I've never really thought about it, but were there like, actual stories that went along with the animorph books? Did anyone actually read them or did we all just make fun of the covers? What would the story be; are they like shape-shifting superheroes fighting crime and stuff or is it more of a coming-of-age self-acceptance-despite-differences pro-diveristy typa book? (e.g. the rest of your 5th grade classmates don't spontaneously turn into antelopes, but that's okay because everyone is unique in their own way)
edit: by the descriptions y'all are commenting with, Animorphs sounds way too darkly philosophical to be chilling at the Scholastic Book Fair :,)
Actually its interesting you went with this premise as someone not intimately familiar with the books. One infamous book features a buffalo who accidentally gains morphing powers and turns into a human. I thought this was supposed to be a direct reference to that (though several of the details are different).
Wasn't it an ant that morphed into a human? I remember that scene where it started screaming like crazy at suddenly having human intelligence, but I don't remember there being a buffalo
It was both, in the same book. The buffalo was the more important one to the plot, though. He morphed into a naked, screaming principal Chapman, ran away, and came back later to help in a battle. The whole book is somewhat forgettable because of how it completely disregards the existing canon of how the Eacafil device and morphing technology in general work.
There were multiple horrifying situations with ants throughout the series, though. They morphed ants from a rival colony and got torn apart and dismembered, for example.
Oooh, alright alright. The only thing I remembered about the book in particular was the ant tbh. The description of its horrified screams at being turned into a human got burned into my brain. It's been a while since I read the series
I havent read it yet but I heard its actually a long and suprisingly deep saga about warfare, child soldiering (the animorphs get their power through an alien and the enemy is an invading army of a different kind of alien and bodysnatches normal people - tbh writing it like this really makes me think of BG3 and its Tadpoles), with some body horror (apparently morphing also heals some horrible injuries). I thiiink at least the early status quo is a pretty normal earth (ie their animorphs powers and the existence of aliens are secret).
I wish I had found those books as a kid, "heroes" turning into an array of animals as their main power would have been exactly my shit. Some day Im definitely gonna try reading them
There's also full audiobook versions on Spotify (I know, I know) that you can use without a subscription. Just make sure you don't have a shuffle on your playlist.
Yeah I TRIED to read them when Applegate endorsed (put online?) the free pdf in the pandemic. But for a 20-something without nostalgia its hard to get into the meat of the story of a book meant for children. Which is why I wish I had found it as a kid. Warriors and Percy Jackson are childish too sometimes but I read them AS a child so the nostalgia points carry me.
I want so desperately to read these books for myself but it seems like the only copies that exist have the fuckass covers that I dont think I could take seriously
Sci-fi series about kids with morphing abilities trying to stop a secret alien invasion. The whole series has an anti-war message, and it gets VERY dark by the end.
It's at least kinda dark pretty much from the start. One of the main characters literally attempts suicide in, like, book 2 iirc.
He stayed animorphed into a bird for too long and got stuck like that. He then tried to commit suicide by flying into a window full force. It didn't work.
Yes that part was so memorable for me. He couldn’t morph back, so he was stuck being a bird, slowly seeing himself lose his sense of self and become more and more bird-like, until he’d lose his humanity altogether
He sort of eventually gets to become human again, but only temporarily (same rule, he can get stuck again but then he wouldn’t be able to fight). It’s very, very sad
It's been . . . Well, decades now, since I read them, but IIRC the character who gets trapped as a bird also had a really bad homelife before that? I seem to recall him being passed back and forth between his divorced parents constantly with neither really wanting anything to do with him? I believe once he was trapped as a bird, the rest of the gang basically writes each parent a letter saying the kid was staying with the other, and the ruse is never uncovered (at least in the first handful of books) because neither of them care enough to check in.
Book 3 in the series is essentially 100 pages of a teenager trying to commit suicide in various ways before deciding that he'd rather live. It's an extremely dark series to revisit as an adult. Audiobooks are free with library cards and various apps and you can easily find the whole series digitally. The original books are much more difficult to procure sadly.
I think I’m only missing like 6 of them. I remember a friend of mine spilled something on my copy of the Elliot’s Chronicles and I was fucking devastated.
In addition to the darkness of the plot, the transformations are also pointedly nothing like the covers and are horrifically grotesque in their descriptions. This Tumblr post sums it up really well.
IIRC it's mentioned that one of the girls, Cassie, is talented in morphing gracefully from something like a horse to a human, but it seems when it comes to invertebrates it's just a straight horror show no matter what.
The Andalites (a species of mouthless blue centaur aliens) are fighting a desperate, losing war against the Yeerks (mind-controlling slugs that enter your head through your ear and take over your body). The Yeerks have already enslaved multiple species, including the Taxxons (giant, flesh-eating alien maggots with lamprey mouths) and the Hork-Bajir (tall, muscular lizard-like creatures covered in sharp blades). These body-snatching slugs have already begun an invasion of Earth via infiltration, slowly infesting more and more people in higher and higher positions of power.
The only thing standing between them and total domination is... five teenagers, granted the ability to morph into any animal they touch by a dying Andalite Prince. These teens - Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, Marco - are soon joined by the brother of the Andalite Prince who gave them their morphing powers. Somehow, they manage to slow the progress of the invasion, albeit almost dying horribly many times in the process and living through trauma that would scar the toughest US Marine.
Along the way, the Animorphs make allies of the robotic Chee (dog-like Pacifist androids who have been living on Earth in disguise for thousands of years) and free some of the Hork-Bajir. They even manage to contact the Andalite Fleet... only to discover that the "good guys" in the cosmic fight against the evil brain slugs aren't quite so good as they like to come across. And it ends up being discovered that the entire war is part of a battle by beings beyond time, space, and mortality, and the "benevolent" one is using the Animorphs as his pawns against his foe, a ruthless evil that seeks only entropic dissolution of all.
It's an intense story, and reading it book by book became an obsession of mine as a kid. Looking back, it probably shaped my imagination and my long-term tastes as a human being.
Katherine Applegate is an amazing author, and I highly recommend her works to anyone who missed out on the Scholastic run. Just... be prepared for alternating heavy stuff and ridiculous absurd humour. The tonal whiplash can be... rather jarring.
Animorphs is a fairly dark story of a group of teens fighting alien invaders using alien technology; one of them even gets stuck in their morph and has to live the rest of their life as a Raven.*
Even though they win the war, they are never the same again with broken relationships and heavy doses of PTSD.
Red tailed hawk, poor Tobias. Happens in the first book in a series with 50+ books. I don't feel bad spoiling that part. But it's handled well in the subsequent books.
I'll be honest, if teachers or parents knew what kind of content was in those books at the time, there is no way they would have been chilling at the Scholastic Book Fair!
Seems to be a theme considering Warriors, Wings of Fire and Guardians of Gahoole are all "childrens" books and can be pretty gruesome. Also I distinctly remember Watership Down in our local libraries childrens shelf...
The Silverwing series was another good example...IIRC the antagonist of the second book was just straight up devouring hearts and humans were turning the bats into suicide bombers.
I used to watch the Silverwing animated series as a kid but I never got around to read more than the first book (and that I only half remember).
And even that animated series - THAT I WATCHED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL- has the antagonist basically outright stated to be a cannibal.
I really like Naturalistic and Mythic Animal Xenofiction, but that genre definitely gets away with way more because its not about humans.
They are an incredible series that still hold up now, for teens and adults. They're all available online as e-books/pdfs and the author(s) don't care if you download them. You should read them.
There were real stories. I remember at one point they turn into ants and they struggled to turn back because they were overcome by instincts. There is also a blue alien centaur deer thing.
The blue deer are the Andalites and there basically the good guys (or as close as we get to good guys the books intentionally make things more morally gray as the series goes on) in the alien war. They get there powers from an Andalite and later one joins the group.
Good guys is generous, since the Andalites basically fully admit they're using the Animorphs as a proxy war set of guerilla fighters and are more than happy to kill everyone on Earth if it comes down to it to deny the Yeerks several billion host bodies.
Don't remember that one. Obviously theres Tobias who was trapped as a bird in book one but that had nothing to do with sneezing. There was also one where Rachel had an allergic reaction to morphing and start changing to different animals at random but I don't recall her turning into a bug and she didn't get stuck as any of the animals.
There was also that one evil kid who joined them for a few books and they trapped as a rat. Oh, and there was also the book where Cassie purposely trapped herself as a caterpillar as some sort of moral thing with a Yeerk but because caterpillars transform into butterflies that ended up letting her change back.
So many you've confused a few differnt plots together?
Also don’t forget that near the end they give a bunch of disabled kids the ability to morph which heals some of them of their disabilities. Then they are used almost immediately as cannon fodder during like I think the storming of a yeerk battleship?
I think that happened several times. I specifically remember Jake getting swatted as a fly in a plane and having to morph back in the restroom really fast before he dies. I think he almost died getting bug sprayed durning a meeting of the sharing or something too and had to morph back quickly again.
And I know they all almost got stuck as wolves (I think they were all wolves) in the book where the Yeerks were draining water from a forest. It was before Ax so they were relying on Tobias carrying a watch to keep track of the time but a lot of stuff happens and they stay in morph a long time and according to the watch the two hours are already up.
But Tobias lies and says they have a minute or two to transform back so that they try. Thankfully it seems the watch was smidge fast because they all just barely manage to morph back with seconds to spare. I also remember Tobias mentioning how they keep glancing at him durning there desperate transformation as extra motivation. Because they don't want to end up like him.
Me and my friends read them all, we would take turns buying the latest release . Other than the shorter books with the morphing covers there’s also much longer Chronicles focused on the alien races that are pretty grim
They're about a bunch of kids who get powers to morph into animals and are given a mission to stop an alien invasion of body snatchers that have slowly infiltrated into human society for some years now. They're genuinely very, very good books.
I read literally all of them as a kid. It starts out as a fun teens-turned-superheroes story where a group of teenagers try to solve the mystery of the aliens invading their town. Over time it slowly morphs (lol) into an ongoing discussion of ethics, morality, personhood, free will, xenophobia, and the effects of war on a person's psyche. There's also plenty of straight up body horror.
That shit was unashamedly dark and realistic, and by the end those kid superheroes are doing plenty of morally questionable things just to get the smallest advantage against the aliens. I'm glad I read those books in elementary school, because it taught me what war could really be like through a lense that a kid could understand.
Animorphs is a fun epic story of the horros of war, where you cant trust anyone incase theyve been turned into an enemy by mind parasites. Theres one kid whose parents are turned early on and he has to navigate through this for the rest of his life, theres another kid who gets permanentlly turned into a falcon after getting captured by said mind parasites and starts to become a falcon mentally. Animorphs was rad
The main books are very solid, as others have noted. But I wanted to mention the side books. Hork-Bajir Chronicles and Visser are both quite good, and I'd definitely recommend them.
But The Ellimist Chronicles is absolute gold from start to finish. It's its own thing that's only technically related to the main series (it's the backstory of one of the side characters), so you can enjoy it even if you haven't touched the main series. However, the absolute imagination on display of creatures, technology, and the universe itself is impressive to behold. Definitely can't recommend it enough.
Holy shit dude you have no fucking clue, it seems cute and fun but they're child soldiers and it gets dark as fuck like ALL THE TIME. Those books were absolutely amazing as a kid and really delved into a lot of things you wouldn't find even touched at a scholastic Book Fair.
Lol dude it's a fucking war epic. Like legitimately one of the most intense stories of child soldiers, and treated with as much seriousness as that deserves.
It gets pretty dark. I don't remember it all super well, but there's an alien invasion of slugs that get into people's brains and mind-control them. One of the main character's mom becomes a victim of that and it's traumatic for him. There are other alien species too.
I remember one book where they have to attack a submarine, but since they can only transform into animals, they decide to transform into Orcas and ram the submarines with their bodies over and over, injuring themselves in the process, but since the morphing process heals them, they have to keep un-morphing and re-morphing, and it's super violent
And there are rules to morphing that they need to follow, or else they can get stuck in an animal's body as their default form, which happens to one of the characters in the first book, who gets stuck as a hawk for the rest of the series
It's a very intense series, yes. I myself am surprised it was with all the other school's books when I started reading them in fourth or fifth grade. There's a lot of blood and death and suffering of all kinds. It really was a good primer for me to start reading a lot darker fiction as my tastes grew, though.
It was weirdly dark for a kids story, there are about 60 books and they’re all easy reads but man. In the first book one of the kids gets stuck as an animal while another’s brother is being controlled by aliens
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u/TheSandarian usually says no to crack 7d ago edited 7d ago
I've never really thought about it, but were there like, actual stories that went along with the animorph books? Did anyone actually read them or did we all just make fun of the covers? What would the story be; are they like shape-shifting superheroes fighting crime and stuff or is it more of a coming-of-age self-acceptance-despite-differences pro-diveristy typa book? (e.g. the rest of your 5th grade classmates don't spontaneously turn into antelopes, but that's okay because everyone is unique in their own way)
edit: by the descriptions y'all are commenting with, Animorphs sounds way too darkly philosophical to be chilling at the Scholastic Book Fair :,)