History Animorphs / TropesIToP

* OnlyTheLeadsGetAHappyEnding: [[spoiler:Completely inverted in the end. Humanity, Andalites, Yeerks, Taxxons, and Hork-Bajir all get a bright future, but most of the leads are dead or psychologically shattered and scarred by the things they went through, and almost all of the survivors get a final BolivianArmyEnding.]]

* NoSidepathsNoExplorationNoFreedom: ''Alternamorphs #1'' is a rare literary example. Despite ostensibly being a {{Gamebook|s}}, the author doesn't seem to understand the concept, because the story is completely linear and every "wrong" choice results in instant death. Oddly enough, the second book went to the opposite extreme to the point of unintentional deconstruction.

** Rachel mentions doing this in an early story, turning four pages' worth of material on the Salem witch burnings into five pages by messing with fonts and margins.
** Marco wrote a three-page paper "[[SelfDemonstratingArticle on the topic of how to write a thousand words and say nothing. Zero. Nada. Squat.]]". Then Jake suggests "[[SesquipedalianLoquaciousness the use of rhetoric to obscure a lack of content]]". It gets him a B.

%* OrganicTechnology

* ''Literature/HaveSpaceSuitWillTravel'': Creator/RobertAHeinlein mentions [[Literature/TheLastContinent this story]] but otherwise has no relation to this trope.

* ThePasswordIsAlwaysSwordfish: The access code for the Pemalite spaceship is "6". That's it. Just "6". It's justified in that the Pemalites were incredibly peaceful and trusting. [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome They are also all dead, and the Yeerks cracked the code in about a second]].

** Averted in the Andalite Chronicles. While on an andalite ship that has lost atmosphere, Loren and Chapman are given andalite emergency breathing devices. The gas mixture in the device is formulated for andalite physiology to keep them alive while exposed to the vacuum of space and it is made clear Loren and Chapman are being poisoned by them. The only reason they aren't removed is the vacuum would kill them quicker.

* IfIWantedYouDead: The second-last book. Not only could Tom have fought them with his battle morph (jaguar), but he could've conceivably called in every Hork-Bajir-Controller on the planet and taken them down.

* IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim: [[spoiler:When the war ends, Jake refuses to kill Visser One (previously Three). Tobias, enraged, demands to know why, claiming that Visser One was the one responsible for the entire war. Jake replies quietly that they "don't kill prisoners"]].
** [[spoiler:The Visser immediately mocks his hypocrisy: Jake has just killed seventeen thousand unarmed, helpless Yeerks. Not to mention he and the others had blown up the shopping mall to take out the Yeerk Pool beneath it, which killed thousands of unhosted Yeerks and hundreds of innocent people.]]

* ProbabilityPileup: ''The Ellimist Chronicles'' establishes that while the odds against the Ellimist's ascension were tremendous, the odds of it happening a second time, to Crayak, were very good.

* NoahsStoryArc: In the seventh book, [[SufficientlyAdvancedAlien the Ellimist]] makes his first appearance by telling the main characters that they have no real chance to defeat the [[PuppeteerParasite Yeerks]]. While he's not allowed to interfere with the war, he offers to preserve Earth's life by transporting a portion of humanity, along with animals, to another planet. He even shows them a BadFuture of how things will go if they don't take his offer. [[spoiler:Said BadFuture actually helps them realize how to strike a major blow against the Yeerks, which was the Ellimist's plan all along]].
* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Hork-Bajir can eat Earth bark and Andalites can eat Earth grass. Yeerks can interface with all sorts of alien nervous systems, suggesting a common signaling system. Also, it seems DNA is very common, forming the primary building block of almost all living organisms around the galaxy.

* OnceAcceptableTargets: The Yeerks are an in-universe example. In early books, the kids (especially Ax) can't overemphasize how evil they are, talking about how they'll [[ForTheEvulz destroy the environment because they can]] and [[AcceptablePoliticalTargets comparing them to Nazis]]. But as the war goes on, they come to realize that not all Yeerks are cackling villains like Visser Three, and even gain allies on the other side in the form of the Yeerk Peace Movement.

* NeverFoundTheBody: [[spoiler:Visser One, who more or less makes a career out of this]].

* NeverTrustATitle: Some of the later books got really bad about this. Titles like ''The Suspicion'' (where nothing is suspicious), ''The Prophecy'' (which features no prophecy), and ''The Hidden'' (which features a bizarre morphing buffalo that is definitely not hidden) come to mind.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Elfangor. Alloran's infestation by Visser Three was his fault.

* ImColdSoCold: There is a rather [[IncrediblyLamePun chilling]] portion with this exchange:

** Parodied in the opening of ''The Ellimist Chronicles'', where Toomin successfully turns his alien civilization in a video game into a cultured race of pacifists, only for his opponent's race of fast-breeding carnivores to land on their planet in a primitive spaceship and slaughter them all for food. [[spoiler:He would later create the aforementioned Pemalites, so it looks like he didn't learn from his mistake.]]

** In #23, Tobias' last name is transcribed as "______" in dialogue. One fan theory is that his last name is "Fangor", since Elfangor was his father and he used the human name "Alan Fangor". Another fan theory is that, because the Ellimist erased all trace of Elfangor from Tobias' mother's memory and she married someone else, even though Tobias [[AWizardDidIt still existed somehow]], Tobias was given that man's last name. Whoever he was.

* NoMouth: Andalites.

** A much darker and more well-deserved version than most: [[GeneralRipper Alloran]] is blamed for [[spoiler:the Hork-Bajir genocide]] and is forever remembered as "Alloran the Butcher". It doesn't help that [[IDidWhatIHadToDo he doesn't regret it at first]]. [[UsefulNotes/VictimBlaming He's also remembered as the only Andalite ever taken prisoner as a Yeerk host]].

* ItsPersonal: David and Rachel, in their rematch toward the end of the series. Rachel was the one tasked with abandoning David, [[ForcefulTransformation stuck in rat morph,]] on a deserted island. Through Crayak's intervention, he manages to capture her and nearly exact his revenge.

* ItsPersonal: David and Rachel, in their rematch toward the end of the series. Rachel was the one tasked with abandoning David, [[BalefulPolymorph stuck in rat morph,]] on a deserted island. Through Crayak's intervention, he manages to capture her and nearly exact his revenge.

* MainliningTheMonster: The Venber are a sentient race with unusual physical properties, chief among them that if they are brought to a temperature above freezing, they melt. The resulting liquid is apparently an excellent coolant fluid for supercomputers, and the Venber were hunted to the brink of extinction for it.

** Elfangor does like human music though, especially Music/TheRollingStones.

* MirrorMatch: Happens a handful of times on account of the Animorphs' powers, usually when they're morphing a Taxxon or Hork-Bajir. It's taken UpToEleven in ''The Revelation'': when Visser Three's elite Hork-Bajir unit corners Rachel and Marco on the narrow infestation pier, Rachel fights ''all of them'' in her own Hork-Bajir morph as they advance.

** Sometimes obvious, sometimes not. According to Word Of God, ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' references are everywhere; "Yeerk" is a reference to "Yrch", the Elvish word for "Orc", and Elfangor and Aximili's names are references to elvish cities. Jake and Tom's (and possibly Rachel's) last name, Berenson, may also be a reference to Beren and Luthien (though it's also a real surname).