#animorphs – @besidemoonlight on Tumblr

there's something to be said about the choice to use "prince" as the main signifier of military rank for the andalites. because it kinda obscures the truth of the situation, doesn't it? a group of kids getting magic powers from an alien prince sounds whimsical and delightful. a group of kids getting pulled into a war by an alien colonel sounds tragic and horrible. the slow reveal of what "prince" actually means over the course of the early books is perhaps the most underrated twist of the entire series, because it fundamentally recontextualizes the entire premise of the series without the reader even consciously realizing it.

letsrevince

Including OP's tags cus they were good

lilacnothlit

Remember, kingdoms are always neutral-to-good and empires are always evil. Princes are what the good guys have. Bad guys have military rank.

"Frightened though they were, some of the ~~animals~~ Andalites might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Prince good, Corporal bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion."

#animorphs

besidemoonlight reblogged

welpwomp

fanonical

the most harrowing animorphs book is the one where the animorphs, who are already child soldiers, are unknowingly forced to fight and kill alien children

yes, this happens

derinthescarletpescatarian

The “good” godlike figure tricks them into it and, the series representation of true pacifism chooses not to tell them what’s going on so he can use them as the tool of vengeance that his pacifism prevents him from becoming himself

derinthescarletpescatarian

#every time I learn something new about animorphs I regret ignoring the bin full of them in primary school#seriously I should have read them but I thought they were lighthearted based on the wackass starfish cover#very embarrassing but yes it was a classic judging a book entirely by its cover sitch#welp better late than never

From memory I think that starfish one is the one where a teenage girl beats someone up with her own severed arm and also pins a random teenager to the wall in the mall (by her clothes) using steak knives, but more importantly, they are all available online for free with the writers’ blessing.

the-cosmic-yeet

every

derinthescarletpescatarian

#I’m sorry Animorphs had a WHAT#A WAR?#I never got to read it but I always thought it was a fun and lighthearted story or something#I need to read it

It’s um

I hate to be the one to break this to you but Animorphs is in fact a war story. The story does not exist without the war. It is specifically a story abut child soldiers being enlisted to fight bodysnatching brain slugs, meaning that almost every time the kids kill a ‘nasty invading alien’ they are also killing an innocent slave. Concepts of the morality of child soldiers, offense vs. defense, what counts as acceptable losses/acceptable collateral damage and whether it’s acceptable to slaughter enemies while they’re helpless, things like chemical warfare and the rights and protections that should be offered to displaced war refugees, as well as war not having ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and most actors being victims of their circumstances and societies, are heavily explored. (As well as trauma – these kids have SO MUCH PTSD. The first suicide attempt takes place in book 3 and things don’t really improve, especially after the torture book.)

I once did a quick tally and found that of all the “main” species in the book (humans plus any alien species that appears in three or more books), only three species do not explicitly attempt on-page genocide in the series. They’re the three species who we are introduced to in the first book as the antagonists.

thedepressionoftrees

I’ve done this rant before but animorphs radicalized me farther than anything else. I remember setting the last book down at the age of maybe 12 or 13, the book ending with a member of the main cast dead, warcrimes committed in the name of freedom, every character covered in scars both physical and mental, and I thought to myself “I don’t want to join the army anymore” Those books hit their target audience in me and they changed me forever. If not for them, I probably would have joined the army at 18 and royally fucked up my life

pushovermediacritic

only three species do not explicitly attempt on-page genocide in the series. They’re the three species who we are introduced to in the first book as the antagonists.

I dunno, I feel like the Yeerk’s whole MO is genocide. Just falling under alternate definitions of genocide than “mass murder”, more under the “mass enslavement + rape + being forced from their homes” definition.

The Hork-Bajir and Taxxons are fairly innocent, though.

bogleech

Yeah the future we’re shown if the yeerks win is a cultural genocide, with all humans kept in basically closets like they’re objects when they aren’t being driven around by brain parasites or arranged to reproduce.

But meanwhile the ostensibly “heroic” race attempting to wipe out whole races just to weaken the yeerks - denying them more dangerous hosts - is a concept I’ve not even seen done in a lot of adult-aimed science fiction even though we see shit like that in actual real life. Wiping out populations because they could hypothetically harbor or become more enemies. In fact that’s part of all war and still gets glossed over and ignored by most media about war, unless of course they have the evil villain side do it. Here it was bluntly addressed and it disillusioned the entire main cast to the very concept of there being a “good side.”

#animorphs

besidemoonlight reblogged

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

Anonymous asked:

Imagine that you were put in charge of a modern, high-budget, well-written Animorphs TV series. What changes to the plot/characters/world would you make while adapting it? (Books that you'd skip, arcs that you'd rearrange, things you would add or outright alter...)

thejakeformerlyknownasprince answered:

[Important caveat: I have ZERO experience in set design, directing, editing, camerawork, or any other processes involved in TV production, unless we’re going to be super generous and count the bit of scriptwriting and stage-acting I did in high school. Ergo, these ideas might make no sense in practice.]

Animate it. I would much much prefer to see an anime-style show to a live-action one for a handful of different reasons:
Battle scenes, morph sequences, and alien appearances wouldn’t be constrained by budget realities. Although we’ve come a long way from AniTV’s practical effects, in 2019 Runaways still minimizes Old Lace (the sentient dinosaur) and struggles with her somewhat less-than-convincing appearance while she’s onscreen. I’d like to see real-looking battles between exotic animals and highly unusual aliens. I’d like to see Ax portrayed as a deer-scorpion-centaur with no mouth who also has complex facial expressions. I’d like taxxons and hork-bajir that match their descriptions in the books. CGI for a moderate-budget TV show can’t do that yet.
The characters’ appearances could match their descriptions in the books. I don’t really care about AniTV’s Jake having blue eyes or Marco having short hair. I do care about the fact that Cassie is described as short, chubby, dark-skinned, natural-haired, and androgynous in self-presentation… whereas AniTV’s Nadia-Leigh Nascimento is (through no fault of her own and 100% the fault of Nickelodeon) none of those things. I’d like to see all of the characters drawn in a way that matches their canon racial heritage, and voiced with actors of those ethnicities as well. For bullshit marketing reasons of bullshit, that’s not as likely to happen in a live-action show.
I’d want the show to convey the frequent mismatches between characters’ physicality and their personalities. It’s an important motif of the books. It’s part of the reason that Tobias has been claimed by the trans* community. It’s a major plot point, lest new viewers think that the vice principal of the school is actually trying to kill his own students. It doesn’t come off in AniTV, for all that I commend them for even trying (casting Shawn Ashmore’s twin as controller-Jake, portraying Chapman as straight out of Stepford), just because the nature of controller-ness and nothlitization are difficult to convey literally. Animation has a lot of tricks, from deliberately distorted drawings to screensaver-like “mental space,” that can actually convey concepts like mind control or body dysmorphia pretty well — Alphonse in Fullmetal Alchemist and Aang in Avatar the Last Airbender great examples of body-mind mismatch and multiple consciousnesses in one body, respectively.
Use a cold open for every episode. I am a sucker for Batman cold opens or any other opening scenes that pick up in the middle of the characters’ everyday lives, because they work so well to convey that there is a crapton of life happening outside of the plot of any given episode. Several Animorphs books (#9, #14, #35, #41, #51) open this way, to great effect, and I love the way that it gives us slices of life we might not otherwise see (morphing to cheat on science homework, completing entire offscreen missions, having dinner with the family) and help build these characters’ worlds outside of individual episode plots.
Introduce James sooner (and have better disability narratives). There are several aspects of Animorphs’ social justice consciousness that age okay (Rachel shutting down Marco’s constant flirting) or not well at all (Mertil and Galfinian). One important way the series could update Animorphs is through having canon disabled characters like James, Mertil, and Loren have bigger roles and not resorting to kill-or-cure narratives. Maybe James could come in sooner and form a Teen Titans West-esque team with the other Auximorphs so that he and Collette and the others could be recurring supporting characters with unique plotlines. Maybe Loren could still gain morphing power, but remain blind and brain-damaged so that the hork-bajir need to work with her to figure out accommodations while sleeping rough.
Modify Jake’s and Cassie’s parents to account for the contemporary setting. The fact that the kids so often disappear all afternoon or even overnight without anyone worrying just wouldn’t translate to a contemporary reimagining of Animorphs. Tobias and Ax are each other’s only family on the planet whereas Marco’s dad and Rachel’s mom are both overworked single parents. Jake’s family, however, and Cassie’s…
Cassie’s parents are so freaking cool in canon that they would definitely start to worry if Cassie went for an entire “weekend at Rachel’s” without answering any texts or calls. Maybe there could be some scenes with them talking about how they have this super-mature responsible daughter whom they can trust not to get into trouble even if she does hate cell phones, but oh well because they’re not big on technology either.
Jake’s parents are… less cool, but they still try their best. The show might explain their lack of concern about either of their disappearing kids through upping the hippie factor from his mom, maybe until she practices Free-Range Parenting. (Why yes, it is true that Jake’s family would have the necessary privileges to get away with free-range crap while Cassie’s family would not, because yes it is the case that black families have been arrested for leaving kids alone for 10 minutes while white families are allowed more passes under the law. Yes, that is a steaming pile of racist bullshit.) The other way it could go is by having Jake’s parents completely checked out, which could get in the way of plots like #31 that hinge on them genuinely caring about their kids, but could also introduce an interesting dynamic if it partially parentifies Tom.
Include at least one Rashomon plot. The TV series would by necessity lose the first-person narration, with all its brilliantly subtle shades of bias and misinterpretation. One way to try and bring that back in would be to convey the same events from multiple points of view with subtle differences in the way that each person perceives what happened. This could happen somewhere in the Visser One plot, with Rachel interpreting the scene as a straight Animorphs-vs-yeerks battle, while Visser One interprets it as Visser Three incompetently sabotaging her as Animorphs ruin her life, while Marco interprets it as a struggle to protect his mom and also save his friends, while Visser Three interprets it as the andalite bandits flagrantly plotting with Visser One, while Jake interprets it as Marco going off the rails from stress… and the only witness who has a sense of what actually happened is Eva. Other possibilities abound.
Start with a plan to make one episode per book… and modify as necessary. There are areas of the series I’d like to see expanded (#50 - #54 covers a lot of ground in relatively little space) and areas that I think could afford to be compacted (#39 - #44 feature a whole lotta nothin’). But instead of adding or discarding an entire book, I think you could spread out many of the plots by simple virtue of TV shows not being constrained by first-person narration.
Certain books just wouldn’t get straight-translated today anyway (#40, most notably). I don’t think any books are so bad or useless that they couldn’t be modified into decent television episodes.
The ramping-up that leads to open war happens mostly in the background of #44 - #51, but a bunch of scenes with just controllers talking to each other could go into that process in a lot more detail. This content could help fill out plots like #44 and #48 that frankly don’t have a lot else going on.
The entire plot of Visser happens over a nonspecific period of time between #30 and #45, so instead of getting one book we could get an entire running Yeerk Empire subplot with major consequences for the main plotline.
Similarly, the andalites’ decisions happen mostly offscreen but have major consequences for the Animorphs. The consequences for the Electorate after the events of #38 could also run for a whole subplot that sets up their decision to nuke Earth in #52.
The biggest absence from the last couple books is Rachel. Her last book is a friggin’ dream sequence, she acts out of character in #52 especially, and the narration order cuts off directly before giving her one last book. It wouldn’t be necessary to add an entire episode just to rectify this oversight, when #51 could still be Marco-centric but also show her and Jake on their sabotage mission, and #52 could have the same rough plot but with a few scenes between her and Tobias thrown in for good measure.
Anyway, maybe the various Chronicles could be a handful of Doctor-lite episodes where the Animorphs themselves are incidental and Elfangor or Aldrea has the helm. Maybe the events of the Chronicles could come out organically over the course of the show, for instance by expanding the memory-dumps Tobias gets in #1 and #33 or having Jara tell Dak’s story in #13 or #23. The Megamorphses, on the other hand, could pretty easily just occur as regular-series episodes, albeit possibly as two- or three-parters.
Lean into the comic-book aesthetic. Animorphs is written very much in the style of a graphic novel, from its “teens with superpowers save the world from aliens” plot to its heavy use of onomatopoeia. Even the use of hypertext symbols around thought-speak hearkens back to the comic book convention of using pointed brackets around alien languages to convey translation. The show could homage this motif through having dramatic transformation sequences, “uniforms” of multicolored spandex the kids use to morph, an opening credits sequence that emphasizes the power of each animal, and other superhero-comic elements throughout.
Have the violence be consequential. To keep the examples from earlier: in Fullmetal Alchemist, as well as in Avatar, characters that get hurt stay hurt. A character getting shot or stabbed is portrayed as a potentially life-changing event. Characters’ injuries do not disappear between episodes, and even alchemy and waterbending are not portrayed as total fixes. Characters scar, they become disabled, they spend entire episodes in recovery, they accrue trauma, and they do not shrug off life-ending injuries. Animorphs helps to justify the idea that six kids could (mostly) survive (most of) an entire war against a friggin empire through making the protagonists nigh-unkillable thanks to their healing abilities, but it nevertheless shows that shooting someone will result in that person bleeding and screaming and possibly dying. Having a sci-fi or action show meant for children isn’t actually a valid excuse for portraying violence as cool or funny or inconsequential the way that (Avengers Assemble, Teen Titans, Kim Possible, Dragonball Z, Pokemon, etc.) too many children’s sci-fi/action shows opt to do.

elexuscal

This echoes a lot of my own thoughts for a modern adaptation of Animorphs. I’ll add a couple of other thoughts of my own:

- Another great reason to go with animation over live action… Realistic ages. Part of the main themes of the Animorphs series is how fucked up that these things happen to kids. If you go live action, you’re almost certainly going to get older actors. And that’s partly just inherent in the medium… Younger actors are less skilled than older ones, on average, and have a lot of well justified rules to keep them from being overworked. Keep it animated, keep the kids.

- In terms of updating… Modern technology has made it a lot harder for kids to sneak around and keep their IDs secret, for a lot of reasons. Stuff like phones tracking locations and storing search results could be hand waved by Ax putting some encryption code and stuff on.

I think it would also be smart to say maybe Elfangor gave the team some sort of… short range EMP device? It would need to be thought out carefully so not to make it over powered, but something to help keep the kids IDs secret. There are way more security cameras, plus everyone has a camera in their pocket; this would help with changing in convenient back alleys and such.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

I still like the headcanon that the kids get caught on camera morphing on, like, several occasions, and every time the internet collectively shrugs and dismisses it as a cool photoshop art project. Either that or the controllers are weirdly helpful because they’re rushing around screaming “fake news” at any and all possible evidence of alien invasion and therefore end up covering up andalite as well as yeerk tech with their imperfect algorithms.

unculturedmamoswine

Honestly, the farther into the future we go, the more possible it becomes that the series cold be set in the nineties. It becomes less ‘dated’ and more ‘period piece’ as we go on. We could sidestep all the messy 'how do they deal with cell phones’ stuff and also get all the fun of 90’s fashion and pop culture references!

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

That is a good point. Cruel Summer and The Owners are already starting to take advantage of the 30-year nostalgia cycle with historical fiction set in the 1990s, so hopefully Animorphs could just remain in its original timeline. Honestly I would prefer that so much; I hate modern rewrites and think the series would lose a lot of its uniqueness if forced to update.

#animorphs #thinking about THIS #also taking this post as a sign to reread the books #long post

besidemoonlight reblogged

alluringalliteration-blog

aniquotes

“Wasn’t it Journey to the Bottom of the Sea?” Marco asked. “No, it was Voyage,” Jake confirmed. “Journey sounds better,” Marco said. Jake sighed. “Hey, time marches on, right? We’re in a hurry. What are you thinking, Cassie?” “Calamari,” she said with a grin. “Snails?” I said, frowning. Ax said. “Wait, that’s not—” Cassie said loudly. Ax continued. “You ate a snail through your hoof?” I asked. That picture temporarily replaced the image of me being squashed to the size of a Barbie doll on the ocean floor. “Ooookay, I think that’s probably enough about snails,” Jake said. “Yeah, especially since calamari does not mean snail,” Cassie pointed out. “Escargot means snail. I was talking about—” Tobias grumped. “Squid!” Cassie yelled suddenly. The birds in the trees around us fell silent. So did we. Until Tobias said, “Oh. Who. CARES?” Cassie cried. “Squid. We can morph a giant squid! Giant squid dive really deep. And they have arms, so we could maybe get into the Pemalite ship.” I met Marco’s gaze. “Why didn’t she just say that to begin with?” “Could have saved a lot of time,” Marco agreed, playing along. Ax wondered. Cassie threw up her hands. “It’s a book. Journey to—” “Ah HAH! It was Journey!” “I mean Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” Cassie grated. “Captain Nemo was attacked by a giant squid.” “Who won?” Marco asked. “Wait a minute,” I said. “It wasn’t Journey or Voyage. It was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne.” Cassie looked like she might strangle me. Then she said, “Oh yeah. Voyage was a TV show. They run it on the Sci-Fi channel.” “I thought it was on Nick at Night,” Marco said. At which point everyone started giggling. “Someone call the Chee and tell them they’re doomed,” I said. “Their only hope is a collection of idiot kids, standing around in the woods debating cable channels.”

Book #27: The Exposed, pg. 65 (by K.A. Applegate)

#animorphs #I love this part

besidemoonlight reblogged

ladyoftheshield-deactivated2024

suzanami

something filled up my heart with nothing, someone told me not to cry children, wake up, hold your mistake up before they turn the summer into dust

six dumb kids playing hero.

primeideal

the cinnamon buns though

Source: suzanami

#fanart #art #animorphs