#dysphere

Dysphere: Electric/Fire, Solar Core/Motor Drive/Solar Power 80/110/75/135/55/80 Solar Core: This pokemon is affected by sun conditions at all times. If you look directly at a Dysphere's core, you'll be blinded. Its eyes are vents that release huge bursts of energy.

Short opinion: I can admit that there are some cool concepts in this book if I’m willing to overlook its three or four glaring plot holes.

Long opinion:

It seems like Cassie’s books tend to be either earth-shattering adventurefests that sweep the plot of the series forward in leaps and bounds (#4 and Ax, #19 and Aftran, #29 and the YPM, #34 and Aldrea, #50 and the Auximorphs) or they are extremely random asides that have no connection to the main plot and never come up again after they’re over (#14 and the andalite PortaPotty, #24’s Helmacron battle, #44 and the Random Australian Field Trip, #39′s buffahuman) and there’s pretty much no in-between.  And yeah, this book is both totally random and objectively bad.

However, criticizing this book also kind of feels like swatting a fly: the poor fly already has enough problems what with being small and ugly and disease-ridden and only having 28 days to live, so smearing it on the ceiling is just mean.  I’m happy to lovingly poo-poo on the Animorphs books that have a fair number of admirers among the fandalites but don’t personally appeal to me (#41, #30) and the ones whose issues have Deeply Unfortunate real-world implications (#40, #46) but kicking this one while it’s already down is like… like shooting a buffalo that never asked to get accidentally turned into a freak of nature and is just trying to go about its buffalo life without bothering anyone.  Bearing that in mind, I’d like to start by mentioning a few things this book does right.

The Good

Once again, this book shows off Cassie’s strengths.  She can run and keep running for a long time while also refusing to compromise her morals (no matter how idiotic the resultant decisions might be under pressure), she can work well alone, she can do nearly-impossible things with morphing, and when necessary she can fall from the sky in order to squash her problems flat on the ground.  Cassie is awesome in this book, mostly by being Cassie.

This plot also starts with an emergency right in the first couple pages, and the tension does not let up until the very end.  The plot-driving problem is a pretty simple one, but it does excuse the Animorphs’ needing to run and keep running for several hours.  The entire story takes place in just a few hours, which gives this one a very tight feel with no room for unnecessary frills.

There are a couple of mind-blowingly simple tactics—throwing the morphing cube across the roadblock, shoving several controllers off a cliff, dropping an “anvil” on the helicopter—that the kids use to get around the yeerks, which I always have a soft spot for because it makes it feel realistic that six children could figure out how to defeat an empire.  They might not be the Justice League (and portraying them as chessmasters of strategy would be silly and unrealistic), but they get by anyway through coming up with creative solutions to complex problems.

I love that their plan to drop whale-Cassie on the helicopter fails.  I have a huge soft spot for plots in which the heroes’ grand master idea simply does not work (something that happens a lot in this series) just because, once again, it feels realistic.  There are a ton of risks inherent in their plan: Cassie could miss the helicopter, Cassie could end up unable to catch the helicopter at all, Cassie could hit the helicopter but be wood-chipperified by its rotors, Cassie could hit the helicopter and survive but squash her friends on the landing… The fact that it doesn’t go according to plan just makes more sense under those circumstances.

Speaking of the ending, I freaking love this dialogue:

«You missed all the fireworks, Cassie,» Marco said, swimming circles around us. «One minute we’re watching this whale the size of a FedEx truck dropping out of the sky and we’re thinking, Uh-oh, she’s not big,enough to take down that helicopter and live through it—»

«You weren’t thinking it, you were screaming it,» Rachel said sweetly.

«Screeching like a bad set of brakes,» Jake teased. 

«Emitting a loud and continual series of high- pitched shrieks similar to an unauthorized entry into a Dome ship air lock,» Ax added.

Silence.

«Well, it was an accurate comparison,» Ax said defensively.

It’s just so them.  We need a moment of lightness after the tension of the rest of the book, and the characterization is spot-on, especially because we can feel the giddiness of their relief that the helicopter is destroyed and they’re not all gonna die.  

If this book had found a different way to get there, the idea of having a nonhuman morpher explore the experience of humanity might actually be pretty interesting.  Science fiction has been all about exploring the boundary conditions of what it means to be human pretty much since Day One, and this series embraces that concept in spades with characters like Elfangor, Tobias, Aftran, Menderash, Toby, and Ax.  However, the buffahuman never does anything interesting or useful while it’s there on screen, and its very existence is rendered idiotic by the nature of its creation, so this book doesn’t exactly capture the same degree of uncomfortable meditation on human nature vs. human culture that, say, The Experiment does.

The Bad

The Andalite’s Gift called, and it wants its plot back.

Seriously, though, this exact same premise—the yeerks can detect morphing energy, and the only way the kids can keep from getting caught is through an elaborate game of keep-away—has already been explored, and better, in an earlier book.  

It would also make a fair amount of sense for the yeerks to make a second attempt at using a veleek, or a second pass at destroying the local forest, or to reuse any of their plans from earlier books.  Instead we get them arriving at a similar place through using Helmacron tech, which would fit better if there were any hints at all in #24 or #42 that the yeerks had access to Helmacron tech.  Which there aren’t.

Not only does this book present approximately the same conflict as MM1, but it also offers the exact same resolution: drop whale-Cassie on one’s problems.  Couldn’t the ghost come up with anything better than that?

«You had an aunt who tried to kill you with her pincers?» Rachel said, giving me a playful nudge. «Boy, and I thought Tobias’s family was bad.»

IS IT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE TO CRINGE SO HARD THAT YOU COLLAPSE INTO A BLACK HOLE OF SECONDHAND EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE WRITER?  Seriously, what even is this line?  Why would Rachel even think that Cassie’s aunt would be hiding out in the woods in the first place?  Would she SERIOUSLY make a comment like that about Tobias’s abusive relatives?  Doesn’t Rachel already know Cassie’s family well enough to make the question “which aunt” (assuming charitably that Rachel actually wants to know) the more logical one?  For that matter, wouldn’t “are you okay” be a better fricking question to ask your best friend who just survived a near-death experience?  

Why does Cassie consider the buffalo “human” if it has morphed one?  

Rachel makes a really straightforward argument—that the buffalo is no more a human than she is a grizzly bear—and that should basically be the end of the discussion.  Jake makes the really straightforward argument on top of that that the buffalo could get them all killed/captured if the yeerks decide to infest it, and again that should be the end of the discussion.  Cassie doesn’t balk at predators killing seals to stay alive (#25), and she understands that sometimes you have to let a deer die to save a human (#9), so it makes no sense whatsoever that she is that obsessed with saving a creature which has the means to kill them all.

Also, Cassie doesn’t consider her ant-copy “human” like 15 pages later when she stomps it to death, and she doesn’t consider herself a wolf-human hybrid, so WHY does she keep insisting that the buffalo is a person?  It’s just idiotically unCassieish.

Also also: no offense Cassie, but this book ends with you killing at least two or three humans who are inside that helicopter.  When you factor in the yeerks, that is four to six murders at minimum and possibly as many as fifteen to twenty depending on the size of the chopper.  What makes buffaChapman more worthy of life than those people are?

Three words: deus ex seagull.

Tobias’s brief explanation about the sheer gross horror of birds sucked into jet engines is not sufficient setup to justify a seagull happening to meet an untimely end AT THE EXACT MILLISECOND it needed to do so in order to stop Cassie from getting food-processed, Marco and Tobias from getting eaten by sharks, and the others from getting squashed or shot to death.  

I’m actually a fan of the Animorphs getting accidentally assisted by real animals, since it fits well with the theme of the books, but the animals’ existence has got to be justified somehow by the plot.  In #27 the presence of the random-ass whale whose DNA lets them morph squids is justified by Crayak’s meddling, in #4 the random-ass whale who saves their butts from Visser Three is explained by their own desire to save it from sharks, in #36 the random-ass whales who try to help them out only to get shot by the Sea Blade are attracted by the calls of other pod members, my god I am only just realizing how many random-ass whales there are in this series… Anywhoo, the presence of the plot-saving seagull is not remotely explained by anything that happens at any point earlier in the book.  Couldn’t the author(s) have left out one of the 70-odd scenes with the buffalo sadly wandering around and thrown in some kind of setup for this ending instead?

The Ugly

That’s not how the morphing cube works.

In #1, Jake picks up the morphing cube inside Elfangor’s ship and only mentions that it feels “heavy;” he doesn’t mention the “tingle” that other people also describe when acquiring the ability to morph until he’s touching it at the same time as Elfangor.

The rule about needing to have one morpher touch the cube in order to “pass on” the morphing appears to hold true throughout the rest of the series.  David carries the cube around for a while but again doesn’t get the zap of morphing energy until he touches it at the same time as Ax (#20).  Tom doesn’t appear to be able to morph until after the battle in the hospital garage, given that the yeerk makes no attempt to acquire or use any of the oodles of hork-bajir or taxxon DNA lying around even when injured; presumably the yeerks later passed the ability from Alloran to him (#50).  The narration’s a little ambiguous as to whether Tobias is touching the cube at the same time as Loren when she gains the ability (#49), but Cassie or Rachel definitely has to be holding the cube for any of the Auximorphs to get it (#50).  

Point being, Cassie is definitely not touching the cube at the time when the buffalo brushes against it, and probably not when the ant crawls on top of it.

That’s not how acquiring DNA works.

If all it took was brushing against someone to pick up their DNA, then all the Animorphs would be able to morph their parents, their friends, various taxxons and hork-bajir, family pets, stray cats, head lice, baby goats from the petting zoo, skin mites, the school nurse… etcetera.  For that matter, Ax and Tobias would also be able to morph Alloran by now, which is the kind of incredibly useful morph that I’m pretty sure the series would have mentioned if one of them had.

The series mentions 700-odd times that acquiring DNA requires deliberate concentration on the part of the morpher.  Why would any self-respecting buffalo in a dominance-fueled rage be thinking “man, I should really try and shapeshift into that human over there”?

That’s not how morphing works.

Morphing requires concentration.  Jake first describes the process as “So I have to, like, meditate on becoming a dog” (#1), and any time the kids’ focus is interrupted, they’re unable to continue morphing.  The most interesting example of that is when Marco can’t morph normally at all because he’s so freaked out over his dad remarrying (#35) but the series mentions time and again that anything from pain to sudden noises can interrupt the process enough to sabotage it.  We’re supposed to believe that a buffalo was capable of directing sustained attention to an abstract task in order to morph, when no mammals other than humans have shown signs of this ability?

More importantly, morphing requires focusing on a mental image of oneself as the desired animal.  When first explaining it to Jake, Tobias says the key is “forming this mental picture of [the animal], right? I thought about becoming it" (#1).  When talking Marco down from nearly being stuck in morph, Cassie says “Focus on the picture of yourself. Form the picture in your mind. Let go of the fear and focus on the picture of your own body” (#21).  WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT AN ANT CONSCIOUSLY CHOSE TO PICTURE ITSELF AS A CASSIE?  

Morphing also doesn’t happen accidentally.  The only times we ever see involuntary morphing are when Rachel has allergies (#12) and when Ax has brain-appendicitis (#29).  So unless that one buffalo and that one ant both happened to be suffering from illnesses that led to hallucinations, this plot makes no sense.

That’s not how ants work.

The narration of the very scene in which the ant morphs Cassie describes all the ways that it would be pretty much impossible for an ant to imagine itself—and only one self—as a human being.  If an ant cannot wrap its little hive-insect mind around the idea of an independent consciousness, then it also should not be able to wrap that mind around the idea of only changing the one body it happens to possess into something different like a human.

Luckily for that one ant, it’s apparently an estreen, since it chooses to demorph just its pincers while keeping an otherwise human body.  Yes, ladies and gentlebeasts: THE ANT IS AN ESTREEN.  Why.  Just… why.  

Just as they are, or if they had the morphing power? Are the Animorphs also around? So many variables!

In many ways my mind resists the idea of adults taking on the Yeerks instead of the teenagers we got. Animorphs is so fundamentally about war destroying childhood that it doesn’t feel remotely the same if you put adults in their places. 

post is deleted, thank you!

i vaguely remmeber that it was terfs sending those asks

done already!!