires cannot please the object of its devotion, acts extravagantly, lacks tact and eventually burns itself out. I am deeply unhappy.

Marie-Henri Beyle, from a letter to Madame Curial written c. July 1819

[no-chill-cassie]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

excerpt:

Cassie weighs decisions in triplicate.

What is best to do

What is worst to do

And what is ethical to do.

--

The ethical solution to the dilemma of love.

-

When it comes to Rachel, she keeps a place in Cassie’s heart warm despite the terrors they commit, the terrors they become. In her head they are half and half, yin and yang. They do not occupy the same traits all of the time; Cassie can wield her empathy like a knife, destroying people from the inside out simply because of how deeply she knows them; Rachel can offer wells of kindness coming from firsthand experience of the depths of rage and vengefulness, wherever they continue to take her.

The best thing to do, is to leave Rachel to her own machinations. Never tell her that she loves the way the Sun hits her hair Just right. The way she loves all of her.

The worst thing to do is to become involved. Open up like she desires to. Two halves joined could become something fearsome. Or they would butt heads continuously, and tear each other, and the Animorphs, apart.

The ethical thing to do, would be to lay her feelings on the table, like she has a surgical knife in hand, like she’s operating on Ax again, say “this wouldn’t work but I want you to know”.

The details of the tumor, at what point she should excise it.(...)

[no-chill-cassie]

me, knowing full well Rachel is supposed to be the fashionable one but seeing Cassie’s cover outifts: i need those overalls

and that jacket

and that flannel

and that denim jacket

[bib3lot]

cassie just screams lesbian fashion and i love her for it

[no-chill-cassie]

like she really did that it was fantastic.

[emily84]

while on an endless phonecall, I found myself doodling animorphs for the first time in 20 years 👽

[no-chill-cassie]

me, knowing full well Rachel is supposed to be the fashionable one but seeing Cassie’s cover outifts: i need those overalls

and that jacket

and that flannel

and that denim jacket

[andaliteful]

I didn’t know I needed this in my life until now.

[inactivenowwahoo]

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

For each of the Animoprhs, which book would you consider the best for showing their characterization? Best book for understanding Jake's character, best for Rachel, etc.

If I can give a very me answer (i.e. verbose and bad at choosing things), I’m not sure there are any books that don’t advance the character arc of the narrator in a meaningful way.  Going down the list:

Jake: Starts the series as a somewhat naïve, privileged kid who wants to save his big brother but isn’t sure why he’s in charge.  Ends the series as a highly competent but also ruthless general who defeats the Yeerk Empire at the expense of his big brother.

#1: Establishes his antebellum family life, and his casual certainty that everything’s going to work out once the andalites come to help.

#6: Forces Jake to confront the simultaneous realities of the controllers’ helplessness in the face of trauma and the dangerous realities of their bodies becoming weapons, cementing his convictions about the war.

#11: Features Jake’s first real crisis as a leader and forms much of the basis for his incessant rumination on alternative outcomes.

#16: Establishes Jake’s biggest Achilles heel as a leader: that he consistently fails to secure his own oxygen mask before helping others.  The plot also punishes indecisiveness and rewards recklessness.

#21: Causes Jake to have to define his role as a leader in response to David presenting the first real challenge to Jake’s authority.

#26: Gives Jake the chance to be his most awesome and competent as a leader, from managing Ax’s emotions and skillfully deploying Rachel and Erek to the Gordian-knot-cutting gambit that makes Crayak himself sit up and take notice.

#31: Confronts Jake with the slow-burning crisis he’s been struggling to ignore within his own family, causing him to (largely unsuccessfully) deal with the threat presented by Tom’s continued existence.

#36: Gives us some heartwarming moments of Jake expressing his love for his team while throwing himself between them and danger.

#41: Features Jake grappling with the realization that he can’t — and shouldn’t — save his own loved ones at the expense of someone else’s.

#47: Largely inconsequential, but does involve the only instance of Jake leading an army against invading forces in a “traditional” battle.

#53: In which Jake applies everything he’s learned to take over the U.S. Air Force, recruit the taxxons, manipulate multiple yeerk vissers, and strategically use all his allies in ways that are effective but brutal.  Also, he FINALLY does something about Tom — and it comes at the expense of Rachel’s life.

Tobias: Starts the series as a dreamy-eyed idealist with no clear-cut identity who eagerly commits himself to the first cause that comes along.  Ends the series as a pragmatic survivalist who values self-sufficiency but also his connections to his hawk and human and andalite and hork-bajir sides.

#3: Acts as the comedown of Tobias’s idealism following his somewhat-impulsive, somewhat-forced decision, as the reality of predation and nothlitization sinks in.

#13: Establishes Tobias as the kind of guy who (literally) looks higher powers in the eye and calls “bull,” but also the eyes in the sky for the team.

#23: Further complexifies Tobias’s already-complex species identity, but also gives him the chacne to be badass and self-reliant in a world that used to stuff his head in toilet bowls.

#33: Puts Tobias through the kind of pressure test that allows him to realize what’s really important to him, from his andalite family to his love for Rachel.

#43: Gives power back to Tobias through showing him — both in flashbacks and in the present conflict with Taylor — embracing the power not to decide (X).

#49: Leads Tobias to the realization that he may never have a nuclear family like Jake’s or Cassie’s, but that his crappy upbringing imbued him with a level of resiliency that Jake frankly lacks.

Ax: Starts the series as a kid who knows exactly who he is (a proud aristh in The Greatest Military in the galaxy) and where he’s from (andalite culture) and just wants to get home.  Ends the series identified as “Aximili of Earth,” with a relentless wanderlust and a reputation for undercutting traditional andalite power structures.

#8: Establishes Ax as a lonely kid under enormous pressure to conform to two different cultures in two different ways, and sets him on the path to balancing those conflicting demands.

#18: Probably the apex of Ax’s embracing andaliteness at the expense of humanity, forcing him to realize that people are people and there’s no rank-ordering entire groups.

#28: Confronts Ax with the nastiest sides of humanity — animal testing and factory farming — to cast him as a witness to whom his human friends must justify themselves.

#38: Allows Ax to measure himself and his team against the andalites’ standards for competency and morality alike, and to find it is the andalites who are wanting.

#46: Probably the nadir of Ax’s embracing andaliteness, with all his prior experience culminating in deep longing to be human in light of the Air Force’s unflinching nobility and the craven imperialism of the Andalite Electorate.

#52: Culminates the conflict between Ax’s cultures through leading him to conclude that his friends specifically and humans as a whole don’t have to be perfect to have fundamental rights and dignity.

Cassie: Starts the war deeply uncomfortable with major decisions but nevertheless convinced that there’s a single “right” answer to every situation, largely only involved at all for love of her friends.  Ends the war as a “one woman army” (emphasis on one) with a nuanced morality system and a willingness to go her own way rather than setting herself on fire to keep others warm.

#4: Forces her out of her comfort zone and into making decisions for the entire team, causing her to discover that she’s braver and stronger than she ever realized.

#9: Crystalizes Cassie’s willingness to embrace and protect the Earth in spite of fully recognizing its inherent brutality.

#14: Undeniably inane, but gets some great humor out of Cassie being a sweet straightforward kid and a terrible liar.

#19: Establishes Cassie’s Achilles heel: that she functions brilliantly with no one to watch out for but herself, but doesn’t play well with others.  Also knocks her off her high horse through forcing her to realize that many enemy soldiers are just as clueless as she is.

#24: Acts as a check-in after the events of the David trilogy, showing just how jaded the kids have become that Cassie and Marco find violent alien abduction to be little more than a minor annoyance.

#29: Plays to Cassie’s strengths — working alone, developing her unusual allies, taking care of her friends, remaining focused under fire — to show her at her most awesome and draw out her competencies.

#34: Gives Cassie a glimpse of what it means to be a compassionate but still powerful leader.

#39: Sets up the end of the series through using the wolf morph to show Cassie’s ability to keep running and changing and being many things at once (both figuratively and literally) after all her friends have fallen behind.

#44: Foreshadows Cassie’s breakup with Jake through contrasting her ability to get by alone in Australia with his “zombielike” state of lost dependence while she’s gone.

#50: Drives a wedge between Cassie and her team, with the consolation prize that she makes a compassionate and discerning move which ultimately sets the Animorphs up to win the war.

Rachel: Starts the series as a restless “mall rat” who enjoys risk and challenge for their own sake, and has casually absolute faith in her own abilities.  Ends the series by telling the reader outright that she’s scared, but that she must do what’s right for her team; uses her last minutes to apologize to Tom for killing him and to seek reassurance from the Ellimist that she made a difference.

#2: Establishes that she’s cocky and fun-loving even after being confronted with the realities of war, but also that she’ll gladly die for love of her friends, from Tobias to Melissa.

#7: Brings out Rachel’s truly reckless side through backing her into a corner — which is when she’s most dangerous.  Also serves as maybe the biggest blow the Animorphs ever inflict on the yeerks with minimal loss of life, crystalizing Rachel’s sense of self-righteousness.

#12: Shows the struggle hidden under her role as “the strong one,” both for her team and for her sisters.

#17: Involves Rachel interrogating how her friends see her, including her awareness that this team would never be able to talk itself into continuously reentering the hell of war without her.

#22: Confronts Rachel with the darkest depths of her own brutality, but also establishes that she’s willing to be the one to do the hard jobs of the war if it keeps the others from having to listen to David’s pleas for help.

#27: Fully cements Rachel’s relationship with Tobias through allowing her to realize what’s really important to her.

#32: Uses one of those awesome SF identity premises to give Rachel the chance to literally argue with herself, and — by showing how much each of her halves relies on the other — shows how all the facets of her identity, ugly and pretty alike, make her who she is.

#37: Contains a couple different truly awesome moments with Rachel realizing that her strengths are not Jake’s, nor are they Marco’s, but that the team will carry her through at the end of the day.

#42: A little silly, but gives Rachel the chance to out-bluster even helmacrons and to force the hard decision that Jake hesitates to make — that they need to sacrifice Marco to save their own lives.

#48: Frustratingly inconsequential, but brings together the disparate threads of her conflict with Crayak, her conflict with David, and her conflict with Jake, and culminates with Rachel confronting Cassie with the reality that if Rachel herself doesn’t do the awful things (kill David, kill Tom) then no one else will.

Marco: Starts the war as a never-serious kid who is nevertheless familiar enough with the reality of death to try and hit the brakes before inevitable tragedy gets too close to his loved ones.  Ends the war as a ruthlessly machiavellian strategist who believes in the necessity of matricide and even war crimes to keep the planet spinning on its axis.

#5: Contains the hilarity of Ax-wrangling and the utter horror of Marco realizing that Visser One thoughtlessly destroyed the lives of his entire family as an incidental aside on her rise to power, establishing early that he’s willing to burn down the world to protect his family.

#10: Gives Marco the chance to call bullshit on the chee’s moralizing about their own nonintervention in the face of massive injustice, delineating his own code of ethics.

#15: Forces Marco to confront his own trauma and becomes the first time that he must make a major ethical choice with no good solutions — and, by no coincidence, is all about him turning into a shark.

#20: Brings out the worst in Marco through emphasizing his mistrust (and lack of compassion) for strangers, his possessiveness of his friends, and his willingness to be a bully when David fails to see the big picture.

#25: Becomes the book where Marco calls himself “Mr. Ruthless” and also sees himself in a motherless pair of baby seals, where he expresses admiration for Jake’s growing manipulativeness and successfully distracts everyone from waiting around for their own deaths with really bad “dumb blond” jokes.

#30: Involves Marco giving an account of himself (as Cates would say) through justifying his decision to the reader as he plans his mom’s execution.

#35: Acts as some much-needed comic relief because of Marco’s refusal to take himself seriously, while continuing arc of his coming apart at the seams when he can’t define himself by his family.

#40: Has a deeply troubling after-school special vibe that culminates in Marco discovering that *gasp* disabled people are people too, and… Sorry, I can’t come up with anything nice to say about this book.

#45: Shows that (unlike Jake) Marco can find the balance between protecting his family and protecting the planet, and also that Marco’s brilliance has a very very dark side when it comes to manipulating Peter.

#51: Again acts as much-needed comic relief during one of the bleakest points in the war, while also showing that Marco may have overcome his intial mutual hostility with Tobias but that he’s also whistling as the world burns at a time when Jake and Rachel could both really use fewer jokes and more emotional support.

Anon, I promise I will do my best to narrow this list down, but your ask sent me off into rapturous enumerations about the tightly-woven character arcs in this series and the fact that even the ghostwritten books are remarkably consistent in light of the big picture for each of the six kids.

[lanahanahan]

(1- the apartment is the building marco lives in until book 5, the bottom house is Jakes cuz who even has a two-story in californiaaaaa, 2- jake at the beach, the rest of the kids are seagulls lmao, 3- all the kids walking out of the mysteriously named “Mall” - as you can see the specific location has been REDACTED) 

ive like . convinced myself that animorphs takes place in santa monica, mostly just cuz i think it’d be really funny to have locations like the santa monica pier, the 3rd street promenade, etc, but continue with the refrain “we can’t tell you where we are!!” 

the only hitch is they go to “the gardens” (aka la zoo) pretty frequently and thats an absolutely BRUTAL ride, probably at least an hour and a half, especially considering the expo line wasn’t under construction until like ten years after these books came out lmaooo. so i figured they’d take the BBB 10 and transfer to the 96 from downtown. 

[inactivenowwahoo]

[red-thorn]

Just… this whole page.

[pembroke]

animorphs prints are up for pre-order!! they’ll be up for about a week to gauge how many i should order. full set discount price available as pre-order only! http://alexabosy.tictail.com/ 

commissions | twitter | tictail

[c-rowlesdraws]

Poor Cassie! Nah, Aftran isn’t leeching off of Cassie taking Cassie’s money, or anyone else’s; she works at Walgreens.

Customer service jobs: the next best thing to being invisible. Perfect for when you’re living in a city crawling with people who want you dead.

[hapalopus]

Things that happened in Animorphs that people don’t talk about enough:

A man was forced to cannibalize his former student

It’s canon that humpback whales are telepathic and can communicate complex ideas such as the locations of shipwrecks

One of the kids was infested by a yeerk and literally saw Satan when the yeerk died. It wasn’t a vision. Satan is a canon character

God randomly shows up once in a while to help them out?

Dogs have been genetically engineered by furry androids

One of the kids is knocked unconscious and eaten alive by bullet ants but it’s okay because it happened via time-travel magic, so she was fine in the next book

One of the kids is allergic to alligator DNA and ends up expelling an entire fully grown alligator from her back, Alien: Covenant style

This universe’s version of Jonathan Taylor Thomas gets controlled by a yeerk, sees someshit, and moves to Uzbekistan after it’s all over

That entire book that was just about horses and an alien toilet

Zone 91, the secret military base where they supposedly keep aliens

The Animorphs crashing a party at the amusement park (because it was a cover to infest high-ranking military officers) and all the attendees thinking it’s a parade

Living, but remote-controlled, hammerhead sharks

The internet was designed by a yeerk who lives in a mansion and cannibalizes other yeerks and is the brother of Visser Three

They travelled back in time and killed Hitler

God is just a gamer who was given too much power on accident

[haiku-robot]

things that happened in animorphs that people don’t talk about enough:

^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes. All of you have loved ones. All can be returned. All can be taken away. (•_•) | PayPal | Patreon

[utterly-unhallowed]

@vissermeme

[le-bon-vent]

Cassie, watercolor + ink, July 2018

“The color of nature wasn’t green. It was red. Blood red.”

[insta] [commissions] [read Animorphs]

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Which do you prefer: Cassie's solo mission to rescue Aftran, or the climax of The Prophecy where she does the big, complicated morph in midair while fighting off Aldrea?

Seriously, though, the end of #34 is awesome because it’s so very Cassie: she’s doing nearly-impossible morphing stuff and also doing it in an effort to bring together members of different species who have every reason to hate each other.

But that whole long sequence in #29 works so freaking well because that’s when Cassie excels and becomes her most badass, when she doesn’t have to worry about her team and she can just do her own thing.  She does some amazing improv and manages to be brave in a very different way from Rachel’s bravery.

Ergo, I’m happy to call that moment from #34 Cassie’s most awesome 30 seconds as a character, and the sequence in #29 her most awesome 24 hours as a character. 

[canem-acidum]