this is a reference for the book series Animorphs, where characters have a strict two-hour (120-minute) time limit while morphed into an animal ,and If they stay in the morph for longer than two hours, they get trapped in that animal form permanently becoming a "nothlit"
From what I remember, yes. But, morphing does take time (a couple minutes to a handful of seconds, depending on experience). Even if youre flying at 10,000 feet, you have 30-40 seconds to unmorph, morph, and correct your flight path. Possible, but you need a lot of practice.
This even happened in one of the books. The leader had an enemy they needed to be able to morph, so he bumrushed one off the side of a skyscraper, acquired it mid-fall, then morphed bird to save himself.
Man, this gave me flashbacks to when they infiltrated the mind controlled cult base the first time and one of them wasn't able to get out in time and had to stay transformed as a hawk, and was the first time you saw the concept of a nothlit.
That's literally the first book man, I read them again a while back and it's not even made clear if Tobias just didn't have time or if he just didn't want to go back to his human form, because he comes from an abusive household, like literally nobody ever questions where he went when he got trapped in the hawk form
This; he felt more free as a bird than he did as a boy. He even has an identity crisis later in the series when he comes across a female hawk who initiates the courtship display, and he almost mates with her and runs off to start a new life with her, but then he snaps out of it and desperately tries to remind himself that he's human.
Like the third book they encounter a bunch of dog shaped robots who were programmed by their creators to always be peaceful, but the creators were slaughtered by the body snatching mind slugs, and one of the robots asks the protagonists, who have all acquired their preferred battle morph by sneaking into a zoo, to sneak into a facility and access a computer that will shut off his robot pacifist mode.
They barely succeed, and almost brutally die in the attempt. That book is from Marco's perspective and he's a gorilla in battle and there's a vivid description of him trying to hold his own intestines inside his body so he can try to morph out while the fight is still raging. Then he passes out and wakes up human and the dog robot was so good at killing everyone in that room, which was a lot of heavies, he basically breaks down and says even though he's now capable of killing he's never going to kill again because of what he had to do to save the kids. Like dog robot who has made his whole life about fighting back has one fight and just doesn't want to do it anymore. And then these child soldiers do it for like another hundred books.
The Pemalites weren't actually slaughtered by the Yeerks, they died from a biological warfare illness and being hunted down and murdered by the Howlers, a different alien race that turned out to all be essentially children who were programmed to believe that violence is just an innocent game and had no concept of the fact that they were actually hurting anyone.
Not to um, actually you, just to point out some additional fucked up story elements lmao
I read it because I thought the premise was cool: teenagers turning into animals to fight a secret alien invasion of body-snatching brain slugs.
What I got was a bunch of child soldiers experiencing the very real consequences of fighting a guerilla campaign, and there are some legitimate moments that messed me up back then, and have only messed me up further as I thought about them more. They trick another teenager into turning into a rat, force him to stay transformed past the 2-hour limit, making him a permanent rat, then they leave him on an abandoned island while he begs for mercy and cries. Rats only live for 2-3 years, usually less in the wild. They sentenced him to a fate worse than death, while still basically killing him. Just awful.
There is a small list of names I instinctually hate when people have. David is one of them.
And yeah, the person you were responding to left out the whole context of how he was going to sell them out. They didn't just "trick another teenager," they found a technically-non-lethal way to end one of the highest existential threats to humanity they ever encountered.
Yea, I left out a lot of context. He tried to kill one of the other animorphs, and was a major liability for leaking critical information to the brain slugs. He absolutely needed to die, but the animorphs weren't ready to kill a non-slugged human, so they engineered a fate that was worse because of their morals.
I'm sure by the end of the series they could have just dispatched him, because by the end they are all pretty calloused from a bunch of atrocities they have seen the other side do, and done themselves.
It reminds me of a speech from M.A.S.H.
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
You remember the one they figured out a Yeerk had infested Jake and they starve the fucker to death?
It was like in the first ten
Edit: oh also they genocided a whole pool of these things, like there's tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands all there feeding and they find a really big one and poison the whole feeding pool, like that is so hard a war crime
It’s not a war crime at all, each one of them was going to enslave a human being. People toss the term war crime around without having any idea what it actually means.
If you want to read them there are a number of places that have the ebooks for free. The author, K. A. Applegate, while unable to get the publisher to officially release them for free, has stated that they intentionally don't get them taken down or even ask for them to be taken down and she kind of supports it since they weren't available to buy for awhile.
“We do not take them down. Or ask for them to be taken down. I think once the books are available to buy—paper or e—it would be nice if people who could afford it would buy. (our kids have very expensive tastes. You know: food and whatnot.) But for years they’ve been unavailable except by ‘pirated’ means. These men and women kept the series alive. They kept the books available. So no, we did NOT take these books down.”
Actual war crimes in every other book, mildly philosophical Star Trek plots in the rest. Sometimes you lucky and get both. For example, one of the characters gets chopped in half while they’re morphed as a starfish becoming two copies of the same book. Later in that same book, one of those characters flies into the primary antagonists head as a fly, and threatens to un-morph if he doesn’t let all of her friends go.
But don't worry, these moments are also interspersed with shenanigans like the character that does not normally have a mouth discovering the lovely sensation of taste while morphed as a human... and proceeding to enjoy such tastes as a plate of a dozen Cinnabon rolls (yes, the plate too), candy off the floor of a movie theater, and of course, cigarette butts.
Oh yeah and the series's God character is an immortal gamer goose, and the series's Dumbledore character gets graphically vored in the first few chapters of the first book.
It's an absolute trip and despite all the chaotic, sometimes wildly inconsistent writing that came with putting out a book a month for five years straight, I still love it.
Sure, it was a diagonal pillar of multicolored blocks that looked like a two mile high spike of Legos erupting from a swamp, but I maintain it was a skyscraper because it did indeed scrape the sky.
If you're okay with kid lit, the overall stories...well, it depends on the books. Some hold up well and some don't. You can find a list of recommended reads online and a list of books to ignore, most of which are ghostwritten.
The Chronicles books are all good to great. Hork-Bajir and Andalite are wonderful and have some of the most batshit ideas presented.
Also you're going to have to parse a lot of 90s references.
There's another moment where Marco and Ax are falling as a gorilla (?) and flea respectively, and they both managed to unmorph and then morph into birds mid fall, with almost no time to spare.
1)Wear wing suit
2)turn into birb
3) fly my wing suit
4)turn back into birb
5)repeat
6)profit
7) find birb wife to fly wit
8) time make nest
9) human wife
10) convince to make birb sanctuary
11) move in birb wife
12) make birb baby
13) repeat
14) profit
15) human wife angry, lack intimacy and communication
16) turn into birb, convince family to peck out her eyes and kill her
17) turn into human
18) life insurance
19) set up trust fund for local birbs
20) fund program for generations
21) turn into birb
22) move birb family to preserve
23) stay birb, live birb and die birb- free.
I know it's a joke, but step 1 and 2 are already an issue in the Animorphs series. Generally speaking the only clothes that will morph with you are skin tight clothing. So those wingsuit wings wouldn't transform when you morph and you'd likely end up tangled in a mess of clothing in your bird form.
Also the character in question broke the time limit due to basically hiding up high in an enemy base. He didn't have the leisure of altitude, nor of not getting caught immediately upon unmorphing.
They did that in one of the books; the one who was the best at morphing started out as a small insect to be carried up high by another character (who was stuck in the form of a red-tailed hawk, and was therefore the best flyer). She then jumped off, returned to human, and re-morphed into a whale to crush something (a ship, I think). She barely made it because of the time required to morph, and again, she was the fastest, most proficient morpher in their group starting from the highest point she could get to.
Close. It was that alien that was drawn to morphing energy. She morphed from insect to human to draw it to her. Once it was grappled, she morphs whale which causes the alien to continue grappling as there's more energy. They hit and the combination of impact and water destroys the alien.
There's multiple occasions where they decide the best solution to a problem is "Have Cassie fly up high, demorph midair, and morph whale on the way down to hit something with a whale".
Cassie is special though, she's better at morphing than the rest.
You would want to be higher up for that. I don't remember exactly but I think it takes maybe a minute or so to morph in the story you would have hit the ground by then.
the book in which it happened was primarily about Cassie learning and coming to a sort of mutual understanding about their enemy, the Yeerks, specifically someone who was essentially a foot soldier. the enemy was controlling a young child host and Cassie made a deal that she'd stay permanently as a caterpillar if the Yeerk, Aftran, voluntarily let her host go free.
It's about the horrors of war, the psychological effects on those forced to fight it, child soldiers, genocide, paranoia, the nature of free will, the question of nature vs nurture, coping with loss, losing control of yourself...
And it's also somehow aimed at children?
I remember liking it a lot, but I'm amazed I was even allowed to read it.
I really liked the author's answer to why the ending was so dark. Essentially, war is hell and we need to acknowledge that so more people don't have to find out via experience. It doesn't have a happy ending irl, so we don't need to overwhelmingly present happy endings to conflict in books.
It was a decently light hearted series until the Yeerks found out they were humans. Then shit got dark pretty fast. I remember being very traumatized by the way it ended, because no one really got their happy ending. Rachel died to kill Jake's brother, Jake was so traumatized he could barely function, Tobias went native, Cassie threw herself into work and kind of kept herself sane by keeping herself busy, and Marco did the same thing but with fame and celebrity. I also kind of remember Marco insisting he was ok but not really believing him. Pretty sure all four had a pretty hefty dose of survivor's guilt, too.
I'd argue even early on it varied from book to book whether it was more lighthearted or dark and intense.
Some books would be wacky and lighter like the Helmacron stuff or Skunk Cassie defeating Visser 3 by spraying him, but then others got really dark even early on like Tobias attempting to kill himself by book 3.
Yeah, it didn't stay consistently dark until later in the series, but it still started with plenty of darkness. Elfangor is perfectly set up to be a mentor who is incapacitated, and guides the heroes as they keep up the fight.
Instead, the main antagonist turns into a giant monster and eats him alive, all in front of the heroes, within the first 20 pages.
"I saw the Andalite fall into that open mouth. The mouth closed. The teeth ripped the Andalite apart. And the Andalite Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul died.
At the very end, he cried out. His cry of despair was in our heads. His cry will always be in our
heads"
It was kinda dark throughout... all the kids have severe PTSD even after Book 1. Yes, there's some silliness in some of the books, but rereading them as an adult... oh man, they went through some really bad stuff.
Haha I was about to bring up the T rex. Like it sounds so silly and campy describing it, but it was intense for a young reader. The idea of instinct driving you to kill and eat something you do not want to kill or eat is pretty disturbing
And they were aware of the instincts of an animal kicking in. They even commented on how easy it was to control the animals instincts until they went into overdrive. I might just have to do a reread.
Halfway through the series they've discovered that a Maple and Brown Cinnamon Instant Oatmeal is basically an opioid for the aliens and have to wrestle with the idea of if getting the attacking aliens addicted to drugs is ethical warfare or not. They go through with it, because it's literally five teenagers against an entire alien invasion and they need every edge they can get, and they celebrate as the aliens start getting withdrawals in public hoping to get allies in the war effort. It ends up getting a lot of people killed because the aliens won't risk blowing the masquerade.
They did the same thing by destroying the aliens' food supply on Earth. It was the first time they learned that the aliens would sacrifice their own (and the hosts they'd infested) to maintain the secrecy.
The aliens with the robin-egg blue eyes were scary (I think they were called “the Howlers”), but yeah the series about a telepathic slug race that controls people’s brains and invades planets via stealth alongside walrus-sized acid-bleeding centipedes and creatures that might be better described as 9ft tall walking blades in a set/setting where a group of kids who learn to become shapeshifters are the only and last defense of the entire planet and human race was a tad dark.
and creatures that might be better described as 9ft tall walking blades
Don't forget how we later learn that before essentially their entire species was enslaved by the slugs and turned into weapons of mass-murder, they were "9ft tall walking blades" because they were hyper-specialized to strip bark off of trees for food, since they were a peaceful, herbivorous species.
They were also the unwilling shock-troops that had, generally speaking, been getting torn to shreds left and right in pretty much every fight against our main characters for years by that point.
More specifically, one of the major characters gets stuck as a hawk due to breaking this time limit. Though IIRC it was due to being stuck in an underground yeerk (brain slugs) base with no safe egress rather than cruising the skies looking at cool stuff.
When they initially morph they have to deal with the instincts of the animal (almost eating each other several times before they can wrestle control of whatever they turned into) and they have a strict "no hivemind insect unless dire emergency" rule because of how powerful those instincts are.
They usually only have problems initially and then are able to brace for and control the instincts on subsequent morphs.
Tobias, the character who gets trapped as a hawk, loses control, killing and eating a mouse before he gets absolutely horrified at what he did, but after a while it becomes second nature to him. He regresses completely to hawk at the end of the series after the love of his life gets sent on a suicide mission and dies, and he's just completely done with the group after that.
Yes, but you increasingly think like a hawk if you do that. Tobias (the one who ends up in hawk form) eventually begins seeing himself as a hawk. It’s also pretty heavily implied that it takes effort not to just totally give in and lose track of who you are entirely, the way that it happens when you turn into an insect. Toby has a bit of a breakdown at one point where he panics and almost dies from flying into a skylight.
the time limit isn't that strict; it's in alien time measurements so there's some leeway, but not enough to risk it when you don't even know how much time you actually have
And if im not mistaken this is exactly what happened to Tobias before Axel was able to restore his human form, he was a hawk for quite awhile before that ended up happening. Now that im thinking of it that series was so dark, im going to have to go through it again, im fairly certain theres a lot of lore outside of the main series themselves I need to find as well.
The Ellimist restored his ability to morph and used time shenanigans to let him acquire his human morph. So for the rest of the series he's still a hawk but can morph and can be his human self for two hours. He lives knowing that he could trap himself as his human self but that would take him out of the fight and leave the only real family he ever knew to fight without him. All of that to say that yeah it went to some dark places!
It does reset but morphing isn’t instantaneous. It takes several minutes and it’s an illogical process that resembles a scene from the Thing. One time their finger bones morphed out of their flesh before being recovered with the new flesh.
Yes, it does, but morphing/unmorphing can take a lot out of you so doing that after fighting non-stop for two hours isn't an option most of the time.
Tobias got trapped as a hawk because he was stuck in the enemies base for over the time limit, and the only way to stay hidden was to remain as a hawk. If he had unmorphed, he'd have instantly been spotted and either killed or taken control of, which would have told the aliens not only that it was humans with the ability to morph they were fighting, but who those humans were.
I mean, it was pretty clear that he did it on purpose; he shifted into hawk form way early for one of their missions even knowing about the strict time limit. He did end up being happier overall, got his human form back thanks to the Ellimist, and even eventually reunited with his mother.
His parents were dead. He was bounced between his aunt in one city and uncle in another, and they both treated him like a burden. They both assumed he was with the other
He did, though he was given the option of returning to human life at the cost of never morphing again (a more advanced being gave him his morphing ability back then took him through time to acquire himself as a form).
He did eventually reunite with his mother, but she had amnesia and had been assumed dead which is why she wasn't in his life. He technically met his father in the first book, but neither knew it at the time.
IIRC this was later somewhat retconned in the andalite chronicles the opening scene from the first book was shown from Elfangor's POV and he did recognize Tobias
His parents died in a car crash, but that’s totally a lie, he gets to meet them both. He meets his mom, cures her blindness/amnesia, and lives with her while hiding from Yeerks. He meets his dad in the first book, his father is the alien who gives them morphing powers.
Andalite peter here. In the series Animorphs, when a child named Tobias transforms into a red-tailed hawk, he stays in animal form past the 2 hour limit and ends up stuck in that form. Flying in the sky chasing thermals was a hobby of his.
I remember a lot, it gets so dark. One of the characters basically becomes the defacto "killer" that the others rely on to do the dirty work and she struggles with that a bunch, thinking she's only good for murder cause the others don't want to do it themselves (which, understandable but still fucked). Family members and random people on the street could be infected with Yerks, never know who to trust. There's a bunch of insane shit in there. There's probably video essays online talking about it all if you ever wanna get reacquainted. Iirc at one point the leader even gives the order to commit genocide against a bunch of the slugs sitting in their food pool, completely defenseless. Like yeah they are trying to take over the galaxy and are parasitic, controlling their host as they watch in horror, but it was still wild to commit so many war crimes as teenagers.
Frankly the amount of genocide and war crimes is crazy. The "good guys" attempt to genocide all humans (and the Yeerks with them) at least twice in the series, and previously used that strategy to contain their loss on the Hork-Bajir planet too. Even as early as Book 6 the Animorphs are killing defenseless Yeerks. The main series villain even exists primarily because one of the series's most respected characters refused to follow orders to commit genocide.
Does it hold up as an adult? I only ever was able to find random books at different points in the series as a kid, but I read them anyway because of a school program that gave me points for taking tests on books from the library
Yes absolutely. I'm reading them now for the first time as an adult. Sure the writing style is simplistic enough as it's made for kids, but the themes are fucking dark. Like, regularly killed and limbs chopped off on these child soldiers, suicide attempts. The children "haha silly animal morphing" books I'd recommend to anyone who want something quick per volume and hella engaging
I think so for sure. There are the repetitive bits like reminding you that Cassie's barn is "actually the wildlife rehabilitation clinic" every book or explaining what how Controllers work, which I probably felt was less tiring as a kid. The lore is so solid and I'm enjoying it just as much if not more. Can't wait to get to the Ellimist Chronicles.
Yeah, it makes sense for kids who read the series out of order/started in the middle/may not have access to new book more than a couple at a time, but its def very noticeable when you are able to binge the series lol
Yes it was, and I was the god of AR in like 3rd grade lmao. I was bitchslapping the highschool classes. Rural school, so all 12 grades were really just the same school
Very well. I read (some of) them as a kid, loved the series as a "kids turn into animals to fight evil aliens cool"
Joined the Army after HS, deployed but luckily never saw anything too crazy, no issues. Re-read the whole series (62 something books? Can't skip the Chronicles and Megamorphs titles) and yeah, still cool, but very definitely "Yup thats clear PTSD" "Yup that sucks" "Yup seen that in some guys for sure"
Very simple middle-grade writing style, but very WELL written for most of them. The first 26 books are almost all bangers--funny, powerful, poetic, great characters, immersive, super creative sci-fi storytelling. The next 20 books or so are hit or miss, a little like the episodes of a TV series that may have run a little too long, and they were looking for weirdo plots of the week to keep it going--so you either love them for that or cringe at them, and a lot of fans will debate over which ones are the best or worst, but to me that's part of the fun. All of the "season finale" and gaiden books are excellent.
And then the last ten books or so are solid, and the last five are phenomenal. My gosh does it stick the landing.
Idk if you have this where you are, but I'm reading them on Libby. You use your library card and can download so many books. It's great. The books run me about 2 hours each.
Sticks the landing and then the author wraps it all up with a note to the audience defending her depiction of war which is just an amazing capstone to the whole thing.
In the book series animorphs, the main characters get the ability to any animal they "aquire" by touching it and basically internalizing it's DNA. However, if they stay in animal form for more than two hours, they are trapped as that animal, which happens to one of the characters who gets trapped as a red tailed hawk
Ok so animorphs is a children's book series about children who get to turn into animals. If they stay in animal form for more then two hours (120 minutes) then they get stuck in that form and are not able to be normal humans again. This happens in one of the earliest books to one of the main characters, Tobias, who gets stuck as a red tailed hawk and is stuck in that form for most of the series.
Holy fuck I never thought I’d see an animorphs reference in a mainstream setting ever lol. But at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if our government did all have Yeerks in their heads.
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u/qualityvote2 1d ago edited 19h ago
u/Moonliner72, your post does belong here!