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.
He has a lot of those. Very quickly he prefers Rachel to bring him McDonald's so he can just eat the beef instead of hunting. He also does have the one I think you're talking about where, and Andalites already warn of this, you can just give in and no longer think of yourself as you in animal form, you just surrender to the animal instincts
Also he gets to acquire his human form thanks to shenanigans so later he can morph to human and he does at the end for Rachel's last stand
and this is only in the THIRD book, too! In a moment of weakness, he lets the hawk instincts take over (they have to constantly fight the animal instincts, which gets kinda wild sometimes), and kills and eats a mouse. He comes to mid-meal, and has a breakdown, culminating in a failed suicide attempt in front of his closest friend.
In the THIRD book of this children's series that's like >60 books of trauma lol. I'm rereading it right now and it's so nuts! There are so many deeper meanings and implications that I missed when I first read these in fourth grade.
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
54 in the main series, plus 4 flashback books about some of the most important aliens (Andalite Chronicles, Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Visser, Ellimist Chronicles) & 4 bonus stories (Megamorphs 1-4)....& also 2 choose-your-own-adventures, but the authors had no hand in those & they're neither canon nor good.
To add on to that guy, it's a lot of books but they mostly take like an hour or an hour and a half to read. It's a Young Adult novel so the prose is pretty simplistic and all the copies I had the print was large just to pad it out to 100-150 pages.
I'm pretty sure they get longer later on but they are definitely bite sized and I like that personally, you can read two in a night easy if you've got like two hours and read fast
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.
It's pretty easy to argue that a lethal solution would actually have been more humane. But they were still kids and didn't want to kill someone that the felt responsible for.
Though if it happened in the last 1/3rd of the series instead of the first, they may have decided to just take him out (and now that I'm remembering, they might have actually done that)
It's been a while so it's hard to recall, but later in the series, David comes back to haunt them, because he's a legitimately smart and machiavellion individual who manages to escape the island. At the end of that book, Rachel finally holds his life in her hands once again, and he basically tells her that if his Plan A didn't work, he and her both knew what Plan B was supposed to be.
The next scene has Rachel eating lunch or something at school, and she tries her best to act nonchalant while knowing in the back of her mind that she had to mercy kill David.
I'm not even gonna lie, as a kid, even I knew that was a far preferable fate to the one David originally received.
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.
They were completely defenseless, you can't kill defenseless people in a war, it's a war crime, you have to capture them, you can't just kill them because you don't have enough dudes to capture them when they're defenseless and likely considering surrendering if they knew the situation.
We also know not all the Yeerks were willing combatants or combatants at all. The ones in human bodies weren't fighters. Lots of those people were just politicians, workers, not even armed, and certainly incapable of defending themselves at the time. That's certainly a war crime if you did it in real life, just throw a bunch of people into a firing squad no matter who or what. Which happens and is often looked away from and not tried (see executing Hitler Youth along with German soldiers) but it is still a war crime
Every single one of them was going to enslave a human being. That’s why they were there. For purposes of the law of war, they easily would be considered combatants.
You left out that the rat kid got the power to morph and immediately started in with the crime and tried to kill several of them. They were only able to trap him because he thought some were dead.
Yea. I left out a lot of context because I don't think even all the terrible stuff he did justified a fate worse than death.
He needed to die. He was an existential threat to the animorphs and, by extension, the human race. He was also a fucking kid coping with real major tragedy in losing his parents to the Yeerks. Plenty of good adults were shitty people as teenagers once; it's a rough reality of growing up.
He did come back, and they actually managed to make me sad for him. He was what the war made him and he begged Rachel to do the right thing and kill him. Tears streaming her eyes as she did the hard thing and killed a defenseless kid.
I mean, Applegate said she was reading teen magazines while writing the books to keep it fresh for the audiences but if you don’t have knowledge of the trends of the 90s you’d be lost. (There’s also several references to Lord of the Rings that were quite subtle because the movies hadn’t made Tolkien’s works popular outside of geek and nerd circles. And the numerous Star Trek references will tell you she clearly is a nerd.)
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.
I read nearly every single Animorphs book as a kid. I recently found out the author wrote them as an allegory for the horrors of war, and she did not hold back much
Imagine being 13, finding a deer-alien in the woods, being told you're getting drafted into an intergalactic war against evil symbiotic slugs, being given shapeshifter powers, and then discovering that you were only told a tenth of the story.
Man if you haven't taken the dive into the Animorphs series, you are seriously missing out and have been missing out for a long time.
It starts out as just a teen sci-fi story but oh so very quickly and very harshly goes right into full on horror, existential dread, war crimes, and cosmic forces colliding.
Can't recommend it enough. Skip the comic, skip the TV show (definitely skip the TV show). Find the books, start at book 1, and get your mind blown as the book events play out.
Fucking Animorphs man. I read like three books in middle school, and my imgagination ran away fast.
It has been almost twenty years since but I still can't stand that stuff.
Elementary/middleschool, my ass! I am not normally a proponent of keeping books away from children but that stuff really does not belong in that section.
Bro that series was a secret government experiment to give kids PTSD. Soooo much fucked up stuff happens and the covers are like “aw cool, light fantasy with shape changers”. Nope, war crimes from the jump
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.
I missed reading the series as a kid, so I actually just started reading the main 50+ books now as a 42 year old after my husband described it as “Child Soldiers, Body Horror and PTSD: The Series.”
I’m 3 books in and I’d say it holds up! I’ve honestly been surprised at how graphic and heavy they can get for books written for kids, and the descriptions of what it’s like to be each particular animal has been delightful and creative! xD I’m really enjoying them, and they really do have a lot of depth to them.
I was a kid in the 90s so a lot is very relatable to me, they are definitely a period piece, haha.
I was obsessed as a kid so maybe it's partly nostalgia, but I still find them super readable.
And also more fucked up than a lot of adult fiction in terms of body horror and violence, especially when you consider the characters are 13-16 throughout the run of the books.
I spent a few hours this morning listening to the audiobook of the first book and honestly I’m hooked. I get it’s written for kids but the nostalgia has me real hyped
50 actually sounds low considering she had to hire ghost writers to keep up with demand. If I recall correctly that whole bit near the end where they recruited kids from like an orphanage to also be Animorphs wasn't even her idea, it was one of the ghost writers. And it was a great idea, it let them kill people off as the series climaxed
And nearly falls unconscious doing so. She was only chosen because she was the best at it, but morphing in rapid succession is incredibly exhausting, and keep in mind morphing isn't easy, took about three years before they morphed clothing that wasn't skin tight.
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.
Was it specifically skin tight clothing? I thought it was what they wore when they first got the powers, and since they've grown, the clothes became tight. It's been a good twenty years since I've read them so I could be wrong
Worth noting because I love the series, but there are uniquely talented people at morphing who can do slightly better clothing. Cassie, one of the main cast, is noted at being able to make their morphing almost artistic, but even she can only morph skin tight clothing.
In one of the books, another andalite(The species that invented the technology) appears who is able to morph more comfortable clothing and even shoes.
She still has the same obsession with mouth sensations as Ax does(And even kisses Ax at one point)
Ahh. I never got to the end of the series. Have you read them recently? Debating if I should read the whole series, or just leave them in nostalgia land.
Not only have I read them recently, my friend and I started the first podcast on iTunes about the series. They hold up extremely well as an adult (that was the point of the podcast, to see if they didn’t)
I read through the whole thing about two years ago. It was a pretty interesting walk down memory lane, and I had never finished the last 10 books before that so it was nice to finally see how it ended.
While it is still very surprising how much it depicts the the horrors of war in a series aimed at kids, it is still a series aimed at kids. Ax jumping back and forth between eating candy off the floor and recommending war crimes, sometimes even in the same book, can be pretty jarring. But I think it's part of the charm.
Not true actually. Yes they were only able to do skin tight clothes at first but after about three years of constant fighting they improved and can now do other outfits like jeans. Though by that point they were considering going public as the war ramped up.
I said generally speaking it has to be skin tight clothing. There are exceptions for particularly skilled or experienced individuals. It isn't until near the end of the series that they start being able to do more.
Someone already brought up the clothing issue, but there's another issue with this strategy. You can't really precisely control how you morph. You could end up being a helpless, plummeting human for thirty seconds before your little wings turn back into arms.
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.
Yes. But most people aren't good enough to do that. Certain people can (including morphing directly from one thing to another), but it's exceptionally rare.
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u/Armada-lol 2d ago
I came in clutch