#ANIMORPHS????

[victusinveritas]

[theoppositeofprofound]

girl i don’t know how to say this. that’s not a found family that’s a platoon of child soldiers.

[brothermouse-skeleton]

Animorphs books be like

Page 1: I am a child soldier. My every waking moment is defined by fear and paranoia. My dreams are full of unprocessed trauma. The fate of the entire world rests on me and my friends. I failed my geography test because I do not know the difference between Equator and Ecuador. Also, I'm really hazy on the difference between geography and geology. Again, the fate of the world rests on my shoulders.

Page 13: <Now THAT is a sexy monkey>

Page 26: *The dopest animal fact you've ever heard*

Page 27: Do you know about thermals? You do? Too bad, I'm going to explain them again.

Page 36: *fart joke fart joke 90's pop culture reference barf joke*

Page 40: Rachel kills someone with her bear hands. Not a typo.

Pages 3,15,16,25,26,30,33,37,40,44,46,50,55,56,57,60: TSEEEEEEEEEEEER!

Page 47: I willed my bones to melt faster. If there was a single bone in my body in the next ten seconds, everyone I ever loved of cared about would die an excruciating death.

Page 50: Funny alien thinks he's people.

Last page: *The gang goes to Burger King to avoid thinking about their war crimes*

[benevolentfalcon]

Most sci fi/fantasy: this civil war has been waged for a thousand years. These great houses have ruled the realm for eight thousand years. These two families have been feuding for ten thousand years. This single political institution has stood for twenty-five thousand years.

Animorphs: there is a war waged across the galaxy, waged by countless species. Entire planets have been conquered, entire species have been enslaved. Multiple genocides have been committed, even by the "good guys." It's been going on about, oh, thirty-two years now.

[cobaltegg]

so like, what if you were the last surviving animorph but it's been canonically established that you still had your best friend's DNA in your body

[carlandrea]

The reason Animorphs works as a deconstruction of the kid hero archetype is that it comes at it from a place of respect for the genre, and for the children reading it.

It never denies the kids agency, because it is a book for children, who want to read about children being given agency. Animorphs doesn't treat its child soldiers as victims the way a story aimed at adults would. They are full agents within the story who make moral choices. The fact that they are children is treated as a tragedy, but it's not treated as something that absolves them of any responsibility.

It plays by the rules. These kids are the only people who can save the world. They cannot trust the adults in their lives. It just takes that story—the story it's telling—seriously.

The message of animorphs isn't actually of "isn't it fucked up that this book I read when I was a kid sent a twelve year old on an adventure" it just uses its take on the kid hero genre to get across the actual message, which is War Is Hell

[wickedlittlecritta]

the energy here is unparalleled

[hapalopus]

Animorphs really has a way to turn every scifi trope on its head. "Why do alien invasions always start in America?" Actually the body snatchers first landed in a Middle Eastern farming community where they kidnapped the first guy they saw, read his mind, and concluded that, since he was terrified of the US soldiers who had brutally destroyed everything he knew and loved, the US would be the ideal place to center their invasion. This is revealed in the spin-off "Visser" which is an excellent stand-alone book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Animorphs. And you can read it for free and with the author's blessing right here:

https://files.animorphsfanforum.com/ebooks/pdf/Visser.pdf

[todays-xkcd]

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

Bracket Symbols [Explained]

Transcript

Bracket Symbols and what they mean ( ) Regular parentheses for setting stuff aside [ ] Square brackets (more secure) { } This stuff is expensive so be careful with it " " Someone is talking ' ' Someone British is talking ‹ › An Animorph is talking « » A French Animorph is talking | | I'm scared of negative numbers but these sigils will protect me * * _ _ / / I have a favorite monospaced font ~ ~ I'm being sarcastic and I had a Tumblr account in 2014 [ ( [ { ( ) } ] , ) ] These Python functions are not getting along ⌊ ⌋ Help, I'm a mathematician trying to work with actual numbers and they're scary ʃ ʅ Why are you trying to read my violin? | ⟩ Don't stop here--this is quantum country

[the-big-mood]

[hugintheraven]

Cassie Animorphs really spoiled me for all future pacifist characters. Like, I didn't love her when I read the series as a kid, but as I've gotten older, I really appreciate that she's the moral center of the group, the one who's always trying to find non-lethal solutions, AND she regularly kills her enemies(and their human shields). Because she understands that if violence is going to happen, then keeping HER hands clean doesn't stop the violence. That sometimes, the only way to keep an attacker from hurting others is to attack them yourself.

And so she does the right thing. Always. And sometimes the right thing involves violence. And she regrets it, but if she's the only one who can save lives and that requires killing, she will. And she'll go right back to arguing that they should be looking for a path to peace while standing in the pool of blood.

Compared to how some series will have a pacifist character who relies on their friends to do all the violence while condemning them for it, or a series will find a loophole/change the rules to allow the pacifist to not kill when it would otherwise be 100% necessary, it was a nice practical situation to have Cassie dedicated to peace while being willing to kill to achieve it.

[lifeattomsdiner]

I was gonna make a jokey post about how Rachel Animorphs is a great character because "what if the most fashionable it girl at your school discovered a passion for war crimes" is just inherently interesting to watch, and you know, that's true

But I think the real thing that makes her interesting is that while the other Animorphs have the "what if you were in a situation where you had to do violence and it was hard" thing covered from a variety of angles, Rachel's arc is "what if you were in a situation where you had to do violence and it was entirely too easy?"

[kooldewd123]

there's something to be said about the choice to use "prince" as the main signifier of military rank for the andalites. because it kinda obscures the truth of the situation, doesn't it? a group of kids getting magic powers from an alien prince sounds whimsical and delightful. a group of kids getting pulled into a war by an alien colonel sounds tragic and horrible. the slow reveal of what "prince" actually means over the course of the early books is perhaps the most underrated twist of the entire series, because it fundamentally recontextualizes the entire premise of the series without the reader even consciously realizing it.

[carlandrea]

One of the things animorphs does very effectively is that the series gimmick (turning into animals) :

- is fantastic wish fulfillment for the kids reading it. Excellent daydream material

- ties in nicely with the series themes about violence

- it’s even educational! Seamlessly integrates Animal Facts into the narrative by making them extremely plot relevant

AND

- would genuinely be devastatingly powerful in the specific context of guerilla warfare

[hoothootmotherf-ckers]

animorphs is for sure a fucking book series (affectionate)