Something Awesome #6 - The Animorphs

When I was a kid, there was something in school called something along the lines of the Schoolastic Book Club (I can't really remember, It's been a while). Maybe they still do it, I don't know, but I know that it was a reasonably big deal when I was in school. Basically these order forms would get passed out in class every month or so and you could pay a fee to join/retain your membership and pick a predetermined number of young adult books from any of a variety of series based on the membership you had. The books would be delivered to the school some time around a week later and passed out to the appropriate students. My family didn't want to pay for me to get a ton of books at once, and even though there were quite a few offered series that I probably would have read, I was content because I was able to afford the Animorphs, a young adult scifi series which released three new books a month. This series has made probably the largest impact on my life of any fictional property, and is almost single-handedly responsible for my love of the written word.

The Animorphs, written (a decent amount of the time) by author Katherine Anne "K. A." Applegate, is almost impossible to describe, at least in a way which accurately conveys why I love it so much. K. A. Applegate, first of all, has a unique skill which I believe singularly makes the series great. She is a brilliant writer who is able to get into the heads of her characters better than any other author I know of. She wrote each book from first person perspective, with each of the main characters taking turns as narrator. Her characters ranged from a relatively athletic, relatively smart hero type, to a class clown, to an environmentalist, to a preppy girl, to a loner, to an alien. As in the extraterrestrial kind. Every character had a distinct voice, distinct motivations, distinct mannerisms, and a distinct arc. Every character changed over the course of the 54 book series, so much so that, by the end, only half of the protagonists were even remotely recognizable.

Of the 54 books in the main series, Applegate, with help from her husband Michael Grant, penned a good number of them herself, utilizing the aid of skilled ghost writers for the rest, though she was sure to write the first book, and the three-part series conclusion herself. She also wrote ten companion books for the series, two of which were a spinoff in the form of choose your own adventure stories, and eight of which were set within the main continuity of the series, giving insight into the lore of the Animorphs universe and the important characters outside of the core six, including a biography of a living god, and the backstory of the series' main antogonist. She did this while working on two other series at the same time. Though fairly unknown Animorphs was brilliant enough to amass a cult following that is failthful to this day, still pushing for new content, and spreading awareness of the content which already exists. The Animorphs fanbase is one which I'm proud to be a part of. Like the six main characters of the series, members of this fan-base feel a certain comradery with each other. Animorphs was a great ride, but it was also quite rough at times. Making it through the series brought us together.

So what, you might be wondering, is the plot of this series? I'm still woried that I can't do it justice, but I have to try, so here goes. One day, aparently by chance alone, five teens from the local high school who only really know each other in passing, find themselves cutting through the same abandoned construction site when an alien starfighter crashes there. From the ship emerges an Andalite, a centaur-like creature with a delicate elf-like torso and a body more like a deer's than a horse's, with a bladed tail, no mouth, two extra stalk eyes, and brilliant blue fur. Desperately this Andalite, War-Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, explains to these five youths that a race of parasitic conquerers, the Yeerks, have begun to infiltrate Earth by taking over the minds of the populace a few at a time, turning them into slave/soldiers. Using an Andalite Escafil Device (a glowing blue cube small enough to fit into a persons hand), he gives the teens the power to morph, to absorb through touch the DNA of other living creatures and then become them for two hours at a time.

Why does he do this? Simple. Elfangor is going to die. He could save himself by morphing and rebooting his DNA, but he is too weak, and either way his enemies are minutes behind him. When Elfangor falls, there will be no one left to defend the earth from the Yeerks, as the remaining ships of the Andalite fleet are light-years away, engaging the Yeerks on other fronts. So now, faced with the terrifying knowledge that deadly, murderous alien brain slugs could be possessing the bodies of anyone they meet, these five regular kids must use various animal forms for stealth, transportation, and combat and fight a geurilla war against an enemy that they can barely comprehend, unaided, while protecting their identities, because if the Yeerks find them, well, they don't want to think about it. Eventually they discover allies, from androids, to friendly aliens, to a young Andalite, Elfangor's younger brother, Aristh (cadet) Aximilli-Esgarrouth-Isthil (they call him "Ax"). Althewhile they are pursued by Visser Three, third highest-ranked military leader in the Yeerk fleet. Visser Three is a psychopath who detests the stealth approach that the Yeerk council has taken to the invasion of the "primitive" Earth. He is the only Yeerk to inhabit an Andalite body, and therefor an Andalite's keen mind, and morphing ability. He is power-hungry and intelligent, and while he is the main villain of the series, he is only sometimes the most dangerous.

If the plot seems odd, it's because it is. Animorph's would be little more than a curiosity if it only had its plot to rely on, so thankfully Animorphs is blessed with something even more important: a brilliant, colorful, and intriguing cast of characters. Doing my best to avoid spoilers, I want to do a rundown of those characters now.

Firstly we have Jake. Jake is contemplative and smart, with a take-charge attitude and a commanding presence. He has a strong moral compass, and the distinct ability to completely ignore it when he needs to, making him particularly suited to make the tough decisions. In the group, Jake is the stern but caring father, and on the battlefield he is the general. This character changes more than anyone else. Jake never wanted to lead, but he assumes the role of leadership out of a sense of obligation, shouldering the weight of the war so that his friends won't have to.

Second we have Jake's best friend, Marco. Marco probably changes least amongst the characters, always managing to retain that which inherently makes him who he is. Marco is a clown (not literally). He is the annoying little brother who you love and hate all at once, but his role in the group is probably, next to Jake's, the most important. Marco cracks jokes to keep himself sane through all that he sees throughout the course of the series. His carefree, humorous attitude gets different reactions from everyone, but it's those reactions, giving the other characters something else upon which to focus their energies during the hard times that keeps the horrors around them from setting in. Marco has a personal stake in the war. Relatively early on he learns that his mother, thought dead for years, is actually host to the leader of the Yeerk military forces, Visser One. Marco is also the one who gave the team its name, a portmanteau of "animal" and "morpher".

Next we have Cassie. Cassie is a farm girl who believes in safeguarding the environment and preserving all creatures. She is the most morally straight character, always arguing for the "right" actions, though she can set aside her values and fight to defend those who she loves. Jake's love interest, Cassie is the understanding mother to the team, and the enduring needle set upon Jakes failing moral compass. Cassie also has extensive knowledge of animals, often determining the best morphs for the missions at hand, and she is an Estreen, a person naturally gifted at morphing.

Cassie's best friend and Jake's cousin, Rachel is a blond bombshell with a heart of a warrior forged in the fires of combat. Rachel begins the series with reluctance and some pretty severe reservations, but fairly early on she comes to a disturbing realization: she likes the war. It takes Rachel far too long to be appropriately horrified by this fact, and by then its too late. Rachel is the commander, always pushing to do more, to fight harder, always butting heads with her CO. She is a warrior, content with her lot in life, because the battlefield is the only place where she feels truly alive.

After discussing Rachel, it's only appropriate that we talk about Tobias. Tobias is a tragic character. As a regular kid, he's miserable. He has no parents, and so is forced to live with a neglectful uncle. He is unremarkable. He's not particularly smart or handsome, or athletic, he's not popular, he's picked on at school, and he has only a few acquaintances and no real friends, until he becomes an Animorph. Suddenly he has a family. Suddenly he is a part of something. Then, during the first mission undertaken by the Animorphs, Tobias is forced to remain in his morphed form of a Red-Tailed Hawk for longer than two hours to avoid discovery by the Yeerks, and he becomes a living reminder of why there is a time limit at all. He becomes a Nothlit, a person trapped forever in a morph. He can still communicate through a form of telepathy granted to those who are morphed, and still does his best to help in the fight, but now Tobias the loner really is alone, as he is suddenly the only creature of his kind on the entire planet. Despite this, however, Tobias and Rachel (another fish out of water as the unlikely warrior) form a strong, borderline romantic bond along the lines of other great unlikely, doomed couples, such as Buffy and Angel. It is this relationship which prevents Rachel from losing herself completely to her budding bloodlust, and Tobias from losing himself completely to the animal he has become. As a loner myself, I always related to Tobias, and so he was often my favorite character.

Finally, there's Ax. Ax is the only survivor of the doomed Andalite attempt to drive the invading Yeerks from Earth. After the Animorphs rescue him from the wreckage of the mighty Andalite Dome Ship, which crashed in the sea, he pledges his allegiance to "Prince" Jake and fights alongside the Animorphs as technical advisor, scientist, strategist, and, thanks to a natural ability of the Andalites to judge time, early warning system regarding the two hour morph limit. Ax, like Tobias, is alone in all the world, and so the two soon become best friends and surrogate brothers to one another. While Ax is an ally to the Animorphs, he never truly becomes one of them until very late in the series when he is forced to, at last, choose whether or not to cast off his loyalty to his people, who may not have the best interests of the non-Andalites of the galaxy at heart. Ax often chooses to fight in his lethal Andalite form, and because of this Visser three comes to think that the Animorphs are Andalite warriors living in hiding on Earth, preventing him from noticing the many clues that the Animorphs are human, and using context clues to track them down and enslave them.

Aside from these six protagonists, there are several other brilliant and influential characters, from the violent Visser Three, to the calculating Visser One, to the non-violent androids known as the Chee, to Jake's own Yeerk-infested older brother Tom, to likely the most dangerous single enemy that the team ever faced: David, a selfish and likely sociopathic human Animorph brought into the team later on in the series, before he proved untrustworthy, turning on his allies. The Animorphs are often aided by a benevolent living god known as the Ellimist, and hindered by his nemesis, Crayak.

I'm sure all of this is very confusing. Anyone who doesn't already know something about the series is probably zoned out by now, so hopefully it isn't too late for me to try to explain what it is about this series which I love most. I love the story and the characters. This series has made me laugh, made me cry, taught me about pain and horror, and making difficult choices and hard sacrifices. These books taught me to be human, but that's not what I remember most about them after so many years. I mentioned earlier that Applegate is gifted at getting into the heads of her characters, and, well, these characters are often animals! Applegate did so much research for these books, learning all that she could about the animals that the children would become. See, when someone morphs into a different creature, they retain their mental capacities, but gain the perception and instincts of the creature that they have become. Thanks to Animorphs I, an unremarkable young man amongst billions, know what its like to run as a wolf, to smell as a dog, to prowl as a tiger, and to fly as a hawk. In a world as mundane as ours, I can't think of a greater gift than that.

Check out Animorphs if you can. Most of the books are pretty hard to come by nowadays, but it's worth tracking them down, even if you are far outside the intended age range. There is no series I recomment more than this one, so give it a chance, and come back tomorrow for another Something Awesome.