#the ellimist chronicles

[andalitean]

🚶‍♀️

[ellimisms]

LISTENNNNNNNNNN I just think Father is a cool villain and one of the few villains from Animorphs that Actually Scared Me. Like we all know why visser three is a ridiculous over-the-top saturday-morning-cartoon villain; he wasn't *allowed* to be too scary and still have it be a kids book. Crayak is supposed to be terrifying, but honestly, he's just... meh. I didn't really care about him for a while, and then I just disliked him because he's annoying. but FATHER??? HOO BOY. Just the idea of a planet-spanning intelligence, stealing people's brains and intelligence and thoughts and memories and also attatching them to tendrils underwater like a fucked up graveyard???? the mental imagery of that planet????? GOD. i love father if you couldnt tell

[guavajaws]

I just finished reading the Ellimist Chronicles and honestly this book is absolutely bonkers

You mean to tell me that the narrator is ACTUALLY an alien gamer bird who had to watch his entire species get wiped out then play video games with a sentient water moon for all of eternity only to finally beat him because he plays shit music- THEN ABSORB EVERY MIND HE’S CAPTURED AND??? Somehow get integrated into the fabric of space and time itself and become god??

What even IS this book

[cyborg-of-color]

Father playing games with Toomin/Ellimist

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What do you think of the Capasins from Ellemist Chronicles? I'm fairly certain there's deliberate parallels between them and andalites and/or humans, but I can't quite figure it out.

I think there’s something really interesting in the idea of gaming as being a place where the absolute no-consequences worst of humanity comes out, and of games (when stripped of context) as being completely horrifying comments on the way that humans behave when nothing matters.  Like, I know Michael Crichton was the most cynical cynic ever to cynicize, but Westworld does a really great job of grappling with the multi-faceted question of what it means about you as a person if you spend all day committing heinous crimes for fun, and maybe more importantly what it can do to you as a person if that’s your only source of fun.  The main point of the show definitely isn’t about condemning gaming as a whole; it’s about condemning gaming to excess, and about the illusion of control created by games that are really just about tilting a ball around a labyrinth on a macro scale.

Anyway, I’ve speculated before that “God is a gamer” is kind of supposed to be a major theme of the series, and that there’s a deliberate fuck-you to the “war = chess” view built into that theme.  Like, K.A. Applegate is all about showing how there’s something despicable and dehumanizing in trying to reduce war to a game or trying to make a game of war.  So I think that’s a lot of the commentary in the capasins — that if Toomin et al were really performing those in-game actions on real species, that’d be unconscionable.  Maybe even so much so as to justify their immediate execution.  Obviously that’s not what the ketrans are doing, and it’s a horrible misunderstanding... BUT that is what the Ellimist and Crayak are doing to humanity and yeerks and all in canon.

The fundamental difference between Ellimist and Crayak, then, is that Toomin knows it’s not a game.  He cares about the individuals whose lives are being damaged or ended by the struggle.  He knows about Ax’s fears and Cassie’s strengths.  He takes the time to argue with Tobias about policy, to answer Rachel’s questions about what it all means.  Crayak views the war as fun, as a way to find out who is “the best” through competition.  And if a few species get annihilated along the way, so be it, it’s just a game.  The Ellimist still has a pretty distant and sometimes problematic view of the war, but he most certainly knows the consequences of pretending that the “nothing matters anyway” view applied in game-space can ever be applied to a reality where your actions have the power to affect other people.

[tsugarubecker]

Just watched this video on YouTube, and even though I haven’t read The Ellimist Chronicles since I was a kid, my brain was immediately like “oh this is from The Ellimist Chronicles”. According to wikipedia, “[Toomin’s] mind was absorbed and kept alive at the bottom of the sea by a moon-spanning entity known as Father that absorbed the information in the brain (or equivalent) of every corpse on it.” I vaguely remember Father being described as looking something like this, with like a dead body stuck on every couple feet (ew). I know Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant did their hecking research into animals for Animorphs, so now I’m wondering if maybe Father was based on siphonophores. Now that I think about it I don’t know why I’m posting here, I need to go tweet at Michael Grant lol. He usually responds. If I find out more I’ll update

[summerlimeismethebrony]

I redesigned the Ketrans. I don't think I ever posted my old one, but I'm happy with how much I've improved.

Lookit this cutie.

[aniquotes]

"I had watched entire worlds die. I had lost my own race. How could I care so much about this one small, unsteady creature? How could her death cut me so deeply?"

- Ellimist, The Ellimist Chronicles, pg. 177 (by K.A. Applegate)

[scienceninjaturtle]

Spotlight- Animorphs (edit)

[andalitean]

the ellimist being a gamer and not even a good one is killing me WHAT IS THIS BOOK.

[tobiasmasonpark]

Reading the chronicles books from Animorphs

[coldbrewblooded]

I've got a handful of animorphs books left to read and then I can freely explore the fandom without fear of spoilers

[stealtharchaeologist]

The Ellimist Chronicles was one of my least favorite as well. Partially because I hated the Ellimist and no amount of backstory would make me appreciate him, but partially also because the book was... Slow. I never cared to reread it.

My god, 40+ books in and I have hit the wall with the Ellimist Chronicles. It is stupidly boring, I have stopped so many times and I'm not even 100 pages in. I was reading 1 to 2 books A Day. I'm 3 days in to this nonsense.

[greatwyrmgold]

Randomly thought of the Ellimist Chronicles, wherein titular character Toomin is introduced to us losing in an advanced alien video game. Then he gets chosen for the big space expedition because for all the great scientists and engineers and such, they didn't have any great losers.

And then he endures losing to Father repeatedly in countless games, until he finds one he can win. His strategy against Crayak is to start/protect life on enough different worlds that it doesn't matter if he loses some of them. Probably other stuff that I can't remember, since I haven't read that book in probably over a decade. And the framing device is one of the Animorphs having lost everything, and the Elimist is explaining all of this to her.

I should probably reread the book before making any sweeping statements about its themes. But the fact that I still sometimes think about those books, years after the last time I read them, is a compliment to their quality.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What did the Ellimist and Crayak do after their game was done and the Yeerks lost?

No reason to assume the game ends when the Animorphs’ war does!

Seriously, though, Ellimist Chronicles makes it pretty clear that the Yeerk-Human War is just one round in a game that has infinite millions of rounds.  The Pemalite-Howler War, the Capasin-Ketran Conflict, the Pangbans and Gunja Wave, the Jallians and Inner Worlders...  They’re all part of a much bigger picture, one that the Ellimist and Crayak can see but not even explain properly to anyone on Rachel’s scale.

The only thread connecting all of the Ellimist’s gambits is the desire to see as many sentient creatures as possible thrive in as many cultures as possible; the only thread connecting Crayak’s is the desire for the strongest species to win and take all.  The Ellimist bets on the andalites not because they’re perfect or uniformly moral, but because they’re genuinely motivated to try and preserve the freedom of other cultures, even though they frequently miss the mark.  Crayak bets on the yeerks because their strategy is primarily about taking things from other species and either annihilating or subjugating other cultures.

It’s also fascinating that — assuming the events of #26 are any indication — the specific yeerk-andalite conflict is going to continue to play out for centuries to come, on many hundreds of different fronts.  So, like, not only is the entire Animorphs series happening on just one level of a game with millions of levels, the entire war itself is just one minuscule part of the level it’s on.  I love that and I hate that, because (as I’ve said) it helps to make the cosmos of the Animorphs feel as realistic as a fictional cosmos ever can.

[princeseerow]

tbh having the books all on dropbox is nice but i do miss the specific physical feel of an animorphs book