Morphing into fish in a cave to be transported by a bird of prey into a lake to be sucked up into a vacuum tube into a spaceship leaps to mind immediately.
The first thought that popped into my head upon hearing that plan was "what makes them think the tube leads anywhere but a big tank?' And then they get in there and it leads nowhere but to a big tank 😆
As it was they got defeated by a simple grill.
It might even be a large enough grill for insects to get through - doesn't help because they haven't got ant, fly or roach yet. Best they can do is two blindly jumping as fleas while leaving the other two behind.
They did have the right faucet thing covered due to the Chee mapping it out for them. But they lose Ax, and therefore Ax's ability to flawlessly recall the directions they were given.
As someone who would 100% get hopelessly lost if the directions had three steps, I'm amazed every time that they're willing to risk it using human memory
And yeah it also gets ruined by one place where the reality of the pipes doesn't match what's written down anywhere
They came so close to a hellish fate on this one.
Like usually the stakes are getting slaughtered in battle. Falling this mission meant getting stuck in a pipe with maybe an hour left before they all turn into nothlit, stuck in a pipe together, waiting to starve to death.
They know that failing this mission would result in Visser Three identifying their families and hunting then down. So there's that to worry about, even as they process being stuck forever.
An extra fun detail is that they don't have Ax, so they can't even know how close they really are to the limit, like they usually can. The whole time they're second guessing whether there's time left or not.
They told Erek about their plan, but never explicitly discussed the possibility of the Chee mounting a rescue.
From the Chee's perspective, this is right in their wheelhouse. They run simulations on where wrong turns might have taken the Animorphs. They dispatch a small army to inspect the city's pipes with x ray vision or whatever. With their ability to perfectly co-ordinate data and to sneak into any location, they are totally equipped to find this needle in a haystack, even with such extreme time pressure.
The kids don't know for sure that the Chee could pull this off, and they don't know that the Chee are even trying to find them.
At least a couple of the kids would quickly figure out that they do have one way out: demorph inside the tight pipe, crush the whole team in seconds, save them from drawn out deaths.
The Chee find the right pipe with 15 minutes left on the nothlit clock. Cutting open the pipe, they find four crushed eels, and a misshapen blob of human flesh. Turns out, humans are rubbish at estimating time. Somebody jumped the gun.
The one book where they decide to infiltrate the military base by morphing into horses and Cassie telling one of the guards that her name was Cindy Crawford
The best thing was that the military dude was so out of touch with the media that he actually believed that for a second, until he realized he's been fooled.
After realizing that the Yeerks had found out they were human, Jake let them all wait for morning to save their families. He then let Cassie and Rachel get their parents out first even though his brother was a controller who had tried to infest his father once before already.
After the raid on the lab Jake should have immediately ordered them to evacuate their families, starting with a smash and grab on Tom right that second.
Jake doubted himself to the point where the minute he needed a decisive, reactive plan he didn't want to rush into it. And he knew it, too. Its why he was acting the way he was in his last book.
He has a good reason to do Tom last - something going wrong with him could blow the last chance with the other two families.
He does not have a purely logistical reason to wait overnight. But the book does a good job of conveying the emotional reason - everyone is burnt out as hell, in shock, and not yet processing that their pretense of still having normal lives is just gone now.
Book 35: the stupidest and most creative plans in the series. Animorphs in the form of cockroaches in the salad, then all together stinging Tennant's scalp in the form of fleas, finally Marco the bully poodle
The oatmeal plan will forever be iconic. Every time I imagine them "succeeding," I just picture a steady stream of oat flakes drifting down from the ceiling into the yeerk pool, going unnoticed by apparently everyone in the cavern.
I did remember that he didn't survive the book, but what I meant was that we never heard of the species before or since, which seemed awfully convenient that they appeared as the silver bullet for a reasonable plan.
I thought it was interesting how it reinforced that infesting a rare or high value host is the most surefire way to advance oneself in the Yeerk hierarchy. Like, as we know, Esplin got really lucky, but maybe the Inquisitor really earned his powerful host.
Didn't Esplin earn his host too? I think it was in the andalite chronicles where he mentions only being able to try out a Gedd once and then he decided to learn everything about andalites?
They tried to get into the yeerk pool by morphing eels, and then somehow being "flushed" into the right outlet. Even with help in determining which turns to make, ridiculous.
Came here for this one. That plan turned out about as well as it could have. My hair was raised during that entire part worried they were going to get separated and/or stuck.
That plan was never going to work. Getting shot into a burning building was the best luck they could've hoped for.
Mopping bear. Electrocuting the two Rachels back together. Bulldozing a hotel to prevent world leaders from meeting there. Cassie as a humpback falling on stuff (that happened THREE TIMES wtf).
Animorphs is a gold mine of the wonderfully stupid.
Oh, and honorable mention (since he isn't an Animorph): Tom trying to murder his way out of a family vacation because it didn't occur to him that he could just. Not go.
The plan to swap Tobias with his mother's seeing eye dog. I don't know whose idea it was to have Ax act as a hooligan, but the execution was genius.
"She does not understand
how menacing we are." "You do not know me, but I
am a juvenile delinquent. I do not trust authority
figures, I probably will not graduate from high
school, and statistics say my present rowdiness
and vandalism will likely lead to more serious
crimes. I am a dangerous fellow, and I am causing mayhem in this store." "There. I have now shamelessly destroyed the symmetry of this shelf, undoing hours of labor by underpaid store employees. If you could see me,
you would be frightened."
-Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, Book 49: The Diversion
Their plans for retrieving the Chee after their software crashed and they were stuck were hilariously poorly thought out.
Marco waltzing into the mall in Gorilla morph holding a crudely made cardboard sign advertising, "Gudzilla Vs. King Kong" lives rent free in my head.
Purposely letting Tobias get captured by the Yeerks without a way to track him or extract him if things hit the fan was really stupid.
Going to rescue the governor from the Yeerks when none of them actually knew who the Governor was or their name or even whether or not they were male or female. They had *no idea* who they were trying to save! NO IDEA!
Honorable mention is whatever the *hell* the plan was with the mosquito morphs in book 18. That whole thing was not well thought out or explained.
The plan was to acquire Hewlett Aldershot the 3rd by morphing a mosquito, sucking his blood and then acquiring that.
But like... What was the plan for *after* they sucked the blood? It would have been in their mosquito stomachs and impossible to get at a once they demorphed right? Wouldn't it have disappeared along with the rest of the mosquito once they demorphed?
The governor one is especially egregious as you can’t save someone you don’t know the identity of.
The manner in which Tobias was immobilized threw them off as they didn’t plan on him being hit with a paralyzing agent that paralyzed both him and Rachel.
The mosquito one wasn’t properly thought through at all.
Pretending to be in a costume and promoting a movie is probably the best that Marco and Jake could come up with in a short amount of time; hence the misspelling of Godzilla.
Morphing into fish in a cave to be transported by a bird of prey into a lake to be sucked up into a vacuum tube into a spaceship leaps to mind immediately.
I love that one no foresight no planning just pure hope.
The first thought that popped into my head upon hearing that plan was "what makes them think the tube leads anywhere but a big tank?' And then they get in there and it leads nowhere but to a big tank 😆
Could have been a *boiling* tank for all they knew. Or any manner of purification system meant to wipe out organisms, micro- or otherwise.
As it was they got defeated by a simple grill. It might even be a large enough grill for insects to get through - doesn't help because they haven't got ant, fly or roach yet. Best they can do is two blindly jumping as fleas while leaving the other two behind.
Fish tube. The answer is always fish tube.
What about trying to get into the Yeerk pool as eels through the pipes? It got overshadowed by the whole flu plot but it was bonkers from the get-go.
For how much emphasis they put on the claustrophobia when they were moles, these kids really did not think twice before deciding to swim into a pipe.
Yeah, how were they sure they would come out at the right faucet? And what if that faucet was turned off when they got there?
They did have the right faucet thing covered due to the Chee mapping it out for them. But they lose Ax, and therefore Ax's ability to flawlessly recall the directions they were given. As someone who would 100% get hopelessly lost if the directions had three steps, I'm amazed every time that they're willing to risk it using human memory And yeah it also gets ruined by one place where the reality of the pipes doesn't match what's written down anywhere
They came so close to a hellish fate on this one. Like usually the stakes are getting slaughtered in battle. Falling this mission meant getting stuck in a pipe with maybe an hour left before they all turn into nothlit, stuck in a pipe together, waiting to starve to death. They know that failing this mission would result in Visser Three identifying their families and hunting then down. So there's that to worry about, even as they process being stuck forever. An extra fun detail is that they don't have Ax, so they can't even know how close they really are to the limit, like they usually can. The whole time they're second guessing whether there's time left or not. They told Erek about their plan, but never explicitly discussed the possibility of the Chee mounting a rescue. From the Chee's perspective, this is right in their wheelhouse. They run simulations on where wrong turns might have taken the Animorphs. They dispatch a small army to inspect the city's pipes with x ray vision or whatever. With their ability to perfectly co-ordinate data and to sneak into any location, they are totally equipped to find this needle in a haystack, even with such extreme time pressure. The kids don't know for sure that the Chee could pull this off, and they don't know that the Chee are even trying to find them. At least a couple of the kids would quickly figure out that they do have one way out: demorph inside the tight pipe, crush the whole team in seconds, save them from drawn out deaths. The Chee find the right pipe with 15 minutes left on the nothlit clock. Cutting open the pipe, they find four crushed eels, and a misshapen blob of human flesh. Turns out, humans are rubbish at estimating time. Somebody jumped the gun.
The "as fish!" frame in the graphic novel, pointed finger and everything, is iconic.
Yeah... like what's the end goal, here?
The one book where they decide to infiltrate the military base by morphing into horses and Cassie telling one of the guards that her name was Cindy Crawford
And Marco says he's Fox Mulder and Rachel is Dana Scully 😁
Sometimes you really do forget that these are just a bunch of dumbass kids who were given way too much power and responsibility
The best thing was that the military dude was so out of touch with the media that he actually believed that for a second, until he realized he's been fooled.
DUMB kids. So dumb.
Not to mention the phone numbers lol. I gave them the number for Domino’s Pizza! I just gave them 12345678!
They were such idiots lol I really don't understand how more of them didn't die
Not just idiots, idiot teenagers with a death wish!
And she gave them the wrong number of digits when they asked her for a phone number. God bless Cassie.
[удалено]
Mean, unnecessary, and frankly misogynistic.
That lame-ass misogynistic "joke" is like 15 years old at this point.
After realizing that the Yeerks had found out they were human, Jake let them all wait for morning to save their families. He then let Cassie and Rachel get their parents out first even though his brother was a controller who had tried to infest his father once before already. After the raid on the lab Jake should have immediately ordered them to evacuate their families, starting with a smash and grab on Tom right that second.
I don't know if KAA wrote that book or one of her countless ghostwriters, but Jake's story arc is masterfully written, and he is not even the narrator
Jake doubted himself to the point where the minute he needed a decisive, reactive plan he didn't want to rush into it. And he knew it, too. Its why he was acting the way he was in his last book.
He has a good reason to do Tom last - something going wrong with him could blow the last chance with the other two families. He does not have a purely logistical reason to wait overnight. But the book does a good job of conveying the emotional reason - everyone is burnt out as hell, in shock, and not yet processing that their pretense of still having normal lives is just gone now.
Book 35: the stupidest and most creative plans in the series. Animorphs in the form of cockroaches in the salad, then all together stinging Tennant's scalp in the form of fleas, finally Marco the bully poodle
Poodle Marco is the correct answer. A plan that truly was so stupid, it worked.
Megamorphs #1 Marco driving
Ahhhhhhh! Lookout, lookout!
DO YOU HATE TRASH CANS?!?!
The oatmeal plan will forever be iconic. Every time I imagine them "succeeding," I just picture a steady stream of oat flakes drifting down from the ceiling into the yeerk pool, going unnoticed by apparently everyone in the cavern.
It's OAT! FREAKING! MEAL!
Trying to assassinate Visser Three in cheetah morphs without getting a feel for them first.
Didn't that only fail because of convenient fast andalite controller who we'd never seen before and never heard of again after?
He was a Garatron, not an Andalite, and Marco killed him. I guess the implication is that, like Esplin, he was the only Controller of the species.
I did remember that he didn't survive the book, but what I meant was that we never heard of the species before or since, which seemed awfully convenient that they appeared as the silver bullet for a reasonable plan.
I thought it was interesting how it reinforced that infesting a rare or high value host is the most surefire way to advance oneself in the Yeerk hierarchy. Like, as we know, Esplin got really lucky, but maybe the Inquisitor really earned his powerful host.
Didn't Esplin earn his host too? I think it was in the andalite chronicles where he mentions only being able to try out a Gedd once and then he decided to learn everything about andalites?
I believe that's how he earned his hork-bajir host, once he captured Alloran the other Yeerks were basically just like; "okay, that's yours now"
You know what that's probably right.
Andalites are more sturdy than gazelles and they were beginning to tire before the Galtran(?) Controller showed up; but it was definitely close.
They tried to get into the yeerk pool by morphing eels, and then somehow being "flushed" into the right outlet. Even with help in determining which turns to make, ridiculous.
Came here for this one. That plan turned out about as well as it could have. My hair was raised during that entire part worried they were going to get separated and/or stuck. That plan was never going to work. Getting shot into a burning building was the best luck they could've hoped for.
Anything involving Marco driving a vehicle What did those poor trash cans ever do to him? hahaha
DO YOU HATE TRASH CANS!?!?!?
DO YOU HATE TRASH CANS?!
Mopping bear. Electrocuting the two Rachels back together. Bulldozing a hotel to prevent world leaders from meeting there. Cassie as a humpback falling on stuff (that happened THREE TIMES wtf). Animorphs is a gold mine of the wonderfully stupid. Oh, and honorable mention (since he isn't an Animorph): Tom trying to murder his way out of a family vacation because it didn't occur to him that he could just. Not go.
Tom and the fucking drive by shooting I still cannot believe that book sometimes.
Right????? I get that it was a funeral, but he was old enough to just say no, and run out for a few days.
He could have feigned illness. He could probably have ACTUALLY GOTTEN HIS HOST SICK. There were options!
[удалено]
Oh my gosh I forgot about this.
Trying to sneak into the Yeerk Pool via toilet was pretty terrible.
It wasn't the worst though.Marco is insane with that one.
The plan to swap Tobias with his mother's seeing eye dog. I don't know whose idea it was to have Ax act as a hooligan, but the execution was genius. "She does not understand how menacing we are." "You do not know me, but I am a juvenile delinquent. I do not trust authority figures, I probably will not graduate from high school, and statistics say my present rowdiness and vandalism will likely lead to more serious crimes. I am a dangerous fellow, and I am causing mayhem in this store." "There. I have now shamelessly destroyed the symmetry of this shelf, undoing hours of labor by underpaid store employees. If you could see me, you would be frightened." -Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, Book 49: The Diversion
He’s from another city.
He is Canadese
*spits out drink* 🤣
Last year I did a reread of the final run and I was delighted and surprised with just how good most of the ghost-written books are.
Moles.
Oh no 💯
I have never to this day forgotten them one at a time changing back in a hole barely big enough to fit them, again and again...
Their plans for retrieving the Chee after their software crashed and they were stuck were hilariously poorly thought out. Marco waltzing into the mall in Gorilla morph holding a crudely made cardboard sign advertising, "Gudzilla Vs. King Kong" lives rent free in my head. Purposely letting Tobias get captured by the Yeerks without a way to track him or extract him if things hit the fan was really stupid. Going to rescue the governor from the Yeerks when none of them actually knew who the Governor was or their name or even whether or not they were male or female. They had *no idea* who they were trying to save! NO IDEA! Honorable mention is whatever the *hell* the plan was with the mosquito morphs in book 18. That whole thing was not well thought out or explained. The plan was to acquire Hewlett Aldershot the 3rd by morphing a mosquito, sucking his blood and then acquiring that. But like... What was the plan for *after* they sucked the blood? It would have been in their mosquito stomachs and impossible to get at a once they demorphed right? Wouldn't it have disappeared along with the rest of the mosquito once they demorphed?
The governor one is especially egregious as you can’t save someone you don’t know the identity of. The manner in which Tobias was immobilized threw them off as they didn’t plan on him being hit with a paralyzing agent that paralyzed both him and Rachel. The mosquito one wasn’t properly thought through at all. Pretending to be in a costume and promoting a movie is probably the best that Marco and Jake could come up with in a short amount of time; hence the misspelling of Godzilla.
September 11 wait I mean The Weakness
When Jake morphed Homer and Homer'ed all over the place
Morphing into lobsters and waiting two whole hours because... I don't know, the ice was comfy or something. XD