Animorphs Redux
by CeruleanSlane is an AU/‘reset’ version of the original Animorphs series. As Jake prepares to ram the One, it is revealed that Rachel and Ax have been taken to a kind of purgatory after their deaths, where they are confronted by the Drode. Since Crayak wanted Jake to actually lose his battle- as opposed to his current Heroic Suicide on his own terms- he has made a deal with the Ellimist; if Rachel and Ax agree, the Ellimist and Crayak will reset time back to a certain point, which will give the Animorphs another chance to win the war (or lose, from Crayak’s perspective).
The catch? None of them will remember the original timeline, resetting time like this will cause other things to change beyond those that are obviously affected by the original reset, and the Ellimist and Crayak each choose one person from the original timeline to survive the reset and go back to the moment the new history begins…
The series currently consists of four stories (with the first story covering the events of three of the original books and all subsequent stories exploring one book each); Animorphs Redux, Redux: The Pretender, Redux: The Suspicion, Redux: The Extreme, and Redux: The Attack. The series has not been updated since 2014, but there is no indication that it has been abandoned yet.
Animorphs Redux contains examples of:
- Adults Are Useless: Subverted with the return of Loren, Tobias’s mother, who is fully aware of the Yeerk invasion and proceeds to help her son rescue the rest of the Animorphs, help the team as a whole rescue Karen from the Yeerks, and is currently acting as the pilot for the Animorphs’ invisible spaceship during their raid to rescue Marco’s mother.
- Almighty Idiot: Played with for David’s character; he’s not entirely stupid, but futureCassie notes that David’s new morphing power has essentially driven him insane, making it even harder for him to come up with a coherent plan beyond ‘kill everyone I don’t like’.
- Ascended Extra:
- In this new timeline, events were arranged so that Melissa Chapman discovered the morphing cube rather than David, resulting in her becoming the new member of the Animorphs
- Also used with Loren, who goes from a minor character discovered towards the end of the war in a crippled, amnesic condition to a valuable asset and ally.
- Can be argued that this applies for Belle; technically an OC, she identifies herself as the Chee who typically takes Rachel’s place when circumstances require the Animorphs to be away on missions
- Body Horror: David’s new morphing ability, where he can control which parts of his body are morphed, such as giving himself a crab claw large enough to cut off Marco’s arm when Marco’s in his gorilla morph, and 'acquires' by literally absorbing his opponents into himself.
- Broken Pedestal: Any good will Melissa might have gained for her parents after learning about the deal they made with the Yeerks takes a serious knock when she learns that her father basically sold out the human race to save himself when he was a teenager.
- Convenient Replacement Character: Invoked with Melissa taking Cassie’s place on the team after Cassie is absorbed by David (although justified as Cassie somehow arranged for Melissa to be in the right place to find the box). This is prevented from being a Suspiciously Similar Substitute situation as Melissa is essentially less moral than Cassie in matters concerning morphing other humans without permission, as well as being less knowledgeable about animals, although she has a greater knowledge of comic books and science fiction.
- Curb Stomp Cushion: When trying to retrieve the morphing cube from David, Marco, Rachel and Cassie end up facing Visser Three, two Hork-Bajir and three armed human-Controllers while they're all in wolf morph. Marco explicitly muses that there's no way they can win such a fight, but he and Cassie manage to cripple the arm and leg of a different Hork-Bajir while Rachel manages to do some damage to Visser Three before Tobias, Ax and Jake (in tiger morph) show up to even the odds.
- Deal with the Devil: David returns to the past through his new deal with Crayak, as well as acquiring a new variation of the morphing power.
- Didn't Think This Through: Potentially used for David, as he morphs into a Chee to escape the attacks of the monstrous Veleek, but didn’t take into account that the Chee’s pacifist programming would prevent him either hurting anyone in this body or allow him to morph out of it, although he may not have actually known about this programming limitation.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Invoked when Loren confronts Visser Three in his Andalite form; when the Animorphs all fear one-on-one interaction with the Visser, Loren not only calls him ‘creepazoid’ to his face, but proceeds to intercept his attempt to stab her with his tail while armed with nothing but a branch, and follows it up by hitting him in the head with said branch.
- Double Consciousness: Used for the Animorphs on a regular basis, but plays a particular part in Tobias’s first meeting with Loren, as his hawk instincts are at war with his natural human desires for contact.
- Everyone Has Standards: Jokingly invoked when the Animorphs are trying to spy on a human-morphed Visser Three while they're in fly morph; when Visser Three goes into the toilet, Marco and Melissa each affirm that they are never going to stick around for that, and the others agree (save for Ax, who doesn't get what they're talking about).
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Arguably invoked with David and the Yeerks; characters note that both David and the Yeerks can’t comprehend the idea that their enemies will keep fighting even against hopeless odds. There is a more specific example of this in David and Melissa's 'dynamic', as David felt that Melissa should ‘sympathise’ with him just because they were both once the ‘new kid’ on the team, unable to acknowledge the differences between them.
- Evil Counterpart: Obviously David, but he has also recruited Taylor and Estrid to act as the ‘Dark Animorphs’ (although they haven’t done anything as a clear team yet).
- Fate Worse than Death: For David, as he is permanently rendered incapable of taking ‘revenge’ on the team because he is trapped in a form that won’t allow him to hurt anybody.
- First Kiss: Between Rachel and Tobias in The Pretender and Marco and Melissa in The Attack.
- Foil: Basically applies to David and Melissa's dynamic, as while they are both 'the sixth Animorph', where David's similarities to the rest of the team prevented him from fitting in, Melissa's own ties to the team, such as her sharing Marco's fondness for sci-fi or Rachel's interest in gymnastics, helps her fit in with the others, reinforcing how David's own flaws prevented him fitting into the team rather than the idea that adding anyone to the team would be a bad idea.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: As in canon, David goes from a random kid to the team’s greatest enemy, made even worse by his new morphing ability
- A God Am I: David often rants that he is the most powerful being the Animorphs have ever fought
- Groin Attack: Used twice in short notice in The Threat; first Jake hits David with his knee (noting that, regardless of David’s superior morphing power, he hasn’t learnt to take away his weak spot), and then Melissa follows it up by attacking David in her new Doberman morph
- Heroic Sacrifice: Arguably, this story begins with one, as Jake’s decision to give his life to stop the One sets the subsequent reset in motion
- Interspecies Romance: Referenced with the revelation that Loren was married to Elfangor, Tobias musing on just how much his parents must have loved each other given the obvious cultural gap
- It's All About Me: David is determined to continue his vendetta against the Animorphs for 'betraying' him, even though the Animorphs of the new timeline haven't actually done anything to him before he started attacking them.
- Kick the Dog: Invoked with the revelation that David attacked Rachel’s sister Jordan just to ‘punish’ Rachel for her role in his prior defeat, regardless of the fact that technically this version of Rachel hasn’t done anything to him yet.
- Laser-Guided Karma: David, who has spent most of the story revelling in his greater power and ability to take revenge on the Animorphs for their perceived ‘crimes’ against him, is left trapped in an indestructible body that will nevertheless never allow him to hurt anyone else ever again.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Rachel’s solution to the threat of David involves pitting David against the powerful Veleek.
- Like Parent, Like Spouse: Invoked when Tobias observes that Loren reminds him of Rachel, but Rachel asks him not to bring that up as it just makes things weird given how she feels about him.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Invoked in Pretender, when Loren- who Tobias already recognises as his mother- talks to what she believes is an Andalite in hawk morph and asks if they know where her husband is, allowing Tobias to identify Elfangor as his father.
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Crayak’s reasons for agreeing to this deal with the Ellimist; he wants Jake to have a second chance to actually lose, rather than to make a Heroic Sacrifice
- Narcissist: As in canon, David has to prove he’s better than everyone else, constantly ranting about how he’s so much better than every other member of the team due to his greater power
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Potentially for the team, as they have reset reality and risk the Yeerks winning all over again, but most specifically for Ax in The Extreme, as his actions create a Z-Space rift that will make it even harder for the Andalites to reach Earth while trapping a vast Yeerk fleet above Earth, all in the name of rescuing one other Andalite from becoming a host, with no evidence that this effort worked.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: David claims that everything he does is because the Animorphs drove him this far, incapable of recognising that his rejection by the team is his own fault
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Rachel giving Jake an emotional hug in front of Marco is a clear sign of how worried she is about the current situation.
- Plug 'n' Play Friends: Arguably used as Melissa joins the team, but it should be noted that, unlike some other examples, Melissa had a pre-existing friendship with one of the team- in this case, Rachel- which helps the others accept her.
- Put on the Bus:
- Shortly after the new timeline starts, Cassie is essentially eliminated by David, although this is justified as her status as an ‘anomaly’ would have caused the new timeline to collapse, and her alternate future self remains as an occasional ally.
- Also applies to the Venbeer, with Rachel and Future Cassie sending the artificially-engineered Venbeer the Yeerks have created away to another planet before the Yeerks can begin using them for their Arctic Kandrona project, as depicted in the original timeline in the novel The Extreme.
- Revenge Myopia: David, seeking revenge for the way the Animorphs treated him despite his own actions being the reason they pushed him that far (which makes even less sense in the new timeline when none of them have done anything to him).
- Sanity Slippage: Explicitly referenced when futureCassie mentions that David’s new morphing ability allows him to absorb minds as well as DNA, with the price that his mind is fragmenting from the new memories he’s taking in.
- Save the Villain: When Jake realises that David is going to try and basically take Visser Three's place, he grimly observes that this means the only way to save Earth is for the Animorphs to save Visser Three (specifically, since they're all in fly morph, they just buzz the Visser to draw his attention to David so David can't take the Visser by surprise).
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Played with; Rachel and Ax chose to take the option to reset history with this in mind, but since Crayak also played a part in the reset, it can be also be seen as Make Wrong What Once Went Right
- Shout-Out:
- When the Animorphs first meet future!Cassie after a confrontation with David, Marco observes that this crisis has become so confusing that he hasn't "questioned [his] sense of reality so much since the moment Buffy suddenly had a sister".
- Demonstrating her sci-fi fan status, Melissa compares the Ellimist to Q from Star Trek and David to Sauron as a whiny, emo teenager.
- Smug Snake: Even with all his power, at heart, David is still the pathetic loser he was originally, ranting about how the Animorphs are powerless against him even with their powers while ignoring the fact that he’d be even more useless against them without his own abilities.
- Stacy's Mom: Briefly comes up when Marco refers to Loren as a 'babe' before he learns who she is. Even after he's told who Loren is, Marco informs Tobias that his mother is hot.
- Stealth in Space: A complex chain of events sees the Animorphs acquiring an invisible spaceship during a mission, but Ax explicitly notes that this ship would only be invisible so long as the Animorphs do nothing to draw attention to its presence, such as start shooting at other ships.
- The Reveal: Qute a few, including the fact that David is The One.
- Took a Level in Badass:
- Where she was a shy and quiet girl who couldn’t understand why her parents had subtly rejected her in canon, after acquiring the power to morph Melissa has proven to be a powerful asset, particularly since her first combat morphs are a vicious Doberman belonging to a neighbour and a bull hippopotamus
- Arguably invoked with Loren, as she was a crippled amnesic in the novels but is fully healthy and has all her memories in this version of events, but the writer explicitly notes that the only change is keeping Loren’s original persona from The Andalite Chronicles intact
- Undying Loyalty: David and Cassie to Crayak and Ellimist, although Cassie notes that Crayak doesn’t actually care about David in return.
- Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Potentially used in Redux: The Attack, as Marco proposed his plan to discreetly enter the Yeerk fleet with their invisible spaceship, rescue his mother/capture Visser One, destroy the Yeerk fleet by triggering the self-destruct, and blame everything on a Yeerk civil war between Vissers One and Three, without the reader learning any of the specifics (the story is currently unfinished, so it is unknown if the plan will work).
- Weaksauce Weakness: Technically with David; he is left trapped in the near-indestructible, superhumanly strong body of a Chee, but due to Chee programming he is completely incapable of directly causing harm to others.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Estrid, whose desire to save her brother drives her to join David’s ‘Dark Animorphs’ despite the fact that the other Andalite present is working against David.
- Wham Line: Quite a few chapters end with these, including;
- “I am the One.”
- “The Ellimist has me.”
- “I need help… Mom.”
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Explicitly invoked in David’s case, as his new morphing power drives him insane.
