Animorphs - The Entire Series

Gonrod gets the Elfangor Award for Tolkien anagrams

I genuinely don't remember the rest of this book and I can't recall what Arbat's deal is. The situation here smacks of the traitor on Leera but not in a way that makes any sense, so it feels more like he was eliminating Aloth as some kind of 5-dimensional chess move. I'm calling bullshit that he's "retired" and his orders to Astrid earlier made it pretty clear that he's actually in charge here (and Gonrod knows it).

Also I'm glad Aloth's gone because I'm not dyslexic but even after their roles had been delineated I was still blurring them together while reading. Pick a different vowel, Applegate!

I'm not going to lie it's been messing with me too. I cannot remember who was who at all without rechecking constantly. Best one easy trick doctor's hate it of writing I was ever given was have all the main characters' names start with a different letter and the reader will have a lot easier time keeping track.

I do that too. George R.R. Martin apparently tried to subvert it because of ~realism~ and if you look at the actual Middle Ages everyone was named either Thomas, William or Richard, but he only did that with dead fathers etc. not actual main characters we were expected to keep track of.

Same, I have had to re-read this more than any others just to keep them straight. Also somehow the guy who sold organs is my favorite out of this group.

I once worked on something set in 1220 or so and, historically, damn near every Lady was named Eleanor or Ellen or Elaine or Helen and it was very confusing.

Chapter 21


So who here had suicide mission?

Chapter 22


And who had biological weapon?

W00t

Welp, here I go genociding again!

Also lol that apparently Alloran wasn't wrong, just ahead of his time.

Interesting that it's suicide mission. Leave absolutely no trace that the noble Andalites committed another genocide. 'Pretty fortunate that Earth is no longer a problem we would have to get to eventually. Guess the humans were due for a pretty nasty plague.'

This plague is intended to kill the Yeerks, not humanity. It's just...not perfect, and humans could be collateral damage. (Not really any better, but unlike with the Hork-Bajir, killing humanity isn't the goal.

Looks like the Andalite govt agrees with my 'Alloran did nothing wrong' stance!

Technically speaking, of course, it's a murder-suicide mission.

Ax has obviously been unreliably-narrating for a bit, co-ordinating stuff with the other Animorphs, and you have to wonder whether or not some of them are in the room right now as insects. If Rachel at the very least is, then I'd assume the second they hear what Estrid just said it's Grizzly Time, and I doubt the others would be much more charitable.


To a given definition of "government." This does smack of the equivalent of the CIA and/or executive branch deciding they don't need to worry Congress' pretty little heads about every little thing they get up to overseas.

Chapter 23


I mean, that's the dilemma, really. Even if Estrid can't fix the instability, the use of the weapon would wipe out the Yeerks on Earth and humans as a host species. It would be a "victory". But at what price is victory too high? If you're so committed to your goals that you don't care the costs in carrying it out, how are you different from the Yeerks, if you're willing to put your morality aside?

Chapter 24


I mean, for me, this one chapter sort makes the book,,,Ax;s makes the decision that anyone who believes in freedom, resists tyranny and pursues peace are his people, regardless of who they are, and those who don't....aren't. And Arbat even makes the whole "I'm a hard man, willing to make the hard decisions because the common people are too weak to do it and don't understand" speech, which even now, some people like so much, and which Ax points out, is the self-pity of the murderer.

There's a youtube channel that's been talked about on here before called poparena, which, among other things, has read, summarized. and commented on each of the books of the Animorph series. There commentary on this ghostwriter is that, of all of them, she's probably most faithful to Applegate's characterizations of the Animorphs, but what she likes to do is play with the book's narrative itself, putting the characters in uncomfortable situations and making them make complex and uncomfortable moral choices, and a lot of that is at play in this book.

Huh. This book is an expansion of Ax calling war a question of balance.

I like it.

Honestly, I'm impressed at how sympathetic Arbat manages to be here, even as he plunges the dagger deep in the back. The war is devouring everything the Andalites can feed it, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Even worse, they may yet lose. Either way, the Humans are doomed, so why not sacrifice them on the altar of victory?

Also, I love the "Of course the mission had to fail. The whole point is to be a doomed mission that gets scrubbed from the books, and even High Command can't scrub "We killed Visser Three and on an entirely unrelated note the entire Human population died. Whoops! Guess we'll never know what happened!" from the records.

Agreed. It's definitely one of the points of his whole character arc through the series: actual exposure to other species is what has drawn him out of his arrogant Andalite bubble and made him recognise common (for lack of a better term) "humanity." Andalite state/military power gets used as a proxy in this series for both the positive and negative aspects of US global power, but I think this is a gesture to American multiculturalism* - a rejection of narrow-minded nationalism and an embrace of a fraternity based on common values rather than race.

(*Which every other Western country does too but to be fair, AFAIK, America did do it first... or was that the Swiss?)

I also liked this bit:


I've really been enjoying this book even though, until the end of this chapter, it's largely been a one-man show. Ax is often used as the fish-out-of-water figure of fun, but we all know he's a great character in his own right, and books where he has to deal with other Andalites are always great.

This one almost feels like a Chronicles book sometimes, in the way that it's not filler because it's dealing with actually a pretty pivotal point in the war, but also in how sidelined the human Animorphs are, and how much a moment like this underscores how important Ax himself has become. Earth is not just a backwater anymore and he's not just a lost cadet behind enemy lines anymore, he's a person who'll end up in the history books. But he's also a person with agency, making critical decisions. (What might have happened if Ax hadn't remained utterly loyal to the Animorphs from the get-go, and hadn't uncovered this plot?) Positioning him at the centre of all this works really, really well - which seems like an obvious thing to say, but it's basically the opposite of his last book, the cow one, which thematically should have been a Cassie book but was instead weirdly narrated by him instead.

This is definitely one of the better ghostwritten/later books. The author really nails the voice of both Ax and Andalite culture. My one quibble is that Estrid specifically notes that she had problems being accepted as a scientist because of her gender, but I swear Ax or Elfangor established that science was seen as more feminine in Andalite culture. Maybe applied bioweapons research was specifically male though.

in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Aldrea calls the arts and sciences "traditional female occupations." Still, missing one line in like 40 books so far....

While it's probably a slight (but understandable) goof from transplanting American gender politics onto Space American gender politics, I could also believe that the war has empowered the male-dominated military to the point that they're running the show across all sectors of Andalite culture. After all, it's been at least one generation since the Hork Bajir Chronicles, so things could have changed a lot since then.

Maybe it's like how cooking is considered feminine but the most prestigious chefs are men. Just for biochemical research, a common at home activity among Andalites.

What's that line about Elfangor's family's cottage industry being... assembling navigation systems for star fighters?

Chapter 25


They found Arbat.

Chapter 26


I admit, I kind of liked Ax's "Correct" line there.

<Estrid, you are beautiful, you are brilliant. But I really do not think I like you very much.>

Great line in a book full of them.

Did Ax thought speak in human morph?

Yeah. I guess you can probably thought speak in any morph, but I don't know how consistent the books are at following that.

I love the caged hosts trying whatever they can to help the Animorphs. Of the top of my head the last time I can remember seeing momentarily free hosts to try fight back was in the first book with Tom.

I was expecting this to be mercing Arbat, but it looks like Ax is gonna have to talk him down. Interesting.

There was some whooping and cheering from the free hosts during one of the other pool fights. But yeah, I love those little glimpses of host rebellion that we see.

Honestly you'd think it'd be worth it to release a handful of controllers and place them in the hork bajir hideout or something. You could do it while keeping the Animorphs' identity a secret and have a source of information at least, even if you don't let them out of the camp.

Then later you could even make animorphs out of the most reliable ones.

Yeah............. but people are stupid as fuck, as evidenced by the last few years, so I'd rate it 100% chance that one of them makes a run for it and gets recaptured, blowing the whole thing.

Also, the last time they did a jailbreak, everyone except one lady was either recaptured or killed. So, it doesn't have a great track record.

In hindsight, if they really wanted to assassinate Visser 3, rather than infiltrating and shooting him with a hand-weapon, they really should have received a ship with at least one weapon, and then just melted the building he was in. A lot harder to miss. An armored podium won't do shit.

Perhaps some sort of remotely operated flying vehicle

Nah just smash your ship into his at a decent fraction of c

You can, and there's been a couple of times when they've specifically used Ax a conduit for communicating with Tobias while they're all on the ground as humans.


Speaking of the ship, it's pretty funny they just left Gonrod locked in his bedroom for all this. Unless Arbat was using "confined to his cabin" as a euphemism and he's already shanked him.

Chapter 27


Gonrod's not dead! Arbat is, though.

Chapter 28


Poor Ax. He's outgrown Estril. In a big way, he's outgrown his people.

So, that's The Arrival. I don't know about the rest of you, but I really liked it. I think it's a really strong book. The next book is The Hidden. It's a Cassie book, and it's ghostwritten by Laura Battyanyi-Wiess. Keep an open mind on this next one. It goes some interesting places and tries some interesting things. I don't know that it succeeds.

Really strong book, would have fit in just fine as a non-ghostwritten one.

I also think it uses the unreliable narrator in interesting ways, not just for the plot but in Ax's feelings at the end there. I'm not sure whether he does actually like Estrid or not, and I'm not sure he knows either, with it all being mixed up in his homesickness. It's pretty significant that - seemingly without even agonising over it much - he just rejected his first opportunity, after all these years, to go home.

I think its the first time we see ax use human sarcasm, yes?