Took a break from listening to the Animorphs audiobooks to…read megamorphs #2: In the Time of Dinosaurs. It may not have been the palate cleanser I needed after the David Trilogy, but it sure is the one I got
What a book. What a book. I don’t know where to begin
Good rule of thumb seems to be that the Chronicles books are where all the poignant, emotionally gut-wrenching and thematically relevant exposition happens
And the Megamorphs on the other hand are just the most genre. Just tropey off-the-wall nonsense cover to cover
Okay so to start out blah blah blah nuclear sub explodes and BAM the Animorphs are transported roughly 65 million years to the past aka the time of the dinosaurs 🦖🦕🌋
Why? Something something sario rip shh you ask too many questions
Need I say more? Dinosaurs. Never tell me applegate didn’t understand her audience
On top of that we get gems like
Tobias being ~hurt~ and for never-explained-reasons being unable to heal himself through morphing, which makes NO SENSE and is never again discussed
He is stranded with his mutual crush when this happens too
This book did more for Rachel/Tobias shippers than anything else so far
This is some fanfic shit here we love to see it
Like Rachel has to carry Tobias bc he can’t fly and does all this self-sacrificing shit like letting him dig his talons into her shoulder and gets her feet all cut up transporting them both
Love how the typical gender roles of this trope are swapped too
Jake nearly gets eaten by a DIFFERENT t-rex
He also like randomly faints after his fight with the Rex in the most cliche way possible
Cassie, Marco, Jake, and Ax all get to MORPH A T-REX
Cassie gets swept away by the morph instincts and nearly eats Jake but then he demorphs and through the Power of Love Cassie recognizes him and comes back to herself
Tobias’s wing is healed only when he and Rachel aren’t stranded together anymore thus further proving he was injured for Shipping Purposes Only
Broccoli is canonically an alien vegetable
The Bad Aliens are just ants that do like a synchronized swarming maneuver to create one bigger creature
The Good Aliens are crab people with hands
Ok ok so like the characters know they’re in the time of dinosaurs. Like they are aware. Tobias even repeatedly tells them they’re in the Cretaceous, the final age of dinosaurs. The late Cretaceous, even. And the whole book there is a honking massive comet in the sky and not once until the finale does it occur to anyone except Tobias that “oh right dinosaurs were wiped out by a comet maybe This Is That Comet”
Canonically this book takes place between books 18 and 19 and actually this informs a lot of why Cassie quit the Animorphs in 19 like they helped wipe out an entire epoch of creatures and one alien civilization there’s some food for thought for you
but anyways forget all that because REALLY we know the point of this book is that they get to see somany dinosaurs
Oh and despite this taking place in the last 3 days before the end of the Cretaceous, Rachel and Tobias fight a spinosaurus and Tobias even chimes in with a note at the end of the book to essentially say “spinosauruses were supposed to be extinct by then but this was fuckin’ sick so who cares.” You gotta love it
