Animorphs

ROTFL. Dunno. Only read maybe about a fifth of the book so far.

Edit: I finished reading it, and it's the mother of the elephant on the cover that dies.

Oh, and it's one of those "based on a true story" things.

edited 7th Feb '13 11:56:23 AM by JMQwilleran

I'm sure it's been posted before, but this guy's art of the aliens in the series is awesome.

My personal favorite is the Veleek from Megamorphs #1.

Called it. No Newberry winner goes without some kind of death.

And yes, dat art be cool.

I just finished the David Trilogy. I think Rachel's book might be my favorite of those three.

... I'm not even gonna try to read that. Haters gonna hate and I'm too tired to bother. Maybe later when I can argue properly.

This is a conversation, not a place to put a review. If you must complain about how the series isn't intellectually stimulating enough for you then take it to the review section.

... Dude, what's your problem?

I really loved that series as a kid, defiantly helped my love for sci-fi.

[MOD HAT ON]

While you are entitled to your opinion, coming into a work thread just to say how much a work sucks and that every copy of said work should be destroyed is not going to fly here.

Thank you for your time.

[MOD HAT OFF]

So, how 'bout them Animorphs, huh? I read most of the series back in the day, but I never did get through every single book (notably, I none of the Megamorphs except the first, and none of the Chronicles except Visser), but outside of those I probably only missed 10-15 books.

Aether: Wow. I never realized how many aliens were actually in the series.

odafangirl: Ever hear of No More Dead Dogs? Because that's what kicks off the plot. :P

I read each one as they came out. This was my absolute favorite series when I was a kid, and I was amazed at how the story matured over time. I wouldn't say it got darker because...well, Animorphs was always pretty f*cking dark. From the moment Elfangor was EATEN in full view of the protagonists, the stage was set for a very dark story, and the rest followed through on that.

I'm still amazed at how much violence this franchise got away with. This is the only children's story I've ever seen in which a character beats an enemy to death with their own severed arm. The combat sequences were intense and terrifying, and Visser Three in particular was probably the scariest thing I'd ever experienced in a kid's story.

Visser Three started to lose his effect on me, I think, because they always got away. As soon as he showed up, it was usually a sign to turn tail and book it, so unless he somehow managed to trap them into a fight that they couldn't get out of (which I'm sure happened, since how cool Visser Three was was half the reason I bought his book) he never really did anything to them.

I don't recall reading the second alternamorphs book, and I didn't read Visser until probably 2011, when I saw that it was available in the children's section of the library in the place I had just moved to, and overrode my slight embarrassment of going into the children's section by reminding myself that I saw other adults going there, presumably getting things for their children.

I've been collecting the books second hand because the library hardly has any of them. In what I just read Cassie said that there have been battles that they fought that were terrible and vital, but this was not one of them. Those words can be said about quite a few of the books. I guess with so many books not all can be relevant to the series as a whole, but it's still worth reading.

Which one was that?

Was that the one with the Andalite toilet? Because that was hilarious.

You guessed it. It's #14 The Unknown.

Hey, you want to talk irrelevant, #11 - actually titled The Forgotten, no less - retcons itself out of existence. #41 - The Familiar - never even happened in the first place and is just a weird dream Jake had that foreshadows the existence of things that may or may not exist and regardless of whether they do or not, never come up again. Literally not a single thing actually happens in that book.

edited 2nd Sep '13 9:42:21 PM by TobiasDrake

Yeah - 11 only exists to exposit on Sario Rips before they show up in Megamorphs, and 41 is a really thin and frustrating excuse for a bad future that even the narrative admits makes no sense.

Whoever was behind #41 could also have been whoever got Ax at the end of the series, but since you never find out who that is...yeah, it's kind of pointless.

It's interesting that by writing style the series is definitely for kids or teenagers with the repetition and whatnot, but it starts out serious and the tone only gets darker as it goes on. You can really see it when Rachel asks Jake if someone was a good guy or bad guy and he tells her that he doesn't even know what he is any more. It's trying to teach about the uglyness of war. How many kids stories do that?

At least one other one.

Avatar was significantly more clean than Animorphs, though the comparison does have merit.

Avatar remains quite idealistic. I would say the other series that does something similar is The Hunger Games - by the last book it becomes unclear who, if anyone, is "the good guys", and the psychological as well as physical damage caused by war are constantly demonstrated.