History YMMV / Animorphs

* LGBTFanbase: Big time, between one character being confirmed bi, a pair of gay-confirmed aliens, and the whole “shifting into another body, including opposite genders when applicable” thing. Both authors being outspoken allies with a transgender daughter also helps.

* UnfortunateImplications: In book 44, Cassie [[ItMakesSenseInContext ends up in Australia in a flea morph.]] She demorphs, only to suddenly realize an Aboriginal boy named Yami was watching her. Fortunately, he basically just [[UnusuallyUninterestingSight shrugs it off,]] saying that in Myth/AboriginalAustralianMyths there are a lot of stories about people turning into animals and vice versa, so that a flea turning into a person isn't that weird. As ''WebVideo/ThePopArena'' points out in his review, this comes across as rather racist, as it's basically saying non-white, non-Christian people are just inherently more gullible, less rational, etc. As an analogy he says: if you're a Christian, if you saw someone WalkOnWater, would you just say "that's no big deal, people walked on water in the Bible"? Of course not! Your response (assuming you didn't think it was just a magic trick) would be something like "Holy shit! Are you a superhero?"

** Poor Tom made one stupid decision that led him to become a [[FateWorseThanDeath prisoner in his own body]] for over ''three years''. Very early on in the series, he'd rather die because he can't see another way out. By the end, [[spoiler:the Yeerks have turned him into a HumanWeapon, and he's strongly implied to be an EmptyShell. Worst of all, unlike most of the major hosts, [[KillTheHostBody he doesn't get better]]]].

%%** This version of Tobias is actually pretty well liked, considering this show's lackluster reputation.

* AssPull: The ending of part 3 of "Face Off" is really weird and come out of nowhere: [[spoiler: The Animorphs are stuck in the Yeerk Pool, and Marco finds what is said to be the control room for the pool, [[InformedAttribute even though it just looks like some kind of boiler room or something.]] He picks up a plastic box and throws it at something offscreen, which causes the ''entire Yeerk Pool to self-destruct''!]]

* IdiotPlot: The series has a few.
** ''#31 The Conspiracy'': The whole book is about Jake secretly trying to get his brother freed and keep his father from becoming infested or killed. The forty-ninth book shows that revealing the truth to their families is as simple as just morphing in front of them, so they can't deny the craziness of what they're being told. Yet Jake doesn't consider that once in the whole book, so that the series can keep going. As a result, his brother stays infested [[spoiler:and his parents are infested later come said 49th book]].
*** The Yeerks have this, too. Surely there's a way to save Tom's Yeerk that doesn't involve [[RevealingCoverUp killing a man in an inordinately dramatic fashion]]? At the end, the Yeerk survives because Tom is injured and sent to the hospital. Why not just arrange an "accident" to break Tom's leg to start with? Technically they wouldn't even need to do that: "Tom" could just fake being ill, then have a Controller doctor diagnose something serious enough that he would have to stay home.
** ''#14 The Unknown'': The team encounters a military battalion that is demonstrated not to be infested by Yeerks, proven by their discovery of a plot by the Yeerks to infest this group. However, the kids completely ignore the potential of revealing the truth to this trustworthy group, and foil the one infestation attempt with no guarantee that the battalion won't be attacked again.
** ''#21 The Threat'': The entire conflict about David being forced to live in a barn and thus feeling resented would have been resolved if he had been sent to live with the Chee in their comfy house instead, just like what is done with Marco's dad twenty-four books later. The Animorphs all seem to go out of their way to be as dickish as possible to David, particularly in the [[WebVideo/ThePoparena "You can only have one bird of prey morph, it is ANIMORPH LAW!"]] scene. It all seems to happen just so that he can go full supervillain at the end.
** ''#50 The Ultimate'': [[spoiler:Cassie lets Tom get away with the morph cube (thus ensuring the Yeerks can morph, and the Animorphs can't get any more new members), when she could have intervened just enough to save his life, which not only would have kept them the cube, but also allowed Jake to de-infest his brother. This act crosses over into LethallyStupid territory in the last book, as it makes Cassie indirectly responsible for Rachel's death]].
** Also, ''The Hork-Bajir Chronicles'' has a small element of this, because the Arn never think to create quickly-reproducing bodies for the Yeerks to infest.
** More generally, as far as we ever find out there is absolutely no limit on how many morphs can be acquired, which makes it a bit odd that the kids all insist on having their own specialized morph for various situations rather than everyone just acquiring as many animals as they can.

* IdiotPlot: Quite a few of them.
** The most obvious example is Episode 11. Jake has been infected, and somehow Ax and Tobias are the only characters that realize that he is. There are several weird things about this.
*** Ax realizes Jake is infected because of a gesture Jake makes with his ear. The thing is, Marco recognized Tom as a Yeerk the same way back in episode 2, so Ax being the only one to notice it is... odd.
*** Jake-Yeerk realizes he can just wait for someone to let their guard down, then morph and run away. He decides to morph... Jake's dog to do it. Something anyone on surveillance duty would find suspicious.
*** On a related note, Rachel and company are lucky he doesn't decide to morph Tiger or something, or they'd all be dead.
*** PLUS Jake's Yeerk dies of starvation moments after he leaves, meaning that even if he wasn't caught immediately, he'd he dead.
*** And of course there's the little detail that the only character to figure out something's up, was the one who ''wasn't there when Jake dipped his head into the Yeerk pool!'' [[{{Irony}} That's an interesting coincidence.]]

** A recurring thorn in Tobias's side is a [[{{StauesqueStunner}} tall]] blonde girl named [[{{Music/TaylorSwift}} Taylor]].

** On various occasions, Marco complains about how they aren't superheroes because they have to do things like look up the phone book to find people, protesting "Wolverine never has to look things up in the phone book!" ''Film/XMenDaysOfFuturePast'' does indeed feature Wolverine looking someone up in the phone book.

** Tobias and Ax both qualify. They were given only one book per ten-book cycle because Scholastic didn't think they'd be as popular as the four main kids. Boy, were they wrong about that...

--> '''Alloran:''' <Do you know who did that? Do you know who moved my tail? I did. I did. I did it.>

--><What enemy?>
--><Well . . . okay, we don’t exactly have one right now,> [Jake] said, feeling fairly idiotic. <But we used to. And we may get one again.>
--><We’re shopping all the sales,> Marco said brightly. <Enemies “R” Us, [=EnemyMart=], J.C. Enemy. Don’t worry, we’ll find one.>

* MagnificentBastard: [[AllPowerfulBystander The Ellimist]], was once a mortal Keetran known to as friends as Toomin, who through a series of cosmically unlikely events ended up becoming a reality-warping being. As the SoleSurvivor of his kind, Toomin's transformation into the Ellimist began after breaking free of "[[TheAssimilator Father]]", while Toomin learns to steal the millions of assimilated minds from Father, then uses this near-limitless knowledge to integrate himself into a super advanced spacecraft, travelling the galaxy as a technological deity to help planets prosper. However Ellimist comes into conflict with [[OmnicidalManiac Crayak]] who seeks to eradicate all life. Unable to stop Crayak's trail of death, Ellimist instead counters by spreading new life on uninhabited planets that outpaced Crayak's work. The two technological gods battle one another, wiping out a tenth of the galaxy in the crossfire, which ends in Ellimist and later Crayak entering a black hole and merging with space-time to become true gods. Continuing to play a CosmicChessGame, Crayak is responsible for the Yeerk crisis ravaging the galaxy, while Ellimist manipulates the formation of the [[Characters/AnimorphsAnimorphs Animorphs]] as his warriors. Ellimist assists the Animorphs from the sidelines numerous times, often exploiting loopholes to give them help without technically breaking the rules of the game.

* HardToAdaptWork: While the television series adaptation had many problems, one key reason behind it failing as badly as it did and being viewed as the embarrassment that it is today is just how difficult the original books themselves are to adapt to any other medium outside literature. On the one hand, the series has a very youthful main cast (with the five founding members of the titular team all being 13 years old at the start of the series and 16 by the end) [[WakeUpGoToSchoolSaveTheWorld who live double-lives where they fight alien invaders]] by [[VoluntaryShapeshifter turning into animals; a premise that one could easily be forgiven for expecting to be for the same demographic as ''Franchise/PowerRangers''. But on the other hand, the series also contains [[FamilyUnfriendlyViolence incredibly violent fight scenes]] and heavy ruminations on [[WarIsHell the cost of war]] that would [[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids automatically reserve it for older audiences]] if depicted in a visual format. Further complicating matters is how the need to depict [[NeverWorkWithChildrenOrAnimals animals]] and [[StarfishAliens multiple different types of incredibly bizarre and ostentatious alien designs]] would put the ability to faithfully adapt the series well beyond a typical live action television budget[[note]]while K.A. Applegate initially wrote the alien enemies as easily adaptable RubberForeheadAliens, she later made sure to go as far as possible in the opposite direction for subsequent alien designs to spite Scholastic after they told her to be more creative, a decision that would ultimately bite the makers of the eventual attempted live action TV adaptation in the butt[[/note]], yet the largely episodic format of the majority of the books means that they don't quite work all that well as films either. All this combined resulted in the live action television series that broadcast in the 90s at around the same time as the books' initial run largely being doomed from the start.

** In the original ''The Invasion'' Visser Three acts like he's meeting Elfangor for the first time, even though ''The Andalite Chronicles'' would establish that they have an extensive history together, including [[spoiler: Elfangor being partially responsible for Visser Three getting an Andalite body in the first place.]] The book fixes this by having him instead comment that Elfangor has become "quite a legend" since they last met.

** Yeerk high command is a circus of failures, with Vissers seemingly given invasion plans diametrically opposed to their skillsets. Fans have joked that this is because the Emperor and the Council of Thirteen are just that StupidEvil, but there's an argument to be made that this is deliberate. Yeerk politics are toxic and run on KlingonPromotion. Deliberately invoking ThePeterPrinciple is a good way to keep hungry young vissers from getting ''too'' successful and [[TheStarscream threatening to replace the very people who promoted them]]. And even if it's ultimately detrimental to the Empire's long-term plans of conquest... well, that never stopped the real-life fascists and authoritarian empires that inspired them from politically interfering in military business, did it?

* Does Visser One have any genuine affection for humanity, or is it all a manipulation? She's not all that sure herself.

** Rachel, valiant and skilled fighter or [[AxCrazy unhinged psychopath]] (not so much alternate, as her slow drift into BloodKnight and PTSD is canon).
** Marco, TheLancer, tactical and strategic genius, or just an asshole who's only good for coming up with horrifyingly ruthless plans and complaining?

** And Taylor: Cold-hearted torture technician or mentally damaged BrokenBird who can only express her bizarre love for Tobias by breaking the bird?

** ''The Exposed'' is about a [[VideoGame/{{Splatoon}} kid morphing into a squid.]]

* RescuedFromTheScrappyHeap: Not hated per se, but in its heyday, Jake was the most criticized character of the group [[StandardizedLeader for lacking the depth]] that others like Marco, Tobias, and Rachel had. CharacterDevelopment kicked into high gear during the [[CerebusSyndrome second-half of the series.]] and these complaints disappeared.

* AssPull: The ending of part 3 of "Face Off" is really weird and come out of nowhere: [[spoiler: The Animorphs are stuck in the Yeerk Pool, and Marco finds what is said to be the control room for the pool, [[InformedAttribute Even though it just looks like some kind of boiler room or something.]] He picks up a plastic box and throws it at something offscreen, which causes the ''entire Yeerk Pool to self-destruct''!]]

** Cassie is practically the walking personification of this. Half of the fandom has practically taken up "[[WebVideo/ThePoparena Cassie is a moron]]" as a catchphrase thanks to her numerous instances of poor judgment, while the other half sees her as the most human and relatable of the Animorphs. Much like anything involving David, this can lead to ''major'' backlash, so we'll just leave it at that.

* TrappedByMountainLions: ''Rachel'', of all people, is subjected to this in the first Megamorphs book, ''The Andalite's Gift''. The first half of the book has her contracting an unfortunate case of EasyAmnesia and wandering around the woods while her friends are fighting for their lives.
* UnexpectedCharacter: Arbon and Loren, two minor characters who hadn't been seen in years and had little reason to return again, both made surprise reappearances in the final arc. Weirder still, while Arbron's fate was neatly tied up in the epilogue, Loren wasn't addressed at all, making her a weird case of this character type meeting WhatHappenedToTheMouse

** Poor Tom made one stupid decision that led him to suffer from AFateWorseThanDeath for over ''three years''. Very early on in the series, he'd rather die because he can't see another way out. By the end, [[spoiler:he's being used as a HumanWeapon by the Yeerks and is strongly implied to be an EmptyShell. [[KillTheHostBody He doesn't get better.]]]]

* GameBreaker: Cassie, in-universe. Her natural ability as a 'temporal anomaly' allows her to see through the {{reality warp|er}}ing powers of beings like the Drode, and her presence in any timeline that's not the 'real' one will ensure the fake timeline breaks down. {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d by the Drode himself, who angrily accuses the Ellimist of '[[FixingTheGame stacking the deck]]' by including her on the team.