Alternamorphs

The First Journey

To discuss this book, we have to come to an understanding about the word "crack". We're not talking about the drug, but the hypothetical effects of taking the drug and writing fanfiction. Okay? 'Cause, really, the book reads better when you assume that they didn't real /mean/ it. In fact, it surpasses any number of fanfics hosted over at the Pit. That it was published is regrettable, but it's not so mind-bendingly awful as, say, that one where Ax and Alloran's gay son who had been raised by wolves fell in love and skipped merrily off to school. Not quite, anyway.

The book starts out innocently enough, with an introduction from our Fearless Leader, Jake. He acts all tough, but he's making an offer: he needs a new Animorph. WE NEED YOU!

Skip to second person singular. All of a sudden, you've got a mom who like, actually cooks, and a sister with a bizarre name little name, and you kind of act all emo and rejected and ride around on a mountain bike at the local abandoned construction site when you "should have been home twenty minutes ago!", but then it turns out that your mom is actually terrific and says "please" when asking you to baby-sit and your sister is such a non-entity that she doesn't get into any trouble when you run off to fight Yeerks instead of watching her and, y'know, any one of the Animorphs would trade you lives in a heartbeat, so STFU.

But I'm getting ahead of myself - as the book itself is rather wont to do. As I was saying, you're mountain biking around some single-track course you've made, with a pinch of snarkiness from the author about "maybe that's why you don't have any friends", which makes me giggle at you because you just talked about your friends three pages ago. But, anyway, the soon-to-be Animorphs wander by, and you feel all left out even though, y'know, you were the one hanging out alone in the first place. You sour grapes a bit about how they don't look much like a group anyway until - DUDE! Blue-not-blue-more-white-bluest-ever light coming out of the sky! Spaceship! COOL! You sneak toward the group and hide behind some grubby wall and then make comparisons about Elfangor and ballet dancers that seriously made me hope for a bit of Andalite-loving in this book, since we still don't have you confirmed as being human.

So you're hiding. But then Elfangor hears your thoughts, because they could do that back in the first book! So he tells you to come out and Marco makes an almost-funny-but-just-/not/ joke about more aliens. Oh, yes - and you said earlier that you knew Marco, and that it was his fault you had a C in history. I didn't know if you considered that a good grade or not. Anyway, Elfa-diddle uses a seven-sided cube to give you the power to morph, Hork-Bajir chase you for a while, then you run home and go to bed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The next morning, your mother wakes you up by vacuuming outside your door and you don't get pissed, which raises your maturity quotient by, like, a million points because I was griping the other day about my neighbor vacuuming down //hall// and waking me up. You come out of your room, your mom tells you there's breakfast on the table (!) and reminds you that it's your sister's birthday. Clearly, the author never had a little sister - there's no way you would have been allowed to forget about a birthday. But, again, whatever. Your mom isn't making the cake, which makes you glad that the thing with the aliens was just a dream, because otherwise you'd totally think your mom had been Yeerked.

But then Marco comes by, and fills you in on the morphing, and whines about Jake punching him, and basically tells you to get with it. So then you decide that it's vitally important to know if your mom is a Controller, and here's where we start getting into choices.

Choice One: you want to track your mother. You choose...

• a fly?

• your sister's pet hamster?

• your weird next-door neighbor's pet ferret?

The consequences are, in no particular order:

• You're fried! Bad morph!

• things work out okay, and you end up demorphing on the beach at The Sharing's party

• Swipe, claw, chomp - you're dessert! Bad choice!

These consequences will become very familiar over the course of the book. A sampling:

• You're knocked out. When you awake, you will have to deal with the horror of being permanently stuck in morph, a creature without mercy, a killing machine. Bad morph!

• < Time to get roasted,> Visser Three says. His hand lifts again, and he sends another fireball your way. This one hits its mark.

SIZZLE! You're dead! Bad morph choice.

• You fall straight on to the lethal blade of a Hork-Bajir. Oops - wrong morph.

• The patrolman runs up behind you and pulls his gun.

Bang! You're dead. Bad morph. You should have thought about Patrolman Teeter!

Once or twice, however, we get "Good morph choice! You deserve to proceed!", which strikes me as even creepier than all of the "Hahaha, you're dead!"s.

In the book's favor, there is kind of a neat plot about /Sario Rips/ that could have had potential had it been given decent treatment. It's not, of course, and while I wouldn't be surprised if a fanfic glossed over details, this is supposed to be publishable material. Of course, the giddy pleasure the author obviously takes in telling you that you've died for some unforeseeable reason (such as the Animorphs basically abandoning you) makes up for the general patheticness to some degree but, really, it's not worth the half-hour it'll take you to read the rest of the book. I'll quote the only notable section, in which the author sporks him/her/xirself:

Yay for canon.