This review of the first five Animorphs books was first written and published in November of 2012.

My name is Jake.

Oooo, I get a little giggle of glee every time I read those words. 🙂

That’s my first name, obviously. I can’t tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it makes a whole lot of sense…

The basic premise of these openings are that the kids are writing the books…um, at some point after the events of the books happened.  (Plus, there’s the glaring plot hole in the last book where…well, Rachel wouldn’t have had a chance to write anything…) 

I’m writing this all down so that more people will learn the truth.

But the basic point of this opening is that these books are being published within the story world so that people will learn about the Yeerks.  Well…that’s a really shitty way of going about things.  I mean, what did they do, walk into a publishing house and say “please print these books about aliens taking over”?  Even if that worked, it’s not like it’d be published as non-fiction, so only the Yeerks would believe anything written.  Were they published by a vanity press?  Is this actually a blog?  (How cool would it be to rewrite these books in blogger format?  It’s really the one that makes the most sense.)

And they omit last names and place names for the sake of hiding from the Yeerks, but…the Yeerks know where their pool is.  They know where Elfangor landed when they came to earth.  They know what they are up to.  How hard would it be to look in their own town and say “how many hosts do we have named Tom?  Okay, and how many of those Toms have middle-school aged brothers?”

Hell, how hard would it be to just pick up a book and say “aw, fuck, they’re humans?”  Even if they changed around all identifying data, if Tom was really named Bob and happened to be an exchange student living in Jake/RealFirstName’s house, that’s really not the point.  The point that they are human and not Andalites is the main thing they need to keep secret. 

So not only does this opening fail at informing the public that a threat is real and not fiction, they fail at keeping security as well.  The real reason these books open the way that they do is so that the author can go into full Tell-not-Show mode.

And…yeah, I don’t care.  I mean, sure, it doesn’t make a lot of sense and that part bugged me.  But the “tell-ish” writing never did.  They say some clever stuff in these openings (usually it’s the stuff that isn’t repeated in every book), and I actually enjoy the way they talk to the reader.  It creates a certain atmosphere through the rest of the book, and it has an almost interactive feel.  Is it a cheap way of writing faster?  Yes.  Could it be done better?  Yes.  Am I going to chuckle and keep reading anyway?  Oh hell yes.

We were playing video games and hanging out at this cool store that sells comic books and stuff.

This makes it sound like comic stores are this mysterious new trend that just recently showed up. 

I have Sega at home

Ahahaha, so 90s.

Mostly, we’re equally good at games. I have Sega at home so I get lots of practice time in, but Marco has this amazing ability to analyze games and figure out all the little tricks. So sometimes he beats me.

I can never tell if I like this section or not.  I mean, for all I say that I like the “tell-ish” portions of the opening, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good writing.  As an author, you want to give the impression that you’re doing your tells on purpose, not because you don’t know a different way of writing.  And this line…sort of falls in the middle of the show-vs-tell spectrum.  I mean, sure, she didn’t come out and say “Marco is good at strategy” without context, but…she did tell us that Marco is good at strategy.  How hard would it have been to start the story in the arcade and show Marco being good at the game?

“Certain people keep forgetting that the SleazeTroll shows up right after you cross the Nether Fjord.

…okay, probably pretty hard when you’re an author who doesn’t know any video games. 😛

So, the boys meet up with Tobias, and…oh Tobias.  I feel like he was crafted specifically so that the audience could relate to him.  He hits every single one of the “outcast loner nerd teenangster” stereotype points and…god bless him for it.  It annoyed me to hell and back in this book, because I was a decidedly un-angsty little pre-teen and indentified more with Jake.  Still, as Tobias grew through the books and became more complex, as he was allowed to step outside his “bullied sad kid” role, he really did take off.  Just…we don’t get to see that in this book.

She has blond hair and blue eyes and that kind of very clean, very wholesome look. She’s one of those people who always know the right clothes to wear and how to look like they just walked out of one of those fashion magazines girls like. She’s also very graceful because she takes gymnastics, even though she says she’s too tall to ever be really good at it.

And Rachel is pretty…by magazine standards.  I mean, I guess it’s good that he mentions stuff like conscious fashion sense and grace.  A lot of ‘pretty girl characters’ leave the impression that these girls can just roll out of bed and look like a model, whereas I got the impression that Rachel actually cared about her looks and put effort into it.  And despite that care and effort, she wasn’t displayed as vain or shallow or toxic.  It was just one facet of her personality, and a minor one at that.  But…it’s such a standard beauty that she has. 

I guess you could say I kind of like Cassie. Sometimes we sit together on the bus, even though I never know what to say to her.

Excuse me while my inner Jake/Cassie shipper sits over here in the corner and wibbles.  🙂

But seriously, I always appreciated how, in the middle of an angst-fest/war, these two could still inject a little bit of good old fashioned, everyday teenaged awkwardness.  They were a nice counter-point to Rachel and Tobias’s everlasting woe.

“You guys going home?” I asked Rachel. “You shouldn’t go through the construction site by yourselves. I mean, being girls and all.”

[…]

“Are you going to come and protect us, you big, strong m-a-a-a-n?” she said. “You think we’re helpless just because – ”

Eeeeeee, subtle misogyny being called out!  Yay!

“I’d appreciate it if they did walk with us,” Cassie interrupted. “I know you’re not afraid of anything, Rachel, but I guess I am.”

Aw, Cassie, why you gotta ruin everything?

I mean, I’m probably being unfair.  She’s 13; it’s fine to be scared of scary places at 13.  But coming on the heels of that conversation, it just sounds more like “stop being such a feminist and let the boys protect us, Rachel.”  She could have at least just said she’d like to have some company, or something along those lines.

Rachel couldn’t say much about that. That’s the way Cassie is – she always has the right words to stop any argument without making anyone feel bad.

And this is telling that’s just annoying.  Yes, we know Cassie stops arguments diplomatically; we just saw that.  You don’t have to tell us what you just showed us.

My mom and dad have sworn to ground me until I’m twenty if they ever find out I’ve cut through the construction site.

So anyway, we crossed the road and headed into the abandoned construction site.

I lol-ed then and I’m lol-ing now.

BTW, remember in Marked where the author said she was trying to make the narrator sound like a teenager?  This is how to do that right.

It was a big area, surrounded on two sides by trees, with the highway separating it from the mall area.

There’s a broad, open field between the construction site and the nearest houses. It’s a very isolated place.

Past-tense fail.  And quite repetitive, too.  The descriptions in this book really could have been a lot tighter.

construction crane that I had climbed once while Marco stayed below and told me I was being an idiot.

Yay for non-repetitive showing!  Good job, author; you didn’t feel the need to follow that up with “I often take pointless, competitive risks for no reason.”

So, yeah, four paragraphs to tell us what we already learned in the first paragraph: the place is big and abandoned.  Thank god the space ship shows up; who knows how long that would have lasted otherwise.

He had been walking along, gazing up at the sky. I guess he was looking at the stars or something. That’s the way Tobias is sometimes – off in his own world.

Stop it, book.  Stop it right now. 

“What?” I didn’t want to be distracted because I was pretty sure I’d heard the sound of a chain-saw killer creeping up behind us.

Stick to characterization like this.  I know you’re written for 10 year olds, but we can put two and two together.  And if we can’t, we need to learn.

So, Tobias sees the flying saucer and points it out to the rest of the kids.  And then just…stand there while it gets closer.  Jake mentions being scared…for about half a line.  More time is spent describing the ship and pointing out that it has weapons than exploring how the kids are reaction to it.  They just…stand around.  Not in shock.  Not frozen in fear.  They just stand there.

“Should we run? Maybe we should run home and get a camera. Do you know how much money we could get for a video of a real UFO?”

“If we run, they might … I don’t know, zap us with phasers on full power,” I said. I meant it as a joke. Kind of.

“Phasers are only on Star Trek,” Marco said

It’s just soulless banter while they’re watching a space ship land in front of them.  Who does this?

The ship stopped and hovered almost directly over our heads, maybe a hundred feet in the air. I could feel the hair on my head standing on end.

Yes, and how do you feel about having a space ship right over your head, Jake?  Oh, you’re not going to tell us.  You’re just going to talk about how funny Rachel’s hair looks while standing on end.  Um…yeah.

To be honest, I was a little scared, too. A little scared, as in so terrified I couldn’t move. But at the same time, it was all cool beyond any coolness ever.

Well, it’s about time.  Then again, this is on the almost-extreme end of the “bad telling” scale.  This is Hunger Games level of bad.  He says that he’s scared, but we never see it affect his words or actions.  It has no impact on him.  He’s scared…but in the same way someone would be scared while watching a slasher movie. 

Tobias was actually grinning, but that’s Tobias for you. He’s never scared of weird stuff. It’s the normal stuff he can’t stand.

You met him a few days ago and don’t actually hang out with him or care about him.  (Yet.)  Where are you pulling this knowledge from, Jake?

So the ship lands, Jake tells us he wants to run but doesn’t make any attempt to do so and it all falls flat, and then they…stand around and banter some more.  Kids, there’s a spaceship right in front of you.  DO SOMETHING.

So finally Tobias takes some action and goes to talk to the visiting alien.

I froze.

Jake, you weren’t moving to begin with.

So, the alien is Elfangor and he communicates using telepathy.  And even though we have a perfectly valid word for that – telepathy – the series insists on calling it thought-speak.  Because…reasons.

I started to get a sick, twisty feeling in my stomach.

…started?  Telepathy makes you nervous, but space ships with giant lasers on them don’t?

And then we finally get to see Elfangor!  Yay!

My first reaction was that someone had cloned a person and a deer together.

That’s not a reaction, that’s an impression.  ‘Reaction’ requires an action take place.  Words, they mean things.

So, fun fact: the author originally made the Andalites look like the standard Little Grey Men, because she wanted things to be easy to transition to a visual medium if the opportunity ever arose.  The publisher came back and said that was boring and asked her to make something more inventive.  She had a “well, I’ll show you” attitude and purposely came up with something that would be very hard to put on a screen.

And, as anyone who saw that horrid Nickelodeon show can attest, she succeeded. 

I can’t really describe how it felt, except that it seemed like the alien was someone I’d known forever. Like an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long, longtime.

And this will never be explained.

I mean, really, does Jake just have a fetish for aliens?  Does Elfangor exude telepathic “I’m a friend” vibes?  Did the Andalites take IFF (Identify Friend or Foe beacon) to a very literal level and make some device that lets others ‘feel’ that you’re friendly?  We’ll never know.  Like so many other things in these books, it was dropped and never picked up again.

he said.

The author didn’t establish that morphing can heal wounds until…I think it was book 4?  Either way, the fact that he couldn’t fix this was a major plot hole. 

And it didn’t have to be.  There could have been plenty of ways to keep morphing as a technology and also still have Elfangor die.  Heck, they could have had him uninjured and still have him die, because it’s not like the burn kills him.  Visser 3 shows up and noms on him; Elfangor could have sacrificed himself to give the kids time to hide.  So we’ve got this big nasty injury here that…ultimately serves no purpose.

“Jake, give me your shirt. We can tear it up and make bandages.” Cassie’s parents are both veterinarians and she’s totally into animals.

She’s into animals, but…what does that have to do with this line?  Elfangor isn’t exactly what we’d term an “animal” (at least, no more than humans are animals), and you can want to help something that’s clearly injured without needing to be “all about” that thing.  Plus, t-shirts make shitty bandages.  Don’t ever use one unless it’s a last resort.  (Plus, he’s burned, don’t bandage that.)

“NO!” I cried. “You can’t die.

lol, Jake finally enters the conversation by screaming.

I will remember his answer forever.

He said,

The whole fandom will remember that forever.  *wibble*

It was strange, the way we all just knew he was telling the truth. No one said “no way” or “you’re making it up.” We all just knew. He was dying, and he was trying to warn us of something terrible.

Yup.  Very strange.  So…moving on?  Yeah, Jake noticed that it’s strange and then never brings it again up or bothers to explain anything.  I guess Elfangor has “trust me” brain waves going out.

Elfangor explains the bare bones of this Yeerk business to them.

I guess he couldn’t think of a word to explain Yeerks, so he closed his eyes and seemed to concentrate. Suddenly a bright picture popped into my head. I saw a gray-green, slimy thing like a snail without its shell, only bigger, the size of a rat, maybe. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

This will also never again be done in the series, and from here on out telepathy will be restricted to actual words.  Which is actually very strange, seeing as in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Aldrea says that thought-speak can be understood by anyone because it works on concepts instead of actual language.  But we never get to see that played with; it’s just a throw-away line to go with this throw-away instance of mental images.

Suddenly we felt that blast of pain, straight from the alien. I could also feel his sadness.

We don’t really get any of this after Elfangor, either.  It’s a shame.  Such a cool concept, and it devolves into your basic telepathy.  Maybe it’s something that only Andalites can do, or that only comes with a life-time of practice/conditioning, and that’s why the kids never do this?  They aren’t used to projecting emotions, so they don’t even try?

Huh, so alien technology can now subvert that “matter cannot be created or destroyed” rule of physics.  Someone should alert the media.

Unless Elfangor’s ship is made out of just “a few molecules.”

And then…THE BLUE BOX, YAY!

Of course, this does beg the question of why the hell Elfangor has that thing on his ship.  It appears to be your basic fighter-plane-esque ship, and everyone gets their morphing power while at the Academy, so why would one of those things ever leave the home planet at all?

Eh, the Ellimist did it.

Jake goes inside the ship to get the box, sees a picture of Elfangor’s family, and then gets mad because Elfangor is dying so far from home.

I felt a small flame of anger against the Yeerks, or Controllers, or whatever they were, for causing this.

Uh, I know Elfangor is sort of the fandom darling, but…Jake, he just told you that they’re mind-controlling people in your town and trying to take over your planet.  How about some anger at that?

no power with which to resist the Controllers.

…the Controllers are the victims, Elf old buddy.  I mean, it’s a pretty shitty word for someone who’s, technically, being controlled, but still.  That’s the word you decided to use for them.  Don’t resist the victims, resist the Yeerks.

Unless Controllers was supposed to mean a Yeerk/host combo, not just the host alone. 

Okay, reading back, yes.  It’s supposed to be a Yeerk/host combo, as opposed to a Yeerk alone or a host alone.  Huh, I never picked up on that before.  The word tends to be synonymous with ‘host’ instead of ‘Yeerk,’ both later in the books and in the fandom.

So Elfangor offers to give them the morphing power, even though no one else in the universe has ever gotten it before.  And he offers this up very easily.  And…he does this despite not really expecting them to fight.  His instruction is to warn the rest of the planet, not go guerilla on the Yeerk army.  Well, really he says “you must tell your people!” and then immediately switches his word-choice over to “resist,” which makes it seem like he intended for the kids to go into warfare mode from the very start. 

And that…wow, that’s kind of asshole-ish.  I mean, if all he wants is for them to tell, he could have handed over that 3-D picture so they could use it for proof.  Or maybe something else out of his ship.  But nope, instead he hands over a power that is only useful for subterfuge.  (Okay, they could morph on the 6 o’clock news, too.  So…primarily useful for subterfuge.)  I know the author was setting up for them to go into guerilla mode, but…she should have made a set-up that actually leads into that, not a set-up that leads into something completely different, then takes a veering left-turn into war.

“I think we should all decide together,” I suggested. “One way or the other.”

Because…reasons?

“We have to do this,” Tobias said. “How else can we fight these Controllers?”

See?  Total 180 in five seconds flat.

Finally, I looked at Tobias. It was weird, the feeling I had at that moment, staring at him. A chill or something.

Okay, really, is Jake just psychic and no one ever noticed?

So Elfangor gives them the morphing power right before the Yeerks arrive and at the last minute he tells them about the two-hour thing.  Wow, how convenient that the time limit lines up perfectly with our arbitrary delineation of time.  It could have been, like 173 minutes, because that’s how long an Andalite hour is.  Nope, it’s 120 minutes, exactly or near enough.

Suddenly some new fear washed through the Andalite’s mind. Linked as I was to him, I could feel it as a dread that crawled up my spine.

New theory. Jake and Elfangor are both psychic, and that’s why they’ve got this non-telepathy connection.  But no one else is psychic enough to connect, so that’s why this shit never comes up again.

The Andalite pressed his other hand against Tobias’s head. Tobias rocked back, like he’d been shocked.

Elfangor was giving him an extra dose of telepathic information this way, and it seems like an instantaneous way to impart large chunks of information.  So…why didn’t he do that for everyone and do it last chapter, so they didn’t have to sit around talking right up until the last minute?

I was shaking from a fear so deep it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was the same fear that the Andalite had shown when he’d realized Visser Three was coming.

Elfangor’s ship sent out telepathic “I’m friendly” vibes.  Visser Three’s ship does the same, but with “fear me, mwahahahaha” vibes. 

Or…something.

I mean, I’m not saying he can’t be afraid of the space ship, but…this is the second one he’s seen tonight and the reactions have been vastly different, just based on sight. 

So, the Taxxons and Hork-Bajir both show up.  Yay!

Because…reasons.  I know it gets revised later in the books, but in this one…yeah, that’s all the commentary we get from Elfangor.  He says the Taxxons are evil, and the kids just roll with it.

Kind of racist there, Elf.  I mean, you didn’t even call the Yeerks “evil.”

…Ever notice there’s a lot of talking from Elfangor going on in this scene, all while these aliens are just sort of standing around and letting him be?  A Hork-Bajir even comes over and searches around where the kids are hiding, and that takes about a minute.  But Elfangor is…just sort of chillin in the middle there?

If you’ve never been really afraid, let me tell you – it does things to you. It takes over your mind and your body. You want to scream. You want to run. You want to wet your pants.

It’s not a “want” to wet your pants.  It’s an “uncontrollable release of bowels.”  I know that’s kind of icky, even in a book with alien cannibalism, but…it’s still a thing.  A pretty common thing, at that.

Visser Three shows up and…the kids start talking.  They’ve just been informed that the Hork-Bajir standing a few feet away from them has excellent hearing, but they decide it’s time to start bantering.

Priorities, kids.  Come on.

the Andalite said.

This comes up again later in this same book, the idea that the kids can “project” thoughts while un-morphed.  The author has already admitted it’s something she straight-up forgot about after the first book, so I’m just going to chuckle and move on.

Visser Three and Elfangor start chitchatting like Bond and one of his villains, and Visser Three goes so far as to explain his “evil plan” to everyone within earshot.  And I mean everyone.  How far does this telepathy extend?  Are there people driving by on the nearby street going “what the fuck was that talking I just heard?”

The night exploded in blinding light.

And…no one from the mall noticed this and came to investigate?

Then Visser Three morphs into a tentacle monster that roars so loud it makes the ground shake.

…no one from the mall noticed that?

This guy really sucks at keeping a low profile.

Jake decides that he’s going to fight the tentacle monster with a bit of pipe and the others have to stop him.  I love this scene.  Well, I love it in a vacuum.  It’s rather sudden, since everything before this was all “oh, I’m scared enough to piss my pants.”  I mean, I’m not asking that he be Chuck Norris right from the get-go, but some sort of build-up would be nice.  Some desire to do something that builds and builds until he just can’t stand it anymore.  As it stands, it feels more like the kids just sit there until the author points at them and says “we need action.  Do something.”

So, Visser Three eats Elfangor, and it’s terribly sad.  All the kids cry…over this alien who they met a few minutes ago.  Because they were just that “connected” to him.  Man, Elfangor’s kind of a Mary Sue, isn’t he?  Everyone loves him instantly and he can never do any wrong.

Marco has the sanest reaction out of all of them: he vomits.  It’s noisy and attracts attention.  They all start running, and that attracts more attention.  Rachel and Jake decide to take all the attention, because they can run the fastest, and Rachel even shouts curses!  I mean, they aren’t printed, because we can have alien cannibalism, but we can’t have curse words.  Or pants-shitting.  Whatever, RACHEL IS AWESOME.

Jake trips, falls behind, and runs to hide in one of the buildings.

It was a man! He had been lying on the ground, wrapped in a blanket.

[…]

The homeless guy screamed. I heard the sound of a scuffle.

Maybe the guy got away. I hope so.

Poor homeless guy.  He’ll never be mentioned or even thought of again.  And really, this is the first time in the books that there’s been collateral damage.  This is the first time any of the kids could have thought “I caused this pain to another person.”  If Jake hadn’t decided to run down that corridor, would that man have survived?  (Even if he’s not dead, come on, he’s at least host-i-fied.  And why would the make him a host instead of kill him?  He’s not useful to their cause.)  So this is a pretty big first…and it’s completely forgotten in favor of turning into pets.

So, that’s part one of Animorphs.  Like I said, the writing is pretty bad.  Almost hilariously bad.  But in spite of that…it’s just bad writing.  There’s only a few points where the bad writing slips over into bad messages, and you can tell the authors did put some thought into what they were trying to say in a larger, meta-sense.  It’s got action, it’s got romance (sorta), it’s got guts and gore, it’s got angst, it’s got humor, it’s got everything, and it didn’t take 500 pages to get there!