@wtfanimorphs / wtfanimorphs.tumblr.com
(Previous | Next)
Chapter 15
Okay, the kids *sort of* have a plan, I’ll give them that. Everyone gets a bee morph and everyone but Jake will sneak into the greenhouse that way. Jake will ring the doorbell, Marco will hide in the house as backup, and everyone will else will hide in the greenhouse as backup backup. Sounds good so far! There’s not really anything beyond that though except “see what sketchy shit Scythe Daddy gets up to and then go from there.”
(Previous | Next)
(We all safe and good here? I mean, as much as can be? Staying hydrated and taking our meds and shit? Good. Keep doing that. <3)
Chapter 11
Okay SO we return to find everyone arranging to casually bump into each other at the mall. Like you do. That is completely sincere, I was a teen in New Jersey in the mid-90s, bumping into each other at the mall was all we ever did with our free time except for bumping into each other at 7-11 or bumping into each other at the movie theater.
Predictably, Jake is not thrilled at how far Marco and Tobias and Ax have already taken their encounter with Scythe Daddy without looping him in, but he’s more focused on next steps. Tobias and Cassie are worried about risks, and Jake is too but he thinks they should go ahead and set up a meeting with appropriate precautions, maybe tomorrow.
OH MY GOD YOU FINALLY GOT TO THE GAY ANDALITES
The number of comments that are just OMG THE GAY ANDALITES are giving me life.
I do remember what gay characters were like around this time so I have no illusions here, I assume one of them is going to die and the other either is already a villain from touching a dick (or whatever Andalites have going on down there) or will become a villain when the first one dies. But I’m going to enjoy this queer disabled Andalite rep while I have it.
*throws a tiny one-woman pride parade for two (2) weird blue deer, one of whom i have not actually met yet, both of whom may turn out to be absolutely awful people*
Chapter 6
Apparently instead of going to talk to Jake, the Marco/Ax/Tobias trio decide to follow Scythe Daddy instead. (Look. I KNOW he has a name now but I keep having to stop and check how to spell it and it’s annoying, so until/unless I wrap my head around Gafinilan he’s gonna be Scythe Daddy, sorry I’m like this, everyone, it’s this or I just change his name to Zach Galifianakis.)
The logic is something like “he had a chance to hurt us and didn’t so we may as well follow him, and also he probably almost definitely saw Marco demorphing and that seems like a problem?” Fair, but I kind of still think one of them ought to go for backup.
It’s January! Welcome back! I have done pretty much fuck-all for two weeks and it’s been glorious, I hope you similarly have had a bit of a break from the grinding horrors of the world. Now let’s...read about the grinding horrors of a different world. <3
Chapter 1
So, the cover of this book indicates that Marco is going to become a bee. That’s fine. I anticipate some body horror around stinging, but sure, that’s fine. What is NOT fine is the “This is your brain with a Yeerk. Any questions?” tagline. I’m pretty sure that was cringeworthy even in 2000. Why are we still doing these taglines. Why didn’t they just quietly retire them after the first 10 or so were all terrible and stupid.
Okay ANYWAY, sorry, I’m a little rusty at this, here we go.
Chapter 19
Ant!Cassie continues to sort of writhe and scream as it morphs back and forth between various ant and human parts, and Cassie is just straight-up frozen in horror for a minute trying to figure out what the FUCK. She vaguely recalls that there had been an ant crawling on the cube and she'd flicked it off. CASSIE. PLEASE. PUT THAT CUBE IN A ZIPLOC BAG OR SOMETHING.STOP LETTING ANIMALS TOUCH IT.
Chapter 15
OKAY I had to miss a few days for boring personal-life reasons, so where were we? Ah, yes, the children and the horrifying nightmare that is Chappalo3 were running away from pursuing Hork-Bajir. Let’s see how that’s going for them.
Hm, not great, everyone’s tired and wounded and cranky. But they’re nearly at the beach, so it’s time for someone to stay behind and slow down their pursuit while the rest of the gang takes the cube and runs. Cassie volunteers, hating every second of it, because she knows Chappalo3 will stay and fight with her. Best chance of successfully slowing the Hork-Bajir down; high likelihood of getting Chappalo3 killed.
Chapter 11
The Chappalo has imprinted on Cassie, hasn’t it? After the chaos it just sort of...follows all the Animorphs and tries to change form when they do, becoming mostly human and starting to sort of grunt and attempt to make noises like the Animorphs’ talking. It’s not unlike Ax’s playing with sounds, really. They should give the Chappalo a cinnamon bun and see what happens.
Cassie’s sort of into it in a fascinated-horror way, like, it’s terrible but also what if she could communicate with an animal? Marco has SEEN MOVIES and knows this is BAD and he would like to YEET IT INTO THE VOID, and Jake is just like, “the sooner this thing learns to talk the sooner it has to die, so please do not communicate with the Chappalo, Cassie.”
It cracks me up so much when the first post of a new book goes up and my notifications start filling up with “oh NO, not THIS ONE”. I gather I’m in for an experience. Let’s do it.
Chapter 6
Well, this is horrifying. Cassie darts off into the woods and eventually demorphs, once Tobias lets her know that she’s safe for the moment. Helicopters are still buzzing around but they don’t seem to have followed her yet.
So she gets into human form and is getting ready to form a next-step plan with Tobias, except that first she wanders into a clearing. And there is the other buffalo, freaking out, with a buffalo body but the head and face of assistant principal Chapman.
Oh, NO.
Welcome back, my darlings! I hope everyone who had a long weekend got some solid doing-nothing-productive time in. I had a lovely stretch of days of doing fuck-all and it was all I dreamed of. And the cats were thrilled I could play with them all day instead of doing “work” for a “paycheck” like a boring human.
But here we are, back with a new book, in which Cassie is on the cover morphing into - a yak? A buffalo? Something like that. Because I have been playing too much of the game Hades lately, the middle morph looks a lot like a minotaur to me, but let’s assume that’s not what’s happening here.
Chapter 1
Cassie’s in the barn tending to an injured mouse when there’s a helicopter overhead, followed almost immediately by a visit from Erek. Apparently there’s an emergency - the Yeerks have fixed the Helmacron ship and therefore now have an active sensor to detect morphing energy. I’d forgotten they had a Helmacron ship but we’ll just go with it, I’m too tired to go look back and remind myself how they got it. I vaguely recall some sort of standoff and I suppose it must have ended up with the ship in V3’s hands.
(Admin business first - I’m gonna take the rest of the week off to do absolutely fuck-all for Thanksgiving except alternate wildly between watching terrible Christmas movies and watching the new Chinese adaptation of Hikaru No Go, so we’ll hold off on starting the next book until next week. Have a lovely long weekend, American friends, and a lovely normal week everyone else. Stay safe, stay home, don’t lick anyone you wouldn’t normally lick if it weren’t a holiday, remember that Thanksgiving is largely colonizer bullshit anyway, eat some pie.)
Chapter 23
Ax is figuring some shit out. Like that the ship’s real mission is to do a little bit of genocide and not to kill V3 at all; if anything, killing him might have gotten awkward as it would have forced the War Council to acknowledge this weird under-the-radar mission that they’re clearly burying and hoping not to publicize. Fine to DO a little genocide but not to TALK about it, given how badly things went the last time they tried this, on the Hork-Bajir planet.
Chapter 18
Estrid and Ax go flying back to the ship, noticing a red-tailed hawk and a grackle flying nearby in the process. Estrid thinks they look familiar and Ax is just, “birds all look like birds,” but I’m suspicious. Tobias? Mystery grackle? WHO ARE THESE SPY BIRDS.
Back on the ship, Ax volunteers to take first watch and is allowed to do so with the proviso that he not touch anything. So of course he goes straight to the computer and starts messing around with it. In fairness to him, it’s not unprovoked - he’s thinking back to something Estrid said when they were at the Gardens, about some particularly high-level biochemical engineering equations. At the time he was too hopped up on chocolate and smooching to think about it, but now that he has some quiet he’s realizing that it’s weird that this supposed role-less rookie is just...real up on advanced biochemistry? He has questions and he thinks he should do some recon.
Chapter 12
Oof, the Animorphs are a mess and they’ve hit one of those “everything falls apart slowly and then all at once” boiling points. Marco challenges Ax to tell him that this sad little band of Andalites is here for Earth’s benefit and not just personal revenge, but Ax can’t do it. He’s not the guy you go to for a diplomatic white lie.
Chapter 7
Ax and Tobias find a human-seeming girl wearing backwards clothes and yelling in absolute transports of joy about the joys of jelly beans and how each flavor is more rapturously exciting than the last. So: yeah, they found the Andalites.
Tobias: “...is that your new girlfriend?”
Ax, starry-eyed: “YUP, AND SHE’S PERFECT.”
I feel like I should buckle up for this one, probably, because the cover is Ax morphing into a (hawk?) and the tagline is “Andalites have reached Earth. Will Ax leave the Animorphs?”
I hardly know what to do with this, folks - the cover tagline is USEFUL and PLOT RELATED? Who knew it was possible? Anyway what I’m saying is this sounds like potentially a big one. Let’s dive in.
Chapter 18
Okay, yes, the plan is literally “everyone morphs into a bird and jumps out of the plane while it’s high up over the Yeerk building, except the last person driving (Rachel), who has to steer the plane down until a crash with the building is unavoidable, and then bail at the last second.”
As one of you pointed out in the comments on the last post, this book comes from a pre-2001 world, so “let’s just crash a plane in a populated area” doesn’t have quite the particular resonances it does today. But still! Don’t crash planes! Into buildings! Where people live and work! Or ideally, anywhere!
ANYWAY, this is just a full chapter of everyone yeeting themselves out of the plane one by one, and then Rachel attempting frantically to do bird morph in mid-air while plummeting down through the building’s roof after the jet. You know, relaxing stuff.
Chapter 14
V3’s chosen a giant oozy mud creature for his morph of the day, and as a bonus it radiates massive quantities of heat. I would LOVE to know how he chooses these morphs. Like, underwater morph, sure, that’s gonna narrow it down right quick, but how did he settle on this particular one to fight polar bears? Is there an app?
Whatever happened, it’s effective, because their polar bear forms are not great at handling heat, and they can’t make much of a dense in his oozy-mud situation Ax grimly and correctly points out that all-polar-bears actually WAS a bad plan here, because they can’t make up for each other’s weaknesses like this, they’re all susceptible to V3’s new horrible morph. So they go out the window.
