Animorphs - The Entire Series

Red tailed Hawks just tend to hang out in David's bedroom?

Gah, got busy and had been procrastinating on catching up with this thread, only to find out we're already 2/3 through the David saga! Well, at least I'm caught up for the conclusion.

On the latest chapter: it is a bit weird how David keeps winning these 1v1 fights against more experienced Animorphs. Jake, Rachel, and the rest have been doing this now for months, if not a full year, whereas David's only been at it for a few days. Yet, he already beat Jake in a fair fight, would have beaten Rachel if not for Tobias stepping in, incapacitated Ax... Obviously for dramatic purposes the dude needs to be a threat, but the kid is pushing beginner's luck pretty hard.

Book/Trilogy thoughts: Echoing what others have said, this trilogy is great but David's character suffers from the truncated nature of the books. Something that's easy to forget outside of this thread is just how short these books are, and they're forced to move very rapidly as a result. David is unquestionably a dick, but he also has very little room to actually develop as a character-It would have been nice to see any of his own internal monologue, or to see him connect (or actively reject a connection) to any of the other characters before his sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

Other thoughts: I dropped off this thread halfway through Megamorphs 2, which really isn't as good as I remembered it. The ending though was really solid-dooming the Mercora is one of the most fucked-up decisions the Animorphs have to make outside of what they do to David at the end of this book , and the image of the comet striking and the last T-Rex wandering across the wastes before succumbing to starvation was one of the big mental images that stuck with me from this series when I read it the first time as a kid. Now in retrospect, I also wonder if writing that section was what inspired them to begin writing Remnants-which, for those who don't know, literally begins with a asteroid striking earth in an extinction-level event. (And for those who haven't read it, oh boy Remnants is a fucked up series, and the death of almost the entire human race is only the start).

edit: Also, someone should really bug a mod for a thread name change.

Marco would totally believe he could untie himself and would spend hours doing so because he almost had it that time.

David killed a red-tail near his house and brought the body to his bedroom, presumably as bait.

But when Tobias actually showed up to save Rachel they were out in a field or something near some powerlines. So yeah it makes sense that he didn't see what hit him and thought it was maybe one of the other animorphs

Yeah I figured it was dark, he can't see shit (if he'd seen and avoided the powerlines by anything other than catching up to Rachel first, he would've gloated about it) and he probably assumes it was Ax.

Marco not immediately morphing out of being tied up also immediately struck me, unless it's another case of "you can be knocked out and be unconscious for as long the plot demands," but even weirder: why on earth did Jake sit around waiting for a bus like a loser instead of flying home?

edit - that reminds me of a story I heard about after Ian Fleming died, and various writers were pitching the estate with drafts for the right to continue the franchise, and one American writer was doing very well, they said, right up to the point where they had James Bond arrive at the airport and then... wait for a bus.

Jake might have just been too tired to want to try morphing again, since he'd already morphed a few times and hadn't got any sleep. I have no explanation for Marco. The way it's phrased implies he wasn't unconscious, either. He could have got more sleep than any of them, except maybe Cassie.

Actually, it seems kind of irresponsible of Cassie's mum to wake her up for this on a school night, unless Cassie was already awake. The random mall tiger had nothing to do with her, as far as her mum knew.

I would let my kid miss a day of school to help with a tiger rescue.

The whole night scene across the two books is really great with a lot of tension, but the way they resolve all the problems of screen again really shows the limitations of these books.

Yeah, the only place this book really suffers is trying to resolve the cliffhanger.

* Jake is critically injured and can't wake up! ...but he will survive in that critically injured state long enough for the police to arrive and call for help, then for Cassie's mom to show up and stabilize him enough for transport to the Gardens, then he just walks out instead of morphing again so that he has to stay up all night waiting for the bus. (If the argument is "he was too tired and didn't want to morph," how much more tired is he now that he's running on no sleep instead of flying home in ten minutes and at least getting a couple hours in bed?)

* Marco is tied up and locked in his closet!... but that isn't actually a problem, he can morph an insect or anything else that can crawl under a door, except I guess he forgot how. And nobody checked on him after David was driven off.

* Tobias might be dead! ...but he isn't, he just got lost despite being their best scout, and it was a random other red-tailed hawk who was conveniently active enough at night to catch David's attention despite definitely not being nocturnal, and when Tobias returned he conveniently attacked David in such a way that David couldn't see him even after retreating. And then, as mentioned above, he didn't check on Marco.

I really like this book, but the cliffhanger from #21 isn't good enough to justify the haphazard resolution at the start here.

Yup, this chapter resolves all the dilemmas from the last book all at once way too neatly. Why would there be a random mundane red-tail flying around, in the same area, that late at night? They're not night hunters, at all.

Shows what the animorphs could do if they're actually ruthless, not afraid of killing, etc

Animorphs Book 22-The Solution, Chapter 9


i sort of feel like this book sort of affects Rachel's and Jake's relationship going forward, along with Rachel's realization that she's an impulsive and violent person and doesn''t want to be.

Chapter 10


This is more of Rachel coming to terms with herself and the way she feels.

Also, I think this is kind of neat. I don't include book dedications here, but this book is dedicated ""For Jeff Sampson and all of his friends"" Jeff Sampson made an early Animorph web page. Originally, Applegate wanted to dedicate the book to specific fan sites and include links to them, but Scholastic said no for legal reasons (Scholastic doesn't have any control what's on them....what happens if a site is listed and it turns into some child unfriendly page, etc.) So this dedication was to all her fans who made webpages.

Yeah, it's a shame what Jeff Sampson did to all those people years later, but you can't expect the author to know the future

Huh. I have a 1998 edition that claims to be a first printing by Scholastic, but it still says "creep". Maybe it was in the mail order version?

What kind of awful parents name their child Saddler?

Our hearts go out to his victims.

The website, btw, was morphz dot com, which I'm not linking to directly. It's not up anymore, but if you wayback machine it, you can see it. Obviously, it contains spoilers, as all the cached versions are after the date of this book.


Jeff. Tom, and Rachel's aunt and uncle, apparently. From what we hear about Saddler, the kid's a jerk, so maybe he wouldn't be if he had a better name.

They're big horseback riders.

This just comes under the I-can't-use-my-real-name thing. Saddler is clearly a stand-in for some other ghastly name, like Ryder or Cobbler or Wainwright.

Lmao at the means of testing to see if Marco is really Marco is to bait him into telling bad jokes.

Oh yeah, whether or not this book's events are being engineered by the Ellimist and (book 26 spoiler) Crayak...btw they definitely are even if it isn't explicit text, the tension between the cousins definitely begins to flare here. I love all the playing on this tension that happens later in the series, even if the characterization begins to get flatter and more one-dimensional as the ghostwritten books become the norm. I just finished 26 which plays nicely on Jake's emerging martyr complex and is possibly the best Jake book. I'm about to reread 27 which I remember liking but I can't remember a Rachel book I like more than this one and book 7 off the top of my head. There is some really great interplay between the kids and non animorph characters like Erek, David, etc coming up as well.

and of course the end of this book is easily one of the most disturbing things they ever do. The genocides, sure, par for the course.The haunted rat island didn't resonate as much with me as a kid but boy oh boy. Do not cross the cool kids at Anywhere California High. they will destroy you.

26 and 27 are both great books but not particularly great Jake and Rachel books IMO, if that makes sense. They're the kind of books that would be great regardless of who was narrating and don't (as far as I recall) have particularly strong links to the narrator's arc.

This came up a little earlier in discussion of how the blue box survived the Yeerk bombardment of the construction site, but that's probably a good example of how the Ellimist and Crayak work. Each of them thinks that they can turn the blue box into an advantage for their side; Crayak sees that David might screw up the Animorphs' plan to save the G6 leaders, and the Ellimist sees how morphing gives Yeerks a way out of their particular life cycle. So it gets placed in a convenient cavity in the rock.

From the PYF meme thread:

Good point. Jakes narration does come thru a bit in 26 when he gets split off from the rest while killing/acquiring the Howler that seems to have killed Cassie but the book itself is one of my favorites basically on the story alone. I'd almost say if there was a narrator with more of a "thing" it might actually draw from the batshit energy of that book.

I'd say Jake's strongest narrations I can remember are probably in 6, 16, and 21. Maybe 11 [REDACTED] because the mission went so wrong[REDACTED]. As the blank slate character he does suffer quite a bit from being a bit of a snore if leadership/war decision trauma isn't your thing.

Animorphs Book 22-The Solution, Chapter 11


Had Ax acquired a dolphin earlier? He had the shark morph, but I didn't think he had the dolphin.


So killer whales and sharks are really the only animals that prey on dolphins. In fact, that's sort of how killer whales got their name. The original Spanish name for them was "Asesina-ballenas", which basically means "whale killers" or "kills whales", because orca pods will sometimes go after small whales. When this got translated into English, it got mixed up as "kiler whales".

He got it at the start of Megamorphs #2. Which I think makes it one of the few times one of those has actually contributed to main series continuity.


They're also technically dolphins, hence the name. Spanish adjective-noun reversal strikes again.

This is a nice subtle touch, given how much she's fretting over the New Rachel and thinking about how she doesn't really recognise her old self that loved gymnastics and shopping. Like she's trying to convince herself.

I vaguely remember reading something, but can't find it now, about researchers watching tagged great white sharks off the Northern California coast. Something affected a bunch of them and just made them take off and completely vacate an area, and when they cross-referenced the data with another tagging project they realised it was the arrival of a bunch of killer whales.

edit - oh, and for some reason the "throwing the chess board across the room" metaphor has stuck with me ever since.

It feels like 90% of Animorphs plans end up with them getting foiled at the last minute and they decide "ok fuck it lets go crazy"

Animorphs Book 22-The Solution, Chapter 13


Just, fuck it, let's go crazy.

Chapter 14


Yeltsin. It's Yeltsin.


A cunning and subtle plan.

Huh. Maybe Yeltsin isn't the Controller.

I'm going to choose to believe that he actually is the Controller, but after however many days of hearing Visser Three yell about the Andalite bandits he was absolutely ready to get wasted in his bungalow and wave them on through when they burst in.

Also, alcohol trivially crosses the blood-brain barrier, so I assume the yeerk wasn't thinking very clearly at that moment either.

My dream: A book where a non-combatant Yeerk uses his advanced knowledge and tech skills to help his host fight crime in exchange for access to tasty food and drink. The key plot convenience is that this Yeerk can only take full control when the host is asleep leading to Jekyll and Hyde shenanigans. The host is straight laced but the Yeerk likes to party.

Rachel refers to her own body as a "human morph" in one of those passages. Editorial slip, or intentional characterization of loss of identity in her exhaustion? Either way, kinda interesting.

Animorphs Book 22-The Solution, Chapter 15


So, speculations it was Yeltsin aside, we never found out which world leader was Yeerked. I also sort of wonder if Visser Three is going to take this out on the real Tony.

Chapter 16


A few chapters ago: Well, the only thing to be frightened of as a dolphin is a killer whale!
Now: Oh no, David's a killer whale.

Also, male killer whales can weigh up to 12,000 pounds, with females weighing about half that.

I'm impressed David managed to get a killer whale morph. That can't have been easy.

Gotta wonder where the hell he acquired that.

edit - lol beaten

This is maybe a few too coincidences too many. David could reasonably assume they're going to try and finish the mission, but he'd also have to know they're coming by water in a dolphin morph (cause if they were all sharks he'd be boned), acquire a killer whale, and also figure out their exact approach vector. The ocean's a big place.

He could have just been in watch in bird form. They fed him false info about their plan, so he thought they'd be up to something, even if it wasn't what they did. When he sees them come out of the ocean, raise a disaster, and... no, wait, there's a storm going on, he couldn't easily fly further out into the ocean and go whale, could he? Unless he landed on that island they pass?

Hm huh ok yeah

Or, like all good nemeses, he's read the script and knows where to hit.