#alloran is my trash baby

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What if Alloran and Elfangor switched places?

Okay, you know how I said I wasn't going to write any more Total Party Kill AUs? This would be a Total Planet Kill AU.

Because Esplin 9466 using Elfangor's body is... not too bad. He might be marginally better at tail-fighting and marginally worse at intimidation. But if Alloran is the big hero andalite who has to make a snap decision about what to do if the yeerks are on Earth? Hoo boy, we saw that play out with the hork-bajir. And War-Prince "Butcher" "Abomination" Alloran-Semitur-Hardass is the reason the universe went from having millions of hork-bajir to hundreds of hork-bajir in like 6 weeks flat.

Like, Alloran might even defeat the Yeerk Empire, in this AU. There just wouldn't be any humans (or dogs, or insects, or birds) around to witness it when he did.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What if Alloran had been infested by a member of the Yeerk Peace Movement? (Ah, the YPM, probably the most sadly underused concept in the series.)

I feel like the yeerk in question would be radicalized straight back to supporting the Empire after 10 minutes in his skull. He just has that effect on people.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

for the ships thing, how about alloran/happiness? that's my animorphs otp

Love it/ Hate it/ Tolerate it/ Would write it/ Have written it/ Would never write it/ Would read it/ Have read it/ Would never read it/ That would be a TRASH FIRE (affectionate)/ That would be a TRASH FIRE (derogatory)/ Squick/ Yay/ Fits with canon (affectionate)/ Fits with canon (derogatory)/ Makes no sense with canon (affectionate)/ Makes no sense with canon (derogatory)

Other: On the one hand, I love the character and love his redemption arc and would love to see him keep going on that path. On the other hand... does he deserve to live happily ever after? Does he really?

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Is Alloran a dilf? 🤔

Hell no! Dude's nasty as fuck. If anything, he's a hatebang you regret once the horny hormones wear off.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Imagine Alloran and Jake talking about Tom after the war.

Oh gosh, this is terrible, but... I'm 99% sure Alloran would have no idea who Tom is. Like I'm picturing Jake being like "he was yay tall? Dark, spiky hair? Looked a little like me?"

Alloran would start by being like «All humans look the same.» But if Jake kept at it (or found a photo), then Alloran eventually might be like «Ohhhh, Squeeblat oh-six-nine's host. Yeah, Squeeblat oh-six-nine was a total prick. Never liked him... Oh, you mean Squeeblat's meat puppet? Never met him, why'd you ask?»

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

If there are ppl thirsty for visser three, where are the ppl thirsty for alloran? 👀🤔

Presumably in the flaming dumpster where they belong

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

After the Bombs Fall [Animorphs ficlet]

[Note: I seem to have lost the ask where someone requested my post-war headcanon for Alloran, but anyway here it is.]

--

Less than a month after the end of the war, Alloran applies for transfer off of Earth and back to the homeworld.  When the first request gets cancelled due to a minor typo in a sub-section of a supplemental form, he curses himself and immediately applies again.

The second application lingers in the metaphorical z-space between agents for longer, nearly two Earth months, before it gets cancelled as well.  The systems are overtaxed due to the sudden influx of Earth tourism, the form letter tells him this time, and they’re very sorry for their inability to accommodate his request.

The third time he applies, the form remains “under review” on the submission portal for half a year, even though the review process normally takes less than a day.  So he applies a fourth time, a terrible suspicion taking hold by now.  The Electorate automatically cancels both applications, and has the gall to send him a snippy comm message asking that he refrain from filing redundant claims from now on.

The fifth application gets reviewed and cancelled; the sixth one doesn’t even get that courtesy.  It just stays there, “submitted” but not yet “under review,” unwanted and ignored.

Just like its author.

Alloran considers, then.  For nearly a day he paces, watching the andalite computer and the primitive human device alike, and weighs the merits of stealing Visser Three’s Blade ship out of the impound lot.  It wouldn’t be hard; the security system is coded to biometrics.  No one but he or Tom Berenson could fly that ship now, and Tom Berenson is dead.

After another day, Alloran instead morphs human and walks to the nearest CVS.

He has to swallow an entire jumbo bag of marshmallows and three jars of tomato sauce for comfort before he can swallow his pride as well.  But the comfort food does its trick, and at the end he pulls out the human cell phone still registered under one of Esplin 9466′s aliases and enters the fifth speed-dial option.

“Hey, you.”  Eva answers immediately.  “How’s it going?”

They don’t know each other, not really.  And yet in every one of their three conversations, Eva has greeted him like an old friend.  Her voice brings a reaction to Alloran’s human morph: tightness in his throat, the heat of tears behind his eyes.

“I apologize for troubling you,” Alloran says stiffly.  “Please, if you are busy, disregard this request.”

Eva snorts a laugh.  At least, Alloran thinks that that’s what the sound is.  “I’m not busy, and I owe you a favor anyway.  Shoot.”

Alloran glances around the room, but there are no weapons, so he decides to disregard that last.  “I am truly sorry if it slipped my mind,” he says, “but what favor do you owe?”

“My kid is not in jail on some foreign planet right now, and I hear that’s all your fault.  What’s the favor?”

“The War Council would not have imprisoned the Animorphs.  That is, perhaps Aximili and Prince Jake may have been imprisoned, but doubtless the full Electorate court would have proven merciful—”

“Alloran.  What’s the favor.”

He’s stalling, and she knows it.  “It’s a bit of a complicated political matter, and I’m afraid I am not well equipped to explain it to a human, but enforcement of our travel policies is more subject to individual agents’ personal judgment than we ideally would have it be, and...”

“Hijo de puta.  They’re not letting you go home, are they?”

Alloran fills his human lungs with more air than they technically need for speech.  “It’s a complicated matter.”  Nevertheless, his voice comes out small.

“You still camping at the Sharing Community Center?”

“Yes.”  His voice is even smaller now.

“I’ll be there in half an hour, querido.”  She hangs up.

While he waits, he goes outside to run, to graze, to stare up at the stars.

He didn’t lie; it is complicated.  The Andalite Electorate is struggling to recover from a decades-long war, one that threatened the existence of their very soul as a people.  Seerow’s mistakes — and Alloran’s own decision to publicize the failings of his prince — have ensured that the whole debacle was a massive embarrassment even before the defeat on the hork-bajir homeworld.

And then...

He’s heard the word, whispered and hissed and screamed and shouted.

Abomination.

Abomination.

His face is the public face of the Yeerk Empire.  His voice is its voice.  The morph he was just using — a bald, middle-aged human male — was constructed from the DNA of a dozen human-controllers.  Everything he owns, from the black limousine parked at the curb to the press pass of a woman called Aria, was taken from the hands of murdered slaves.

Of course his people don’t want him back.  Of course not.  The quantum virus was one thing, but then he had the gall go to and get himself captured by the yeerks.  And he’d added insult to injury when he’d challenged a captain on Aximili’s behalf.

He can see it.  That’s what stings.  He can stare up at the glittering point of his home star even as he runs across a field of dull foreign grass, and at this rate it’ll never be anything but a fixed point of light in an unfamiliar sky ever again.

Eva shows up then, before he can feel too sorry for himself.

She brings a human substance known as pinot noir.

**********

“And then...”  Eva points a wavering finger at him.  Her words have gotten blurrier over time.  “And then, we just sneak it in, and bam!”  She slaps the tabletop.

Alloran leans in across to her.  “Bam,” he agrees.

“You needed a ride home?”

At the new voice, Alloran stands up sharply.  Too sharply.  He gets his two flimsy little legs tangled in the chair and almost pitches over.

Marco catches him.  “You all right?” he asks.

“I,” Alloran intones, “am intoxicated.  Tox.  I.  Cate.  Ed.  Wonderful word.  Intock.  Sick.  Kate.  Dd-d-d-d-d.”

“Yeeeaah, I was getting those vibes from the—”  Marco leans around him in an impressive display of human balance.  “Bottle of wine apiece you two’ve apparently emptied.”

Eva draws herself up.  “I did not call and request a ride home, I called and requested a ride to the Netherlands!”

“You’re right, you did.”  Marco rolls his eyes.  “Which is why I made the decision to show up and bring you home instead.”

“No, no, the Netherlands.”  Eva steps up next to Alloran.  They both regard Marco carefully.  “Not to worry, we’ve thought it through.  You call your friend with the private plane, Bradley or Bradford or whomever his name is.  We fly out to the Hague tonight.”

“Where is this going,” Marco mutters.

“Holland,” Alloran informs him.  “It is-sssss in...”

“Yeah, I’ve been.”

“Anyway.”  Eva gestures sharply, bringing attention back to her.  “We shall have a perfectly ordinary canister of table salt with us, and we shall request to visit with Visser Three—”

“Oh Jesus.  Mom.”

“The guards will not suspect a thing, for it is just an ordinary condiment.  All we must then do is create a diversion, and...”  Eva flings out both hands as if miming an explosion.

“Splat,” Alloran says.  “Pllll-lat.  Hissssss.”

“And this will accomplish what, exactly?” Marco asks.

“Making Alloran feel better,” Eva whispers to him.  However, she seems to be whispering a great deal louder than she realizes.  Humans are ill-equipped for private communication, with their sad reliance on verbal speech.  “None of the andalites want him back.”

“Yeah.  Cool.”  Marco laughs.  “Ten out of ten therapists recommend war crimes for a friend in need!  And as a guy who’s been to at least ten therapists, I’d know.”

Alloran is not certain, but he believes that Marco might be employing the human verbal quirk known as “sarcasm.”

“No one will suspect a thing.”  Eva pats him on the shoulder.

Marco sighs.  “Security will just think it’s cocaine.”

“Cocaine?” Alloran asks.  “Coke-cane?  Co-c-c-c-c-c-c-aine?”

“Something you’re never going to try.”  Marco levels a hard stare at him.  “Given how well you handle your red wine.”

“Cooo-caaayyy-nnnee.  Co-cane.”

“How did you get wrapped up in this dumbass heist, anyway?”  Marco looks from one of them to the other.

“Alloran needed me,” Eva says.

“I have no friends,” Alloran announces.  “And Arbron does not own a cell phone.  Ell.  Elffffff-own.”

Marco closes his main eyes for several seconds, massaging the bridge of his nose.  An impressive feat of daring, for a creature with no stalk eyes who relies upon bipedalism.  “Should’ve known you’d be a morose drunk,” he says.

“So, you’ll take us to the airfield, then?” Eva asks.

Lifting his head up, Marco opens his eyes.  “In the words of my wise and estimable mother: if you want it that bad, you can have it when you’re sober.”

Eva opens her mouth halfway, squinting in what Alloran would guess is the effort of remembering when she would have said that.  After a second, her expression clears.  “I was right to say it, that floozy would have broken your heart in the morning, and this situation is entirely different!”

“That floozy’s name was Jake Gyllenhaal,” Marco mutters, “and I totally would’ve gone for it when I was sober, but I never got his number.”

Eva says something in Spanish, presumably about the loose morals of Jake Gyllenhaal.  Marco’s expression would suggest that he only pretends not to understand her.

“Anyway.  The point stands.  I’m driving you home.”  Marco jerks his chin at Eva.  “And you,” he says, looking at Alloran, “are gonna morph and sober up before we go anywhere.  I’m not having you nothlited on my conscience.”

“But,” Alloran says, “the salt—”

“We’ll revisit the salt in the morning,” Marco says firmly.  “Demorph.  Please.”

Alloran considers pointing out that he is a war-prince, he does not take orders from alien children, he has his pride... And then considers whether any of those statements is actually true.

He demorphs.

Instantly, he feels both better and worse.  On the upside he’s more clear-headed now, but on the downside he’s more clear-headed.

“I’ll call you.”  Marco gives him a long look while shepherding Eva out the door.

**********

Marco does not call, but he does send several written missives to Alloran’s cell phone.  The Animorphs still have an illegal andalite communication device, it would appear, and Marco has put in requests to channels both official and not about the possibility of transport from Earth to the homeworld.

     —Ax is on it, Marco’s latest text reads.  —He’s calling an old friend.  Might take some smuggling, but we’ve got an idea.

     —Thank you, Alloran types carefully on the tiny keyboard.  —Your assistance is greatly appreciated, and undeserved.

He’s debating whether to hit send when there’s a knock on the door.

Alloran’s in an abandoned building the Sharing used to use for housing human-controllers.  There is very little chance that this is an incidental knock, or someone who wandered by accidentally.

The thought occurs to him that it’d be smarter to morph human and blend in before he answers.  But the fear of facing the unknown in a half-blind, tailless morph wins out.  He opens the door as is.

It proves to be the right decision.  The andalite on the other side didn’t bother to morph either.

Estrid stares at him in silence for several seconds.  Her expression is unreadable, all eyes ahead and carefully blank.  Alloran doesn’t know what she’s looking for, but he lets her look.

«Estrid,» he says at last, when it’s clear she isn’t going to speak first.  He gestures with his tail blade, the downward sweep of greeting for an honored warrior.

«Father,» she says.

Her own sharp tail-turn puts the flat of her blade toward him.  A greeting between equals.  An insult.  Both not formal enough for an aristh to acknowledge a war-prince, and too formal for greeting a family member.

But then, Alloran went for Estrid, didn’t he.  Not Aristh Estrid-Corill-Darrath, not Estri-kala or my child.

They haven’t seen each other in over two years.  They haven’t spoken in almost twenty.

Arguably, given how young she was when he was taken, they’ve never really spoken at all.  Certainly Alloran knows little of the person his daughter has become as a young adult.  As a groundbreaking aristh.  As a brilliant researcher.

As a war criminal.

Humans have a saying, about apples that don’t fall far.

«How is Jahar?» Alloran says.  It’s what he really wants to know, and he doesn’t know how to approach any of the other minefields that lie between them.  «And Ajaht, how is he?»

Judging by Estrid’s expression, she takes this to be a standard small-talk opening instead of the deeply earnest inquiry it is.  «Mother is well enough.  I suppose you’ll have to apologize to her in person.»  She doesn’t mention her brother.

Alloran feels his tail blade drop nearly to the floor without his permission.  «Yes.  Of course.  Estrid...»

«I’m on a diplomatic mission to Earth,» she says briskly.  «Prince Aximili and I have concluded discussions with several local leaders about access to morphing technology and tourism restrictions going forward.  Therefore, I will be able to exit the planet and return home after being subject to nothing more rigorous than human security scans.»  The dismissive little flick of her tail at this last is, all things considered, somewhat warranted.  Humans have yet to devise a single effective way to detect morphers.

«Return home,» Alloran repeats.

Might take some smuggling, Marco said.  It’s sinking in: Estrid is here to bring him home.

Home.  To the wife he disgraced.  The brother he got killed.  The children who won’t even acknowledge him, a feverish pair of overachievers desperate to leave his legacy behind.  Ajaht’s tail-fighting is so legendary that, even using human channels, Alloran has been able to find scraps of news.  Estrid’s skill is not praised so publicly... but the yeerks got ahold of Arbat’s files, after their disastrous mission to Earth.  Alloran knows more about her, he thinks, than he ever wanted to.

«We’re leaving now,» Estrid says.  «My window for authorized exit ends in two-point-eight-six Earth hours, so we need to move.»

She must have been here for days if not weeks, to negotiate the way she’s describing.  And yet she came to find him at the last possible second.  Likely to minimize the time they’re forced to spend together.

Alloran doesn’t have the time or the energy to care.  «What would you prefer me to morph?»

«Something small and Earth-based.»  She barely finishes speaking before she starts to morph herself.

Alloran pauses in surprise, because Estrid morphs with shocking skill, melding from andalite to human in a mere forty-seven seconds, all without ever once losing her footing.  She even wears a normative amount of clothing when she’s finished, a sundress and sneakers and a coat overtop.

She sighs, looking him over.  «We don’t have all day, here.»

«You were wasted in Arbat’s lab,» Alloran says.

«You don’t have to tell me that,» Estrid snaps.  «Tell me, dear father, what else was a girl and a second-born and the child of a disgraced bloodline meant to do?»

Alloran has no answer.  Silently he morphs.

His options are limited — Visser Three overwhelmingly preferred large to small morphs, and Alloran hasn’t bothered acquiring much else — so he opts for snake, Lachesis muta according to a human-controller from the area.  It’s still larger than most Earth reptiles, but by coiling in close he becomes small enough to drop into the oversized pocket of Estrid’s jacket.

Estrid doesn’t speak to him, and he doesn’t ask her to, the entire way back to her fighter.  She’s under no obligation, and he won’t force the issue.

********

«We’re landing soon,» Estrid tells him, three Earth weeks and eighty-two light years later.  She’s maintained that icy formality throughout the entire journey so far, responding to Alloran’s questions — about her research, about her brother, about her morphing — with flat non-answers.

Alloran steps to the viewport to look out over the rolling grasslands of home like a child on his first in-atmosphere flight.  Is it home, really?  It’s been thirty-nine years since he left home to quell the small skirmish on the hork-bajir homeworld, forty-seven since his first offworld assignment serving under Prince Seerow.  He has seen a dozen planets, been a hundred species, since that time.  This body belonged to Visser Three for nearly as long as it did to Alloran himself, decades of nonexistence until he all but forgot his own name.

«What will you do next?» Alloran asks Estrid, still desperate for conversation.

She flicks a dismissive hand at the air.  «I have my work.»

«Even without Arbat?»

«I didn’t say it was easy.»

«And the quantum virus?»

She turns all four eyes on him.  A small part of him wants to scold her for bad form, but a far larger part of him recognizes he’d be overstepping.  «The quantum virus never happened,» she says sharply.  «And if it did, I was never informed of its existence.  This journey was my first visit to Earth, Arbat died in a lab accident, we were never involved in weapons development, and if you even think about saying differently the War Council will back my story, because all of the documentation —»

«Estrid.»  He cuts her off as gently as he can.  «I would never...»

He sees it, in the stiffening of her stalk eyes.  Hears it in the catch of her breath.  She doesn’t want a father.  Or if she does, she doesn’t want him.

«I would never dishonor the memory of my brother by raising questions about his death,» Alloran says instead.

Estrid relaxes, and turns back to the controls.

He is weary of war, weary of being alone.  The person he’d been when he first met Esplin 9466 would have been shouting by now, demanding to know what right Estrid has to consider herself any better than him.  He only deployed a quantum virus, had no hand in its evil creation.  Either she is a hypocrite... or she is just like the War Council officials who consider it a far worse crime to be enslaved by yeerks than to have murdered ten million hork-bajir.

It’s been a long war, and Alloran has missed her every moment of it.  Let her be angry; she’s here.

There is one more delicate question Alloran needs to ask, however, before they disembark on their family’s land.  «Jahar,» he says.  «I assume... She has found someone else.  To help raise you, and...»  Dark Sun, but this is hard.  «She deserves to be loved, of course.»

Eva’s mate remarried, after all.  Together they’d cried about that, somewhere between the third and fourth glasses of wine.

«Who would date her?» Estrid asks.  «Who would be seen speaking to her?  No.  There’s no one.  There hasn’t been.  There was me, and Ajaht, and that’s it.»

Alloran feels sadness and relief and disappointment and shame at his relief, all at once in a rush too complex to understand.  «I see,» he says at last.

«So go to her.»  Estrid yanks hard to unseal the fighter’s outer door; they’ve landed without his noticing.  «Go to her and—»  Another hard yank.  «Kriffing thing!»

Alloran puts his hand next to hers, pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t pull away.  As one they move, and the door comes open at last.

She came to meet them.  Alloran doesn’t know why he wasn’t expecting that, and yet...

Jahar is older, lined around the eyes and stooped in her shoulders and dull-edged around her hooves.  She’s radiant.  Transcendent.

Alloran is frozen.  Aware of all the knocks he’s taken, all the shine he’s lost.  Aware that they’ve been apart for longer than they ever were together.

He blames that last for the way his knees lock.  For the voice that freezes inside his mind, unable to form words.  For the crack in his breath and the painful squeeze of his hearts as she becomes the one to step forward.  As she raises a hand to his cheek, in the first gentle touch he’s felt in over twenty years.

--

[Note: I know that Aloth’s line in #38 about Estrid being Arbat’s niece — which would make her Alloran’s daughter — is probably not meant to be literal in context.  But the straightforward interpretation is boring, so I went with the fun one.]

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I just checked out your podcast and it's amazing! It's literally everything I ever wanted in an Animorphs podcast and more. Thank you and your sister so much, it's so good and I love it with all my heart. .... .... But what I don't love is the horrifying realization that Alloran was in fact there when Visser 3 ate Elfangor. How did I not realize??

Thank you!  The podcasting pace has slowed as Cates and I have been flung around the country by jobs, but we are determined to keep it going during the times when we can get a mic and a few hours to spare.

And yeeeaaah, poor Alloran being forced to cannibalize Elfangor in #1 was probably not his best day ever.  Not sure what it says about Animorphs as a whole that that isn’t even a stand-out moment of unusual levels of body horror for the series as a whole.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Speaking of Alloran, how do you suppose other andalites treated him when he got back after the war?

So I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s something interesting (AKA yet another really good use of the andalites to comment on imperialism) in the way the andalites react to Alloran destroying the hork-bajir versus the way the andalites react to Alloran getting taken by the yeerks.

After Alloran lets the quantum virus loose on the hork-bajir homeworld, the andalite high command essentially sweeps the whole thing under the rug.  As of Andalite Chronicles, he’s certainly not at the height of his prestige — Elfangor notes how weird it is for a full war-prince to be sent to babysit to arisths on a delivery mission — but he’s also still got all of his titles and ranks.  He can do things like order a different andalite ship into an airstrike on the taxxon homeworld, and he continues to believe in the automatic superiority of the andalite cause.  Annihilating the hork-bajir is sketchy, in the andalites’ book, and it’s kind of shameful, but it’s not enough to make one, say, an abomination.

Contrast that with the way that Ax has been taught to think about Visser Three, and by extension Alloran.  Ax’s view of Alloran is dehumanizing, regarding him as this monster that represents the andalites’ greatest failure and shame.  Estrid’s team in #38 uses “eliminate Alloran at all costs” as their excuse to make it to Earth, and Ax immediately concludes that that story makes perfect sense with what he knows of the Andalite War Council.  That term — Abomination — presents Alloran as this perversion of the natural order whose mere existence is anathema to everything the andalites stand for.  But it’s not really about the existential horror of an andalite-controller.

It’s about shame.

Nobody actually comes out and says that they blame the victim in this case.  But then nobody ever actually says outright that they’re blaming the victim in any case.

Alloran comes to represent, very visibly and unavoidably, that andalites are fallible.  His loss cannot be swept under the table the way that the hork-bajir’s can, not when the yeerks are using him as their flagship host.  He is literally living proof that when you put an andalite mind and yeerk mind into the same skull, the andalite mind loses.  Alloran is an abomination, because he is the most visible failure the andalites have ever suffered.  Better to put that on Alloran himself, than to suggest that that could happen to anyone.  Because if it could happen to anyone, then andalites are all fallible, and any andalite could potentially become a controller.

He puts the lie to the very myth that he himself once upheld so well: that andalites are born superior, and therefore their actions are always just provided they are using other species for those other species’ own good.  If andalites can be controllers, then andalites are not the saviors of the galaxy by destiny, but just by chance of having the biggest guns and fastest-developing tech.  If Alloran is the only abomination who could ever be a controller, then he’s an exception that proves the rule.

Tl;dr: I don’t think he’s exactly gonna be welcomed home with flowers and parades.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

V3 often morphs in full view in a tense or even full combat situation without ever being near-helpless for a good two minutes like the Animorphs. They often rush to attack as he starts morphing only to be countered. Is Alloran a speed-focused estreen? Is Esplin through him? Or is this just the result of twenty-plus years' practice?

Iiiiiinnnnnnteresting. I hadn't considered that. Or I'd mentally classified it as a side effect of him usually going from one super-dangerous form to another even-more-dangerous form with no need to stop at "squishy human" along the way.

But you make a good point that pre-Esplin, Alloran himself seems unusually comfortable with morphing for an andalite of his cohort. He's the first andalite (after Aldrea) to approach the battle for the hork-bajir as "the arn made a bunch of monsters? Great, let's acquire those!" instead of trying to engineer space battles or bioweapons the way the other andalites are doing. In relative terms, he jumps to morphing as a solution even faster than Aldrea does, given that she's on the planet for months before she tries it and he's got a lerdethak morph and a new fondness for eating his enemies within days of arrival.

And then in Andalite Chronicles he has that "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" moment over the taxxon homeworld. He's practically gleeful — probably the most gleeful we ever see Alloran being — as he's announcing to his baby arisths that they're about to get their hooves wet, because here comes the body horror and giant centipede hunger. When we contrast that attitude to both Aldrea and Elfangor treating morphing as this strange horrifying weapon of last resort, it's pretty striking.

Anyway, I like the headcanon that Alloran's so enthusiastic because he's damn good at it (i.e. an estreen). I also like the headcanon that he's damn good at it because he's enthusiastic and adopted the tech early. Both are good.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What's your favourite Chronicles book?

Hmmmmmmm.  Man, they all have some good shit in them.  Like:

Andalite Chronicles

Pros: 

Classical-ass tragic hero stories? Check.  Jokes about Twinkies and Dr. Pepper?  Also check.

+400 to Loren for having zero warrior-skills and still THROWING A ROCK AT VISSER THREE’S HEAD because why not

+5000 to Elfangor for having All the warrior-skills and responding to this discovery by doing everything in his power to avoid fighting anyone ever

Arbron should be president

Arbron might already be president?  Depending on the political structure of Living Hive.  More research is needed.

My trash baby Alloran, setting dumpsters on fire since 1979

Cons:

Okay, look, that thing where the living asteroid just, like, gives up on being cool/unique, turns into a black hole between chapters, and no one comments on it?  Mildly annoying.

Ellimist Chronicles

Pros:

Actually makes sense?  Which should be by all rights impossible given the premise of this book?

Most excellent subtle jabs at gamer culture

Most excellent subtle praise of gamer culture

Straight-up saves the universe with song, dance, and the power of friendship

Cons:

Tbh kinda boring during all the parts where Rachel isn’t present

Not enough Alloran

Visser

Pros:

Eva.  End of sentence.

Good way to keep the existential terror at bay by reading this just before bed and giving oneself nightmares that way instead :)

Eva

Excellent for cleaning out the tear ducts through vigorous washing

Also Eva

Really terrifying depictions of evil from the inside in a way that is more subtle and adult than pretty much anything else in the series

Final point in its favor: Eva.

Cons:

More volleyball than expected

Alloran is present for most of the book, but doesn’t say anything.

Hork-Bajir Chronicles

Pros:

Critiques of imperialism that will rewire your brain forever.

Good monsters.  The best monsters.  In fact, some of the best monsters get to tell the story this time.

(Not you Dak you’re doing great.)

My trash baby Alloran, living in a dumpster and setting turds on fire since 1963

Aldrea being also a highly excellent and also frequently terrible representation of andalitity

Chadoos

Cons:

EVERYBODY who is even reasonably likable in THIS ENTIRE BOOK dies horribly at the end (and no I’m not counting Alloran in that statement because he’s the one who set the dumpster on fire)

They named... their child... Seerow?  What, were the names ‘Esplin 9466′ and ‘Weworst name you could give to a hork-bajir kid born in the middle of the yeerk war, there is no getting any worse than that.

Okay, on second thought, it could’ve been worse.  They could’ve named their hork-bajir kid ‘Alloran.’

Final consensus?  I vote Andalite Chronicles.  But Visser is a close second for me.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What do you think would have happened with Alloran after the end of war? Would his wife Jahar and their two unnamed children have (eventually) welcomed him back, or would he be on his own and looking for a new purpose in the universe for the rest of his life?

Answered here!

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

There's this kind of... idk, poetic? philosophical? streak to some of the things Alloran says and it fascinates me. This and designing a ship. He's got this disdain in TAC for warriors learning science and art but he's not just a brute himself.

YES TO ALL OF THIS.  One of the many reasons I find Alloran fascinating: We get so many tiny details about him that hint at multitudes, and most of the time they’re given up incidentally.  It starts as early as that moment of genuine hesitancy — genuine uncertainty — before he gives Ax his name in #8, and it continues all the way through the Animorphs straight-up forgetting he’s there in #54 until he steps in to help Ax.

The character is — for lack of a better descriptor — deeply human.  He custom-designs his fighter and names it after his estranged wife.  He awkwardly comforts Loren after Chapman is casually ableist toward her father.  He has these tiny bursts of genuine emotion: snapping his tail like a little kid just after being freed from Visser Three, revealing to Elfangor that he is not just angry but deeply pained by the Andalite Electorate’s rejection after the hork-bajir massacre, giving Arbron that field promotion with honors in an effort to soften the blow (to Elfangor more than Arbron himself) that an andalite fighter housing two squishy biped charges is no place for a taxxon-nothlit, etcetera.

...which is disturbing, in light of the fact that he’s also a monster.  He views the hork-bajir species and culture as a natural resource of which he can deprive the yeerks, incidentally annihilating an entire people to hurt a different species.  He wants to dump a yeerk pool with hundreds of thousands of civilian yeerks because, well, just because.  He’s some guy.  He gets up in the morning, puts his shoes on one at a time (metaphorically speaking), nerds out about science or art for a bit, and demonstrates the capability to commit genocide with a wave of the hand.

He’s an object lesson in the fact that a few individual acts of compassion or selflessness do not balance some cosmic scale against enormous acts of evil.  That you can think of yourself as a good person, and even do good deeds, and still be a butcher and an abomination.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

DVD Commentary: It was all misdirection, of course. All designed to keep the vultures focused on the image of “Visser Three and Visser One, United at Last,” as one tabloid had so tastelessly put it, rather than on the billion and one horrifically personal questions that the world had for Alloran at the moment. Not that Mr. Bad-Ass War-Prince I-Have-More-Monster-Morphs-Than-Anyone-Else-Alive would ever be nervous in front of the media of a foreign species, of course."

DVD Commentary: When writing Total Recall, I made a fairly conscious decision to mention Alloran after having debated with myself for a while about whether or not to include him.  Because — as I mentioned in A Straight Line — it was always going to be Alloran affiliated with Matter Over Mind, or the hork-bajir affiliated with Matter Over Mind.  Nary the twain shall meet, and anything short of that felt disrespectful to the hork-bajir’s history.

Anyway, two factors pushed me toward including Alloran.  The first was rereading #23 and being struck all over again by Toby’s ultra-firm “no gods, no kings, no masters, no humans” stance when it comes to the hork-bajir, which leads me to believe that post-war hork-bajir might be willing to work with human organizations on occasion, but that they probably wouldn’t be joining human organizations en masse.  The second factor was rereading a fic (which has since been deleted, proof that the Ellimist hates us) about Eva coming to find Alloran after the end of the war because they both recognize that they need to give up on their old lives — Alloran because his whole species disavowed him, Eva because she’s come to realize that Peter will be happier with Nora – and deciding to help each other figure out next steps together.  I loved that story, it was part of the inspiration for Eleutherophobia, and if anyone knows of anywhere else it might still exist now that it’s no longer on fanfiction.net, please let me know.

So that led me to conclude that a) I’m fascinated by the possibilities of an Eva-Alloran friendship, b) a lot of what I love about Toby is her fierce independence, and c) Alloran is my trash baby.  I wrote him into Total Recall, I wrote him into Thing from Another World, and I have a million more headcanons about what he’s up to in the background of the Eleutherophobia ‘verse.  I do really love how much Alloran is all about show and Eva is all about substance.  And seriously if anyone knows of a different home for that fic please please let me know.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Oooh, that's interesting. I was thinking more about the contrast between Eva and Alloran, because the first time we meet Alloran, he's hurt, poisoned, terrorized, and begging for death. The first time we meet Eva, she's also hurt and terrorized, but she manages to hold herself together and walk right back into slavery for the sake of the planet. Alloran was a soldier and General Ripper. Eva? We don't really know, but definitely a suburban housewife who went through hell and came out stronger.

To follow up here, I do headcanon that Eva’s a full-time mom before the war.  Partially because there aren’t nearly enough stories about kickass empire-toppling full-time parents.  Partially because, as I said, motherhood is so freaking important to Eva in Visser.  Partially because we don’t hear about Eva having a job pre-invasion.  Given that Applegate manages to sneak in professions for even minor characters like Jake’s mom and Rachel’s dad even though neither one of them features in more than three scenes before being infested in #49, it’s probably safe to say that if she’d really wanted to establish Eva’s career then she would’ve found a way.

And if Tom has minimal identity when he’s infested, Alloran has a very disorganized and distorted identity when he’s taken.  We see in Hork-Bajir Chronicles that when it comes to andalite-superiority rhetoric, Alloran is the most dedicated zealot in the whole colonialism machine.  He believes in helping the Andalite Empire Electorate so hard that he’s willing to kill and die and fucking commit genocide for the betterment of his species.  But then Alloran does, in fact, commit genocide… and the very propaganda machine that he worships immediately turns against him.

In Andalite Chronicles, Alloran’s bitter raving about how he was the only one brave enough to make the sacrifice play with the quantum virus seems like, well, just a bunch of bitter raving.  However, with the context of HBC and also #38, we start to see that he has a point about being just the guy who pulled the trigger.  Over a dozen andalites help to engineer, package, ship, store, and prime a quantum virus that just happens to kill hork-bajir.  Every andalite on the hork-bajir homeworld except Aldrea knows about the virus before it’s released.  But Alloran is the only one who gets the credit and the blame.  Alloran deserves a lot of blame, to be sure — he had the authority to prevent the virus at like 15 places in the plan and never once tried to stop it — but the idea that he went rogue and acted alone is straight-up propaganda.  Real governments do this all the freaking time: they order state-sponsored atrocities and then blame alleged bad eggs within the organization.

Not only did Alloran have a lot of help in killing the hork-bajir, he also recognizes that the Electorate never actually stopped pulling this bullshit.  A good thirty years later, after having allegedly washed their hands of the “Butcher of Hork-Bajir” bad egg from last time, the Electorate’s War Council sends Alloran’s own brother to go be Alloran 2.0 in #38.  And it’s fascinating that they use eliminating the bad egg, i.e. Assassinate the Abomination, as their cover story while planning a second imperialistic genocide.  (To be clear, Arbat saw what happened to Big Bro after Alloran became the face of the last “protect them from Communism controllers by killing them” action.  He gets that the War Council gave him a ship and a quantum virus and a set of orders, but that the War Council will reward him by claiming he went rogue and became a monster just like his brother.)

However, unlike Arbat in #38, Alloran actually believes in HBC that he’s on the right side of history and that history will see it that way.  And then time passes, and history happens, and he’s not vindicated or rewarded.  In AC, he’s shunned by his own beloved culture, sent to die on some foreign planet under a fool’s errand.  No one comes along to say “it was hard but you did the right thing” or at the very least “it’s not like you deserve 100% of the blame;” they just keep right on pretending that Alloran got the quantum virus and the idea to use it out of nowhere.  And it’s under those circumstances that Alloran gets betrayed by his own aristh, outmaneuvered by an alien child that he considers no better than a dumb animal, and infested with a yeerk who (if possible) believes in the myth of andalite superiority even more than Alloran himself does.

So yeah.  Alloran has an identity in HBC, and it’s being The Best Andalite Prince There Ever Was, here to save all the lesser species from barbarism by way of might-makes-right.  He has a collection of delusions in AC, but I’m not sure he has a clearly formed identity anymore.  And then the twain converge: Alloran meets Esplin 9466, living proof of the extreme bullshit underpinning the idea of andalites as saviors.  What I wouldn’t give to see the interaction in which those two discover (to their mutual horror) just how much they have in common.

Alloran spends the next 15 - 20 years being used as a tool by the yeerks to hurt the andalites.  Small wonder that the only way out he can see in #8 is for Ax to kill him.  He does learn and grow.  He eventually becomes the kind of person who goes to bat against the Electorate out of loyalty to a human war-prince (#54).  But he goes through a very personal hell in the interim, and that’s a lot of what we see in #8.

I also think that that timing is no accident.  We see Chapman almost incapable of intentional movement in #2, Tom groveling to his captors in #6, a whole bunch of hosts rendered helpless with despair in #7, Unnamed Ex-Host Lady unable to function even after being freed in MM1, and then Alloran begging for death in #8.  All of these moments help to establish controllerdom as this horrific atrocity that must be stopped at all costs.  HOWEVER, we also see William Roger Tennant saving Marco’s life by fighting off a yeerk command in #35, various hosts risking death to shield the Animorphs with their bodies in #38, Eva kicking ass while still a controller in Visser, and Arbron and Toby leading a crapton of hosts in rebellion in #53.  By that point in the series, we get the point that being a controller is TERRIFYING AS FUCK.  Using characters like Eva and Arbron, Applegate shows us that hope and personal integrity and even abolitionist revolution are still possible even under those circumstances.