Moran Rereads Animorphs
Listen to me, kiddies. I read these books for the first time when I was SEVEN. (Well, it took me about three years to collect most of them and get to the end, so I read the first half of the series about twelve times by the time I was ten or eleven.) And let me tell you a thing: if you have passed these books up because of the ridiculous covers or because they’re ‘kids’ books’ you need to reevaluate your life. Immediately.
ANYWAY, I found them all for free on the internet (GET THEM HERE) and I’m rereading them/reading them out loud to Adler, because we are actually DISGUSTINGLY domestic. And I was originally planning to comment on them like five at a time, because otherwise I’d have way too many posts, but I wrote like a solid page of things down about the first book alone, so….yeah. I guess books-per-post will be flexible based on how much I say about the book in question. Here be spoilers, obviously. If you don’t want to hear about it, please feel free to block my Animorphs tag, I won’t be offended.
Book 1: The Invasion
AKA “The first named character is murdered, a main character is trapped as a bird, and five kids sign up for a lifetime of PTSD”
- THEY’RE SO YOUNG???? THEY ARE BABIES, THEY ARE THIRTEEN, G O D.
- There is something sort of specifically creepy about Chapman’s order to bring back the heads of the kids at the construction site. Like, it indicates a level of businesslike casual behavior that is unnerving: they’ve done this before, they know the procedure to cover up a murder (identify the kids, arrange for the body to be found far distant after some time, and offer comfort to the grief-stricken parents), and they’ll do it again. It’s a Tuesday night. No big deal. They’re going to go out for drinks or fermented maple syrup or whatever Taxxons get drunk on afterward.
- That conversation Marco and Jake have about ‘maybe it’s your own brother you’ll end up destroying.’ H A. It’s not funny. I’m still kind of laughing though. Especially since, like, shit, no need to page through the whole series for all the times Tom almost dies as sheer collateral damage, he almost dies IN THIS ONE. Admittedly as a free human being, which…well. Free or dead, right? Might’ve been better if the fall from the stairs had killed him.
- The bit in the Gardens when Marco and Jake are bolting from security and wind up in the tiger enclosure? I always laugh myself stupid. Adler laughed herself to TEARS while I was reading it to her. ALSO. Once they’re out of the tiger habitat and security’s coming after them before, Marco goes “should we morph” and Jake is like “????? You only have one morph and it’s a silverback gorilla, what POSSIBLE HELP could that be” and you know what, SAME JAKE. Marco is a very wickedly intelligent human being, but NOT ALWAYS LOGICAL. Tobias is better at cold hard logic. (Also I will fight ALL OF YOU for Slytherin!Marco. Has anyone written a Harry Potter AU? Do I have to do that myself?)
- Jake tries SO HARD to be a good leader and he has the raw stuff for it, he pulls it together beautifully in the Yeerk pool to get everyone out alive, but he’s ONLY A BABY. He’s thirteen goddamn years old and his biggest problem should be how to ask Cassie to hold his hand without getting mocked mercilessly by Tom and Marco, NOT GETTING PEOPLE OUT OF HELL ALIVE. But he does good. He tries so hard. My poor battered boy, I love you so much, you TRY.
- T O B I A S. I fuckign. I can’t even talk about this. And him and Rachel? Jesus Christ. These poor fucks are why I write such tragic romances into EVERYDAMNTHING, and yet I have never quite TOPPED “one of them is A FUCKING BIRD for the entire three year relationship”. TO SAY NOTHING OF BOOK 54.
- Speaking of things that continue to fucking ruin me, RACHEL. I have a tag for her, it’s ‘Rachel my bold beloved bloodied sister’ AND LIKE. This is baby girl’s first battle, I want to take a picture and put it in a scrapbook to look at later like “Awwww, sweetie, look at you in your elephant body steamrolling Taxxons and yelling at Hork-Bajir and throwing humans left and right.” I am just so adoring of this girl, AND KEEP IN MIND THAT I’VE READ THE WHOLE SERIES WHEN I SAY THIS, but Rachel was always what I wanted to be when I grew up. Bloody and broken and unbowed, and ready to go to war for her people and her planet and her freedom. I am. Very upset about Rachel.
- The one line that always makes me a little teary is after they’ve escaped from the Yeerk pool and they’re all ALIVE (for a given value thereof, because FUCKING TOBIAS, I’m a wreck) is “The final count was exactly one human freed—the woman who rode Cassie’s back up out of that hellish pit.” Because, like. Look at all this damage. Look at these children who will never be the same, who will never be KIDS. Look at Tobias, trapped as a hawk, and at Cassie, who hates fighting, and at Marco, who’s so afraid for his dad he can barely move, and at Rachel, who’s realizing that there is something inside her she was never prepared to find, and at Jake. Jake, who went down into that pit to save his brother, who was a breath away from pulling Tom out alive and well and free, who is alone and crying on his bed while his not-brother comes home, a slave again. All that sacrifice, all that pain, and all they get for it is one human freed. And it’s not Tom, it’s not even the person they went down for, it’s a stranger, the only person who was lucky enough to hold on.
- I remember reading that for the first time (this might say more about me as a kid than I’d like) and I was…kind of relieved. Because in my experience, no one had ever so bluntly admitted that sometimes you do your best and more than your best, you give everything, and you’re still left alone and crying with nothing to show for it.
- The closing
line? “Until then, we fight?” Always gonna be a fave. Fuck me up.
