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Man, I loved these books as a kid. And oh Lord did they get hosed up as the series went on. Which was Applegate's point. I remember an interview where she went off on a critic of the books ragging on how the series ended with "Dude, how did you miss the entire goddamn message of the series?"
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Mar 17, 2020 21:26
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IIRC, Tobias in particular is a weird kid from a broken home to begin with, so no wonder he's handling all this well.
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Mar 19, 2020 17:02
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Ah, the Taxxons. The certified expendable mooks of the Yeerks. As for the framing device of the books, my assumption as a kid was that the Animorphs were dictating these into a voice recorder as a record of their war in case they failed and were wiped out. So even if they fail, there will be a secret record of what really happened and everything they knew and learned for someone else to find and continue the fight. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Mar 20, 2020 |
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Mar 20, 2020 15:18
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nine-gear crow posted:Yeah, their turnaround time was straight up like probably 3 weeks because they had to get them out on a monthly basis. It was the primary reason Applegate and Grant hired all those ghostwriters, aside from them starting a family. Even with the two of them working their asses off, they were just barely keeping ahead of the train laying the tracks. To be fair, Applegate herself straight up told people after the series ended that the Animorphs were terrorists. Terrorists the reader probably agrees with, but that's what they became by the end.
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Mar 23, 2020 01:01
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I'm willing to let the 'only Marco gets the gorilla' thing slide because it's a YA book and IIRC they gave a different primary combat morph to each of the kids, with the gorilla being Marco's. Now making the black kid turn into a gorilla to fight, that I find harder to defend.
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Apr 4, 2020 03:15
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Ah, I somehow missed that as a kid or forgot it. I thought Marco and Cassie were both black.
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Apr 4, 2020 13:22
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Radio Free Kobold posted:
It's... a little more complicated in context. It's the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Turns out a couple of alien races were also on Earth at the time.
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Apr 12, 2020 22:43
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What the hell?
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Kchama posted:And they all work about as well as you'd expect, which is why the books are so great. Really is kind of entertaining that where your standard YA books would have the heroes nevertheless prevail in these situations, Applegate has them straight up fail horribly and people get killed.
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Apr 20, 2020 01:36
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Epicurius posted:What must it be like to deal with having to not just taking on an animal's shape but also its psyche? I'd assume it can't be easy. I'd assume that this is also the obstacle to morphing into another human. It would probably be like deliberately inviting an extremely nasty form of disassocative identity disorder on yourself.
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Apr 22, 2020 02:16
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Also highly relevant from this chapter, I think, is the existence of that Yeerkbane creature. To me, the implication is that Yeerks, although sentient, are a prey species. Even when they're infesting another creature, there's a creature on their homeworld perfectly adapted to hunting and eating them. That has to leave a mark on a species' psychology.
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Apr 26, 2020 02:07
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disaster pastor posted:Unlike (apparently) most in this thread, though, Cassie started as my least favorite and then I liked her even less every time I reread the series when I got older. I think she suffers far more than the others from the lower quality ghostwritten books. I liked Cassie and Jake a lot for being an interracial couple that no one batted an eyelash about. I grew up in the Deep South, and when I got old enough to start thinking about girls, my parents took me aside to warn me that I'd need to be careful if I liked a black girl: my parents were just fine, but my grand-parents, and many of my parents' friends, would lose their poo poo if they found out I was dating a black girl without some extensive prep work from my parents first.
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May 9, 2020 16:51
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Kchama posted:This quoted section made me wince with very future memories. The old "they haven't yet means they can't" line of thinking. Never, ever a good sign if you're rooting for the person expressing it.
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May 17, 2020 01:12
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chitoryu12 posted:A loving kid’s series is better written than Twilight. The kids' series also respects its audience's intelligence significantly more.
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Jun 6, 2020 02:54
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Fuschia tude posted:I feel like a mixed race couple was kind of edging on still a bit controversial, even in the 90s. Especially for a children's book. Am I wrong about that? Mixed race couples are a bit controversial now in some parts of the country, especially for a children's book.
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Jun 8, 2020 12:11
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Rosalie_A posted:Dolphins are cool. You don't need a porpoise for including dolphins. Well. We do know now that they're sex-crazed thrill killers who torture animals to get high...
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Jun 9, 2020 02:34
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Epicurius posted:Here's the thing, though. Dolphins are smart animals. Really smart, actually. Because they're so smart, they suffer from a problem that a lot of other animals don't have, which is boredom. A dolphin gets bored, it gets depressed, it goes kind of around the bend. One of the things that seems to amuse dolphins, though, is killing things. They seem to enjoy watching other animals suffer. (If you ever saw the documentary "Blackfish", about the killer whale Tilikum, who was responsible for the death of three people, that's likely what happened there. Killer whales are actually a large species of dolphin, and incidentally, are one of the few species of dolphins actually to prey on and eat sharks.) So, every once in a while, a pod of dolphins will go on a shark hunt, just for its own amusement. They'll kill sharks and then play with the bodies. Sorry if this ruins your Flipper rewatch. I'm not going to even talk to you about dolphin sexual behavior. It's also possible - the research is disputed - that dolphins will torture puffer fish to get them to secrete toxins so the dolphins can get high.
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Jun 11, 2020 00:58
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I think a bigger issue is: how could the Animorphs prove the truth of what they're saying? Yes, they have their morphing capabilities. Yes, there is a certain spoiler character. But that's still a long way from proving their version of events to anyone, particularly given that what Controllers do exist in whatever government or institution they reveal themselves to would likely try to muddy the waters. Doing so would also risk an escalation with the Yeerks that Earth might not survive. Just because the Yeerks haven't hit the planet with an open attack yet doesn't mean they're not capable of making one, and the Animorphs putting all their cards on the table might very well result in the Yeerks putting down all of theirs. That's a scenario the Animorphs probably won't walk away from whistling.
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Jun 16, 2020 20:14
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Not gonna lie, Ax was one of my favorite characters in these books as a kid. PetraCore posted:Note what he fixates on when explaining things to the team, though! He's not completely unskilled or useless by any means, but I love how his age and grasp of the situation matches the others. It's also so refreshing to see a sci-fi military cadet turn up in a book series, and... he is in fact a young, inexperienced guy with only a bit of training who is not a prodigy of any kind.
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Jun 18, 2020 21:35
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The feeling I always got from the Yeerks is that their aggression is born from desperate insecurity. Given that they were apparently a prey species - sentient, but even with the ability to infest Gedds far from the top of their world's ecosystem - it makes some amount of sense that the Yeerks have a burning psychological need to completely control their environment and remove any and every possible threat.
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Jun 19, 2020 14:34
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PetraCore posted:EDIT: Oh god, I just realized the method of yeerk infestation implies the geth were just shoving their heads in yeerk pools until yeerks evolved to hijack them. Do the geth eat yeerks? That would explain a lot. IIRC, gedds are naturally amphibious, so yeerk infestation would be a risk of their habitat. Like ringworm, but worse.
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Jun 20, 2020 02:09
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I do like the running gag throughout the series that Visser Three keeps turning up in monstrous alien gribblies... and almost always gets his rear end kicked by Earth wildlife. I remember one of the later books explicitly stating that Earth's ecosphere is unbelievably vicious by galactic standards, and that most aliens who know about Earth have humans on their radar for the simple fact that humans are the apex species of this death world.
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Jun 23, 2020 13:17
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Obtaining a Yeerkbane morph would probably require a bit more competence than we've seen so far though. A zoo, probably. I could see the Yeerks keeping some around as trophies after completing their conquest of their homeworld. And Visser Three making up a story about how he totally fought one and acquired it legit, when he just went to the zoo and had it sedated.
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Jun 23, 2020 17:35
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Radio Free Kobold posted:jesus christ what the gently caress Let's Read Animorphs: jesus christ what the gently caress
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Jul 1, 2020 19:35
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Keep Ax away from the special brownies.
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Jul 9, 2020 21:26
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Epicurius posted:Ax has completed his formal academic learning and is an aristh, or cadet, in the Andalite military, which is, as far as I can tell, an apprenticeship where the aristh learns the things he needs to become an Andalite warrior, mostly by being ordered around by everybody, and I don't think Ax was very far along in it, so he doesn't have much practical knowledge. He was sent up to the dome to keep him safe and out of the way when the battle happened. I think he's pretty on-point for an Age of Sail midshipman, including his age. He's learned his letters, so he's been sent off to sea to learn how to officer and sail under the supervision of the more experienced officers.
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Jul 10, 2020 14:28
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I knew she was a Controller. I wasn't expecting Visser One. IIRC, at the time I was wondering if Visser Three had been a smokescreen and Visser One had been so hyped up because they'd be the real villain of the series.
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Jul 11, 2020 01:53
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Also, as we've seen here, Three doesn't give humanity much credit. He hates being here except insofar as it's a chance for glory and he thinks very little of humanity. Even if someone suggested that maybe an Andalite did give humans morphing, I think it's very likely that he'd dismiss the possibility simply out of his disdain for humans.
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Jul 12, 2020 13:49
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Fuschia tude posted:It's weird how different everyone else's opinions have been compared to mine. At the time I think I found his character the most annoying. Same. My favorite character as a kid was Tobias, I related a lot to being an extreme misfit and loner. Marco, Rachel, and Jake came across to kid me as being too smart/popular/cool for me to like or relate to. I only really warmed to Rachel in one of the later books where there's an alternate timeline where Nazis took over the US and Rachel isn't present because she's in a reeducation camp for not being a meek, submissive woman. That made Rachel click for me and made me reevaluate everything I'd felt about her.
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Jul 13, 2020 14:35
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Fritzler posted:Interesting that Jake can control himself at the beginning of this infestation. Wonder if that's because Yeerk wasn't ready/expecting to get a host yet, or if it always takes a while. We've seen that the hosts can occasionally rebel (Chapman) but that makes me surprised Visser 3's host never rebels in combat to try to die or anything like that. It makes me wonder if you could be a Controller and not even know it, if the Yeerk was unusually subtle. If they could make the host think it's just part of their subconscious or whatever talking, not an independent entity.
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Jul 27, 2020 18:09
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Daikloktos posted:There's out of character and then there's Ax-Jake Jake's a teenager. He is going to do weird poo poo because a thought probably related to trying to impress a girl (or a boy) entered his developing, hormone-addled brain.
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Jul 28, 2020 12:28
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Also worth noting, I feel, is that the Animorphs are being genuinely smart and clever in this part of the book. Yes, they're teenagers and do a lot of dumb teenager things, but they are not stupid and this bit is a good example of it.
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Jul 29, 2020 14:32
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Epicurius posted:True, but Ax could be wrong or oversimplfying. Ax has never been a Yeerk. And they may have bad enough vision that they're functionally blind. My guess is that Yeerks have other senses don't correspond to any human or Andalite senses, and Jake's mind is filtering the Yeerk's memories of its native sensory apparatus as sight.
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Jul 30, 2020 03:21
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Epicurius posted:It's the last third of the book, but it does loom a lot larger in the mind. I think it's because it's the intense, unique part, while things like "Jake practicing morphing, the kids infiltrating a Sharing meeting/discussing how to stop a Yeerk plot" is sort of routine and not surprising at this point. It's not every book where a group of teenagers not only consciously decides to imprison a sentient being until it starves to death, literally the only alternative would get them all killed or enslaved and with them probably doom humanity. Probably would have been too on the nose for the Yeerk to ask them to give him a quick death and voluntarily leave Jake rather than die the slow, agonizing death of starvation.
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Jul 30, 2020 17:44
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disaster pastor posted:It's just not a thing a Yeerk would do. Regardless of the accuracy of "humans don't give up ever," the books are pretty consistent that Yeerks do. If they can't win, they don't bother fighting until/unless that changes, even if they could get a taking-you-with-me out of it; they'll sit and wait for the ever-decreasing chance of rescue instead. Personally, I wonder if that's due to how helpless Yeerks are in their native form. If a Yeerk is in trouble outside a host, it's screwed, end of story. There's no biological impetus to fight on even when survival is improbable because Yeerks are that helpless unless they're in a host.
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Jul 30, 2020 18:14
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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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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
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HisMajestyBOB posted:Alternatively, all of the junior Yeerks know exactly who the Animorphs are, and literally none of them are willing to tell Visser Three he's wrong. This is my take. Visser Three is so openly contemptuous of humans that other Yeerks can and have solved the puzzle but Visser Three dismisses it out of hand and no one's willing to argue with him.
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Aug 6, 2020 02:56
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Starsnostars posted:If the Ellimist had been a species closer in technology to the Yeerks and and had said that they could get a few people out on a refugee ship or something then fair enough. Coming in and saying that they can only save a few while being all powerful and having found a whole planet for Earth species to live on leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I remember nothing about this book, so my guess is that it may not have been a sincere offer. I'm thinking it was a test to see if the Animorphs were committed to fighting for Earth and thus worthy of his help.
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Aug 6, 2020 13:33
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Piell posted:As far as Ax's Andalite homeworld morphs go, he probably does, but he never uses any. Remember that the Andalites are noted as not using morphing for battle capabilities, they seem perfectly happy with the tail blades in their existing bodies and energy weapons. They regard morphing as a tool for spying and sabotage, not combat. Visser Three and the Animorphs use it for combat for different reasons of their own.
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Aug 9, 2020 12:58
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Kchama posted:Wow those ship designs are great. I approve of all of them. The Blade Ship actually looks as dangerous as they describe it. Visser Three flying a Klingon battlecruiser somehow doesn't surprise me.
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Aug 10, 2020 12:22
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