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Spent pretty much my whole day off burning through this thread, it fuckin' rules. Animorphs was probably one of my favorite series when I was a kid, and I have very distinct memories of checking out the first two books that were on display in my school library when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. Loved those books. Also, to go back two pages: freebooter posted:This does raise the amusing point of location. "I can't tell you where I live... except it's the United States, on the coast, with mountains and forest in close proximity..." So in the United States, there are a variety of what we call "Land Management Agencies." These are all government agencies that manage lands owned by the federal government, and include the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers, and a few others. Each of these agencies have different purposes, and will manage lands in different ways—for instance, the National Park Service manages areas designated as National Parks, Monuments, Battlefields, Historic Sites, Seashores, Recreational Areas... stuff like that. The NPS mission is to preserve these sites for current and future generations, so generally speaking there's not going to be much in the way of logging or resource extraction (Though there are some historic exceptions—there was an active uranium mine on the rim of Grand Canyon until 1968, for instance), and large tracts of land are managed as pure "Wilderness"—a legal definition which effectively means nothing can be built there, and no vehicles are allowed. National Forests, meanwhile, are operated by the US Forest Service, under the Department of Agriculture. Though these areas are under federal protection, these protections are less robust, and development, such as logging, can occur. But any development is going to take years of permitting processes and (likely) legal battles to go through, so realistically the Yeerks would have a hell of a time getting permission to clear-cut any significant portion of the forest before they flat-out took over the earth anyway. (Also, as an extremely pedantic point that stems from when I was going through Book 3 this morning, all the rangers would be Forest Rangers, not Park Rangers. They wish they had our flat hats).
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Sep 18, 2020 07:05
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freebooter posted:This book, like all Marco books, is an absolute classic. And I want to post the inside cover except it's spoilers. But I think we're already up to that specific spoiler? I've known some dudes with longer hair who can pull it off, but it depends on the style and the dude themselves. I definitely used to keep my hair longer when I was in middle school and high school, though since college it's become... somewhat less viable. (drat genetics)
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Sep 19, 2020 16:18
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We'll have to get small to track them, just in case. I bet THIS insect morph won't go horribly wrong!
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Sep 20, 2020 02:29
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Just amputate the leg, morph, and demorph, I don't know what the problem is?  Aw man that sucks, wishing you a quick recovery!
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Sep 21, 2020 16:41
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I'm glad I'm not the only one who was inspired by this thread to order the graphic novel  It is funny though just how much of a resurgence in Animorphs there's been lately between the movie announcement, the graphic novel release, and of course the general uptick in remembrance and discussion of the series (Such as this thread). I'm glad to see it though, it was a great series and really ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
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Oct 12, 2020 02:26
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Erwin the German posted:The whole thing is a straightforward adaptation, but I feel like the series was always begging for that evocative visual element, and the TV show never came even remotely close to delivering that. Despite the colorful and almost childlike style, it's so good at conveying the horror and existential dread every single character has to endure. My copy came in today, and after reading through it I completely agree. In particular, the closing pages of Jake talking to the (now-trapped) Tobias really nailed the disconnect between "voice of a teenage dork" and "stoic face of a predatory bird" that came up frequently in the books, and made me reckon with it in a way I never had just reading them. A very solid adaptation through and through, and well-worth checking out.
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Oct 16, 2020 05:02
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Also, excited for the next book! Though I'm pretty sure I read through all the books via the library at one point or another, I only ever owned a handful, and this was one of them. So naturally, I read through this one often enough that a good portion of it remains embedded in my brain to this day, and I'm excited to see how well this one in particular holds up.
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Oct 16, 2020 05:06
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I'm pretty sure if I dug around hard enough in my parent's basement I could still find my mom's old VHS recordings of Dawson's Creek.
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Oct 19, 2020 05:33
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quote:<They fit right in,> Marco said. Haha, I wonder if that was intentional foreshadowing, Applegate remembering that line and adding the bit about the Taxxons in the Amazon in the last book, or just a bit ol' coincidence.
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Oct 28, 2020 05:27
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I always had trouble trying to envision how a good film adaptation of Animorphs would work, so I'm not surprised KA and Michael decided to pull out. The series just feels very ill-suited for the silver screen, especially compared to the graphic novel that just came out or even the old TV series (Flawed as it was).Shwoo posted:This book really is just Jake making worse and worse decisions until he dies. And he's the only one who remembers it. Poor guy. At least he got to be a jaguar in a rainforest for a little while. There was a lot of talk about how boring Jake is as a character earlier in the thread, but as this book demonstrates I don't think that's really true. Jake's arc is really all about him coming to terms with being the leader of the Animorphs, which is an immense psychological burden, as it means taking responsibility for the lives of not only his friends, but every single human being on the planet, and it's a theme that's explored in most of his books. For instance, this book obviously gave Jake a grim vision of "What happens if you make the wrong decision, and say Go to the wrong mission?", while the last book explored "What happens if you get captured? Can the group survive without you?", and even the very first book demonstrated the burden of command by having Cassie get captured and Tobias get trapped in morph. And later books will continue looking at the consequences of failure and the increasing desperate and ruthless lengths to which Jake is willing to go to in order to achieve success as well as an extremely dumb underwater adventure but we can agree to ignore that one. But while the struggles of the other Animorphs are out in the open for the rest of the group to support each other (Tobias being trapped in morph, Ax being away from his species, Marco's unwillingness to cause pain to his dad), Jake bottles up pretty much all his internal struggles. Outbursts like the one in this book from Jake over being forced to be the leader are extremely rare in the series—instead, he handles his role as the leader as best as he can, all while growing more hardened and accustomed to the realities of war, to the point that (BIG spoiler): he's willing to sacrifice his brother and his cousin to achieve victory. Of all the characters, Jake ends up changing the most from the beginning of the series to the end, and not for the better, and books like this are why I think he is one of the more interesting characters in the series—even if it's not always apparent from the other character's perspectives.
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Oct 29, 2020 05:29
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Rachel is truly a font of spectacularly poor decisions. Also this is technically from the last chapter but loving  at Cassie's mom and "Nice is Neat." When I read this book as a kid I didn't really have a frame of reference for what kind of music NIN was, but the joke ended up sticking in my brain for years. I'd actually completely forgotten it was in this particular book, so reading it again now gave me a good chuckle.
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Oct 31, 2020 21:17
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That sequence is 90s.txt and I love it.
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Nov 1, 2020 01:26
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nine-gear crow posted:Yes. Baywatch was a megapopular 90s phenomenon, and Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff were at one point considered the sexiest woman and man alive respectively thanks to their work on Baywatch. Honestly, I think the series actually benefits from being so solidly rooted in the '90s, mostly because it gets to avoid the unavoidable problem of cellular phones (And particularly smart phones) becoming ubiquitous and thus throwing a massive wrench into, like, half the series. It also helps that the references are usually unobtrusive, can be understood through context clues, and root the books in the Real World—which, given the intended reader was in fact kids growing up in the '90s (Such as myself ) was a Big Deal.
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Nov 1, 2020 04:16
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nine-gear crow posted:Is there a VOD link anywhere? https://www.facebook.com/barnesandnoble/videos/2688779761387521
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Nov 6, 2020 03:20
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So in short,
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Nov 8, 2020 03:09
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Even the comedy books have genuinely impressive body horror. [/quote] It's got some legit funny moments but it's honestly still pretty far from a comedy book, given it starts with a child nearly getting eaten by crocodiles, features Rachel panicking that she may have accidentally killed her sisters after collapsing the house as an elephant, and in this chapter alone desperately pleading with Cassie to run because the croc will straight-up kill her. ...man this series is dark
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Nov 9, 2020 05:08
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HisMajestyBOB posted:Agreed. I feel like I've enjoyed this one more now than when I was a kid. Yeah, same. It helped that compared to most of the other books we've gone through so far, the ~yeerk plot of the week~ wasn't the main focus—the morphing allergy was. That allowed the book to go in some slightly different directions than what we're already used to, and to bring out some really nice character moments (Especially between Rachel and Cassie). And, of course, every Marco moment was pure gold.
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Nov 11, 2020 05:42
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Epicurius posted:The Andalites are very much a stand in for the modern US, I think, and I think that's something to talk about both in this book and future ones. They definitely have a "World Police" vibe, which is fitting for when these books were written—especially considering (late book spoilers) their willingness to kill innocent aliens to achieve their objectives in winning the war.
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Nov 17, 2020 01:58
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From the Sub-Visser's perspective (who I think is gonna turn out to be Visser 3), he may simply think it's too risky—Elfangor is going to do his best not to be taken alive, the temporarily-freed Hork-Bajir may try to intervene himself, and there's a lot of space in-between for something bad to happen to the Sub-Visser while he's out of his host (And like hell would he let one of his subordinates get a crack at taking over an Andalite). It'd still probably make more sense to restrain him until he can be properly restrained and infested—even if Elfangor did run over the time limit and become a nothlit in the meantime—since then they could ply various Andalite military secrets out of his head, including the details of his mission. But, 
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Nov 19, 2020 05:21
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Man, poor fuckin' Arbron.  Probably the single unluckiest bastard in the entire series.
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Nov 20, 2020 05:23
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ahahaha Jesus Christ this series
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Nov 22, 2020 02:35
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I actually just asked my mom why she let me read these books (not that I was complaining, they're obviously great), and her response was that they were in the school library so it's not like she could have stopped me anyway
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Nov 22, 2020 20:45
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Remalle posted:What always bugged me was: when you morph something small, the extra mass gets shoved off to z-space, okay. When you morph something big, are you borrowing the mass of somebody else who's currently morphed small? Or do you keep the same mass and just have the density of styrofoam? I assume the extra mass also comes from Z-Space
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Nov 24, 2020 23:12
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Honestly Loren's been holding up impressively well up to this point, and it makes sense that she'd start breaking down right when home seems so close, but is actually farther away then ever.
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Dec 2, 2020 03:32
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FlocksOfMice posted:Can I get a spoiler of if Tobias ever finds out about being Elfangor's son? Yes. And Loren shows up again! Not for a long-rear end time though, unfortunately.
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Dec 8, 2020 03:53
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:What about the female? Hey, given their normal mission success rate, only taking 50% losses is pretty good!
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Dec 11, 2020 05:12
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Tree Bucket posted:That's got to be a Top Three, at least Someone should do a dive to see how many missions actually accomplish their objective and how many end in near-disaster.
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Dec 11, 2020 06:45
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freebooter posted:A prudent Yeerk would probably just keep it to himself Knowing Visser 3, the best case scenario would be their claim getting dismissed out of hand, with the worst (And most likely) case being a swift execution for letting them get away.
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Dec 19, 2020 23:55
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The Elmist is one real motherfucker. Gives Tobias what he wants (The ability to fight alongside his friends and become human), but in a way that ensures he'll never actually become human or stop fighting.
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Dec 20, 2020 06:10
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Logically morphs don't age, if only because they'd have to pick up new fly morphs every month or so otherwise.
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Dec 20, 2020 15:18
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applegate and grant are cowards for not letting them keep the dino morphs, prove me wrong 
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Dec 21, 2020 00:48
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I don't remember a single part of this book so I'm looking forward to how bananas it gets.
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Dec 21, 2020 07:45
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freebooter posted:Plants have RNA not DNA Oh, that book I remember in explicit detail, and I cannot wait to revisit it. 
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Dec 21, 2020 09:11
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SirSamVimes posted:marco fuckin rules
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Dec 23, 2020 06:51
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Bobulus posted:I'm more curious how they can reference so much pop culture, but have to rename Area 51. Probably because Area 51 is a real place in Nevada, and the books thus far have tried to stray away from the Animorphs visiting concrete real-world locations or solidly placing them within a particular geographic region. Funnily enough, given what we do know/find out about their rough location (Southern California), the actual base they'd likely be visiting isn't Area 51 (Which would be a ~300 mile flight across a lot of open desert and mountains), but instead Edwards Air Force Base or China Lake Naval Weapon Testing Station, both of which are located in the western half of the Mojave Desert just a hundred/hundred and fifty miles northwest of LA.  I really do want to know how the hell they missed the guard patrol walking around though, you'd think they'd be pretty drat obvious. Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Dec 24, 2020 |
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Dec 24, 2020 07:33
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Morphing in the break room without even bothering to check for cameras sure is a choice, alright. Excited to see if that comes back to bite them!Epicurius posted:So, why are tanks on an air force base? Most plausible scenario I can give you is the tanks were being transported as part of a test or an exercise, or they're actually APCs used by base security and Tobias and Cassie don't know the difference.
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Dec 25, 2020 07:18
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Edwards also isn't far from Fort Irwin, which is the National Training Center is. (Basically where the Army sends units to go do fake combat for training using sophisticated laser tag setups). 82nd Airborne used the air-droppable M551 Sheridan until '96, which is roughly around the time this book takes place, and M551s were used as OpFor vehicles at NTC until 2003. So maybe these tanks had just been delivered and were about to be prepped for a mock combat drop at NTC? Which might be plausible??? I am putting far too much thought into this.
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Dec 25, 2020 07:32
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As we went through the book I did end up remembering bits and pieces (The toilet reveal, the haunted house encounter), but this was definitely one of the weirdest and wackiest books thus far.
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Jan 5, 2021 00:37
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This series has always been an exciting window into the mid-late 1990s but this sequence is just 
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Jan 19, 2021 05:20
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oh god I'd forgotten a lot of this book but I remember exactly what's coming next
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Jan 20, 2021 06:34
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