Animorphs #55 and onward: The outline

Because if KA Applegate could get away with writing half the series by giving a rough outline to a crew of ghostwriters then so can I.

Epistemic status: Recommend skipping this one if you never read animorphs (unless you really like fanfics). Potentially spoilers for any potential sequel series if Applegate steals my ideas. I am not sure of the details of zero-space physics and probably got some details wrong.

I have sinned by posting about object-level politics, and must now atone by outlining my vision for an Animorphs sequel series¹. In all seriousness, Animorphs was in the unique position of being a series that both (a) ended when it should have and (b) left the plot with not only a sequel hook, but a surprisingly specific setup for one (including introducing new characters and a new setting). Which means I both have a pretty specific idea for how it would go, and am unlikely to ever see an official version. So here goes.

To recap the situation at the end of the original series: The six members of the crew (three original animorphs, three newly introduced characters) are on the Rachel, an experimental Yeerk ship. They get confronted by the Visser’s blade ship, now ruled by a mysterious creature called The One (who seems to have assimilated various other creatures, including Ax). Jake gives the suicidal-seeming order to ram the blade ship, and we cut to black.

We do know one more thing, which is that everyone on the ship survived.

There’s a few ways we know this: First, it would be ridiculous for them to die in a mere spaceship incident. Over the series they’ve survived being shot at, stabbed, and blown up² dozens of times³. No way one more planned spaceship crash would kill them. There’s also a mechanical explanation for how they would survive, since it was specifically mentioned earlier in the story that the Rachel had a couple of smaller fighters docked in they could use to escape while the ramming distracted or wounded the blade ship. Also, it was confirmed by Word of God⁴.

So this suggests the next step of the plot: The Animorphs⁵ split into two groups and head to the escape ships, on which they flee to two different point on a nearby planet (I imagine one group crash lands and loses their ship, while the other group manages to land in safe but unfamiliar ground). This lets us start off with a party split arc, where group 1 tries to figure out where they are and what’s going on in the planet after the crash, while group 2 tries to find group 1 (and also get in their own trouble). It’s a good way to focus on building the new characters and giving them some more connection with the original cast.

How do we split the group? We have three original animorphs (Jake, Marco, Tobias), two special forces operatives from Jake’s morphing warrior training program (Jeane, Santorelli), and one Andalite pilot turned human nothlit (Menderash).

I think you have to split up Jake and Marco for this arc. They have too much shared background that would get in the way of introducing new relationships, and Marco deserves his day in the sun leading his own squad. Jeane has to go with Marco - they clearly have some kind of flirty thing going, and after going through sixty-odd books of the original series without any sort of love interest, Marco deserves a break. Santorelli has to go with Jake - have to split up the two generic humans to get a chance to build them up. His character is kind of a blank slate, so let’s give him a sense of humor and to break the tension on Jake’s team.

The hard part is where to put Tobias. He ended the original series with a lot of tension with Jake over the whole “sending Rachel to die” thing. I kind of want to let that rest for a while before bringing it back up, but putting him in the room with Marco and his new love interest just feels wrong (especially since we always got the sense that Rachel could have ended up with Marco in a different timeline⁶. So Tobias goes with Jake, and we start off dealing with the tension where we left off. We can let it breathe for a bit as they climb out of the wreckage of their escape ship and have to deal with the immediate crisis, and my idea for Santorelli would actually get along pretty well with Tobias (and Jake) separately and help bridge things while things are still tense between them.

That leaves Menderash to go with Marco. Since he’s the one of the six that’s a trained pilot, it makes sense that his escape ship would be the one to make it out whole (and Jake’s crew also seems better suited to dealing with being lost after crashing). He also has the ability to give both a fun clueless alien straight man to the Marco/Jeanne banter, and provide more serious weight to that team to avoid it getting too jokey (what with the whole thing where he turned himself into a nothlit to atone for letting Ax down). He also might know more about various alien cultures in general, which would work well for that team. So that’s our draft.

The actual story… I have less direction for. This one should focus a lot less on animals (there’s not a lot of earth animals around anyway, but it’s played out by this point) and should have a lot more alien world exploration (in the style of the Andalite or Ellimist chronicles, easily the high points of the original series). There’s also no explicit war - the Kelbrids don’t (and aren’t planning to) have a war with the Andalites. I imagine their society as being clannish, involving many different species⁷ who form alliances to build and man their unfathomably massive starships. Some of the clans are friendly and some are enemies, but there’s no goal of defeating some clans. The One is doing… something, with the clans. he’s trying to get information, or some kind of power.

The One is the real villain of the story. He turns out to be a creature we’ve heard of before, the one who drove Crayak out of his home Galaxy and scares both him and the Ellimist. But he also needs to have goals that can be affected by lowly humans and andalites.

I think his nature should be some kind of Z-space-powered personality sponge. Basically he has Father’s ability from the Ellimist chronicles - to absorb other life forms into himself - but he’s a more evolved version who can do it across Z-space in some way. It would give him the ability to absorb the Ellimist (or Crayak) directly if they ever met, which is why the Ellimist is so afraid of him, and goes to great lengths to avoid any sort of information entanglement with him⁸. On the other hand when dealing with humans or other creatures, his special nature only gives him so much advantage - he can absorb them to some degree, gaining their knowledge and skills (one reason he was so eager to absorb Ax; he wants Andalite technology and morphing skills). Though like with Father, when he absorbs a living creature, that creature can still resist him (so he doesn’t start off with a full morphing library like Visser Three; Ax can still resist him from the inside, and it takes time and effort to absorb his skills). He also wanted to copy Yeerk biology, which is uniquely suited to taking over hosts and would help him a lot. The Blade Ship crew’s alliance with him is actually quite uneasy because of this (he wants to eat them; they do not want him to eat them, partly because they don’t want to be eaten and partly because they’d lose their leverage over him. They have enough control of the ship to prevent him taking them by force, but they do need his help to survive in a hostile galaxy).

His ultimate goal is to track down the two creatures that managed to fully ascend to Zero Space, and absorb them. He hunts down any creature that has interacted with them (he really wants Jake). He also wants the time matrix, through which he could find the Ellimist. Fortunately Ax lost his memories of it⁹, but The One is still out to find him. The Animorphs, meanwhile, need to try to undermine his alliance with various clans (or the Blade Ship crew) via alliances, spycraft, and occasional fighting. Since he relies on allies for much of his power, this can weaken him.

They also want to rescue Ax, which they find out early-ish on is theoretically possible (though it’s only actually happened once or twice, if ever). Rescuing his mind captives would also be a way to eventually defeat him.

Anyway, that’s as much of the plot as I have. On to the characters and their arcs.

Character Arcs

Marco

Marco starts off getting a chance to be his own squad’s leader. So we see him, early on, struggle with the same sorts of struggles Jake always did (although he handles it differently). This is contrasted with Jake trying to get back into his leadership role at the same time. As Jake' tries to overcome his doubts and find his ability to be decisive again, Marco deals with similar challenges without the baggage (but also without Jake’s natural talent for it).

He also finally gets a love interest. Her background is as an intelligence analyst/occasional field agent, and she’s actually smart and analytical enough to keep up with him and have her own ideas on operations planning, which should be nice for him.

Jeanne

A lot of Jeanne’s arc just has to be introducing her. She has some kind of background working for French Intelligence, so she’s good at bringing new approaches to try to figure out where things are¹⁰. It should give her enough of an interesting role to be an interesting character in her own right and not just “Marco’s love interest”.

I’m not sure how she’s interact with Menderash. We do have an implication of some tragedy in her past (Jake picked her and Santorelli for having no living family), so she should be good at relating to his isolation. Might be a good chance to see her soft side, while she usually acts tough or banter-y around Marco.

Menderash

This one’s the hardest, since he has enough of a background that we roughly know who he is, but no clear hooks to build on that. He’s haunted by feeling he has to atone for abandoning Ax, has complicated feelings about being stuck as a human, and genuinely enjoys flying¹¹. Beyond that… I have one idea for a scene after the groups reunite where Jake talks to him about learning to live with the people you let down (and in the process finds his own ability to do that). But I’m not too sure of his role aside from that (and providing general space knowledge).

Tobias

Tobias’s main arc is to find his place in a world without Rachel. On the one hand there’s the direct effect of dealing with grief (and anger at Jake) about losing her, and he does need to get over that eventually. I think he finally forgives Jake - not explicitly, but just indirectly by supporting a risky decision of Jake’s after it led to a disaster, when Jake is crashing hard from his loss of confidence and considering just giving up towards the end of the first arc (with the teams split up). And losing Rachel hurts, but he learns to live with the grief itself.

But the bigger problem for Tobias is that he never had much connecting him to the world, even before he got stuck as a hawk. Rachel wasn’t just his girlfriend, she was his only real connection to a human society he never really fit into. His one other connection was Ax, which is why he’s here in the first place, but Ax doesn’t really connect him to anything beyond sharing an outcast status. So Tobias’s larger arc is finding himself somewhere he wants to belong, in the Kelbrid’s hybrid cosmopolitan society where everyone is weird and doesn’t belong so it’s okay to just be himself¹². The other characters, I think, go back to Earth in the end, but Tobias decides to stay.

Santorelli

Santorelli’s surface thing is being the fun, wisecracking Marine veteran¹³. a bit like Marco in the original series, except he replaces Marco’s mix of cynicism and creativity with a more experienced veteran style approach to life. He’s good at getting along with both Jake and Tobias. With Jake, as a good soldier/commander rapport from someone who’s more experienced than Jake at serving with different officers in a military setting, but still respects Jake as being a good commander with a lot more real world experience than he has. With Tobias, they share a lot of background (both being orphans who crashed out of school. Santorelli eventually picked himself up, got a GED and enlisted in the Marines - his backstory is basically Tobias if instead of joining the Animorphs he’d put his life back on track by joining the military. He also found himself socially after that, which gives Tobias some hope of finding himself socially eventually too). So Santorelli ends up in a bit of an older brother role (but one who’s still amazed by Tobias’s ability to fly; he originally washed out of flight school screening before deciding to enlist anyway in ground forces. He tries bird morphs throughout the series but while the instincts helps he just seems to not quite get 3d flight mindset, which is a running gag/occasional serious problem).

Jake

Jake’s arc is the longest one. This mostly stays an ensemble cast kind of story, but Jake probably gets a bit of extra screentime - around 30% instead of a sixth - because his main arc is getting over his PTSD and self doubts, which is also the main arc of the story more generally.

If the original story of Animorphs was about how war is horrifying and emotionally traumatizing, the point of this story is that it’s still not the end of the story, and as long as you’re still alive you can learn to get up and go on. There’s no more war with the Yeerks and everyone’s lost friends, but there’s still more to do be done for the people who are still alive. So Jake has to go up, get to work every day on surviving his situation (and later, trying to defeat The One), and let go of his doubts so that he can actually function. He starts out being bad at it - avoiding risky decisions, delaying too long on big ones, doubting himself and changing his mind unexpectedly. Still, he retains enough of his old instincts to get his friends out alive from his mistakes, and gradually learns to trust himself again.

The big conclusion for his arc is his attempt to rescue Ax. He figures out that The One is some kind of sponge, but also figures out a way to get assimilated while keeping his personality, and decides since they’re doomed, their best hope is to let himself get assimilated so he can try to break down The One’s coherence from the inside (like Toomin eventually did with Father). But at the last second he decides he doesn’t actually want to die and doesn’t give up hope of winning without it either, and turns away from the plan. Which is his big moment of deciding he does actually want to live, even when he can rationalize himself into thinking giving up is a better option.

This incidentally also saves the world, because (unbeknowest to Jake), he’s more connected to Crayak, the Ellimist and the Time Matrix than any of the other characters¹⁴. So if he’d lost he would have put the entire Galaxy at risk.

Anyway, this is what I got. If you have ideas for how this would actually go, please comment.

1. As was foretold.

2. The excuse for this one was “no it was actually the other ship that blew up, we were fine all along”.

3. This has always bugged me. Each specific case of this makes sense - it’s probably easy to miss shooting a darting tiger with a pistol or a laser beam - but claiming they got so consistently lucky so many times stretches my suspension of disbelief.

4. Michael Grant, Applegate’s husband and co-writer, confirmed this in a reddit AMA.

5. Can we still call them “the Animorphs” with half the crew changed and a third of them not even able to morph? Heck, I’m going for it.

6. Okay, this was actually explicit in the alternate timeline book. But it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
As an aside, there’s a neat symmetry to the main animorphs couples: Tobias and Rachel would never have gotten together if not for the war, but the war brought them closer. Jake and Cassie, on the other hand, would probably have been a natural peacetime couple, but the war ground them down and changed them until they couldn’t work together anymore.

7. We can have the Iskoort world show up at some point. We know it was way out there, but heck Kelbrid space is pretty far off.

8. The weird creature from Animorphs #41 who gave Jake the scary future vision is vaguely connected - it’s some kind of Z-space herbivore who’s trying to avoid The One’s attention (to avoid being assimilated), and it discovered Jake while looking for plots to bring him down. This isn’t exactly all 11-dimensional chess for him, but he did help Menderesh survive out a vague hope that Menderesh would bring Jake and other humans, who seemed like good allies from what he good tell from his weird time-skewed z-space viewpoint.

9. It’s originally unclear how - he did remember in the original series- but gradually becomes clear the Ellimist removed them when he left Earth.

10. In general, having her and Santorelli here lets us introduce more professional intelligence/military style doctrine into the story (and also see how it clashes with the Animorphs’ more elf-developed style, and where each work better or worse).

11. As a pilot; he can’t turn into a bird anymore.

12. This one turned into an unintentional metaphor about the kind of society I like to live in, huh.

13. In the actual books he was implied to be an American special forces vet of some kind. I tried to decide which branch and ended up with MARSOC, which seems like the closest to actually being a good background for the kind of operations the Animorphs end up doing in alien planets. He can, however, transform into a seal.

14. Except maybe Cassie, since she can see into different timelines. Good thing she didn’t come along on this one.
But even in the alternate timeline book, We see Jake semi-remembering his morphing ability even without Cassie around, suggesting that he also has a bit of her ability.