Animorphs / Tropes A to H

Tropes A-H | Tropes I-P | Tropes Q-Z

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Tropes from Animorphs.

A

• Aborted Arc:
  • Book 41, The Familiar, centers on a Bad Future where the Yeerks have conquered Earth, with the Animorphs themselves all either infested or fighting in the terrorist anti-Yeerk resistance. It is revealed to be All Just a Dream, and as Jake awakens he hears an entity speaking that humans require "more study", implying that the vision was some sort of test by this entity. Nothing in the book ever comes into play in the rest of the series and the mysterious entity is never revisited or explained, though Jake notes specifically that its voice is not the Ellimist.
  • A few off-hand references are made to the Yeerks having some presence on the Andalite homeworld, but this never developed into anything and by her own admission Applegate just forgot about it.
• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Marco's dad eventually gets over his wife's death... only she isn't really dead.
• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Andalite tail-blades are incredibly precise and demonstrably sharp enough to cut metal and lop off limbs.
• Accidental Adultery: Marco's mother Eva is thought to have died in a boating accident, but in actuality she was infested by the parasitic alien Visser One, who staged the accident as a cover. Marco eventually discovers this, but is forced to keep it and his double life a secret. However, his dad starts courting another lady, and Marco has trouble accepting her knowing that his real mother is still alive (that, and she's a math teacher). He ultimately lets them marry, deciding it's better that they move on, but shortly after Eva is freed, and Marco's dad reunites with her. They have some trouble reconnecting at first, but are later said to be "as in love as ever". (It helps that the new wife was infested, and Marco lied to his dad that she'd been a controller the whole time).
• Accidental Time Travel: Sario rips tend to send the Animorphs to random time periods when they get caught in them.
• A Chat with Satan: Rachel's discussions with Crayak and the Drode.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The kids never find out what the Ellimist really looks like, as he usually takes a humble, benign humanoid shape. The reader does get a vague and incomplete description of Ketrans in The Ellimist Chronicles, and the Ellimist says, after his ascension, that he chooses the humble form of a mere Ketran (in contrast to the terrifying, monstrous form Crayak chooses.) The cover of The Ellimist Chronicles most likely shows the Ellimist's favored form.
• The Ace:
  • The descriptions of Jake's pre-Animorphs life make him out to be generally all-around average, an unimpressive student and mediocre athlete (Not even good enough to make the basketball team), but he has this indescribable quality that draws people to him. After the war starts, this quality is what transforms him into the leader of the team.
  • Rachel is a beautiful, popular girl with an indomitable spirit, is recognized as having the makings of a world-class gymnast, and is a genius student (she gets a national award for academic excellence at one point). Unfortunately the war turns her into a violent Blood Knight until everything else disappears from her life.
  • Cassie is the best morpher of the group, even better than Ax. He compares her abilities to Andalites who use their morphing skill for art and entertainment purposes.
• Achilles' Heel: The two-hour time limit for the Animorphs. The Yeerks also have a weakness: they need leave their host to absorb Kandrona rays every three days.
• Achilles in His Tent: Jake, for a couple books in the final story arc. Though he's actually angry at himself, as he failed to keep his parents from being infested. In his mind, he's unfit to lead. When he does come back as leader, his personality has changed considerably...
• Action Girl: Rachel, most prominently, verging on Dark Action Girl by the end. Cassie as well; she doesn't have Rachel's Blood Knight tendencies, but she can more than hold her own in combat. Loren in The Andalite Chronicles is especially impressive given that she has no special powers. And Aldrea helped the Hork-Bajir start a guerrilla war against the Yeerks.
• Adults Are Useless: Zig-zagged. Some adults turn out to be useful once they're let in on The Masquerade (Eva and Marco's dad, some members of the government and the military both human and Andalite), but on the whole they're obtuse, refuse to listen to anyone not old enough to drive, and the parents at least are more of a hindrance than a help.
• Affably Evil: The original Visser One who uses Marco's mother as a host comes across as a friendly Reasonable Authority Figure compared to Visser Three, although that's not saying much. In one of the prequel books, Visser Three himself seemed to fit this when he was younger/in his earlier host body, prior to becoming an Evil Overlord.
• Alien Abduction: The Skrit Na abduct and experiment on humans for unknown reasons.
• Alien Animals:
  • Turns out domesticated dogs resulted from the Chee binding the Pemalites' essence with wolves.
  • Megamorphs #2 reveals that broccoli is another example. In an interview, KA implied that ants evolved from the Nesk.
• Alien Among Us: There's aliens all over the Earth, of course, but Ax is the only one who fits this trope as an Andalite stuck on the planet who has to learn human customs to fit in. The only other major alien races on Earth, the Yeerks and the Chee, are there by choice, have ships that would allow them to leave if they really wanted to, and have no problem at all integrating into human society — the Yeerks because they can scan their host's memories, the Chee because they've been living with humans for millennia.
• Alien Blood:
  • Andalites' is dark blue, Hork Bajir are sometimes described as having black, and Taxxons have a sickly yellow.
  • In The Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor and his friend even reference how strange and unnatural they think red human blood is.
• Alien Gender Confusion: Marco asks Jara how to tell apart male and female Hork-Bajir. Ket tells him that males have three horn blades while females have two. There's another difference too, but that's "only for Hork-Bajir to know".^note Despite Tobias canonically only having the female Hork-Bajir Ket as a morph, the inside cover of The Journey depicted his Hork-Bajir morph with three head blades.
• Alien Invasion: Yeerks invade Earth (and several other planets, including the Hork-Bajir homeworld), and the Helmacrons try to...
• Aliens Are Bastards: Fairly obvious with the Yeerks, but the Andalite case is far more interesting. In the beginning of the series, kids look up to their erstwhile saviors, the great and glorious Andalites, and are counting on them to swoop in and save the day. It becomes increasingly obvious, however, that Andalite military command couldn't care less about humans. In the end, their strategy for for winning the war was to bombard Earth from orbit to take out as many Yeerks as possible. Subverted though, as this only applies to the Andalite military. The final chapter reveals that Andalite civilians are nowhere near the Jerkasses their military would give you the impression they are and get along with humans perfectly fine.
• Alien Sky: The Andalite homeworld has a red and gold sky with multiple moons. The Yeerk homeworld has a green sky and constant thunderstorms. In The Andalite Chronicles, Loren, Elfangor, and Sub-Visser Seven create a weird hybrid of their respective homeworlds, and the sky is a patchwork of three different kinds of sky.
• Aliens Love Human Food: If there's one thing that can make an Andalite go out of control, it's letting them try out human food while they have taken human form. Human-morphed Andalites will lose all self-control over the simplest of treats like sweets, chocolate, and buns. This is justified as in their native forms, Andalites do not have a sense of taste in the traditional manner^note as they eat grass through their feet so upon taking human form they experience Sensory Overload and are overwhelmed by their new form's instincts. Ax once daydreams of a future where there would be a day each year when Andalites all morphed into humans and spent their time stuffing their faces with "Earth delicacies". Once the Andalites and Earth establish diplomatic relations, Andalite tourists rush to try tasting food for the first time. Cinnabon, in particular, find themselves doing very brisk business, and the Andalites literally exchange faster than light travel for a Krispy Kreme franchise on the homeworld.
• Aliens Speaking English: Subverted, lampshaded, and played straight in various cases.
  • Andalites (at least members of the military) all have Universal Translator chips implanted into their brains that can translate any language after a brief exposure to it. In addition, their "thought speak" (and by extension the Animorphs') can be understood by any sentient being, because it communicates concepts in addition to specific words.
    • The ridiculously convenient nature of thought-speak is eventually explained in The Ellimist Chronicles, where we learn the Ellimist took his extremely high-tech "communications system" with him when he took the form of a prehistoric Andalite; presumably the genes or literal translator microbes or whatever he was using got passed on to his descendants.
  • The Mercora and Leerans both use thought-speak, though the Leerans can also read minds, so they can presumably pick up the language of whoever they're talking to.
  • The Nesk and the Arn both speak human languages after less than a day's exposure to them (and in the Nesk's case, this only included eavesdropping on the Animorphs).
• Aliens Steal Cable: And record every channel! The Andalites apparently show TV programs like the news and MTV in school as part of learning about humans. At one point Ax, apparently not content with free-to-air TV, actually does steal cable.
• Alike and Antithetical Adversaries: Both sides of the conflict are very heterogeneous, both in species and personalities. Yeerks, by their very nature, must essentially become different species (in addition to more traditionally recruiting other species, like the Taxxons, for their uses). Humans, Hork-Bajir, and Andalites all oppose the Yeerk forces. Both factions have individuals who switch sides or change beliefs or alliances, and a major theme of the series as a whole is that no one species is all good or all bad.
• Allegiance Affirmation: Invoked and exploited by the Animorphs. As Ax usually fights in his own Andalite body while the rest of the team use terrifying animals, the Yeerks speculate that it's done to announce that the "Andalite bandits" are here, and possibly that he can't morph like the others. The former is correct, as it helps fuel the impression that they're all Andalites instead of mostly humans.
• All Flyers Are Birds: Ax describes the six-winged kafit as one of three "bird" species on the Andalite homeworld.
• All Just a Dream: #41 is an odd version of this as the events of the book turn out to be some kind of dream or simulation created by some mysterious aliens who never show up again.
• All Men Are Perverts:
  • Justified; the main characters are all teenagers, after all. Marco's libido is often brought up, and he does everything from trying to get Cassie and Rachel to make out to using the internet to look up scantily clad women. Jake makes fun of Marco for it, but when Cassie's in a bikini, Jake can't stop staring. Even Ax is portrayed as being a poor student because he's always thinking about girls (he's a teenager too, albeit an Andalite teenager). Tobias is the only one unaffected, most of the time.
    <I am never a Peeping Tom,> I said way too quickly, then added, <I cannot use my superpowers for evil.>
  • He's affected by other things. In "The Pretender," when he watches Rachel transform into an eagle, he gets waaaaay too into it. He also seemed interested in a female Red-Tail in book 3.
    • Unfortunately for him, Rachel's eagle morph is a male.
• All Part of the Show: #14, on a haunted house ride.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like:
  • Mostly averted, with similarities generally being more by analogy, such as Andalite vs. Earth grass despite theirs coming in shades such as red (both are edible to Andalites though).
  • The Yeerk planet is completely different and unpleasant. Fittingly.
• All-Powerful Bystander: The Ellimist and Crayak. If one of them tries to do something, the other will fight right back to counteract them. Last time they went all out, a good chunk of the galaxy was destroyed. Now they mostly just sit back and play Chessmaster.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: Cassie tries but mostly the characters are on their own. Marco lampshades the impossibilities of telling a professional therapist about their problems: "Hello, Doctor Freud? My dad's thinking about remarrying. See, he thinks my mom is dead, but she's not. She's actually a slave to an alien race trying to take over the planet. And did I mention that I'm fighting this alien invasion myself? That I do it by turning into animals? Say what? What size straitjacket do I wear?"
• All Up to You: Cassie has two or three of these. Take, for example, #29, The Sickness, in which everyone gets a fever but her; and #44, The Unexpected, in which she gets separated from the others on an airplane flight to Australia. In #19, The Departure, she goes off on her own, but the rest of the Animorphs show up after searching for her.
  • She does better on her own than the others, which is probably why she's the only Animorph to truly "survive" the war and make a new life after it.
• Alpha and Beta Wolves: When morphing wolves for the first time, Jake is the only male because Cassie didn't want to waste time having two male wolves fighting for dominance, even though that isn't how wolves behave in the wild. It works out well (although Jake feels the need to pee against every tree they pass), until they meet a wild wolfpack.
• Alternate Continuity: The Alternamorphs series featured two books, The First Journey and The Next Passage. They were structured in the form of a Gamebook type story. In the first book, the reader became part of the group that gained the morphing power from Elfangor and joined the Animorphs on their first adventure. Upon completion of this, the story continued with an adventure involving a Sario rip (rip in time). The second book involved elements from two different Animorphs stories from around the midpoint. However, the books were structured in such a way that only a single set of possibilities allowed you to continue the story. Perhaps, for this reason, the series never really caught on, has been largely forgotten, and was discontinued after the second book.
• Alternate History:
  • Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret and Megamorphs #4: Back to Before both play with this. In #3, they follow Visser Four with the Time Matrix and experience him changing the outcome of battles and other historical events to his benefit. In #4, the Drode lets Jake see what it would have been like if they had never been given the morphing powers.
  • #41 The Familiar is also an example: Jake goes to a potential future.
  • Predating all these examples is #07 The Stranger. Animorphs was fond of this trope.
• Alternate Personality Punishment: In one alternate timeline, World War II is fought against a Franco-German alliance (with no Nazis in sight) and Hitler is just an army chauffeur with a particular mustache. Tobias (in Hork-Bajir morph, an alien with blades on its arms) instinctively puts him in a headlock despite Cassie pointing out that this Hitler isn't responsible for the Holocaust. He ends up with his throat slashed anyway (possibly accidentally).
• Always Chaotic Evil: Tends to be subverted. Every time an apparently Always Chaotic Evil race is introduced, it quickly becomes clear that something more is going on.
  • The Howlers are the army of doom of Crayak, a malevolent god. A hive-mind, they've destroyed countless worlds without hesitation. The twist? They never knew killing was wrong, or that other races didn't like to be killed. They are perpetually innocent, like small children, and killing is their "game." Their collective memory is culled when necessary to preserve their naivete. Then Jake manages to sneak a memory of him kissing Cassie into their hive mind. They then try to kiss everything in sight rather than massacre it.
  • Hork-Bajir: Eight-foot walking razor-bladed lizardmen, who appear bred purely for combat. Turns out they're Gentle Giants, vegetarians in fact (the blades are used to harvest bark), used as host bodies by the Yeerks for their brute power. Which brings us to?
  • Yeerks: Literal brain-slugs who control your mind. But the Yeerks were largely pushed towards conquest by a hatred of their standing in the galaxy. In their natural state, they're 2-inch slugs, doomed to a blind, drab existence while cursed with the sentience to understand just how awful such a life is unless they take host bodies. Most, at least the ones we see on Earth, have embraced conquest, but there are a few who cooperate with the host rather than completely controlling it, and even fewer who are actively against the invasion. They're Often Chaotic Evil, but not always. Even those who have embraced the imperialist philosophy don't see themselves as evil, just doing what they naturally do (you don't think of yourself as evil because you kill and eat pigs, do you?); this mindset has been drilled into them with Yeerk Empire propaganda since birth.
  • Then there's the Taxxons, who turn out to be intelligent beings trapped in bodies that are slaves to hunger, to the point that one recently disemboweled Taxxon is seen trying to eat his own entrails before he dies. They only let themselves be enslaved by Yeerks in exchange for a continuous supply of food, and the slim hope that having an overriding parasite could help overwhelm their racial hunger. NOPE!
• Always Someone Better: Elfangor, but only from Ax's perspective. In fact, the main reason the Animorphs rescue Ax is because they feel an obligation to any Andalite because of Elfangor's kindness. From his own perspective, Elfangor is more of a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
• Ambiguously Gay: Gafinilan and Mertil. They either have a very close and important friendship or the most well-written romance in the whole series. We don't get definitive evidence either way.
  • Confirmed by Michael Grant
• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • Ax uses this as an excuse when he morphs human (which causes him to turn into a Sense Freak where food is concerned) to get some cinnamon buns, and after accidentally causing a disturbance, the Cinnabon manager takes pity on him, shows him some trays of buns, and allows Ax to "have one". His narration shows his thought process:
    Ax: One mouthful? One bun? One tray? It was certainly not my fault if there was any confusion.
  • At the end of The Departure, Cassie explains her time missing in the woods to her parents by saying she'd survived for three days eating mushrooms. The news reports it with the headline, "Girl Survives Ordeal Eating Mushrooms."
    I thought that was kind of funny. Like the ordeal was mushrooms.
• Amicably Divorced: Variations: Rachel's parents, Dan and Naomi, are uncomfortable spending time together, but they'll do it. On the other hand, she's friendly enough with Jake's parents (her ex-husband's brother and his wife) that she'll dog-sit for them when Jake's mom's grandfather passes away, while she and Jake still refer to each other as "aunt" and "nephew." And on the other hand, she and Saddler's parents don't really get along, but her family still "helps out" once he's in the local hospital.
• America Is Still a Colony: In Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret, the villain Visser Four travels back in time to alter various points of human history to make Earth of the present easier to conquer. One of these changes is warning the Hessians of Washington's approach, allowing them to ambush the Americans as they cross the Delaware and thus prevent the United States from being founded. (This is a bit of Hollywood History: a Tory farmer historically did try to warn the Hessians, but their commander was already so drunk he never even read the warning letter.)
• An Alien Named "Bob":
  • Comes up when the cast rescue an escaped alien Hork-Bajir, who tells them his name is Jara Hamee.
  Jake: He's kidding, right? He said his name is Jeremy?
  • While on Earth, Elfangor goes by Alan Fangor (shortened to Al) in his human morph.
  • Jara Hamee later names his daughter Toby. Justified because she's named after Tobias.
• Anatomically Ignorant Healing: Played for Drama in Book #29, The Sickness. Cassie, a teen whose only medical experience is as a vet assistant, has to perform brain surgery on Ax, a Starfish Alien. She does get some help from Aftran, who went inside Ax's brain to find out where Cassie needed to operate.
• And Call Him "George": The Howlers, after Jake introduces them to the concept of kissing. The Ellimist reveals that they try to kiss instead of kill their next genocide targets.
• Ancient Astronauts: The Pemalites (multiple books) and the Nesk and Mercora from Megamorphs #2
• And Then What?: The characters often try to convince themselves, and each other, that after they've saved humanity from a race of alien parasitic monsters, they'll just go back to being regular kids. Yeah, right.
• And I Must Scream: If you're infested by a Yeerk (like Tom and Eva), then your memory and body is completely at his command... And it leaves your mind and intelligence intact, completely unable to do anything other than watch your "guest" do all sorts of horrible things, at least while they're not going for a swim in the Yeerk Pool. The Yeerks themselves suffer this in their natural state, being blind, mostly deaf slugs who just happen to be sentient.
  • In order to get rid of David (who impersonated Jake's and Rachel's cousin Saddler after he died from injuries), the Animorphs trick him into transforming into a rat, lock him in a cage so he can't demorph, and then wait two hours until he becomes a nothlit, before sending him to an island along with many other rats.
• And the Adventure Continues: The series ends after a couple of timeskips with Marco, Jake and Tobias heading into a battle while in search of Ax.
• Animal Espionage: Most of the team's non-combat morphs are for this purpose, and in time manage to get the hang of a morph's senses (especially insects) well enough to understand what's being said. The Yeerks grow wise about this, and take great care to kill any insect or animal that enters their facilities.
• Animal Lover: Cassie is very good with animals even before her shapeshifting kicked in and made her understand them better. Many books where she's the focus involve animals and she's usually the most hesitant about hurting/killing animals, though the book where they're in the Arctic does prove that she'd sacrifice an animal for a human.
• Animal Motifs: Each of the Animorphs has a few favorite morphs that they use consistently, particularly in battle, that tends to say something about their personality and fighting style. For instance:
  • Rachel's favorite battle morphs are grizzly bear and elephant, neither of which is particularly subtle or defensive.
  • Jake's favorite battle morph is a tiger, which is known for its intimidating appearance.
  • Marco, the clever one, uses a gorilla, one of the few animals that can manipulate things and use tools.
  • Cassie purposely chooses a wolf morph for combat, even after she acquires far more powerful animals, as she hates fighting and prefers not to seriously hurt her opponents. (Although out of the team's battle morphs, the wolf has by far the greatest stamina and endurance; this represented how Cassie was able to hold onto her morals, even to the end.)
  • And obviously, Tobias is the hawk. Even after he regains his morphing ability, he often goes into battle in his now-default hawk form.
  • Ax also often goes into battle unmorphed, since Andalites are plenty dangerous in their natural state (extremely sharp tail blades, remember?).
  • David has the lion and the rat - the lion represents his savage fighting style, as even Jake in his tiger morph couldn't defeat him, while the rat represents his cunning and self-serving nature.
  • When Tom acquires the morphing power late in the series, the only morph he is ever seen using is a cobra. This is incredibly fitting, given his role in the final story arc.
  • Finally, Visser Three has a grab bag assortment of alien morphs, but the only one he uses more than once is the 'Eight', the bizarre eight-headed, eight-armed, eight-legged, fire-breathing abomination he uses in the climax of the first book. Besides setting up the Visser as an alien threat of monstrous proportions, this particular morph owes a lot to the Beast of Revelations.
• Animal-Vehicle Hybrid: The Andalite Chronicles features a bird-like creature called a Mortron, which can detach its head from its torso in battle and attack with both. Its bottom half has wheels at the end of each of its limbs.
• Animorphism: The Trope Namer.
• Anti-Hero: All the Animorphs are this as they do some rather unsavory things while fighting the yeerks.
• Ant Assault:
  • The first time the team morphs into ants as part of an infiltration mission, they nearly get stuck in morph because it turns out the ants have a Hive Mind that overrides their own minds.
  • During an accidental mission in the Amazon, Rachel falls unconscious in bear morph on top of an army ant colony. Cassie starts ripping out bloody chunks from her and puts on a nearby ant colony so the ants start fighting each other instead of devouring Rachel, lasting long enough that Rachel can jump in the river to get rid of the ants.
• Ant War: In one book, Rachel falls unconscious on top of an army ant colony while in bear morph and starts getting eaten alive by them. Cassie rips out chunks of her to lure over a nearby ant colony so the ants will start fighting each other instead, buying time for Rachel to regain consciousness and jump in a river to get rid of the ants.
• Anyone Can Die: Death of named characters is incredibly rare before the final arc begins, particularly if the character has appeared in more than one book, but quite a few of the supporting characters (Jara Hamee, Tom, Edriss, Arbron, James, and the Auxiliary Animorphs) and two of the main characters (Rachel and Ax) are dead by the series' end. Possibly more; the only main character confirmed to be alive after the ending is Cassie — everyone else was last seen ramming their space fighter into the Blade Ship. And it's unclear if Ax's consciousness is still alive inside The One
• Apocalypse Cult: Two years after the Yeerk defeat Jake finds work training a morph-capable counter-terrorism unit created in response to a spate of attacks on alien tourists. Apparently some of the worst are perpetrated by cults that think the presence of aliens on Earth is staving off a long-awaited apocalypse.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Ax notes at one point that human firearms are no match for the energy weapons of the Yeerk and Andalites, but still do a good job of blowing large, messy holes in you. Visser One/Edriss confers, saying that a Hork-Bajir can be killed with a 9 millimeter bullet^note and a Taxxon can be killed with a can opener! and given the way humans outnumber both Yeerks and Hork-Bajir, a big enough group firing enough guns will do damage.
• Arch-Enemy: Visser Three to the group collectively, although especially to Ax. And to Elfangor, before he died. Then there's Crayak to the Ellimist, Taylor to Tobias, and David to Rachel.
• Armor-Piercing Question: In the book featuring David's return, Rachel decides that the only course of action is to return him to the island where he was originally trapped (see And I Must Scream above). Cassie immediately protests, saying that Rachel's too badly shaken by the last incident: "I don't know if you can do it a second time." Rachel fires back: "You know what, Cassie? I don't know either. So will you do it for me?" Cassie can't respond.
  • This question also pierces Rachel's personal armor, as it allows her to realize that while she is becoming a ruthless Blood Knight, she's also a Combat Pragmatist who does the dirty work that no one else will, helping her make peace with her more violent tendencies.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In Visser the charges against the former Visser One are read during her trial, followed by the different forms of death penalty associated with each crime. It ends almost incongruously with "... treason by murder of subordinate Yeerks, which carries a sentence of exile to punishment duty."
  • When the new Visser One is put on trial at The Hague after the war, charges include mass murder, torture, conspiracy to overthrow all the world governments, and performing experiments on human subjects without permission.
• Artistic Licence – Anatomy: While everything related to morphing can be shrugged off with "alien technology", there's a much more basic mistake: Yeerks take over Controllers by entering through the host's ear and wrapping around the brain. There is no direct passage connecting the inside of the human ear to the brain; the Yeerk would have to chew, melt, or in some other fashion penetrate several layers of tissue to reach the inside of the skull, which would undoubtedly prove fatal.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: Early on in Megamorphs #2 the Animorphs encounter a couple elasmosauruses with their necks arched out of the water like swans. Judging from elasmosaurus fossils, their necks were nowhere near flexible enough to do this.
• Artistic License – Physics: In The Andalite Chronicles, after the Andalites rescue Loren and Chapman from a Skrit-Na Alien Abduction, they go to return them to Earth in War-Prince Alloran's personal starship Jahar. After leaving the Dome Ship, they come out of Z-space between Earth and Mars and plan to hoof it the rest of the way over several days, on grounds that if they used Jahar's full power, Time Dilation would cause years to pass on Earth. Actually, even traveling just shy of the speed of light (and the "Maximum Burn" they were talking about would only propel them to about a quarter of that), and even assuming Mars and Earth are as far apart as they ever get (401 million km), it'd be more like twenty minutes on Earth compared to an eyeblink for those on the Jahar: relativistic Time Dilation doesn't cause time to travel faster for the rest of the universe, it causes time to travel slower for the traveler.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Erek was introduced in #10 as a one-off character, named after a fan who won a contest. However, he had the perfect skill set to spy on the Yeerks and was also established as knowing that Marco's mother was Visser One's host, making him an easy catalyst for reintroducing her in #15, his second appearance. By #20, Marco (who narrated #10, #15, and #20) considers his dropping in with information more or less routine, and Marco's next book, #25, establishes the plot-enabling concept of having Erek and his friends impersonate the Animorphs so that their families won't miss them if they have to go on longer missions. The very next book, narrated by Jake, has Erek act as a Guest-Star Party Member and the book after that, focuses on rescuing him. He was created as a Character of the Day, but he ends up being so convenient and helpful to both the author and the characters that he was, in the end, probably the most influential of the side characters, facilitating and enabling numerous plots throughout the series and playing a huge role in the final battle.
  • For most of the series, Tom is a background villain, only having any starring roles in two books (The Capture and The Conspiracy). Come the final five books, he takes Taylor's role as The Dragon to Visser Three and even eclipses him in threat level to the kids, being a much more proactive character than the Visser by that time.
• Ascended Fanboy: The Ellimist, He starts out as a gamer on his homeworld and eventually turns into a near-omnipotent being playing "games" with Crayak. Also the campers from The Resistance, who are Star Trek fans on their yearly camp out to look for aliens or something. Not to mention Erek.
• Ask a Stupid Question...:
  • During one of the Megamorphs books:
    Rachel: No way. George Washington?
    Marco: Jake, tell her, "No, Guido Washington."
    Jake: Marco would like me to pass along a sarcastic remark.
  • In "The Suspicion", Helmacrons appear in their very small spaceship for the first time. Not knowing what they are, it's suspected it's a drone. Jake asks Ax if the Yeerks might use a flying thing to spy on them. A confused Ax says, "What is a flying thing?". Marco replies, "That would be a thing that flies."
• Assassin Outclassin': There have been numerous attempts to kill Vissers Three and One, including by each other.
  • Ax tries to kill Visser Three in book #8, and succeeds in forcing him out of his host body, but can't bring himself to kill Alloran.
  • Arbat and his team try to kill the Visser, but are foiled by the Animorphs, who want to prevent him releasing a Synthetic Plague.
  • In book #30, the Animorphs attempt to manipulate an Enemy Mine situation to get both of them to kill each other, but both survive.
• Asshole Victim: Book 25 has an extinct alien race known as the Venber being cloned back into existence by the Yeerks to serve as slaves in cold climates. At one point Ax is telling the story of how the Venber went extinct: an alien race known only as "The Five" hunted them to extinction (despite them being sentient) as their bodies make a highly effective coolant when melted. He then explains the Five went extinct too, and while he says no one knows why, it's heavily implied that the Andalites were so disgusted by what they did to the Venber that they wiped them out as well.
• Assimilation Backfire: By morphing a Howler, a race of Psychopathic Manchildren with a species-wide Hive Mind (anything one sees, all of them know), Jake manages to implant the memory of his and Cassie's First Kiss. The Ellimist tells him that the next time they're deployed, they'll try this novel tactic, which will ensure that they will never be used as shock troops again.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Visser Three, in The Andalite Chronicles, is a Hork-Bajir Controller with the respectable rank of Sub-Visser Seven. He's promoted to a low Visser rank immediately upon (and explicitly because of) his infestation of Elfangor's commanding officer and becomes the only Andalite-Controller in history. His rise turns meteoric from there.
• Asteroid Thicket:
  • The Ellimist created one between two warring planets soon after constructing his ship body.
  • In The Andalite Chronicles, an Andalite Dome Ship is destroyed by living asteroids.
• Asymmetric Dilemma
  • A couple of books in the' series take place on the Hork-Bajir planet, where several deep chasms open down to the molten planetary core. The Arn, a winged species, have cliff dwellings extending partway down these chasms, with very thin walkways. In two separate instances, Andalites have concluded that there is no need to worry about the magma, because the body would probably be disintegrated in mid-fall.
  • This seems pretty typical of the Andalite sense of humor, as Ax makes comments like this all the time. "You're worried that a passing Z-Space craft might collide with our extruded mass and splatter it all over Z-Space? Don't worry. That's impossible. The ship's shields would just disintegrate it."
• Attack Its Weak Point: Subverted in a interesting way with the Orff (a race of aliens who only appear in book 41). Their flesh is completely transparent, leaving their vital organs easily visible. At first Jake thinks it's ridiculous that a creature would evolve with such an obvious weakness. Later on, he gets grabbed by a few Orff while in human form, and tries punching one in the lungs, which it just shrugs off. He then guesses the "organs" might actually be decoys, and tries punching the Orff as hard as he can in a seemingly empty space right above its "heart". This knocks the Orff out instantly.
• Author Filibuster: From The Pretender. Happily, things actually do turn out pretty okay for the free Hork-Bajir after the war.
  I wondered about the image of Hork-Bajir and humans living side by side if the Yeerks were defeated. Humans didn't have a great record of getting along with people different from themselves. Humans killed one another over skin color or eye shape or because they prayed differently to the same god. Hard to imagine humans welcoming seven-foot-tall goblins into the local Boy Scout troop when they couldn't even manage to tolerate some gay kid.
• Awful Truth:
  • A major motif in this series is the fact that there are some things that you just can't unlearn. The kids can't, although they desperately want to, forget about the Yeerks and go on living their lives, because they now know they'd be dooming the entire planet to enslavement; to quote a Megamorphs back cover, "You can't close your eyes to the truth you know is out there".
  • Subverted in one instance, when Jake strikes a deal with Crayak to return them to the moment where they chose to walk through the construction site (where they met Elfangor and learned of the invasion). The kids walked home the safe way and consequently they had no knowledge of the Yeerks or the invasion. But, true to the theme of the series, the kids eventually have to confront the reality they didn't even know was there (made even cooler because now they don't have any powers).
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Taylor. And probably Rachel. No, Ax is not Ax crazy. (He may act crazy around certain foods, though.)
  • David in The Solution.
  • Visser Three, all the time.

B

• Badass Adorable: All the human Animorphs at least. At the start they are at most 13 or so.
• Badass Teacher: Quiet, unassuming Mr. Tidwell is actually a revolutionary fighter who has a symbiotic relationship with the Yeerk inside his head.
• Badass Normal:
  • The one time Tom appears uninfested, he punches a Taxxon and then tries (and fails) to punch Visser Three.
  • Loren gains the morphing ability near the end of the series, but she never uses it. That said, The Andalite Chronicles proves she was a badass long before then. She used her softball pitching skills to hit Visser Three in the head with a rock.
  • In Back to Before, a side-novel that takes place in an alternate timeline where the Animorphs never got their powers, Rachel grabs a baseball bat and beats "Tom" with it when he's trying to take Jake to the Yeerk Pool.
• Bad Boss: Visser Three (promoted to Visser One during the series). Not only does he sarcastically mock his subordinates, but he kills them for little-to-no reason. Didn't kill the Animorphs? Decapitated. Made a mistake? Decapitated. Interrupted the Visser? Decapitated. Closed a door too slowly? De-fucking-capitated. You can't win with this guy, to the point where Yeerks pass over promotions because it means having to work with Visser Three, and therefore probably being decapi-SLASH- *thud*. Lampshaded: Jake points out that Visser Three's tendencies to kill his subordinates make them hate and fear him, making him (and them) less effective. He also says that that gives the Animorphs an advantage over him.
  • There are several Yeerks that suspect that the "Andalite bandits" may actually be human. But none of them are crazy enough to tell him he's wrong. If he wasn't like this, the Visser would have won fairly early on.
• Bad Future:
  • In The Stranger, the Ellimist transports the Animorphs to Earth in the future where the Yeerks have conquered the planet, and all of them are either dead or infested. However, some errors that future-Visser Three makes when speaking to the Animorphs convince them that this is a possible future, not the definitive future, and they resolve to avert it.
  • In The Familiar, Jake suddenly wakes up in his own body ten years in the future with no memory of the intervening time. The Yeerks have won the war, and he had been infested. So has Marco, whose Yeerk is Visser Two and in charge of Earth, and Ax was host to the general who conquered the Andalite homeworld. Cassie has also been infested, but she and her Yeerk together are part of the Evolutionist Front terrorist rebellion. Rachel is still alive, but is crippled, and Tobias has permanently morphed into Ax and leads the EF resistance. This world is self-contradictory even in just what Jake sees and experiences, eventually learning it to be All Just a Dream.
• Battle Cry: Rachel's "Let's do it!" and the Hork-Bajir "Free or dead!"
• Batman Gambit: Cassie uses one to defeat David, relying on his obsession with humiliating Rachel to lure him into a trap.
• The Battlestar:
  • Both the Blade ship and the Pool ship qualify (the former is a battleship, the latter is more of a barracks and Airborne Aircraft Carrier with big fucking guns).
  • On the Andalite side, we have the Dome ship, with the titular domed reproduction of the Andalite homeworld that detaches for greater maneuverability in combat.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: The Ellimist and Crayak tie each other's hands as to what they can or cannot do. If one wants something, they have to make a concession. Both do plan on eventually defeating the other forever, however.
• Bears Are Bad News: Rachel, always on the edge between Action Girl and Blood Knight, loves her grizzly morph. The characters consider their polar bear morphs to be their most dangerous — even more dangerous than Rachel's grizzly bear — with good reason. Rachel was killed by a Yeerk in polar bear morph.
  • This is another example of Science Marches On, to an extent; it is now known that in over 70% of the encounters between a wild grizzly bear and a wild polar bear, the polar bear comes out on the losing side.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished:
  • Rachel, as a human, according to everyone else. But her morphed battles have included chewing through her own tail and whacking Mooks with her own severed arm.
  • Averted in #41: When a grown-up Jake encounters the future version of Rachel, she is severely crippled: One of her arms has been cut off, both her legs are missing, she's missing an eye and her face is grotesquely scarred.
  • Also averted by Taylor, a very beautiful and very narcissistic girl who willingly became a Controller because the Yeerks promised they could restore her beauty after she was severely burned. It's made clear that her new cyborg form is quite attractive, but it still hits a sore spot when Tobias shows up to their meeting in #43 in her pre-fire body.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In the first book, Tobias states he's alright with his red-tailed hawk morph and doesn't want to be anything else. Consequently, the end of that episode (and the whole rest of the series) sees him trapped in that shape.
  • Although since he has a terrible home life, the other characters often wonder if his staying in morph for over two hours was really an accident...
• Bee People: The Helmacrons are an alien race whose society fits this trope, with a strong emphasis on social and racial pride, grovelling before the dead queen, submissive, slavish males, and an indifference toward the death of the individual. As for their anatomy, they resemble insects not only in their shape, but in their size — being about the size of fleas. Subverted when Marco and Cassie, attempting to teach their male keeper (who Marco dubs "Wuss" for obvious reasons) a thing or two about gender equality, inadvertently start a massive social uprising. The consequences of this are never explored outside the context that the characters consider it a bit of a joke, but it's more than likely that, now that both genders violently believe that they should be in charge, the whole species is going to go extinct.
• Belated Happy Ending: The Ellimist at the end of The Attack tell the heroes that in three centuries the Yeerks might make contact with the Iskoort and learn there's a way to peacefully coexist with the galaxy instead of either conquering worlds to take sentient slaves or existing as blind slugs. The Ellimist then admits that this is so far in the future it has no effect on the Animorph's current conflict.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: It's hinted that Rachel and Marco's playful rivalry in the early books might be this, particularly on Marco's part. It begins to take on much darker and nastier undertones as the war wears on.
• Benevolent Monsters: The Hork-bajir are fearsome looking creatures with blades sticking out in almost every direction, but when they are introduced, Elfangor stresses that they are good people when they don't have a Yeerk in their brain. The blades are actually for slicing apart the plants they eat on their homeworld.
• Benevolent Precursors: The Pemalites are almost a deconstruction. They are Perfect Pacifict People who appear to be more technologically advanced than any of the other races except Crayak and the Ellimist. However, they were ultimately wiped out by a technologically inferior race because they were unwilling to use violence even in self-defence.
• The Berserker: Rachel, at times.
• Berserk Button:
  • Best not to insult Andalites around Ax...his arrogance will start to come out. Also don't compare Andalite technology to Yeerk technology.
  • Claiming to be an Andalite bandit around Visser Three will probably get you missing some body parts very soon. Ditto with just failing him in general.
  • Never, and I mean NEVER get in Ax's way if he wants the delicious and narcotic food he loves SO much...cinnamon buns.
  • Tom's status as a Controller was always a source of tension, but it doesn't really reach boiling point until the second-to-last book:
    Marco: ...We'll be sitting ducks if Tom turns the Blade ship on us, and we all know that's his plan.
    Jake: It's not Tom! IT'S NOT TOM!! It's not Tom, don't call him that! It's the Yeerk, it's the Yeerk in his head, NOT MY BROTHER!!
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Human-Controllers (Yeerk hosts) generally have public personae falling between "normal but caring human" (Chapman) and "Friend to All Living Things" (William Roger Tennant). The Sharing, "a Boys & Girls Club for everyone" responsible for a great deal of youth work and charity events, is a Yeerk front organization intended to recruit new Controllers.
  • Cassie, who is dangerous exactly because she's nice. Remember, she felt it would be kinder to trap David in rat morph on a tiny rock-island in the middle of the ocean instead of just killing him. She also lets Tom escape with the morphing cube, because Jake, his own brother, would have had to kill him to get it back, which caused Ax to wonder if Cassie could be more dangerous than Rachel.
    • She also chose to erase Visser Four's host body from existence instead of just killing him.
• Big Bad: Visser Three takes this role for most of the books, as the leader of Yeerk forces on Earth.
• Big Brother Instinct:
  • Tom does everything he can, which isn't much, to keep his brother from being infested and goes nuts at the thought of the Yeerks getting to Jake. Jake displays a similar protectiveness towards Tom besides being younger. Also, Elfangor towards Ax.
  • At one point in the series, when Jake and Controller Tom are talking (which they do often, being brothers, obviously), "Tom" lies to Jake to cover his status as a Controller, and, if only for a second, Jake notices Tom's face twitch strangely. Jake suspects that Tom is trying so hard to fight against his Yeerk that he momentarily wrestled control of his body away from the Yeerk, which is pretty much established as impossible.
  • Rachel, for all that she's annoyed by her little sisters, is fiercely protective of them.
• Big Brother Worship:
  • Jake grew up near-worshipping his older brother Tom, and the realization that Tom has been infested by the Yeerks is what fully brings him into the war. Played for maximum cruelty - not only does Jake never get to save Tom, the war ends with him ordering Tom's death at the hands of Rachel, their cousin.
  • Ax is similar to Jake in his hero-worship of his older brother Elfangor, who was already in the Andalite military before Ax was born. He gradually learns that Elfangor was a much more complicated person than he initially believed, though it never gets to the point of a Broken Pedestal.
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: The Andalites tried to do this to prevent the Yeerks from enslaving the Hork-Bajir race (by way of a virus that only affected the Hork-Bajir), but eventually failed. They almost do the same thing to Earth in book #38.
• Bird-Poop Gag: The tendency of birds to poop on things is exaggerated whenever the kids morph into seagulls. They have the ability to fire off precision-guided missiles of crap at will, which they use to harass and distract their foes to great effect.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Yeerk invasion is defeated, but Rachel, Tom, and several supporting characters die in the process. Jake and Tobias suffer from depression and find themselves unable to adjust to life after the war. As if that isn't enough, Ax gets captured by a new enemy and the rest of the Animorphs try to rescue him, only to result in a Bolivian Army Ending. Cassie survives, since Jake knows she's never been a warrior at heart and doesn't take her on the rescue mission. Despite Jake's suggestion of marriage in #53, they drifted apart afterwards and Cassie is dating someone else. That's both official couples torpedoed, since Rachel is dead. Tobias has Rachel's ashes, and unless he traps himself in a morph that lives longer than a red-tailed hawk, he may get to be Together in Death with her soon afterward. The Animorphs universe apparently has some sort of afterlife, as Rachel's spirit got to talk to the Ellimist for a few moments before continuing on its ghostly way to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence or whatever.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: And how. Enforced when the publisher asked Applegate to make the aliens more interesting. Where to start:
  • Andalites: Blue centaurs with two pairs of eye (one on stalks on top of their heads), no mouths (they eat by smashing grass and absorbing it with their hooves), and scorpion-like tails ending in a scythe blade. The tail is fast enough to almost move faster than sight and the blade is strong and sharp enough to cut trees and metal.
  • Hork-Bajir: Genetically engineered bipedal lizards with blades on their heads, wrists, elbows, knees, and tail. Created to harvest bark from trees and used as shock troops by the Yeerks.
  • Yeerks: Slug-like creatures that can enter a victim's ear and wrap itself around the brain, taking over the creature completely.
  • Taxxons: Giant centipedes who are completely unable to not eat meat when given the chance. They have even been seen eating themselves after being cut in half.
  • Mortron: A two-pieced being, with the top half having wings and the bottom half having biological wheels. When cut in half, they regenerate like starfish, only much faster.
  • Helmacrons: Four-legged aliens 1/16 of an inch tall with egos to match Visser Three.
  • Howlers: A sentient hive mind of lava-skinned children created by Crayak who think they are playing games when they are acutally committing genocide.
  • Venber: An extinct race of hydrogen-based life forms resembling a bipedal hammerhead shark with four arms and skis for feet. At temperatures above freezing, they melt and turn into a liquid that makes an excellent superconductor.
  • Pretty much every monster from the Hork-Bajir world and every monstrous beast Visser Three morphs.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Yeerks are implied to have No Biological Sex but do reproduce sexually. Three individuals fuse into one which then breaks apart into hundreds of 'grubs'. The original three Yeerks are killed in the process.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: A major theme in the books. Definitely applicable by the end of the series. Can also cover the Andalite military, who are just as bad as the Yeerks, just in a different way.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Hork-Bajir.
  • And on their knees, and on their wrists, and on their feet, and on their foreheads...
• Blessed with Suck:
  • The Taxxon's insatiable hunger certainly fits. The Yeerks' parasitism, which is all fine and good until one becomes conscious of one's status as a parasite. The morphing power itself may qualify, as once the kids gain it, they can't really enjoy it as they're caught up in an interplanetary war.
  • Andalites and their thought speak. It's cool being partially psychic, but the lack of mouths meant it took the Andalites centuries to develop alternatives to things like telephones.
  • The whole Animorphs gang, really. And at least Tobias was stuck as a hawk, not a flea. Or a rat.
  • The Yeerks make the Hork-Bajir Cursed with Awesome as well. They're used as shock troops for combat because they're strong, agile, and just about every moving part on their body has a wickedly sharp blade sticking out of it. The thing is, those blades? Uninfested Hork-Bajir use them to harvest tree bark, their main food source. The whiplash musculature and quick movement come from the fact that they're an arboreal species that prefers to avoid predators entirely, rather than fight off attackers.
• Blood Knight: Rachel tries not to fall into this. More often than not, she fails horribly. During The Separation, when she gets split into two different personalities, one of them is a Blood Knight personified, interested ONLY in fighting. She's still somewhat interested in Tobias while like this, but that interest takes a secondary seat to violence.
  "It was a scene of perfect beauty. Blood slicked the concrete. Taxxon guts lay in steaming piles. There were bellows and cries of pain. Battle! Desperate and deadly! I almost cried at the sheer loveliness of it."

  — The Separation.
• Bluff the Eavesdropper:
  • Once the team realizes how unstable and dangerous David is, they sometimes do this while discussing their plans, in case he is eavesdropping on them in morph.
  • Also done by the Animorphs when Estrid, Arbat, Gonrod, and Aloth came to Earth in order to fool Estrid into believing the Animorphs had split up.
• Blunt Metaphors Trauma: Ax. Being an alien, metaphors don't really work well with him. He has a tendency to take instructions literally, which, combined with him being in public in human morph, makes for some very funny situations.
  • Ax gets confused when Rachel tries explaining the difference between hot flavors and hot temperatures, and has no idea what she means by "Skip it" when she tries ending the explanation; when she tells him to forget about the discussion and "Drop it," he literally drops what he's holding.
    No sooner were those last words out of my mouth than I regretted them. Ax promptly dropped the container of refried beans he'd been holding. It landed wrong side down on the table.
  • When Ax attends a school dance and is confused about why a girl keeps looking at him, Marco tells Ax that "She wants your body." Some time later, Ax tells the girl that although he'd like to dance^note read: "Shuffle my artificial hooves to the music" with her, she "cannot have (his) body."
• Bluff the Impostor:
  • When David acquires Marco, Rachel taunts the real Marco with "You know you're a toad, right?" and Cassie asks him to describe how it felt when they morphed trout. They know it's Marco because he answers sarcastically ("Kiss me and I'll become a prince," and "The cracker crumb coating chafed," respectively).
  • Marco does beg for them to not try this, because he's terrified that he'll miss a punchline, and Rachel will eat him before he has a chance to explain. (Although, that could be sarcasm, too...)
  • In another book, a Controller says the word "Andalite!" loudly to a person he suspects to be an "Andalite bandit" in human morph. In reality, he's as close to being right as you can be, as the person in question is Cassie in Rachel morph. But he's satisfied when, without missing a beat, Cassie/Rachel immediately replies as if he had just said the words "and a light".
  • Marco also does this after his dad discovers Z-space, trying to see if his dad's a controller by pointing out that the trip his dad wants to take would mean they'd be gone more than three days, the amount of time a Yeerk can go between feedings.
• Body Horror: Most of the morphing is this, except for Cassie, who has a talent for it. If a morpher hits the two-hour mark mid-morph, they get Mode Locked as misshapen monsters stuck between their morph and their real form.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The last book ends with Ax assimilated by The One, and Jake, Marco, and Tobias ramming their ship into the Blade Ship. The fates of all the Animorphs except Cassie (and the already-dead Rachel) are left up to the reader's interpretation.
• Bond One-Liner: Visser Three.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Visser Three, full stop. Almost every book Visser Three appears in involves him capturing one or more of the Animorphs and locking them up or holding them in place instead of just killing them right then, allowing the Animorphs to turn the tables. His Mooks are just as bad about it, but it's justified that because of the Visser's Bad Boss tendencies they're too scared to death of him to actually kill the group without his express order.
• Bored with Insanity:
  • The kids remark from time to time that they only thing they find strange anymore is that they don't find anything strange anymore. Constantly lampshaded by Marco, who often remarks, deadpan, on how utterly insane their lives have become.
  • Let's see: started with aliens, added shapechanging, destroyed some spaceships, traveled through time...again, manipulated by god-alien, bartered hair and holograms for tour guide on distant planet, the oatmeal issue...and that's just the beginning.
• Borrowed Without Permission: The main characters are occasionally forced to steal things from innocent civilians in their guerrilla war against Puppeteer Parasites- most often clothes, since their shape-shifting abilities only work in thin leotards, which aren't great for blending in. They do try to later pay back what they took. Their Sixth Ranger David, however...
• Botanical Abomination: The Lerdethak is a genetically-engineered monster created by the Arn on the Hork-Bajir homeworld. It looks like an old tree surrounded by hundreds of vine-like tentacles.
• Boys Like Creepy Critters: Inverted. In The Change, Marco, having just learned that the terrifying Hork-Bajir aliens have males and females, idly wonders how you tell them apart, like looking for bows on their head or "getting weird around bugs and snakes". Since this is taking place in Cassie's barn, she throws a garden snake at him. He panics.
• Brain Uploading: The ixcila works like this, as a copy of a person's memories that can be implanted into someone else after their death. Aldrea had one made before her death, and Cassie ends up hosting her.
• Break The Game Breaker: The Animorphs get the chance to acquire dinosaur morphs when they go back in time; the ending provides a Snapback so that they cannot use these morphs in the future; random Techno Babble at the end of the book gives us an explanation why.
• Break the Haughty: Alloran was an arrogant, ruthless, bitter, snobbish war criminal who was sure that everything he did (including trying to commit genocide against the people he was trying to save) was right and everyone who disagreed was foolish and naive. Then he was enslaved for years by one of his greatest enemies and forced to murder and murder indiscriminately. In #8, he begs for Ax to kill him; in #54, he gives himself up to Jake's command.
• Breaking Speech: Sixth Ranger Traitor David in his attempt to break Rachel's will to fight.
• Breather Episode: The series has had a couple.
  • Book 12 (The Reaction) has very little in the way of plot advancements or character trauma, instead focusing on the comedy of ''Rachel'' having an allergy where heightened emotion could trigger uncontrollable morphing.
  • Book 24 (The Suspicion). This book mostly ignores the Yeerks and introduces us to the Helmacrons: an entire race 1/16th of an inch tall who are bent on controlling the universe. The sheer inanity of their culture is so hilarious that you can't help but laugh rather than worry about the Animorphs as usual.
  • The Helmacrons' second appearance, Book 42 (The Journey) is once again a light-hearted, comedic story, placed between two very dark and intense books (The Familiar and The Test), and doesn't feature the Yeerks aside the first few pages.
  • Book 32 (The Separation) stands out for being relatively light, compared to the three books before it (many of which were on the borderline of Wham Novels) and especially to the one after it. Also, other than introducing the AMR, it didn't introduce much to the continuity.
  • Book 44 (The Unexpected), which is the last book preceding the final story arc, is about Cassie's accidental journey to Australia.
  • Book 51 (The Absolute) is a pretty good example. The two episodes right before it and the three right after it were some of the darkest books in the series, filled with emotional trauma and huge changes to the status quo. Book 51, on the other hand, is basically one big chase scene, and although it does change the status quo some when the Yeerk invasion is made known to the public, it doesn't end up mattering too much.
• The Bridge: The Pool ship's bridge and the Blade ship's bridge are the locations of some very important events.
• The Brute: During the last story arc and the books leading up to it, the kids reflect that Visser Three is an incompetent tactician and instead relies on technological advantages; he's pushed for all-out war since the beginning. "[He] doesn't know tactics," Jake says, "he fights with a sledgehammer."
• Breeding Slave:
  • The first two free Hork-Bajir mention this in "The Change".
  • In the Alternate Timeline shown in "The Familiar", humans being bred is also mentioned. In this case, it's rather easy to do given that Puppeteer Parasite powers are used.
• Broken Masquerade: James and his friends, the Carpenters, and the Animorphs' parents. The kids' parents have a very difficult time adjusting, except for Eva, who adjusted a long time ago. This escalates to the entire world when open war is declared, especially in the last book of the series.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • For Jake, at least:
    "It's all your fault! I used to see you as a hero, Elfangor. A leader. But the truth is you just couldn't see another way out! You sentenced us to hardship and pain and suffering. We were just kids! You made us question every value we had ever learned! You had no right to heap that weight on us, huge and impossible. You used us!"
  • Andalites in general for all of the kids. At the end of the series they found out the Andalites were planning to take advantage of the Animorphs' complicating the Yeerk conquest and forcing them to concentrate more and more forces on Earth. Unfortunately they were going to do it by glassing the planet to kill as many Yeerks as possible in one fell swoop. Then flipped around: it turns out the Andalite civilian population is wholly against this, and public opinion forces the Andalite naval commanders to back down and accept the Animorphs' solution of turning any Yeerks willing to surrender into animals.
  • Not to mention, Jake for Tobias. When the series began, Tobias adored and idolized Jake because the latter saved the former for some bullies. It was even Tobias that pointed out that Jake was their leader. Too bad by the end of the series, Jake's progressively harder decisions culminating in him getting Rachel, the girl Tobias loved, killed and ruining his and Tobias's relationship.
• Breather Novel: Book #24, The Suspicion. Tiny aliens invade Cassie's barn and try to steal the morph cube. Hilarity Ensues. Made all the more blatant as a breather because it comes right on the heels of a major Wham Novel.
• Bring Him to Me
• Bromantic Foil: Marco to Jake.
• Butterfly of Doom: Visser Four in Elfangor's Secret.
• Butterfly of Transformation: The Departure heavily features the theme of a caterpillar, and later a butterfly. It is not a coincidence that this is where Cassie meets a surprisingly sympathetic yeerk, one willing to give up her host body if Cassie is willing to experience the rest of her life as a Yeerk... or the closest thing at hand: a caterpillar. This, along with Cassie's continued realisation that the world isn't as black and white as she thought, signifies change. It also brings up the fact that natural metamorphosis can somehow undo the Shapeshifter Mode Lock of remaining more than two Earth hours in morph, something Cassie willingly did to make the Yeerk free her host.
• Bullet Time: A trick frequently used by K. A. Applegate; when one of the characters are on the edge of death, in battle, time seems to slow down. It's never explicitly called bullet time, though.
• Bug War: The war on the Taxxon planet in The Andalite Chronicles.
• Bystander Syndrome: Initially, the kids see the Yeerk war as strictly between the Andalites and the Yeerks, which is why Marco is so against getting involved. However, when Jake learns Tom is a Controller, the kids realize that the stakes are much closer to home than previously thought. For Marco, the most reluctant Animorph, he only finds a reason to continue fighting when he learns what happened to his mother. By the end of the series, the kids have lost their faith in the erstwhile Andalite reinforcements, and have concluded that it's all up to them.

C

• Caged Inside a Monster: Erek, an android, reveals that the Chee are doing what they can to fight the Yeerks, sluglike parasites that wrap themselves around the host's brain and control them, but need to leave the host every three days. By pretending to be infested, they trap Yeerks inside their own cranium and extract information from them.
• Cain and Abel: Tom and Jake, respectively, though in an interesting subversion, in this case it's the Abel that kills the Cain. That particular subversion appears to be a favorite of K.A's. She also uses it in Everworld.
• Calling the Old Man Out: In book #41, Jake meets what he thinks is Elfangor, and calls him out for putting the fate of the planet on the shoulders of five teenagers. "Elfangor" turns out to be Tobias in an aged-up Ax morph, and the whole book ends up being All Just a Dream in the end.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Marco. Also, Jake and Elfangor.
• Can Only Move the Eyes: Sometimes Controllers can break through the Yeerk's control to portray a meaningful glance or facial expression.
  • Used in an attempted Taking You with Me in Visser. Visser One taunts her host by granting her control of one eye. The host then waits to use it until the Visser has to deal with traffic on a highway, taking away her depth perception and almost killing them both.
• Can't Shift While Shifted: It's just how their "morphing" technology/power works, but it's justified because the new forms only store the DNA for the original form and not any of the other ones, so the Animorphs can't shapeshift into their other forms without going back to their Shapeshifter Default Form.
  • Cassie, the best at morphing due to having The Gift of being an estreen, could occasionally manage to change her morph, going from bird to whale midair to destroy a helicopter.
  • In The Reaction, Rachel suffers an allergy to her new crocodile morph that results in fits of Involuntary Shapeshifting whenever she experiences strong emotion. After getting angry at Jeremy Jason McCole during a covert mission near a private yacht, she finds herself morphing directly from seagull to elephant in mid-flight, blowing the team's cover in the process.
  • In The Return, Rachel is courted for recruitment by evil Eldritch Abomination Crayak and granted temporary enhancements to her morphing power so she can prove herself in a Shapeshifter Showdown against Visser One - including the ability to morph without first reverting to human form. Where this gets nasty is that if Rachel turns down Crayak's offer, she'll be reverted to the form she was in before the battle - a rat trapped in a small box, unable to demorph without crushing herself to death, and once again unable to morph to something else without reverting.
• Can't Stay Normal: Cassie is a sub-temporally grounded anomaly. When the Drode reworks reality so that the kids never got the morphing power, allowing them to stay normal kids, Cassie's mere existence causes the new reality to go haywire, with people randomly teleporting between locations and coming back from the dead. Depending on how you look at it, Cassie either can't stay normal, because having animal morphing powers from alien technology is the the true reality and any attempt to deviate from that will end up breaking reality, or she can't stay abnormal, if you postulate that "animal morphing powers from alien technology" is her normal.
  "She's a freak," the Drode spat.
  "Yes," the Ellimist said fondly. "She is."
• Can't Tie His Tie: In The Threat, Ax needs to disguise himself as a human Controller, but the disguise includes a tie, which none of the guys know how to tie. Rachel ends up doing it.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Averted. There is a hyperspace analogue called "Zero Space," but its configuration is prone to sudden shifts that may extend what was once a trip of a couple of days into months. Among other problems.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: There is no apparent difficulty or time expenditure in moving between the different objects of a star system.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Nobody believes the kids the first time they explain what's going on.
  • At one point the Andalites are sending the majority of their reinforcements to the Anati system instead of Earth, believing the majority of the Yeerk fleet to be there. The kids have inside information that the Anati system situation is an ambush (the asteroid fields are rigged with automated turrets and mines). When they hear this, the Andalite command assumes the kids are lying in an effort to become a priority.
• Catching the Speedster: In "The Weakness", the team runs into a Controller with an as-yet unknown alien host with a strong resemblance to Andalites and Super-Speed. It's only taken out at the end after Marco' cobra morph manages to bite him.
  Marco had struck the Garatron while he was moving at full speed. Like snatching a bullet out of the air.
  <You're fast, Yeerk,> Marco said. <I'm faster.>
• Catching Up on History: In Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret, when the Animorphs travel through time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, Tobias reads a history textbook to find out what changed in that timeline (the most major changes being the failure of the American Revolution and Nelson losing the Battle of Trafalgar).
• Catchphrase:
  • Everyone, in narration: "My name is [name.]" Additionally, Rachel's "Let's do it!" and Marco's "This is insane."/"Are you insane?!" also qualify. Both are frequently Lampshaded.
  • In one instance, the two switched catchphrases, after Rachel goes over their plan:
    Marco: That's it exactly.
    Rachel: Yeah, this is insane.
    Marco: I know, right? Let's do it!
  • "That was exciting/fun/really cool." "Let's never, ever do it again."
  • Ax: "We have x of your minutes left."
    • "They're everyone's minutes, Ax."
  • Jake's "Don't call me Prince." is something between this and a Running Gag.
• Caught in the Ripple: Megamorphs #3's first chapter ends with the Wham Line about people owning slaves, with nobody seeing a problem. It gets worse from there, with Rachel nowhere to be seen, Jake being a egomaniac asshole considering selling out Cassie to the government for disapproving of a war, and writing off entire chunks of humanity called Primitives. When the Drode restores their memory to the real timeline, they retain the branch timeline's memories and feel sick to their stomachs. For the rest of the book they have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, but retain the memory of what will happen if they fail.
• The Cavalry: During the fourth book, the Animorphs in dolphin morph save a whale from sharks. Later, they are being chased by the Visser in the morph of an alien sea monster. The whale family shows up and saves them. The exact same thing happens in book 36, oddly enough, also involving whales.
• "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate:
  • One book informs us that, when they were younger, Jake and Marco would spend entire afternoons arguing about whether or not cheese tastes yellow (Marco thought it tasted sorta green). Now that they're older, they have more serious, adult debates, like Who Would Win: Spider-Man or Batman?
  • Cassie and Marco got into a debate about which term for vomiting was the best after Marco pointed out that the action has a lot of Unusual Euphemisms... while carrying a very sick Jake back home after he had aborted the mission to throw up. Terms range from the expected (Ralph, Hurl, Puke, Spew) to more creative (Blowing Chunks, Upchuck, Losing your Lunch, Tango with the Toilet). Marco is declared the winner with "A Yawn in Technicolor" which causes even Jake to laugh and then immediately barf again. It should be pointed out that this is not something Cassie is known for doing, but she knew Jake was upset for botching the mission and that he would have had this conversation with Marco if he wasn't as sick as he was.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The story goes from a more light-hearted Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World to War Is Hell over the course of the series. Best illustrated by comparing the two Alternamorphs books ^note Alternamorphs were Choose Your Own Adventure books which a retold of key arcs only with the reader as a new Animorph. The first was optimistic with a Golden Ending. The second a a slew of Downer Endings with the best being the protagonist potentially being stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• The Chains of Commanding: A major focus of Jake's personality is the burdens of leadership (combined with Comes Great Responsibility and I Just Want to Be Normal). Exemplified when Rachel acts as leader for a short while and experiences the same issues, making her wonder whether being leader was the enviable position she once thought it was.
• Changeling Fantasy: Tobias. Elfangor is his father.
• Character Development
  • The whole series is really about walking the line between this and Break the Cutie. The humans characters start off the series as five more or less normal kids. By the end, three years later, they are, respectively: a ruthless leader willing to sacrifice anyone at all to win, a bloodthirsty killer who honestly believes that she could not survive in peacetime, a boy who willingly severs all ties with humanity and never looks back, a vicious manipulator who has given up on just about all of her principles, and a strategist so obsessed with the "bright, clear line" between himself and victory that he can't turn away from it. Whether this is character development or character damage is anyone's guess.
• Character Focus: Each book is told from a given character's perspective, with the narrator usually getting the bulk of that book's big moments or character development.
• Character Name Alias: Marco, Rachel, and Cassie go by: Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and Cindy Crawford, respectively in #14.
• Chekhov's Classroom: Played with. Ax, being the Token Non-Human, is often their only source of information on alien species, technology, or physics, but half the time he wasn't paying attention in class on the day that subject was taught. Since none of the other Animorphs know anything about aliens to begin with, it's still better than nothing.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In the beginning of The Departure, it's mentioned that a leopard escaped from someone who keeps wild animals. The leopard ends up playing a huge role in the story.
• Children Do the Housework: Due to his dad's deep depression since the death of his wife, Marco has had to do the chores and shopping for a while when the series begins.
• Child Soldiers: A major focus of the series and a deconstruction of Kid Hero and Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World.
• Children Are Tender-Hearted: Cassie's position as The Heart of the team is often reflected in her love of all living creatures and hatred of seeing them in pain. Since her parents are veterinarians, Cassie already has medical training; in an Establishing Character Moment, her immediate response to discover the injured Elfangor in a construction site is to start trying to apply first aid, despite him being a blue-furred, four-eyed, blade-tailed alien. In another book, she nearly blows the team's cover while they're in the Amazon rainforest when angry Controllers start shooting every monkey they can find in an attempt to smoke out the group. Since one of the major themes of the series is the cost of war, Cassie's compassion for animals is often used as a reminder that the Animorphs, despite fighting terrifying aliens, are just scared kids who stumbled into an intergalactic conflict and became Earth's only line of defense by accident.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Hey, remember Mertil, the Andalite that had also survived Elfangor's ship's crash and had been living on Earth for the entire war? Remember how he was found by the kids and decided to remain in hiding? Or maybe you don't, because he was only in one book. Having another Andalite on board would've been very useful for the kids. Even if Mertil didn't join the kids for his own reasons, it would've been nice for him to get another mention, seeing as an Andalite war hero living on Earth is kind of a big deal.
• City with No Name: The Animorphs refuse to tell the reader where they live, not wanting the Yeerks to read the books and find them. According to the author, she did have a specific location in mind for them, and evidence in the final book (and probably Visser) confirms their location as somewhere in California.
• Close-Enough Timeline: How Megamorphs #3 ends. But it's unclear how much really changed, other then the Yeerk didn't find the Time Matrix.
• Closest Thing We Got: Ax often fills this role as the Animorphs' 'expert' on alien races, advanced technology or unconventional concepts that they haven't encountered before; while he was just a cadet when he became trapped on Earth, and freely admits he wasn't paying attention in some of his lessons, he's literally the only person on the team who even might have that kind of information.
• Cockroaches Will Rule the Earth: The Ellimist finds the planet that will one day be called Earth, and sees the future not in the lumbering dinosaurs but the small hairy creatures. the planet's destiny is further changed when the Animorphs go back in time to discover two alien species warring over Earth, the Nesk and Mercora. After getting the Nesk to leave the planet, Tobias takes the responsibility of making sure the Mercora don't keep it either, as humans would likely not have evolved if a sentient species was already present on the planet.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Increasingly becomes a possibility.
  • Book 33, The Illusion, is mostly devoted to Tobias undergoing this. The Agony Beam keeps it from getting bloody, but it's plenty harrowing despite that.
• Les Collaborateurs: Some members of The Sharing. In an alternate timeline where the kids didn't meet Elfangor, Tobias became one, albeit because The Sharing was able to appeal to his lack of friends.
• Collector of Forms: Andalite morphing technology only works if the user "acquires" the DNA of the target organism by touch; fortunately, the acquiring process puts the target in a trance, so the morpher doesn't have to worry about getting eaten or mauled. Over the course of the series, most of the main characters end up acquiring a sizable library of forms from across the animal kingdom, including several aliens, and Ax is even able to create his own unique human alter-ego by acquiring DNA from his fellow Animorphs. However, Visser Three takes the collection business to a new level, and actively seeks out deadly new forms on alien worlds for him to acquire - and use in combat.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Andalite technology tends to be based around the colors blue and white. Yeerk tech (at least that used by Visser Three) is usually black and red.
• Color-Coded Speech: The graphic novel adaptation uses colored speech bubbles when characters use thought-speech to differentiate it from spoken dialogue. Each character has their own color to indicate who is speaking. Jake has orange, Rachel has magenta, Marco has gray, Cassie has green, Tobias has yellow, Elfangor has blue, and Visser Three has red.
• Color Me Black: Inverted when Cassie, confronted with a racist when travelling back in time, turns herself white - into a polar bear.
• Company Cross References: In Book 32, The Separation, Nice Rachel says she had goosebumps to which Marco quips he used to read "those books". Both Animorphs and Goosebumps are Scholastic properties.
• Combat by Champion: The Animorphs vs. the Howlers in book 26.
  • It's ultimately revealed that the entire series is this trope on a literally universal scale. The Ellimist and Crayak have been fighting a constant battle for millennia; the last time they directly attacked each other, they wiped out entire galaxies with their strength. As such, they've agreed to a Cosmic Chess Game instead, with Crayak's pieces as races that want to destroy, maim, and conquer, and the Ellimist's pieces as those who protect and nurture life. The Yeerk-Andalite War, and by extension humanity's involvement in it, is simply another set of moves in this game, with the Yeerks as Crayak's champions and the Andalites and humans as the Ellimist's.
• Comes Great Responsibility: Tobias is very serious about this in #1. Jake also notes in MM4 that their power traps them in a bind: they have enough power to fight and make them responsible, but they don't have enough power to actually win.
  Jake: The power made us responsible, see. Without the power, the knowledge would have just been a worm of fear eating up our insides. Bad enough. But it was the power that turned fear into obligation, that laid the weight on our unready shoulders...Power enough to win? No. Power enough to fight? Ah, yes. Just enough, little Jake, here is just enough power to imprison you in a cage of duty, to make you fight...
• Comic-Book Time: Played with. The series seems to take place over a vaguely six-month period, with the timeline never more specifically defined than a "few months" from when they met Elfangor. Early books in the series had the Animorphs worry about how they would adapt in winter, which implies that their adventures are all taking place prior to the first winter after receiving their powers It is ultimately revealed that the steady climate is due to the southern California setting, and the worries about winter were deliberate disinformation so as to not give away their identities. It was actually three years from the beginning to end of the series.
• Commander Contrarian: Marco, for two reasons. Firstly, because the kids' plans are usually slapped together at the last second or played by ear and therefore incredibly risky ("This is an insane plan!"); secondly, because Marco has a talent for zeroing in on inconsistencies, and wants to make the plans as effective and watertight as possible. It's said that pointing out flaws is really all Marco can do, which is what makes him a bad leader, as he's too cautious to actually get anything done. It also makes him the best tactician of the team, as is often pointed out. He couldn't make you go along with it, but he could hammer out a working plan well enough.
• Common Tongue: Galard is a galactic language designed to be pronounceable by pretty much anyone. It doesn't see much use (although Hork-Bajir occasionally lapse into it) because the primary aliens are the telepathic Andalites and the Puppeteer Parasites Yeerks.
• Compact Infiltrator: Once they start acquiring smaller animals like mice and cockroaches, the team becomes quite adept at sneaking into restricted areas via air shafts, holes in the wall, and even pipes. However, given the two-hour limit, the Animorphs have to be careful about where they are when they have to demorph, as returning to normal in a space smaller than a human body can result in the subject accidentally crushing themselves to death.
• Completely Off-Topic Report: In one of the novels, Marco is required to do a book report on The Lord of the Rings, and does so horribly that it was obvious he didn't read the book.
• Continuity Drift:
  • In the very first book, it's possible for a human to thought-speak with someone in morph, which is totally ignored in every single other book.
  • A whole list of KASUs can be found at this page: "A List of Mistakes in Animorphs"^note Archive generated by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (dating back to October 27, 2009), due to the closure of GeoCities..
• Continuity Nod:
  • In #54, Ax was promoted from "aristh" straight to "Prince," calling back a conversation between Elfangor and Arbron in The Andalite Chronicles, where Arbron snarks that glory-hungry Elfangor's probably fantasizing that they'll make him a Prince without even stopping to make him a full warrior.
  • In the last book, when the Rachel is about to battle the Blade ship. The Rachel's weapons can't penetrate the Blade ship's shields, so Jake orders to "Ram the Blade ship." Almost twenty years earlier, Elfangor had issued the exact same command, which won the battle and earned him the rank of a full warrior.
  • One early mission nearly falls apart due to the kids getting overwhelmed by the Hive Mind of an ant colony. Consequently, statements to the effect of "We're never morphing ants again!" are repeated every few books.
  • When Marco morphs lobster to get his keys from the bottom of his pool: "It seemed like a lifetime ago that me and Jake morphed lobsters to escape from the Yeerks by hiding in a grocery store fish tank. The days, man. Those were the days."
  • In the penultimate book, Jake flushes thousands of unhosted Yeerks out of the Pool ship into space. This is exactly what Elfangor refused to do back in The Andalite Chronicles, showing that Jake is now far more ruthless than Elfangor was (at least at first).
• Contempt Crossfire: Aftran (a Yeerk) has some difficulty convincing the Animorphs that there is such a thing as peaceful Yeerks who oppose taking unwilling hosts, as they've known nothing but Yeerks trying to kill them. Meanwhile the militaristic Yeerks see the peace movement as traitors to the cause and hunt them down.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Since the Yeerk-Andalite War is just another move in the cosmic chess game between the Ellimist and Crayak, the two struck a deal before the invasion came to Earth: the Yeerks are Crayak's "pieces," and the Ellimist got to choose six people at random, and none of them were allowed to have a direct connection to the conflict. The Ellimist agreed...and proceeded to choose Ax (Elfangor's brother), Tobias Elfangor's son, Marco (the son of Visser One's host), Cassie (who, in addition to being a naturally-skilled morpher and someone with a connection to all kinds of animals, turns out to be a "sub-temporal grounded anomaly" whose very existence prevents reality from being rewritten), Jake (a natural leader and tactician and someone whose brother is infested, making the fight very personal to him), and Rachel (who is eventually revealed to be the only truly randomly selected member of the group, but is a deadly Blood Knight who makes for a great warrior nonetheless). Furthermore, they all know each through Jake and thus have the ability to be connected. Plus, they have ready access to a zoo and a veterinary practice filled with animals for them to morph, and woods right by Cassie's house perfect for an Andalite and a hawk to reside in. Crayak's right-hand man the Drode whines that this can't be a coincidence and accuses the Ellimist of Loophole Abuse by "stacking the deck."
    Ellimist: [laughing] Did I? If I did, that would be very clever of me.
  • There are several apparent ones in Book #27, but it is ultimately an aversion. Erik is left unable to move or project his hologram, so the Animorphs carry him out of the mall. There was a major sale, so virtually everyone was elsewhere in the mall and all the cameras are down. They take a bus, and the bus driver doesn't notice. This makes them suspicious. Later, when they realize they will need a sperm whale morph, a sperm whale "happens" to beach itself. This they all realize can't be a coincidence, and that someone is pulling the strings. The Drode turns out to have been behind all of it.
• Cool Car: In The Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor finds a 1970s yellow Ford Mustang in the Skrit Na ship, and drives it across the Taxxon homeworld, while listening to The Rolling Stones and drinking Dr. Pepper through his hoof.
• Cool Starship: The kids themselves are partial to Dome ships, especially newer models like the Elfangor. The Rachel is also supposed to be pretty sweet.
• Cosmopolitan Council: The Yeerk Empire is made up of officers called vissers, who take orders from the Council of Thirteen.
• Cornered Rattlesnake: David. He even has a rattlesnake morph, though he's not using it in the end.
• Cosmic Chess Game:
  • The Ellimist and Crayak are stuck in one. The last time they fought personally, the damage killed billions and damaged the very fabric of the universe, so these days they just use intermediaries.
  • Crayak himself notes that neither of them can possibly "win", given their immortality...but for that same reason, they have to do something to kill the time. The Ellimist's other suggestion, that they just sit back and watch evolution, is too passive for him.
• Covered in Mud: At one point, Cassie jokes about how Rachel never seems to get dirty - that any mud just seems to be deflected away. She throws a ball of mud at Rachel, who knocks it away without it splattering all over her. Cassie comments that Rachel's hand probably isn't even muddy, but Rachel refuses to show her.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The cover for Visser features a picture of a mature Andalite with a sinister expression. The logical assumption is that this book is all about Visser Three. Turns out it's all about Visser One, and Visser Three is a supporting character.
  • Occasionally, the cover will show a character morphing into an animal with little or no relevance to the plot. The best example of this is The Revelation, which shows Marco morphing into an ant, which only factors in to a single page of the book.
• Create Your Own Villain: David, he was pretty obviously already not a nice guy, but some of the things Jake and the others did really didn't help.
• Creator Provincialism: It's not really made clear what's going on outside the States during the entirety of the war. We know that at least one major head of state outside the U.S. is a Controller (the President of the U.S. isn't though), but except for, like, four missions outside the country, the kids mostly ignore everything beyond U.S. borders. Or more than a day's journey from their home town, for that matter. Justified to a certain extent since they're teens and can't travel too far from home most of the time.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: If an Animorph tries demorphing while in an enclosed space, they'll end up crushing themselves to death for their trouble.
• Cryptically Unhelpful Answer:
  Tobias: <No one wants to ask you because they think maybe it's rude. But everyone wants to know how you eat with no mouth.>
  Ax: <How do I eat? Well, I have hooves, don't I?>
  • (It's later revealed that Andalites absorb nutrients from grass through their hooves.)
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: In #14, "Crazy Helen" happens to be right that aliens are behind the weird horse behavior, and there is alien technology at Zone 91, though she thinks they're stereotypical Martians rather than Yeerks or Andalites. Of course, she thinks aliens are behind everything.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Erek King, the millennia-old robot that is capable of generating personal forcefields and shrugging off being hit by a truck. He can move faster than the eye can follow and is described as being able to "obliterate you down to your individual molecules"; however, he's hardwired to hate violence and can never commit any violent act. In one instance, this is subverted, allowing him to rescue the Animorphs. The fight lasted less than a minute, and was only vaguely described. In the time it took you to read this paragraph Erek managed to kill dozens of Hork-Bajir. Afterwards, Erek begged to have his original protocols restored. Rachel saw it and the brutality reduced her to tears.
• Cult: The Sharing is based on and operates like real-life cults.
• Cultural Posturing: Ax does this frequently.
• Custom-Built Host: The Iskoort are a symbiotic species made up of the Yoort and the Isk, which were genetically engineered as hosts for the Yoort.
• Cutting the Knot: The Animorphs found out the Yeerks are trying to abduct several heads of state during a G-8 conference, and attempt to stop them with a stealthy infiltration-and-sabotage mission. They're thwarted by a Yeerk trap and barely escape with their lives, so they turn to Plan B: Simply turning into elephants and rhinos and charging through the building doing as much damage as they can, thus getting the conference cancelled.

D

• Dangerously Garish Environment: The Iskoort city consists of brightly-colored platforms all stacked on each other like giant Lego bricks. However, they have no railings, and it's a long way down to the surface.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Marco. The disappearance of his mother and the subsequent split of his family caused him to become more cynical and, in effect, more ruthless and pragmatic and less attached to romantic, idealistic principles.
• Dark Is Evil: All of the yeerk ships are described as a very dark black color.
• D-Cup Distress: Rachel is shown as upset several times in the series that she is too "top heavy" to pursue a career as a gymnast.
• Deadpan Snarker: Marco, usually, but Rachel and Tobias are both pretty sarcastic when the situation calls for it.
• Decadent Court: While the average yeerk is not necessarily Always Chaotic Evil, their government is an absolute circus of depravity and murder. The various Vissers are constantly trying to kill their higher-ups, while their underlings jockey for power underneath them and occasionally try to take their jobs in the same way. Meanwhile, the Council of Thirteen, who runs the Empire, works with the identity of which one of them is the Emperor concealed from the others, since they all fear his assassination. At one point, when the Animorphs launch a raid on the trial of Visser One in VISSER, the Council, safely present only in holographic form, enjoys the spectacle like sports fans, taking bets on the outcome, cheering and booing one side or the other, all that jazz. One, in a taxxon host, is so overcome with emotion that he grabs a passing clerk and begins eating him alive, in the most disturbing example of Pass the Popcorn ever.
• Deconstruction: In spades. Really, the whole angle of the series.
  • Kid Hero: It's obvious from the get-go that the kids, having no sort of military knowledge or practical connections whatsoever, are pretty much just making it up as they go and doing the best they can with what they have, and they're closer to Child Soldiers than anything else.
  • Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World: As you'd expect, fighting as an uncover guerrilla resistance agent tends to take up a lot of the kids' spare time and energy, and is too important to leave to an extra-curricular schedule. The war takes place at the expense of the kids' personal lives (sometimes forcing them to fight for up to, it is mentioned, three days straight without sleep) and their grades and sociability are pretty much done for by the end of the series.
  • The Good Guys Always Win: Played with. The kids actually do manage to save their home planet, but the fact that they're massively outgunned is a major element in the story, and the kids comment from time to time that only rarely are their missions actually successful. One of the major messages of the series is that, despite idealistic platitudes, victory ultimately goes to those who are ruthless and desperate enough to take the most extreme measures, not to the morally superior.
• Destructive Saviour:
  • Throughout the whole series, Jake and the kids wait for Andalite reinforcements to save them from the Yeerk invasion; originally, Elfangor had said the fleet would arrive in a year or two. It eventually takes three, as Andalites see humans as a low priority and take their time getting there. Unfortunately, by the time the Andalites arrive, they've realized they've made a huge mistake: the Yeerk presence on Earth is much larger than anticipated (in the rare instances where the kids made contact with Andalites, the Andalite high command assumed they were lying to become a top priority). By that time, the secret war has erupted into a full-blown conflict, so the Andalites decide to wait for the Yeerks to completely commit their forces planetside. Once that happens, they will "quarantine" Earth: A nice way of saying that they're going to completely sterilize Earth from orbit to kill everything, Yeerk military and humans alike.
  • When the Yeerks invade the Hork-Bajir planet, the Andalites send only minimal reinforcements. When it's made clear that the Yeerks are winning, Alloran creates a quantum virus that will kill every Hork-Bajir on the planet, in order to make sure that a minimum number of Hork-Bajir can be used as hosts.
  • Eventually averted in the last book. Prior to the last book, Ax notes that the prolonged war against the Yeerks has given the Andalite military command more power than they rightly should have, and they no longer properly represent the will of the people as they're supposed to. This comes to be proven true in the last book, when Ax invokes his legal right to challenge the decision of Andalite Captain-Prince Asculan regarding Jake's promise to Yeerk prisoners on Earth, by which Ax's challenge would be tried before a civil court as opposed to a military one. It is heavily implied that the civil government and the people are surprisingly supportive of the human victory; Prince Asculan is forced to consult with his political advisers, and, realizing that he doesn't stand much of a chance in a civil trial, begrudgingly bows to Jake's wishes.
• Death from Above:
  • In the second-last book, Visser One kills the Auxiliary Animorphs and some of General Doubleday's troops by shooting the Pool ship's Dracon cannon from orbit.
  • Tobias whenever he's feeling hungry. Or in battle. TSEEEEEER!
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Marco gets brought back to life twice. Although in one instance, he's not technically dead, just comatose, because he's in cockroach morph, which is practically unkillable.
  • In Elfangor's Secret it's known that one of the kids will have to die to set things right, and Jake is shot in the head as they cross the Delaware. But because Visser Four's host is erased from time, there was no reason for them to travel through time in the first place and Jake pops back, alive. In addition, because Jake is dead and the Ellimist said only one Animorph would have to die, the rest of the Animorphs are invincible for the rest of the book, even when they should by all means be dead.
• Derelict Graveyard: The Nartec city.
• Descending Ceiling: Used by Visser Three to scare the Rachels in #32 because he thinks she's an Andalite and Andalites are somewhat claustrophobic.
• Despair Event Horizon: Jake's parents' infestation. And then it gets even worse when Rachel and Tom die.
• Deus Angst Machina: Pick a character, any character. Especially the auxiliary Animorphs. And, in a weird way, Loren.
• Deus ex Machina: To the Leeran conflict, the Animorphs could be considered this. They are not supposed to be there, show up right when all hope seems lost, and happen to have the exact abilities needed to ensure Andalite victory there.
  • The Ellimist counts as a literal example of this. In his first few appearances, he is a figurative example, as a seemingly omnipotent force that can appear randomly to influence events and solve big problems for the Animorphs, but he uses a very light touch. During his origin novel written close to the end of the series, we find out he obtained the intelligence of hundreds of individuals from multiple species and used this knowledge to create a ship and plug his consciousness into it. Over time he turns himself into an entire fleet of ships, growing more and more powerful and intelligent, especially once he enters into his escalating conflict with Crayak. Eventually Crayak ambushes him and he ends up with his fleet "body" stretched across Z-space, normal space, and a black hole. This event causes him to become uncoupled from reality and emerge as a god-like being with the same cosmic level intelligence and power, but without the need for a physical body anymore. As a bonus, the black hole gives him power over time itself, something he uses multiple times to subtly help the Animorphs.
• Devil's Advocate: Marco would sometimes offer the Devil's Advocate view on missions.
• Did Not Die That Way: Marco believed that his had mom died in a boating accident, but it was a cover so the Yeerks could get her away without a lot of questions.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Jake to Crayak, repeatedly. One time, the rest of the team to Crayak by bringing Jake back to life.
• Didn't Think This Through: In The Android, the Animorphs morph bats in order to navigate a pitch-black room rigged with tripwires and pressure sensors so they can recover a valuable alien crystal. It isn't until they reach the crystal that they realize they have no way to actually carry it out of the room beyond somebody holding the crystal in their mouth, which would render them unable to avoid the sensors.
• Direct Line to the Author: Mentioned at the start of every book, but it gets weird in the last book because Rachel continues to narrate immediately after her death. Then again, she was talking to the Ellimist, who can do just about anything, so there's that.
• Dirty Business: All of the Animorphs, but especially Cassie, deal with doing morally reprehensible things and justifying them to themselves as the series goes on. After the end of the war, Jake is haunted by his decisions to flush 17,000 defenseless Yeerks into space and send Rachel to kill Tom, which resulted in both of their deaths. At Esplin's trial in the last book, Jake asks the others how they're any different from the Yeerks, given what they've done (see the quote page for the quote).
  • Alloran wasn't the only one to create the Quantum Virus that decimated the Hork-Bajir, but he was the one who ordered its creation and was blamed for it. He comes to regret his decision after 25 or so years as Visser Three's host.
• Disability Superpower: Literally. Most of the Auxiliaries are hospitalized children, as Yeerks are less likely to infest the disabled. It's mentioned that they have a much easier time controlling the instincts of a new morph, as their minds are stronger from spending so much of their lives unable to move their bodies as freely.
• Divine Chessboard: The heroes are guided by Big Good The Ellimist, while Crayak is behind the Yeerks and other adversaries.
• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: Affects all the kids to some degree. Rachel in particular, as can't remember what she was like before the war started.
• Disposable Superhero Maker: Subverted when the morphing cube turns out to have survived the destruction of Elfangor's ship.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child:Nearly all the kids' parents. Justified since the Animorphs are upholding The Masquerade, but none of them have any idea that something is wrong until the last few books, when Marco reveals the truth to his father (his mother knew about the Yeerks already, being Visser One's host, and had figured out the truth about the Animorphs already) and then the rest of the Animorphs evacuate (or fail to rescue) their families a few books later. Rachel's mom probably has the hardest time coming to terms with her daughter's secret life and Blood Knight tendencies. And of course, Loren has amnesia, so she wouldn't know Tobias anyway.
  • Tom, despite being Jake's brother and living with him for the entire war, took 3 years to figure out Jake was an Animorph. He didn't even realize the "Jake" in #6 was actually Ax in Jake morph, despite his weird behavior.
• The Dog Bites Back: Tom's Yeerk. Guess Visser Three should have promoted him when he had the chance.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Rachel.
  • Elfangor in the first book. Even when he knows he's about to die, he dies on his feet, and manages to strike Visser Three with his tail blade.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Marco hates being pitied by the others, and often shoos Cassie away when she tries to play therapist. Jake, similarly, can't stand pity, because he feels that as the leader, he should appear flawless and confident in every decision he makes, and therefore tries never to let the others see him second-guessing himself.
• Doomed Hometown: Bug fighters destroy the kids' hometown in the second to last book to create a giant dead zone around the Pool Ship's landing site. They reduce the entire city to a desert of ash, so that nothing can get close without being seen.
• Door Stopper: Not the books themselves, but Marco mentions picking The Lord of the Rings for a book report. Three books long, and each as long as three books.
• Double Consciousness:
  • The Morphing technology grants you your animal form's instincts as well as your own consciousness. Sometimes these play well together, sometimes not. It usually depends on how humanlike said animal is. Tobias struggled with this while in Shapeshifter Mode Lock in some early books, then came to terms with it.
  • The kids wonder about the morality of morphing, as controlling the animal's natural mind is similar to what Yeerks do to humans and the kids decide early on to never morph sapient species without the permission of the person. Near the end of the series, some missions become impossible to accomplish without morphing human or Hork-Bajir, so the kids compromise their morals. By the end of the series morphing Hork-Bajir is commonplace and Tobias uses it as a battle morph.
  • In Visser, Visser One is freaked out by the Humans Are Special feature of a two hemisphere brain, and can't understand how a creature that is always arguing with itself could possibly function.
• Double-Edged Buff: At the end of the series, Ax is in command of an Andalite ship that comes across a derelict ship. He orders the ship's power to be shifted to its sensors to get a better idea of what's in it (not wanting to send a team in blind), but unfortunately this means its shields are weakened, leaving the ship exposed when the "derelict" opens fire, leading to Ax being infested by an alien entity and the rest of the Animorphs taking it out in a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Double-Meaning Title: The title of The Pretender alludes to the rival red-tailed hawk challenging Tobias for control of his valley, and to Visser Three posing as his cousin Aria.
• Double Standard: Rape, Sci-Fi: A human (or any other species for that matter) with a Yeerk in their head can't consent, and their partner usually doesn't know it's not them in control unless they're also a Controller. Edriss and Essam had children with the bodies of their hosts, and it's likely that Peter had sex with Eva when she was infested. In the Bad Future of book #41, a character mentions Breeding Slaves to create new human hosts. And keep in mind that all the Hork-Bajir were enslaved by the Yeerks, who likely forced them to breed too. This mostly falls into the realm of Fridge Horror, since the books aren't aimed at adults.
• Downer Beginning: In the very first book, only 43 pages in, Elfangor is Eaten Alive while the kids can only watch in horror. Also at the end of the book, where Tobias is trapped as a hawk.
• Downer Ending: Rachel and Tom are dead, Tobias has fled to the woods, Jake's guilt continually drives him deeper into depression, Cassie has had to leave Jake and the Animorphs behind in order to move on, and even Marco's happy rock-star life is bittersweetly shallow. Ax seems comparatively well-off to begin with, being promoted directly to Prince in the Andalite military and later given his own ship to command, but his capture and apparent assimilation by a new mysterious life-form is what leads to Jake, Marco and Tobias flying off into space and possibly all dying. The only upside is that the war is over and things are looking up for humankind, but it's heavily implied that there's another war on the horizon.
• Down the Drain: The Animorphs' initial plan in book 29 is to break into the heavily guarded Yeerk pool by morphing eels and navigating the city sewer system until they reach a sink outlet there. They don't take into account the chance of getting lost, or of getting a contagious flu.
• The Drag-Along: Marco initially, though he eventually grows out of it.
• Dragon-in-Chief : Visser Three
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Initially, it's in both sides' best interest to keep the war a secret. The Yeerks prefer a strategy of infiltration, then suddenly seizing control of the planet, in order to minimize both Yeerk casualties and the deaths of thousands of potential host bodies. The Animorphs, on the other hand, prefer the war also remain a secret, for tactical reasons: the Yeerks have much more advanced technology and would certainly win any open engagement where they were free to use all of their weapons (a bunch of animals can't do much good against Yeerk capital ships destroying cities from orbit). Also, the primary reason the Yeerks want Earth is because of the large population, and a war would reduce the value. On the other hand, there are so many damn humans compared to Yeerks (6 billion versus a couple hundred thousand) that open warfare might even hurt the Yeerks despite their serious technology because humanity could and probably would Zerg Rush any terrestrial fortifications, at least enough to turn the campaign into a Pyrrhic Victory that the Andalites could take advantage of.
• Drawing Straws: Used routinely to decide who is put on a mission when the Animorphs are making it up as they go (which is often).
  Ax: <The human scientific method.>
• Dream Deception: One book has the team infiltrate a mental care facility through the restroom as cockroaches. Rachel is still halfway through demorphing when someone comes in. Fortunately, as these are mental patients the team rationalize that no one will believe any witnesses (and as it turns out, the patient is also remarkably accepting of Rachel's explanation and helpfully fetches the man they wanted to talk to).
  I was about two feet tall, with skin like burnt sugar, monstrously long antennae sprouting from my forehead, human eyes, semihuman legs that bristled with dagger-sharp hairs, blond hair, and a wide, throbbing yellowish-brown abdomen, when the bathroom door opened.
  A man shuffled in, wearing slippers. He headed for the toilet. He hesitated. Slowly, very slowly, he turned.
  My human mouth was just appearing. My lips grew from melted roach mouthparts.
  "Hi. Could you get George Edelman for me?"
  The man nodded. "Sure." He started to go.
  Then he turned back. "Are you real?"
  "Nah. Just a figment of your imagination."
  "Ah. I'll get George."
• Dream Sue: When Jake becomes a Controller early on, one way the Yeerk tortures him is by replaying an embarrassing fantasy of Jake's from years prior, where he won the big basketball game with a difficult shot and was then congratulated by Tom (a much better basketball player).
• Dreaming the Truth: It turns out #41 was all a mind exercise, during which Jake rediscovers the things they're fighting for in the first place.
• Drives Like Crazy:
  • It's a running gag that whenever Marco drives any vehicle, he sucks at it. In one instance Marco achieves this with an Abrams tank.
  Jake: Do you hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?!!
  Marco: I can't drive with you screaming in my ear.
  Jake: You can't drive at all!
  • It's later revealed that Tobias is an even worse driver; Marco even calls him on it.
• Drop-In Character: Erek was good at walking up from out of nowhere. So was Mr. King. It's a Chee thing.
• Dumb Blonde: Subverted. Everyone outside the group assumes Rachel to be a ditzy airhead. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not to mention she's a really hot teenager, so boys make hasty assumptions. They get corrected really, really fast.
• Dumb Is Good: The Hork-Bajir in their normal state are rather dumb by human standards but still nice.
• The Dung Ages: Invoked in Elfangor's Secret, which emphasises just how awful personal hygiene was in medieval times. Everyone at Agincourt, including the King of England, is covered with sores, missing teeth and crawling with lice. Ax quips that if the Yeerks had arrived in this era, they'd have decided humans couldn't support any more parasites. The time-travelling Visser sticks out largely because he doesn't have a face full of holes.
• Dwindling Party: In #18, the Animorphs are caught in a Negative Space Wedgie and end up hundreds of light-years from Earth, on an alien planet. As they head to meet up with the Andalites and then go on a mission to arm a continent-wide explosive, they disappear one by one. They eventually figure out that it's a snapback effect, and each of them is getting sent back to where they were in spacetime when the wedgie occurred.
• Dying as Yourself: A host will sometimes experience a moment of freedom before death as the Yeerk will abandon them in an attempt to save themselves.
  • The Yeerk who kills Rachel allows her to demorph to say goodbye to the Animorphs as a human.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first ten books have a disproportionately large number of KASUs and introduce a lot of plot points that are never mentioned again, the more significant ones including:
  • The first book's use of thought-speech. Elfangor projectes an image of what a Yeerk looks like in the kids' minds, floods Tobias' mind with images and information on the Yeerks, including Yeerk Pools, before the kids hide from the approaching Yeerks, and finally bolsters them by transmitting courage as they watch him die. Jake also uses thought-speech while un-morphed at one point. All these things are impossible for the rest of the series — thought-speech is limited to words, can't be done by humans unless they're morphed, and the images the Andalite Prince sent to Tobias are never mentioned again.
  • An odd back-and-forth one: in the fourth book, Ax says that Hork-Bajir can't swim. The Hork-Bajir Jara Hamee says he can swim in the thirteenth book, but much later in the series Visser Three oversees a project to graft gills onto Hork-Bajir, implying that Ax was right after all.
  • In the sixth book Tom's Yeerk describes Yeerk promotion as changing the numbers in his name. Later books establish that Yeerk name numbers refer to their generation and are static.
  • In the eighth book Ax tells Cassie that Hork-Bajir have a "biological time clock" that sets them all warring with each other every 62 years. Later books strongly imply that Hork-Bajir don't even live that long.^note It could just be Andalite propaganda, and might not be referring to Earth years.
  • Alloran reveals that Yeerks have infiltrated the Andalite home world in the eighth book. This bombshell gets a single payoff in the form of an uninfested Andalite traitor who appears in the eighteenth book, but after that it's completely forgotten.
  • There's a lot of references early on to the Yeerks still having control of their home world and the Council of Thirteen being based there. Come the Hork-Bajir Chronicles, it's established that the Yeerk Empire is made up entirely of Yeerks that managed to flee their home world and that the Andalite fleet maintains a stranglehold grip over the planet.
  • Jake's morph into a lizard on the cover of the first book is depicted in eight steps (Jake's human form, the final lizard form, and six middle stages in-between). The rest of the series from the second book onwards depict the cover morphs in only five steps (the viewpoint character's default human/hawk/Andalite form, the final animal form, and three middle stages in-between).
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After years of unimaginable pressure and War Is Hell torment, the kids become the greatest heroes in the history of humanity. However, only Marco, Cassie and Ax get to profit from it - Jake's clinically depressed due to his actions aboard the Pool ship, and Tobias struggles to live a solitary existence in the woods.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: While initially it seems that Earth is simply the next planet on the Yeerk list to conquer, it soon becomes apparent that it attracts more attention than the rest; the Humans Are Special factor is what attracts the Yeerks themselves, while the Skrit Na have already been here before the other present-day races. Then there's the fact that the Mercora decided to settle down on it at the end of the Cretaceous, resulting in a fight with the native sentient ant species, and to cap it all off, before any of that happened, the Ellimist recalls a fight wherein Crayak took potshots at the planet with some giant weapon and he had to bat them away like a galactic baseball game. In short, Earth is the one planet every race in the galaxy has come to.
• Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion:
  • The Helmacrons are a microscopic species with egos the size of planets. Their one invasion force is a single ship the size of a plastic toy, and they still think they can win. To quote Marco, who snaps after constant exposure to their bravado:
  "You couldn't hope to go mano-a-mano with a maggot and win. And that's sad, because maggots don't even have manos."
  • Ultimately, the entire Yeerk invasion that the series is based around ends as this, with the Yeerks mostly contained to a single California city for the whole of the story and ultimately being beaten without even managing to conquer that. In a what-if alternate story where the titular Animorphs don't acquire their morphing powers but get pulled into the war anyway, the Yeerk invasion is literally thwarted in days. Some great alien conquerors they turned out to be. Much of this is because the Yeerks could do an actual open-war invasion, but this would defy their whole objective, which is to obtain a large number of usable hosts and avoid being noticed by the Andalites. Because of this, they're stuck with a slow-and-steady approach.
• Eerie Arctic Research Station: In the novel "The Extreme", the Animorphs have to destroy a Yeerk facility in the Arctic that is developing a means of turning any body of water into a Yeerk pool using satellite broadcasts. It turns out that the Arctic was chosen so that the Venber, a previously-extinct ice-based species that the Yeerks have resurrected and placed under their control, could be used there.
• Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas:
  • Ax does something like this once when the kids are in fly morph:
    Ax: He’s welcoming the visser back aboard the Blade ship. Or he may be telling him his brother is a meteor fragment. I understand Galard, but this morph’s hearing is very uncertain.

    Since the Visser actually does have a brother he's been trying to hunt down and is part of a species capable of faster-than-light travel, the second translation isn't actually that far-fetched.

  • When Polo introduces himself by slapping his chest and saying his name, Marco, who is translating, says that that's either his name or his favorite brand of shirt.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Crayak.
  • The Drode to some extent.
• Electric Instant Gratification: Worked into an Electric Torture device, and proves more effective on hawks than standard torture. A hawk can handle torture just fine; animals are good with dealing with pain. But a hawk doesn't know what to do with that kind of pleasure, and lowers its defenses for when the torture comes back.
• Elite Mooks: If an Animorph is struggling against a regular Yeerk one-on-one, it's usually controlling a Hork-Bajir. Visser Three's personal Praetorian Guard is entirely Hork-Bajir, albeit quite a few notches above the rest, and they make their debut by cornering Marco and Rachel on the infestation pier.
  "We're in trouble now," Rachel said solemnly, pointing to a fearsome-looking group of Hork-Bajir marked with blue armbands on their bulging biceps.
  "Who are those guys? They're... crap, they're the most pumped Hork-Bajir I've ever seen!"
• Empty Shell:
  • The Ellimist's back story involves him being captured by Father, a huge sea creature that absorbs/enslaves the minds of others. Eventually, the Ellimist learns to absorb those dead minds from Father into himself. In the end, it seems that Father had no real mind of his own, just a Hive Mind from everyone he had absorbed.
  • Possibly the Isk, created by the Yoorts and together making up the Iskoort species.
  • This also seems to be the fate of anyone who's a host for too long. In an early book, the Ellimist shows the Animorphs a Bad Future where the Yeerks won and their human slaves have lost the will to do anything; and near the end of the series, the real Tom is described as an "empty husk" and "mindless puppet".
• Endangered Species: The protagonists refer to themselves as this in the earlier books a few times, despite not being changed enough to justify species reclassification.
• Enemy Civil War: Visser Three and Visser One's rivalry creates a fragile equilibrium that the heroes take advantage of. It ends in Book 45, with Visser One's execution.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Perhaps the most important one is the above-mentioned rivalry between Vissers Three and One. Visser One is just as bent on world domination as Visser Three is, but she and the Animorphs agree that things would be worse for all of them if Visser Three overthrew her, at least for the time being.
  • In Book 24, the Animorphs attempt to convince the Helmacrons to take out Visser Three for them, but the Helmacrons turn out to be so annoying they agree to a temporary truce with Visser Three just to get rid of them.
  • In Elfangor's Secret, the Ellimist and Crayak both agree that the Time Matrix should not be in the hands of a mere mortal and help the Animorphs stop Visser Four.
  • In the last few books, they team up with Tom and his followers in order to hijack the Pool Ship. Both sides then double-cross each other, but the Animorphs end up winning in the end.
• Energy Weapon: Andalite Shredders, and what the Yeerks modified them to be, for more effective disintegration and pain-causing: Dracon beams.
• Engineered Public Confession: Or rather, an engineered public demonstration. In Book #35, after spending days harassing a particular famous-but-psychologically unstable Controller, Marco (as a poodle) provokes the Controller into attempting to strangle him to death on national TV.
• Enslaved Tongue: There are several instances of controllers making their human hosts say things they really don't want to.
• Establishing Series Moment: In the very beginning, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this will be like a Saturday morning cartoon and Elfangor will be the wacky alien mentor. Then Visser Three arrives, morphs into an "Antarean Bogg" and eats him alive. For added horror, it is explicitly said that parts of him rain down to be gobbled up by Taxxons, making it clear just how dark this series can (and will) get.
• E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi:
  • In The Andalite Chronicles it's implied that Elfangor made friends with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, which led to the advancement of human technology.
  • In book #16, Joe Bob Fenestre created Web Access America. The reality is he's a Controller and the Yeerk used Yeerk technology to create the advancements his company is known for.
  • Also played with in #45 The Revelation, when it's revealed that the Yeerks helped humans discover Zero-space. Lampshaded by Ax in the same book.
• Even Evil Has Standards: A good deal of the series' ambiguity revolves around the differing customs and ethical values of humans, Andalites and Yeerks which make it very difficult to draw the line between moral and immoral warfare.
  Jake: He's a prisoner of war. We don't kill prisoners.
  Visser One: No. Of course not. You merely blow up ground-based Yeerk pools and kill thousands. And then another seventeen thousand of our brothers here on this ship. Defenseless, harmless, unhosted Yeerks. Murdered. But you don't kill prisoners.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Visser One (not Eva, the actual Yeerk) and her human children, who were, oddly enough, allowed to remain uninfested during their time with her. Well, one of them, anyway.
  • David's main motivation is to free his parents from Yeerk control, but since he doesn't know about starving out Yeerks, he tries to make a deal with them instead. Once that's off the table, he tailspins real fast.
  • In The Alien, a minor Yeerk agrees to help Ax assassinate Visser Three in revenge for the Visser allowing his lover to die of Kandrona starvation.
• Everyone Can See It: Despite initial trying to keep their relationship low-key, it was very apparent to everyone that Jake and Cassie were smitten with each other. Marco also sarcastically makes the same observation in an early novel when Rachel pulled a He Is Not My Boyfriend regarding Tobias.
  Rachel: [threateningly] What did you say?
  Marco's thoughts: Like it was some big secret.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep":
  • The Ellimist. Oddly, Ellimist was originally his online gaming handle, which he adopted as his name when he ascended to omnipotence. His real name is Toomin.
  • And the Drode. According to the... er, being himself, it means "wild card."
• Everyone Meets Everyone: Downplayed as each of the five main characters knew, or at least knew of, the other four before the series began, but they weren't close.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Rachel appears to be just a pretty face as she is tall, graceful, blond haired, blue eyed, and glamorous but her fearlessness makes her more than that.
• Evil Gloating: A couple times in minor books, but most notably done by Tom's Yeerk in the final two books (narrated from different perspectives):
  "You appear to be experiencing some engine trouble, Visser," Tom said, gloating.
  <The Empire will track you down and kill you for this, you do understand that, I hope?> Visser One said.
  "Oh, I doubt it," Tom said cheerfully. "The Andalite fleet is rather close by. It's possible that I misled you on that point." He was all but giggling.
• Evil Is Hammy: Visser Three.
  "You dare defy me! You dare resist!"
• Evil Overlord: Visser Three. The first Visser One might also qualify, as things she does are undeniably ruthlessly evil, but they're more motivated by her military goals than an inherently malicious personality.
• Eviler than Thou: The whole hierarchy of the Yeerk Empire, but particularly the Visser One/Visser Three rivalry.
• Evil Me Scares Me: Rachel gets this several times- when she gets split in half; when she gets turned into a monster; when she gazes into the abyss of her soul and sees a fearsome Blood Knight staring back at her.
• Exact Time to Failure: Ax has to give regular time reports so that the Animorphs don't exceed two hours in morph.
• Exact Words:
  • In Megamorphs Three, Crayak only agrees to help the Ellimist and the Animorphs fix the past on the condition that "one of them will die." Jake is ultimately killed during the American Revolutionary War, much to the group's chagrin—but then they discover that they are now immune from all fatal injuries (or at least recover from them after time jumps). Crayak said one Animorph had to die, and now that Jake has done so, the Ellimist is using his own powers to make the rest of them immortal for the remainder of the mission.
  • One of these is responsible for some fanbase-wide speculation. The Drode tells Rachel that "The life of your cousin is your key to salvation in the arms of Crayak", in an attempt to get her to kill Jake. She ultimately kills Jake's brother Tom, who is also her cousin, leading to a lot of questions about her post-mortem fate.
  • Towards the end of the series, we discover that the Ellimist's role in his and Crayak's Cosmic Chess Game relies on this. The Yeerk invasion of Earth is one of the representations of that game: Crayak controls the slugs and allows the Ellimist to pick six random "players"—none of who can have any connection to the conflict when picked—as his own pieces. The Ellimist agreed...and while the choices were technically random, he pulled them from a pool that he very carefully curated to be perfect selections: Ax (Elfangor's brother), Tobias (Elfangor's son), Marco (the son of Visser One's host), Cassie (who, in addition to her natural gift with animals and ties to a veterinary clinic, is a "sub-temporal grounded anomaly" who naturally causes all attempts to warp reality to fail), Jake (a born leader who is determined to win because his brother is infested), and Rachel (who's ultimately revealed to be the only truly random one in the group, but nevertheless is a Blood Knight who proves invaluable to the team). The five Earthlings also all know each other because of Jake. When the Drode finds out about all of the Animorphs' unique powers and personal connections to the major players of the conflict, he whines that the Ellimist clearly "stacked the deck"; tellingly, the Ellimist doesn't deny it, instead remarking that it would certainly be clever if he had.
• Exploding Fish Tanks: Done twice in book #15. First when they sneak into an aquarium to acquire a hammerhead shark, and have Ax use his tail blade to cut open the tank so they can escape the Controller guards. The second time is technically an inversion, as it involves the Self-Destruct Sequence of the Yeerk Underwater Base, letting the ocean in.
• Exposition Beam:
  • In the first novel, Tobias stays behind with Elfangor for a bit longer than the others and gets a blast of random information, including how Yeerk pools work. Elfangor also demonstrates the abilities to show the Animorphs mental pictures as well as talk to them telepathically. Other than the existence of Yeerk pools, none of this ever comes up again.
  • One book features the Iskoort, who buy and sell memories (among other things). It basically involves copying somebody's mind and then letting other people download it. The Animorphs plus Erek see some Howler memories and wind up selling their own to get by. These memories are later used to give the Howlers a species-wide Heel–Face Turn, since Crayak had previously kept them ignorant of other species' sapience.
• Extinct in the Future: A Bad Future variant in "The Message". Ax reveals that all species of life on Earth will be wiped out by the Yeerks, except for those required to feed their human hosts, if they succeed in taking over Earth. Fortunately, the Animorphs manage to stop the Yeerk invasion before it succeeds at the end of the series.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: Pretty much all the aliens, particularly the Andalites, who first thought that human clothing was part of human's bodies. Ax has trouble understanding why he has to wear clothing while morphed as a human.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: While its maintenance serves the interests of all sides in keeping the war from going from covert to hot and resulting in massive casualties, the trope is still played straight: people are freed on multiple occasions (they even make a website), but somehow avoid both recapture and informing the general public. Near the end of the series, even as the situation deteriorates to the point of military battles (including the annihilation of a carrier battle group) and a revealing speech by a governor, as far as the reader knows the masquerade is maintained right up until the city gets systematically destroyed.
• Extremophile Lifeforms: The Venber melt in above-zero temperatures. They nearly went extinct when it turned out the resulting liquid had many useful properties.
• Extreme Omnivore: Ax eats all kinds of stuff (cigarette butts, engine oil, and paper plates, just to name a few) but it doesn't really bother him. He can't see what the others are getting so upset about.
  Cassie: Were the nachos good?
  Ax: They tasted of grease and salt. Plus, there was another flavor that reminds me of some delicious engine oil I tried once. Oil. Oil-luh.
  Jake: Ax...you know how I mentioned you can't eat cigarette butts or dryer lint? Add engine oil to the list.
• Extruded Book Product: Roughly the entire second half of the series was ghostwritten, although KAA was still involved in coming up with the plot outlines.
• Eye on a Stalk: The Andalites have two large eyes where a human's would be, along with two eyes on flexible stalks on top of their heads which give them 360-degree vision.

F

• Fake Better Alternate Timeline:Animorphs did this in one book, with Jake making a Deal with the Devil with Crayak to Cosmic Retcon the timeline so that the Animorphs never received their powers in the first place. The kids end up winning the war with the Yeerks FASTER without their powers, but it's largely due to Cassie being "sub-temporally grounded", which seems to give her some degree of reality-warping powers when she isn't in her "right" universe. Even with that, most of them die in the process.
  • Also very briefly toyed with in one of the Megamorphs books, where a Visser goes through time changing history to make the world easier to conquer for the Yeerks. As a result, slavery still exists (though apparently not related to race as Cassie owns one), Jake is a loathsome wannabe dictator considering selling Cassie out to the government for opposing their genocide in South America, Rachel is in a reeducation camp for independently-minded females, and the U.S. doesn't exist. On the other hand, neither Hiroshima nor the Holocaust happened, as the D-Day landing is fought against a French-German alliance and Hitler is just a jeep driver. Marco looks very briefly reluctant as his mother is still with him in this timeline (and not Visser One's host), but claims he's joining in because the timeline has only two TV channels.
• Fake Danger Gambit: During the trial of Visser Three and Visser One, Visser Three executes a scheme where he has his officers secretly release wild animals in the courtroom, so he can kill them all and make a show of having seemingly defeated the Animorphs. However, Visser One notices some of the animals attacked each other, and covertly contacts the Animorphs to attack the courtroom for real, exposing Visser Three's deception.
• Faking the Dead: More than once. Visser One sets it up so that it looks like Eva, Marco's mother, drowned at sea, so that she had an excuse for disappearing into space. Later, Marco has Erek and Mr. King stand in for himself and his father when the Yeerks come to kill them. Finally, Jake fakes the deaths of all the other Animorphs in order to sneak them on the Pool ship in his final gambit.
• Fallen Hero: Jake.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: The fight scenes in this series are quite graphic. Ripping out throats, hacking off limbs, stabbing, shooting, maiming, disemboweling - you name it, someone's done it. What makes the violence notable is that because morphing heals every wound the Animorphs have, the same character can have the same limb hacked off multiple times.
• Fantastically Challenging Patient: In "#29: The Sickness",

Ax the Andalite comes down with a disease called yamphut, which requires his tria gland to be surgically removed. Unfortunately, the gland is located in his head and the Animorphs can't take him to a hospital without possibly blowing their cover to the Yeerks (on top of the complication of a human with "primitive tools" operating on an alien). Cassie has to do the surgery herself, though she's just a veterinarian-in-training who has done little more than neuter animals. Fortunately, she manages with help from the good Yeerk Aftran, who enters Ax's mind so she can tell Cassie exactly where his tria gland is.

• Fantastically Indifferent: The defining character trait of Derek from "The Extreme" is his total non-reaction to all the weird stuff he sees. This ranges from humans with Dracon beams blasting the wildlife to the heroes demorphing right in front of him.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • In addition to the commonly dismissive perspective the Andalites take to the Yeerks, the series gets some good mileage out of Tobias's attitude towards other birds. He calls Golden Eagles "nuts" (they occasionally hunt hawks) and is generally disdainful of seagulls and pigeons. There's even a debate as to whether or not this could count as racism by the other Animorphs.
  • Andalites tend to be like this in general. While they don't hate other species (except Yeerks) they generally see them as primitive and inferior
  • Yeerks can't seem to help this when they see Andalites. The Yeerk that infested Jake was discovered when he sneered upon seeing Ax. It was confirmed when Ax, attempting to acquire Jake's DNA, was called "Andalite filth".
• Fantastic Slurs:
  • Yeerks are "slugs", Andalites are "grass-eaters", Taxxons are "bugs" or more commonly "worms", Hork-Bajir are "geniuses" and "bark-chewers", and humans are "monkeys."
  • The standard Yeerk-on-Andalite insult seems to be "Andalite filth!," while the inverse is "Yeerk scum!"
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In book #42, the Helmacrons take Marco hostage by invading his body. The Animorphs shrink down and go in after them.
• Far-Out Foreigner's Favorite Food:
  • Andalites eat through their hooves, and tend to become Sense Freaks when they morph human and get taste buds for the first time. Ax will eat practically anything, but his cinnamon buns are his favorite by far.
  • In another book, a female Andalite goes nuts for jelly beans.
  • After the war is over, Andalites start going on taste tours on Earth where they take on human form and visit food courts. They eventually end up trading some valuable scientific knowledge and technology...in exchange for having a donut shop opened up on their homeworld.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: By means of Zero-space (Z-space for short), which is "anti-space." It shifts and reconfigures, meaning the time it takes to travel from one planet to another isn't consistent. Z-space is also where the Animorphs' excess mass goes when they morph creatures smaller than they are (as mass can't be created or destroyed), and, presumably, where they derive the mass for when they morph larger creatures. This also makes travel through Z-space dangerous, as that excess mass is physically present and can be crashed into.
  • Lampshaded in VISSER, where Edriss and Essam marvel at the characters of Star Trek accomplishing this in real space, which they know to be impossible.
• Fate Worse than Death: David. Ironically, Cassie chose to permanently trap him as a rat specifically because she felt it was better than killing him.
  • Inverted with the Taxxons. They view their eternal hunger as this, so many of them willingly became Controllers in exchange for a steady supply of food.
• Fictional Counterpart:
  • WAA (Web Access America) = AOL, Jeremy Jason McCole = Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Power House = Home Improvement.
  • John Berryman (Visser Four) isn't quite a Fictional Counterpart of John Barrymore, but he was a Shakespearean actor, though not a very good one.
• Fictional Disability:
  • In the novel "The Other", an Andalite named Mertil suffers from a condition that makes him unable to use the morphing technology, and his friend Gafinilan suffers from a painful disease known as Soola's Disease, which can only be gotten rid of by acquiring and permanently morphing another Andalite.
  • In "The Reaction", Rachel is revealed to have an allergy to her alligator morph, which causes her to morph uncontrollably whenever she experiences any strong emotions. She gets better by the end of the novel, though.
  • In "The Proposal", Marco's emotional issues revolving around his dad deciding to marry his math teacher causes him to morph into freakish animal hybrids, such as a salmon with gorilla arms or a skunk/spider hybrid. Similarly, he gets better by the end.
• Final Battle: A pretty epic one, too, although the main characters don't directly participate in it. (Jake even describes it as the "final battle.")
• Final Speech: Hirac delest is an Andalite term for one's last thoughts or final words. It is a fairly common practice among Andalite warriors to record it just before their demise. In The Andalite Chronicles, the entire text actually serves as Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul's hirac delest.
• Fire-Forged Friends: How the Animorphs became friends. Before the meeting with Elfangor, they weren't close - Marco and Jake were best friends, Cassie and Rachel were best friends, but Rachel and Jake, despite being cousins, weren't close, Cassie and Jake only barely knew each other (but still had a mutual-crush thing going), and Rachel and Marco only really knew of each other. Jake was the only one who knew Tobias much at all, having stopped him from being bullied a few times, and, of course, they had never met Ax. But, as Marco notes, after someone saves your life a couple of times, you tend to cut them a little slack.
• First-Name Basis: Most of the main characters. Out of the main Animorphs, only Jake (and arguably Rachel's as well, since Rachel and Jake are related through their fathers) and Ax's full names are ever revealed. The Pretender and The Andalite Chronicles hint that Tobias' last name is Fangor, but it's never confirmed. See No Name Given below for more on that.
• First-Episode Twist: Elfangor dies, Tobias is trapped in the body of a hawk, and Jake's brother Tom is a Controller. This is found out in the very first book, so it's not even worth spoiling.
• Five-Token Band: Jake and Rachel are Jewish, at least on their fathers' sides, Cassie is black, Marco is Hispanic, Tobias comes from a very broken home, and Ax is an alien. (Although Jake and Rachel are at very best extremely reformative Jews.)
• Flanderization: Deliberately invoked to show the psychological effects of the war against the Yeerks, which gradually makes certain buried aspects of the kids' personalities all the more prominent. Rachel gradually gets more ruthless and hot-headed as she learns to enjoy the thrill of battle, Cassie gradually gets more pacifistic and compassionate as her actions during the war start to eat at her conscience, and Jake gets more angsty as the burdens of leading the Animorphs take a toll on his psyche. By the later books, Rachel is borderline-psychotic, Cassie can't stomach the thought of killing Visser Three, and Jake is clinically depressed.
• Flashback Nightmare: Often, but mentioned more than seen.
• Floorboard Failure: In The Reaction, Rachel involuntarily morphs an elephant on the second floor of her house, causing the floor to collapse.
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: Tobias' Shapeshifter Mode Lock and morphing ability. Poor guy can't catch a break.
• Foil: All over the goddamn place. All the main characters act as foils to each other to some extent.
  • Marco is the foil to Jake (taking orders vs. giving orders), Tobias (pragmatism vs. idealism), Cassie (pragmatism vs. moral relativism) and Rachel (subtlety vs. brute force).
  • Jake is the foil to Marco (taking orders vs. giving orders), Rachel (leadership vs. insubordination; they say this is what happens when two "strong" personalities mix), Tobias (confidence vs. insecurity) and Ax (leadership vs. loyalty to authority figures).
  • Cassie is the foil to Marco (pragmatism vs. moral relativism) and Rachel (peace vs. conflict).
  • Tobias is the foil to Rachel (peace vs. conflict), Jake (confidence vs. insecurity), and Marco (pragmatism vs. honor).
  • Rachel is the foil to Marco (subtlety vs. brute force), Jake (leadership vs. insubordination), Cassie (peace vs. conflict), Tobias (peace vs. conflict) and Ax (giving orders vs. taking orders).
  • Ax is the foil to Jake (giving orders vs. taking orders), Marco (pragmatism vs. "warrior ethics"), and Rachel (emotionalism vs. logic).
  • The Ellimist and Crayak act as foils to each other (life vs. death, the forces of good vs. the forces of evil).
  • Visser Three is the foil to Visser One (psychopathic, sadistic, irrational evil vs. pragmatic, intelligent, everyday evil).
• Follow the Chaos: In Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret:
  "See Ax? Told you it was Rachel. Any time you hear screaming and see people running, you're going to find our girl Rachel somewhere close by."
• Foregone Conclusion: All of the Chronicles books, to some extent, by way of being stories told in flashbacks about established characters.
  • The Andalite Chronicles is narrated by Elfangor, who died in the first book. His commanding officer is Alloran, the host body of Visser Three. Even if you didn't know either of these things before reading, the Framing Device is Elfangor transmitting his last testament telepathically to his ship minutes before he dies, and he mentions being responsible for creating the Abomination, Visser Three.
  • The Hork-Bajir Chronicles is about the invasion of the Hork-Bajir homeworld by the Yeerks. At the start of the series proper, all of the Hork-Bajir are enslaved by Yeerks.
  • Visser is about Visser One giving testimony about her invasion of Earth while on trial for treason. It is obvious from the series proper how successful she was.
  • The Ellimist Chronicles is the Ellimist telling a dying Rachel how he became the godlike being the main characters know him as.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In The Underground:
    Rachel: [narrating] But even I have enough sense to know the words "we have to win" are the first four steps on the road to hell.
  • The Ellimist Chronicles begins and ends with the Ellimist visiting a dying Animorph. He admits that he did not cause him/her to be an Animorph, and that it was random chance. According to Megamorphs #4, this means that this can only be Jake or Rachel. It turns out to be Rachel. And there's more foreshadowing regarding that point if you think about the situation in Megamorphs #3: we see a glimpse of an alternate timeline. Presumably, the Ellimist would have had a hand in choosing the team in that universe too, and Jake was still there, but Rachel was not.
  • Most of the information about Z-Space's finer workings comes from the books narrated by Marco. Marco's Dad is the first human to discover the existence of Z-Space and build a transmitter.
  • In the first book, and as seen in the fourth quote on the quotes page, Marco comments to Jake "You want to get into this fight against Yeerks? Fine. We'll see how gung-ho you are when it's your own brother you have to kill." Jake has to give just that order in the finale. It also foreshadows the fact that, for much of the series, Marco's mother (also a close relative) is Visser One's host body, as well as the fact that Marco has to (attempt to) kill his mother (although the time he pushed her off the cliff, she survived).
  • The entirety of The Solution, most especially how Rachel begins to recognize both her own violence and darkness and Jake's tendency to use people, perfectly foreshadows the circumstances surrounding Rachel's death.
  • In Book #18, Ax briefly pretends he wants to defect to the Yeerks in order to get himself out of a sticky situation. Later that same book, he and the other Animorphs encounter an Andalite who really did start working for the Yeerks.
• Forgot About the Mind Reader:
  • The Leerans are fully-capable mind readers. As are, naturally, the Animorphs when they morph Leerans. Their first conversation in Leeran morph is... awkward.
    "Um, I'd just like you all to know," Marco said loudly, "that whatever thoughts you may be hearing are completely made up. They're not real."
• Forgot About His Powers:
  • In book #3, the Animorphs need to catch fish to acquire them and sneak into an invisible Yeerk ship. Despite Cassie, Marco, and Rachel all being able to morph birds that prey on fish and thus have helpful instincts for catching them, they waste hours trying to catch fish with a line and hook.
  • In book #22, Marco gets tied up and thrown in his bedroom closet. It takes all night for him to escape when he could have easily morphed into a small animal to slip free.
  • Since Ax and Tobias's human morphs are not their Shapeshifter Default Form, they can use thought-speak in human morph. In a few early books, they seem to forget they have this ability.
  • Jake gains a Howler morph in The Attack but never uses it again, despite how useful it would be in combat. Possibly justified as him not wanting to attract any more attention from Crayak than he already has.
• Forgot I Could Fly: Sometimes the members of the team forget the different abilities their morphs have.
  • There's a Running Gag where the team keeps forgetting that cockroaches can fly. This is subverted once when the narrator remembers this ability and attempts to fly, only to realize they forgot that cockroaches can't fly well.
  • In The Familiar, Future Cassie is thrown from a tower. Jake has to choose between saving her and saving the world, apparently because she's forgotten she can morph.
• Four-Star Badass: General Doubleday. Though, as Jake notes, his rank isn't very intimidating to any of the Animorphs; "After you've stared down the likes of the Ellimist and Crayak, you don't quiver just because some guy has stars on his shoulder."
• Framing Device: All of the Chronicles books. The Andalite Chronicles is presented as Elfangor's last testament (known by Andalites as a hirac delest), given in the final moments of his life. The Hork-Bajir Chronicles is told to Tobias by Jara Hamee sometime between books 13 and 23. Visser has, by far, the most in-depth one, switching back and forth between Visser One's memories and her present-day trial. Finally, The Ellimist Chronicles is narrated to a then-unnamed dying Animorph, indicating that at least one of them will die.
• Freak Lab Accident: How the Ellimist became a godlike being. Having his consciousness spread across multiple advanced bodies, some remaining in space and some in Z-space while the rest was sucked into a black hole, allowed his consciousness to integrate with the fabric of the universe. However, he notes that while the odds of this happening once were astronomical, the fact that it happened meant that Crayak could replicate it.
• Friend to All Living Things:
  • Cassie. To the point where, as a Yeerk incredulously discovers, she feels guilty about killing a termite queen.
  • The Pemalites were biologically designed to be a Planet of Hats for this trope.
• Fugitive Arc: In book #45, Marco and his dad fake their deaths and go into hiding in the Hork-Bajir valley. The other human Animorphs and their families join them four books later, after the Yeerks find out that they're human. This is generally considered to be the start of the series' endgame.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Jake gives one of these to Ax in "The Attack" for disobeying him. It's awesome.
• Fun Personified: Not exactly "personified" since it's an animal, but all the Animorphs agree with this about their dolphin morph. They even force Jake to use it at the end of the series to try and get him out of his depression. It works.
• Future Badass:
  • Jake in The Familiar again. "A body a Yeerk would give three ranks for."
  • Future Tobias also qualifies. Future Cassie is a badass, but all her other good qualities such as her sense of justice have completely gone.
• Future Me Scares Me: Future-Rachel from The Stranger. Not only is she a controller, she's one of Visser Three/One's highest-ranking subordinates. Furthermore, in the alternate past, the two of them cooked Tobias and ate him with barbecue sauce.

G

• Gambit Pileup: In Book #53 The Answer, Jake uses the Auxiliary Animorphs and the U.S. National Guard to distract Visser One, so he can sneak above the Pool Ship. Or so Visser One thinks. Actually, Jake is relying on him to believe that, so he doesn't realize that Jake and the other Animorphs are already aboard the ship, with help from Tom, who wants Visser One dead himself, and plan on fighting him with the help of the free Taxxons. But, Tom decides to betray Jake to Visser One at the last moment, which Jake saw coming and avoided dying with help from the Chee, who Tom and Visser One didn't even know existed. Yeah.
• Gambit Roulette: Cassie's surrender of the blue box.
• Gamebooks: The two Alternamorphs books. The first book cast the reader as a Sixth Ranger there with the Animorphs at the start, while the second featured the reader as an Expy of David.
• Gender Bender: Pretty much all of the kids at some point: Rachel's eagle, acquired between books 1 and 2, is male, as is the grizzly bear that she acquired in book 7. Marco acquires a girl wolf in book 3, while Jake, Marco and Ax all become a female skunk in book 9, and Rachel and Cassie (along with the four boys) acquire a male polar bear in book 25. The only human example, however, is Tobias, who acquires Taylor, a human female, in book 43.
  • And Rachel acquiring a male sailor in #46 and Marco acquiring the governor in #51. The six of them often acquire the same non-human animal, meaning that some of them are genderbent.
  • In #13, when the kids are helping two Hork-Bajir escape, Rachel morphs the male and Tobias morphs the female.
  • In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Aldrea morphs Alloran.
• General Ripper: Alloran. Elfangor is really surprised when he finds out he Used to Be a Sweet Kid.
• Genetic Memory:
  • Howlers, though their memory is constantly tampered with by Crayak, to preserve their naiveté and maintain their usefulness as killing machines.
  • Andalites also possess a genetic memory, though it's much more random and is only triggered as a near-death-experience; Tobias gains it after acquiring his uncle, Ax's, DNA.
  • It's also implied that the Yeerks have this to an extent.
• Genre Savvy: Marco shows a strong indication that he knows he's in a fairly dark series with a rather sadistic author whenever he's being a Deadpan Snarker. Later in the same book, upon being told they're not comic book heroes, he makes the rather prophetic comment: "Yes, but I really really want it to be a comic book. See in a comic book the heroes don't get killed."
• Genre Shift: The series starts out as an Alien Invasion / Conspiracy Thriller, then switches to a Space Opera after the fifteenth book or thereabouts.
• Giant Footprint Reveal: During the dinosaurs special where The Team is transported back in time, the gang finds themselves on an island where a lot of trees have been knocked over. Jake also slips into a large hole. Most of the gang assumes the trees were knocked over by a tornado, only for Ax to ask if a tornado had feet. When they try to explain to him what a tornado is, Ax points out that whatever knocked the trees over had feet and that Jake was in one of its footprints.
• Glamour Failure:
  • A Yeerk controlling Jake gets surprised and glares at Ax (Yeerks and Andalites are practically bloodsworn enemies). The reaction warns the Animorphs that something is wrong. The Yeerk does an okay job protesting his innocence until Ax moves to acquire Jake's DNA so he can play his role while the Animorphs make sure Jake isn't infested. As soon as Ax comes in contact with Jake's skin, the Yeerk yells out, "Get your hands off of me, you Andalite filth!" thus torching any chance he had of solving the situation with his secrecy intact.
  • Other than that, one of the really disturbing things about this series is that, for the most part, there is no Glamour Failure on the part of the Yeerks; their replacement and impersonation of their host is so thorough and effective that even their closest friends and family never notice the difference. There is a subtle change, though: Marco notes in an early book that "Tom just hasn't been acting like Tom" after the kids realize Jake's brother is a Controller. Similarly, Melissa notices that her parents, who are Contollers, always seem insincere. The Yeerks essentially rely on the fact that no human would automatically assume that a subtle change in personality would mean an alien parasite in their head.
  • Near the end of the series, there's a lot more Glamour Failure. For example, Tom will disappear for hours without giving an explanation. In one instance he mutters to Jake about how he's "preparing" for something. Justified in that by the end the Yeerks have amassed enough power to forget stealth and secrets, and are simply waiting for the orders for an open war.
• God for a Day: Rachel was given the chance to become the ultimate fighting machine by Crayak. However, such things are not much fun for a Blood Knight and it leaves only the satisfaction of sadistically snuffing out your enemies which is a road she doesn't feel comfortably going down when Crayak starting saying she is not so different.
• God's Hands Are Tied: Not so much gods as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, the Ellimist and Crayak can not directly (or at least, overtly) interfere with other species under normal circumstances, generally guiding their allies or followers instead. The reason is that these two beings are basically locked in a galaxy-wide Cold War: the Ellimist is good and wants to help everyone, Crayak is evil and wants to destroy everyone, and any open conflict between them would probably be very, very bad for everyone involved. The Ellimist Chronicles shows what happens when their hands are not tied. At least 10% of the galaxy was destroyed before they became Sufficiently Advanced, and they are many orders of magnitude more powerful now than they were then. The Cosmic Chess Game is required to keep the fabric of reality from falling apart. Both the Ellimist and Crayak are, however, willing to put aside their usual rules and work together if something particularly disastrous happens. This is the case in Megamorphs #3; antagonist Visser Four finds the Time Matrix and uses it to completely rewrite the history of the Western world (including altering the Battle of Agincourt, the American Revolution, and World War II). The Ellimist and Crayak are the only living things able to realize that this is wrong, and combine their powers to both restore the Animorphs' memories of the lost reality and send them through time to stop Visser Four.
• Godwin's Law of Time Travel:
  • Subversion: Visser Four rockets through the time stream, altering the results of battle to see to it that the human race is more cowed and easier to enslave. The book opens in a totalitarian alternate present with slavery still legal and women who "don't know their place" in reeducation camps, but no actual Nazis. During his travels he goes to D-Day to ensure a Nazi victory, but thanks to his previous changes, there never were any Nazis.
  • But they do see Hitler. Though tempted, nobody does anything to him since this Hitler is just a scared guy driving a jeep. Then Tobias's Hork-Bajir blade either slips or "slips." The question of which it was kinda hangs there unstated.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: During the David Trilogy, the Animorphs try to infiltrate the Marriott resort as seagulls, but a Human-Controller wearing sunglasses is able to stun them and other birds with his sunglasses from a distance.
• Go Out with a Smile:
  • Rachel, in the final book.
  • Much later, Jake, with "a dangerous smile. Rachel's smile."
• Going Native:
  • Elfangor in The Andalite Chronicles. Also Arbron in the same, Aldrea in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Toomin in The Ellimist Chronicles with the Andalite cavemen, and Essam and, to a degree, Edriss in Visser. Those Chronicles books certainly did follow a formula, didn't they?
  • This applies to the Chee as well after they used their holograms to disguise as humans.
• Good All Along:
  • Yeerks, though more of a case of "Neutral All Along":
    • Yeerks, like humans, aren't all evil. They simply have the unfortunate luck to be born puppeteer parasites, who's natural form is very much And I Must Scream. The only way for them to see, taste, build, basically be anything more than a slug was to take over a being that can do those things. On their home world, they have a symbiotic relationship with a clumsy sub-sentient humanoid, the Gedd, with the Yeerks essentially acting as interchangeable brains. Upon discovering that they were able to utilize better species as hosts... well...many humans would not be strong enough to pass up the chance at becoming a superbeing, either.
    • While most Yeerks, such as Visser Three, genuinely support the imperialist philosophy of conquest or are Just Following Orders, some Yeerks are part of a Yeerk Peace Movement dedicated to the creation of artificial, non-conscious host bodies (In an alternate future, the Yeerk Peace Movement becomes the Evolutionist Front, a splinter-cell terrorist group, albeit with similar goals as the YPM.) Even more startling: Some of the Yeerks who inhabit host bodies are children, who are given the choice between participation or execution.
    • It's implied that even the imperialist Yeerks are only like that because they've been spoon-fed Empire propaganda since birth.
      Cassie: They don't know any better. If you were raised since birth on Empire propaganda, you'd fight to take over Earth, too.
  • Taxxons are actually intelligent creatures who posses an unfortunate trait: They're constantly hungry. When they see an open wound they go insane with hunger, "it's like watching sharks react to blood in the water." On their homeworld, this is kept in check by a benign Hive Mind, allowing them to live peaceful and productive lives. When removed from this influence they are overwhelmed by their base instincts. Because of this, the Taxxons have willingly offered themselves into bondage by the Yeerks, in hopes that the Yeerks would be able to suppress their insane hunger. It didn't work. But the Yeerks are fine with that.
  • The Hork-Bajir are a terrifying species of nine foot tall Lightning Bruisers covered in razor-sharp blades which the Yeerks use as shock troops. The catch? The pre-Yeerk hork-bajir were peaceful, cultured, and charmingly dopey herbivores who used these blades for climbing the massive trees of their homeworld and stripping bark and branches.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: The Pemalites were a race of dog people with no concept of violence or killing. As such were defenseless when the Howlers exterminated them.
• Good Republic, Evil Empire: Played with a bit, as the Yeerks are clearly an empire and the Andalites a kind of republic, but the vast majority of Andalite government and military leaders the characters meet aren't much better than the Yeerks.
  • Oddly, while the Yeerk Emperor is chosen for life by the Council of Thirteen, the Council itself is democratically elected; meanwhile, the Andalite government is practically a junta; specifically, the Andalite civil government is apparently democratic, but it is implied that, over the decades-long Yeerk War, their military has (intentionally or unintentionally) usurped a large degree of informal autonomy.
• When did they say the Council of Thirteen is elected?
  • It's also stated that the Emperor of the Yeerks is not Hereditary. His or her identity is kept secret from the Empire as both a means of safety (so no one tries to assassinate the Emperor) and a check on authority (so the power doesn't go to the Emperor's head). The power of the Emperor is he gets to cast a vote if the other 12 members of the council are in a deadlock. If a simple majority decides something the emperor is opposed to, he's got no power of recourse against the decision.
    • It wouldn't make much sense for any Yeerk ranks to be hereditary, since Yeerk reproduction kills the three parent Yeerks.
• Good Shapeshifting, Evil Shapeshifting: The Animorphs, as defenders of Earth, acquire morphs almost exclusively from earthly animals; even Ax the Token Nonhuman only uses morphs from his adopted home. The Big Bad of the series, Visser 3 (AKA Esplin 9466), actively seeks out choice morphs on alien worlds and has by now acquired a whole menagerie of exotic and terrifying morphs, appropriate for an alien conqueror... and given that he's both a showoff and a sadist, he looks for any excuse to use his impressive library of morphs against the "Andalite bandits."
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Morphing heals injuries, meaning Applegate abuses the hell out of this trope. It becomes an issue when they enlist disabled kids as backup, and those who had merely been permanently injured get healed and now have to hide their returned mobility.
• Good Weapon, Evil Weapon: The Andalite shredders are designed to kill as quick and painless as possible while the Yeerk dracon beams are designed to be as painful as possible.
• Gorn: The team's ability to heal any injury by morphing means Applegate was free to put them through as much horrific punishment as she wanted without permanently injuring them. Naturally, she got carried away at times.
• Go Through Me: A quiet moment of awesome in #38: the Animorphs are fighting in the Yeerk pool, backed up against cages containing temporarily free human hosts. The hosts stand up and make a human barrier to keep the Hork-Bajir from just shooting through the cages; the Hork-Bajir haven't been ordered to kill hosts and they hold their fire.
• Grail in the Garbage: The Animorphs first meet David when they discover that he's selling the Morphing Cube online without having any idea what he's got his hands on.
• Grand Finale: The final two books.
• Graceful Loser: It seems to be a sort of Yeerk racial trait to surrender when obviously defeated. Visser One is described as having a Thousand-Yard Stare and a slacked posture, in stark contrast to his near-constant aggression, when he realizes he's been totally outplayed, and soon after surrenders to the Animorphs without a fight.
  • During her trial, the former Visser One goes into an impassioned speech about humans possessing a bizarre - to them - ability to fight long past the breaking point, making last stands even when defeat is certain.
• G-Rated Drug: Instant maple and ginger oatmeal is addictive to Yeerks, replaces part of their brain stem, eliminates their need for Kandrona rays, and drives them insane.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Averted. Marco mentions knowing "about fifty words" of Spanish, and never uses them in conversation.
• Graying Morality: It starts off as a typical children's sci-fi with the Yeerks as evil and the Animorphs, and by extension the Andalites, as the good guys. This doesn't stick.
  • One of the major themes of the series. It starts out as Black-and-White Morality, but The Departure turns the black into grey as we learn more about the Yeerks (though with Visser Three in charge, a very dark grey ) and The Hork-Bajir Chronicles turns the white into gray as we learn more about the Andalites.
• The Great Exterminator: Alloran, Visser Three's host, is repeatedly referred to as "Alloran the Hork-Bajir killer" because he released a disease onto the Hork-Bajir world in an attempt to keep them from being Yeerk hosts. By the time of the main series, no free Hork-bajir remain.
• The Greys:
  • The Skrit Na, who like to abduct people and perform bizarre medical experiments on them for no discernible reason have this as their "Na" form (the Skrit are described as large and cockroach-like). The other characters note this but don't spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. Oddly enough, the Skrit Na were mentioned in The Ellimist Chronicles, meaning this race has existed in spacefaring for for tens of millions of years.
  • The original design for the Andalites was based on the Greys, until Applegate's publisher asked her to make them more interesting.
• Growing Up Sucks: Especially when you're trapped in an interstellar war to save human freedom at age thirteen.
• Groin Attack: Rachel does this to a male Controller once, and Loren does this to Chapman in the Andalite Chronicles.
  Elfangor: I believe the kick was painful to him.

H

• Hammerspace: Zero-space. Mass required for larger morphs is pulled from this dimension to make up the difference, and morphs smaller than normal store the excess matter here as well.
• Handshake Refusal: At the end of the episode where Tom and Jake are taken to the country for their grandfather's funeral longer than the Yeerk can survive, the Animorphs save the day by breaking Tom's leg so he gets sent back into town. Marco, who came up with the idea, offers his hand to Jake as a sign of all being forgiven (Jake had been dealing with the possibility that his brother might be finally freed), but Jake just lets it sit there.
• Hands Looking Wrong: In #41, Jake's teenage mind gets sent into his adult body, in a Bad Future where the Yeerks have taken over. The first he notices that he's not in his usual body is when he catches sight of his hands.
  I stopped suddenly as I studied my fist. It was big. I mean it was rough and callused and had veins that pumped across the hairy, muscular forearm like I belonged to Gold's Gym and actually used my membership.
  It was the hand and arm of a grown man.
• Haplessly Hiding: During one mission, the team goes to fly morph in an airport restroom. Unfortunately, Tobias ends up somewhere he doesn't recognize: inside a kind of huge, damp white bowl. And suddenly it gets dark...
  Marco: Caution: falling objects.
• Hannibal Lecture: Tobias uses this while Taylor is torturing him.
• Happiness in Mind Control: Yeerks are Puppeteer Parasites and most of their hosts were forcefully enslaved, screaming inside their heads. However there are some voluntary hosts who welcome being controlled and will feel lonely without their Yeerk partner.
• Happy Place: When Taylor figures out that simply torturing Tobias won't work, she starts sending him to his Happy Place too, attempting to shatter his mind by jumping from pure pleasure to pure pain. It works, but Taylor is too far gone herself to notice. Although interestingly enough, you could also argue that she tries this method specifically because Tobias is sending HIMSELF to a Happy Place (albeit not a terribly happy one) in order to keep from breaking down. Up until that point, he'd been surviving Taylor's methods by hiding in the hawk half of his mind, which, being the brain of a wild animal, was much better at living with pain without suffering deep psychological damage than his human side was. That's why the Happy Place method was so effective- the hawk brain was good at dealing with pain, but it didn't know what to do with happiness, which isn't something that a hawk brain understands. The happiness was just too tempting for Tobias' human side, and it drew it out of hiding- at which point Taylor slammed down on the pain button again and wacky fun ensued.
• Hard Light: The Chee holograms would count as this.
• Having a Gay Old Time: The phrase "hooking up" makes many appearances. In context, it just means "meet up," but the phrase has taken on quite a different meaning today!
• Healing Factor:
  • One of the perks of the morphing power is that injuries don't persist through morphs because they're based on DNA rather than the physical condition of any given form. In addition to allowing a person to acquire a morph of an injured animal and transform into it at full health, this means that what should be fatal injuries can be shrugged off if you can survive long enough to morph or demorph. Since Loren and several of the Auxiliary Animorphs were crippled as a result of injury instead of birth defects, they're fully healed upon demorphing for the first time.
  • The Hork-Bajir can heal extreme wounds very fast, such as when Jara Hammee cuts his own head open, shows his brain to the Animorphs, and is able to close the wound simply by pressing the two sides of his cut flesh together. It's not like he isn't hurt from it, but it was clear that the injury was far from lethal, and a scar forms over the cut in moments.
• Heel–Race Turn: In the last two books, the Taxxons defect from the Yeerk Empire and ally with the Animorphs in exchange for getting to Shapeshifter Mode Lock themselves into anacondas to escape their Horror Hunger.
• Heel Realization: Rachel has one after she threatens to kill David's parents.
• He Knows Too Much: Not advocated, but suggested, when the group talks about David. It makes everyone very uncomfortable.
• Helpless Observer Protagonist: Several books have a viewpoint character temporarily be infested by a Yeerk, which leaves them trapped inside their own minds.
  • Jake spends the last third of The Capture mentally arguing with a Yeerk named Temrash. At first, he tries to fight back and warn the others, but he can't. Fortunately, Ax Spots the Thread, so his friends tie him up in the woods and constantly monitor him until Temrash dies.
  • Cassie allows Aftran into her brain The Departure to stop the Animorphs from killing Karen (Aftran's previous host), though it doesn't last for long and the book switches to Jake's perspective for the next few chapters.
  • In Back to Before, the alternate timeline's Tobias joins The Sharing and becomes a full member, not realising what he's getting into until it's too late. He spends the rest of his pagetime panicking.
• Heroic BSoD: Many, many; particularly Cassie in "The Departure" and Jake in "The Ultimate" and "The Beginning".
• The Hero Dies: Rachel, in the final book.
• Heroic Vow: Two major ones. Firstly, the kids will never morph a sentient species without the individual's express permission. The other vow is a little more vague: The kids "fight Yeerks, but won't become them". This essentially means the kids agree to not use the same underhanded tactics Yeerks use (cold-blooded murder, ganging up on a single enemy, et cetera); this is so that the kids can try to maintain their morality while fighting a guerilla war in which they are hopelessly outgunned. The kids wind up breaking both of these vows.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Tobias counts for this one right from the very first book, The Invasion. During the battle under the school, he chooses to attack one of the Hork-Bajir ready to infect Cassie with a Yeerk. This in turn leads to him ultimately being trapped as a Red-tailed Hawk, permanently. He gets better, though. Sorta. Although the characters begin to wonder if it was intentional.
  • Also in the first book, the real Tom is close to escaping the Yeerk Pool... when he turns back and tries to fight Visser Three's One-Winged Angel form du jour. He fails and gets reinfested shortly afterwards, but he buys the Animorphs enough time to escape.
  • In #19, Tactical officer Hareli-Frodlin-Sirinial self-destructs his ship when it's about to be captured by the Yeerks, due to the captain's betrayal.
  • In #19, Cassie permanently morphs a caterpillar to prove a point to Aftran, so she'll release her host Karen. She gets better.
  • In Megamorphs #3, Crayak demands that one of the Animorphs must die in exchange for a chance to fix the timeline. Jake is shot during the Crossing of the Delaware, but this means all the other Animorphs are immortal for the rest of the adventure, since only one of them must die. He gets better.
  • At the end, Rachel agrees to go on a suicide mission to kill Tom and destroy the Blade ship from within. Turns into a Senseless Sacrifice when it's revealed that Erek drained the Pool ship's weapons, not wanting Jake to use them to kill. As a result, Rachel is unable to render the ship completely inoperable, and it escapes.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners:
  • Gafinilan and Mertil if you care to read it that way. Briefly Marco and Ax after Marco fakes his death.
  • Jake and Marco.
  • Also Tobias and Ax, with Ax even referring to the Andalite name for this trope (shorm).
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • Some of them were seriously at risk of slipping into this as the war ended.
  • And Rachel did slip into it. Before her final mission, she accepts the fact that she's become something of a nutcase and thinks that Jake's made the right decision in using her appropriately.
• Hey, That's My Line!: Rachel's reaction whenever somebody else says, "Let's do it."
• Hidden Depths: In the final story arc, Jake relinquishes command for a short period. When he becomes leader again, he's an absolute authority figure, and refuses to second-guess himself or let anyone else question his decisions, working from the standpoint that "a leader who shows weakness invites disaster." This ultimately leads him to becoming the most ruthless character in the series.
• Higher Education Is for Women: The Andalites value education and intelligence in general, but when it comes to careers, they play this straight. In their culture, the sciences and the arts are considered the domains of females, while males are expected to join the military.
• Historical In-Joke:
  • Erek was FDR's butler and coined the phrase "New Deal" in a card game. He also worked on the Pyramids and did Catherine the Great's hair. Elfangor also talks about his human friends "Bill" and "Steve" and their primitive ideas regarding computers.
  • Also, Mr. King was the one who suggested heat to Pasteur as a means to kill bacteria. Also, remember that painting of Washington crossing the Delaware? The kids go back in time and find out the river and the night were freezing. So not only did the kids see first-hand that Washington never posed like that, they directly state that if he posed like that in the middle of the night on the front of a boat crossing an ice-cold river, his soldiers would have thought he was a loon.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Visser Four actually hoped to find Hitler and warn him of the Allied invasion on D-Day. Trouble is, thanks to the other ways he screwed up time, the Nazis are a combined French and German force, the invaders are all British, and Hitler is a Jeep driver, and as Marco points out, the "Nazis" don't actually appear to be Nazis anymore, and they can't even be sure the French/German alliance is the "bad guy". So rather than being of assistance, Visser Four is captured and imprisoned. Tobias still wants to kill Hitler on general principle, but Cassie insists they can't because this Hitler hasn't actually done anything. Tobias later gets shot, and his blade "instinctively" slips and he kills Hitler anyway.
• Hive Mind: Howlers. And Taxxons, through The Hive. Taxxons can voluntarily cut themselves off from The Hive, though, and they do when the Yeerks arrive (or the Yeerks deliberately cut them off). In The Ellimist Chronicles, The Generation are described as having this as well, to the detriment of the individuals. In addition, morphs of Earthly creatures with hive minds (such as ants and termites) tend to end very badly; on two occasions, the Animorphs took on such forms and came within inches of being trapped in the hive mind for good.
• Holding Back the Phlebotinum:
  • The instant maple and ginger flavored oatmeal is only referenced in one book. In their defense, as Jake points out, battles that involve oatmeal will never really end up being historical.
  • Also, if Erek King could fight, the war would be over in about a week. Unfortunately, while he recognizes the necessity of the kids' cause, he himself finds violence to be too horrific to participate in (largely because his memories of the experience never fade) and is programmed to never commit any violent act. Everyone is severely traumatized by seeing Erek fight and kill, even Marco, who's unconscious for most of that battle. The carnage is so intense that it leaves Rachel a weeping, semi-broken-down wreck. It's also implied that Cassie was left traumatized by this as well and that it was a major factor in her decision to temporarily step down nine books later.
• Hopeless War: The Animorphs' objective isn't to win, but to at worst slow down the Yeerk invasion before the eventual loss and at best to slow down the invasion until the Andalite reinforcements arrive.
• Holding Out for a Hero: While they try to slow the invasion on their own, the kids spend the better part of the series waiting for Andalite rescue. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting...
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Though usually a very pragmatic series, Animorphs pulls this one out of left field during the David Trilogy. The titular character is a Sixth Ranger the Animorphs have narrowly saved from capture, who in the process has been completely cut off from his family, his home, and everything he's ever known. Normally a pragmatic bunch, the Animorphs suddenly become unyielding sentinels of morality in dealing with him, forcing him to sleep in a cold barn rather than letting him sleep in a hotel room (which he admittedly broke into). Jake even goes so far as to threaten David's life, which is especially jarring when one considers how often the other members of the team have used their powers for selfish ends. With all this dumped on him, it's really no surprise when David snaps and goes Sixth Ranger Traitor on them.
  • In The Decision, all the Andalites on a ship decide to collectively commit suicide rather than running away when it becomes clear that they can't defeat the Yeerks the way they'd hoped. This was Lampshaded in Cinnamon Bunzuh!:
    Ifi: You can morph too, dude
    Ifi: Did you forget that you can morph?
    Ifi: You can all morph.
    Ifi: You can ALL morph.
    Adam: Isn't escaping the honorable thing to do?
    Ifi: Not as honorable as MASS RITUAL SUICIDE
  • In The Departure, Cassie mode locks herself as a caterpillar to prove a point to Aftran, a Yeerk who seemed close to defecting and freeing her host. No thought about how this would affect her parents, or the other Animorphs, or how the loss of one-sixth of their forces would affect the fate of the world. No, in that moment all she cared about was saving one little girl (and she had no guarantee Aftran would ever do it). She gets better, because otherwise there would be no more Cassie books.
• Horror Hunger: The Taxxons are only barely able to control their hunger at any time. In battle, Taxxons near injured combatants will, without fail, break off from the fighting to eat the dying. This includes themselves.
• Hourglass Plot: In #49, Tobias notes the sad irony between him and Jake: Jake is now effectively orphaned, his whole family having been infested by the Yeerks, just as parentless Tobias rediscovers his long-lost mother.
• Hour of Power: Morphing has a 2-hour time limit; overstay your time and you'll be stuck in that form.
• "How I Wrote This Article" Article: In The Android, Marco writes a school paper on the topic of how he hasn't come up with a topic for the paper. Later in the book, it's mentioned in passing that his writing about "the use of rhetoric to obscure a lack of content" got him a B.
  Marco: "A topic will... emerge. I just have to keep writing until I come up with a topic."
• Hufflepuff House: The Yeerk Peace Movement, anything in the Anati system, the Rakkam Garroo conflict, the free Hork-Bajir.
• Hugh Mann:
  • Played straight with Ax, who, in human morph early on, is just not quite right, thanks to a cocktail of misunderstanding human humor, taking directions too literally, and having access to taste buds. By the last third of the series, he's become much better at passing for human.
  • Completely averted by the Yeerks, as human-Controllers play their parts perfectly 99% of the time.
• Hulk Speak: The Hork-Bajir, due to their low intelligence and in many cases learning English as a second language, if at all. Seers, a rare genetic mutation which grant comparatively genius-level intellect, speak normally.
• Humans Kill Wantonly: Ax becomes disgusted with humans during Megamorphs #3, when he sees the nature of human wars. He claims that though the Andalites had their own wars, they were never as pointless or sadistic as human wars were. He also claims that Andalites never deliberately killed children or committed genocide to other Andalites.
• Humans Are Special:
  • The sheer length of the series entry on that page should say something about how much this trope plays a part in the series.
  • Both serious and not-so-serious examples. A prime example is the Yeerk designation of humanity as a "Class Five" host. They are intelligent and far more numerous (to the point that after a younger Visser 3 found humans, he had to repeat that there were five billion of use, not five million) but at the time of discovery possessed few natural or technological defenses against Yeerk infestation. They failed to count on human adaptability, though...
  • One notable example is Ax's observation that the Animorphs are using the morphing technology in ways the Andalites never even considered, in weaponizing it and acquiring dozens of different morphs for different situations, especially in so short a time. Most Andalites use it for subterfuge, and tend to specialize, only acquiring one or two animals over the course of their entire lives. That's not all there is to his observations, either. In the very first book from his point of view he noted that humanity went from basic powered flight to moon landings in only 66 years, a quarter of the time it took Andalites. He is further shocked when, after predicting humans would achieve Z-space travel in fifty years, Marco's father discovers it a mere two years later.
  • In The Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor and Arbron are confused by Loren's "loose and colorful skin" and "hooves held on by ropes". Apparently the Andalites had never met a species that wears clothing and shoes. Related, Elfangor is very confused when Loren and Chapman mention that they need them for areas of Earth that aren't always temperate, wondering why humans would live there if it was uncomfortable.
  • Ax also notes, as do a number of other charactes, that Earth is Special. It has a diversity of species on a scale of a thousand times that of most worlds. The Andalite homeworld, for instance, has three species of birds. Earth? About 10,000.
  • Humans are the only species the Andalites have met that walk on two legs and don't have a tail for balance.
  • The first Visser One in the series had this to say:
    "Humans have fought thousands of wars. Thousands! We as a race have fought a mere handful. They run straight into the bullets, Visser Three, again and again. Did you know that? They attack against insane odds. They defend what can’t be defended. Outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, hopeless, they will still fight, fight, fight till they are each and every one dead. Something you might know if you stopped posturing long enough to learn something!" ^note Of course she then gives Marco the opposite speech later.
  • In the flashbacks from the book "Visser", Visser One and her companions are shocked to find that humans have split hemisphere brains upon first infesting them, and attribute this physical feature with being responsible for Humans' ability to hold internal debate over their own choices and harbor doubts and contradictions in their behavior.
• Humanity Ensues:
  • Ax, by combining DNA from all the kids, makes his own human morph. He's weird.
  • Also, an ant morphs Cassie. The result is so horrific that even Cassie thinks it should be euthanised. In the same book, a buffalo morphs Chapman; as buffalo have a sense of individuality and more intelligence than an ant, this doesn't go over quite as poorly.
• Humans Need Aliens:
  • Played with. The human kids spend the first arc of the series optimistic that the Andalites will come to Earth and take over the fight with the Yeerks for them. It turns out that the Andalites believe that humans aren't worth much overall, and decide that the best course of action would be to wipe out the entire human race so the Yeerks can't use them as hosts. The kids quickly up the ante in their missions after they hear that bit of news.
  • Also Zigzagged when Tobias led the free Hork Bajir to the valley, but was only able to because he was getting the directions from the Ellimist.
  • The Chee make it a lot easier for the Animorphs to go on long-distance missions.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Ax, Elfangor. And in Visser, Visser One.
• Humiliation Conga:
  • David, after spending his entire arc being a self-centered Jerkass. He thinks he's pulling one on Rachel but he's really being lined up for a Fate Worse than Death.
  • Also Visser One, in a way. You get the sense that his whole defeat is very humiliating for him; especially the fact that even after losing his enemies won't just kill him and get it over with. Visser One first abandons his host body then has to go through a war crimes trial, which Jake describes as "very un-Yeerkish."
• Humorless Aliens: Andalites don't seem to understand the human sense of humor or its purpose, though Ax gets better at it as the series progresses.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The kids are, in one, instance, "pulled" into zero-space while in morph; that is, their consciousness was pulled into their extruded mass left in zero-space. Zero Space is not pretty, and they would have died if Ax hadn't been able to contact the passing Andalite ship.
• Hypothetical Fight Debate: One instance had Jake and Marco arguing over Batman vs Spiderman, the point of contention being whether or not Spiderman's webbing would slide off Batman's body armor. This conversation is also something of a Running Gag.

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