Animorphs

Ugh...

Can we just get a good adaption of this series please?

Animorphis Fowl.

So, same thing that happened to the Avatar live action series.

Yeah, linking that legendary Rick Riordan post is not a good sign. At all.

Guess who got graphic novel~

Actually I got it for my younger cousin for Christmas but read it myself before wrapping it.

Art is decent enough. Sometimes hard to tell if Tobias or Rachel are talking, they look so much alike. It's actually easier to tell who is taking when in morph since every thought speak bubble is color coded to a specific character.

They kept the "only thought speak in morph" fix from the updated books, and all the stores and stuff are now generic and non-branded.

The intro is the back cover warning from the books, but that's the only non dialogue writing we get. Which makes some of the graphic novel kinda rushed since a lot of the establishing character traits and relationships were in Jake's head. If you didn't know beforehand who was related to who and how, you would assume these five are all close friends already.

The morphing is creepy, so they got that down to a pat. Some added jokes got a laugh out of me. What sets the art apart from the books for me is it really emphasizes just how young the Animorphs are and how huge the Yeerk Pool is. Despite knowing better, in my head it was always a relatively cramped cavern. This thing is a huge open complex, more like a large military base than anything I had imagined.

I heard the second graphic novel is out, has anyone read it?

Also, I was thinking, if you wanted to change perspectives in any of the filler-y later books to a different Animorph, who would you pick? I feel like Ax might be a better focus character for the second Helmacron book, since Rachel's perspective didn't really add anything and it might be funny to see the Helmacrons and Marco's internal organs through Ax's eyes.

The second graphic novel doesn't come out until October.

I recently watched this one-hour retrospective from Lord Ravencroft, which happens to a part of a three-part series of his analysis of the Animorphs franchise as a whole.

As the title suggests ("A Painfully Strained Defense"), he offers a little bit of a charitable look into the late 90s live-action series, and how it adapts the source material. He takes into account the era that it was made in, along with Scholastic's strategy of producing adaptations primarily to promote their books at the time.

Table Contents:

• 0:00 - Intro
• 4:04 - The Adaptation
• 9:44 - The Episodes
• 26:21 - The Changes
• 43:55 - The Analysis
• 1:05:03 - The Tie-Ins

Over the past month or so, SoloMoon has given me feelings about Tom (especially from Eleutherophobia^note Anyone else want to trope it?), so I thought I might as well get my thoughts down.

In terms of the narrative structure of Animorphs, Tom Berenson is an object. He only has one moment of agency in the entire story and is defined by being a motivation for a main character. Unlike other major hosts such as Alloran, Eva, or even Chapman, there isn't an entire book where he's Yeerk-free.^note I know Chapman was briefly infested in TAC, but for most of the book he wasn't. He functions as an article of clothing for his Yeerks, rather than a separate individual, to the point where we only get Temrash's name after he's left him. In hindsight, it's obvious that they wouldn't be able to save him — we never knew him well enough to know what he'd be like after being saved.

This isn't a bad thing — it works for the story Applegrant wanted to tell — but I have a bad habit of getting so attached to minor characters that I lose sight of who the story is really about... and even though I've known how Animorphs ends for years, I'm dreading actually reaching it because I don't think my tear ducts could handle it.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Sep 8th 2021 at 7:23:04 PM

Sorry for double-posting, but has anyone read The Visitor graphic novel yet? I always thought the book was "meh", and the graphic novel hasn't really changed my mind, but Rachel's nightmare about maggots should be the image for NightmareFuel.Animorphs.

So far, the only memes people have made out of it are about all the characters looking the same, except for one pointing out how oof-tastic Cassie's "someday we'll save Tom" line is.

Applegate and Grant are re-releasing Remnants and Everworld, and they will also be launching a website that they want to have all of their published work on it, including Animorphs, though the rights are still being worked out for that series.

Is this that modern update they were talking about years ago, or just a straight re-release?

There is a LOT more information in the link than I was able to include in my summary. It looks like they're just re-releases with new cover art.

Fellow Animorphs commentator Poparena has done their own review of the recent release of the annual Graphix adaptation of the series, with "The Visitor".

I noticed that the Seerowpedia page for The Visitor graphic novel stopped being a stub shortly after that review was posted. Coincidence? I think NOT!

Also, I'm running an Animorphs fanfic event on another site if anyone's interested.

How heavy would you estimate the average Andalite, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxon to be?

Andalites are probably about as heavy as a horse and rider given they are centaur like beings.

Taxxons probably aren't that heavy compared to their size. They're not a particularly strong race, implying there's little actual muscle on them. They are basically a race of constantly hungry carnivores who can't actually hunt that well. That's why so many of them joined the Yeerks in the first place — in exchange for being willing hosts, the Yeerks would help them sate their hunger.

Hork-Bajir otoh I would imagine weigh a literal ton if not more. They're not only big (at around seven feet tall on average as adults) but they also have massive blades on them. They also have to be strong enough to actually cut off the bark of the huge trees of their homeworld, implying there's a lot of densely packed muscle on their bodies.

Edited by M84 on Nov 23rd 2021 at 10:16:06 PM

Andalites are also consistently described as slimmer than horses, more like deer. Though in at least one case they’re shown to be strong enough to bear a rider.

Yeah, but they're pretty lean, and stated to be built more like a deer than a horse.

Personally, I estimate a Hork-Bajir to be about twice as heavy as an average Human, a Taxxon to be a little heavier than that, and an Andalite to be a little heavier than that. My logic is: Hork-Bajir are tall, but slender. Taxxons are bags of meat but they're not actually that large, coming up to around chest-height when standing upright. Andalites seem to have the most mass, with the whole rear segment.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Nov 23rd 2021 at 7:17:04 AM

If they're strong enough to bear riders then they must have a considerable amount of muscle on their deceptively slim frames.

It's mentioned in one early book (The Stranger, I think?) that Ax's back slopes downwards, but that's contradicted by literally every illustration of an Andalite.

Also, is it ever outright mentioned that female Andalites are purple? The only instance that comes to mind is when Esplin describes Aldrea as "bluish-purple" in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.

I think it's just assumed because of Aldrea, but I prefer the idea that Andalite fur color can vary from blue to purple and it's not based on gender.

...er, I think we may be over/underestimating how much things weigh.

Andalites are described as deer-like, but Elfangor at least can carry a human female on his back. The analogous Earth creature, then, should probably be the reindeer as a deer-like animal which can also bear riders. Given that the average weight of male reindeer is around 350-400 lbs, and accounting for both the tail weight and also stick a somewhat slender human torso where its neck would be, male Andalites are probably 400-450 lbs.

Hork-Bajir do not outmuscle Marco's gorilla morph, and the high end for gorillas is about 500 lbs. Being arboreal, there's also a cap on how heavy they can be. Their bones are likely honeycombed to reduce weight. I'd probably peg a male Hork-Bajir at similar to a male Andalite, 350-400 range. Keeping in mind that human strongmen tend to cap off at about 250-300 lbs, I think 50-100 lbs extra muscle and bone make a decent amount of sense. Seems weird that they'd weigh less than Andalites, but we do need to keep in mind that the "centaur" shape means they have a quadruped lower body + part of a quadruped upper body + a humanoid upper body.

Taxxons I'm not sure about. They might be large but relatively not dense, given they're not described as particularly strong and tending to burst apart if you so much as chuck a large rock at them. Burmese pythons are around 200 lbs, anacondas are around 500, and I'd guess Taxxons are more towards the Burmese python end of the scale.

I thought taxxons were more like huge centipedes (bigger than pythons by a long shot, since they can eat people)? Not sure how you’d scale that up, but it might produce different weights than vertebrate comparators.

But it’s been a long time since I read the books, so I may be misremembering.

Edited by Galadriel on Nov 26th 2021 at 4:25:59 AM

Don't know why you would specify a "male" Hork-Bajir. Andalites make sense, we know female Andalites are slightly smaller, but Hork-Bajir are stated to be near-identical between sexes, with the only visible difference being the number of head blades. And Hork-Bajir are 7-feet-tall, that's big but not even outside the realm of possibility for a human being to reach.

Also, I think Ax is stated to be about eye-level with the other Animorphs, which would make his centaur body start at the same height as their waists. That's quite small, way below reindeer size.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Nov 26th 2021 at 5:39:00 AM