The Liquor Cabinet > General Discussion

Animorphs

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Capman:
Yeah, I started reading a book for grade schoolers at 28 years old.  What of it?  YOU WANNA GO?  YOU WANNA FUCKIN GO MATE?!

No but for real I am impressed with how much complexity is in these 100-something page books for children.  It's a very easily digestible story that is a good primer for like what MaOCT should be like.  Every story of these sad traumatized teens involves some kind of mundane emotional grounding that provides some relatability to a really bizarre setting and reminds us of real stakes while also these children transform into tigers and fight an alien invasion every story. 

I'm like 8 books deep into the series (9 if you count Megamorphs but nobody counts the first Megamorphs) and it continues to find fresh ways to change up the stakes in both senses while slowly compounding on canon that exists outside of the basic plot of each story.

Clockwurke Bear:
Except it's fucked up by even what MaOCT standards are. Not saying that's a bad thing, but like wowwww shit is fucked. Enjoy feeling the body snatcher inside you go through the torturous pains of dying via basically a combination suffacation dehydration.

Capman:
Oh yeah this shit is crazy and I can't believe how violent and graphic this children's book is.

Needless to say, even if you don't take the whole thing, it encapsulates a local problem very well and does a good variation on monster of the week

Clockwurke Bear:
A really interesting piece of it's appeal is its constant introduction of small new powers, giving new forms for new problems to pose constant new situations. That would be interesting to replicate in a monsters game, though doing anything but copying them limits options a bit.

Capman:
There's also this weirdness where they have to wage this guerilla war between their normal day to day activities.  In the second book they're trying to figure out how to spy on one of the controllers and they're like "well I have to prep for a test on Thursday, and it's Cassie's dad's birthday the next day, and I've got homework too. . . so like maybe we do it Saturday?"

Keeping in mind the idea that they don't have all the power and they need to pick their battles to keep things clear while also having to maintain the cover of their normal everyday lives to avoid suspicion from the secret aliens that could be anyone keeps the stakes fairly small and the need to stick to their day-to-day allows the stories to be emotionally grounded and also leave in weird mundane stakes like Rachel's dad moving away and asking her (pressuring her to say) if she wants to join him.

You can see in Megamorphs 1 where they don't add any real emotional grounding and it becomes more of a pure adventure book that the format breaks down when the story becomes huge and they're like fighting giant monsters in broad daylight.  Megamorphs is one of the longer and more complicated books in the series and the whole thing just feels kinda empty because there's no accompanying emotional throughline.

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