Okay, SO. Book club might come back? Owner at least is posting books again, tho no one but me is talking about them. And discord is inherently a place that can be lost so... I'm gonna keep writing here. I plan to outlive Discord by a long shot, at any rate. So lets see.... I realize I'm not 100% sure which character will be next. When I had trouble remembering homestuck classes/aspects, I'd just quiz myself at regular intervals to remember the entry order of the trolls. (Look, theres a REASON I ended up making sburbsim. I get... obsessed.) So. What can I remember about the order, and the three books each character SHOULD have by now? Well. First is jake, Obviously (and last book was jake so that means we're on the start of a new cycle. ). First book introduced the concept, had tobias get stuck in the body of a hawk forever, showed Jake his brother was a controller and that their vice principal was, too. They found their first yeerk pool, which they described as being about as clsoe to hell as you could get (underground, wails of the damned, monsters, etc) Next is Rachel, who morphed a cat to try to learn more about the vice principal, and learned the reason her best friend has been so distant is both her parents are distant and she's afraid its her fault and she's anxious and depressed (actually they both became controllers in order to protect her.) It has the first instance of MANY of rachel keeping things from the team in order to be allowed to continue doing risky, reckless things. then.... it gets fuzzier. I know Marco morphed gorilla on the front of his first book, learned his mom awas Visser 1 (not dead and lost at sea like he thought). I think thats the one where they morphed fish and got sucked into a ....no That's tobiases. They were def in space for marcos tho, cuz the only reason they escaped was visser 1 wanted visser 3 to look bad. So tobiases book HAD to be before ax, because I remember its themes hit harder because there was no one less human on the team than him. He struggled with the pull between human and hawk, the sheer fact that frozen tv dinner meat wasn't keeping him alive and allowing himself to hunt mice. That's the one where everyone became fish and he was left out of the mission entirely but used a dracon beam to cut them out of the ship they were trapped in. then CASSIE must be next because she was the one who helped them find ax, and had her weird spiritual dolphin experience. marco got cut in half as a dolphin then and avoids sharks ever since. i don't think we had ax till the next loop (they alternate tobias and ax) so then jake next? okay lets review my actual notes. no wait lets list out every book i remember for each char and then figure out what order. Jake was a lizard then.... theres the book where he was captured (that was fly right) and had to experience first hand the horror of his eyes and hands and mouth not being under his own control . (god that one happened earlier than i thought) so 1, 6, ....11 and 16 right? so 11 must have been him but my head is just EMPTY alright, rachel was a cat... then i get confused cuz the MEGAMORPHS had a lot of rachel in it but it wasn't her book. so i can only remember 1 Cassie had horse and dolphin (horse was when they infilitrated area 51)... missing 1 from her too marco had gorilla, spider (where he found out dogs were secretly reincarnated aliens taken care of by dog cyborg pacifists) hammer head shark (where he learned his mother was forever screaming in her own head and now extra tortured becasue she thought her son was captured ) he also got REALLY weird about the shark, like OBSESSED with being it, so he could be his greatest fear and inflict it on others tobias... maybe only one tobias book? no wait, theres the one where he freed the hork bajir escappess and the ellimist let him acquire his own past self (and gave him his morphing powers back). WAIT! that's the other rachel one isn't it! At least one other. the ellimist took them to the future to show them it was "hopeless" but they noticed that the future actual gave them a clue on a terrible blow (destroying the kadrona) in the present. ax, that was his rattle snake morph where he could have killed visser3's andalite morph. so NOW lets see what i forgot about entirely. ~~~ 1 Jake, (lizard morph cover) , learns about vice principal and yeerk pools. tobias trapped in hawk morph 2 Rachel, (cat morph cover), captured by vice principal, lied to her friends 3 Tobias, (human to hawk cover), everyone turns into fish, get sucked into a yeerk ship and trapped, tobias lasers them out with a space gun in his claws 4 Cassie, (dolphin morph cover), cassie (and tobias) hear weird cries for help coming from the ocean, find the andalite who gave them morphing powers' little brother at the bottom of the sea and recruit him 5 Marco, (gorilla morph cover), the ant horror sequence. he finds out his mom is Visser1 here and not dead, adn i don't remember how. marco describes andalites as "horses but with small arms where the neck should be" which was so dumb i found http://andalitetruth.org/ 6 Jake (fly morph cover), he makes the decesion to boil helpless yeerks alive as a distraction which is definitely not foreshadowing for anything, then gets taken over by a yeerk and lives out a nightmare as his friends starve the yeerk out of him slowly and painfully 7 Rachel (grizzly bear), rachels dad offer to take her to another city, the ellimist shows up and offers to take her and her family to another planet (since humanity is doomed), "proves" it by taking them to the future where they meet a Controller Adult Rachel, instead it was a plot by teh ellimist to reveal an important tactical yeerk secret 8 Ax (human morph), ax throws human tech ahead a centruy on accident, when he tries to fix it a yeerk traiter tells him where to find visser3 in a vunerable state, turns into a rattlesnake and tries to assasinate visser 3, but visser 3 has abandoned his host, Alloran, who begs ax to kill him, and he can not bring himself to 9 Cassie (wolf morph), there are zero secrets. she raises a skunk family and turns into termites in order to prevent yeerks from being allowed to destroy the forest (to flush out the "andalite bandits"). struggles with whether she had the right to kill the termite queen to save herself and her friends 10 Marco (wolf spider morph), disocvers an old friend is a robot dog with a hologram of a person on. they helped build the pyramids (as works, not architects or engineers), their masters were dog people pacifists who all died out but their "essence" was placed into wolves to become dogs. marco helps them recover their own source code or something so they can hack themselves to no longer be obligate pacificsts. His friend, Erek, does something horrific, then hacks himself to be a pacifist again and is traumatized. fucked up even by animorphs standards. 11 Jake (jaguar morph), oh, i forgot that this was a REAL book and not a fever dream or a megamorph. jake keeps getting flashes of a jungle, bullshit techno babble sends everyone slightly back in time and to the Amazon Rain forest, Jake gets everyone killed, goes back to the future to redo the decision that lead here, has to live with the knowledge of his own failure forever while no one else remembers 12 Rachel (crocodile morph), turns out you can be allergic to dna. rachel starts uncontrollably morphing any time she has strong emotions , the yeerks try to enslave her celebrity crush, so she morphs a lot. she lies to her team that the problem is resolved so she can keep fighting (just like the second book), chaos ensues 13 Tobias (hawk to human, masterful gigglesnort, its DIFFERNT than book 3), tobias keeps being in the right place at the right time to just happen to save the only two free hork bajir in the entire galaxy AND lead them to safety. its the elmist meddling again, who promises to give tobias his "hearts desire" but cautions him it might not be what he thinks it is. tobias has his morphing ability restored, and he's bitterly upset because he wanted to be human again (even as he acknowledges how fucked up his life as a human was), then elimist sends him back in time to acquire his own dna 14 Cassie (horse) cassie discovers that yeerks are infesting horses in order to infiltrate area 51 to figure out what the humans have of alien tech. turns out its an andalite toilet. its very silly. 15 Marco (shark) turns out yeerks are making sharks smarter so they can fit in their brains in order to send them to a water world to act as shock troops. marcos mom is there and sees him and dispassionately lets him know her host is crying and screaming to see him. fucked up. 16 Jake (rhino)--just read this one So yeah, should be time for Rachel. Let's gooooo. Bat morph on the cover. IIRC they turned into bats in book 10, to get the pemalite crystal that would let the Chee hack themselves. I love how they always talk about never using their powers for selfish reasons or for unnecessary risks and yet nearly every single book opens with them doing exactly that. Oh man, that line about the pores stuck with me through the years. I have no clue why. I'm sleepy...but i wanna at least read enough to remember what this book is about. oh i should add the index as a separate file there okay back to reading oh cool, rescuing a suicide sure won't bring attention to themselves, but thats their whole thing they cant just let people die even if it makes tactical sense not humans, at least i don't remember this I do like that the status quo isn't maintained. Rachels house is still fucked up from her crocodile allergy. Szechuan shrimp! I'll always remember that too! oh this guy has an alien man i don't remember this one yet. (not the first one that didn't ring a bell) i mean, obviously the szechuan shrimp rang a bell yeah it really is upsetting that all your unused mass is just. as is shoved into z-space. its gross and weird and i remember in the mosquito book it becomes upsettingly relevant i DO like they put a lampshade on it, tho "A roach can squeeze through a space no wider than the thickness of a nickel." see this is what animorphs is about body horror, ptsd, sheer goofiness and Sweet Animal facts oh! i think i remember there was a spider in the banana crate, referening like, an urban legend lets see man, this is really a problematic book huh oh no i know what episode this is not from memory from tumblr its instant oatmeal, isn't it. thats the food that lets yeerks live without kadrona but makes them go insane. " Tobias said. I winced. “It’s oatmeal, okay? Not anything illegal.” Tobias argued. “It’s still just oatmeal,” I said. “Oatmeal is oatmeal. Jeez! I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.” “Look,” Marco said, “the bigger question here is WHO CARES?! They’re Yeerks. They’re the enemy. They attacked us, not the other way around.” Ax asked. “If we lose this war we’re all going to be without hope,” I said. “Ax, I can’t believe you, of all people, would even hesitate.” Ax swiveled his stalk eyes toward me. “Sink to the level of -” I started to yell. Ax cut me off. " Seriously. Its.... Kid's book or not they really have the most nuanced take on the horrors of war I've ever seen. Cassies lost. That's right. She told that little boy last book not to trust his dad, the one that reminded me of lionfish, and realized all paths felt evil. ~~~ alright, new day, lets keep reading oh man the foreshadowing, the idea that yeerks simply won't compromise and you know maybe they wouldn't, if they don't end up recovering the morph cube as an alternative i remember thinking that was an insanely clever way to give yeerks a third option between enslaving others and being blind and helpless. honestly it reminds me of that tumblr post about how cosmic horror is not "ant is in an unfamiliar environment" but "ant UNDERSTANDS that unfamiliar environment like a human would, for a brief second, but now its lost forever and they would do ANYTHING to get it back" i'm sure yeerks were happy enough before the Gedd. happy enough even AFTER them. but that first taste of something more.... how could you say no to it? how could you go BACK? and humans are so perfect. not dissimilar from their evolutionary hosts, the gedd (both simian), so easy to keep alive, so numerous. and then you get that fucking howler book later on, where the elimist shows the animorphs some evolutionary cousins of the yeerks who DID find an even different path. the position of this book is there is ALWAYS another way, no matter how hopeless things seem. that genocide can't be the answer. " Ax said. Tobias said with obvious distaste. “It’s OAT-freaking-MEAL!” Marco exploded. Cassie suddenly laughed. It was a cynical laugh. I didn’t know she was capable of a cynical laugh. “And all the rights and wrongs, and all the lines between good and evil, just go wafting and waving and swirling around, don’t they?” Jake shook off his funk and stepped to the center of our little group. “I have to ask myself: If it were Tom, and it may be Tom in the end, would I do this to him? On the one hand, life as a slave of a Yeerk. No free will at all. On the other hand, as we saw with Mr. Edelman, some free will, some ability to communicate, but with this insane Yeerk in your brain.” Tobias asked him. Jake shrugged. “In the Civil War, they were ending slavery. Most of the Southern soldiers who were killed weren’t slave owners. They were just guys trying to be brave. Maybe they could have worked out a compromise. Maybe they could have ended the war earlier if the North had agreed to leave some people as slaves. But would that have been right? No. So the war had to go on till everyone was free.” Tobias added grimly. I laughed without any humor at all. I’m pretty gung ho. Unlike Cassie, unlike Tobias perhaps, I’m ruthless at times. But even I have enough sense to know the words “we have to win” are the first four steps on the road to hell. And I noticed that Jake never answered himself about his brother. Would Tom be getting the magic oatmeal slipped into his breakfast? Not a chance. Jake still hoped to rescue Tom someday." god silly oatmeal book or not this hits HARD. 6 kids making these kinds of decisions. wrestling with it. understanding just where their road leads. but not seeing how they can leave it. and yeah just, straight into the ptsd dreams again they ALL Have. even beyond the horrors of war, just morphing gives them ptsd. i feel like so many "for kids" or even "for young adults" book sjust. DON'T. acknowledge how fucked up the adventures would be in reality? oh god thats right happy meal with extra happy oh no i think i remember this. i think i remember that they've installed zappers for anything other than host species. i remember them being flies and almost dying at a yeerk pool entrance. yup, i DID remember this book. okay so memory says they tunnel down as moles. see i do genuinely forget these are for kids sometimes, given how fucked up they are. then they define clausterphobia for us, just in case and it hits me. theres also just something... weirdly vulnerable in being the only person in a room morphing, while everyone watches. feels like they should at least look away. yeah okay parker is just a mole. lil mini panic attack at being surrounded by nothing by emptiness and air. you know, thinking of rachel from a Magnus Archives FEar pespective intersets me. she DOES seem very Buried. When she thinks of yeerks, what makes her afraid is how helpless their victims are. how full of despair. and now this fear of enclosed spaces. parker is afraid of being trapped, too, you know. he tries to ignore it but... he is so so afraid of being trapped in the bad situation he is, penned in on all sides and just barely with enough room to breathe. at the same time theres something conforting to him, in that very trap. the idea that he can just. STOP caring. stop caring about his appearance, about his performance, about consequences. its all out of his hands so. just. let go. sink into it. that's my take on magnus archives avatars. that they are so so scared of the fear they've taken on, but also empowered by it. i'm terrified of the spiral, of not being able to trust my senses, my memories. but i'm also perfectly fine inflicting it on others and could sink into the fear and call it comfort. each of the blorbos is like that. witherby is so very afraid of being alone that he isolates himself on purpose and calls it strength, as an example. but anyways, READING time. its so weird they go to the mcdonalds they nearly died in, that they know is full of yeerks, just so casually but like thats just a tuesday they almost died at the mall, at school, they can't avoid these places. and yeerks are everywhere. that's just a fact. "There must be something kind of liberating, just being able to say “I’m scared” like it’s no big deal. I can’t do that. I don’t know why. I just can’t." oh yes i'm going to keep interpreting her as Buried. what about the others? Jake seems classic Stranger, what with Tom right there. He even got taken once and became a Stranger himself. Marco is equally obviously desolation. He had a normal happy life and lost it all in an instant. Everything he does as an animorph is with the keen understanding that he could lose it all again and not wanting to risk that. and when he DOES have to take action he's incredibly ruthless, being willing to strip away everything from the other person. v avatarish. "i have to do it to you so it doens't happen to me and also its not that bad that it happened to you, stop whining" (still reading, you can really tell jake is ALREADY obessively reading military books to learn from human generals) cassie is harder. she cares about nature. she tries to think of humans as just another animal, with no more or less right to live than anyone else. could make a case for her being Extinction, but if we're gonna claim its not real then... i dunno, hunt is tempting, but thats hardly her fear is it? but then when she picked the hork bajir flesh out of her teeth and remembered how it felt to bite... yeah i think hunt does work for her. she fears being just another animal and craves being just another animal. tobias might be buried (after all trapped in a morph, trapped in families that didn't want him) but i could argue another type of 'trap' he's in might be more important: the ellimists web. his very BIRTH was part of a vast plan he can't possibly understand. so web kinda works for me. what about ax? we get less of an emotional read on him, other than him being vaguely superior and wanting to be like his bro... oh! eye! ax is having to bare witness to terrible things he never wanted to know. what andalite high command is really like. what yeerks are really like (good and bad). even what his BROTHER was really like. and he started out having a 'terrible secret' he didn't want to get out (seerow's kindness) so there we go. time to write down my headcanons. you'll notice i didn't make any of them flesh. thats cuz morphing ITSELF is body horror. time to morph a bat while blind and hearing your organs squish and your bones liquifiy. yay! "Sometimes it’s hard to get out of a role once you’ve started playing the part." damn i love how incompetent the yeerks are. they have exactly zero cctv cameras, they put scanners at all their enterences but have a LIVE BAT CAVE right into their cavern. 10/10 bad guys i actually believe can routinely be defeated by traumitized 13 year olds. and i also love that their incomptence MAKES SENSE because of the yelly screamy authoratiarian blame assigning asshole boss they have. Visser 3 is the entire reason this invasion is failing and visser 1 is right to say it. oh cool there goes her greatest fear. into the yeerk pool, fully human oh so she becomes an ant, everyones OTHER favorite morph. well, at least theres probalby no rival colonies around also rachel once again is lying to everyone. not directly but like. "if they know i'm alive they'll try to resucue me" so she stays silent and leaves them to think she's dead. she's such a TERRIBLE team player. and now she has space guns. this is her second time using her own form on a mission. first time being with the mental hospital. yeerk addicts. ``` I said. Marco corrected gleefully.``` its funny how hard it is to recognize the INTRO of a book but once it gets going my brain just "yesssssss" and it turns out i've been thinking about this book for years. see you need to realize that i would read and reread these book as a kid. i read a lot, but these were the books i OWNED. only books i had new, really. rest were random stephen king or dean koontz books mom found at yard sales, or random books that were never in order from the library i didn't have a computer back then. and if i did i probably wouldn't have been in a 'fandom' kinda space. but THIS was my first fandom. first thing i obsessed over and read and reread and was long form in a way nothing else ever had been. ~~~~ reading again i stopped before with only 6 pages to go, but IC wanted to hang out and then i got distracted trying to get hte last thing in vamipre survivors complete. its not even part of 100%ing it, or getting all listed secrets. i just wanna get toastie to 200 in 30 minutes. im so close. so yeah, last 6 pages. you know, i don't think ginger is even IN oatmeal anymore. i love how bad visser 3 is at lying. he's already stopped the entire fucking room in terror then tries to claim he doesn't mind if the oatmeal goes. "The Hork-Bajir, the Taxxons, and the human-Controllers were still busy being very, very still. If any of them had shown initiative, they could have probably taken us out. They might well have been able to get Marco before he could hit one of the barrels. But you know what? Terrified underlings never show initiative. The Yeerks there may have hated us. But they were terrified of Visser Three. " see you think im overanalyzng a childrens book by talking about how visser 3's management style is the reason they kids get so far but no, the BOOK is going there too man i legit don't remember how they get out of this, but only two pages left so *shrug* lol she buries herself alive buried buried just casually and in a very 90s way (talk about wanting to scream), talking about being buried alive adn having to , as a mole, hollow out enough space as a human to demorph they can do 6 feet in an hour. thats in a straight line. she must have been cutting it so close and then having no clue if it would even be enough. not knowing how long she'd been in morph unless in contact with ax. demorphing slowly and hoping she doesn't collapse the whole thing on herself. talk about wanting to scream. aw, she rescued the guy, good for her and there we have it. the goofy oatmeal book was still psychological horror. man no wonder i turned out the way i did.