#GIVE US THE ANIMORPHS TV SHOW AND JUST KEEP IT ALL STRAIGHT TO THE BOOKS

[swan2swan]

Ax interrupted, <We cannot risk our lives for a vecol.> “Okay, Ax-man,” I said, my voice a little less than steady. “I’ve been cutting you slack on this handicapped thing because you’re part of the team. But when you talk like that, like this guy is some sort of dirty, worthless thing, I have to say you’re just not one of us.”

i am SLAVERING AT THE MOUTH RIGHT NOW I AM JUST CHEWING THIS TO PIECES GO GET HIM MARCO YOU TELL HIM BRUH

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@je-blauge

In relation to that last line, Animorphs Babysitters Club AU?

Marco

Would respond to any and all difficult questions from the kiddos about racism/sexism/the future/death/sex/math homework with “You know what the answer is?  Cake!  And TV!”

Would then proceed to whip out inordinate amounts of sugar and PG-13. 

Would explain to the kiddos that “Cake and TV were my parents.  And I turned out great!” (X)

Jake

Honestly seems like he might be the only halfway competent babysitter on the team?

I’m talking kids in bed on time, only healthy snacks (but the fruit’s all cut into fun shapes so they don’t notice), age-appropriate bedtime stories, an endless well of patience for finding Teddy Bear when it goes missing, and actually following all the parents’ directions.

Let’s be real, “firm but gentle” is practically Jake’s middle name.  He’s persuasive without being manipulative, commanding without being intimidating, and willing to take other people’s problems seriously even if he doesn’t get why they’re serious.

Parents love him!  Kids also love him!  Whoever works the BSC phone lines really wishes they’d get the occasional request for anyone but him!

Tobias

Child: What happens when we die?

Tobias [without hesitation]: Your consciousness ceases to exist, and your body starts to decompose.

Child: What’s ‘decompose’?

Tobias: You rot like an old banana.  If you’re lucky, something will eat your corpse.  Maybe a predator, maybe just some worms.

Child [tears in eyes]: Rot...?  But I don’t wanna...

Tobias [nervous for the first time]:  They’ll be nice worms.  Good worms.  And your flesh will feed their worm families.  Won’t that be nice?

Child: I don’t wanna be worm food!

Tobias: There’s always cremation?  It’s kind of wasteful, as is embalming, but either way nothing will eat you then.

Child: What’s embalming?

Tobias: So they drain all the fluids out of your corpse, and—

Child: What’s a corpse?

Tobias: You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?

Child: You’re a poopy-head who’s lying to me, aren’t you?

Tobias: What?  No, I’m trying to give it to you straight—

Child: You ARE lying about the worms!  You ARE!

Tobias: No, I...

Child: [taking deep breath to prepare for impending meltdown]

Tobias: ...

Child: ...

Tobias: ... Yes, I lied.  When you die, you go to a nice farm upstate and you always manage to eat the worms before they can eat you.

Cassie

Is of course an utter sweetheart, but maybe too much of a sweetheart?

Like, she’s used to feeding and medicating and bedding down animals that don’t argue back.  So she’d be an old pro at handling things like biting and spitting... but again, maybe too much of an old pro.  Because you don’t stop and explain to a goose why it’s wrong to bite people, you just slap some iodine on the wound and keep going like nothing happened.

So it’d probably seem like it was going great at first, because the kids seem happy.  And maybe they haven’t actually brushed their teeth or gone to bed or even taken their vitamins (seriously, how do you get a human to take a pill?  Presumably shoving it down their throat and massaging the larynx until they swallow is frowned upon), but it’s fine.  They’re fine.

Which is to say, they’re running roughshod all over her.

You know that Very Special Episode book where one of the babysitters gets in over her head and ends up having to call a friend for help and then afterwards she and her friend have a great conversation about how everyone needs help sometimes?  Yeah, Cassie would be the star of that book.

Ax

The good news is, recent research suggests that sugar is actually more of a depressant than a stimulant!  So giving the kids massive amounts will cause them to crash and become grumpy, not get all hyperactive.

After the sugar crash (and possible stomachache) of everyone in the house having eaten half their weight in cookies starts to set in, Ax would probably make an earnest attempt to show the kids his favorite movie.  Considering that his favorite movie is a 90-minute infomercial for the Sham-Wow, this will somehow go even worse than giving them an entire sleeve of Thin Mints apiece did.

Then again, Ax’s wonder at so many ordinary things in the world would probably endear the kids to him anyway.  So he’d probably be in the “kids love him, parents hate him” category of babysitter.

Rachel

Rachel: Who rules the world?

Large group of 4-year-olds who just finished their first self-defense lesson: Girls!

Rachel: I can’t hear you!  Who rules the world?

4-year-olds: GIIIIIIRLS!

Rachel: Awesome!  Now, onto techniques for breaking the kneecaps of anyone who tries to grab you from behind...

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Considering there's now a Power Rangers movie, do you think it is possible that someone will go out there and make a live-action (or fully animated idk) series/movie out of Animorphs? Would you think it wise? We have the know-how to animate morphing and aliens, and there are probably many people out there who started reading Animorphs 20 years ago who are now working in the animation or film industry so the adaptation probably wouldn't stray too far from the original.

You know, I’m not sure Animorphs ever will get its own show or movie again.  I love the current format of turning books or series into entire freaking TV shows (American Gods, Handmaid’s Tale, etc.) and it might be cool to get a second crack at an Animorphs show, but… But I’m conflicted. 

Reasons I’d love to see an Animorphs movie or show:

There would be a whole younger generation that we could bring into the fandom!  They could share in our hilarity and pain, which would be awesome.

It’s pretty much inevitable that the books would get re-released, which means we’d be able to stop relying on crappy PDFs any time we wanted to reread the series. 

Visual media = greater internet fandom. 

Seriously, though, TV shows > video games > movies > comics > novels when it comes to online fandoms, and I think a big part of that is the fact that Tumblr, Livejournal, and Reddit are so image-heavy. 

And I really WANT this series to be so mainstream there are fandom wars and remixes and hipster-effects.  It’s so frustrating right now when people ask what I’m writing and I usually end up telling the truth but telling it slant (ex: “There aren’t enough stories about stereotypically masculine young men working as administrative assistants, so I decided to…” or “Have you ever thought about how demonic possession would affect neurological processes?  Because I have.”)  And it would be so nice to be able to say “I’m writing about Animorphs,” and have other people go “Oh, that super-disturbing series with the oatmeal jokes?” 

There are some REALLY FREAKING COOL images in the series that it would be really freaking cool to see on a screen.  For instance: the huge hellish cavern where the yeerk pool is located, the iskoort and their backward knees, Cassie becoming a whale-osprey-human-andalite hybrid for a hot second in midair, Ax jumping backward over a swimming pool by accident, that freaking veleek, etcetera. 

Reasons the idea of an Animorphs movie or show fills me with trepidation:

Have you SEEN AniTV?  I didn’t think it was possible for writing that good to get turned into scripting that bad, and yet.

Whitewashing.  DragonBall-Z, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Ghost in the Shell, Death Note, and Cloud Atlas all took minority characters from the original works and cast white actors.  AniTV itself whitewashed Eva and Ax.  I’d rather have no screen adaptation at all than one with an all-white cast or one that tokenizes any or all of the characters.

It’d be super-easy for the grey-and-black morality of the books to get lost in translation, which could lead to deeply unfortunate consequences if the kids are shown killing controllers left and right with abandon.  (See: Seasons 5 - 10 of Supernatural and the number of completely innocent humans the “heroes” straight-up MURDER because they happen to be in the way.)

Hollywood is allergic to tragedy.

The movie adaptations of Blood and Chocolate, I Robot, Catching Fire, Ender’s Game, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Series of Unfortunate Events, I Am Legend, The Golden Compass, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Ella Enchanted, and Charlotte’s Web all took ambiguous or unhappy endings and made them fit the Hollywood mold, not only by having everything wrapped up with a nice bow (and no dead characters) at the end, but also by back-fitting genuinely original stories into tired and unoriginal tropes.

Animorphs would not be Animorphs if almost every book didn’t end with the characters not sure what they learned this week, outside of “war sucks, and then you die.” It definitely wouldn’t be Animorphs if the last two books weren’t all about how sometimes you have to make terrible sacrifices to stop evil.  I have a sneaking suspicion Hollywood would try to sweep all of that under the rug, especially if the screen adaptation was geared for the same audience as the books.

I’d be worried about the portrayal of the hosts.

As it is, AniTV already has some super fridge-horrifying moments that come from the writers’ failure to distinguish between yeerks and yeerk hosts.  Tom and Melissa make out and possibly sleep together while he’s definitely a controller and she might be as well, and the way that the series plays it for laughs suggests that no one did the math that 33 - 50% of the individuals in that relationship are physically incapable of giving consent.  The series also plays Chapman getting spattered with oatmeal and Iniss 226 going insane for laughs, even though the implications for poor ol’ Henrick are pretty horrifying. The books take the time to have the characters debate whether harming the hosts is worth it to harm the yeerks; the show genuinely doesn’t have the time to do that in its 25-minute run and so leaves those problematic questions out. 

Similarly, it is super-easy to slide into victim-blaming where the controllers are concerned.  The books can give us moments like Naomi saying “You were Visser One,” and Eva coming back with “I beg your fucking pardon?” (I paraphrase).  They can have the heartbreaking scenes with Jake imagining what Tom thinks or feels while some alien acts uses him to try to kill their dad.  Visual media can’t necessarily convey that information, and would necessarily have to cast actors as Visser One, Visser Three, etc. who almost never stop to play the parts of Eva or Alloran.  As Supernatural demonstrates (sorry to keep picking on this show), it’s really easy to forget there’s an innocent human who doesn’t get a choice about being used as a weapon or being caught in the crossfire.  It could be so freaking easy to make Tom or Eva or Chapman or Alloran themselves into villains by just forgetting that the host exists at all. 

Anyway, that’s all a very long-winded way of me saying that I DON’T KNOW IF I WANT A LIVE-ACTION ADAPTATION OR NOT.  Also that I care too much about the meatsuits, but anyone who follows this blog probably knew that by now. 

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I'd love to hear opinions for Megamorphs 4

Short opinion: I giggle every time I read the line “President Clinton urged everyone to remain calm” but seriously this book is so scary specifically because it feels so realistic to canon.

Long opinion:

I’ve always felt like this book takes place in direct conversation with #1, fleshing out the existing personalities and relationships of the team as of the moment that they walk through the construction site.  The actual first book in the series sweeps the characters along so quickly toward their destiny (by necessity, because anything else would be bad writing) that we get extremely few details about what these kids are actually like before the war ruins their lives except in the retrospective.  Back to Before feels like a chance to go back and find out who exactly these kids were before they all became homicidal cinnamon rolls.  Of course I’m a sucker for the details about Tom (He has a driver’s license!  He wears a denim jacket over blue jeans like a true 90s fashion victim!  Temrash 114 keeps at least two separate dracon beams in his room!  His parents think he should pay more attention in school!) but there are also a ton of rich characterization moments for all six Animorphs.  

This book really shows us for the first time why Tobias is so desperate for his life to change that he throws himself into a war (and maybe-maybenot gets himself trapped in morph) just to have friends and a purpose.  He belongs nowhere—not at home with his alcoholic uncle, not at school where he’s constantly under threat of physical violence, not at the mall where Jake listens to him out of pity while Marco’s openly hostile—which means that he grabs the first chance he can to fly away from it all.  Maybe he’s being short-sighted, since by #3 he already knows he had no idea what he was getting himself into, but he’s so desperate to get out that one can hardly blame him even when he resorts to becoming a controller in order to have someone to talk to and something to give him meaning.  

It’s also striking that Tobias is the one who ends up recruited by the Sharing, while Jake attends one meeting and leaves.  Most of the series has this implicit assumption that if any of them will be the first one taken, it’ll be Jake, since he’s the one with a controller already living in the house.  (For instance, #41 and #7 both feature variations on the theme of everyone getting caught because Tom saw something he shouldn’t, and in #49 everyone is shocked when the yeerks’ DNA match isn’t between Jake and Tom.)  However, here Jake sees everything the Sharing has to offer… and tells Tom “I’m not really a joiner,” because he’s really really not (MM4).  The unfortunate flip side of the coin of Jake’s leadership ability is that he makes a fairly terrible follower.  In this book it saves his life, but there are other instances (when dealing with the andalites in #18 and #38, during the negotiations with the Arn in #34) where everyone would probably be better off if Jake could find it in himself to sit down, shut up, and do as he’s told.  Non-Animorph Jake is probably at risk of becoming a useless washout (between the crappy academic performance, the mediocre athletic performance, and the lack of motivation to do anything, he’s probably destined to spend the rest of his life as a failed artist living in a studio apartment in downtown LA paid for by his parents’ money), but he’s also not at risk of becoming a voluntary controller, because he’s perfectly content with his mediocre life.  

Rachel, by contrast, is incredibly restless in her normal life.  Cassie describes her as “hunting” with “laser focus” when looking for bargains at the mall (MM4).  It takes her about ten seconds to get on board with chasing down and attempting to tackle some random stranger because Marco thinks said stranger looks like his dead mom.  She snaps into action the second that Ax broadcasts the news that aliens are attacking the planet, and keeps fighting with whatever tools come to hand (including a severed hork-bajir head, because this girl is hardcore) until she gets killed.  For all that she loves it, this book implies that the war might be the worst thing that could have possibly happened to Rachel.  After all, she’s quite good at channeling all that pent-up aggression into verbal sparring the way her mom does (notice how much she enjoys arguing with Marco in the planetarium) and also releasing that extra energy through athletics the way her dad does (unlike Jake, she’s not deterred in her sports ambitions by a mere hiccup like utter lack of talent).  She also has a lot of friends and admirers, a track record of being one of the highest performers in her class, and a casual self-confidence that is rare enough for a girl her age to win her a lot of favors with a lot of people.  Non-Animorph Rachel (in a world that also had no yeerks) would probably thrive in whatever career she chose for decades before dying at a ripe old age surrounded by her highly attractive husband and seven fat grandchildren.  

Maybe my favorite piece of Marco characterization from this book is the way it establishes there is actually a lot more to his crush on Rachel than thinking she has beautiful hair and looks cute in a leotard.  He’s considerably less comfortable in his own skin than either of the Berensons, but he also practices what he preaches by appreciating a joke at his own expense just as much as one he uses to mock another person.  This book makes it obvious that he looks up to Rachel (not just literally, although Marco’s jokes about his own height are also amazing) because he recognizes how intelligent and ruthless she is, and those are the qualities he values the most in himself and others.  Cates pointed out that it’s interesting almost all of Marco’s role models are female (Xena, Alanis Morissette, Carmen Electra, Eva for that matter) and in a lot of ways he doesn’t just like Rachel; he admires her.  

And then there’s the portrayal of Ax when no one comes to rescue him.  #4 and #8 only hint at what it must have been like for him to spend weeks stuck in a tiny dome at the bottom of the ocean, not knowing whether anyone was coming for him, suspecting more and more every day that his whole crew was dead, but here we get a much deeper look at those long days of solitude.  He comes off almost like a prisoner in solitary confinement in the scenes before he manages to use the shark morph to escape: compulsively addicted to routines, talking to inanimate objects, starting to hallucinate when left alone for long enough… Ax is a survivor, tough enough to live through years of loneliness and grief while fighting a war on a foreign planet.  This book shows just how much of that strength comes from within, fire-forged by his traumatic introduction to Earth.  

Oh, and Cassie is sub-temporally grounded, apparently.  I have nothing nice to say about that concept so I’ll settle for saying nothing at all.

Anyway, I love both the opening and closing of this book.  The first scene has one of those UTTERLY HORRIFYING banality-of-violence beginnings, where we open on the aftermath of a battle that may or may not have accomplished anything other than giving the kids involved a few more nightmares.  Jake is disturbingly casual about the fact that he has lost an entire leg and is slowly bleeding to death, making wry jokes about how he and the three-legged table match each other. We can tell why: this isn’t the first (or even the thirtieth) time he’s been fatally maimed and then forced to shrug it off in order to keep fighting.  The kids try—and fail—to save the host of a fatally injured yeerk a few minutes of pain, and end up watching both beings bleed to death.  And then Jake goes home, and he once again plays the game of Lying For His Life with his parents and Tom, and he goes to bed ready to do it all again the next day, wondering what dreams of Sauron Crayak will come.  This poor schmuck literally never catches a break.  No wonder his little deal with the devil seems so tempting for the millisecond that it takes for Crayak to pounce.  (By contrast, the TV episode features Jake asking the Little Blue Ellimist to make him a Real Boy because he doesn’t want to do his math homework and plan a battle at the same time. What a whiner.)

Ugh, and then the ten little soldiers go out to dine, and they drop off one by one so fast that most barely get the chance to fight back.  Rachel and Ax especially do their best to battle the oncoming horde, but they’re largely unarmed and clueless against the yeerks. Tobias becomes the living puppet of a living puppet of Visser One, and then there were five.  Marco stands a little too close to a Bug fighter, and then there were four.  Rachel runs straight into turret fire because Rachel is still Rachel even without unleashing her inner grizzly bear, and then there were three. Cassie is in the wrong shopping mall at the wrong time, and then there were two.  Jake faces down an army of hork-bajir as just his little human self, and then there was one.  Ax might be able to survive—but he isn’t looking to go home and be safe, he’s looking to save the world.  And then there were none.  

A lot of the point of this book is that of course the Ellimist “stacked the deck,” because these kids in particular are the the only ones who have the necessary combination of idealism and grittiness to take on an entire army and win (MM4).  Marco says it best in #54: “We beat an empire, my friend, the six of us, and we did it in large part because you didn’t know any better than to trust your own instincts.”  Ax has the tech savvy and determination to engage in total war, but he can’t survive on Earth without human friends.  Rachel has the ferocity to be a one-woman army, but without her friends to ground her she’d get herself killed a lot sooner.  Jake might be a natural leader, but he’s also naive enough not to know how to balance ethics in times of atrocity without Marco’s ruthlessness and Cassie’s pragmatism to guide him.  Without Marco, the team would never succeed in taking down Visser One.  Without Cassie, they would never get in contact with the Yeerk Peace Movement.  Without Tobias, they’d never succeed at freeing the hork-bajir.  These six form a constellation of skills and needs and strengths and neuroses that balances the fate of the entire galaxy on the shoulders of a bunch of middle schoolers.  They don’t need morphing power to be badass—but they do need it to win.