I guess I didn't realize how dark this series got

September 1, 2016 12:21 PM

The cheesy sci-fi Animorphs books heightened the strangeness of adolescence
Animorphs: Why the Series Rocked and Why You Should Still Care
Throwback Thursdays: You Mattered, Animorphs

K.A.'s Response to Criticism of the Final Animorphs

Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don't end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.

That's what happens, so that's what I wrote.

posted by the man of twists and turns (35 comments total)

K. A. Applegate does Reddit AMA, turns out to be amazingly cool.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:37 PM on September 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

The Thirteen Ghastliest Horrors of Animorphs:

It's a children's series, after all, with a premise that sounds like a recipe for pure hijinks, and of course it is, if your definition of "hijinks" extends to things like, say, desperately trying to keep your own intestines from spilling out as you grapple a blade-encrusted space lizard, or weighing whether or not you should kill your entire family to spare them a living hell as a prisoner of their own body, or how about the family favorite we call uncontrollable autocannibalism?

posted by quadrilaterals at 12:40 PM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

In the late 90's I would have been about twenty years late to the party of Animorphs... did kids really enjoy these books? They seem to be totally weird, and in a way that hurts my brain. Mind you, Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars left me feeling really weirded out when I read it as an 11-year-old in 1982.
posted by My Dad at 12:47 PM on September 1, 2016

My son brought one of these home once and the writing was bad enough that I was relieved he could read them on his own. He moved on to something else after reading one. I think I only read one chapter. The plot summaries sound metal as hell, though.

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars

All of Pinkwater's stuff is great, but his older kid stuff is wonderfully twisted. I have a "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death"-shaped spot in my heart.
posted by middleclasstool at 1:00 PM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Well, I was 8 years old in 1996 and distinctly remember convincing my parents to buy me the first four books from the B. Dalton's in the Mall of New Hampshire and having my mind blown. They were great! Creepy! There were girls who were awesome! There were cool animals! Aliens! It was fodder for about a zillion recesses-worth of pretend, and hours and hours of reading and rereading and figuring out which animals would be coolest to morph into. It may not have been high literature, but ... it was a cool sci fi series for 3rd graders with girls and characters who weren't all white! It was awesome!!!!
posted by ChuraChura at 1:03 PM on September 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

I probably would not be the person I am if it wasn't for the Animorph books. One of my cats is named after one of the main characters. (Tobias)

I was never really into reading books prior to starting the series. I know my parents dutifully bought up to at least book 30. I never did finish it, but that's still on my to-do list. Amazon was (still is?) selling them for kindle.
posted by INFJ at 1:04 PM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I was a '90s kid, born in '89, and yeah, I loved the hell out of Animorphs books. They were "YA books", in the sense that the librarians didn't read them and didn't care if we did, that were brutal and weird and fascinating (and yeah, retrospectively, way more diverse than nearly anything else out there). I went back and read a few of them a few years back when I was cleaning out some old books from my mom's place, and while the writing's nothing special, I remain impressed by how ambitious and uncompromising Applegate's vision was for the story.
posted by protocoach at 1:07 PM on September 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Morph Club is a rad podcast that discusses the series in depth, if that's up anyone's alley.
posted by majuju at 1:08 PM on September 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

I saw the later books described on Twitter as "War Crimes: You Know, For Kids!"
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:16 PM on September 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

This podcast from a couple years ago is where most of what I know about the series comes from (not counting some very hilarious/enlightening tweets yesterday). It's a good intro that comes from a place of love (rather than merely "wtf") and does a decent job of explaining what's good about it beyond mere wtf value.
posted by sparkletone at 1:18 PM on September 1, 2016

Morph Club podcast (Previously) on MetaFilter. It's awesome.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 1:25 PM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Weird Twitter's Leon reacts to some of the stranger moments from the series.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 1:28 PM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

hours and hours of reading and rereading and figuring out which animals would be coolest to morph into.

this was like 95% of the appeal of animorphs for me (i was also 8 in 1996 and read like every single book in the series and had completely forgotten how brutal it was until just now)
posted by burgerrr at 1:32 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I loved these books growing up. I think I stopped reading when they started being ghost written? This is definitely one of those series that I think fondly of, but have always thought it wouldn't hold up to rereading as an adult.
posted by Carillon at 1:34 PM on September 1, 2016

I reread the Animorphs side novel The Andalite Chronicles last month. It was the first Animorphs book I'd read since I was a kid. It was actually really enjoyable, plainly written, competently executed space opera. There was some really dark, surprisingly impactful stuff too. And a lot of total nonsense. And a very weird 90's middle American version of the ending of Solaris.
posted by One Second Before Awakening at 1:36 PM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Ellimist Chronicles was... quite a read. Pretty psychedelic. When I read it as a kid it definitely threw open the doors of perception. Probably had long term impacts that I'm not even aware of.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:42 PM on September 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I have a "The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death"-shaped spot in my heart.

Thirty-plus years on, I still have Avocado and Baconburg Horror.
posted by My Dad at 2:05 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

The shit they did to David still haunts me occasionally. "No more Dave" indeed...
posted by Night_owl at 2:53 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Every night I read with my two little boys. They're smart and voracious readers and plowed through many of the Animorphs books on their own. One day a librarian handed us another Kate Applegate book and said we had to read it. Knowing she did the Animorphs series, I said, sure, whatever, but took the book to be gracious.

And so we sat down on the couch one night and started reading this book, "The One and Only Ivan." It's written from the point of view of a gorilla stuck living in a dingy shopping-mall zoo, based loosely on a true story. And oh my. Not only is it hands-down the best children's book we've ever read, it's one of the best books I've read, period. Heartbreaking, uplifting, perceptive and in the end beautifully triumphant. Tears all round on the final sentence.

It won later won a Newberry, and as far as I'm concerned it should get a Nobel, too.
posted by martin q blank at 3:14 PM on September 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

From the AMAZING response to criticism of the end of the series:

So, you don't like the way our little fictional war came out? You don't like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don't like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.
If you're mad at me because that's what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.
K.A. Applegate

Good godDAMN, that's who I want writing for kids, that is absolutely piercing.
posted by neonrev at 4:44 PM on September 1, 2016 [25 favorites]

I also read Animorphs as a kid, although I never finished the series because our library only had an incomplete collection of maybe the first 10-15 books and a couple of the ancillary books, and since my book-buying was limited to salvo I also read a few random books scattered throughout the series. I absolutely loved them, thought about them and the moral questions they raised, thought about how what it means to be 'yourself', just, ugh. Thinking about it, there was so much deeper stuff there than in basically anything else I was reading at the time, and I picked up the first book because I thought turning into animals would be cool. That's far from the main thing I think about them now.

Looking back, yeah, those books were actually incredibly diverse for the time, and it was done in a way that I, a fairly conservative kid, did not ever take as preachy or even noticeable. My favorite character/narrator was Tobias (I was a very isolated and lonely kid too), followed closely by Cassie and Marco. I'm sure the writing was not great, but it was dialogue and the thoughts of kids that read true to me as a kid, which was also pretty rare.

I'm going to have to re-read what I read and finish out the series, they were short reads even as a kid, and looking back, I think I owe her an incredible debt.
(Is there a compilation series that bundles more than one book into a larger volume? I want that badly now.)
posted by neonrev at 4:49 PM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

When I was the appropriate age for such things, I also had a borderline-pathological need to read series Completely and In The Correct Order. The sheer number of books and the random scattering that most libraries tended to have available scared me away completely, even disregarding my disdain for science fiction at the time and strong preference for fantasy. (If they were MAGIC teens fighting DEMONS, I'd have been much more inclined to seek out the first one so I could start properly.)
posted by Scattercat at 5:05 PM on September 1, 2016

The ant morph.

The ant morph.

DEMORPH!
posted by KChasm at 5:22 PM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I looooooved them. Oh my god I loved them. So did my other nerd girl friends in elementary school, and whenever a new book came out it was all we could talk about at the lunch table. I guess technically it counts as my first fandom.

Yes, it is absolutely full of terrifying shit. I think it could be reworked into a modern-trend-compatible gritty YA three-part series along the lines of Hunger Games
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:31 PM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

A recent Reply All had a story about a woman who created a tulpa out of a character from her Animorphs fanfic. (Tulpas, previously.)
posted by BrashTech at 6:08 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Things I think about sometimes from animorphs as a tax paying 26 year old married man:
- yeerks crawling into your ears and controlling your brain
- yeerks living in a secret place and slithering all around each other
- sucks that Tobias got stuck being a bird
- wonder what that cube looked like
- the cheesy morphing book covers that somehow I used to love and study for clues about possible evolution stages
- animorphs/pokemon alternate universes
posted by oceanjesse at 7:17 PM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

- animorphs/pokemon alternate universes

Oh god, I just remembered. When I was a kid I tried to write Pokemon/Animorphs fic.

Only I didn't have much in the way of creativity back then, so basically all I did was try to retype up an entire book, only replacing all the morphs with appropriate Pokemon.

Kid me was a hell of a dope.
posted by KChasm at 7:44 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Holy hell Leon's summary is eye-popping.
posted by Theta States at 7:54 PM on September 1, 2016

Thirty-plus years on, I still have Avocado and Baconburg Horror.

You are only the second human being I have encountered in over four decades who has even heard of that book. That book scared the ass off me when I was little.
posted by middleclasstool at 8:57 PM on September 1, 2016

Wait, dangummit, it was a termite morph. I messed up.

Or—

Well, now I can't remember at all.
posted by KChasm at 9:16 PM on September 1, 2016

This series was hugely, hugely formative for me. It turned me into a reader. A few months ago I found my old diaries and came across my very first fanfic, written at the age of 11 or so. I RPed in AOL chatrooms. There was a period of several years when I would never be able to see a hawk in the sky without thinking "Tobias!" It was such a real, living, breathing universe to me.

And that the mastermind behind the whole thing was a woman? Just the icing on the cake. (Nevermind the assistance from her husband and countless ghostwriters, who were obviously necessary to keep releasing these books at an astounding one-a-month clip)
posted by Gordafarin at 1:23 AM on September 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Good timing, as I just read through TV Tropes' Nightmare Fuel page on the series.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:50 AM on September 2, 2016

This book series was MY LIFE in middle school. The first fanfiction I ever wrote was for Animorphs. The first website I ever made - on Expages, in 1998! - was an Animorphs fan site. I faithfully bought every single book (even the execrable Alternamorphs choose-your-own-adventure books) until the very last one was released, just a few months before I started high school.

I remember I was placed in freshman Honors English - the only honors class I ever took, just because I loved reading and writing and was naturally good at it. The teacher greeted us on the very first day of school by telling us how much smarter and better we were than all the other kids, how we were probably in all honors courses (I was in remedial math and standard everything else), how we probably got straight As and were headed to Ivy League schools and destined to become doctors and lawyers and CEOs. She didn't breathe one word about enjoying literature until she gave us our first assignment: to write an essay on what we liked to read. (Adding, of course, that we probably all read classic literature, not that silly YA stuff.)

I was so livid, I wrote this passionate essay all about Animorphs and its deep political and philosophical themes and how I know it's a kids series and I know I'm too old for it and sure I can read more advanced material - and do - but I love Animorphs and I don't care what you think of me for it. She seemed really impressed and gave me an A, which I think pissed me off more than anything.

A few days later, 9/11 happened. Looking back now, especially re-reading KAA's defense of how she ended the series, Animorphs feels almost chillingly prophetic. A bunch of privileged children who suddenly and traumatically find out that a war has been going on right under their noses. Who have to fight a war where literally anyone could be the enemy. Who constantly have to choose between doing what's right and doing what's necessary, and sacrifice their ideals without ever really knowing if what they did was actually, truly necessary at all. Kids who go into battle and see horrible things and do horrible things and are haunted with PTSD for the rest of their lives.

Our generation read Animorphs, and then we lived it. And it's almost like KAA tried to prepare us for what was coming, and we still ended up like those kids. The only difference is, Jake was put on trial for war crimes. At the time, that felt realistic. Now it strikes me as naive. Imagine: a white American male who saved the entire world, being held accountable for slaughtering literal aliens en masse, in defense of Earth! Our leaders did so much worse, with so much less justification, and none of them saw the inside of The Hague for it.

Anyway. I grew up and moved out and eventually donated my massive Animorphs collection to a local school. I hope the kids there love them as much as I did. But I did have a tinge of regret about giving away a book series that was so formative for me. Then, a few months back, I stumbled upon a site that had free ebook versions of the whole series. Out of curiosity, I re-read #19: The Departure and #33: The Illusion - the ones I remembered as the best books in the series - to see how they held up. I'd forgotten about the sound effects. That made me cringe. Other than that, though, it occurred to me that if you took #19 out of its "disposable middle-grade sci-fi series" and repackaged it as its own book, and did some minor editing to remove the sound effects and provide a little more background information, it could stand on its own besides Newbery winners. There was some real gold in those books.

I'm so glad people are talking about it again. I agree with whomever said that it would fit in with the current trend of dark and gritty YA trilogies. I really feel like the time is right to adapt it into a series of movies or a TV show (and I have so, so many ideas! Ask me about my Animorphs ideas!), something rated R or M so its anti-war themes don't get watered down in the interest of kid-friendliness. (Don't even get me started on how "fantasy violence" where no one really gets hurt does more to romanticize violence and make it look cool than any amount of real gore.)

Sorry for rambling. I clearly still have a lot of Animorphs feels, even after all these years.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 8:10 AM on September 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

Okay, I'm gonna say one more thing and then I'm gonna shut up: the popularity of Tobias as a baby name shot up dramatically at exactly the time when people who were 10-13 in 1996 hit their mid-twenties, and no way in hell is that a coincidence.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 8:26 AM on September 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

I really like Animorphs, because it introduced the existential horror to me of Tobias being forever stuck in hawk form. I still think that's a formative reference for me when I think about how despondent life can get. It also was just so weird and stark in comparison to everything else that was on the YA shelves. I didn't continue reading it because I thought the writing was a little clunky and took a while to get to places, but the concepts are so good and fantastic.
posted by yueliang at 3:10 PM on September 2, 2016