who is your favourite animorphs character?

[Shenmue654]

Dear old Visser Three was interesting to me too, but mainly as others have said when K.A. wrote him really well. The ghostwriters couldn't do it at all, and K.A. even occasionally screwed it up. He seems to get his brain back in the first Megamorphs too, even if I've heard that people have mixed opinions on that one. Loved that one. Also loved the less-than-playful banter going on between Three and One in Visser.

And his pompous-as-all-hell behavior around the Council in that one. XD In the Roleplays we do with Meg, where Roleplay Mar starts to sound like Broadway Javert's demented bastard child, he's also probably channeling the good old Visser's rants from way-back-when. Then again, I've also heard that practically any attempt I make to get passionate gets a bit of it in there. <.<

As for the notes on Tobias....oddly, my childhood wasn't exactly free of angst and I occasionally responded pretty similar to him. o.o; I think it's more his gender than anything, as sexist as that is---- like I said, all of my male role models at that age were.....arrogant as all hell, and prone to converting angst into aggression. 

So yeah. :p

[itw2009]

Visser 3 has to be my favorite besides anyone in the main six.  I mourn him though, as his potential was killed off pretty early.  His own power crazed ego turned him into a scooby doo villain by the time the Animorphs met him.  In the Andalite and Hork-Bajir chronicles he was smart, dangerous, and full of ambition.

I really did enjoy his 'monster of the week' schtick in the books.  He was just horrible at actually doing his job though, and Visser 1 was much more dangerous.  Its too bad the only fear he actually inspired was turning into horrors from other worlds.

i completely agree with this. and shenmue. and i'd not really thought about it before- he did have a lot of potential as a character and villain, huh? hmmm.

[esplin]

I guess its kinda cool that Visser 3 can get it done when it really matters.  I'm still disappointed that he was such a horrible leader and villain in the regular series though.

Shenmue had a lot of great points.  He was pretty awesome in Visser and Megamorphs 1 as well. 

[Chad32]

There was also book 11 when he morphed something that looks like a tree to blend in with the jungle. Plus just waiting for the Anis to come back instead of sending search parties.

He had good moments. He was just overused, and thus also needed to be the fall guy.

[AniDragon]

My favourite Animorphs is Tobias, my favourite character is the Ellimist.

[Chad32]

I got the feeling that people didn't care a whole lot for the Ellemist. Personally I don't mind him, and liked the idea that he was the reason the Anis always made it out of missions ok.

[GalagaGuru]

The Ellimist was pretty cool. He was interesting enough as a manipulative bastard in the main series and the Megamorphs, but when it came time for his story to be told in The Ellimist Chronicles, I felt many feelings for him.

My favorite Animorph, as many also say, changes often. It's hard to choose when they're all so brilliant. Right now it's Marco, but a week ago it was Jake, and it's usually Ax. Maybe next week it will be Cassie.

[AniDragon]

I always LIKED the Ellimist, but he became my favourite when I read his Chronicles book and found out that he started out as a gamer... And a crappy one, at that.

[Seer]

This is a really tough decision.  They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I'll have to go with Tobias, followed by Rachel, Marco, Jake, Ax, and finally Cassie.

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Tobias is by far my favorite.  I've had a terrific childhood, but I find him oddly relatable.  All of his books felt very well written to me.  It just bothers me how in the end, Applegate screwed him.  He never got to have the life he deserved.

Rachel's reckless and violent nature intrigues me, but I feel like more should've been done about her character.  She felt kind of underdeveloped in the end.  They really could've done more with her.  It seems odd then that I would have her be my second favorite.  It's just that there was so much potential in her that I couldn't put her any lower.  I almost want to say that I relate to her as well as Tobias, but I don't.  There are only small bits of her personality that I relate to, but I still

What's not to love about Marco?  He's sarcastic, logical, cautious, and would've made a much better leader than Jake were he able to make rapid-fire decisions under pressure easier.  The ongoing story about Marco's mother was great, too.  I simply liked Rachel a bit better.

Jake actually kind of bored me at times.  He's just so average that he gets kind of bland.  However, he does have some really great moments with Crayak and the Ellimist as well as some interesting moments with internal struggles about leadership.  And who can forget possession by Yeerk!

Ax's comic relief made him my favorite when I was younger, but now he really isn't that interesting of a character.

Cassie has always been a huge annoyance for me.  Her need to go over every decision with a moralistic fine-tooth comb just irritated the piss out of me.  One good thing about the last several books was Cassie's ability to finally see that they are in a freaking war and you can't win by planting flowers and singing songs at the enemy.  This change in character is slight and isn't really noticeable until she argues with her parents about certain war tactics.

Interesting enough, some of my favorite books are Cassie books.  The Aftran books were brilliantly done and Cassie's hyper-idealistic attitude actually has merit here.  Of course, she then has to ruin my appreciation of her in these books with her terrible decisions and attitude in others...

[Blaise Zebrataur]

Tobias without a doubt he is just the best character you could possibly have in a book, in my eyes anyway.

[RagingDaddy]

While Cassie was not a 'fun' character, like Marco (who is my favorite), she is quintessentially the spirit of the Animorph books.

Free will, right and wrong, good and evil

The Departed - Karen shook her head. ".. Do you think I would deliberately trap a morph-capable body as a bug if I weren't sincere? I'm giving up everything! Will you give up nothing?"

And she actually went through with it. Which of the other Animorphs would have done this with so much negative bias towards ALL Yeerks? Not to mention the storyline payoff of having the Yeerk resistance aiding them.

I couldn't find the quote in my books, but I believe it was Tobias in one of the last 10 books - "I dont hate [them]. Its like, I don't even hate the Yeerks right now", a very Cassie-like opinion 25 books of content after she displayed this.

So while Cassie is not THE favorite, I do not believe she gets enough credit, and deserves more respect than being labelled a Mary-Sue. We could have had an Animorph series without Marco, and while the tone would have been different, the story would have remained relatively unchanged. If Cassie was left out, bad choices would have been made that would have hurt the overall outcome of the book.

[Chad32]

I don't think you should get credit for for something going right when you do something stupid. What she did paid off, but she went about it the wrong way. That isn't skill. That's luck.

[Snakie]

Cassie is a somewhat tragic character in the sense that her character would have been great to read if it was always written the way it was in 19 The Departed.

She was still the foolish moralizing idealist of the group in that book, but it was written in a way that felt much more understandable and organic.  Many still wouldn't have liked her, but she would have been way, way more readable and accepted.

I don't know why on top of her being annoyingly moralizing and a broken record they also had to make her the most likely to do stupid things like screw up military time.

[Chad32]

I'm not exactly sure what I'd do to make Cassie better, except maybe have her be called out more, or grow out of her idealistic mindset more. If she had been the most idealistic, but eventually grew out of that and became a more pragmatic, adult person, it would be better not necessarily a lot like Marco or Rachel, but just more realistic about how she does things. Things go right for her, seemingly not because of how she does things, but because the author wants things to happen a certain way.

19 had some of her best and worst moments. It's good that she found out more about Yeerks and helped Aftran, but abandoning the group for selfish reasons, and putting blind faith in something she wanted to happen was stupid. The only reason Karen is alive and presumably uninfested is because the author wanted a happy ending.

I think some people have theorized that she was reinfested, but by a peace movement Yeerk, and they didn't tell Cassie just to make her feel better.

[itw2009]

this discussion about cassie makes me want to go back and reread books so i can be sure that i'm saying the accurate thing when i talk about her.

in any case, when i was eleven/twelve, i might've screwed up military time, too. someone go find smartgirl333 and ask her if she knows - sans search engines - how to tell military time. (she's about thirteen-ish, isn't she?) the scenario was also, imo, a simple and accurate way of using a child's inexperience as a foil for what might otherwise have been a brilliant mind. it does stink that it ended up being cassie making the "stupid" mistake (and i remember raging at her the first time i read the book), but the tension created by the stupid mistake made the book more of a page-turner. the fact that i haven't read the book in a decade and still remember this is pretty impressive, imo. literarily, that's something i appreciate.

big-picture-wise, the group would also have had significantly less dynamic if there hadn't been a 'cassie' character on hand. that's not to say that 'increases group dynamics' makes a person more interesting, haha. still, it wholly improved the series.

i suppose that cassie's ideal, adult self would still instinctively graft those solid morals into her daily actions, but she wouldn't consider them absolute and she also wouldn't be as driven to take that aspect of herself seriously 100% of the time. (plus, she might learn how to let others' mistakes 'go', instead of seeing someone's personal, moral 'failure' as something to 'correct'.)

....but i wouldn't expect that out of a thirteen-year-old. i mean, kids are still figuring out how to answer that "i am a person; who is that person?" question at that age. some adults never get past that point.