by Miranda [redacted]
My name is Miranda. That’s my first name, obviously. I can’t tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere. Everywhere. And if they knew my full name, they could find me and my friends, and then…well, let’s just say I don’t want them to find me. What they do to people who resist them is too horrible to think about.
I won’t even tell you where I live. You’ll just have to trust me that it is a real place, a real town. It may even be your town. I’m writing this all down so that more people will learn the truth. Maybe then, somehow, the human race can survive until the Andalites return and rescue us, as they promised they would. Maybe.
If you read the Animorphs as a kid, then you remember that intro. Always “My name is ____” and then the narrating character setting up the premise of that book.
If you didn’t read Animorphs as a kid, then you missed out on one of the weirdest kid lit phenomena of the nineties.
To be honest with you, I should have missed out on the Animorphs. I was born in 2002, one year after the final Animorphs book was published, and by the time I was old enough to read, the golden age of ordering Scholastic monthly/bimonthly books had faded into a mass-produced mist. But then my mom went to a garage sale and found a bunch of books with kids turning into animals on the cover, and bought thirty-five of them.
I loved the Animorphs. I was 8 when I read them for the first time, and I devoured them. It was every kid’s ideal scifi book: kids turning into animals to fight aliens! Five kids and an alien having snappy banter and narrow escapes and the constant drama of leading a double life? Sign me up!
When I think about the Animorphs, what I remember most is how fun they were. They were cool and fun and the plot was always crazy. The lore was intense and it built on itself. Character development that happened in book six stayed developed in book seven. Running jokes eventually got resolved and turned into new running jokes. Characters and villains developed and changed so slowly over time that you almost didn’t realize when someone was no longer a hero.
When I think about the Animorphs, I also remember the ending, and how it broke my heart. But we’ll get to that!
Here’s a brief overview of the world of the Animorphs:
🚨Spoilers for book one‼️🚨
The premise, at first, is simple. Evil alien brain slugs, called Yeerks, are secretly taking over the planet. No one knows about it, because when you are infested with a Yeerk, it crawls into your ear and into your brain and controls your every motion. It can also read your every thought and memory, which means it can perfectly mimic your behavior and trap you in your own head so completely that no one, not even your loved ones, would ever be able to tell.
So the Yeerks can take over entire planets with no one the wiser as long as they do it subtly.
Guess what they’re doing to Earth!
Don’t worry, the universe as a whole isn’t doomed yet. The Yeerks have an enemy called the Andalites, a warrior-race who have taken it on as their sworn mission to fight the Yeerks. (Fun fact: the Andalites were originally supposed to be generic little green men, but K.A. Applegate’s publishers were like, “That’s kind of boring,” and K.A. Applegate said “Bet,” and changed it to the current design. The Andalites as they appear in the books are blue centaurs with six fingers and bladed tails that function as a combination between scorpion tails and scimitars. They also have no mouth, and four eyes – two in the usual place, and two on flexible stalks.)
The Andalites are the only race in the entire galaxy to have created morphing technology, aka the ability to turn into any animal as long as they touch it and “acquire” its DNA. Due to the whole ‘having no mouth’ problem, they communicate via thought-speak (a sort of telepathy that can either be publicly broadcast or directed to a specific person(s)), and thought-speak is incorporated into the morphing technology, so that they can still communicate when they are, say, worms who have no vocal cords.
Of course, with great power comes great limitations, and the morphing technology has a big one: a two hour time limit. If you go over the time limit, that’s it – you’re stuck as that animal for the rest of your life. 🙊
Book one starts with an Andalite warrior crash-landing in an abandoned construction site, where five kids witness his dying moments. He tells them that the Yeerks are winning in taking over Earth, and gives them the morphing power so that they can fight back before a high-ranking Yeerk general kills him, violently, in front of the kids.
They spend the rest of the book wrestling with the ethical dilemma of becoming child soldiers, and end up embarking on a failed attack to the main Yeerk hideout that ends with one of them being permanently trapped as a hawk for the rest of his life.
That’s just book one!
There’s 54 of these books, plus a few extras and tie-ins and choose-your-own-adventures, and it keeps up the tone of wacky kids dealing with the ethical horrors via witty banter and animal body horror throughout.
Here’s the kids you need to know:
Jake, the leader
He’s the one who’s keeping this whole thing together, mostly by virtue of actually knowing all of the humans before they got the morphing power. He starts out as a kid whose biggest worry is that he didn’t make the basketball team, and ends up forcing himself to become a cold tactician and master of strategy to win at any cost.
Rachel, the warrior
She’s a beautiful gymnast with a deep-seated hidden rage that very quickly becomes a useful weapon in the fight against the Yeerks. She’ll do the dirty work and the ethically dubious murders to get stuff done.
Cassie, the moral compass
She’s the daughter of a veterinarian and a zookeeper, and she’s the one most in tune with nature. She also takes up the role of moral compass, which is a losing game in war, and makes her mutual crush with Jake very difficult.
Marco, the strategist
He’s the one who makes Jake’s plans happen. He controls the tone of the group more than anything – Marco’s the funny guy, and he knows it, and he uses it to get everyone going, even when he himself is deeply sad. He’s also the one who named them the Animorphs (animal + morphers)!
Tobias, the loner
He’s the original 2000s emo. An orphan whose aunt and uncle hate him, bullied in school – he needed an alien war to just give him something to do. And if that wasn’t sad enough, he’s trapped as a hawk after book one and fighting the Yeerks and dealing with hawk angst becomes literally his entire life.
Ax, the lost boy
He’s the necessary alien perspective to the human team’s five-man-band. Aximili-Errasgouth-Isthil is an Andalite stranded on Earth who decides to join the Animorphs to do his duty against the Yeerks. He takes himself very seriously, but no one else does, especially when he’s in human morph (he has no mouth in his original body, so most of his time as a human is spent experimenting with fun mouth sounds and the exciting taste of cardboard, spicy food, and cinnamon buns.)
There’s also dozens of side characters with minor arcs of their own, but the main six are who you need to know for the rest of this longwinded blog post/book recommendation.
And I have to say, I wasn’t even alive in the 90s, but because of Animorphs I have such a powerful nostalgia for the time right before I was born. Spending weekends at the mall, talking about BoyzIIMen, Radioshack, Gap, riding bikes everywhere, ditching class when no one could track you on your phone, watching Xena Warrior Princess and Baywatch, so much 90s pop culture permeates the Animorphs. That constant infusion of (now-dated) pop culture surrounds the narrative in a way that makes it feel real and alive. (Side note, if you’re a fan of the Locked Tomb series, Tamsyn Muir used to write Animorphs fanfiction, and if you read Animorphs and The Locked Tomb, you can definitely tell – the merciless inclusion of modern memes and slang in a way that will clearly age terribly is very Animorphs.)
As a kid, I read every single one of these that I could get my hands on (roughly 35 of the total 54), and I loved them. I have such fond memories of the kids getting into wacky adventures, the wish-fulfillment of animal morphing, and snappy dialogue. And it was fun!
I also remember the moral and ethical quandaries the characters faced, and the absolute devastation of the ending. But don’t worry – I won’t spoil it for you.
Though most of the visceral fear and terror faded over the years until my primary memory of the series was just the fun parts and the premise, I never forgot the Yeerks.
When, in college, I got hit by that wave of childhood nostalgia we all face, I turned back to the Animorphs. At this point, I had learned where to find online fan responses, and I have to say, the memes alone made it worth a second look. (pictured throughout the post) It also showed me just how much nuance and moral complexity K.A. Applegate put into her brightly-colored kids books. This was also the first time that I read the letter.
Any Animorphs fan who has read the ending of book 54 will understand why Applegate wrote the letter. The fan response to that ending was so strong and angry that Applegate actually wrote a letter to the fans, as the author, defending her choice. I think she says it best:
“Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating….I’ve spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who.” --- K. A. Applegate
And yes, this is a wacky story about kids turning into animals. But it’s also about war. And to be honest, that makes me love it even more. Its lessons have shaped me, and though specific memories have faded, this series taught me a lot about war and morals and judgement.
The moral of Animorphs is not just that “war is bad,” the moral is that “war is complicated, and no one really wins.” It also teaches kids about prejudice. The Hork-Bajir are the primary foot soldiers of the Yeerks – they’re basically your classic alien lizard biped, plus blades sprouting from their wrists and forearms that can cut a man’s throat as easy as you please. The Animorphs are terrified of them, and assume that even Hork-Bajir without the Yeerks in their heads would be warlike and scary. But they aren’t. The Hork-Bajir are herbivores, and their blades are designed to help them climb the massive trees of their home planet. They act scary because of forces beyond their control, and the Animorphs understand that, even as they make the choice to kill Yeerk-infested Hork-Bajir to save their own lives. They understand that they are killing innocents, and though that makes it harder than if they were killing mindless killing machines, it’s an important distinction that allows them to keep what’s left of their humanity.
Here are a few more of the wacky moral dilemmas that you can contemplate if you decide to dive into the world of Animorphs:
🚨Spoilers for a few books throughout the series‼️🚨
What does it feel like to be on the other side of a species conservation program?
This experience isn’t because they turn into animals. No, this one is because of the Ellimist. The Ellimist is basically god in the Animorphs world – a weird 4+ dimensional figure who can warp time and space and is constantly playing 4-dimensional chess with the universe against the Crayak, his evil counterpart. (How good the Ellimist actually is is up for debate.) Anyway, the Ellimist basically shows up and says, “Hey Animorphs, you’re going to lose the war against the Yeerks and all of humanity is going to end up dead or enslaved. I think you’re pretty neat, so if you want I can drop you a few of your family members on a nice grassland planet so there’s still a few free humans left in the universe.” And then the kids have to decide whether they want to stay on Earth and keep fighting or save, like, twenty total humans and run away.
Should you kill your classmate?
Look, the David trilogy is dark. “The David Trilogy” is the semi-official name for books 20-22. Basically, the Animorphs say, six kids against an army of alien hostiles is kind of a lot. What if we started recruiting our classmates to be child soldiers with us? So they pick a loner with zero friends on the logic that he’ll have a lot of free time to fight aliens and he’ll probably be down to join the team. This does not end well. David keeps it together long enough for the Animorphs to give him the morphing power, and then he faces death for the first time and goes off the deep end, deciding he’d rather use the morphing power to suck up to the Yeerks and survive rather than fight them. So to get into the Yeerks’ good graces he attempts to kill the Animorphs. The Animorphs deal with him. Permanently. And though it’s never explicitly stated, that is a euphemism for exactly what you think it is.
Is cannibalism okay if he’s eating people you hate?
The Yeerk-cannibal shows up for one single book as a Yeerk who kills and eats other Yeerks in order to survive without Yeerk technology and be independent of the Yeerk army. He’s living in a rich guy’s head, and catfishing other human-controllers in order to capture them and eat their Yeerks. So, very technically, he’s helping the Animorphs. But at the cost of great mental scarring and also, you know, cannibalism.
Does deciding that you have to win at any cost horribly warp your interpersonal relationships?
Look, Jake’s the leader. They all agreed. And Jake knows they need to win. So Jake has to make the choices that lead to them winning. And that means using his resources, which are his friends. Of the Animorphs, Rachel is the one who most embodies the win-at-any-cost mentality, and Jake uses that. Rachel quickly becomes the most efficient (read: murder-y) Animorph, and Jake encourages it. It makes her useful. He knows his cousin is willing to do the dirty work that Cassie’s moral principles would be repelled by, and he uses that. He gets to know all of them – Cassie’s empathy, Ax’s desire for authority, Marco’s strategy, Tobias’ lack of human responsibility, Rachel’s violence – and he deploys them as necessary to get the job done. He gets to know them because he cares, because they’re friends dealing with the horrors together, but as the choices build up and the war continues, he uses that close knowledge of them as the means to the end.
Is pacificism also a morally grey choice?
The Chee! The Chee are robot dogs, originally made by dog aliens who just loved having a good time and were incredibly kind and loyal and good natured. (The dog aliens were all horribly murdered). In honor of their creators, the Chee – equipped with advanced holograms – took on human images and lived regular human lives as really intense dog people, to look after the dogs that reminded them of their creators. Sweet, right?
Being robot dogs, they are basically indestructible. They would be so helpful in the fight against the Yeerks that they could practically end it on their own if they chose to help. But they choose not to. Their dog-aliens were pacifists who died because they refused to fight, and to honor their memory the Chee won’t fight either. Instead they watch the human race lose against the Yeerks, and occasionally lend a hand by impersonating the Animorphs to their families so the actual kids can go have traumatic overnight adventures.
The Animorphs kind of hate the Chee for this. Just because the Chee refuse to get blood on their hands doesn’t mean that there is no bloodshed – the Yeerks would kill people whether or not the Animorphs were fighting back, but since the Chee can’t be touched by the Yeerks, they refuse to participate.
Can an entire species evolve to be evil just by existing?
By the end of the series, the Animorphs have examined the Yeerk issue from a lot of different angles. The largest one being: are Yeerks inherently evil? Are they born to be power-hungry and manipulative, just because they can take over people’s brains? Is the only good Yeerk a Yeerk that chooses not to enter a creature’s brain, and instead spends their entire life as a sentient being swimming around in a Yeerk pool on the homeworld, completely blind and with minimal senses and communication? Or do Yeerks have a right to sight, to see the stars, even if that means subjugating a thinking creature to a fate worse than death as their entire self is hijacked?
The answer is – it’s complicated.
So all of this is a long and rambling way to say: if you want a fun kid’s book with actual narrative stakes, read Animorphs.
If you want to examine complex moral arguments in guerilla warfare, read Animorphs.
If you want some great banter performed by great three-dimensional characters who are slowly being crushed and changed by the weight of their secrets, read Animorphs.
If you want to live in the 90s again or for the first time, read Animorphs.
If you want to read classic-Star-Trek levels of wacky science fiction adventure (sario rips! Z-space! DNA magic!), read Animorphs.
What I’m saying is: read Animorphs. And then come and talk to me about it, because I love these books.