Remember, I didn’t finish the series, so let’s go easy on the spoilers.
Let’s finish up the book!
So, last time we ended as Tobias explained his utter willingness to die for the cause.
Ch13 Marco explains THE SHARING people keep suspiciously bringing up while brainslugged is probably a brainslug thing. He isn’t saying this to be helpful, mind – he’s using it to further his argument Jake’s brother is brainslugged, because that is apparently an argument against stopping the yeerks.
Anyway they go to THE SHARING which has apparently taken over a chunk of beach to do their own stuff on. Jake loves it because oh boy oniisan is paying attention to him again best cult ever when Tom starts rambling about how also you can become a “full member” dot dot dot ominous music and then, because Jake is still in denial, has a facial tick midway through making it obvious.
Ch15 Cassie’s social competence comes up – everyone else says that THE SHARING is full of such nice people and Cassie says yeah except the part where they look like they want to eat them. This probably should’ve happened before Tom confirms he’s brainslugged. Jake could have a whole thing about how his crush disagrees with him wat do?
Jake goes to stealth into the secret meeting right next door (yeerks are dumb) because apparently in California no one cares about stray dogs. Turns out their assistant principal is one, because it’s always the assistant principal that’s evil. Also, Tom says it’s probably Jake on the basis that sometimes Jake walks through the construction site – not that Jake acted a little funny when he brought it up, just that it is technically possible for Jake to have been.
Ch15 Jake is upset oniisan doesn’t love him and desperately tries to rationalize that it was actually the yeerk saying that. Considering it actually was the yeerk saying that I’m not sure why he’s struggling so hard. I guess this works better when you’re a kid and the idea appearance is different than the person is much harder to understand.
Meanwhile Cassie’s realized she hasn’t been an idiot so she goes to look for Jake. Who is disguised and can contact them with telepathy if anything is wrong, while she is not and can’t. This seemed like a better idea than asking Tobias to turn back into a hawk. Or more likely, seemed like a better idea than stopping saying every five seconds that no he can’t turn into a hawk again stop asking no Tobias you have been a hawk all day no.
Anyway turns out the current yeerk plan is, shockingly, to not just murder kids left and right but just wait because obviously anyone who saw that will talk. I don’t know if they even know the kids talked to Elfangor, in which case they’re freaking out at the idea of people saying they saw aliens at all. The yeerks being crazy paranoid to the point they do more harm trying to keep everything under wraps might have actually been good except they are secret-meeting it up on a random beach.
And Jake finally realizes that wait, yeerks in his brother’s brain should actually be motivation for fighting against them.
Ch16 Instead of morphing into a bug, their idea of “small” is lizard. So we finally get to the cover morph. Should’ve been a dog. He morphs while cutting class, too. And by climbing into his locker.
Ch17 Someone steps on Jakelizard’s tail without even noticing he’s there. Not possible. Even assuming you could fail to see it in an empty hallway, you’d feel it. We were keeping some toads over Christmas vacation once and the damn things were the most amazing and infuriating escape artists (and preferred to do it at night) and yet we squashed none of them despite all getting underfoot multiple times and they all went on to live long, happy, annoying lives of being toads. This is all to show off that lizards can lose their tails, but it’s dumb. Luckily it is assistant principal yeerk, so he follows the guy a little way and hey, portal to yeerk pool hell is in the school! Kind of like Buffy.
Ch18 And Jake tells everyone! Marco continues to give a sum total of -1 fucks. Jake says he has to do it for his brother, Tobias says for the andalite, Rachel says because it needs doing. Marco says fine he’ll come because Jake’s his friend. Then Cassie:
“I guess what we’re doing is sort of basic. Even though it was Andalite technology that made it possible. We’re still just scared little humans, trying to borrow the mind-of the fox, and the eyes of the eagle . . . or the hawk,” she added, smiling at Tobias. “And the strength of the lion. Just like thousands of years ago, we’re calling on the animals to help protect us from evil.”
“Will their strength be enough?” I wondered.
“I don’t know,” Cassie admitted solemnly. “It’s like all the basic forces of planet Earth are being brought into the battle.”
I think this is why they’re so shitty as actual fighters throughout the series. This all sounds very mystic and stuff, but the morphing technology is great for infiltration. For fighting people with guns and ships, guns and ships work better. Use your morphs to get guns and ships instead. You’ve got to trawl the whole galaxy like Visser Three to actually have combat morphs worth anything. (Especially since by this point humans have systematically wiped out almost all the large animals. So much for the forces of Earth!) Maybe if the cube had given them a library of existing morphs for combat and they used those to supplement their Earth morphs.
Ch19&20 They go to the zoo that isn’t like a regular zoo because of how totally awesome it is. Marco suggests the best way to deal with Visser Three’s supermorph is fleas and no one realizes that turn tiny, escape is actually the best way to deal with Visser Three’s supermorph.
Someone sees them and they run off and Marco and Jake get chased into a tiger pen which probably isn’t all that dangerous since they’re well-fed and used to people and Jake gets a tiger morph which, if I recall correctly, will spend the series being boringly average.
“That is an awfully high wall,” Marco observed. “That’s got to be thirty feet high. This is not good. That wall is high for a reason. There’s something in here that they don’t want to escape. ”
I scanned the wall. There was a steel ladder set into the concrete about fifty yards away. “I guess that’s the only way out.”
“Let me ask you something,” Marco said. “Why haven’t the guards come after us?
I just really love stuff where people instinctively use the behavior of other people to figure stuff out. Our brains are so well tuned for social functioning! You look at stuff and say “A human did this. They had a purpose for doing this. If I were doing this, my purpose would be because OH SHIT!”
Also neither girl believes their story, which is surprisingly funny. I guess it’s the way the other kids are still thinking in terms of mundane life where such craziness just doesn’t happen.
Ch21
His gaze met mine. Was there some sign in those eyes? Some evidence of the selfish, evil creature that was controlling him? No. I wish there had been.
But there is no way to know who is a Controller and who isn’t. No way. It’s what makes them so hard to stop. They can be anyone.
Well, the subset of anyone who smells weird to a dog. If only you had some way of knowing who smells weird to a dog’s nose.
Oh, and Cassie’s not there and Tobias is a hawk. For some reason no one just tells him to turn back, even when they decide their plan is to walk in and hope the yeerks don’t know all host faces yet. Or that some of them aren’t hawks. So they do that!
Ch22 The cop yeerk who saw Cassie messing around at the private SHARING meeting has decided fuck subtlety brainslug time. Also, the place is huge.
And when I say huge, I mean huge. They could have played the Superbowl in there and had room left over for a couple of malls. It was like a giant bowl turned upside down, all carved out of solid rock. At the very top of the bowl was the faint outline of a hole. I thought I could see stars through it.
All around the outer edges of the cavern I could see other stairways, like ours. They seemed to come from every direction, appearing out of the rock walls, and leading down to the floor of the cavern.
We clustered closer to the center of the stairway. It was a sheer drop off the side of the stairs.
The yeerks follow the Tolkien dwarf rules of construction, apparently. I don’t remember that. Also, why not just an elevator?
Ch23 They see cages full of people and also some hanging out watching TV. These are the voluntary hosts. It will never really be explained what the voluntary hosts are getting out of it. Tobias claims it’s a culty thing about how the yeerk will take away their problems, but does it do anything about the problem of seeing lots of other people screaming and begging every three days while you hang out with alligator sized maggot-lampreys? I can see that being the pitch to get people to agree, it’s just it does nothing to prevent them changing their mind afterward.
Also because Jake is a moron he worries if Tom is willing or not, because obviously willing-Tom would still desperately warn him away from THE SHARING. Do they get less dumb as the series goes on? Not smart, just, less dumb that this?
Ch24 Rachel turns into an elephant because Rachel knows how to pick a morph. She then murders some aliens and tosses a guy to his probable death. So they’re not hypocritical, good.
Ch25 Tiger >>> hork-bajir? Gorillas are also apparently way better. Why aren’t the yeerks just infesting gorillas? Then Tobias claws the eyes out of the hork-bajir holding Cassie. Mostly the casualties have been aliens so far. I think this just gets more extreme over time.
Cassie turns into a horse in the middle of the crowd, which should have blown her cover totally. They try to free some people.
Visser Three then shows up to assume they’re andalites because andalites can morph. Now, if he mentioned there’s no way the andalites would ever share their precious technology with other races, it’d make sense to believe that while still being really worried the kids talked to Elfangor before he died.
Ch26 Visser Three turns into a multiheaded dragon that spits fireballs. Do we even ever see this again? I think he never repeats a morph. He’s probably got so many he wants to show them all off. In this case his choice was stupid because he can’t climb the stairs. And apparently they have no one in range to tell them to block off the upper stairs. Also, no one has guns or phasers.
They lose Tom near the top, and Jake screams his name, and he doesn’t die and gets reyeerked so that’s further evidence they’re human and it’s his brother. I remember being so bothered by this at the time, because I already knew Tom was still around.
Ch27 Final tally: one escaped human, a bunch of dead hosts, maybe a dead yeerk or two. No mention of where the escaped human went. I recall she’ll turn up again insane, but wow plot hole. Also, somehow Tobias couldn’t swoop in after them, so he stayed down there for ages and got stuck. Like I said, disappointing because it seems like it was really just an accident. Actually, not sure how he got out considering there was a door with a knob. (More interesting reveal – he got out fine, then got stuck in morph later and lies about it.)
So yeah, that was a plotholey book. The telepathy is going to get turned way down, we won’t be seeing stuff like random saved humans disappearing, they’ll actually try to keep their human identities secret. Future plots have less of the yeerks just knowing to harass the main characters too – actually, they just sort of drop the whole concern about the kids seeing aliens, which does sort of make sense when they’re more worried about andalites but then again, the andalites seem happy to keep this just as hidden while presumably the concern was the kids would talk. I think the mysticism goes up, and as I recall the andalites turn from being the noble badass space elves into the asshole elitist space elves and “Prince” turns out to have no connection to any human meaning of the word.
“Not possible. Even assuming you could fail to see it in an empty hallway, you’d feel it.”
Well, that depends on a lizard. There are some with very long thin tails. I think you can step on one of those without noticing. Not sure if those species actually lose tails, though.
You will notice them trying to get away, though.
The point about an empty hallway still stands, however.
“I think this is why they’re so shitty as actual fighters throughout the series. This all sounds very mystic and stuff, but the morphing technology is great for infiltration. For fighting people with guns and ships, guns and ships work better.”
Yep, the power of progress is amazing.
“Maybe if the cube had given them a library of existing morphs for combat and they used those to supplement their Earth morphs.”
Well, to be fair, from what I remember the books are partly about how cool Earth animals are. With morph library, the books would’ve been about how cool alien animals are which is a rather different flavor. There likely wouldn’t be any mention of thermals because aliens in Animorphs tend to be kinda bizarre, so an analog of a bird would fly using some weird and convoluted way.
On uneven ground it’d be easy to miss a tail, but we’re talking tile, and as the frogs proved, you actually notice slight irregularities better than you’d expect. I mean, they were getting out at night, so we were always half asleep, and on carpet, and sometimes wearing shoes, and yet they always lived to escape next night. if you weren’t thinking about it, you might not really care you were stepping on something irregular, but you’d at least look down at whatever it was. Maybe some dumb kid dropped a pen.
There likely wouldn’t be any mention of thermals because aliens in Animorphs tend to be kinda bizarre, so an analog of a bird would fly using some weird and convoluted way.
Ah, but they could still use the regular morphs for reconnaissance and end up having to fight in them. Like, scoping out wooded yeerk areas? Go grizzly. Or in a semi-populated area and worried obvious aliens will lead to the yeerks brainslugging everyone to cover it up since “escaped circus animals” isn’t good enough? Sure, elephant and tiger all the way. But an established set of murderdeath morphs for combat makes sense, and is the only way you could believably have animals that are better than just grabbing a gun already.
“They go to the zoo that isn’t like a regular zoo because of how totally awesome it is.”
My gut instinct is to object like the dickens, but then I remember that not every zoo is the Detroit Zoo with large exhibits, a distinct lack of cages, and the sort of respect for ethical treatment of animals that results in voluntarily closing down one of their most popular exhibits and sending the animals to refuges because they just didn’t have enough space for their elephants to be happy elephants. <3
Also, is the sizing on brainslugs consistent throughout the series? Like, I remember that much was made of how much they compress themselves, but I still thought you could plausibly hold one in your hands. I could be misremembering, though.
Well, also this is the past, so it’s the state of our zoos a decade ago. If they gave more details about the zoo I’d be willing to accept it, but it’s just YAY BEST ZOO.
Maybe the brainslugs swell up like a pufferfish when outside a host, to look more intimidating. That’d fix it.
omg drive-by Detroit Zoo love. (And it was still awesome ten years ago, when I was a little one!) Just another one of those wonderful institutions… with the sad misfortune of happening to be in Detroit.
“Final tally: one escaped human, a bunch of dead hosts, maybe a dead yeerk or two.”
This, way more than the lovingly described violence, was what really disturbed me about these books as a child. Compared to anything else I was reading or watching at that age, they were just mind-breakingly bleak. In the first book, the heroes try to do some active heroing and end up not accomplishing anything but getting a lot of innocent people killed. After that they’re mostly pushed back to playing defense against a foe they can’t beat and that is actively torturing and killing countless people they can’t save, all in the hopes that they’ll buy enough time for help to arrive. But then the more time they buy, the clearer it becomes that help isn’t coming, and in the face of that is it really worth it to keep doing the horrible things they have to do — to themselves and to innocent people in the line of fire — to keep pushing back the seemingly inevitable total conquest? Heavy shit for a seven-year-old.
Especially after the side story about how the hork-bajir all got wiped out, where the andalites do get there…just not in enough numbers to stop it.
I also thought everything they stopped was happening all over the world so in all the other places they weren’t there to stop it, it must have worked, so by like the tenth book or so it was shaping up to be pretty doomed.
This was actually what I liked about them so much. It felt like a real our-world analogue. I hated the silly-happy feel of most books geared toward me as a third-grader– these were violent and sad and bleak and emotional.
I had the same reaction to the American Girl books. While most of my friends were just getting the doll that looked like them so they could real about how great it was to be white and rich, I campaigned hard for Addy. She was the one whose story was being a slave on the eve of the Civil War, and it was heavy shit (to the point that my parents bought me the doll but wouldn’t let me read the book for a long time; eventually I snuck it out of the school library). I’ll never forget when she’s made it to the North and sees the remainder of her family for the first time, and you’re thinking, “Please let everyone have made it,” but of course they didn’t. It was miserable, but incredibly powerful for a kid to read, and I felt like I was actually growing as a person from it.
I’ve always been weirdly emotionally mature, but I suppose at the end of the day I was just a strange child…
Oh yeah, I remember those! Molly’s was basically ordinary life in the slight past, then there was rich Victorian girl, and the colonist times one, and they’d just introduced an immigrant girl. Can’t remember any others. I read a couple of the books and yeah, Addy’s was the only one where stuff actually mattered. I think I read one of the Victorian ones but I can’t even remember it, and I just remember the colonial girl chafed slightly at being a proper girl and felt mildly uncomfortable about all the slavery. I couldn’t even tell you if I read more than one book.
I guess the problem is that they were mostly based on merchandise, and the route of rich Victorian girl doll has much better outfits and stuff.