#Garatron

[pixelsilver]

Smol Garatron bf with his big strong andalite gf.

[dr-reids-fidget-toy]

and those guys i guess

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[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Try and find a serious topic to focus the story and that might help? I think. Just spitballing, so I have no idea.

Oh I have several. My problem is I keep biting off more than I can chew. For example, the main story I want to work on involves arisths on a training mission to the Taxxon homeworld some 20 years later discovering the Time Matrix had been there once, and a race to find it starts after they realize the training mission was just a ruse so the Apex Level could find the darn thing. Also Alloran is there.

But then my brain goes "The Apex Level ruse was a plot by a resurgent New Yeerk Empire, who have infiltrated Andalite society and want to use the Time Matrix to make sure they never lost the war. But they're being manipulated by their new 'god', The-One-Who-Is-Many, who is actually a giant spaceship holding millions of victims in an off-brand Matrix because TOWIM's ultimate goal is to keep everybody safe from danger because they were initially a Chee that was reprogrammed at the end of the Pemalite-Howler War and if they had the Time Matrix then they could fulfill that mission programming. Also, the Animorphs survived ramming the Blade Ship, but they're all in animated suspension inside TOWIM."

And that's the SHORT version I've reached after years of trying to make it simple! For reference, my rough drafts and notes and abandoned scraps and snippets currently total at 1.4 million words. And I have nothing to show for it. ;_;

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What if Jake had been in town when the Garaton Inspector came by?

Honestly, Rachel's plan in #37 is not bad. It's a good idea to attack Visser Three while he's feeding, and a good idea to convince the Council of Thirteen to get rid of him — he's the yeerk pushing hardest to wipe out 95% of humans to make the remaining 5% easier to enslave. Rachel perceives herself as reaching the highest highs of hubris before dropping to the lowest lows of incompetence... but as Jake points out, she fixes her own mistakes the best she can and comes out on par with his usual performance. She's not good at listening to her team, but she's not actually the terrible leader she sees herself as being.

So. I think Jake, if there, would suggest attacking Visser Three while feeding. And then he'd agree with Rachel's idea of a hit-and-run blitz to make the visser look bad to the inspector. That said, Jake wouldn't make Rachel's mistake of telling everyone to use the same battle morph. There are times when Jake is guilty of thinking big cats are superior to all other morphs (#2, #11), just like Rachel mistakenly assumes bears are superior in #37, but Jake also excels at recognizing others' strengths.

I also think Jake would attack the one place Rachel doesn't: his own house. Rachel knows Tom's there alone in #37, but the other Animorphs tend not to touch Tom with a 10-foot pole because they know he's Jake's berserk button. Jake wouldn't want to trash his own house, but I could also see him getting defensive about not targeting Tom and declaring that it's time to go break his parents' shit and lightly injure his brother.

There might not be a final confrontation in the yeerk pool, without Rachel's mistake with the all-bear team. In which case, the inspector might survive, but garatrons might get used as hosts, but Visser Three might get removed, but someone worse might replace him. As Jake and Rachel conclude at the end: it's a wash, but at least they all lived to tell the tale.

[holodeckprotocols]

animorphs book 37 (the weakness) #thoughts

morphing cheetahs for a mission reminds me of david's dream of morphing them and robbing jewelry stores, lol. king of subtlety. 

omg i LOVE this inspector. smash cut to an it's always sunny title card that just says "visser three gets audited." 

i get what this book is trying to do. but it's sort of agonizing to read. rachel is a bad candidate for a leader - we knew this. it's difficult to endure a whole book of it. maybe that's the point? but eugh. watching her constantly demand approval and all but ask the rest of the crew "do you like me? am i good?" makes me want to eject my skeleton from my body. she feels too much like her mean self from the starfish book. there's no nuance.

i know i just said that the kidnapping plot from #31 was insanely sloppy but THIS was even worse. at least that was by necessity. but why was anyone agreeing to this half-cocked very public serious of attacks? i can accept that rachel proposed it but why would someone like, say, cassie agree? i just can't see it. 

actually i hate to say it but. huge dee from iasip vibes from rachel here LOL

okay, it's nice to see rachel trying something more balanced when her feet are held to the fire. though "stealing a plane for the vine" is a new one for the animorphs.

i just can't stop thinking about how mad jake's gonna be when he gets back, lol

i love the garatron. for some reason he reminds me of peridot from steven universe. i was sad to see him go!!!!

no WAY would jake let rachel off this easy. no way. i can buy the plane crash and the highly visible attacks but i cannot buy this. they scrapped HARD over david. they've fought worse over less. absolutely no way. bad. wrong.

[swan2swan]

“Physical similarities don’t necessarily mean there’s a genetic relationship,” Cassie pointed out. “Mammalian shrews and marsupial shrews. A lot alike, but not related. Could be the same thing with Andalites and Garatrons.”

Cassie says “don’t be speciesist”.

[jodjuya]

This is the Garatron: a centaur version of this guy in blue.

[red-thorn]

Animorphs, volume 37:

Jake comes back and is like, "Being leader is fuckin hard, cuz. Y'all are alive? Then ya did good." That's fair, I guess.

These Garatron entities are still a bit worrying, even if they defeated this one. Fighting style seems to be mostly running in circles, though, so could be easily exploitable. I wonder where the yeerks got them.

[lilacnothlit]

He hasn't learned to love anything but his own comfort and his own coolness. There's something in this kid that just needs help. (Is it still Kick The Dog if he refuses to be concerned for the animals' welfare?)

David growing up be like:

Seeing people defend David while having a vendetta against Cassie for book 19 is so weird lmao

David

Tried to join the side of the slaveowners for his personal benefit, which would have doomed the entire earth to slavery

Attempted murder several times against the only people who could actually do something against the slaveowners

Killed a terminally ill child to take his place so he could escape his responsibility (which, btw, all the other animorphs had too, he wasn’t special even if they were dicks to him sometimes)

Cassie in book 19

Tries to understand a slaveowner’s perspective and humanise them (still not the same as taking their side)

In several points considers the slaveowner’s arguments to have some weight (yeah, fucked up, but she’s also a 13 year old kid, and is still ultimately against slavery)

Ultimately decides that freedom is more important than someone’s right to live fully, and is literally willing to die on this hill.

Sacrifices herself so a child can be free, and actually ends up freeing a child from slavery.

If she hadn’t appealed to Aftran’s moral sense, Karen would have continued to be enslaved. The only other way to free Karen was to kill her, which you have to admit isn’t the best option.

Cassie fucks up a lot. But when I see people feeling bad for David while demonising Cassie for “supporting slavery” in the book where she gives up her life (or she thought she was anyways) to free a slave, it really makes me wonder if we read the same books.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that David’s white.

[animorphsfanfic]

Not sure the overlap between the Animorphs Fandom and creature design enthusiasts, but I guess we'll see.

So I often have random design thoughts for the aliens of the series. For example, my go-to version of Andalites is more deer-like with less emphasis on the human features. My flavor of creature design favors biological plausibility, and the dual torso ribcage of the centaur body type doesn't make a ton of evolutionary sense.

There's this competition between satisfactory creature design and making something as canonical as possible.

I tend to have this rabbit hole I fall into where I'm going through a lot of creature reference, finding something really cool... then weighing cool anatomical feature against canon.

Wouldn't it be cool if Taxxons were bioluminescent like glow worms? Does that violate canon? Or wouldn't a creature that spends much of its life cycle underground not benefit from an ability to generate its own light? What if Taxxons had alternate states like other colonial insects? Soldier Taxxons and worker Taxxons, queens, drones..? They're described as a eusocial hive species, and typically things like ants, bees, molerats have only one breeding female and the rest as non-breeding females. Have we never seen a male Taxxon in the whole series?

The Hork-Bajir were engineered, but I'm still plotting them out like they evolved for their biome. They're mostly described as reptilian, something like a mix of a dinosaur and an arboreal primate. But the dinosaur references led me to wonder about feathers. Or blades in places you'd expect display feathers. They lived in a canyon valley and also what is probably somewhat similar to a cloud forest, and so I have references of tree frogs. Referencing their blades led me to lionfish. The Yeerks tried grafting gills in Book 15, which made me question how they breathe. The presumably warm humid environment of a geothermal forest where all the water was stored in the vegetation... would they breathe through their skin like amphibians? Would they have vestigial gills that the Yeerks thought to surgically modify for Earth's saltwater ocean? (I still say making Hork-Bajir scuba gear would've been easier and more cost-effective.)

I also have no real intention of actually designing the Garatron. I just didn't like the idea of two alien species from disparate planets somehow looking that similar. But Andalites evolved to run at speed on a planet with higher gravity than Earth. I have references for the pneumaticized bones of birds and sauropds. I'm looking at having their spine something between a deer and a cheetah. My head-canon for some of Ax's feats of agility - feats that shock even him - is that every time he morphs, he's resetting his body to Andalite gravity. He's probably significantly lighter than a horse/deer of similar size, but with the muscle mass to propel an animal of that weight.

I'm looking at deep sea snailfish and sea snails for the Yeerks. I have references for bullfrogs, toads, and orangutan for the Gedd.

I don't know, just bored and ranting I guess.

Does anyone have any specific suggestions for anatomical features? Doesn't have to be canonical to the series. I'm just always curious about everyone's "if I were designing this alien" kind of ideas.

[lorenfangor]

The Weakness is actually the only book too where I think the craziness of the main plot can be explained in a Watsonian fashion with “unreliable narrator”, which is I think why I find myself feeling fondly about it

We know, canonically, that the kids change names and dates and anonymize details of their missions to keep some facts private. Most of the time I do think the only/best argument is “the plot is rendered faithfully, maybe some names or dates are changed”, because I don’t believe in using an unreliable narrator defense every time I think something happens that’s bad writing (if I did, I’d argue that #36 and #39 never happened)? But in this case, I find myself coming back to the certainty that the events of #37 were heavily edited.

It comes down to two things: Rachel’s reactions to civilian casualties and the other kids’ reactions to her plan in the first half of the book seem extremely disproportionate to what they’re actually doing to hamper the Yeerks, and the Garatron is too conveniently Never Mentioned Again. I’ve said before that there’s a lot of stuff that gets a one-off mention and that doesn’t Mean Anything, and of course that’s true, but in this case, why would an entire host species be scrapped just because one single individual failed? The free Hork-Bajir don’t mean that every Yeerk with a Hork-Bajir host has to give up their host, after all. Also, the canonical resemblance to Andalites with no good explanation feels off, somehow.

so my read of 37 takes into account that the version of events we’re reading is about 80% accurate as opposed to the 99% accurate of the other books - I think the kids did something way more morally grey and line-crossing in their efforts to discredit Visser Three, and Rachel is reacting to casualties caused by something much more severe than triggering a heart attack in an old man, and I think the “Garatron” is connected to the genetic experiments we hear half-serious mention of in #18, and is a cloned and modified Andalite based on harvested DNA from battle casualties rather than an entirely different species. That explains why Esplin is so gleeful when it dies and why he’s so disinclined to help the Inspector - it’s personal, he still wants to be the only Yeerk with an Andalite or Andalite-adjacent host.

[unculturedmamoswine]

Garatrons would be psychic/fighting and their ability would be speed boost

If andalites were a pokemon their typing would be Psychic/Grass and their ability would be Contrary.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Things I Want To Do

Stick an Andalite in a kiddie pool of colored water like a flower and see if they change colors.

Stick geophones in the surface of the Taxxon homeworld to eavesdrop on the Taxxons.

Same with the Yeerk Pool, but hydrophones instead of geophones.

Install trailcams on the Hork-Bajir homeworld that anybody can watch online. Will today be the day you see a monster? Who knows!

Find out what the Desbadeen look like. I want to know more about them.

Strap roller blades to a Garatron.

Put Tobias in therapy.

Make knitted hats for Andalites with little turtleneck sleeves that go around their eyestalks.

Throw TOWIM out of an airlock.

Throw Crayak out of an airlock.

Throw Toomin out of an airlock.

Send the CDC and DoE in to help the Nartec with the radiation-related gene problems.

See the Nartec win a court case recognizing them as US citizens because they were born in US territorial waters.

See a Nartec get elected President of the United States.

See a Yeerk born in the California Yeerk Pool get elected President of the United States. Or a Hork-Bajir born in the Hork-Bajir Valley get elected President of the United States. President Toby Hamee.

Taxxon Bite Strength Test.

Find out what Hork-Bajir would look like with tattoos.

Morphing Cube Petting Zoo.

[xeno-bio-sociology]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Visser One & Visser Three Characters: Alahar 7865, Visser Three, Visser One, Original Female Character(s), Original Yeerk Character(s) Additional Tags: Yeerks, Garatrons, Andalites, Andalites are sketchy, Humor, Attempt at Humor, PowerPoint, Spare the Pretzel Rod Spoil the Visser, Politics, Yeerk Politics, Alanis Morissette - Freeform, lesbians Summary:

A Yeerk underling must survive Vissers One and Three... and her very sarcastic human host. Presentation is everything.

Set just before Book #37: The Weakness.

[c-rowlesdraws]

Your andalites are so delightful! Have you ever tried drawing their speedster cousin, the garatron? (or any of the other aliens that show up in the books?)

I’ve never drawn the garatron! Probably because the book it’s from is bad and I keep forgetting it exists. I have drawn a Hork-Bajir before though! Look, there she is:

I also drew a Taxxon in this ask reply about Cassie and Aftran hypothetically in morph together! I’ve also drawn Yeerks now and then... but Andalites have pretty consistently been my favorite aliens from the series to draw.

[joysweeper]

this is just plain based on Avian-King’s design. I commissioned that one to take the features of the canon design and just tweak them to be more to my liking - heavier tail, more blades, climbing spur ankle blades, parallel-horned females.

The Nahara hold the distinction of being the first species utterly conquered by the Yeerks, but it’s the Hork-Bajir that really captured the imagination of the Empire. For better and for worse, it was during the conquest of the Hork-Bajir that Yeerks came to associate host species with status. Few Yeerks can currently aspire to wearing a Garatron, Ongachic, or a Ssstram, and of course, at present there is famously only one Andalite-Controller. Hork-Bajir, however, are within the grasp of any who apply themselves and possess just a bit of luck.

It must be remembered that without the efforts of heroes like Kandriss 7055 Hork-Bajir would be like the aforementioned status hosts. In the wake of the conquest their clearsighted and inspiring efforts to salvage Hork-Bajir, both host-quality and potential breeding stock, ensured the survival of the species and its continued large-scale usefulness. 

Make no mistake, though, the Quantum Virus cut off many possibilities. Even with elaborate husbandry across decades, the Empire’s stock is barely half of what it was near the end of the conquest, and there are no new tribes waiting for discovery. A relatively common Class Four species is still Class Four.

As a species created to live in a limited environment Hork-Bajir are slow to breed and it takes some extraordinary effort to ensure fertility. They are also simple, stubborn creatures reluctant to accept their roles in the Empire. Those are their only real downsides. Fast-growing, strong, large, quick, and possessed of natural weaponry, regenerative capacities, and keen senses, Hork-Bajir have an enduring appeal.