#ANIMORPHS

[church-of-crayak]

ax taking a little jog (wip)

[suzanami]

<hear no evil, feel no evil.>

something something about Marco hiding his machiavellian pain behind his incessant joking, something about keeping it all in so he can just see the bright, clear line from A to B.

[fanonical]

rachel: i'm just saying, being a bear solves all our problems rachel: fighting taxxons? i turn into a bear! rachel: fighting hork-bajir? i turn into a bear! rachel: late homework? i turn into a bear, then we have a new problem!

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

That person mentioned losing glasses while morphing on the hearing aid post and now I'm falling down a mental rabbit hole. I don't know whether my eyesight is hereditary or childhood damage (reading in the dark, sitting too close to the tv, etc). Could morphing fix it if it is? Does it depend on how young you were when it happened? If you've gotten LASIK would morphing mess it up again?

So. Literally everything about you, from your height to your hair color to your personality, is the product of genes AND environments. This is one of the most consistent findings throughout psychology/anthropology/biology. Your hair color's obviously got a huge genetic component, since it's likely to match your parents' — but it'll be influenced by how much time you spend in the sun, what shampoos etc. you use, and amount of life stress (rate of greying). Your height is a product of your genes and your diet. Your personality is your predisposition to experience certain emotions strongly, plus your history of experiencing situations that caused those emotions.

Whateverthefuck is going on with morphing, trying to divide it into genes OR environmental influences is always going to be nonsensical. My theory is that morphing takes a "snapshot" of the animal at the moment you acquire it, and always takes the morpher back to that snapshot. Those baby seals they acquired in #25 are always going to be baby seal morphs; Tobias is always going to be physically the age of the hawk that was in Cassie's barn that day; if Cassie acquired Rachel with pierced ears then she'll morph Rachel with pierced ears. If you wear glasses now, the person who acquires you will have imperfect vision. No, this doesn't perfectly explain every weird thing with morphing, but the series always comments on the fact that no theory does.

[kooldewd123]

if i had a nickel for every time the climax of an animorphs plot involved cassie morphing into a whale midair to dive-bomb something, i'd have three nickels

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

[wyndryga]

welp. im rereading animorphs. its liveblogging time

first book observations:

its remarkable how well KAA fleshes out her main cast with just the observations of Jake. like the story is built around Jake being both incredibly introspective and observatory abt his friends and his own place in the world but also Just Some Guy

i think its also a really interesting look at setting up a fictional series. 60% of the aliens they romp with in the next 60 books are introduced in the first 7 or so chapters. everything gets fleshed out as the series goes on but you immediately know 'okay there's 4 main groups of aliens. they have lasers and mind control. you can shapeshift now, go forth'

jake having to be held back from trying to kill visser three with a metal pipe within thirty seconds of seeing the guy

you are a teenager walking home from the mall and psychically experience an aliens death from his perspective in real time. what do?

rachel swears like a sailor when given the opportunity

rachels ruthlessness is IMMEDIATELY established holy shit. opening action scene has jake and rachel realizing theyre the fastest runners, making themselves targets, and then when jake trips he tells her to keep running and she does. berenson family wild

oh okay that homeless dude totally died. i actually did not remember that At All

hey jake. mr berenson. this is definitely a very straight way to talk about your friend you think is a guy

tobias' cat being named Dude, who is also his first morph: me when im totally not already pretending to be a guy on a regular basis

Totally Normal Boy develops a personality after shapeshifting into a cat for the first time. hello girl

ah. this is why i am the way i am

hey jake? what the fuck, dude

jake the tumblr doggirls would love you (just turned into a dog talking about another dog)

i do love how kaa writes the kids as animals. very fast paced narrated thoughts, def had a huge impact on me as a writer

"hmm i wonder why animorphs was such a hit with trans autistic furries"

I WONDER

[benevolentfalcon]

Most sci fi/fantasy: this civil war has been waged for a thousand years. These great houses have ruled the realm for eight thousand years. These two families have been feuding for ten thousand years. This single political institution has stood for twenty-five thousand years.

Animorphs: there is a war waged across the galaxy, waged by countless species. Entire planets have been conquered, entire species have been enslaved. Multiple genocides have been committed, even by the "good guys." It's been going on about, oh, thirty-two years now.

[cobaltegg]

so like, what if you were the last surviving animorph but it's been canonically established that you still had your best friend's DNA in your body

[brothermouse-skeleton]

Animorphs books be like

Page 1: I am a child soldier. My every waking moment is defined by fear and paranoia. My dreams are full of unprocessed trauma. The fate of the entire world rests on me and my friends. I failed my geography test because I do not know the difference between Equator and Ecuador. Also, I'm really hazy on the difference between geography and geology. Again, the fate of the world rests on my shoulders.

Page 13: <Now THAT is a sexy monkey>

Page 26: *The dopest animal fact you've ever heard*

Page 27: Do you know about thermals? You do? Too bad, I'm going to explain them again.

Page 36: *fart joke fart joke 90's pop culture reference barf joke*

Page 40: Rachel kills someone with her bear hands. Not a typo.

Pages 3,15,16,25,26,30,33,37,40,44,46,50,55,56,57,60: TSEEEEEEEEEEEER!

Page 47: I willed my bones to melt faster. If there was a single bone in my body in the next ten seconds, everyone I ever loved of cared about would die an excruciating death.

Page 50: Funny alien thinks he's people.

Last page: *The gang goes to Burger King to avoid thinking about their war crimes*

[wickedlittlecritta]

the energy here is unparalleled

[fanonical]

if i was an animorph i would simply morph a cat and hang out in a cat cafe

[hapalopus]

Animorphs really has a way to turn every scifi trope on its head. "Why do alien invasions always start in America?" Actually the body snatchers first landed in a Middle Eastern farming community where they kidnapped the first guy they saw, read his mind, and concluded that, since he was terrified of the US soldiers who had brutally destroyed everything he knew and loved, the US would be the ideal place to center their invasion. This is revealed in the spin-off "Visser" which is an excellent stand-alone book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Animorphs. And you can read it for free and with the author's blessing right here:

https://files.animorphsfanforum.com/ebooks/pdf/Visser.pdf

[todays-xkcd]

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

Bracket Symbols [Explained]

Transcript

Bracket Symbols and what they mean ( ) Regular parentheses for setting stuff aside [ ] Square brackets (more secure) { } This stuff is expensive so be careful with it " " Someone is talking ' ' Someone British is talking ‹ › An Animorph is talking « » A French Animorph is talking | | I'm scared of negative numbers but these sigils will protect me * * _ _ / / I have a favorite monospaced font ~ ~ I'm being sarcastic and I had a Tumblr account in 2014 [ ( [ { ( ) } ] , ) ] These Python functions are not getting along ⌊ ⌋ Help, I'm a mathematician trying to work with actual numbers and they're scary ʃ ʅ Why are you trying to read my violin? | ⟩ Don't stop here--this is quantum country

[deejay]

[carlandrea]

The reason Animorphs works as a deconstruction of the kid hero archetype is that it comes at it from a place of respect for the genre, and for the children reading it.

It never denies the kids agency, because it is a book for children, who want to read about children being given agency. Animorphs doesn't treat its child soldiers as victims the way a story aimed at adults would. They are full agents within the story who make moral choices. The fact that they are children is treated as a tragedy, but it's not treated as something that absolves them of any responsibility.

It plays by the rules. These kids are the only people who can save the world. They cannot trust the adults in their lives. It just takes that story—the story it's telling—seriously.

The message of animorphs isn't actually of "isn't it fucked up that this book I read when I was a kid sent a twelve year old on an adventure" it just uses its take on the kid hero genre to get across the actual message, which is War Is Hell