Liylac-Pantherra-Untsya

"Just tell them we're Animorphs." "Tell them we're what?" "Idiot teenagers with a death wish."

THE ANIMORPHS30 ZINE IS HERE!!!

(And thanks to @gros-chat-fait for this beautiful cover art!!)

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series, creators of the fanbase have come together to bring you a zine of nearly 200+ pages (at which point I'm not even sure we can call it a zine anymore! The correct term at this point would be anthology!), filled with art and writing.

You can download it as a PDF here, or if you just want to view it without downloading, it's available on Canva here.

Currently I'm still working on options for getting a printed release, but self-printing is still an option! Stay tuned—there should be a self-print mirror available shortly (I'll just need to change some links to QR codes, among other things).

And Ax is like, "Buh?"

And Tobias explains and is like, "So, that makes it my family honor too, right?"

And Noorlin is like, "Forlay is going to blame me for this. I don't know how or why, but this will somehow be my fault."

And later, Marco will be like, "Who knows, maybe he got the monster-fucking gene from her side of the family."

And Ax punches Marco in the face, but while his technique is better than you'd expect, he still has weak Andalite arms.

@nordicninja Aaaand Avatar the last Airbender

And like, okay, true! But also consider: on this particular front, AtLA is good at this because it is a solid 8.5/10 on the FMA side of this scale.

(The 8.5/10 isn't a critique of AtLA, which is an excellent show on all counts, but it doesn't quite measure up to the FMA threshhold here simply because of the limitations of being an American kids' show. It can do the thing, but it can't foreground the thing or spend five seasons of anime/27 volumes of manga meditating on the ravages and implications of violence, because it's busy also being aimed at 10-year-olds and about other stuff too.)

Witness:

You could defeat the enemy, if you killed him. Your allies say you should. It would work.

It wouldn't even make you a bad person -- not here, not now, not in these circumstances. Of course you wouldn't be "as bad as they are," that's bullshit. Putting down a single mad dog does not equal literal genocide. FFS.

You could do it. You should do it. It would work, and isn't that the most important thing? To stop the horror? In the light of all the sheer destruction and evil at play, your own personal lily-white rejection of culpability is purely selfish. Isn't it?

But, god, you don't want to. You don't want to kill. The whole point is that life is important, is sacred, is worth protecting. You haven't been forced to yet. You keep finding ways around it. You've seen enough death. You don't want to do it.

Here and now, if you did -- it would fix the problem. It would fix things! It would save the day! The world would be inarguably better. You know this!

You know this. You know it because the world will not stop telling you this. Everything you've seen, everything you've been taught. Everything the people you love and respect say to you. And it's not a lie, it's not made up, it's true -- killing, here, in this one case, would help.

Why is the world so set on forcing you to kill? Why is this how the world works, that a child (you're not as young as you were when you started, but you're a child, you were a child, the first time somebody assumed you would someday simply have to be a murderer) gets handed a weapon and made to use it?

We are using the rules that the world set. We are using the rules that the genocidal maniac set. They are the same rules, because there's a reason genocidal maniacs are able to come to power in the first place, because the world is built in a way that violence works.

You know this. You're good at it! You're skilled at violence. It's how you've come so far.

But.

((and you know, the only reason you're able to have these thoughts, is because other people have already killed for you. will kill for you again. will wear the blood on their hands to save your life. somebody else is taking it so you don't have to, and you do not get to forget that.))

But maybe, if you're skilled enough. If you're good enough. If you can find a third option. Maybe, maybe, if you are just clever enough, if you're willing to risk losing entirely, you can do more than save the day.

Maybe you can rewrite the rules. Maybe you can rebel, not just against the genocidal horror villain about to doom the world, but against the entire world in the process.

If you're good enough to find the loophole -- to master the magic -- to put everything you've ever learned into practice. If you can find another way. If you can prove that another way exists.

Maybe you get to do more than close the door on one evil.

@thoughtful-collections Could you go into the Animorphs side of the child soldier question? Obviously they do kill and I think one character even kills many of the yerks while they are defenceless and justifies it as a necessary step to win. I suppose that series is saying there is no avoiding murder/killing/getting your hands dirty in war?

Yesssss

Look, there are a lot of child soldiers in the genre, whatever 'genre' that may be. Some kill easily, thoughtlessly, like any action movie star. Some have Important Moral Lessons on how killing makes us no better than the bad guys. Many of them get their very own generous plot device get-out-of-jail free card: either they have some form of captivity that their opponents get sent to at the end of a fight and we never have to think too hard about false imprisonment without trial (Steven Universe; at least one instance of Power Rangers?; Batman and Robin generally; etc), or, their opponents aren't really people, so it doesn't actually count as murder (media as diverse as the Persona series all the way back to good old Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Sometimes, through sheer force of will, grit, and absolute unparalleled protagonist energy, child soldiers get to avoid killing in a world that makes it a genuine option.

Animorphs looked at all of those options, and it said, nah.

You want a war story, little child? Okay, the books say. Here's a war story. This is war.

Here's how it starts: you're goofing around with your friends one night. You take an ill-advised turn. You watch somebody get horrifically murdered.

No, you can't save him. Yes, you can save yourselves. Get used to that. Get used to it so, so fast.

You're on a trolley. Up ahead are two tracks. On one side: a dozen evil aliens. On the other side: your brother. Make a choice.

Good job, you didn't crash the train into a cliff. By the way, did we mention there are a thousand more tracks? More people tied to each and every one?

You get to put your hands on the steering wheel. You get to drive the trolley. This is a gift. Make a choice.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

You can jump off the train, if you want. You don't have to be the one to steer. Maybe you'll even survive the fall. Maybe the friends you're leaving behind will be good enough to make sure they don't run you over on your way down.

Your mom is on one of the tracks, by the way. Your dad. Your sisters, your cousins. Your brother, still.

You don't have to steer. You don't have to do this. You can let the train take its course, you can let it plow through all of humanity. You can let it happen. You get to do that, if it's what you want to do.

Nobody is coming to save you.

On one track: the aliens have names, thoughts, dreams, personalities. On the other track: there are six billion humans on this planet today.

Every single option in front of you is a war crime. If you're lucky, you'll get to pick which one.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

It's fun sometimes, driving a train. When there's nobody in the way, for just a little while. When you can pretend you're mowing down enemies in a video game. When you can give into the rush of adrenaline and just be glad you have the skill.

Maybe, maybe somebody will come to save you. They'll take over steering. You won't have to choose.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

Who will they choose to hit? Will they care? Will they care enough?

You watch TV. You watch Xena, and X-Files, and Buffy. You can pretend to live in a world where your enemies are nameless monsters without souls, if you want. If that makes it easier.

Is it easier, to kill them soft and vulnerable and completely powerless, unable to fight back? Does that feel better than killing the ones hunting you down, weapons in hand?

You are looking for a loophole. You are looking, and looking, and looking for a loophole. You don't get to fight monsters without souls. You don't get to lock them up in tiny bubble jail. They are going to kill you. This is what you get.

It's you. You're the one standing here. This is what's happening.

Refusing to act is still a decision.

(There is a loophole, eventually. A third path. One of you finds it, eventually.)

(It would not have worked, without years of war first. It took you years of war to find it and if you hadn't killed so, so many, it would not have worked.)

You don't get to be good, in war. You don't get to save the day by sacrificing your own life and remaining morally pure. That would be too easy. War means dead bodies. That's what it means.

That doesn't mean you give yourself over to despair. That doesn't mean you shrug and figure the lives being spent don't matter. You don't get to throw your own moral code on the altar of heroic sacrifice and claim to be the real victim here. It never stops mattering. It will never, ever get to stop mattering.

That doesn't mean you never fight. It just means that when you choose to step up and fight for something, you'd better be goddamn sure it's worth the cost, because chances are somebody a lot less powerful than you is going to be the one to pay.

On one track: Your brother. Your cousin. Seventeen thousand unarmed, helpless enemy agents.

On the other track: a new train's barreling straight at you and all six billion members of the human race. All-out slaughterous war. Giving over the steering wheel to the last hands that decided the best answer to their problems was genocide.

(REFUSING TO ACT IS STILL A DECISION)

This feels a little bit like that ask about the Animorphs in the plot of The Martian (funny how those books resemble each other...) in that I think it comes down largely to how each of them handles isolation:

Rachel would full-on volunteer for the mission. That scene with Grace standing in front of his class and realizing some of them are going to starve to death someday, only to literally run out of the building to go beg Uncle Sam to let him help... that's got Rachel written all over it. Injustice enrages her, and she will not let it stand if there's a single breath left in her body. Coma her, STAT. Sol's dimming every day, so get the lead out! That said, once she's out there, I don't know how equipped she would be for the linguistic challenges. She's the type to get fed up with fiddly work, and (though Weir yadda-yaddas it) we know it takes months of experimentation for eridian-human contact to go beyond meaningless and contextless single words. I would hope that she and Rocky could get there eventually, but I honestly don't know what she would do if she got fed up enough to quit.

Tobias would excel under these circumstances. I'm less certain he'd volunteer, since he might be a little more "what has humanity done for me lately, huh?" But he's exactly as much of a little freak ecstatic at the idea of first contact as Grace is. He would bring that boundless curiosity to every known problem that Grace demonstrates, and he'd be exactly as open to unconventional solutions like "turn the alien amoeba into food." This challenge is perfectly suited to Tobias's skill set, in that it requires being extremely open-minded and also willing to hammer away at a problem while keeping dozens of competing hypotheses in mind. And it's not like the project needs volunteers for its crew.

Jake is, as usual, screwed. He's the Animorph least able to handle isolation well, and he doesn't have the radical open-mindedness he needs to communicate on a level playing field with aliens. He works best on the fly, when other people ask him to do things and he rapidly comes up with imperfect but confident solutions. He might get talked into volunteering, (again, nice not necessary) but he also wouldn't do well. In this case failure would probably look like spending a few weeks or even months attempting to communicate with the Eridian ship, before giving up and moving on to look for a solution alone. And then dying in space with no solution to send back.

Ax is Grace, obviously. We've seen him stumble his way into effective communication with an alien species, we've seen him end up isolated away from his people and his home, and we've seen him figure out how to combine his own knowledge with unfamiliar technology to make novel solutions. He's not as wildly curious as Tobias (or Grace) but he's duty-bound enough to make a solution work even if he didn't choose to put himself in that situation.

Marco would absolutely be the guy that security has to sedate in order to get him in the capsule. And then once he got out there, he'd spend a long long time fucking around trying things before he figured out a solution. I don't remember how much of a ticking clock there is in PHM (I know the relativity math is vague on purpose) but Marco's capriciousness might end up being an issue here where it would be an asset if he's stranded on Mars. That said, he'd admire Stratt's vision even as he curses her name, and he'd set to saving Earth with a ton of bitterness but almost no reluctance. However... I'm pretty sure Marco would keep right on going back to Earth rather than turning back to save Eridian. Marco looks out for his own, and only his own. If you're lucky enough to be on that list, you've got a smart-as-hell force of nature on your side. If you're not? Too damn bad.

#Marco wouldn't go back to save Eridian#but what I got from the movie#(haven't read the book)#was that Grace didn't go back for Eridian but for Rocky#and that was the point#like Marco#Grace isn't the kind of person to do things for worlds#But he becomes someone who will risk his life for a friend#I dunno if Rocky & Marco would form that same bond#But if they did#Everyone lives nobody dies#Also am stumped on Cassie though

Valid. I honestly don't know if Marco would bond with Rocky that hard, but if he did then you're right he'd probably go back for Rocky.

How much does the Yeerk Homeworld know and support the space-faring Yeerks? How much of a split is there on the homeworld? We don't really know. Because their is an Andalite Fleet parked at their homeworld ready to blast everything.

So that also means that Yeerks like Esplin 9466 Prime that were born on the Yeerk spacecraft don't really have the option of just going home if they decide that they don't want to conquer other species. We know that some of the other Yeerks in his training program didn't like it but they really can't just leave.

Like, what do you even do in that position? You could do your best to be nice to your Algerian neighbors, but that won't stop them killing you first chance they get because you're on their parents' land. You could try joining that rumored Anti-Colonial League, but that wouldn't necessarily help Algeria and might even accelerate the rate at which Germany takes over the entire planet. You can't go back to France — it's occupied, you've never been there — but staying in Algeria makes you part of the problem. You could join the military, because at least then you're protecting your own, and you're helping prevent Germany wiping out Algeria entirely... but likely as not you'll get sent to "quell unrest" in Algeria instead.

Pre-contact Yeerks weren't as primitive as the limited description we get (from the notoriously biased Andalites) paints them. We know they used clubs to attack the Andalites, but that doesn't mean much - WE use clubs and we also have atomic bombs, and Andalites describe both weapons as primitive without making any distinction between them. The Yeerks already had their Council of Thirteen, their Vissers, and apparently an understanding of the idea of conquest. They're also very, very good at mixing technologies they acquire from others - see the Dracons, which are a mix of Shredder and Ongachic particle beam technology. See the fact the Yeerks start building their first Blade Ships within two Earth years of leaving their homeworld. The Yeerks were already very capable, they just didn't have any ability to travel the galaxy.

So I imagine the Homeworld is kinda built up. Their philosophies, even early on in their empire building, point to a civilization that is organized around centralized rule and the absolute power of individuals who lead and races having specific destinies. I don't think Seerow taught them that, I think they already had it. They had also already "tamed" their environment, mostly by killing predators and causing ecological collapse. That takes time. Their mindsets also most closely mindsets humans developed in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, e.g. absolute domination of the environment, jingoism, fascism, the right to build empires through strength and conquest, etc. I hate to say those ideas MUST accompany the technology from those time periods, but I really do like the idea of the Yeerks being a spaceborne British Empire, and the Homeworld basically being a wetter version of London. Kandrona is their tea.

Anyways, take all of this with a grain of salt, I am sleep deprived.

How much does the Yeerk Homeworld know and support the space-faring Yeerks? How much of a split is there on the homeworld? We don't really know. Because their is an Andalite Fleet parked at their homeworld ready to blast everything.

So that also means that Yeerks like Esplin 9466 Prime that were born on the Yeerk spacecraft don't really have the option of just going home if they decide that they don't want to conquer other species. We know that some of the other Yeerks in his training program didn't like it but they really can't just leave.

Like, what do you even do in that position? You could do your best to be nice to your Algerian neighbors, but that won't stop them killing you first chance they get because you're on their parents' land. You could try joining that rumored Anti-Colonial League, but that wouldn't necessarily help Algeria and might even accelerate the rate at which Germany takes over the entire planet. You can't go back to France — it's occupied, you've never been there — but staying in Algeria makes you part of the problem. You could join the military, because at least then you're protecting your own, and you're helping prevent Germany wiping out Algeria entirely... but likely as not you'll get sent to "quell unrest" in Algeria instead.

How much does the Yeerk Homeworld know and support the space-faring Yeerks? How much of a split is there on the homeworld? We don't really know. Because their is an Andalite Fleet parked at their homeworld ready to blast everything.

So that also means that Yeerks like Esplin 9466 Prime that were born on the Yeerk spacecraft don't really have the option of just going home if they decide that they don't want to conquer other species. We know that some of the other Yeerks in his training program didn't like it but they really can't just leave.

Like, what do you even do in that position? You could do your best to be nice to your Algerian neighbors, but that won't stop them killing you first chance they get because you're on their parents' land. You could try joining that rumored Anti-Colonial League, but that wouldn't necessarily help Algeria and might even accelerate the rate at which Germany takes over the entire planet. You can't go back to France — it's occupied, you've never been there — but staying in Algeria makes you part of the problem. You could join the military, because at least then you're protecting your own, and you're helping prevent Germany wiping out Algeria entirely... but likely as not you'll get sent to "quell unrest" in Algeria instead.

My thoughts:

JAKE: Would get in touch with his more artistic side in his rare moment of downtime

RACHEL: Would always morph a bear arm first and foremost so that she couldn't immediately start punching enemies

MARCO: Would morph in such a way that always managed to "mysteriously" end up closer to Rachel (for ex when shrinking to a cockroach with Rachel on his left, most changes would happen in ways that made him lean/fall left, no one knows why, such a weird thing)

AX: Would unfortunately have one more "proof" in the superiority of Andalites over humans.

TOBIAS: Interesting question: is estreen-ness tied to mental focus or genetic luck? Would he still be an estreen once trapped in hawk form? Regardless, I do think it would have taken him a little longer to get trapped, because he his go-to when he got stressed would be to more hawk wings on his human form for a couple minutes and it would help calm him down, and he might feel less trapped overall.

What do you think?

I love all of these. And now I'm fascinated by the idea that Tobias just doesn't try that hard at morphing, and most of his apparent delay behind the others is just down to lack of motivation. Because it certainly fits.

Growing up I did a lot of reading, as many kids in the 90s did, and thusly, much like many 90s kids, I was exposed to the wonderful world of Animorphs.

So OBVIOUSLY that meant I had to read the recent graphic novel adaptation. Which I honestly quite enjoyed for the most part.

It had some minor issues here and there, but it excelled in depicting the mid-morph process, (great job!) conversely it really struggled with it's basic character design, and because of this, nearly all the human characters had a terrible case of same face.

Everyone having the same chubby heads and big round noses, regardless of age, gender or race, and all of them constantly making that stupid DreamWorks eyebrow meme face that I found really unfitting for some characters. I was frustrated by it, because it really detracted from what I felt was otherwise a really solid adaptation.

So when I saw this piece of official art included in one of the later issues, I thought 'Wow, that's super cute, I just wish the characters looked a bit more like themselves.'

(Included here is the original image.)

So I decided to redraw it, using a mix of their book descriptions and their cover models. I really wanted to blend the aspects of both, as the covers are just so instantly recognizable to anyone even vaguely familiar with the series, I just felt I would be remiss not to.

Also I wanted to add Ax! Now the group is truly complete!

War Prince alloran