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freebooter posted:Remind me why Rachel eventually views Ax as a traitor to the team? *MASSIVE ENDGAME SPOILERS* In the final arc of the books Ax makes contact with Andalite high command and learns that the Andalite fleet is indeed finally on its way to Earth, only it's not coming to liberate Earth, it's coming to glass it--Yeerks and humans alike--and then call it day. Ax initially keeps this from everyone, leading to questions over his loyalty and whether he'd side humanity or his own people. Rachel in particular takes the revelation spectacularly poorly.
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 04:51 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:04 |
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disaster pastor posted:I agree that the stereotype exists, but it annoys the hell out of me, because the text says the opposite: Rachel is Marco's competition for "smartest Animorph." A lot of their dynamic (that isn't Marco attempting to flirt) is informed by this; Rachel doesn't understand why Marco is so hesitant when they're both smart enough to know that their plans are probably pretty good, while Marco doesn't understand why Rachel is so gung-ho when they're both smart enough to know that there's no plan so good that they can't at least improve it by giving it more thought, if not replace it with an even better one. That's why it's so funny.
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 04:53 |
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The Stranger Chapter 4 posted:<It would be a very serious blow. They would survive, but they would be weakened.> I dug this moment of Cassie trying to subtly talk everyone out of it followed by her resignation that it’s going to happen. Whether that’s cowardice or a concern about the deaths of Controllers if the Animorphs do win is ambiguous.
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 05:31 |
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It would be monumentally stupid and shortsighted for the yeerks to not have a backup kandora (or several!) installed down there... so that's absolutely gonna be the case, isn't it.
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 13:12 |
If they only have the one it would make sense that the invasion seems so localized. Must be a logistical nightmare trying to get anything past an Andalite barricade.
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 13:32 |
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Or maybe kandronas give off immense heat or some other emission, forcing the Yeerks to only have the one for fear of detection by humans.
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 16:29 |
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Police raid expecting a grow-op. DARE saves the day?
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 16:39 |
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Mazerunner posted:Police raid expecting a grow-op. DARE saves the day? They're very '90s books.....
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 16:42 |
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Ooh, my artificial sun, my robot sun Three more days of TIME, KANDRONA Ooh, you make my Yeerk pool run, my Yeerk pool run Get it all filled up with SLIME, KANDRONA Never gonna stop, give it up, taking over minds I always swim right up, for the Hork of the Bajir kind Aagh, aaghh, aghhh, NOOOO M-m-m-my Kandrona
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 23:23 |
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Tree Bucket posted:Ooh, my artificial sun, my robot sun
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# ? Aug 2, 2020 23:37 |
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Lets just...go on to the next two chapters. The Stranger-Chapter 5 quote:"What's for dinner?" I asked my mom as soon as I got home. The walk in the woods had made me hungry. Being outdoors always does that to me. The Stranger-Chapter 6 quote:I flew in absolute silence. The wind rushing over the top of my wings never ruffled a feather. The moon was low on the horizon, just a sliver. High clouds blocked the starlight. The grassy field just a few feet below me would have been black and featureless to human eyes. But I was not looking through human eyes. I don't really have much time to delve into these chapters now, but I wanted to get them up. My parents were never divorced, so this wasn't really had to deal with. How about the rest of you? Did you have parents who lived in different cities? Did any of you have to choose who to live with most of the time, and how'd it feel? How'd you feel about your non-custodial parent?
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 00:11 |
Hmmmm.... is the other city Seattle, maybe? I don't know America that well, whats a thousand miles from Cali thats a much bigger city, and does this help identify where they are? San Luis Obispo maybe?
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 00:47 |
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Hmmmm.... is the other city Seattle, maybe? I don't know America that well, whats a thousand miles from Cali thats a much bigger city, and does this help identify where they are? San Luis Obispo maybe? I was thinking Denver because of the mountain climbing/sports city mention, but it could just as easily be Seattle or Portland. For some reason when I read this as a kid I remembered thinking it was Texas, but that doesn't really match up with the way he described it. Is it common for a news anchor to be offered another job this far away? I thought this family drama stuff was nicely written, and as someone from a tense household made up of two second marriages, I thought the barely concealed tones of resentment in Rachel's parents really worked. This book explores some really good stuff, I'm excited to get to the parallel second choice from the Ellimist. excited to discuss that when we get to it later in the book.
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 01:10 |
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Weirdly, with how local the invasion seems to be for now, Rachel's dad moving a thousand miles away could be a really good thing as far as getting him out of the immediate danger radius. Then again, we don't know how local local is...
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 02:01 |
So their town/city is near the coast and probably one of the major ports, backs onto a national forest with mountain lakes... does that narrow it down at all or is that pretty much California.txt?
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 02:03 |
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The books never really specify where The Animorphs take place. But somebody did some extrapolating, and came up with a location, which is somewhere in Ventura County, or Glendale, California.
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 02:09 |
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Oh jeez. I started reading that thinking something's not right, is she infested? But then it got shockingly personal. My parents divorced when I was a kid; mom wound up making a career move to the other end of the continent. I feel it.
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 02:18 |
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Epicurius posted:The books never really specify where The Animorphs take place. But somebody did some extrapolating, and came up with a location, which is somewhere in Ventura County, or Glendale, California. Yeah, it's somewhere along the Highway 101 corridor about an hour or two outside of Los Angeles, a setting Michael Grant would return to in the GONE series. Perdido Beach is explicitly set in that area, as opposed to implicitly like Animorphs is. It is, unsurprisingly, relatively close to where Applegate and Grant themselves live in real life.
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 03:32 |
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Epicurius posted:I don't really have much time to delve into these chapters now, but I wanted to get them up. My parents were never divorced, so this wasn't really had to deal with. How about the rest of you? Did you have parents who lived in different cities? Did any of you have to choose who to live with most of the time, and how'd it feel? How'd you feel about your non-custodial parent? My parents have been divorced since I was two (both eventually remarried), so I've never seen it as a big deal. When I was 10, though, my dad was pretty much in this situation. First it was a temp gig (6 months) in Australia to oversee a project. Then after all that was done, maybe half a year after, he was offered a permanent position there, and he took it. He's been living on the other side of the world since (Singapore now, he's changed jobs since). Again, though, I was too young to really be mad at him for it? My mom never really saw eye to eye with him after the divorce but they both agreed to put me and my sister first over any arguments so it was always civil. Ever since, he visits once or twice a year, calls regularly when he isn't in the country, and I've visited him twice, with a third time (and my first time in Singapore) hopefully coming up when the world isn't ending. So I've always been more chill about it than Rachel is now, even when he was moving away, but I guess I've also not really been as close to my dad ever as she seems to be - not that it's a bad relationship but seeing him only once every two weeks and then once/twice a year after he moved away puts some distance in any relationship. I also never had a choice to live with him - too young, again, so they decided it was best to let me and my sister stay with mom. Which I agree with, I think. Uprooting to Australia would've been weird. I like to think I turned out alright, anyway.
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 07:29 |
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Wahad posted:I like to think I turned out alright, anyway. i dunno, you're posting on something awful afterall
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# ? Aug 3, 2020 20:30 |
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The Stranger-Chapter 7quote:I flew into Tobias's territory. It was also the territory of at least one real horned owl, who would not be happy to have me around. It belonged to Tobias by day and to the owl by night. Ouch quote:But Tobias was cool. He just laughed silently. First, Tobias is more sarcastic than people give him credit for. Second, Rachel should definitely confide in Tobias. quote:I opened my wings and beat them powerfully, sliding through the dead air of night. But I did not go home. I flew around a while, trying to get a grip on the confusion in my head. But I couldn't. And I couldn't go home yet. I knew I would just lay there in bed, eyes wide open. So Rachel obviously has a dilemma here, and is facing choices she doesn't want to make. And I think both the desire to morph and the search for action are her ways to escape from those hard choices. By focusing on the now, she can pretend the future doesn't exist. And, of course, what makes this harder for her than most people is she's got that responsibility to fight the Yeerks, and she's one of the few people who can do it. So if she doesn't, if she leaves, the Animorphs are down someone, and what if that leaves them vulnerable? But at the same time, staying means she won't really see her dad, and she values the time she spends with him. quote:The next evening, as planned, we all arrived at the mall separately. I hooked up with Cassie at the food court. This counts as a very little act. quote:I looked at my watch. "Perfect. We have fifteen minutes to wander slowly toward The Gap." And they got in without being stepped on. So good on them.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 00:50 |
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Epicurius posted:
The downside of Rachel being the POV character and doing this solo is that it's easy to skip past just how incredibly, ridiculously bonkers this is, especially for only seven books in. Try to imagine this scene if this were a Cassie- or Marco-narrated book and they'd gone along with Rachel. Book 1, Jake acquires the tiger by accident, stumbling upon it with Marco, terrified out of their minds, acquiring it only because Jake knows it'll be chill for a few seconds after that and they can flee for their goddamned lives. Book 7, Rachel goes by herself at night, heads directly and intentionally to the grizzly enclosure, unintentionally wakes up the grizzly, and instead of reversing the morph and fleeing, reaches out to touch the grizzly knowing full well that if the grizzly doesn't like it, there will be very little left of her body when the staff shows up the next morning. And the whole time, her attention is way, way more on her (entirely valid!) complaints and discomfort with her own life. Not with her potentially being at the mercy of a grizzly bear, but with her sadness about her father and Tobias and all the involuntary Controllers locked up in the Yeerk pool. It's a more amazing scene than Rachel's narration paints it as, and it tells us a lot about her.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 01:13 |
Id like to draw attention to something else, which jumps out to me as a recovering addict. Rachel can't deal with her problems, so she seeks solace in what she loves but hasn't even admitted to herself - killing. That's why she seeks the bear - she wants the deadliest thing she can find. There's a point in every addict's life where they make a conscious choice to lose themselves in it, and i think we just saw hers.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 02:28 |
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disaster pastor posted:The downside of Rachel being the POV character and doing this solo is that it's easy to skip past just how incredibly, ridiculously bonkers this is, especially for only seven books in. Try to imagine this scene if this were a Cassie- or Marco-narrated book and they'd gone along with Rachel.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 14:59 |
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So I think at this point, pretty much everyone's acquired their go-to battle morphs for the rest of the series? I remember as a kid thinking a lot about if I were an Animorph what my go-to battle morph and bird of prey morph would be, and arguing about it at-length with my friends. My choice was a mountain lion, but I had a friend who was dead-set on crocodile and another who wanted to be a rhinoceros.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 19:41 |
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ninjahedgehog posted:So I think at this point, pretty much everyone's acquired their go-to battle morphs for the rest of the series? Spoilers for book 13: Tobias obviously doesn't have his Hork-Bajir yet, but otherwise, I think so.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 19:46 |
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ninjahedgehog posted:My choice was a mountain lion, but I had a friend who was dead-set on crocodile and another who wanted to be a rhinoceros. A Saltwater Crocodile would be my immediate first choice. 20 feet of muscle, teeth, and armor.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 22:31 |
Badger. Vicious little fuckers
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 22:40 |
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Tiger here. Big cats are clearly the coolest.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 23:30 |
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Khizan posted:Tiger here. Big cats are clearly the coolest. Plus it looks like Visser 3 would be hesitant to have you shot
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 23:41 |
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Cythereal posted:A Saltwater Crocodile would be my immediate first choice. 20 feet of muscle, teeth, and armor. Not very good at sustained bursts of energy on land, though
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 23:41 |
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grizzly bear, for sure. five hundred pounds of apex predator, as close as nature's got to bulletproof.
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# ? Aug 4, 2020 23:47 |
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Too bad you can't acquire DNA from fossils, that could get interesting.
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 00:09 |
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I would combine the dna of the world's deadliest animals to create the deadliest of them all
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 00:15 |
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The Stranger-Chapter 9quote:The first time we went to the Yeerk pool complex, we had taken an incredibly long stairway. This time it was more of a ramp. It wound downward at an easy angle, no worse than walking down a driveway. And to our roach bodies, which barely experienced gravity, it was like walking on level ground. Good point there. quote:We had two hours total in any morph. At two hours and one minute, we would be stuck. Like Tobias. And this was one time I actually agreed with Marco. I was not interested in being a roach forever. Here we see again Ax's relative inexperience. It's his first Yeerk pool, and he's a roach, so he's missing out on the horror that they all experienced. quote:We were at the end of the ramp. We reached the flat floor of the cavern. There you go. So, "You smell like a flaar" isn't an insult. quote:<So we have french fries and humans.> Marco said. <Are you telling me we have reached the Yeerk pool McDonald's?> Well, that's the series, everyone. I mean, I didn't expect it to end this way with our heroes eaten by a Taxxon, but, you know, the series is full of surprises. So, if you have any other nostalgic kids' series you want me to read, post your suggestions. Maybe there's something you....oh, wait, sorry, there's more to the book. The Stranger-Chapter 10 quote:<I can't get loose!> Jake yelled. In an instant, without warning, death had come for us. I was glued down, helpless, as the Taxxon's red tongue sucked back into its mouth. So, this is odd. quote:<Time has stopped.> Ax said. <For everyone but us. I can feel it. > Very Rachel. quote:]The Ellimist looked at me. "You cannot begin to understand what I am." So, in short, in today's chapters they're about to be eaten, they meet one of Ax's gods, and it turns out he's a nature-lover with a very skeptical view of our heroes' chances..
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 00:20 |
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space. wizard.
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 01:21 |
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Here they call him an Ellimist, as though there were many. Obviously there are in-story reasons why this might be - the likeliest being that Andalites just don't really know his true nature, or he once appeared in multiple bodies to them for reasons of his own. But, out-of-story, I wonder if the initial intention was for Ellimists to be a species with more than one member. Perhaps to contrast with Crayak, who we saw as a singular being last book? But the authors decided that it worked better thematically to have one Crayak vs. one Ellimist? Pure idle speculation, but interesting to see, I had forgotten this!
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 02:17 |
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...And here, we see our story engage in a regular, if uncommon behavior - the deus ex machina. (I need to work on me nature doc impression, ain't I?)
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 02:32 |
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I think it could work even with the Ellimist chronicles stuff. He's a hive mind by the end of that, I could see him referring to himself as "we" since his original personality is just a small part of the total by that point. He's kind of a species with just one organism.
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 02:34 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:04 |
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Given the events of the finale, it's somewhat ironic that Rachel is the one the Ellimist tells "you cannot begin to understand what I am." Wonder if that was planned.
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# ? Aug 5, 2020 02:42 |