Animorphs - The Entire Series

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Read this thread over the weekend. Loved these books like a lot of other people, though I stopped reading around book 30, which is when I started middle school. When I was in high school I read the last two books from the library which were wild, and not what I remembered from elementary school. You can see some of the terrifying things in these early books more than I remembered. For some reason my strongest memories are:
*David, and how scared I was of being trapped as a rat, on rat island
*How completely insane the Ellimist is
*Ax and his love of cinnabon, looks like he is coming soon but it does seem really different without him
*I really liked Toby and the Hork-Bajir chronicles and how comically dumb the Hork-Bajir are, but I am worried this will be worse on the re-read
*When they find a yeerk chatroom

Excited to read/post along in this thread.

editted question: Does anyone ever come looking for Tobias? I don't remember

Yeah. That's the book when we learn he's literally the son of the Andelite that gave everybody morph abilities; Visser 3 was trying to track said son down and Tobias only gets away because he keeps a straight face after months of living as a hawk and having not used those facial muscles in forever--after he gains his old human form as a morph via the Ellemist..

Yeah, that actually happened.

I remembered that Elfangor was his dad/Ax was his uncle, but not the rest of that spoiler at all. That's wild.

Yeah, Visser-3 basically says something about hating Elfangor, but that hate becoming a type of pity after seeing what his child grew to be, that line was pretty good because the Animorphs in general are awful people, but I don't remember it being mentioned again.

I was super into these books when I was 9, so this has been an excellent trip down memory lane.
There was a construction site in my hometown, and my friend and I would often wander around there on the off-chance that we would maybe find the crashed remnants of an Andalite ship. Of course we had to be home by 7pm because we were 9.
One time we spotted a big ass centipede cruising around on the ground and concluded it must've been a baby Taxxon. That indicated to us that we were getting close to some sort of wreckage and therefore our own awesome morphing powers!

Now I can't remember if this actually happened in the books, or if it's something I made up, but do they ever do something like tie a controller up and basically starve the Yeerk out of them?

Keep this up, it's fun as hell.

Yes, they do.

I don't know what the situation for children's literature is like now, but back then books like this were a major source of entertainment and were read in a similar way to watching serialized television shows. You'd periodically check what new books were available at the Scholastic fairs, or whenever you went by the bookstore.

I think this sort of thing was more appealing back then because we didn't have the internet and video games weren't as capable of being addictive time-sinks (I remember getting quickly frustrated with most NES games I played and once SNES/Genesis came out it was still mostly just something I did with friends). So there were fewer alternatives to reading (though this didn't stop me from seeing every single Doug episode 10 times).

And because it's Jake, you get to see the whole thing first-person!

Ok, I hope everybody had a good weekend and are ready for ANGST! It's a Tobias book!



The Encounter-Chapter 1


Do people still use the word dweeb? Or is that not done anymore?


Marco is right.


Fun fact. Only mammals can get rabies. Not birds.


Tobias and his hawk crush here.



So, this book starts promisingly, with Tobias and Rachel busting up a car commercial to free a hawk. This book is going to be a wild ride.

semi-related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sZuN0xXWLc

this is a trip, i read these as a kid and lost interest around the time they had a bunch of really transparent filler in the form of the tiny dudes, interested to see how this is 20 years down the line

Thanks to the series repeating this paragraph at least once per book, I've never forgotten what thermals are in my entire life.

In a real sense, this is a series about thermals.

Wow, the tiny dudes were the best, how dare you.

Off to a great start, I see.

Let's hope the series won't go weird with this.

The series will go plenty weird, but not in the way you're afraid of.

Ahaha, so it wasn't just me! This series really cares about thermals.

While I think of it, do we ever get any info on how big the Yeerk and Andalite empires are? Tens of worlds, hundreds, half the galaxy?
I distinctly remember being eleven and catching a hint that the Yeerk empire isn't that huge, yet, and feeling absurdly relieved.

Visser's speech in the first book seemed to imply that there wouldn't be anywhere close to enough Yeerks to infest every single human


In fact it seems like getting enough Yeerks would be a huge undertaking of it's own. And this isn't even counting any Yeerks infesting Taxxons/Hork-Bajir/etc.

And what's more is he claims that those billions of humans (backed with Yeerk tech I'd have to assume) would be an unstoppable force, so it would seem that the other races aren't crazy populous either.


e; this also possibly hints at a reason why a human might work with the Yeerks now- even after the conquest is complete, there will be loads of non-controller humans while the Yeerks build their numbers. So you trade being controlled now, but in exchange you get freed (plus maybe some sort of reward or cushy position) later

Although as we learned in the previous book, the Yeerks (or at least Visser Three) will make promises to people that they have no intention of actually keeping, in exchange for becoming voluntary hosts.

I'm pretty sure either book 3 or book 7 is the book I re-read most when I was younger, so I'm excited to see this discussion.

In terms of total size. we find out in Visser that humans outnumber other races by orders of magnitude. When Visser One reports to the Council of Thirteen that Earth contains almost 6 billion people, they mishear her and think she says 6 million, and that itself is enough to make it a high priority target. When they realize she said 6 billion, they don't believe it at first, because they can't imagine that many people on one world.

That's making me curious to see what the setting would look like after the yeerk/animorph conflict is over. Like, are Humans with locally-built bug fighter clones going to dominate the galaxy through sheer weight of numbers?

Yeah the Yeerk empire is not very old and pretty small. It started within Elfangor's lifetime. Taxons are the most numerous host but the Yeerks hate infesting them because they have to deal with the hunger instinct. They don't have many Hork Bajir because the Andalites killed almost all of them with a bio weapon

I've always felt so bad for the Hork-Bajir because of how peaceful their race actually is. They use those nasty blades to strip and eat tree bark if I'm not mistaken.

There definitely is a later Tobias book where he at least obliquely considers shacking up with a lady hawk, though its more about whether he should just accept his fate as being a bird forever rather than diving too deep into furry (feather-y?) territory.


This makes the Andalites' eventual plan to largely ignore the conflict on Earth before deciding to let the Yeerks congregate there and then glassing it from orbit make even more sense from a realpolitik perspective.

I love this series so much. Very excited to read along. It's really wild how much they launch into body horror right from the getgo. I never finished the series as a kid so maybe this will be the time I finally do it. Had it spoiled for me long ago but I think the journey is infinitely more fun. I remember really loving the first Cassie book which is up next and I believe the one where they find Ax, and the following one which I think is one of the extremely scarring ones about insect hiveminds, this time with termites!!! Did they morph ants and termites, and if so, why? Or am I misremembering? I thought the ant colony thing was in a Marco book but I'm pretty sure the termite thing is from Cassie's perspective.

It kind of makes you wander what would happen if the Yeerks were mildly smart and went the V 2009 route of just blatantly rolling up to Earth and presenting themselves as "Hey, we're your cool new alien companions, here's a Power Point presentation on all the benefits having your very own Yeerk Companion* in your head has to offer. Step right up! Be the first family on your block to become a Yeerk Family today!" And also painted the Andalites with the blackest tar black brush they could and united humanity against a "common enemy".

A legitimate human/Yeerk cooperative alliance would be honest to god terrifying because they're functional the same thing in their ability to just rip through stuff like a buzz saw in terms of expansion and cooption. It would be the perfect distillation of all the best and the worst both races have to offer all at once.

Plus they both fucking love bureaucracy, especially net-violent bureaucracy.

So far I have really loved how the kids have been shown to use morphing when they're not on a mission. Tobias and Rachel's hijinks here, plus Rachel nuzzling with Melissa in the past book and using her powers to scare the creep off, and especially Tobias using hawk morph to escape from his life a bit (and then permanently) have been really good examples of how dumb goofball teens would actually use their powers without thinking of the implications quite yet.

The Encounter-Chapter 2


So, after a little banter, we have what's now become the standard "the story so far" laying out the premise.


He called it.

So, continuing our conversation about the Animorphs TV show, Tobias was played by Christopher Ralph. Because of the limited budget for the show, Tobias spent most of his time as a person.



That was Ralph from the TV show.



This is the most recent picture I can find, although I don't think it's particularly recent.

He seems to have most recently acted in 2013, in a webisode for the TV show Lost Girl. He doesn't seem to have had a lot of roles though, and his last real recurring role was as part of the cast of 2003-4's "1-800-Missing", about these two detectives who are part of a squad that hunt for missing kids.

It's mentioned in The Capture that Earth has an almost insane amount of biodiversity compared to the Yeerk homeworld. In the Andelite Chronicles Elfangor mentions that there's only three species of birds on the Andelite homeworld

The Hork-Bajir Chronicles says that the Yeerks first left their homeworld in 1966, so by the time if the books they've been doing their thing for about 30 years. They haven't conquered many planets, and their homeworld is under siege by the Andalite fleet too.

It's one of my favourite running gags of the first couple books. Jake constantly tells them not to do it, and everyone including Jake does it anyway.

let's be honest here, every 13 year old would have abused this even if they'd also gained the knowledge that there was a secret hellwar going on they'd just been unwillingly drafted into

It's 100% correct and accurate and it's why the books are so good.

Oh absolutely. Long after I stopped reading the series when I was getting up to my middle school hijinks I would still secretly wish for morphing powers so I could get away with something or have some kind of advantage on the situation. I would have abused the shit out of morph technology. I still think shapeshifting is by far my preferred superpower.

I can't be the only kid who imagined Pokemon/Animorphs crossovers.

I'm pretty sure I wrote at least one PokeMorphs fanfic as a creative writing assignment when I was 8.

Thanks for the Yeerk demography info, thread! Super interesting. This series is somehow better than I remember.
It's funny, as a kid I was sort of dutifully aware that the Chapman and Melissa stuff was bad, but as an actual parent decades later, it's horrifying.

Another thing about this plan and the size of population of earth: I remember Ax said that the time that Earth went from initial space flight to landing on the moon was way less than the Andalite time between those two events. It freaked him out and made him realize Earth could eventually be an interstellar powerhouse. I doubt the Andalite home planet would know that, but another reason they may not like Earth.