The BBEG fights by polymorphing

>Things get dark as fuck at some points

It's every point. Every book they emphasise how shitty morhping actually feels and looks. Every book someone loses a limb or comes within an inch of death in the most gruesome ways. Every single book has some sort of callback to a classic "war story."

I remember after one battle and all the controllers are dead, there's still one left alive and the Yeerk is begging the animorphs to help him since the controller's body is dying and his ear cavity collapsed to the Yeerk can't get out. That shit stuck with me

it pretty much started the "edgy young adult fiction" genre too, probably wouldn't have hunger games without it.

If it's Visser 3, no.

There are still scenes of levity. And it did nonhumanoid aliens really well.

The Animorph movie will be great as long as they don't touch on the Elemist or the Crayak.

>Yeerk is begging the animorphs to help
Can't remember this, which book was it?

>Every book someone loses a limb or comes within an inch of death in the most gruesome ways.
Reminder that Erek the Chee android completely fucking obliterated entire platoons of dinosaur-lizardmen, humans armed with military-grade assault rifles, carried all the Animorphs in full battle forms over two miles, restarted hearts and reattached arms. In a time span that took probably about long enough to read this reply.

It was so horrifying that not even the author could put that shit into the book, all we see of it is that it reduces the deadly hardened berserker warrior Rachel to tears of horror.

/co/ has threads about Animorphs every so often.

>that book where cassie willingly traps herself in morph
>the books where they recruit the crippled children

So pic related?

>is the quickest way to let my boyfriend know I am dragging the entire party into my magical realm.

>crippled children

Man, fuck that book so damn much. That was to me honestly a sign of just how twisted the main characters had gotten, that they were willing to give morphing power to crippled children just to provide extra soldiers in their fight. Actually, wasn't it Cassie who even came up with the idea in the first place? What a hypocrite.

Oh lord

>Bandaging wounds.
>When morphing resets your body to its genetic baseline.

Why?

Do you guys remember the book where Cassie let a Yeerk infest her, so that she could try to teach it what it meant to be human?

Cassie was too good for this world.

I forget what the progenitor race of the Chee were called; do you remember?

They were fucking AWESOME, though.

They came to Earth and became dogs. That's why dogs are so awesome; they're the descendants of highly-advanced really awesome bro-aliens.

Wouldn't morphing fix the crippling?

Unless the disabilities were genetic.

I mean, morphing would re-grow lost limbs and stuff.

Genetic disabilities. One of them broke his back in a car crash, and morphing completely fixed his legs and regenerated them to perfect working order. But other than that, they were all still ruined on the base DNA level, except when morphed. One kid was born unable to speak, but while morphed he could thought-speak as much as he wanted.

Pemalites.

>im fucking plying

She was a goddamned monster with a guilty conscience. Rachel and Tobias were the real heroes.

Pamelites.

And yeah, one of the grotesqueness of the story (if you can call that things that are funnily horrifying and horrifyingly funny) is that if the Chee put their minds to it they could probably end the Yeerk War in an afternoon. They're each like Superman tier powerful.

They just wouldn't.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I dunno; so long as they weren't mentally disabled, allowing people the ability to fight for their homeworld doesn't seem TOO cruel.

Yes! That's right; Pemalites.

Explain?

Being violent went against their programming and it stood in opposition to everything they were created to be.

I remember someone making the case that Animorphs was literally to YA science fiction what Madoka was to mahou shoujo shows.

Applegate basically presents you with a classical setting for one of those (which especially back in the 90's everyone thought of as being mindless, funny and harmless) with weird looking aliens and a KIDS TURNING INTO ANIMALS TO SAVE THE WORLD, AIN'T THAT CUTE premise, then just when you expect everyone to start making stupid puns all of a sudden it's GORE AND MADNESS AND PARANOIA AND WAR CRIMES EVERYWHERE, OH GOD.

It was a series of books that aged with its audience.

You started reading it in elementary school, and by the time you were in high school you had war crimes and PTSD and people getting their eyes burned out and ramming the Blade Ship.

I was going to say "because she wants the bitchin' scar," but then I remembered she also takes pains to stay pretty in addition to being the axe murdery one, so that doesn't actually make sense.

Maybe someone saw her get hurt and instantly healing it would be a masquerade breach? No reason it has to be a war wound. Secret child soldiers can still trip onto a nail at a family picinic.

All of a sudden? Dude, the BBEG turns into a giant monster and eats the Andalite version of Captain America literally on-screen in what, the second chapter of the very first book? While the text makes sure to explain how he's eating him piece by piece with Taxxons rushing around below his monster form gobbling up the bits he misses?

It was gory and horrifying from the outset.

I'm not sure if I'd call them Superman tier, but their physical abilities do seem to be on par with, say, the kryptonians from the new Man of Steel movie.

Still terrifying.

I like the part where they went "Okay, we need more Animorphs. We need a LOT more Animorphs. Let's use disabled kids."

Then the kids all died. Like, they get incinerated by an orbital bombardment. They all die forever.

Yes, I loved that part.

And then she went on to write Elseworld and Remants, which were even MORE adult YA fiction.

Jesus Christ, Remnants was basically a series of sci-fi horror novels, and Elseworlds had a teenage goth-witch employing a bunch of neo-Nazi skinheads to conquer a fantasy world where alien gods were EATING EARTH GODS.

I'm still so fucking mad about flushing the Yeerk mothership, fuck that shit.

The scar would heal the next time she morphed, because it's not a genetic imperfection.

What are you talking about? Rachel was a fucking rage-monster -- she'd rape you with a chainsaw and laugh about it if she could somehow spin the murder to be about advancing the cause.

I dunno, man.

The Yeerks were kind of an entire species of fuckers.

Sometimes its best to just... exterminate an infestation and move on with your life.

I mean, if ticks were sapient, would you be more accepting of the fact that they're ticks?

And wasn't the kid who's back was broken forced to spend the foreseeable future pretending he was still crippled so as to not raise suspicion? And the other kids were all super depressed they had to go back to being blind and shit.

Frankly, that was a good act. The question that comes up a lot is "Hey, should Ax have killed Visser Three when he had the chance?" and "Should Elfangor have flushed the Yeerks when HE had the chance?"

In both cases, the answer is "Yes, they should have shown no mercy." It's not explicitly stated, but given what unfolds immediately afterward, you can tell that killing them all would have been the right choice.

Raise your hand if the Animorphs gave you your first childhood fiction-crush.

Raise your hand even further if it was Rachel.

There is a time for restraint and handling conflict with basic decency and that time is not when body snatching slugs are on the cusp of enslaving your species forever and then using its vast population to shit directly into the galaxy's mouth.

In the end it didn't matter. All of them died.

Cassie puts herself forward as the nice and moral one, and even deceives herself as being one, but deep down all the most fucked up ideas always, inevitably, and without fail, are hers.

Name three.

I'm not challenging you, I just want to relive the memories.

>The scar would heal the next time she morphed, because it's not a genetic imperfection.

Scars stay in the same way your haircut does, unless you deliberately concentrate on them being gone.

They were able to retrieve the crystal that allowed them to rewrite their programming

Problem is the way robot memory works there's no scarring of bad memories so they'd never ever forget what they

Also speaking of war crimes was there a reason Hake tricked Erek into mass killing, what, like a hundred thousand helpless sentient beings?

...

I stopped reading the series around book 42. I remember thinking the series wasn't going anywhere...

I saw this thread and decided to look at what I missed out on. Damn.

Kinda figured Rachel would be the one to die. Didn't see Jake's fate coming, though in retrospect it made sense based on the "what if" Elimist story.

You mean Everworld, and holy shit that's from the same author? fuck man

They didn't choose to be ticks, though. They kind of got completely fucking shafted if you think about it.

They needed a diversion, if I recall correctly?

Also, it was something like 20 thousand, not hundreds.

Offering the first... Termites!

To be fair, as I recall she used a lot of ghostwriters.

This. They're still sentient beings, and what Jake did was absolutely a war crime.

Yo if were talking about dark kids books.

The entire Blood Clan arc had the to the edgiest thing in the series. and also for some reason the rats in this book acted like fucking Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy

as I recall, by that point it was basically open warfare, wasn't it?

My man.

The Yeerks were an entire species of war-criminals.

>The Yeerk cries out as he strikes you.

strawpoll.me/11355722

Let's see where Veeky Forums stands on this. Note that the question is distinct from "is this a war crime?", which, while a fascinating question, isn't one a poll would be as useful for.

didn't visser one(marco's mom) form a splinter faction of yeerks who sought co-existence with their hosts instead of taking them over?

Im gonna be honest with you fuckers even as a kid this book covers looked like jokes to me.

I legit never knew this book series had all this dark shit wasnt this like some official scholastic thing too?

>being born a parasite makes your life worthless
>despite the fact you can feel, think, even fall in love (see Eslin 359 and Derane 344)

There's this, and the fact that the Andalites had technology that allows shapeshifting, and said shapeshifting is permanent after two hours.

I don't recall if it had been invented when the yeerks were discovered but if it had been and it was being withheld the andalites have nobody to blame but themselves for allowing a race of parasitic slugs to have a justification for their conquests.

Although giving them portable kandrona may have been the dumbest decision ever.

They chose to live as war criminals. That one ellimist book showed there was an alternative for the yeerks they hadn't considered.

yup, and after the first wave of books scholastic got some ghost writers to pad out the series too.

Ah, the Yoorts?

We're they? They were slavers, sure, but the only war crime I recall them ever comitting was being ununiformed.(which is a silly one anyway)

The visser used torture but only ever on subordinates. (oh and Tobias I guess, when they were testing the demorph ray, so that's one instance)

All the genocide, chemical warfare, biological warfare, and mass starvation was done by the good guy races.

Iskroot.

A splinter faction like that existed but visser one wasn't involved.

That method required
A. Extensive bio engineering technology, which the yeerks didn't have when they got off their planet and may never have developed and
B. Not being at war

As soon as the yeerks stole some blue horse boats and fucked off to dino world peace and cooperation flew out the window and directly into a lake of burning shit.

visser three constantly was experimenting with new superweapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare, animal experimentation, etc.

there was also his HJ organization with The Sharing

wasn't she involved with it? like, that was the plot of Visser, wasn't it? With her seeking coexistence with marco's mom, and her helping the humans out to take out visser 3 because she didn't approve of his methods.

I'm almost positive visser 1 was involved with the coexistence faction.

Peace and cooperation doesnt have to mean peace and cooperation with andalites. The Yeerks could totally have approached Earth peacefully and openly and just asked for volunteers.

It's not like the andalites were making a "we're the lesser evil here" pitch very difficult.

Is everyone forgetting the part where the Andalites were ready to go Exterminatus on Earth?

But the blue horses dindu nuffin they a good species

Part of it was Crayak's fuckery, I think. He WANTED them to be parasitic bastards turning into an empire, even though their empire was more like space Afghanistan.

who here said the andalites were good?

pretty much the only 2 'good' andalites in the entire series were elfangor(who was more human than andalite by the time we met him), and ax.
andalite chronicles was fucking awesome.

The only reason she didn't aprove of three's meathods was because he wasn't making progress. She was being gentler to humans, but only because she prefered subversion. She was never involved with the peace yeerks.

In hact, her boyfriend yeerks she was in a weird 4way romantic relationship with started talking that game and she killed him over it.

I actually was thinking about the possibility of a yeerk-human alliance, but the likelihood of that working depends on how quickly yeerk tech can get into production on Earth, and if that can get flowing before the Andalites realize what's happening and send a fleet to fuck it up.

As far as I can remember the Yeerks were making a big effort to not have their Earth operation show up on Andalite radar.

>mfw people still make OCs and write fics about this shit

Oh yeah, that fucking reminds me. ALL of the shit in Animorphs, all the struggles and the warring, all the shit the animorphs go through, the huge war between humans and yeerks and andalites.... It's all just Crayak vs the Ellimist. Everything bad that ever happened is all fucking Crayak.

A Yeerk-Human alliance actually sounds pretty boss, considering that Andalites and Yeerks were absolutely astounded by how fast humans can advance, technologically. If the Yeerks hid on earth with the aid of humans while the humans developed over a mere, say, 100 years? With Andalite tech to study? They'd be ready.

What happened to Tobias after Rachel died? Did he go full bird?

yeah, he went full feral.

Emobird went Birdemo, yes. Then General Jake Washington-Shepard called him up for One Last Mission.

>black viking using mjollnir to fuck up an aztec war god
everworld was my shit, man

Yeerks need warm bodies more than they need production. Moving voluntary controllers off planet by the millions shouldn't be high visibility untIl they actually take the field, which needn't happen until it's too late.

The Andalite high command were pretty determined to ignore Earth. It took multiple contacts with the animorphs and the eruption of open warfare to get them to show up in force

How long would it have taken them to check up if they never got a phone call at all? Too long.

I actually read Ellimist Chronicles without having read the finale, and it didn't specify who was dead, so I thought it was Cassie.

>tfw reading the death

>The human child, one of those who called themselves Animorphs, asked me to explain. In that final moment, the human wanted to know: Was it all worth it? The pain, the despair, the fear. The horror of violence suffered, and the corrupting horror of violence inflicted, was it all worth it?

>Ellimist tells his story

>"Did I… did I make a difference? My life, and my... my death... was I worth it? Did my life really matter?"
>"Yes. You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered."
>"Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then."
>A small strand of space-time went dark and coiled into nothingness.

Cassie's entire deal is that in her desperate efforts to engage in technical pacifism and assuage her guilt she winds up guilty of far greater sins than the others.

And none of it fucking matters since it's all just one war out of thousands, and the Yeerks aren't even the worst things out there.

That's advanced-level Animorphs bullshit, so they'd never touch it.

So does /v/

Cassie's the most fucked up on the inside, but she's too frightened of it to embrace it and instead tries to compensate by being good.

I remember one of my favorite parts was the Hork-Bajir.

One of the few books I read out of circulation at school book exchanges was the one with the ants. You know, where one ant touches the morphcube thing and then one of the girls, and morphs into a nude, disoriented human experiencing things that it could not process and had to be mercy killed.

Where else was a boy stuck as a bird going to find someone who loved him? Spending all that time as a bird permanently changed his personality and his mind couldn't handle being stuck as a human.

>And none of it fucking matters since it's all just one war out of thousands, and the Yeerks aren't even the worst things out there.

>something larger scale than me exists therefore I don't matter.

I've never understood this sentiment. Every win is a win and evety loss is a loss. They can't be obviated by large numbers.

If the tide carries a single grain of sand away from Europe's shore, then Europe is diminished by that much.

not only that, I believe the ellimist mentioned that their battle on earth was one of their most important.