Fic Review: r!Animorphs: The Reckoning
Can you write fiction that's *too* rational? (No clickbait needed: after reading this, you'll see the answer is definitely yes)
Animorphs is a nearly forgotten property. It's one of those enormous franchises that become passé almost immediately after they end and their fanbase grows up. Most of the time, people at least recognize it due to its… let's say unique cover art, which you can see above.
It didn't help that its only chance to go mainstream, a TV show, turned out to be so low budget1 and poorly managed that it failed to appeal both to the fans and a wider audience. And the target demographic was children, so if kids that watched Goosebumps2 thought it was garbage, you know it had to be truly special.
Probably due to its obscurity, I never got into Animorphs as a kid, and only read it last year.3 I found a book series written by people who clearly trusted their audience to understand “adult” sci-fi, with a lot of care put into the mechanics and worldbuilding. Despite that, the medium was still short books sold at Scholastic book fairs. They couldn’t avoid some jarring forced references to everything they thought kids liked at the turn of the century (from South Park to The Offspring). Additionally, each installment had to re-introduce the cast and stakes just in case it was a reader’s first book, so, barring some exceptions, there was little room for complex plots and character motivations.
A source material with some dumb elements is usually the perfect target for a rational fic, or a rationalist fic. The definition for the former is a bit loose, but the latter is easy, because the quintessential example is also the most famous “ratfic” in general: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. In short, rational fics try to flesh out the setting and make it self-consistent, avoiding plot contrivances. Rationalist fics try to make them didactic as well, depicting role models thinking their way through hard problems in detail, in hopes of helping the reader become a “better rationalist”.4
I thought it worked for HPMOR. If the original Harry Potter was a steak, HPMOR used just the right amount of rationalism to cook it to medium rare. r!Animorphs: The Reckoning, by comparison, took the Animorphs steak and turned it into a house fire.5
Before we talk about the failure modes of rational fiction, allow me to try to summarize this byzantine 655,000-word labyrinth of plans and postmortems. While reading it, I legitimately had to keep an exhaustive log of every event that happened in the story, if only to avoid being completely lost if I took a small break. Fortunately, you don’t need to see that.
Let me just trim everything that doesn’t matter, compress the rest, contrast with the original novels… here we go:
The starting point of the series stays somewhat the same as in classic Animorphs, though it takes place in modern times instead of the 90s (this was a really bad move, which I’ll get to later). Five kids stumble across a benevolent alien, Elfangor, as he's escaping Visser Three, an evil yeerk commander. Elfangor shares morphing—a power to turn into any being you’ve touched—with the kids. As he dies, he charges them to defeat the yeerks, who are alien slugs that conquer worlds by getting into brains and controlling bodies.6
This sets up the main conflict of the series: human kids (and after they find him, a young andalite) have to fight an alien army with cool animal-themed powers. In canon, they turn into rhinos and tigers and fight laughably weak aliens, sneak into enemy bases while morphed into flies, commit war crimes, things like that.
But, for the fic, things diverge here. Duncan Sabien’s r!Animorphs doesn’t respect the stations-of-the-canon of the original novels, and it doesn't leave any characters recognizably intact, except maybe Cassie, and oh boy does the plot write around her.
Jake, everyman kid learning to be a leader, now has a soft superpower where he can travel social situations with incredible ease by modelling the opponent in his head and just being really convincing. To be fair, he was a good diplomat in the original, but I don't know why it had to be a "best in the world" talent here.7
Marco, originally comic relief, is now a rationalist genius stereotype, the de facto leading man of the ensemble. This means he's less of a Jake toadie and the two have some fun conflict sometimes, but it also means he’s very annoying.
Cassie, heart of the group, now dies 5% into the plot so the author can (mostly) avoid accounting for virtue ethics and can focus exclusively on utilitarianism, completely missing the point that one of the main Animorphs themes is people finding common grey ground over those black/white topics.8
Tobias, originally perennial bullying victim stuck in the body of a falcon,9 now wears a leather jacket and is generally angsty and edgy instead. He lives in an orphanage where he's besties with the original new cast member, Garrett, who is younger and autistic. Garrett's autism is a superpower because it makes him a savant with thoughtspeak, which only he can use as a weapon. Tobias never turns into a falcon, which saves us from really boring and repetitive sentences about thermals and air currents. I think that justifies some big changes to his character (even if, honestly, he could have just been cut).
Rachel remains unchanged (beyond an accelerated arc from schoolgirl to bloodthirsty badass), but that just means she becomes the stock incompetent person to make the rest of the cast look smarter.
Esplin/Visser Three, the main antagonist, is the smartest being in the universe due to a quirk in how yeerk mechanics work, and his only goal now is achieving immortality, which he’s needed to escalate a lot to achieve since most yeerks and all andalites have wanted him dead since he was born. In the original series, he was a complete idiot and the only reason Earth wasn't taken over in seven hours.
But these characters changes are not enough to justify the massive changes to the plot. In addition to the former, everyone gets an agency upgrade as a byproduct of changing how morphing works at its core. As a reminder, in Animorphs, they touch an animal, acquire it, and can later turn into it. Here:
You can take things with you into morphspace (so you're an animal on the outside, but the pocket dimension that holds your original body also has more things in it). In the original, you could only take skintight clothing into it, and that was presumably only because the authors didn't want to write a thousand scenes of naked children.
Morphing also had a two-hour hard time limit, after which you’d get "stuck in the morph" permanently. Here, the limit is based on how much mass you take into the morph, and the kids learn to refresh their morphs often so it’s a non-issue.
Morphing in the original is basically magic, your brain is magically controlling the animal you become, with no applications beyond that. Here, the tech is derived from yeerk biology, with the kids connected to a “fake yeerk” that is controlling the copied biology. When the kids morph into a sentient being and learn how to "turn on" the host body, they realize a clone of the being is fully conscious and they can talk with or interrogate the clone at will.
If you get stuck into a morph of a person, you've basically cloned them, with the clone waking up and controlling their new body. I predicted in advance that this would be used to bring people back, and it does really get spammed around the last third of the story, with the Animorphs convincing dying hospital patients to morph into their morphs of their dead friends, and Marco making thirty clones of himself, as a treat. You may think this is a batshit turn of events, but this is actually on brand for canon.
You can now morph as Luigi.
If you're thinking that maybe tacking all of this onto the already somewhat complex Animorphs lore might be too much, I fucking WISH that was it. Let's move on. We know the kids get their hands on the morphing power. What happens next?
These changes mean that animal guerrilla tactics don’t need to become the Animorphs’ one tool, they can, in fact, just shoot people, and bring an entire group into a morph and deploy them wherever they go.
This is their first big mission with those powers: they get into the terrestrial base of Visser Three, and successfully manage to expose the secret yeerk invasion to the immediate vicinity. The alien villain then naturally responds by dropping an asteroid from orbit, destroying the entire town and preventing anything from leaking. Yeah, we’re escalating to space weapons within the first section of the story, and it only gets worse.
But wait, you’re asking yourself: the kids live in that town. Wouldn’t they all die? Well, no, because the Ellimist stops time and intervenes.
Have you ever watched Star Trek? There's this Q character whose gimmick is being an all powerful trickster god. He's a jerk so he refuses to get the main cast out of sticky situations. He just causes them sometimes, as moral tests for humanity and such.
In Animorphs, his equivalent is The Ellimist, a mysterious alien that often gets the kids out of sticky situations and removes consequences with unpredictable, nigh omnipotent abilities. He's known for liberal embodiments of deus ex machina, and only ever feels like Q in a few of the "non-canon"10 books that don't matter.
His abilities are technically balanced by the equivalent evil guy Crayak, who plays a role in the single, really good standalone book The Fight,11 and almost nowhere else. You could write both of them out and the story would be better. The entire Animorphs plot is just a minor battle of a cosmic war to them.
When I read Animorphs largely in preparation for reading this, I consoled myself by thinking "well, I bet the rational fic won't keep this awful fucking character around". The rational fic kept this awful fucking character around. He’s more prominent. His chess match against Crayak12 sets up everything that matters in the fic, and is the focus at its climax, while in canon it’s left an unresolved backstory.
The story almost taunts us by saying things like "well he's all powerful and unpredictable, so we’d better not think about him, there's nothing we could do if he turned out to be evil or misaligned to our goals". Despite this, he stubbornly continues to exist, and is acknowledged in each character’s thought whenever they plan anything. Did the Ellimist plan for this? If this is all a design of a nearly omnipotent being, do the Animorphs even need to do anything? Something weird just happened, was it the Ellimist or Crayak?
Imagine those last three questions, repeated around four hundred times, and you’ve got a pretty good summary of this story. After he reveals himself to the kids, the Ellimist stops time and offers to get a limited number of kids away from the meteorite, which is all but one. He says the energy he can spend without giving Crayak too much of an advantage is very limited. They have a pact to each spend the same amount of energy, you see. Cassie, the most “lawful good” of the kids, chooses to be the one that stays behind.
The other Animorphs, alive but homeless, grieve Cassie and become eternally paranoid about Ellimist plans from there on. The plot moves to its next stage, the most annoying part of the book: international conflict.
The Animorphs obviously can’t have quaint local missions now that their hometown exploded. So they decide to escalate and go global, contacting presidents of world nations, informing them about Esplin. Esplin counteracts this by going public and admitting to everything, or at least everything the Animorphs can prove, spinning everything in a positive light.
You see, Yeerks are naturally blind. They can only ever experience the world by taking over other beings. They weren’t even doing anything that bad, and you can’t prove they were because, yes, they might have destroyed an entire county from orbit, but—
This nonetheless leads to an uneasy surrender from most of the world powers, since no one wants to piss off the alien that can throw meteorites at them, so the Animorphs of course have to become terrorists afterwards and take over the fight.
But here’s where we need to hit the fast-forward button. The central conflict in canon and throughout the first two thirds of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning might be “save Earth from the yeerks”, but as the story progresses all of that is abandoned for more Ellimist versus Crayak bullshit. For your benefit, I’m going to omit the summary of the “international arc” that follows. Beyond letting the kids discover more facts about morphing and yeerks, most of which I’ve gone through already or will later, there is not much that alters the status quo or touches on the story’s themes.
There are however some cool interludes and scenes here and there, like a Yeerk AMA. Interludes were the few rays of light in this dark period.
Odysseum asked:
>But there are people both near where Alexandre lives and near where he works that I enjoy being around.
Waiwaiwait—like, you enjoy interacting with them as equals? Or you get some sort of raw sensory pleasure because e.g. they’re cute or they smell good?
Regardless, that’s really creepy. I guess I was still thinking of the invasion as something far away, something the Americans have to deal with. But if you’ve got sleeper cells in France, you probably have them in Germany, Japan, Russia, Brazil … *shudders*
ZombieAsInAlanis answered (2 days ago):
Re: the invasion: well, there’s like a handful of sleeper agents, and 7+ billion humans. You’re probably safe (for now).
Re: friends: more the former, although the latter’s definitely in there a little bit. “Equals” isn’t exactly the right term, since I’m obviously lying to them about extremely important things, but… I don’t know, I respect them as interesting people?
EDIT: Look, I can see the thread below confused and upset a lot of people, so I’m going to start over and try to sum it up in simple terms. tl;dr nihilist moral relativism, maybe? […]
The battles between the Animorphs and Esplin escalate until he has legions of directly-mind-controlled bodies and the Animorphs have a fleet of alien ships.
During the final arc, Crayak’s howlers show up. These are evil aliens that enjoy people’s suffering while stuck in a childlike mindset with absolutely no empathy. Thanks to the Visser, our protagonists are barely holding on as it is, which means the howlers can land on Earth and start massacring humanity unopposed. In the original books, the problem the aliens present is solved by hijacking a howler’s “genetic memory” and inserting memories of people being good and stuff,13 so Crayak has to destroy them to prevent the entire species from turning on him. Here, that doesn’t work because it’s rational fiction, feelings absolutely cannot be allowed to be part of the solution, come on, read the room.
The only way to kill them is surrendering to Esplin in exchange for help, so he can release a quantum virus and genocide the aliens as is Animorphs tradition. But then Esplin is killed by Crayak. I guess the new only way to kill them is getting their hands on the Ellimist’s power. Fuck, the Ellimist just got killed by Crayak too. Luckily, this is all part of his plan… yet again.
The Ellimist, before he died, granted his power to Rachel to use while Crayak is distracted (i.e. stopped power-saving like they both do), thinking his opponent dead. Rachel goes into the supercomputer that runs both beings’ powers (long story), and finds an upload of Esplin there. Turns out Esplin had one last fallback plan, and this is it, though he’s not happy about the shape it took. Esplin has always wanted immortality, and Rachel has always wanted to not die in general, like humans tend to do, but they can’t trust each other, so after a long conversation they reach common ground.
Much earlier…
"What do you want to do, then?"
"Honestly?" Jake asked, looking the tiniest bit vulnerable. "My best idea was to get everyone in a room together. I mean, if this is a story—or a game, whatever—if what really matters is people's choices, their decisions—" [despite this foreshadowing, this is a very ironic quote for a story where morphing mechanics minutiae and battles take up 80% of the word count]
You see, Esplin was the only yeerk to ever control an andalite. As we learn through the book, this union resulted in a much smarter being than intended by the yeerks, with the two minds merging more deeply. One of the side effects was that the andalite he’s controlled intentionally sabotaged his rationality before being integrated, to fuck him over, specifically the escalation and compromise-related parts. Rachel helps him notice that blind spot, and how it has hindered his plans for immortality more than helped.
Esplin finally gives up and agrees to the only logical plan, which is fusing into one being to ensure both their utility functions are fulfilled. They do that, beat Crayak, and use Ellimist powers to fix as much as they can. The story ends there, plus a mandatory fake-sequel-bait mini-chapter to mirror the one in the original series.
Maybe some of these events sound cool. And the final arc (around the last 20% of the book) is pretty well handled, compared to the 80% before it. What’s wrong with that 80%? Well, I’m sorry, I’ve got a List, and would you look at the scrollbar?
Let’s start with the writing style. Jesus christ, this is legitimately the most annoying prose I've seen in a work of fiction.14
Here's a particularly egregious example, which incidentally showcases the big issue with Aximili’s alien viewpoint chapters:
[A SECOND SUN RISES ABOVE THE HORIZON, ITS BRIGHT, BLUISH LIGHT MIXING WITH THE DEEP MAGENTA OF ITS COMPANION, CHANGING THE COLOR OF EVERYTHING BELOW…
I thought, and the warm chorus around me received the thought, reverberated with it, refracted and reflected it back so that even as the idea emerged from me I could see it in its entirety—from the outside, from behind, from every possible angle. I could see the ripples of its impact, the way it changed the chorus and was changed by it, and I could feel those ripples, too—was both a part of the experience as well as its witness, was both myself and the others even as their different voices rose and fell in response—as I rose and fell in response.
It was—
Harmony.
(Synchrony.)
‹Synergy.›
‹Balance.›
{—warmth—}
It was all of those and more, eib and dain and something deeper, not merely Aximili and Temrash, nor even a simple union of the two, but also Elfangor and even—incredibly—the shadow of Tom Berenson, some dain-like corner of Temrash that had shaped itself around the human boy with such fidelity that now it thought it was him.
(It was unprecedented, at least as far as Temrash knew. But then, there had never been such a transfer, mind to mind after days of coherence, without the dissolution of the sharing in between. Had they returned to the pool, the shadow would have been washed away—would have been broken up, distributed, absorbed and reintegrated, losing all definition in the process. But somehow, in the leap from Tom’s head to my own, the delicate imprint had been preserved, enough for it to think and feel if not quite rich enough for it to truly live and speak.)
And we were together, all four of us—present with an immediacy I would not have thought possible, the Yeerk neuro-flesh having somehow slowly bridged all of the gaps, worn down all of the barriers, until it now allowed every part of my experience to touch every part of theirs and even forged new connections between parts of my mind that had never before been adjacent.
None of us understood how it had happened—whether it was a fluke, a random accident, a trick of the Ellimist, or whether this would always happen between Yeerk and Andalite—
(—and thus had happened once before—)
—or whether it had somehow emerged from the choices each of us had made, was in some strange way a decision, our own doing.
I cut off the quote early, before it goes into multiple parentheses per paragraph. The breathless, punctuation-heavy cascade never stops. I have the stats to prove it, by comparing it to other easily accessible pieces of web fiction, with a percentage of emdashes/word:
Unsong: 233k words, 652 emdashes, once every 357 words.
This review: ~5.5k words,16 9 emdashes (four of which I will soon use for humorous purposes), once every 611 words.
r!Animorphs: 600k words, 16933 emdashes, once every 38 words.
While Fargo and Unsong place them conservatively, where they’re needed, r!Animorphs uses them everywhere. That’s 3-6 times per average paragraph—so—pretty—damn—frequently.
This is probably not an intentional writing choice, since there are only very rare exceptions to this style. The author just has an awful tic that will be forced on us for 600k words. The worst part is that I understand the reasoning that led to the spam being allowed. Rationalist (and to a lesser extent, Rational)17 fiction absolutely loves putting readers directly in the midst of the main characters' thoughts, something that superficially seems a good fit for Animorphs, a series where each book is narrated by a different character in a different style. And people in stressful situations do think a bit like the quote above, jumping from thought to thought, so this could be a cromulent stylistic choice. But as I'll expand on soon, situations are always stressful, so the sacrifice of readability for style is permanent, and, I'm sorry to say, it's not remotely worth it.
I can’t move on without mentioning Garrett, who is one of the only characters to have a specific non-emdashed narration gimmick, due to his autism (yeah, I know…). He gets like four short chapters to work with in the entire fic, so it doesn’t get as annoying as the quote below might imply, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
And they never quite make it to the GOLDEN MEAN, which is ϕ pronounced “fee” and which starts out as 1.6180339887 but actually is IRRATIONAL and goes on forever. But you can see how they kind of zigzag closer and closer and in fact you don’t even have to go very far out before you get two numbers that match all the way out to the TEN BILLIONTHS place (196418 and 121393).
And me thinking that MRS. STOKELEY was a PROMISE-KEEPER was like comparing 1 to 1 and getting 1, and TOBIAS saying that MRS. STOKELEY was a LIAR was like comparing 2 to 1 and getting 2, which was still wrong but closer, and the more I watched MRS. STOKELEY the closer I got to understanding what she was really like and there were always surprises but usually smaller and smaller surprises as time went on but the key thing was to never ever ever forget that I didn’t really know for sure and that just because somebody had never done something before didn’t mean they wouldn’t all of a sudden.
And I don’t know if I would have ever figured that out without TOBIAS’S help because I certainly hadn’t figured it out before and I had been thinking of everything as being BLACK OR WHITE in a way that was kind of like tying my own shoelaces together because it meant I was getting UNPLEASANT SURPRISES all the time and that meant I was pretty much always stressed-out and low-functioning. So it’s kind of like TOBIAS saved my life because I don’t think I would have had a very good life the way I was going.
Finally, I mentioned earlier that the story takes place in the modern day. Let us look at what the author replaced the 90s references in the original books with. Keep in mind these are all quotes from the climax of the story, not some downtime chapter.
then the closest thing there was to an actual god had been torn apart right in front of me, torn apart just like Elfangor had been, and then the Visser, too, like—like Thanos had snapped his fingers or something,
…
But also Crayak hadn’t used the Howler ships as rams—hadn’t Holdo maneuvered us,
…
The thinking had been that we could pull a kind of seven Potters diversion—send multiple Rachels in multiple directions, forcing Crayak to split his attention
I’m choosing to save you from the Rick and Morty reference. Now that we’ve gone through the style of the story, let’s take a look at the tone and scope.
You could probably see this coming from my description of character changes, but Marco losing his role as comic relief is just representative of a larger problem. Animorphs is a surprisingly dark story, but, beyond maybe the very end of the series, knows how to balance humor with darkness, returning the characters to a familiar place at the end of every big arc, allowing the kids to show their friendship with one another.
r!Animorphs categorically refuses to give the characters downtime, or comedy, or fun.18 I suspect it’s because this is a rational fic, and the author can’t picture a Realistic Alien Invasion with moments of levity. Throughout the entire first half of the story, I remember a character talking about how they found flying fun, and that's it. Most thoughts we're privy to are depressing, stressed, shameful or coldly planning. There's no room in the story for anything but the grim darkness of the situation. Many scenes are characters lambasting their beloved friends for not thinking extremely, extremely complex situations through in the heat of the moment.
Some of it is due to the scope. I’m sorry for continuing to bring up HPMOR, but in that fic, the story concerns the tiny wizarding world, really only Hogwarts. That’s a place with many rules and constraints, with existing powerful/neutral authorities preventing anyone from rocking the boat too much, giving the writer a lot of structure to build on.
In the original Animorphs, the antagonist is an idiot who’s obsessed with the specific town where his homebase happens to be, and only rarely does he make an effort to gain a foothold elsewhere. So we have all the right elements for a Hero’s Journey: an easy “mission generator” that creates a new adventure every novel in a new location, and a comfortable home to return to between books.
In this fanfic, the scope might as well be the whole world at all times, sometimes the whole galaxy. The writer and readers need to constantly keep factors like presidential approval, war logistics and international cooperation in mind, instead of... fun things.
I will say though, r!Animorphs tries its hardest to account for every possible complexity to the point it might as well be its mission statement. It tries. But I don't think it's fun to read, or ultimately realistic. It’s one of the Classic Ratfic Problems: if a writer could come up with a perfect plan to take over the world from an occupying force, they'd be using it, not writing it down.
This reminds me of a diegetic review from a completely different work of (arguably rational) fiction, The Northern Caves:
Other Mirrors, the latest and longest installment, is undeniably imaginative; it probably has the most dizzyingly elaborate plot ever featured in a work of children's literature. Does that make it complex? No, it makes it complicated. And between those two little words is a world of difference.
Salby's plotting builds hierarchically, inexorably, unforgivingly. Every new development serves as scaffolding for the next, and any idea or event, however minor, however many pages or books ago it was introduced, can serve as fodder for new narrative contortions. The result is a reading experience that recreates with eerie accuracy the atmosphere of the schoolroom. Salby demands academic devotion; everything will be on the test. As Other Mirrors demands from its reader a certain drab, bureaucratic cast of mind, no child who is fully a child will enjoy it; as its sensibility never progresses beyond that of a precocious adolescent, no adult who is fully an adult will tolerate it. Salby has written what is perhaps a definitive test of abnormal development, but he has written a dreadful novel.
Of course, authors are allowed to write dark, cerebral fanfics of their favorite stories, and I don’t agree with the fictional quote above that it has anything to do with maturity. But, even within the gradient of darkness, there aren't any comparatively lighter moments. Unlike Worm, a notoriously dark story popular in the same circles, this fic lacks any celebration scenes or downtime whenever characters accomplish something big.
But this is as much a problem of tone as it is of pacing, the next item in our review agenda.
"I don't trust this," said Marco. "I don't trust this, and I don't get it, and—and I don't know what the fuck is going on, and neither do any of you, and I don't see what difference any of this makes. So sure. Fine. Whatever. We literally can't do shit about anything, so we might as well take yes for an answer. Meanwhile, we still have actual problems to solve. Like, for example, all of them."
r!Animorphs often has interludes between arcs, but they largely feature villains or "NPCs"19 reacting to something that just happened. This keeps the main plot in stasis until the next character focused update.
How does this work? Well, the story just timeskips to the next action or planning setpiece, switching characters. You just suddenly find out David (who is quite irrelevant to the overall plot, sorry for not mentioning him) has killed his father, or an alien ship has suddenly been shot down over Washington D.C. There's nothing leading into or from those events. The brunt of r!Animorphs consists of these prompt-response chapters, where you're instantly transported to a stressful situation and have to see how characters react to it. The characters start feeling like flawed robots, which is ironic because Animorphs already has those.
This doesn’t only apply on the macro level. The choice is made to not hide anything that happens during the chapters, which takes us to the perfect example of what a normal story would skip. A character has set up a mental confirmation notice to fire a death laser at their location. They need to think “cancel” every 30 seconds, the classical dead man’s switch.
‹Confirm O.R.B.?›
‹Cancel,› I said.
I turned away from the cockpit and into the open cargo hold, shivering as the night wind wrapped around me. I hadn’t exactly dressed for the occasion.
Should be fine. If you’re here for more than thirty minutes anyway—
Trudging down the ramp, I stepped off the dark metal and onto the rocky soil.
‹Confirm O.R.B.?›
‹Cancel.›
Slowly, keeping my steps as quiet as I could, I walked toward the two distant figures, barely visible as twin blobs of black, careful to swing wide around the invisible shape of their parked fighter.
‹Confirm O.R.B.?›
‹Cancel.›
This back-and-forth continues to show up throughout the chapter, even in the middle of the dialogue.
“Agents claiming to be Visser-Three-Controlled have been popping up all over,” the other Marco said quietly. “Mostly doing logistics. Funneling resources from place to place, repairing damaged infrastructure, some emergency response stuff—”
‹Confirm O.R.B.?›
‹Cancel.›
“—super well-coordinated, for the most part—we think they’ve got long-range thought-speak somehow. We’ve gotten reports of a few groups of them doing police work, first aid, search-and-rescue near the bomb sites—”
Any other writer would have stopped it long before r!Animorphs does, which is over 20 mentions in (I counted) and only when the character decides to blow himself up. There’s something to ratcheting tension by continuing to show a hidden bomb under a table as characters speak, but I don’t think it applies here.
Another incredibly annoying factor is how twists are delivered. They basically aren't. As we somewhat saw earlier, we read through the character’s entire zigzaggy thinking process... but a couple steps before the conclusion, they pause, maybe go "holy shit—”... and then the story moves on. The readers don't find out what they realized until they talk to another character, or maybe chapters later. If the story wasn't confusing and fast paced enough already, this makes it much worse by "teasing" the audience about it.
Needless to say, all these issues make r!Animorphs a hard sell for archival reading. In some long running TV shows, procedural elements are tolerable because you only see them once a week in real time. Not until you attempt bingeing House M.D. does it set in just how repetitive the show is. This story lacks that level of repetition (barring the O.R.B. thingy), but I posit the long months between chapters merely made both author and audience blind to similar macro-level issues, which become insufferable in the complete story.
But it’s not all bad. I’ve already mentioned the interludes, but one obvious improvement over the original is the magic system. Well, it’s technology, but you get what I mean.
Most of the new morphing abilities are cool, but one could argue they only amount to incremental improvement in logistics, movement, or weaponry. Morph Cloning is a whole different animal. Here’s Jake morphing into his dead crush to talk to her:
Her disorientation deepened as she reached for her muscles, her eyes, and found the way blocked, her body still and unresponsive. I said nothing, an odd reluctance tugging at the back of my mind, an unsympathetic unwillingness to help as she struggled to put together the pieces.
‹Wha—where am—what’s going—what?›
‹You’re a morph, Cassie.>20
I watched as the words produced a rush of understanding, followed—as always—by a spike of sickly fear.
Here it comes.
‹Am I—›
‹Yes,› I said bluntly.
I was being callous, cruel—noticed myself being cruel, and yet had no energy to spare to walk it back. Inside our shared head, the copy of Cassie withered, buckling beneath the weight of the revelation. I felt her despair as it welled up, thick and sticky and black—watched the frantic tumble of her thoughts as she searched desperately for words that she would allow herself to hear, to think, to say.
But on my end—
Only impatience.
Not the kind of impatience that motivates you to speed things along. Not the kind that makes you want to help. The kind that’s made up mostly of judgment, of annoyance—of waiting for the other person to screw up, to justify the contempt you’re already feeling. We’d been here fifty-four times before, the two of us, and the cut scene—
Again, in this fic, morphing is based on yeerk body snatcher technology. If you focus on allowing the copy to "wake up", you can rifle through their memories, interrogate them.
This adds some specific moral quandaries the original books lacked. The kids are truly worse than yeerks, creating and murdering people over and over, which they’re not shy about doing after a certain point in the story.
This happens early on, with Marco morphing a friend without permission or any excuse other than insecurity. What the original books would do here is say something like "we've gone too mad with power, let's agree to never use This One Cool Trick again". In this fic, the kids just agree that Marco made a mistake, but that the strategic value is too high when humanity is at stake. They just agree to each morph each of their friends in a group session, to clear the air and prevent their friend from becoming a pariah. They also agree to allow slightly more questionable uses, which leads to the quote above.
The ability is the source of a bunch of cool scenes: their new bread and butter "touch potential ally, interrogate them to see if they're trustworthy, allow them to join the team", morphing and interrogating their dead mentor Elfangor for war intel and advice. The kids even learn to morph slightly outdated copies of themselves so they can instantly demorph and “heal” wounds,21 but Jake gets stuck in an old morph once and loses a week of memories. He has essentially gone through a delayed cloning process, and the original is now dead.
I could go on, but really, I'd just end up retelling large sections of the fic again. This is one of the few changes that kept my interest going, and I'd hazard a guess many people just remember these aspects when recommending it.
Also, if you don't like ability experimentation, you're not going to like the beginning of the fic. It's not going to be timeskipped.
Finally, let’s take a broader look at the expansion of Animorphs canon. Methods of Rationality was far more about Harry badly applying rationality to problems and overcoming them than it was about Harry researching or inventing types of magic. This is usually the biggest complaint people have with the fic, maybe tying with "I want to punch this kid". While HPMOR did get quite a few recursive fanfics,22 they're often just sequels or building on the existing plot. Critically, there are few if any AU fics that simply "steal" things from the setting, because it didn’t add much that wasn’t critical to the story’s twists and turns.
For r!Animorphs, the writer worked really hard on fleshing out the setting and adding some cool tricks, only some of which I’ve gone over. Most interestingly, yeerks are also expanded.
Yeerk "pools", in canon, are a communal place where they must exit their hijacked body and rest every few days. In the fic, that aspect is preserved, but they’re also sort of temporary hiveminds, even beings upon themselves. Each individual yeerk “splits” from that "repository", and "updates" every time they go back into the pool. If enough yeerks have good human experiences, the pool can eventually become unaligned with Esplin's goal as whole, and this is in fact something that happens.
There are also more minor character details than I can recount. For example, giving all characters last names when they reveal themselves to the world, i.e. Marco Levy, who's also made gay for his best friend—which as a reader of the original books I can’t honestly say is a stretch—and naming the specific place the story takes place in, California's Ventura county.
You can implement most of these without significantly altering the direction of your story, so I expect this fic is or will be pretty fandom-influential, for the ten people still writing Animorphs fics.23 Garrett as a whole is pretty good too (yes, despite some questionable writing decisions), a good emotional core for the story with Cassie gone. There are probably some situations where he could be reused.
That’s the end of the good stuff. Let’s now be negative again and skip to the main thesis.
I don't think this should be considered as one of the “pillars” of rational fiction.
It showcases the genre’s worst excesses, almost to the point of parody. An escalation of complexity until the reader reaches a terminal failure of caring. No light moments, little emotion but stress and neuroticism. Large swaths of the plot becoming irrelevant at the end due to an ascension to a higher plane of existence (you wouldn’t think this to be a rational trope, but I could make a list).
It even lacks the didactic aspects. Despite seeing characters fail over and over, I don’t think I learned anything from r!Animorphs, besides some facts about dolphins I’d rather forget. Time pressure makes people act stupidly but also moves the plot along so it’s impossible to say if it’s good or bad? At least I learned elevator safety facts from Worth the Candle.
I just don’t get why it’s highly recommended. I have to suspect a huge part of the readerbase willingly chooses to only remember the cool worldbuilding details as the main core of the fic. No, the core of the fic is emdash spam as Marco or Jake stressfully thinks through a just-introduced crisis, only to trigger a timeskip to the next crisis.24
The painful part is that that core doesn’t even meaningfully connect to the main point of the novel. The Crayak vs Ellimist/Esplin vs Rachel conflicts have nothing to do with the logistics of how any of them got there. I haven’t even mentioned that Rachel got written out for half the story due to brain damage after a botched resurrection. She was only brought back at the end for the True Ending Moment, much like Cassie.25 That’s how jarring it all is.
It’s bad. There are good elements to it, but they’re tiny yeerks swimming in a giant pool of horribleterrible.
I think, in the end, the way to deal with having read a work like this is internalizing what it did wrong. If you write a ratfic in the future, you now know the failure modes. If you're a reader, you'll now be able to complain more effectively. And what else can you ask from a book? Oh, that’s right, an enjoyable experience.
Them's the breaks. Let’s take this as a lesson and vow to never be rational again.
You can read r!Animorphs: The Reckoning by Duncan Sabien at Archive of Our Own.
It's my understanding that the alien main character always stayed in human form, and the awful decision to use live action meant that everything needed either real animals or good CGI. Both of them were too expensive for the budget, so they just didn't morph all that often.
Not dissing it, I liked the Goosebumps TV show when I was a kid too!
Here’s the monthly review post where that happened, but perhaps it warranted a full review, because it was pretty good even as an adult.
If you need a more detailed description of what rational fiction is, which would surprise me given the target audience, we can get lazy and quote the /r/rational wiki:
Highly-rational fiction could include one or more of the following features:
Focus on intelligent characters solving problems through creative applications of their knowledge and resources.
Examination of goals and motives: the story makes reasons behind characters' decisions clear.
Intellectual pay-off: the story's climax features a satisfying intelligent solution to its problems.
Aspiring rationalism: the story heavily focuses on characters' thinking, or their attempts to improve their reasoning abilities. This is a feature of rationalist fiction, a subcategory of rational fiction.
Thoughtful worldbuilding: the fictional world follows known, consistent rules, as a consequence of rational background characters exploring it or building realistic social structures.
Presence of these particular features is not necessary: overall impression of the work is more important.
Adjacent tropes: Rational stories tend to include certain narrative elements. Though their presence doesn't make a story more rational, this community highly enjoys them. Most important ones include:
Fair-Play Whodunnit: story's mysteries could be solved by attentive readers ahead of time.
Absence of Deus Ex Machina: established story rules are never broken.
Deconstruction: genre tropes are re-imagined in a more realistic manner.
Munchkinry: characters attempt to exploit their world's rules in creative, non-intuitive ways.
Genre Savviness: characters are familiar with common genre tropes and try to avoid or exploit them.
The knee-jerk response to this is “you’re just describing good fiction in general”, but I find the “adjacent tropes” section is less adjacent and more extremely important.
…I could write far more words on this subject than anyone could want, but let’s focus on what’s ostensibly the subject of the review.
Historical note: I finished this review months ago and submitted it to the Astral Codex Ten’s Book Review Contest. I didn’t make it to finalists, which means the reader who suggested I do this kinda just succeeded at delaying the review. That said, I did refine this a lot over time to make it more palatable to regular audiences, so if it reads better than usual, you can thank them. Maybe I became a better review writer, too (probably not).
There’s some intentional mirroring between morphing and yeerk bodyjacking in canon, but r!Animorphs doesn’t focus nearly as much on any Themes that aren’t directly related to Rationalism.
Comically, the climax of the story features diplomacy, but it’s Rachel of all people who engages in it.
There are a lot of seemingly varied moral arguments in r!Animorphs, but they usually take the form of Utilitarianism vs Less Extreme Utilitarianism.
As depicted in the official Animorphs Transformers set:
Scholastic was really hoping for the franchise’s future mainstream success.
There are a bunch of ghostwritten books, and technically everything is canon, but in practice no one is going to bring up how they went on a time travel adventure through American history, because that’s stupid.
All the original book titles follow the format The $GENERIC_WORD, making it incredibly hard to keep them straight. This also explains why the fic is titled “The Reckoning”.
The beginning of the defining quote for Crayak in the Animorphs wiki says it all, really:
In the industry, we call this “the Eragon asspull”.
And from me, that means something. You've seen the trash I regularly read. It's worse than Almost Nowhere's Azad!
Not that one.
It gets a bit complicated when you’re counting the stats themselves.
Shit, I could have used an emdash here…
I took note of the first and last time we get anything I'd consider dedicated comic relief, in chapter 19, which I’ll paste here for reference.
<Okay,> I said, as soon as I could thought-speak. <Let’s get out of here.>
<Cassie. I’ll cover you until you’re clear, over.>
<Counter that, says Jake. Cassie, Ax has it under control. Get out now; Rachel will finish up and follow. Over.>
<Translation: Jake loves Cassie more than he loves Rachel. Over. Also, this was Ax speaking, over.>
<Aximili speaking. I am being misrepresented, likely by Marco. Over.>
<Jake here. Both of you cut the nonsense—they’re not out yet.>
At least they sometimes give us a break from the Abominable Emdashes.
In this canon, you can morph a morph, so this is trivial. Would be impossible in the original books.
A recursive fanfic is a fanfic of a fanfic. I don’t think I ever heard this term before the “final exam” arc and the end of HPMOR triggered an avalanche of them.
While looking for fandom stuff, I saw a new reader being told to just use the r!Animorphs last names as a headcanon, so this isn't just hypothetical. That said, I also learned that Animorphs are really desperate for any kind of content. I thought Homestuck fans had it bad…
I recently listened to Rationally Writing’s r!Animorphs episode, featuring the author of the story. I learned that he put a lot of effort into the plot, as I expected, but what I didn’t expect is that he’s really happy with the outcome and thinks he wrote a masterpiece. I listened to the whole thing, expecting him to go into flaws, and the closest he gets is (paraphrasing): “I wish I could have added more jokey references to the original books and dinosaur morphs, but I couldn’t figure out how to fit them in”. God help me.
While “writing out the only two female characters in the story” might smack of sexism to some, the president of the US is a woman and she has many competent appearances in the part of the story I skipped over, so I don’t think this was in any way indicative of author bias. I usually don’t talk about culture war topics at all, but a certain story killer gave me some feedback on the review and I had to include this to #correcttherecord.
Let me know if you are OK with this existing: I created an AI audio conversion of this back when it was one of the ACX candidates.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/acx-book-review-ranimorphs-the-reckoning