#the yeerks presumably know when and where they got attacked

[thekinglemingle]

I can't tell you the town where we live, the Yeerks might find us. But I can tell you, it's the one where the Yeerks' plans keep getting foiled

[animorphs narrator voice] my name is sara. i can't tell you my last name or where i live. it wouldn't be safe. all i can tell you is that i live in a town in the northern half of the continental u.s. that's near both the ocean and the mountains, where you can get a mile outside the city and run into wilderness that borders a national forest, but that is nonetheless big enough to have a combination amusement park/zoo and a robust public transit system,

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I recently had a thought I can’t get out of my head, and I love your au fics more than I love breathing, so here’s this: what would happen if Ax (or any other Animorph) had managed to acquire Alloran during the events of book 8?

Interesting thought.  It’d take a little wrangling, and I think it’d have to be Ax — any of the others would have to demorph to human — but it would be doable.  The question then becomes: what do they do with his DNA once they’ve got it?

Plan A: Be Emperor for a Day The most obvious solution: pretend to be Visser Three long enough to infiltrate a yeerk base.  This would probably work exactly once before the real Visser Three caught on to what was happening and implemented a password system or a Gleet Biofilter scan that could tell the difference between an andalite and an andalite-controller.  But once might be enough.  On one mission, Ax-as-Alloran could do a mass download of every one of the yeerks’ computer files on the invasion.  He could bring the rest of the Animorphs with him and drop them off where they could wreak the most havoc, in a sensitive base or near another ground-based kandrona generator.  He could steal a Blade ship through just ordering a bunch of controllers to pilot it, and then bring the Blade ship to a crowded human area before turning off its cloaking technology and announcing the invasion.

Plan B: Become a Chaos Demon  Instead, pretend to be Visser Three several times, in small subtle ways.  This idea would require more finesse, and a lot more intel, but Ax could infiltrate yeerk communications this way.  He could give vague or contradictory orders, always in such a way as to have plausible deniability.  They’d have to rely on the real Visser Three to just yell «I NEVER SAID THAT!» and then behead whoever followed Ax’s orders to keep the ruse going, but it might work for a while.  The whole idea would be for Ax to pop in to a vissers’ Webex meeting long enough to go «That’s a stupid idea, cancel that!» in response to whatever was said last, and assume that everyone would either A) actually cancel the plan or B) not know how Visser Three feels about the plan long enough to make it hard to do anything.  I’m not sure how Ax would get the vissers’ Webex password, but he could be massively powerful if he did figure out how to get in.

Plan C: Fuck with the Biometrics  This plan might not work until later on in the series, when Tom’s yeerk apparently gets budget-happy with invasion security.  But assuming that at least some of the tech we see in #52 - #54 (life form scanners, DNA readers, rotating passwords with select overrides) is already in use, then Alloran’s DNA could be useful from a whole different perspective.  Presumably, all of the yeerk tech that relies on biometrics relies on hosts’ biometrics — it’s stolen from andalites, and it’d be damn inconvenient to have to pop out of one’s host long enough to do a cheek swab.  Ergo, Alloran’s biometrics could be the hypothetical keys to the kingdom.  All six kids could sneak into various yeerk-owned spaces, and then Ax could morph Alloran long enough to use his fingerprints/DNA/retina to perform all kinds of fuckery.  He could reprogram all of the hunter ‘bots on the planet to refuse to attack morphers.  He could set all of the dracon beams in storage to fire on each other and destroy a few weapons’ depots.  He could make the Gleet Biofilters refuse to let yeerks into the yeerk pool.  He could leave viruses throughout the communication system that only get triggered by certain conditions.  Etcetera.

Plan D: Get Visser Three Fired This one would be a little more feasible to pull off than some of the others; it’d just involve figuring out how to put in a call to the Council of Thirteen.  Sure, Ax would still have to do a lot of hacking, and he’d probably need Erek’s and/or Peter’s help along the way, but if he could pull it off, then it could be over with in 30 seconds flat.  This plan would also require a lot less acting than Plan A or B, because Ax would just have to act bizarre or bad-mouth the Yeerk Empire in some way.  The real Visser Three could claim it was an imposter all he wanted, but the Council doesn’t forgive that kind of nonsense, especially not when we know that he’s already on thin ice after the events of #7.  Without Visser Three, leadership of the Earth invasion would probably default to Visser One, so long-term this one would probably be worse for the Animorphs.  But they wouldn’t know that going into this plan.

Plan E: Jujutsu  In other words: the Animorphs don’t do a damn thing with Alloran’s DNA... outside of letting the yeerks know that they’ve got Alloran’s DNA.  This might be the plan most in line with the Animorphs’ usual tactics.  A lot of their biggest successes come about from wasting the Yeerk Empire’s resources, be that water (#3), kandrona (#7), land (#9), host bodies (#23), time (#35), or good ol’ fashioned money (MM1, #12, #17, #28, #53).  If the Animorphs can simply make it known that they have Alloran’s DNA and they’re not afraid to use it, then the Yeerk Empire will be forced to make a response.  Probably an expensive one.  Probably even one that costs them more than the Animorphs attacking directly ever would.  The yeerks might end up having to implement a whole new security system (Plan A), might decide to fire Visser Three just to be sure (Plan D), might have to reprogram their tech (Plan C).  They might even straight-up murder Alloran to make any imposter easy to spot.  If they did that, then they’ve lost their biggest single-controller weapon against the Animorphs, and they’ve also lost their figurehead.

Most of these have a high probability of the real Alloran dying along the way.  I think Ax would be uncomfortable with that, but not necessarily uncomfortable enough to call a halt to the whole thing.  A lot of these have a high probability of Ax dying along the way, which I think Tobias would be NOT AT ALL okay with, but if Tobias was outvoted then the kids might try it anyway.  I also think there’s still a big risk of Visser One ending up in charge, which is a fucking terrifying possibility, but the kids don’t know enough about her to know that as of #8.  So, could work out, could crash and burn.  All depends on how quickly and well the yeerks manage to respond.

[thenixkat]

Animorphs notes 25

Book 25

Narrated by Marco

Marco actually has a love life and is a fucking dweeb about it. Neat

“Marian.

Not only is Marian gorgeous, with long, black hair, deep, dark eyes, and

dimples that make me want to cry every time she smiles. She's also

nearly as smart, charming, and charismatic as I am.

You can see we're a perfect couple. The only flaw I can find in her is

that she doesn't seem to think my jokes are very funny.

That, and her taste in music.”

Marco’s dad likes classical music

The school has served tainted meat to the students at least once

Apparently this is a shitty school if things are getting shut down b/c someone had to take it to court over asbestos 

Marco did poorly on the date. Should not pretend to like things that you don’r actually like to get with people

Marco talks about his love life with Cassie

So… the animorphs can scope out someone that Marco’s date probably isn’t a host but do they do that for their families?

Yeah I’m still bullshit on the whole dogs are always good and happy b/c alien pacifist spirits. B/c like dog? Not always happy or friendly.

Jake has charisma like plain oatmeal has flavor.

AU where the free horks assassinate Visser 3 when they’re feeding their host

Visser 3 scracthers their butt in public

So bug ships are good with flying through a planets atmosphere

So… does Visser 3 get parasites often enough that they don’t immediately jump to the andalite bandit conclusion?

The animorphs continue to be the luckiest motherfuckers in existance

Visser 3 has a collection of tourture instruments in their private quarters

The animorphs getting hosts killed b/c they didn’t think their plans through again. Huzzah

“Rising up behind her was a pillar of glass. A cylinder ten feet, twelve feet tall, and half as broad. Inside the cylinder was a vague shape, blood-red and midnight-blue slashes highlighting a glistening silver body.

Yes, body. Because despite the frosted glass and the mist that filled the cylinder, that ten-foot-tall tube contained something biological. There was a row of the cylinders spaced across the cargo bay. Maybe ten in all.”

Venber hybrid design

I’m guess he means -200 F?

Also the animorphs are so lucky that the yeerks don’t belive in video survalence

So can the writer’s just not count? Or does teh editor just not exist? 4 fucking doors opened in that fucking sequence. Ach counted 6 doors in this sequence and i trust that she’s better with numbers than I am

Ah the animorphs getting more people horribly maimed and killed b/c who the fuck knows is in the cansister with the alien that lives in absurdly fridgid temps

The free horks should hate these children and they’d be justified

And Visser 3 continues to be a shit leader

Rachel saving Cassie’s bacon

I mean Cassie, yer a Californian wolf (already kinda odd) but like you don’t think that an animal that lives in a hot place wouldn’t be good in the cold. No mexican wolf is gonna do well if just dumped in the arctic

Rachel keeps Ax warm as he and the others morph to hide in her fur from the cold. 

Jake, you have a Siberian tiger morph, why are you gonna hide in Rachel’s fur? That tiger should be doing just about as well as Rachel’s bear

Oh no I was wrong just Ax and Tobias hide in Rachels fur

Marco goes into shock b/c he stayed a tropical animal instead of at least trying his wolf morph

...Rachel, hitting someone in the head is a good way to give them a concussion or brain damage so not helping 

Again at best yall have Mexican wolves or Timbers adapted for the heat, Rachel’s grizzly is better than that

If you’ve been heading north al this time the arctic is more likely

“There were two of them. About eight feet tall. Humanoid. Torso, head, and limbs in the usual places. Only their heads were shaped kind of like a hammerhead shark's, oblong with big, dark globs on each side that must have been eyes. Each creature had two thick upper arms growing out of broad shoulders. The upper arms split at the elbows to make two forearms.

Big, burly, nasty-looking beasts. Silver, with flashes of blood-red and midnight-blue along their flanks, along their shoulders, and converging in their faces.

They were sliding toward us on long, ski-like feet. They used two of their forearms, one right and one left, to propel themselves forward.

And they glistened in the light like diamonds or crystals.”

More venber hybrids

Who apparently look exactly like regular venber

“The Venber kept coming, making strange, crunching noises. Regular, repeated sounds that seemed to ricochet off the rocks behind us in a weird, distorted echo. ”

Venbers echolocate apparently

Huh, so they’re not that far north then if the sun is setting

There was a polar bear at the zoo they got their morphs from. Too bad they never whent and collected more morphs from there

And teh andalites totally commited some form of genocide against the Five

Just assuming that humans are the creatures with the most complex genetic info avalible to the yeerks. But noooo the series isn’t saturated with ‘Humans are special!’

There’s fucking grass more geneticly complex than fucking humans

Really bitches? Yall do worse than seal shredding to yeerk hosts on a regular basis and Cassie you should be used to fucking predation

Ok i checked and this is after the dinosaur book more or less. Why are they surprised by Cassie being ok with hunting/scavenging? She’s already demonstrated more survival skills than the lot of yall

Cassie you’ve broken that don’t kill a sentient creature unless in absolute self defense many many times. I have not forgotten book 19 when you decided to kill a downed hork-bajir host that didn’t pose a threat to you

I like how all dolphins are lumped together by that statement

… dolphins have no blubber? Marco you just joined Jake’s “bows and arrows are close combat weapons” level of the fuck?

Seals have the instint to run? Sure

Amazing how these orca have blubber and can survive the artic waters

Also isn’t it a bit all that all the natives that the animorphs encounter all imediately assume that these kids are spirits?

I like this new kid but uh not the writers

Derek has a job

Derek is friends with a polar bear named Nanook. This is not getting less suspect

Friends as in watches him from a distance is slightly better

Derek goes back to his own life. 

You know animorphs you could warn him about the whole yeerk thing in case, ya know you guys loose. Spread some info around. 

Also, ya know if his village gets cable they can probably communicate to other people

Also, so, this inuit kid named his bear friend a bastardized version of the word for bear in his presumably native tongue

According to Marco polar bears hunt for fun b/c they are capable of going without eating for awhile. Almost like its difficult to find food in the fucking arctic and requires time and luck. These fuckmothering writers

The venber are strong enough to bend steel in their hands

Poor venbers

So there might be two surviving venber at the lest. If the yeerks can’t track and recapture them. If their programming stopped and they still arent attacking all quadrupeds putting them at odds with the locals who probably own dogs.

The book is finished at least. Did not enjoy that.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What don't you like about #47? Not hating. just curious.

Short opinion: I’m just gonna leave this here.

Long opinion:

Seriously, though, Isaiah Fitzhenry’s journal cuts off mid-sentence.  Because we know he died in the act of writing it.  Oh, and by the way, he’s lying in the middle of a battlefield, bleeding to death, while writing those words.  This book clearly didn’t think things through nearly well enough, or perhaps assumed that its child readers wouldn’t notice.  Trust me, I noticed.  When I was eight years old* I had this ridiculous mental image of this dude lying there in the middle of a freakin’ Civil War battle writing in his notebook with his pen.  Now that I know a little history I have this EVEN MORE RIDICULOUS mental image of this dude lying there in the middle of a freakin’ battle with a quill pen, an ink pot, a sheet of non-waterproof wood-pulp, a pen knife, an ink blotter, and some kind of writing surface AS HE BLEEDS TO DEATH IN THE MUD.

There are several other utterly ridiculous leaps of logic that this story is forced to make in order to achieve the journal at all.  Why the heck even bother adding in a character named Jacob?  Given that he died before meeting anyone from the Fitzhenry family who actually survived long enough to procreate, one can only assume that Jean Berenson has read her grandfather’s great-aunt’s dead brother’s journal enough to go want to name a kid after this dude, and yet she has never once mentioned that fact to Jake.  Otherwise it’s just a weird coincidence, one which violates the One Steve Limit.  

On the subject of dead brothers and Berensons (too soon?) it’s interesting to note that this book continues the motif of eldest siblings kicking the bucket that runs throughout the series.  Rachel and Tom are the obvious ones, as I’ve noted, but there’s also Elfangor, Saddler, Arbat, Aldrea, and now Isaiah Fitzhenry.  If I had to guess the fact that Isaiah has a younger sister and then dies tragically is no accident.  (Although that all could have been avoided if he’d just gotten to a friggin’ medical tent instead of whipping out his complete set of writing supplies in the middle of a battlefield to continue his vaguely-racist memoirs…)  It’s also a nice connection to that chilling moment at the beginning of the book where Jake dumps a box of Tom’s things in the trash because he has pretty much given up on the idea of saving his brother at this point in the war.  

However, even the way that Jake ends up with the journal is kind of weird and logic-defying.  His Grandpa G tried to leave it for him as a gift (which makes sense, given how obsessed that kid is with military history) but somehow or other it got lost in the mail because Jake is only now finding it mis-labeled in some box in the basement.  Which makes sense how?  Why the heck didn’t it come up during that whole sequence where Tom and Jake were looting all their great-grandpa’s stuff looking for medals and daggers?  For that matter, why didn’t Jake’s grandmother just give it to him after the funeral, given that #31 specifically mentions she made sure to pass along everything that her father wanted Jake to have?  Assuming it did get lost amidst the chaos of the funeral and the Attack of Moby Cassie and Tom ending up in the hospital and all, how on earth did it end up in a box in the basement among a bunch of Tom’s old school papers?  

It also has to have traveled a heck of a ways to make it into Grandpa G’s possession in the first place.  Someone has to have found it on the battlefield, presumably delivered it to Isaiah’s sister, who then passed it down to her children’s children, who then thought it would be a good thing to hoard and only pass on to the one great-grandchild who happened to prove himself worthy.  For that matter, did Jake read the whole thing sitting there in the basement?  If so, why does he only react to the first chapter?  If he didn’t read the whole thing in one go, does that mean he’s carrying it around in bird morph until he reaches the hork-bajir valley?  Again where it defies logic, and all to achieve a plot device that could have been conveyed so much more easily with good old-fashioned flashbacks.  

And, well, as Cates has pointed out, no discussion of this book would be complete without commenting on the GLARING RACISM in the parallels between the past and present day.  The idea of escaped slaves fighting back against the people who once disenfranchised them in both the 1860s and the 1990s would be interesting and all… But in the process this book compares hork-bajir, who Marco says have “the intelligence of your average second grader” (#51) to African American individuals.  Not only does it draw a parallel between white individuals and humans while also drawing a parallel between black individuals and non-human characters, but it does so in a way that suggests that the black individuals are comparable to simple tree-dwelling primitive aliens with no written language or ability to comprehend complex ideas.  If I think too much about this accidentally horrific metaphor (which I try not to) then it could arguably even re-cast the hork-bajir, with their simple but intuitive reliance on “head voices” (#13) and “Mother Sky’s flowers” (Hork-Bajir Chronicles), as Magical Negro stereotypes.  

The racism is far and away the biggest problem with this book, because RACISM, but there are also a ton of flaws in the characterization and plotting that just bug me.  Jake’s personality is all over the place in this book, most especially when he acts like a total jerk to Toby when Toby (very logically) points out that sixty-odd walking Salad Shooters can’t just duck and run every time the going gets tough the way that six morph-capable kids can.  One of Jake’s great strengths as a leader is his decisiveness, and he spends huge chunks of this book quibbling about the right course of action in an utterly unJakeish way.  Oh, and don’t get me started on the fact that during the final battle HE FORGETS THAT TIGERS KNOW HOW TO SWIM.  Exactly how hard did you get hit over the head by Visser Three’s tentacle-morph, man?  

Toby herself has a couple of downright bizarre lines in this book, including “The trees whispered something about new friends who would take up our cause.  Human friends who would join our fight… I see things, Jake.  Many things” (#47).  Say what?  I thought it was Aldrea who was secretly an andalite, not Toby.  The hork-bajir like their trees, sure, but they also view the trees as a natural resource that needs to be carefully cultivated, not as sentient whisperers sent by the gods to warn about impending Trekkies.  Also, no offense to the assorted Carpenters (Did Richard Carpenter have a younger sibling?  I bet he did.) but why the hell do the trees consider their arrival important enough to bother telling anyone about it?  It’s not like three civilians with no natural weapons are exactly going to turn the tide of a battle that is otherwise being fought by battle-hardened shapeshifters and walking razor blades.  In fact, I’m kind of disappointed in Jake and Cassie for not simply morphing polar bear and herding the dumbasses back to civilization by force before someone could get killed.  I’m 99% sure they contributed nothing to the battle outside of distracting the poor schmucks who had to worry about saving their sorry butts from the aliens.  

Frankly this book feels like it accomplishes with a sledgehammer what #31 already did with a scalpel.  It’s about how Jake is descended from this long line of badass warriors.  It’s about how war is never pretty and the reality has no room for glory amidst the unspeakable horror.  It’s about realizing that you have no control over who lives, who dies, and who tells your story (X).  It’s about struggling to be a good person amidst cosmic events where there are no real clear answers.  It’s a story about families and countries tearing themselves apart over the fight for freedom.  All of which were already covered thoroughly in #31, in a book that actually advances plot, character, and narrative arc.  

Part of what’s so frustrating is that, unlike #48, this book actually has several moments of decent writing.  I love the image of Jake starting to write “Tom” on that box of his brother’s things only to cross it out and write “trash” instead.  The sense of impending catastrophe is huge in this book, because even before the yeerks find the kids’ identities there’s building suspense around the idea that war, children, is just a shot away (X).  The scene with Raines firing four shots in the length of time it takes Samson to reload is freaking powerful.  The parallels between the American Civil War and the Yeerk-Human War are right there when you look for them.  There’s some great social commentary on the fact that in reality the Union was almost as racist as the Confederacy because that was the poison everyone was drinking back then.  There’s the most epic open battle in the whole series, one that is decided through the Animorphs’ home team advantage rather than the yeerks’ shock and awe tactics.  

If only the author had decided to leave out the Logic-Defying Journal of Racism, this might have the makings of a really good Animorphs book.  

*Side note: when I was eight years old and reading this book for the first time, I had no clue what a “Trekkie” was and could only assume at the time that it was some type of specialized camper, since the book never actually specifies what the term refers to and never even mentions Star Trek by name.  Reading it as an adult, I cringe at this condescending portrayal of sci-fi fans in a novel written for sci-fi fans.