Headscratchers / Remnants

• How did Mo'Steel get a berth on the Mayflower?
  • His parents were scientists. Most of the Eighty were scientists with NASA contracts.
    • I just re-read the first book, and it never says that.
• Mother was much bigger than the Rock, so why didn't it affect anything when it crashed? And why wasn't it later discovered in recorded history? Was it somehow hidden until after the Rock hit?
  • I might need to go and recheck the books, but I thought that Mother crashed sometime after the Rock hit—-in the centuries between the Earth's destruction and when everybody gets back. So, all sorts of stuff could have happened that wouldn't affect "modern" people.
    • The end of book 13 says "the Rock wouldn't hit Earth for centuries to come."
    • It could have to do with the speed. Mother wasn't traveling as fast as the Rock was when it hit Earth.
    • Before somehow traveling back in time to before the Rock hit, the people on Mother had caused her to devolve into a smaller version of herself called "Daughter" so she was probably a lot smaller than she originally was when she hit Earth.
• What happened to D-Caf? The epilogue didn't say a thing about him.
  • YES! He was my favorite character, but he was barely used at all...
  • He fell in a plot hole and got stuck there.
• What the heck is with all the plot holes?! Everybody gets superpowers, because...? There's something called the Ancient Enemy, which is...? Am I the only one who suspects The Chris Carter Effect here?
  • Intentional Kudzu Plot, I think. Like A Series of Unfortunate Events.
  • Or maybe not. If you look at how the books were produced, it was pretty chaotic for Applegate. She'd been churning out a book a month since 1997, when Animorphs began. Particularly in the first few books, when she was also doing Everworld, she barely had enough time to get everything on paper, let alone really think it through. So really, it's amazing that she managed something coherent, let alone something good; in the hands of literally anyone else, the series would be a complete disaster. And really, this doesn't have nearly as many plotholes as Animorphs; there, the plothole to book ratio was something like 6:1.
  • Applegate only personally wrote 1-4; the last ten books were ghostwritten. Much like with Animorphs, the ghostwritten books are enjoyable, but when you have so many cooks in one kitchen, it gets chaotic.
• So, they watched the earth get destroyed and shattered into small pieces, and later return to visit, and it got better, sorta. What happened?
  • Maybe gravity pulled the pieces back together.
  • The moon, too. The moon was gone when they returned, so gravity must have smashed it all together.
• Why is this for kids? What moronic Scholastic executive looked at this series and thought, "You know who this would be good for? Seven to fourteen year-olds." Other than the first book, nothing in this entire fucking series is kid-friendly. There is cannibalism and worms eating each other alive and more deaths than what you'd expect in a Hunger Games and dealing with gender roles and why is it for kids?
  • It was the late 90s/early 2000s, this was the acceptable norm back then. I grew up reading them and never found them particularly horrifying.
  • You could say the same thing for Animorphs and Everworld. Applegate was a potential cash cow because of Animorphs, and she's been pretty clear that the only person at Scholastic who ever read the books was her editor. As someone who read them in middle school, when you're that age, you WANT books that aren't for kids.
  • Kids are are not all the teetering, half-disassembled Jenga towers that you seem to think they are.
  • Your problems are cannibalism, worms, death and... gender roles?

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