Did anyone here read Animorphs? They were my favorite books in elementary school. What I wonder, is why I liked them. They were hastily written with poor prose, frequent and blatant continuity errors, and minimal character development after book 8 or so. But I ate them up. I went to the store the day they came on the shelf each month, and read half of it on the ride home. I know I'm not the only one who liked them, so hopefully it's not that I had bad taste in books. My question is: what made these books so good, despite all its ubiquitous flaws? If we can tap into that, it could make us better writers. I have my opinions, but I want to hear yours first.
Yup, I read tons of Animorphs as well. I think it was mostly that it was very well-imagined. I love animals, and the imagination put into deciding what it would be like to be each animal was mostly what was amazing. It was the situation and so on that really made it worth reading, rather than the style or characters. That said, I loved Marco as well, because the lines she gave him were often very funny to a 10 year old, though I can't say why now - probably just because until then I'd read very few sarcastic characters, so at that age horrible sarcasm seems funny still. I bet I'd want to punch him if I read the books now.
I'd have to re-read them to figure it out. I was amazed when I read somewhere that Applegate said that the fans would notice if she broke her hand. I interpreted that as having no room for things like writer's block. Remembering the plot, it's probably tapping into some popular fantasies. It's up to kids to save the world, they have super-powers that let them turn into animals, adults and people of authority are all potentially the bad guys. It was rather imaginative. They had to use their powers in creative ways, just turning into an elephant and stomping everything was rarely the answer. Then there was connection to different cultures, but just enough information to light the imagination.
I own every single book, including the Alternamorphs. They were my main obsession and it kept helped me keep my sanity. It also introduced me to the concept of fanfiction.
i loved them, my school used to have a book club. when ever they used to crop up id snatch them up and read them in general in less than a couple of days. how many were written in then end? i moved schools and they didn't have a book club so swapped over to the Redwall novels Redwall and Animorphs were both my guilty pleasures, haha.
I loved the animorphs when I was young! I'm not sure why I liked them, but if I were to speculate, it may have been something along the lines of that they seemed to do things in the story that I hadn't read before. Slimy silver slug-like aliens that could take control of ANYONE (even you). The danger of staying in a morph added suspense. The realization that the risk was genuine when Tobias stayed in the falcon form to long and became stuck was was really interesting to me at the time. Changing a character and carrying that on without everything going back to normal is something I hardly ever see to this day. I absolutely loved the way that they got around how he couldn't transform anymore, and how he was able to then transform back into a human. At that point, he had a choice, to stay a human and go without the shapeshifting, or keep the shapeshifting and stay "non-human". However, now when I look at those books, I can hardly read any amount because they're so bad.... :S
Red-tailed hawk, if you want the animal nerd's opinion. I read some of those books, but I was beginning to lose interest towards the end. Did they ever fix him? Because they did have a cube of animorph power for a while... Surely it's a matter of a few hours between Tobias morphing back into himself, getting stuck as a boring human, and then just getting the morph power back again that way? I don't remember what happened and I never read the end. Just lost interest and suddenly had no will to keep reading. Even tried and I just didn't *get* it any more.
The morphing cube wouldn't have been effective on a nothlit (someone trapped in morph). The Ellimist, an omniscient alien that some compare to Star Trek's Q but is more closely related to Babylon 5's Lorien, gives Tobias his morphing ability and takes him back in time so that he, in hawk form, can reaquire himself as a human. So it creates a bit of drama for Tobias from then on as he has the choice to return to human form and become trapped yet again.
I never got into the whole Animorph series as a kid, but I did have a very similar experience with the Goosebumps series. I always ventured into the local library looking for the choose your own adventure versions of the books, and always cheating at them. I think it was the freedom of choice which interested me at the time although I vaguely remember half of the choices being superficial.
Wow, I was reading this series probably up until my junior year of high school. I guess it is probably my favorite science fiction series, probably because there were some fantasy attributes. But I have to agree. The writing style was shabby. She just continuously pumped out the 50 or so books. I loved every one. I bet I'd still love them if I read them, just for nostalgia sakes. Rachel was one messed up girl.
I remember reading one where a girl who was normally this really mobile and aware animal (like some sort of cat-like creature) was changed into a worm for some reason. It was interesting how this transformation affected her emotionally, not being able to see or move, living life in darkness. At the end she transformed into a butterfly, and again there was the shift in description of her experience. Granted, the books are not extraordinary, but there was indeed suspense involved as I wondered whether she would be stuck as a worm forever, whether her friends would find her in time before she died as a butterfly with a short life span, etc. It was cool. I think most kids resonate with the idea of "If you were an animal, which one would you choose to be" idea. I think it was different and great for those early years of identity formation.
I went through a short-lived Goosebumps stage. I think it was short-lived because, unlike Christopher Pike books, which I had discovered around the same time, Goosebumps weren't really scary. They were many times these far-fetched stories that would never in a million years ever happen. I remember reading them and thinking that they were most likely made for younger kids who weren't quite ready for the real scary books. Then again, I ditched Christopher Pike after most of the plots of his books all ran together, and discovered Alfred Hitchcock, which was way more fun!
