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hatingfromacrackedscreen · 8 months

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One of my favorite things about the Animorphs rotating pov is how you get to see character development happening so subtly but from so many different angles. One of my favorite examples is with Cassie & Marco’s relationship, from when she left the team to the David Arc (books 19-22), and how it explains so much of their dynamic for the rest of the series.

Marco and Cassie have one of the most interesting dynamics out of the Animorphs because of how often they disagree over conflicts/strategy, but also because of the fact that they usually end up being the de facto strategists of the team (They also both are like, in love with Jake, which also leads to really interesting moments but this isn’t about that). Naturally this puts them at odds with each other often, especially during Book #19. Cassie quits the team and voluntarily infests herself so she doesn’t have to kill Karen, something that Marco doesn’t understand and also is upset about, because now he may have to kill Cassie. After book’s end Cassie makes it back to the team and Aftran begins the peace movement. There’s a lot of threads that contribute to spiral from the book, and Cassie and Marco’s relationship is one of the subtler ones. What’s important to note is that the next book, book #20, is a Marco pov. We get to see his thoughts, and all is not forgiven. He reminisces about the recent Cassie-related events, and says something along the lines of “yeah I’m not really chill with her after the shit she pulled with Aftran.” Which I support Cassie fully, but fair enough! Not only did Cassie voluntarily cause their biggest security breach at the moment, but also he thought he, a 14 year old, was now going to have to kill his friend, another 14 year old. I would be pissed too. (Also this is another great subtle narrative thread leading into the David Arc, which derives its most central tension from this same dilemma)

However the culmination of the Cassie Marco tension comes not from either of their own pov, but from the next book, book 21 which is a Jake pov. The Animorphs all morph bugs to break into a hotel that has a Yeerk conspiracy involved, and they come close to the 2 hour limit. They all morph back successfully except Marco (the weakest morpher) who is stuck as a several foot tall giant grotesque flea. Everyone’s freaking out, but it’s Cassie who’s comes forward, places a hand on Marco, and soothingly guides him through his sheer panic, and into demorphing back to his human self. After Marco breaks down and sobs on Cassie, and Jake even notes he’s never seen Marco cry like that. Which is significant since Jake has known Marco grieving through his mother “dying”. Jake doesn’t note it, because it’s a situation he doesn’t even know about, but in this moment Marco forgives Cassie. Marco never gives her shit for the Aftran situation again, either in his narration or in others. And I love that it’s something that’s not explicitly said by Jake in this book, or Marco or Cassie in later ones, but all of the resolution of that tension between them beautify resolves in a book that’s not either of their povs and doesn’t even explicitly mention it.

Not only is that a knack to Animorphs’ character writing, but it sets the foundation for their relationship going forward. It’s why Cassie still goes to talk to Marco in Book #35 through his issues with his dad remarrying, and he ridicules her a bit but hears her out. And then by series end, when Cassie gives the morphing cube away to the Yeerks, and Jake tells everyone. Is Mr. Marco “ruthless bright line from A to B” pissed at her? No he’s over it and back to being chums with her. Because that’s Cassie his bestie now❤️ And I love that no matter how often they’re at conflict later in the series, after the flea incident it never gets as serious in Marcos narration as it was to him before, in book #20. Animorphs’ character writing amongst multiple povs is just so so soo good.

#cassie and Marco are always one of my favorite underrated animorphs dynamics #THEYRE SO INTERESTING #I love Cassie and Rachel’s relationship more prbly but I do think Cassie and Marco are more interesting foils #Animorphs #cassie animorphs #Marco animorphs #Jake animorphs #animorphs meta #Cassie&Marco #animorphs 19 #animorphs 20 #animorphs 21 #who asked?

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kiwisandcoconuts · 6 months

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Hes so lofi girl coded

#animorphs fanart #animorphs jake #animorphs #my art #fanart #lofi girl #shitpost #guys hes making war plans #in his pretty princess era #help my drawing tablets broken and I'm running out of stored up animorphs drawings #the quality is shit #animorphs meta

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lorenfangor · 2 years

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Rachel’s relationship with shopping isn’t actually about her feeling validated by it.

She’s not an airhead fashionista mall-crawler in her own narration, or in her interactions with Tobias and Cassie. She treats shopping like it’s a challenge, like it’s a game to be won with the sales and the deals. She dresses up for social clout and power, not to fit in with a trend.

canonically, she’s not particularly concerned with popularity. she’s not on the cheer squad, she doesn’t hang out with shallow girls, she avoids the pitfalls of parties and dates that other preps would get tripped up by. she thrives on showing up to the homecoming dance with the Hot Mysterious Boy on her arm while also being the hottest girl in school, but it’s a performance. her femininity isn’t rooted in gender presentation - she feels more herself in the body of a male eagle or grizzly bear than in a pastel pink mini with a made-up face. she’d never go out dressed in something ugly or badly fitting, but it’s not just because she has standards

her relationship to the mall, and to fashion, and to shopping, is about putting on a facade. it’s fun to play dress-up. it’s fun to take up space and command attention. it’s exaggerating femininity for the purposes of personal enjoyment. it’s drag, almost.

and you can see this in her internal narration! she uses the mall as an excuse to spend time with people and scratch an itch, she’s not constantly worried about her hair or her makeup - and those do take effort to maintain, particularly if you have a foundation that loves to settle into all the fine lines. Jake and Tobias and Cassie see more in her before her polished facade, Marco’s the one who primarily characterizes her as “Miss Teen Model” and a mall-crawler, and that’s because Marco really wishes he could get the kind of positive male attention Rachel gets.

If Marco were Rachel, he would be shallow and obsessed with looking pretty and flirting with boys, so Marco assigns that importance to Rachel in his own narration. but she doesn’t like Flirting With Boys, and he doesn’t like girls or really understand the high of being the hottest person in the room, so they’re always at cross-purposes. Tobias is, as usual, the only one who sees all of Rachel at once, and the only one who ever truly glories in how herself she is when she’s in morph.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #rachel berenson #rachel/tobias #just to be safe

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featherquillpen · 2 years

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Animorphs hills I will die on:

Cassie killed the cop in book 1

Rachel killed David in book 48

Tobias got trapped in morph accidentally-on-purpose in book 1 and the Ellimist made him a baseline hawk in book 13 because that's what he actually wanted

The Animorphs survived ramming the Blade Ship in book 54

Seers are not actually all-around "smarter" than other Hork-Bajir, they simply excel in a few particular skills—most importantly, rapid language acquisition

Even if the Animorphs hadn't fucked up and had managed to house David with the Chee, etc., they would have had to kill/nothlit him eventually

The dawn of the Yeerk Empire is not Prince Seerow's fault; it is the fault of the Andalite military institutionally for landing and building bases on a planet of Stone Age technology sentients who weren't bothering anybody else

#animorphs #animorphs meta

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goodgrammaritan · 1 year

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@thejakeformerlyknownasprince @blessedislandofgoodboots

#Animorphs #willy wonka #animorphs meta #polls #animorphs polls #this just looked fun

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rays-animorphs · 1 year

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I’m thinking about something.

So, I’ve been reading some of Chuck Tingle’s non-erotic choose your own adventure books, and he really hammers home the “love is real” message. Whatever that means. Anyways, I’ve been thinking that one of the most important messages stories can have is “pain is real”. I believe you. Your pain matters. I see you.

And I think that’s actually the core message of Animorphs. Your pain matters.

Why is war such a central theme in the books, even though the target audience 1. live in a country that hasn’t had an at-home war in some time and 2. won’t go away to war for several years at least? How is war relevant to their lives? It’s relevant because war is a relatively easy way to understand trauma. The real theme isn’t war at all. Because kids (who live in a country that hasn’t had a war on its soil any time recently) don’t need to read fifty odd books conducting an in depth exploration of the theme of war. But lots and lots of kids have experienced trauma and need a way to make sense of it.

And it doesn’t matter what the trauma is, whether it’s related to family strife or not having a family or verbal abuse or physical abuse or sexual abuse or painful and invasive medical procedures or cops in your neighborhood who are very much not there to keep people like you safe or seeing someone die or something else entirely. Pain is pain. Pain is real.

#animorphs meta #pain is real

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theidiotabides · 10 months

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Would really love to hear about the angsty marcotobias fic if you're interested in sharing. 👀

Oh gosh, I feel like I'd have to actually write it for it to make sense because like 80% of it is subtext, but here's some rambling in that general direction.

I'm chiefly interested in the ways in which Marco & Tobias are actually incredibly similar -- their senses of humor, their attractions, their complete direspect for authority, and most importantly how they both lowkey hate themselves but insist on survival anyway, largely out of spite -- but how they treat their similarity as, like, a cautionary tale rather than the basis for a healthy connection that it could be.

Like, Tobias disappearing into the woods and giving up on everybody is exactly the kind of behavior that Marco finds incredibly triggering, having lived through it with his dad. Marco would never walk away from his remaining loved ones like that, especially in the post-war world where he's charged himself with being the public face of the Animorphs because somebody has to. But there is absolutely a part of him that wants to give up and disappear; ya boi is tired.

Meanwhile, I think Tobias sees Marco's devotion to Jake and refusal to abandon him even after how Rachel died (which Tobias blames Jake for) as a version of the hero worship complex Tobias used to have about Jake -- like, I think Tobias sees Marco as being too devoted to Jake to see "the truth" about him, and he pities that in Marco. But at the same time, Tobias envies Marco's close personal connections, and I think on some level he knows that the only way to get to that place would be to work through his anger at Jake to get to his anger at Rachel, and he just can't bring himself to do that. It's easier to stay mad.

And then there's the question of Rachel herself, whom they were both deeply invested in trying to keep alive at the end of the war. Like, we see this explicitly from Tobias, with his "just be Rachel" and constant emotional check-ins with her, but I don't think Marco gets enough credit for his active role in keeping her literally alive. Dude bodily removed her from battles, at risk to his own life, and I just refuse to believe that's not something Marco & Tobias talked about, given how much time they spent together in Ax's scoop during that period of time between Marco's fake death & the move to the valley. Rachel is both a mutual love and a mutual failure for them (and that level of mutual devotion to a third person gives my polyamorous ass A Lot of Feelings).

Basically I think there's a lot of respect and love between Tobias and Marco, but they can't get to it because it would require each of them to deal with Rachel-related guilt and confront parts of themselves that they don't want to acknowledge.

...so I want to get them high on Marco's fancy penthouse balcony and make them kiss about it

#when I say “their attractions” I mean both of them are in love with both Rachel & Jake because they are Berenson-sexual #also I cannot be the only person who headcanons that The Scoop Boys were weed smokers #like maybe when it was just Ax & Tobias they were more straight edge but as soon as Marco was living there they were lighting up guaranteed #I have never met any 16-year-old who spent that much time either programming or hanging out in the woods who was not a pothead #I bet they were all absolutely high af when they hacked the CIA #I bet Marco used CIA employee credit cards to order pizza while Tobias and Ax giggled and shushed each other in the background #I also have a lot of Feelings about the role that Marco plays in helping Tobias rescue Loren in 49 #like there's this line where Marco says that Jake sent him & Ax to check on Tobias & I Do Not Believe It #Jake was losing his shit over his family at the time; he just let Tobias fly off alone & he spends the whole next book abdicating leadershi #Jake did not so much as consider the possibility that Tobias would stage a solo rescue mission; meanwhile Marco was fully expecting it #Marco absolutely took his own initiative in rallying Ax to help Tobias & then credited Jake for it because he didn't want to be Seen Caring #I also have like 10% of a fic about this btw but it's mostly centered on Jake #animorphs meta #animorphs #tobias animorphs #marco animorphs #marcotobias

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l-egionaire · 9 months

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This feels like such an odd line to come from Ax. Like, yeah it's established Andalite's have a lot of sexism and stuff in their military but...unlike his stuff with disabled people, Ax has never once shown any surprise or anything at the idea of women fighting. Hell, he's been fighting with Cassie and Rachel for a few years at that point without showing any shock at their combat or morphing skills. So, why does Estrid being a warrior surprise him so much? Is it because she's an Andalite and he's shocked a female Andalite is a warrior? Like, a female human being a warrior isn't surprising to him but a female Andalitr warrior is?

#Animorphs #The Arrival #Visser three #aximili esgarrouth isthill #Ax #Estrid #rachel berenson #cassie animorphs #Animorphs meta

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fist-fullofstars · 2 years

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i read all the animorphs books in 5 days and im just gonna say it *breathes*

the books routinely do rachel so dirty she’s so well characterized and then in half of the ghostwritten books it’s like “omg rachel’s such a megalomaniac she just loves power/violence” and sometiems even contradicts the other ghostwritten rachel books they never do this to the men im kicking and screaming and crying rachel animorphs deserves better

#rachel animorphs #animorphs meta #rachel berenson #my beloved #animorphs #textpost

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 6 months

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What I was wondering in particular about Percy Jackson is- on paper, it seems like it would have the same sort of seriousness as Animorphs going for it. Heroes die during battles. They fight and kill humans. The overarching conflict is morally grey. But Animorphs somehow *feels* darker, *feels* more real, and I can’t put my finger on why, and I was hoping you had insight.

One word: consequences.

Many words: In Percy Jackson, killing a monster momentarily inconveniences that monster - it'll be back in a few months. In Animorphs, killing a monster means killing a person with friends and family who will now miss that person who is gone forever - oh, and every time you kill a monster, you also kill an innocent prisoner of war.

Percy Jackson has a major plot hinging on Luke betraying his friends for reasons that are sympathetic as well as selfish, but when Luke chooses to die to save his species, it's implied that Luke has earned Elysium. Animorphs has a major plot hinging on David betraying his friends for reasons that are sympathetic as well as selfish, and this leaves his friends with no choice but to trap him in eternal body horror until such time as Rachel is implied to have killed him. It's canon that on death, Animorphs - including Rachel - "dissolve into nothing." Percy has to choose between letting Annabeth die and letting Kronos take Earth, but finds a third way out where no one dies. Marco has to choose between letting his mom die and letting Visser One take Earth - and then murders his mom. The Animorphs are tortured by the assumption they won't live to adulthood; Percy is tortured by the question of how to use immortality responsibly. So on.

#animorphs #percy jackson #violence #percy jackon and the olympians #animorphs meta #i think both types of stories work #you just have to be CONSISTENT about it [side-eyes umbrella academy]

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krakendra · 1 year

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Esplin, my guy, you're a big weirdo.

Does his conviction that an andalite would morph into a cat mean that Alloran is ALSO a cat fan?

#esplin and alloran agree on ONE thing and that is that they would be cat ladies if they weren't busy #animorphs #animorphs meta

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acavatica · 1 year

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If theres an andalite social hierarchy, then is there an intelligent species social hierarchy? hmmm

Not entirely sure what you mean, but I'd argue there's a social hierarchy any time at least one species can recognize the personhood of the other.

If you mean "do the Andalites have a hierarchy for the other species they know," then yes, absolutely. It's probably based on how much like Andalites the other species are perceived to be. I'd argue that without Seerow, the Andalites would never have accepted the sapience of the Yeerks, and even beyond that, that the Yeerks had to show they were a military threat to gain that recognition and the potential to improve their status. After all, if two countries are at war, they're more equal than if one is subjugating the other.

We don't know enough about the other species to know how the Andalites relate to them. I would imagine the Leerans would have fairly high standing, but the Andalites would keep them at a distance. A chilly, but respectful political relationship. They didn't value the Hork-Bajir based on their perceived intellect. They are openly disgusted by the Taxxons. They're still on the fence about humans, but at least they do look like half an Andalite.

#animorphs meta #andalites #fictional politics #i could probably talk more about this

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lorenfangor · 2 years

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something that I wish was more discussed about meta and assorted conversations centered around “Andalite imperialism” (in quotes because as I’ve argued before I think this is much more of a personal read than the objective canonical fact) is that the Yeerks are often perceived as more victimized by their government than the Andalites are, in a way that skews interpretations in their favor.

What I mean is this - whether or not a cog in the imperial machine personally agrees with every single value espoused by that machine, whether or not they’re a good person, whether or not they’re kind and compassionate - this doesn’t actually prevent them from doing harm, or believing most of what’s being taught without examining it. We see this with Aftran, to an extent, where she doesn’t actually start to disbelieve until Cassie’s sacrifice but she wasn’t ever a huge fan of the Yeerk Empire before. Same with the Yeerks from 8 who were in love. Sure, they’re good people? but they’re soldiers in a war just the same, and no matter how much they regret or how victimized or personally wounded they feel they’re leaps and bounds better off than their slaves and prisoners. ultimately what they’re doing is still incredibly evil and simply defeating them in war won’t end their ideologies or dissuade them from rallying and trying again in a century or so.

and this is relevant to discussions of the Andalites because so much fan conversation paints them as gleeful, willing collaborators for an imperial cause. In so many cases, it doesn’t seem to matter how good they are, or how disconnected from the war machine they are, or how badly they want to process the trauma of war, they can’t escape being tarred with the same brush as Lirem or Arbat. Yeerk grooming and propaganda is something Yeerks can’t help but believe and they’d be good people if the Empire was gone, but Andalite grooming and propaganda indicates deep problems in the core beliefs of the whole society, things every single citizen must tackle and unpack before they pass the “good enough” mark.

and that’s baffling to me, because one group is a pre-9/11 commentary on the US during the Vietnam War and the other are slavers with no scruples about mass murder on a truly galactic scale. one group has committed genocide, yeah, but it was both accidental (don’t forget that the Yeerks attacking the lab were what caused the quantum virus to be released! making a weapon of mass destruction and using it are two different things!) and the great shame of their military. the Yeerks have committed far vaster and more damaging crimes. they aren’t scrappy underdogs being poisoned from the top, they’re a rabidly fascist police state and most of their citizens DO believe in the ideals being taught to them. Yeerks might be scared of their superiors but the majority aren’t conscientious objectors advocating for nonviolence or joining the Peace Movement. every individual Yeerk is just as complicit, canonically, as fandom analysis says the Andalites are.

I’m wondering if the Yeerks are easier to sympathize with because their government is so much more obviously in the wrong and oppressive, and we see a lot more fear and uncertainty in their ranks because of how the Council of Thirteen functions, while the Andalite military and electorate are much more nebulous and subtle in their flaws. there’s probably a lot of personal guilt too, recognizing the things about America that are easy to hate in how they behave. but the Yeerks have a lot of those same problems too, so maybe that conclusion is incorrect. hm. more thoughts to follow probably.

#animorphs #animorphs meta

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featherquillpen · 2 years

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"a world of indescribable beauty": an animorphs meta

In Book #19 The Departure, we finally hear a perspective from a Yeerk, Aftran 942, about why the Yeerks left their planet and began conquering other species as hosts. One of the reasons she gives is Andalite imperialism, which makes a lot of sense: the Andalites began occupying and building military bases on the Yeerk planet before the Yeerks posed any kind of threat to them. This obviously doesn't justify enslaving other species, but it is certainly a reason why the Yeerks won't just go home to their pools: they would be submitting themselves to utter Andalite domination.

But there's another reason Aftran gives that is given a lot more emphasis within the story. It goes like this:

“In our natural state, we have an excellent sense of smell. We have a good sense of touch. We can hear. We can communicate, using a language of ultrasonic squeaks. But we cannot see. We are blind, until we enter a host. Over the millennia we have moved up the evolutionary chain to more and more advanced hosts. Eventually, the Gedds became our basic host bodies.

“They are clumsy, slow creatures. But they have eyes. Oh, you can’t imagine! You can’t imagine the first time you enter a Gedd brain and seize control and suddenly, you are seeing! Seeing! Colors! Shapes! It’s a miracle. To be blind and then to see!”

Suddenly she stooped down and snatched up a caterpillar from a leaf. “Do you see this? This is what I am, without a host body. Helpless! Weak! Blind!” She spun and pointed at the meadow. “Do you see those flowers? Do you see the sunlight? Do you see the birds flying? You hate me for wanting that? You hate me because I won’t spend my life blind? You hate me because I won’t spend my life swimming endlessly in a sea of sludge, while humans like you live in a world of indescribable beauty?”

Aftran says that Yeerks want to infest host bodies because Yeerk pools are disgusting and vision is magical. She takes Cassie on a journey in this book of becoming a caterpillar, nearly blind, and coming to appreciate once more the glory of her vision.

For years I have known that this narrative is contemptibly ableist, positioning a blind life as a terrible life worth enslaving others in order to escape. But after reading the book An Immense World by Ed Yong, a book about how animals perceive the world through a dozen different senses, I think this narrative presented in book 19 and throughout the Animorphs series is not just ableist, but also betrays disdain, ignorance, and contempt for the astonishing and beautiful diversity of animal perception - a very poor move for a book series very much about the beauty of animal diversity.

The sensory world of a Yeerk

Aftran tells us about the senses Yeerks have, and we see them from Cassie's point of view in book 29 and Visser Three's point of view in The Hork Bajir Chronicles as well. They have an excellent sense of smell, a good sense of touch, they can hear, and they can echolocate. They may have other senses that Aftran didn't list, such as heat-sensing (to find Kandrona rays, perhaps) or electroception. But let's stick to the ones we know they have.

Smell, as shown in the books like book 1 and 21 where a point of view character morphs a dog, is a remarkable sense. While our eyes can only detect three colors in various combinations, a sense of smell could differentiate thousands upon thousands of unique scents. In aquatic environments, like where a Yeerk lives, a strong sense of smell can be used for navigation: different areas of water with different dissolved nutrients will smell different, creating a scent-scape. Smell also has a time dimension that vision does not. People and things leave trails of smell behind, which means a keen sense of smell can delve into the past. Approaching beings have a wave-front of smell in front of them, so you can also smell what's coming, sometimes from a very long way away, if the scent molecule is very small and volatile. More than any other sense, smell gives you access to the past, present, and future of a place.

In water especially, a sense of touch can create a fantastically nuanced sense of the world around you. Since Yeerks swim, they likely have touch receptors that give them a sense of flow, like the lateral lines of fish. In the ocean, everything is touching each other at a distance through the medium of water, via the currents created by swimming. The same would be true in a Yeerk pool: a Yeerk would likely be able to feel everything and everyone moving around it, each wriggle of a fellow Yeerk felt on the skin like a caress.

Our closest template for the Yeerks' underwater sonar shown in book 29 is the sonar of dolphins, which is even more remarkable than Applegrant showed in the various books where the Animorphs become dolphins. If Yeerk sonar is like dolphin sonar, then they are living medical scanners: their sonar can penetrate flesh to internal organs, as long as they are underwater. They would be able to perhaps hear the brain of a submerged host, or at least the skull. They would sense the contours of things buried in the sediment below the water. Sonar is very finely tuned because those who use it can adjust the frequency, length, pitch, and volume of their calls depending on what they want to detect. Imagine if you could "tune" your vision to different wavelengths: that's what sonar is like.

From all this, I think we can draw only one conclusion. That "world of indescribable beauty" where Aftran says that humans live? The Yeerks lived in one, too. It was just a different world with different indescribable beauty.

The problem with centering vision

First of all, let me be clear: the worst part about this narrative, in book 19 and throughout the Animorphs series, is that it's ableist. It's incredibly cruel to blind readers to suggest that they live in a world without beauty. This cruelty shows in the way book 49 treats a human blind character, Loren, who is also depicted as having an impoverished life-- not so much because she is literally dirt poor, but because she's longing for sight, which Tobias provides her via the morphing power.

But there is another big problem: this narrative undermines a lot of the key themes that Animorphs is trying to communicate.

Within book 19 itself, the passage I quoted above is trying to make Aftran more sympathetic. She's not just a monster who enjoys controlling and dominating others; she infests hosts for a supposedly good reason: because her sensory world is devoid of beauty and joy and hosts give her access to it. It's a turning point in the story for how we view this character. But if we reject the premise that a Yeerk's life in a pool is dreary and joyless because it is not sighted, Aftran here becomes very unsympathetic. Like a colonizer who already has a countryside manor but also wants a cottage on a tropical beach, Aftran already lives in a world of indescribable beauty, but she wants to exploit other people so she can experience the beauty of their worlds in addition to her own.

One of the core themes of Animorphs is the beauty and wonder of biodiversity. Aftran celebrates the beauty of the meadow in the passage above from book 19. When the Animorphs morph dogs (book 1), their sense of smell is a wonder; when they morph dolphin (book 4), their sonar is a miracle. But when Yeerks rely on those same senses, they’re inherently inferior to vision.

For a long, frozen moment of disbelief, I did not know what was happening. I didn’t understand what my brain was receiving.

How could I? How could any Yeerk who has not had a host?

Sight!

Objects - not felt, not smelled, not reflected on sonar - but seen. It was like a sonar image, but oh, so much more. So much!

(The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Chapter 5)

Which one is it, Applegrant? Is the diversity of perception a good thing, or is vision the best sense and everything else a distant second? You can’t have it both ways.

The third problem is that this narrative undermines another core theme of Animorphs: anti-imperialism. This deserves its own section for a deep dive.

Anti-imperialism and the diversity of embodiment

Anti-imperialism is a core theme of Animorphs. K.A. Applegate’s father served in Vietnam. Parallels are drawn throughout the series between the Andalite-Yeerk war and proxy wars between the U.S. and the Soviet Union: the Vietnam War (in The Andalite Chronicles) and the first Gulf War (in Visser.) The Andalites and the Yeerks are like the Americans and the Soviets, causing immense suffering on other planets in their proxy wars over species that they consider either slaves or necessary sacrifices.

One of the ways that empire works is that the bodies of imperial subjects are designated inferior and in need of correction. For example, in the U.S., natural Black hair is considered to be inherently “unprofessional,” and in many professions it must be shaved down or chemically straightened to be “professional.” Now, the Yeerks are themselves imperialists, but before they became the Yeerk Empire, they were occupied by an Andalite military force that considered their bodies to be disgusting and inferior before any Yeerk had ever raised a weapon against them:

«Orders are to avoid incidents,» another Andalite said. «Don’t you know these parasites are our brothers?» This was said with a sneer.

The Gedds moved closer.

«Orders or not, these filthy slugs are not touching my ship.»

(The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, chapter 1)

This is exactly how empires work. It’s good writing. But then we run into a problem, which is that every Yeerk we meet in the series agrees with the Andalites that their bodies and their senses are inferior. Aftran speaks disparagingly of “swimming endlessly in a sea of sludge,” which is the Yeerks’ natural state, but humans and Andalites consider disgusting. Aftran, Visser Three, and other Yeerks think vision, an important sense for Andalites and humans, is superior to sonar, an important sense for Yeerks. In the entire series, we never meet a single Yeerk who enjoys being a slug, living in a pool, and perceiving with Yeerk senses. They are all eager to either enslave host bodies or use the morphing power to permanently change their bodies. The series justifies the Andalites’ imperialist beliefs: the Yeerks agree that their bodies are in need of correction.

Celebrating the diversity of embodiment, lifting up all bodies as different and equal, is an anti-imperialist message. What Animorphs gives us by depicting (abled) human and Andalite bodies as enviable and Yeerk and Taxxon bodies as hellish prisons to be escaped at any cost, is an imperialist message.

How to fix it

The series has been done for twenty years now, but we’re all fans here, and we like to transform our favorite works. I’ve done a lot of work in my series Dæmorphing to fix this narrative, and I think there are a lot of opportunities to do so in fic and fanart.

Be realistic about animal perception. Applegrant do a much better job than most authors on researching animals and trying to depict them realistically, but they still tend to overplay the role of vision in the various animals the Animorphs become. For example, when Ax and Marco morph wolf spider, vision is emphasized as an important sense for them, when in fact touch/vibration is much more important to them when they hunt.

Depict aliens (and humans!) who prefer other senses to vision. There’s an opportunity to do this with Loren, a blind human given an ableist narrative in canon, and Elena, a blind girl the Animorphs rescue in book 51. You could also depict a Yeerk who experiences vision via a host and decides they like their own senses better.

Show Yeerks as victims of empire, not victims of their own bodies. I think this interaction that Ax has with a Yeerk in book 52 is very revealing. He’s caught a Yeerk in falcon morph who wants to stay in that morph and become a nothlit.

«I will be free,» the falcon insisted. «I will fly. I will see. No more need for Kandrona. No more orders, no more of this horrible war. I’ll just fly away.»

I understood. This creature was like Tobias, my true shorm. What a human would call my “best friend.”

Tobias was once a human boy. A very unhappy human boy. He stayed in red-tailed hawk morph for longer than two hours. I suspect he did it on purpose. It was his way of escaping the complexities of human life.

Tobias was abused and neglected and lived in poverty and chose a hawk body to escape the miseries of his life. This is exactly what this Yeerk wants. And it’s not just about wanting to see: it’s about wanting to escape the horrors of the Yeerk Empire. This is fertile ground to reframe the Yeerk desperation to escape into a host body or a nothlit form.

The average Yeerk did not ask to become a foot-soldier of empire. Throughout the series we meet Yeerks who do not like the role they were given. If Aftran lives in a world without beauty, then it’s not because of her senses; it’s because she lives under empire. Think of the Yeerk pool on Earth compared to how a pool must be on their own planet. The Yeerk pool on Earth is a giant concrete tub. A pool on their planet may have teemed with other life. It may have had all kinds of differences in sediment, rocks, water composition, sunlight. The Yeerks on Earth are like rats in a barren cage. Their senses didn’t deprive them of “a world of indescribable beauty”: the Yeerk Empire did.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #ableism

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