Things that bug me:
How Cassie lived in a farm, but the only one mentioned to have a proper dog was Jake.
Why couldn't Cassie get a
kelpie or something...
One thing that annoyed me was the lack of using dog morphs. And when they did use them it was pretty much fu n and games, whereas wolf form was used in battles often. Seriously, there are plenty of breeds that are superior in strenght to wolves and even leopards. And using a dog morph would have been quite practical in spying situations in public places, you just look like a stray dog, though a very muscular one.
Breeds that are able to kill a wolf and a human if controlled by an Animorph, go Google 'em up, see what I mean: German Shepherd (very common, easy to find, doesnt attract attention, possibly weakest of the breeds I mention), Bernese Mountain Dog (common as well, very strong but not naturally aggressive), Greater Swiss Mountain Dog (great strenght, a rare breed), American Bulldog (common in USA, rare elsewhere), Mastiff (common and a true gladiator breed), Bullmastiff (a bit smaller than Mastiff, common), Caucasian Ovtcharka (common in Europe and Russia. Very aggressive and powerful, used to guard sheep from wolves and bears, also used to guard the Berlin Wall), Central Asian Ovtcharka (a bit rare, closely related to Caucasian Ovtcharka), Kangal/Anatolian Shepherd (very savage, large but agile, these dogs eat wolves for breakfast), Great Dane (common), Rottweiler (very common) and the list goes on and on and on.
Thank you,
Nara, I totally agree with this too. I would even add a
Dobermann to your mighty canine list up there. David would have morphed a Dobermann, me thinks.
Being a 'dog person', I know enough about dogs to know that the Anis, a character like Cassie, could have exploited that a lot. Instead we get the good old
Golden Retriever and
Irish Setters (goofy fun) and
Poodle (annoying temperament). Dogs and cats are like central to human dwellings, wish that could have been more explored.
I for one was really ticked off by some of the inconsistencies in onomatopeia throughout the series (ref. to animal, alien, tech sounds etc...). Let's all agree that the 'TSEEEW!' sound is trademark in the books. But it was typed different every now and again. And in the Andalite Chronicles, the Andalite shredder was applied as TTTSSSAP! or something. But in
The Arrival, Gonrod's crew were using Andalite weapons that sounded an awful lot like TSEEEWWW! or something like a dracon beam. "GHAFRASH!" was sometimes "GAFRASH!" and so on.
If I had a dollar for every time I read, "Bird of prey don't exactly get along," or "Hawk eyes aren't exactly good for seeing in the dark, but are great for stargazing," I could probably pay to have a movie made >_>
Hahah!
The fact that Tobias was being set up to be this Andalite descendant of Elfangor's lineage, and then virtually NOTHING was done with him, post-
The Illusion. The character got quite bland, whinny even, to me after a certain point.
anytime an Andalite was mentioned as having only one stalk eye or some awesome scars to increase his bad ass points, I couldn't believe he'd never morphed once after his injury to fix it.
THIS bugged me, too. By the same token, the fact that we were NEVER given any further cues as to what could have been that notorious 'lethal injury' that a Prince full of zeal such as Elfangor couldn't morph/heal himself out of.
On a similar note, also, the ambiguity about how one acquires the morphing power through contact with the blue cube. Does one need a conscious agent with the latent ability or does one touch the device and just go on random physical contacts and that's all that is required.
That whole thing with Helmacrons don't really 'die' and only enrich their colony or something, that really bugged me.
Something that always bugged the hell out of me, was the characterization of Rachel slowly becoming all crazy psycho warrior girl. When in the last book of the David trilogy, there is a passage near the very end that specifically states how Rachel herself sort of lost the exciting thrill she always had for the war and "grew up a little bit" after the trauma of the whole David situation. I don't know, I guess I thought it was a nice touch for her as a character that was just thrown out the window, and now Rachel is regarded as this dark warrior who loved the war just a little too much.
I really hate that portrayal too. she acted quite dark in the David trilogy, and two of the last things she did was say no to ultimate power and think about shopping just before the polar bear morpher killed her.
Yes she was the darkest Ani, but she never really lost herself. On TV Tropes someone called her a Blood Knight as soon as she took the grizzly bear morph, and that's just ridiculous.
This is gold! Totally agree with yas.
The fact that nothing ever came of Erek's magical untraceable phone number at the end of #10. Would've been cool if they'd Chekov's Gunned it and brought it back when they couldn't find the Chee in the final arc, instead of being like "Marco tried, he didn't find them, so I was was like "try harder!" and he did". Even aside from that it just seems like it would have been handy....
HAHAH!
(1). The fact that Visser Three seemed to suffer from an almost fatal case of Villain Decay as the series went on. Not that he was exactly brilliant in the earlier books either, but there was something about him that was freaky. It was probably from sheer lack of experience and the lack of knowledge I had as a reader, but the situations the Animorphs got into "back then" seemed far more compromising than what occurred later. Though they did quite a few silly things too, and it did get more thematically complicated as it went along...
Yeah, I share this feeling, too. You can only attribute this 'decay' to ghostwriters.
Visser Three creeped the far out of readers early on and maybe even through the middle of the series. He was chopping heads and bursting thoughts into the protagonists' minds. Later on, he's just this automaton, still doing these things to some degree, but resembling 'sizzle with no stake'.
The
Varnax was a morph that intrigued me, but we got zero more than that scen in
#The Visitor. Really wanted to see the Visser pull the Yeerkbane morph on one of his subordinates.
