How do I convey the overflowing excess of books in the nineties ? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled complete into the check lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gingiva and nail clippers. Their pages were whitish and delicate as Pringles, their covers therefore bright they were about despicable, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints adenine soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing .
What were they about ? What weren ’ thyroxine they about ? There was a link novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one link novelization of a link television show of a Hollywood movie. There was an highly pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries ( fictional, presumably, though it wasn ’ t wholly open ). There was a omnipresent best seller that was just two hundred pages of a fiddling male child being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother ; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “ You insatiate little book-suckers, ” the publication diligence sneered, chucking chicken soup at a twelve newly identified subtypes of soul, “ you ’ ll read anything, won ’ triiodothyronine you ? ”
For children ’ south books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an ceaseless glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “ series ” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly footing by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the syrian pound. Often they came with a release bracelet or bangle, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public ( by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs ) —and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable stool .
But then there was Animorphs .
There ’ s a certain sound that certain millennials make whenever you mention Animorphs in front of them—a shrill inhalant, a piano “ Oh ! ” No other series from that earned run average elicits such a reaction. Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club are met with self-deprecating laugh and hyperbolic enthusiasm : “ I must have read a thousand of those ! ” But for Animorphs we go quiet, we ’ ra suddenly twelve years old again and we ’ re suppressing our excitement lest we be teased for caring besides much. “ Oh, ” we say—a hushed confession— “ I loved the Animorphs. ”
Loving the Animorphs has never stopped being faintly embarrassing. The serial ran from 1996 to 2001 and consisted of fifty-four books plus spin-offs, all credited to “ K.A. Applegate ” ( in world, they were written by the husband-and-wife team Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, with ghostwriters taking over after Book 25 ). Like Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club, the Animorphs books were a intersection of the scholastic industrial complex, which meant that they looked like disposable crap. If you didn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate read them, it ’ randomness probably because you were repelled by their bum cover art. It was always a magnetic declination on the lapp theme : a homo adolescent “ morph, ” thanks to primitive computer graphics, into an animal. By stages, a floppy-haired nineties blank son became a jaguar ( Book 11 ) ; a pretty black girlfriend became a butterfly ( Book 19 ) ; a stately blond became a giant squid ( Book 27 ). If you flipped the pages cursorily, you could make the transformation happen and un-occur via crude flip-book illustrations on the bed right corner of every page. The entire series seemed to be merely a showcase for these software-generated images, which even then weren ’ t particularly impressive .
If you ’ vitamin d already judged the books by their covers, their premise was improbable to change your mind. even nowadays I hesitate to explain it, because it just sounds so dazed : earth has been invaded by alien slugs called “ Yeerks ” that slither into the human ear, take up permanent mansion in the brain, and control the host ’ second soundbox from within. No one on the planet is aware of this extraterrestrial threat except five teenagers—Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias—who have handily acquired the charming power ( I mean, you know, “ alien technology ” ) to transform into animals. Somehow, in between school and homework and trips to the promenade, our heroes find clock time to wage conflict against the Yeerks, a job involving frequent travel to the Amazon rain forest, the North Pole, the thick sea, forbidden space and, once, the Late Cretaceous period. Their secret is never discovered by anyone. besides, they have an alien buddy named Ax, a blue centaur who ’ s obsessed with cinnamon buns .
Look, I know ! I know how it sounds. And even, against all odds, the books were great. They were dark and witty and thrill, infinitely imaginative and achingly sad. They made me laugh out forte and cry myself to sleep. I ’ ve been thinking about them for twenty dollar bill years .
I ’ m not the only one. In recent years there ’ s been a brace trickle of belated critical care to Animorphs. Those articles, this one included, bear the burden of proving that the series was not disposable crap—even though, yes, it looked like disposable stool and sounded like disposable stool and was made into an inexplicable live-action Nickelodeon TV testify that was disposable bullshit. There ’ s something about this intellectual exercise that regresses us all to petulant twelve-year-olds at the supermarket, insisting to our doubting parents that these books are not stupid, they ’ re educational and wholly worth $ 3.99, please, please, please !
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consequently, today ’ randomness Animorphs apologias parcel a tendency to assert that the series wasn ’ t in truth about five teenagers morphing into animals to fight aliens—that it was very about something else, though there ’ s no consensus on precisely what. Matt Crowley of the AV Club argues that the whole thing was a metaphor for puberty. Meghan Ball of Tor and Lindsey Weedston of The Mary Sue play up its feminist message. Tres Dean of Geek.com claims that Applegate was a “ prophet ” whose books anticipated 9/11 and the Iraq War. many fans, including me, find a compelling transgender narrative in the character of Tobias, who chooses to remain in the soundbox of a red-tailed mortarboard everlastingly rather than continue living as a male child. In drafting this essay, I briefly considered making the argument that the series was in truth about the feel of being a child inappropriately entrusted with an adult privy .
none of these readings are wrong. But none of them feel precisely right to me, either—not as an explanation of what made the books capital. I don ’ thyroxine think we loved them for their allegorical resonance. We loved them because they were precisely what they appeared to be : a series about five teenagers morphing into animals to fight aliens .
It felt so substantial. No count how absurd the plots became, the write constantly remained absolutely true to the aroused and psychological reality of the characters ’ position. Each book opened with the narrating Animorph ( a term the characters themselves disliked and used only with wincing irony ) addressing the proofreader directly. “ My name is Rachel, ” they began, or “ My name is Marco ” —and then, apologetically, they explained that they couldn ’ thyroxine tell you their last identify, or their accurate historic period, or their placement ; it was excessively dangerous. They shouldn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate be writing this at all, actually, but they were risking it because the destine of the world was at stake. The sense of urgency was palpable and convincing ; it was a signally effective narrative proficiency. ( denim Guerrero of LitHub admits to believing, as a child, that the books were nonfiction. )
Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias exist in my memory as real people who endured ineffable horror. I may not remember the details of the Animorphs ’ trip to the rain forest, but I recall with absolute clarity the crushing apprehension suffered by Jake, the loath leader with the weight of the earth on his shoulders. I don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate remember why Rachel had to morph into a giant squid, but I will never forget Rachel herself, the democratic fashionista turned unstoppable killing machine—how much she loved the war, how profoundly disquieted she was by her own newfound bloodlust, how her fellow Animorphs increasingly relied on her to do their dirty workplace even as they quietly speculated that she was a sociopath. ( She ’ s the character who tends to get raise nowadays as a feminist character model, a flatten oversimplification that I think does her a disservice. ) I still can ’ thyroxine decide whether Cassie, the exalted pacifist, was brave or uninitiate for sympathizing with the Yeerks and occasionally trying to compromise with them. I silent choke up when I think of Marco, who discovered that his mother ’ sulfur torso was possessed by the highest-ranking Yeerk and that he would have to kill her. ( “ I love you, Mom, ” he whispered as he pushed her off the cliff. My affection ! ) I could talk about all of this everlastingly .
But if you didn ’ thyroxine read them in the nineties, I have little hope of convincing you. The books are long out of print. You can dig up crumbling old copies here and there, but I doubt you ’ ll go steady past the sans serif baptismal font, the barrage of sub–Star Trek sci-fi babble ( Kandrona rays, Gleet BioFilters, Z-space transponders ), the cartoony onomatopoeia littering every page—hawk-Tobias screeching Tseeeer !, Yeerk laser blasters going TSEEEW ! TSEEEW !, our heroes constantly screaming “ AAAAHHH ! ” Can I in truth demand, in full conscience, that you read fifty-four of these ? even if you did, it wouldn ’ thymine retroflex being twelve years old at the supermarket in 1998 and reveling in the swerve abundance of it all. These books were designed for that twelve-year-old, not for you. They were made to be disposable .
To be an Animorphs sports fan today is to witness for a cult religion that will never gain another convert. We live in a different world now, a universe in which publishers pay a single writer to write a fine-looking show sawhorse of a hardbacked once a year, rather than employing dozens of ghostwriters to crank out unconvincing assembly-line paperbacks all day long. In such a universe, Animorphs will always fall brusque of the aesthetic standard set by Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. This is unfair, since by many other standards it ’ s the superscript series. It surely deserves its own movie franchise. But as the Animorphs knew besides well—as all twelve-year-olds know—life international relations and security network ’ thyroxine fair .
The mystery of Animorphs is not why it ’ s been forgotten, but how it managed to be so well in the first identify. How did it happen that the Scholastic factory, grinding out reserve after script after book, squeezed out a rhombus amidst the ember ? What made Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias leap off the page and stay with us constantly ? I ’ m about to get a graduate degree in fabrication and I still don ’ thyroxine know how that character works. I know it ’ s no likelier to happen in literary fiction than in science fiction, or children ’ sulfur fiction, or fiction written very promptly for a faceless corporation. equally far as I can tell, a novelist has identical little dominance over the animateness of her characters : either they spring to liveliness on their own, or they don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate. I ’ m grateful to Applegate et aluminum. for showing me that all you can do—all any writer can do—is write. The stay is stranger technology.
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Read earlier installments of YA of Yore here .
Frankie Thomas is the writer of “ The Showrunner, ” which received special mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her writing has besides appeared in The Toast, The Hairpin, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She is presently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers ’ Workshop .
