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Dracon beams are flashlights but I propose this addendum: shredders look like torch lighters
I am imagining how this could be potentially perfect for a weak 7-fingered hand! Bonus if they're infamously difficult to use if you have fewer than 7 fingers and/or break if you squeeze them too hard. Hence the real reason yeerks developed dracon beams as an alternative.
OK, but I feel like having flashlight dracon beams could also lead to a black comedy running gag where controllers try to turn a light on and wind up shooting each other and getting eaten by Taxxons, and everyone just sighs and shakes their heads.
Oooh, it could be like that thing from The Pink Panther Returns where the one character has a lighter that looks like a pistol and a pistol that looks like a pistol in his desk, and keeps mixing them up so that at one point he tries to kill someone by flicking a light at them and then later blows his own nose off trying to light a cigar.
Between that and all the chaos of shredders and dracon beams having opposite-direction numbering systems (depending on how you read Andalite Chronicles) so that people trained on one are always going to be at risk of misusing the other, aaaaallll the black comedy could ensue. Especially if there was some in-universe justification for human-controllers actually carrying around actual flashlights all the time (maybe to cover for their dracon beams? so they always have a light if someone asks for it?) and then constantly doing accidental murder or ineffectually illuminating their enemies by grabbing the wrong thing.
Ooh, i got one I actually need answered for a fangame project. Did the Hork-Bajir primarily use Dracon Beams against the Animorphs in the books, as I seem to remember it? Or was there a good mix of beam and melee fighting? More importantly, if you were playing an Animorphs fangame, would you be mad if all the hork-bajir were just shooting at you
It seems to depend on the environment. They definitely shoot at the Animorphs plenty, but seem to use a lot of melee fighting too. The hork-bajir obviously have a huge melee advantage in forested areas, which is probably part of why they use melee attacks there. Other times they use melee attacks seem to be when they're limited by the environment (e.g. #7, where they're inside a human-owned building and would risk discovery if a dracon shot went through a wall). But it seems like it's both.
I don't think I'd be mad, but I also think I'd get frustrated if the enemies have distance attacks and I don't. The Animorphs themselves are 99% melee fighters, with the rare exception of Rachel or Marco occasionally picking up a dracon beam. So I think that I'd want to play an Animorphs game to get to fight in different animal shapes, and I'd be frustrated if I either couldn't be effective because I couldn't get close enough to my enemies, or else had to use a dracon beam to counter distance attacks.
What if dragon beams look like flashlights on purpose so that if they’re found there’s an easy explanation, and the lowest power setting is so harmless it can actually be used as a flashlight so it can be demonstrated if it ever comes up?
Yeah, I've said before that I really like the flashlight-looking dracon beams from AniTV, so much so that I kept them for my own Animorphs fics despite them not being canon for the book series. We don't know a ton about the dracon beams from the books, other than that a) Jake immediately recognizes one as "a gun" the first time he sees one in MM4, b) Tobias has to use get his talon around a trigger guard to shoot one in #3, and c) Rachel quickly figures out how to use a dial to get to the low-power "stun" setting on one in #17.
Near as I can tell, the only official art of that design is a tiny subset of the #34 cover insert, showing a few hork-bajir-controllers firing them.
Other than that we get a few drawings of them in the comics, which look cool (and at least more alien than the gun design) but again not that comfortable for a variety of hands.
Anyway, I like the flashlight-style dracon beams from the show much better than the ray-gun-style ones from the books, because they seem both more stealthy and also more broadly ergonomic. My personal headcanon is that they're like those big bulky old-school flashlights even more so than the slender little ones from the show; those would be easier for gedds than humans to hold, which in my mind fits the bill.
That pistol-like design is a little too well-fitted for human hands for my taste; I like how much easier a flashlight-like design would be for tiny taxxon hands and giant hork-bajir hands and clumsy gedd hands to wield. It's a recurring theme in the books that Bug fighters are just awkward for humans to use; they're set up to accommodate up to three taxxons or hork-bajir, and so some features (chairs, ten-finger keyboard setups) had to be sacrificed to that goal. If a dracon beam's a big clumsy tube with maybe two buttons for a trigger and a power setting, then it feels more alien than a laser pistol does.
{Fire!} Visser Three yelled. {Burn his ship!} The night exploded in blinding light. Red beams lanced from the Blade ship and the remaining Bug fighter. The Andalite ship glowed, and, with a strange slowness, disintegrated. Then, in the flash and glow of Dracon beams I saw . . . or thought I saw . . . humans. A small group of them, maybe three or four, back in the shadows behind the Visser.
Fight Scene by rachelroach
