"We do have places like that," Loren said, smiling sadly. "There's a place we went once, back when I was little and my dad was still with us. Before he went to the war. It's a place called Yosemite. We camped out in a tent. Yosemite is like that."

<And did you stick small white cylinders in your mouth and smile at the beauty of it all?>

"Small white cylinders?" Loren looked puzzled. Then she laughed her strange but delightful human laugh. "You were looking at cigarette ads! Those white cylinders are called cigarettes. They're bad for you, actually. Very bad for you. They make you sick."

<So… so humans go to beautiful places and use sickening cylinders? Why?>

But Loren was laughing too hard to answer.

So in all the animorphs books up to 40, everyone says that Jake is the de facto leader, that it just happened sort of naturally, But in Megamorphs 4 Jake remembers it as "some doom pronounced by Marco, because 'that's the way it has to be.'"

So I'm thinkinghead that Jake and Marco remember it as it really was, that Marco said to him at some point when the others weren't there that he has to be the leader otherwise it wouldn't work and he accepted it because Jake.

Today's book is 'the visitor'.

The winner for 'the invasion' was 'Where is my mind' by 'The Pixies'.

The battles described in the series take place over three years.

Toby Hamee is born well after the beginning of this time.

Doesn't this means that she's like, 2 years old at the time of Books 50-54? I understand that she's a prodigy but is she also aging at a rate similar to dog years?

I’m on my nth re-read (I tend to do one about every 5-7 years or so….) and this time I’m paying more attention to details, I guess.

In book 7, when the Ellimist interferes when they’re in the yeerk pool, and they go back to being eaten in roach morph by a Taxxon, they have to demorph IN THE YEERK POOL like a cafeteria type area, and RUN AS HUMANS through the yeerk pool. Rachel morphs to grizzly while running, and the others also morph while working their way towards the dropshaft.

There have been other instances too although I don’t remember the exact details, but this is the most hard to believe recent one.

I’m not trying to nit-pick KA’s writing, but am I missing something or imagining the yeerk pool wrong? Like is it less crowded than I think? Are there more places to hide behind while running to the dropshaft? Are they killing everyone that sees them? Do we just assume some controllers DO know but none dare tell visser 3 he’s wrong about them being andalites?

What song yall think would fit the ending of book one well?

For years I've thought the existence of the time matrix is weird. It was supposedly created by the Ellimist, but why? Why would he make something like that? He doesn't need it, and it's not part of the story of how he became the Ellimist... unless it is. Here's my theory:

When Crayak tricked Ellimist so that he fell into that black hole, something about the event transformed the Ellimist into who he became. What if that event also transformed the black hole? What if the Ellimist didn't mean to create the time matrix, it just happened, and now even he can't destroy it? Thoughts?

*Note: apparently similar fan theories have popped up in the past, so I'm not the first to think of this, but it does mean I could be on the right track. What do you think?

Recently I've been buying the Animorphs audiobooks and listening to them at work. I've really have been enjoying them for the most part. At this point I've heard thirty-six books, three Megamorphs books, and three of the four chronicles books.

Now I'm on #37 The Weakness. This time I did something different. I cracked out my real #37 to read along when I'm at home. I still have the entire series from when I was a teenager. I'm on chapter 8. I read the entire chapter at home and started listening to it when I got back to work.

But I was dragged out of the immersion when Rachel gives the order to attack the book store and suddenly cutting to Cassie chiding Marco for messing with the Blue's Clues display. I looked at the book again when I got back home and found that two whole pages were cut from the audiobook.

What the heck?! Why? Was it cut for time or something else? Am I the only one that noticed this?

Now I have to follow along so I can find out what else was cut.

Edit: On a hunch I bought the Kindle version. It skips those two pages too.

Reddit has no chill nor sense of Irony.

Which book/s, if any, would you consider to be filler? I just finished reading #47 - The Resistance and I found it to be.....kind of underwhelming. I liked the idea of showing the parallels between Jake's present day scenario with his ancestor's time in the Civil War. It's a great trope and it was used well. But the book as a whole seemed kind of dull. Filler material.

Yeah, Tobias and Jake reveal the existence of the Animorphs and aliens in general to some regular people, which was pretty cool. But other than that, there was nothing else that really matters. Even the mention that they can now morph while wearing jeans and t-shirts came and went quickly and I'm fairly sure that it's never mentioned again. Even the free Hork-bajir having to relocate was pretty much zipped over.

5/10

Boy oh boy did I love this book! Being a 90's kid I was all about Jurassic Park so the kids jumping through time to when Big Rex was king was awesome. If Tobias was reading this I'm sure I'd hear a <Yeah but we were in Cretaceous Park>.

This book started off strong because Marco was watching the news and saw people in need and was like 'ugh I better get the Animoprhs together and help them'. I thought the way they showed the divers was super fun and at the end of the book people thought the diver was just hallucinating.

Another Sario Rip was very cool. The first time we see that is when Jake is jumping back and forth in the jungle and this time it was at an instance they jumped through time. I hope we get some more and deeper explanations of it because I think its strange that Jake didn't know about it but died to jump back out of it. (please don't spoil anything if you reply to this point)

I LOVED the aliens races on Earth because its such a fun though experiment of what could have been on Earth but just obliterated during an impact like that.

The dinosaurs were dope, the little note on the last page was fun too with the correction to the Spineosaurus.

The Nesk saying "eff you" and pushing the comet into Earth was a nice touch to create a time loop of the kids having to part of the historical event.

One really great thing is seeing the evolution of the kids. Seeing Cassie become a leader was awesome. Seeing Tobias make the hard decisions was very cool and Jake finally got a break. >!I can't wait until the group finds out Tobias is half Andalite!!<

Don't spoil anything but I wonder if the Nesk are related to the Yeerks.

The main problem: these simulations run really, really deep. They robustly, realistically respond to arbitrary input. They simulate whole environments, whole solar systems, down to the microbial level, at least. Flora. Fauna, with a broad spectrum of intelligence. People. Cultures are born and die among apparently-sentient species, organically, in direct response to the actions of the players.

When Ellimist parts the clouds, the Pangabans look up and express fear. That's a realistic reaction for a species who doesn't possess the concept of something not-gray in the sky. When a religion around a weapon-granting sky god springs up a million years later, Ellimist never remarks on the fact that they're, in a sense, completely right. They do have a sky god whose express, acted intent was to make them evolve technology—he literally, purposefully granted them weapons.

And they fast-forward the simulation right as the Pangabans start to freak, sure, but Ellimist and Inidar choose to do that. There's no indication they can't let it keep playing back at 1x speed indefinitely; this is the fundamental time resolution at which the simulation runs.

The stated "goal" is minimalism, but the simulation is so realistic, so fine-grained in its detail, and so unrestricted in what it allows for, that it will react to any change in exactly the same way the real world would. You can apparently, effectively, do anything you want. Ketrans like Menno, have even begun homebrewing their own rulesets and rampaging around their toy universes like malevolent gods.

The game's actual goal is extinction. Victory over your opponent is wiping out their species. The whole fixation on minimalism is just an elegant cultural garnish, whether it's encouraged by the designers or not. The book mentions the actual win condition so sparingly (or in other words, the Ketrans lavish so little attention on it), that it fades into the background. Genocide is rendered... invisible. Automatic. Boring. Assumed.

The Capasins apparently mistake the games for reality, as if the Ketrans are committing wanton, playful, routine genocide against real alien species. Well, for a simulation this advanced, with people and cultures so sophisticated that they can react to any stimulus the way real people and cultures would—aren't they actually... kind of... a little bit... on some level... real? From a certain perspective, are the Capasins really wrong? Maybe they knew exactly what the Ketrans were, what the game was, what the context was, and they shut it down anyway.

Thoughts?

So I'm making my way through the series for the first time and I could swear in the first half of the series their original bodies couldn't heal from damage, but now that I'm in the 30's and 40's they mention morphing and demorphing to heal. Is this a well known continuity error I'm just now learning about? Like in Megamorphs: The Time of Dinosaurs, Tobias injures his wing and Rachel has to patch him up using torn off clothing and sticks instead of just morphing to heal himself. Why does Visser 3 not just morph when Ax bites him as a rattlesnake? Am I going mad? Is the series gaslighting me rn???

This is something I have wondered forever. Can Cassie morph a gigantic anteater? Opinions go!

The blurb of Visser mentions that Eva had a successful career. What do you think her career was? I suspect she met Peter at university. However her personality comes across as that of a self made woman.

In one of the David books Marco mentions his mother wasn't born in America.

Which central American or south American country do you think she originated?

Mexico is obviously the most likely answer, but El Salvador, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, Bolivia and Chile all provide interesting backstories.

Under what circumstances do you think she migrated to America?

Do you think Peter & Eva where older parents, and therefore Marco's only child status was due to Eva being a geriatric primigravida (to use old fashioned terminology, the more modern term is advanced Maternal age)? Or do you think they where younger and his status as an only child is due was either a choice or some other cause? I suspect the evidence leans towards the latter as Edriss wouldn't have selected a host who wasn't quite fit enough to be taken off world.

What year do you think she was born?

Do you think her marriage to Peter survived after the war?

What do you think became of her after Marco's disappearance?

In the Andalite Chronicles Elfangor can't speak the Taxxon language, in the Hork Bajir Chronicles Aldrea presumably had time to learn the Hork Bajir Language before ending up a Hork Bajir nothlit (although, ultimately she could have solely used thought speech even after she nothlit as a Hork Bajir since she wasn't trying to be sneaky about what she was). And then there's Aximili who is distracted in all his classes but when he gets stranded on Earth he is immediately passable at english.

So, how do we think Ax learned english?

Edited to add two relevant quotes from the Andalite Chronicles

"The Taxxon body had Taxxon instincts, but not a Taxxon’s life learning. So I couldn’t speak the Taxxon language."

"I had no experience speaking with sounds. And even though I still had the translator chip in my head, it could not interface with my Taxxon brain."

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It is said that one member of the council of 13 is the Emperor but know one knows who and this is to prevent assassination. However shouldn't the council themselves know which one of them is the emperor? What would prevent the other members from assassinating the Emperor?

Here's a little drawing of Rachel. Please excuse the fact that I'm not very good at drawing humans. This is probably one of the best human drawings I've ever done.

Also I'm not really sure how to add pictures on Reddit so sorry if this shows up wonky.

Whereas "a number of separate images depicting an animation" is an "image sequence."

A "sequence image" is all on the same page, where "image sequence"s are each a set of several images that (on a whole) depict an animation.

Are there any dvds or Blu-ray? Somewhere to stream it in 4k or at least HD.

I'm almost done with my Animorphs fan art jacket :) Tobias is gonna be the hardest part