Fanfic / Dæmorphing

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Dæmorphing is an Animorphs AU by Poetry that incorporates the cosmology of His Dark Materials. It explores how the events of Animorphs would play out differently if all the human characters had dæmons, and the relationships the various alien races have with the Dust.

Most setting tropes from Animorphs apply, though plot tropes may or may not. Spoilers for Animorphs are unmarked.

Additional worldbuilding and guides for readers unfamiliar with one or both canons can be found here.

All spoilers prior to chapter 8 of Welcome Home are unmarked, to avoid whiting out half the page.

This fic series provides examples of:

• Adapted Out: Many of the events of the books, especially the earlier ones before the status quo changed entirely, still happened but were not portrayed as for the most part they were similar to canon but with dæmons. These include the appearances of the Leerans and Helmacrons, though they're mentioned. Other things, particularly the wackier stuff, outright didn't happen in this setting. See "Adaptational Mundanity".
• Adaptational Consent: In Seeing in Color, the series' equivalent to Animorphs: The Departure, Aftran still infests Cassie but goes about it very differently. Rather than roughly seizing control, being silent, and seriously considering turning the Animorphs in, Aftran is much gentler, keeps talking, and plays around in Cassie's body. Canon Cassie hates the experience of infestation and refers to it as a violation, even if she's still wiling to become Aftran's host rather than allowing her to die, but Aftran's greater care makes Dæmorphing Cassie much more open to infestation as a positive thing.
• Adaptational Mundanity: Dæmorphing tries to be a little more grounded than the series proper. Rachel doesn't get split into Nice and Mean Rachel, instead of leaving an ixcilla Aldrea just recorded a final statement, instead of morphing hybrids Marco just has panic attacks, the Helmacrons don't return, nor does their tech and a water buffalo doesn't get the power to morph, there are no mind control hamburgers, no Nartec, there's no Animorphs: The Familiar outside of some Dæmorphing Divergences, Cassie doesn't go to Australia. Some of the wacky chase in Animorphs: The Absolute still happens but as different characters are present it's shorter and less frantic. After Bridge to the Stars and A Place to Stand, Crayak and the Drode make no more appearances, and the Ellimist doesn't talk to anyone though he narrates The Herdsmoot and mentions that the Andalite military is among Crayak's pawns. The Kelbrid appear but as one more odd people who can be negotiated with and have motives that can be grasped, not as completely mysterious, and the One doesn't take Ax.
• Adaptational Romance Downgrade:
  • In the beginning Poetry was not interested in writing the canonical romantic pairings among the Animorphs, so Rachel/Tobias and Jake/Cassie were downplayed, with emotional moments between them often either off-screen or happening differently. For example, canonically in Animorphs: The Stranger, when Tobias is briefly human again Rachel hugs him. Here, Tobias instead focuses entirely on Elhariel and being able to see and touch her again. Similarly, where in Animorphs: The Attack the Howlers retain the memory of Jake and Cassie kissing, in Bridge to the Stars the memory is of Loren singing to Ax and Tobias. As characters developed in different ways, Poetry found their dynamics more interesting and so the canonical couples still get together, but differently.
  • Except for Marco's parents, anyway. In canon they hook right back up when reunited and he describes them as happy (then makes no mention of them post-war). Here, while Eva still loves Peter she can't forget that when she was infested by Edriss he noticed the change in her and liked it because she didn't assert herself as much. His memory of this being the happiest year of his marriage and her memory of helplessness and violation clash too badly.
• Adaptation Deviation: That humans have dæmons and other species have their own anchors is the obvious difference, which leads to more, but there are a few others unrelated to dæmons or Dust in general.
  • In canon at the start of the series command of the Earth invasion is handed over from Visser One to Visser Three, after which Visser One was assigned elsewhere and only rarely returned; here, while Visser One may have contributed to the invasion of Leera, afterwards she's pretty well permanently stationed above Earth, running administration on the invasion, and is very roughly Visser Three's boss more than his rival.
  • Instead of an escaped leopard menacing Karen, Aftran, and Cassie, it's a cougar.
  • In Animorphs: The Reunion Visser One says that after the base she oversaw was destroyed in Animorphs: The Escape she was demoted back to Sub-Visser and Visser Three, suspecting her of having helped the "Andalite Bandits" back in Animorphs: The Predator, accused her and got a death sentence put on her head. Animorphs: Visser opens with her as a roughed-up prisoner facing a charge of treason. Here, Visser One was party to all those same things but something was different behind the scenes, so when Eva and Aftran start their impersonation of her they step into the role of Visser One, not a prisoner on trial or a disgraced Sub-Visser. Visser Three still finds out about Darwin and tries to use him to discredit Visser One, but trots him out when "Visser One" is in a position of strength.
  • There are many more Sub-Vissers and Vissers mentioned, with nearly any Yeerk in a position of power having some kind of rank. This is likely in part because of the increased focus on Yeerks and the Yeerk Empire.
  • Yeerk pools observe strict biosecurity and go on alert and clean up when a host so much as vomits off the pier, instead of having them sit out in the open and letting injured bats fall in without comment.
  • Yeerks themselves desiccate very quickly and feel pain at the first touch of air rather than being able to tolerate it as long as in canon.
  • The morphing technology is slightly tweaked and made consistent. It's a form of nanotech here which always funnels a morpher's entire mass away into Z-space - dæmons vanish when humans morph because they go with it - while bringing in new mass for the new morphed body. Being given the power to morph requires the participation of someone who already can and an intelligent focus on the Escafil device, so it can't be given to animals. There's a reason why some people are estreens, and it's that they know more about animals or biology in general.
• Adaptation Drift: It started out as straightforward retellings of the Animorphs books where the only major difference was the existence of dæmons. However, once Loren becomes a Team Member in the Adaptation, the changes start piling up, leading to the war ending in a completely different way.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • The Dust is usually called hrala, occasionally Rusakov particles, and rarely spirit-motes or the Kolumatiy. "Dust" comes up in Prometheus in Chains simply as a descriptor since Jake doesn't know what to call it and in The Herdmoot, narrated by the Ellimist, who calls it Dust with a capital D.
  • The process that separates humans from their dæmons is called severing instead of incision. "Incision" is used a few times but Rachel insists people don't call it the more clinical, removed word.
• Adaptation Species Change: Euclid is Nora's dæmon instead of a regular dog.
• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: Applies to pretty much everyone. The Chee give the Animorphs therapy, Tobias is less cut off from humanity and reunites with his mother much sooner, Tom is saved halfway through, and Jake's parents are never infested. However, the alliance with the Chee breaks when the Animorphs, the free Hork-Bajir, and the freed human hosts vote to try to use a virus to modify the Yeerks. Therapy stops and as the Animorphs feel the strain and do more morally questionable things the angst upgrades itself.
• Adaptation Expansion: Animorphs is almost exclusively focused on the Animorphs, who get all the POV, and gave the one Andalite member of the team fewer books. Dæmorphing certainly cares about the Animorphs but also puts a lot of focus on their various allies and extended allies and expands the setting in doing so, including worldbuilding about the different aliens.
• Adaptational Diversity:
  • Since Animorphs was written in The '90s, there weren't any overtly queer characters. In this series, the teens discover their sexualities as part of their arcs, the Hork-Bajir practice polygamy, and there are a few transgender characters. Including Tobias.
  • The humans' religious beliefs, which were only mentioned in passing in canon, are given much more focus.
  • Cassie and her parents were the only black characters in canon, but this series introduces a few original ones as well.
  • It's never said in canon what race Marco's father Peter is. Here he's Chinese, making Marco Latino-Chinese.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: Loren shows up shortly after the events of book 15 (a whole 34 books before she appeared in the main series in canon), Mr. Tidwell and Illim appear during the brief adaptation of #27 (two books earlier), and the Taxxon Rebellion in the loose adaptation of #51 (two books earlier in the main series).
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • Toby in much of the series is a bit more assertive than in canon but has a very similar personality, but as the stakes rise and she has to be party to and endure more and more she becomes harsher and has increasingly less patience for her allies, even the Animorphs. This culminates in changing her name to Kalij, a Hork-Bajir name.
  • In The Attack, when Jake morphs Howler he finds that their mentality is more similar to dolphin than anything else - playful, joyful, without malice, and like children. In Bridge to the Stars, Bachu (unlike Erek) tells the Animorphs about their mindset immediately. In a reversal of how Erek and the Animorphs considered the situation, she still finds them to be like children, but the Animorphs see them differently. These Howlers might be considered non-evil only in that they have such a Lack of Empathy for their targets that they can't acknowledge them as people at all. Slaughter is still a game, but they're less little kids and more gamers, competitive and focused on their scores. When presented with the body of a Howler who'd been killed they dismiss it as garbage; it was weak, therefore it wasn't a real Howler.
• Adaptational Late Appearance: Events are shuffled around so that the Animorphs evacuate their families to the Hork-Bajir valley (Welcome Home, based on #49) before they find the various Andalites stranded on Earth in Destroyer of Worlds. Additionally, Mertil and Gafinilan are introduced before Arbat's team, which was the other way around in canon (#40 and #38, respectively).
• Adaptational Nice Guy: The petulant self-centered aspects Tobias sometimes shows in canon when talking to Hork-Bajir are absent in Dæmorphing, as is his rejection of the concept that there are innocent Yeerks. In general Dæmorphing Tobias is less reserved, more pro-social, and willing to reach out to people of many species, probably because he's so much less isolated in this series. For that matter, all of the Animorphs and not just Cassie are readier to see Yeerks as people, and can accept Taxxons as allies too.
• Adaptational Sympathy:
  • Canonical Animorphs gestures towards regular Hork-Bajir being people, Yeerks being Not Always Evil, and even Taxxons as having sympathetic aspects, but ultimately keeps them all at a remove to one degree or another - the only "Taxxon" who even gets a name is actually Arbron. Dæmorphing makes all these species more complex and gives them more nuanced goals and desires, Taxxons in particular.
  • Voluntary hosts in canon are not well-regarded. At best they're broken-down and pathetic, at worst they're The Quisling, laughing and comfortable amidst the screams of the involuntary hosts. In Dæmorphing there certainly still are quislings among the voluntary hosts but it's more varied. Many voluntary hosts started as involuntaries in the cages, but when they couldn't find a way out they just tried to make the best of things. Cooperating at least lets them be comfortable while their Yeerks feed. And these become less voluntary when their Yeerks lose their coercive power.
  • David, the Sixth Ranger, is still a nasty piece of work with a shocking Lack of Empathy, but here the Animorphs can understand his cowardice, his desire to use morphing to benefit himself, and even him wanting to make a deal with Visser Three to return his parents. They don't like any of that but they can't hate him for it, not like they can hate him for (he believes) killing Tobias because he's "just a bird" and for touching Diamanta.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Estrid is portrayed rather more harshly than in canon, with her willingness to go to extremes to take out the Yeerk threat being more fully examined, her uncertain or questioning sides not shown, and she does a lot worse. Early into her appearance she shares some welcome news of home with Ax - according to Poetry this was by no means a kind gesture but purely manipulative. She's portrayed more sympathetically after Ax nearly kills her, at which point she grows a conscience.
  • The Andalites in general look worse, which is saying something considering the endgame in canon. In Daemorphing the Yeerks' desire to experience the world through different bodies is not an inherent drive but a result of Andalites teaching them to find their slug bodies inferior and lacking. The Yeerk Empire itself is only a militaristic Empire because the Andalites are one, and the Yeerks think of their hosts and aliens in general as disposable because Andalites as Xenophobic Herbivores have little regard for the lives of aliens. Ax comes to be ashamed of his culture and fears that there's nothing good about it.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Interspecies bonding over art is a recurring theme, whether it be the Paradox Family and Andalite thought-speech-singing, more instances of bonding over stories and legends than can be counted, or Tidwell and Illim's shared appreciation of poetry. Canonically Ax thinks all human music is terrible, but here he's introduced to choral singing through Loren and comes to like it, even if he doesn't care for other forms.
  • Five Artworks about the Andalite-Yeerk War describes several art installations. Aliens of other species get a very different sensory experience than those who created them - The Pools Beyond Reach is a series of shallow Yeerk pools each with different conditions. Yeerks can swim through these but others have to wade and get a different effect. A Message From Low Command is a video, but it's cut to make sense to Andalite stalk eyes, so a human viewer struggles to track the rapid, pixelated movement. Insulation can only be sensed at all by Leerans and Yeerks. These aren't meant to be beautiful so much as meaningful, and the "critical reception" field under each one suggests that while these aren't the kind of art that is taken home and framed, aliens knowing context can still get a lot out of them.
• An Alien Named "Bob": One of the Peace Yeerks is known only as Helen.
• All Therapists Are Muggles: Defied. After Loren insists on it, the Chee serve as therapists to the Animorphs until their alliance breaks. Elgat Kar provides therapy to new-frees in the valley, and to Ax when he suffers the effects of being too far from his Guide Tree for so long.
• Alternate Animal Affection: Humans regularly comfort or soothe themselves by interacting with their dæmons, reaching out to touch them or being touched themselves. Some are well-suited to cuddling up or hugging, others aren't but make do. Kalysico is a four-eyed butterflyfish, so when Tidwell interacts with her he trails his fingers into her tank and she nibbles them or brushes his fingertips with her scaly sides. Dæmons also often interact to show the affection between different humans, nuzzling or caressing each other. Elfangor transformed his guide tree Hala Fala into an orchid bee dæmon who would buzz in Jaxom's ears and crawl on his head. And while a human in morph touching a dæmon doesn't have the same effect as touching one as a human due to their own dæmon being there, Tobias often perches on Abineng or Jaxom, an intimacy other characters notice.
• Ambiguous Ending: The Museum of Stolen Moments ends with Toby deciding to Shapeshifter Mode Lock themself one more time. What they morph into is left unsaid.
• Angry, Angry Hippos: In The Cowardice of Lions Jake and Rachel impersonate the dæmons of David's parents, a striped hyena and a pygmy hippo respectively, in a ploy to kill him. Jake, feeling guilty about using Rachel as the killer of the team, chose to be the hyena and the killer, but at the last moment Rachel decides to spare him from becoming a cold-blooded murderer and kills an unsuspecting David with one bite to his dæmon. A pygmy hippo is half the height and one quarter of the weight of a full-sized hippo plus they're more docile than their bigger cousins, but they still have huge teeth◊ and can be aggressive; when she first morphs the hippo, its built-in instincts have her wanting to stand and fight.
• Animal Motifs: Humans in this setting have dæmons, animal-shaped manifestations of their souls. Poetry prefers a behaviour-based angle to Pullman's more symbolic approach, so snakes are not symbols of evil or deception and lions don't denote nobility.
  • Tobias's Elhariel is a European storm-petrel, a bird that flies great distances alone. Jake's Merlyse is a whiskeyjack, a corvid that thrives in the harshest winter. Cassie's Quintavion is a vampire bat, manipulative towards its prey and intensely altruistic towards its cave-fellows. Marco's Diamanta is a timber rattlesnake, a patient ambush predator with close bonds to its friends. Rachel's Abineng is a sable antelope, a huge beautiful antelope that contends against lions to protect its herd. And Sixth Ranger Loren's Jaxom is a zebra duiker, a tiny shy antelope that will nonetheless fight ferociously to defend its territory.
  • There are some noteworthy non-Animorph examples too. Eva's Mercurio is an emperor penguin, a social bird that survives months without food in the Antarctic winter and has extensive devotion to its chicks (and also meshes with her love of the water). Naomi's Caedhren is a blue jay, a relative of her nephew's whiskeyjack which is less specialized but is still assertive and happier dealing with strife. There's reasoning behind the dæmons of the first wave of human refugees in Kref Magh too. In The Cost of the Fight Jordan's Tseycal settles as a spectacled flying fox, a bat which has group dynamics similar to sable antelopes though with more social fluidity and less defensiveness towards predators.
• Ascended Extra: Lourdes and the other Chee who tended to replace the Animorphs whenever the kids had to be on a prolonged mission are fully developed characters. They're not alone. The Peace Movement Yeerks (especially Aftran), Tom, Melissa, Arbron and the Taxxons, the various stranded Andalites, and Toby and the other Hork-Bajir are given much more focus, with tons of original characters added as well to flesh the populations out.
• Aura Vision: Hork-Bajir can see the Dust, which they call hrala. Turns out the Chee had this ability too, but they disabled it after their creators went extinct.
• Author Appeal: Ecology and animal behavior, alien worldbuilding, disability (including mental), Judaism, gender identity and sexuality, and intense relationships that are not necessarily romantic are aspects that come up in a lot of Poetry's writing, especially here. Poetry has also written other dæmon fic for other fandoms and for His Dark Materials.
• Badass Army: The Free Hork-Bajir get a lot of focus and are shown to be quite competent and organized, all the more so when the Animorphs give some of them the power to morph.
• Badass Family: Are you related to Elfangor and on Earth? Then you are badass no exception. There's the Andalite legend himself, Loren who retains all her Andalite Chronicles badass, Tobias, and Ax.
• Back for the Finale: A number of characters appear in The Presence of Justice who'd been absent from the narrative for some time. These include Jake's grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, David's parents, Ax's parents, and - the deepest pull - Tobias's neglectful uncle. Madra (Edriss's daughter) and Wunmi (a minor Original Character, whose Yeerk had tried to kill Rachel and murdered Fei Chiang for stopping her) are also present representing newly-freed hosts trying to find refuge.
• Bat Out of Hell: Defied. Cassie is horrified at first when she realizes directly after the Animorphs kill David that Quincy's settled as a vampire bat, but her dad tells her that vampire bats are altruistic despite having to do harsh things to survive. Her parents then affectionately call her "my little bat" fairly often. There's also no negative consideration towards Jordan's Tseycal, but after all he does settle as an adorable fruit bat.
• Biological Weapons Solve Everything: Zig-zagged. The Iskoort world ended up the way it is now (highly capitalistic, but not bad and Aftran thinks Yoorts have wonderful lives) thanks to gene therapy that made Yoorts only capable of Symbiotic Possession, not one-sided control. Primarily it was given to willing Yoorts, though some people administered it by force. The quantum virus Andalites used on the Hork-Bajir decimated them and left the Yeerks with fewer shock troops, but they were able to capture and forcibly reproduce enough of them to avert genocide; Hork-Bajir continued to be infested in some numbers. The Andalites were planning to release another genocidal virus against the Yeerks on Earth but by then the Animorphs understand that Yeerks are people, as well as fearing knock-on effects. The Guardians Of The Galaxy have Estrid reverse engineer a retrovirus that alters Yeerks in the way Yoorts were changed and spreads through the water, and deliver it to all Yeerks on earth. Improperly tested and made by one person with an out-of-date lab that Ax destroys before it can be used to adjust the virus, it causes many deaths but does allow for the end of the invasion.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Andalites keep their genitals between their forelegs (something that's also the case in other fic by this author) and find a face-to-face hug erotic. Their children are initially quite small and kept in a "pouch" which Andalites of any gender have. Great Gardens Andalites believe that it's traumatic to the infant to be removed from a pouch and so one parent carries it until it's old enough to emerge. Regardless of gender that parent is considered the "mother" of the infant while the other is the "father", going with a line from Animorphs: The Alien where Ax notes that all human fathers are male. Ixilan Andalites freely transfer their infants from one parent's pouch to the other and so don't have distinct categories like that.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: Taxxons used to have four genders, similar to the castes of hive insects: nurses, queens, workers, and soldiers, which is reflected in their language. However, thanks to the Endless Famine that demolished Taxxon civilization, nurses and soldiers are extinct by the time the story begins. Some Living Hives refer to themselves with the pronouns associated with the nurse gender, ve/ver.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: Inverted. The humans find it weird at first that aliens' consciousnesses aren't split between two bodies.
• Blessed with Suck: Having a dæmon is a mixed bag. There are very few downsides to having an unsettled dæmon, as children do. The ability to shape-shift instantly into any Earth animal is maybe not quite as awesome as it sounds because unlike with morphing, dæmons don't have animal instincts and have to learn to use their forms; when Tobias morphs his cat and jumps effortlessly onto the bed, Elhariel says that she wouldn't have been able to make that jump even after that week that she'd spent in cat form. Still, humans can use their other halves' senses, a dæmon can speak clearly even if emotion or illness makes it impossible for the body, and there are countless instances of dæmons helping carry things, keeping watch, and getting something out of reach.
  • All dæmons eventually settle when their human bodies are teens, in forms that suit their personalities and which may create challenges. Having a large daemon is likened to a physical disability in the social model as it can prevent people from entering buildings or riding in cars. Insect dæmons are usually kept in lanyards around their body's necks because they could be blown away by wind or damaged. Eva is unable to run because as a penguin Mercurio can't keep up, and Nora can't climb a tree very far because her poodle dæmon Euclid has to stay on the ground. Aquatic dæmons don't need to live in water but it's more comfortable and allows them to move, so several characters lug around heavy tanks for fish or cephalopods. All these characters manage well enough, but there's also mention of kids settling as giant jellyfish and having to live on houseboats.
  • Dæmons also represent a unique vulnerability, settled or not. Anyone can touch a Taxxon's anchor without ill effect. It's taboo for anyone else to touch another Andalite's anchor, but their Guide Trees are in protected places on their homeworld. But a dæmon is right there at someone's side, unable to get very far away without causing soul pains, and a human can be incapacitated if another human deliberately touches it, or killed if their dæmon is killed. (If an alien, or a human who's in morph and therefore is both selves in one body, touches a dæmon this is still socially significant but doesn't have that same striking effect.)
• Bond Creatures: As in Lyra's world in His Dark Materials all humans have dæmons, which here are explicitly parts of themselves. Non-humans morphing humans do not form dæmons, but unlike in HDM people can't tell at a glance if something is an animal or a dæmon - so when Ax morphs human and goes out in public, Tobias rides on his shoulder. This means that Ax has a Cloudcuckoolander's Minder who keeps him on track and from running wild and attracting attention, and Tobias is far less isolated as he can go into regular society and be seen as a sapient being who draws no special notice, even if he can't talk.
• Breather Episode: Self-Defense, Putting Down Roots, and Remainder are much lower on the violence and horror than typical for the series or source material.
• Burying a Substitute: A variation in Abel or Cain: the Animorphs and Chee fake Tom's death, so the Chee dig up a corpse from another grave and pass it off as Tom so his family will have something to bury.
• The Cameo: Elizabeth from Sporadic Phantoms appears in chapter 2 of The Presence of Justice. The actual Elizabeth is never heard from in that podcast, only her Yeerk. Here she's encountered in the voluntary host lounge while Korant is feeding and is a "Sharing cultist" who talks the way Korant does in the podcast, referring to Yeerks as "imagos" and saying the upside of the dreshked virus is that it sorts the wheat from the chaff, the true believers in the Sharing's values from those who just went along hoping for a promotion. Taylor finds her and the other "cultists" weird and off-putting but they're a major source of support for her, so she tolerates them.
• Chekhov's Armory: Earlier installments in the series set up giant walls of guns to go off — some of them get fired, like Bridge to the Stars having the Yoorts being Yeerks modified by a retrovirus going off all the way in Destroyer of Worlds when Cassie talks Estrid into making a contagious version of said virus using DNA from a Yoort morph.
• Child of Two Worlds:
  • In the alternate universe of A Place To Stand, Tobias is this for humans and Andalites.
  • In The Presence of Justice, Loren realises that they need feshlath, children of two herds, to talk the Andalites out of blowing up Earth. She and Tobias can act as go-betweens for the humans; the Hamees for the Hork-Bajir; and Arbron for the Taxxons. All of them are related to Andalites in some way.
• Children Are Innocent: This is a recurring motif.
  • Forcibly breeding Hork-Bajir and raising them underground is portrayed as the most depraved thing the Yeerks have ever done, and the Guardians of the Galaxy are determined to put a stop to it.
  • Among the Yeerks in the Aftran Plisam Pool are the recently-born Mielan spawning, and the older Yeerks want to make sure they have a future free from propaganda.
  • Sky Hive, the living hive who ends up on the Pool Ship, is constantly curious about the world, and Eva wants to protect its innocence.
• Children Forced to Kill: This gets even more focus than in canon, where they don't always think as much about aliens being people and can usually get away with knocking human-Controllers out. Killing David devastates all of them.
• Competence Zone: Defied. While the team starts at thirteen, Loren is in her late thirties or so, and Eva and the Governor are likely older than that. In canon those are some of the only non-useless adults, but here many of the Animorphs' parents, and various adult refugees, are pretty competent in their ways and able to contribute significantly instead of being The Load.
• Composite Character: Tom's second Yeerk is Demoted to Extra, but Sub-Visser Fifty-One (Korin), with Taylor's help, takes his place as the Yeerk who usurps Esplin and steals the Blade Ship in the finale.
• Contamination Situation: The Animorphs and their allies resort to releasing a modified Quantum Virus to disable the ability of Yeerks to control hosts against their will. As it spreads through water rather than air, Eva and Aftran in particular have to arrange for it to spread beyond the main Pool under Santa Barbara, and up to the Pool Ship and beyond.
• Cool Old Lady: Cool Middle Aged Lady? The Governor doesn't get to be quite as awesome as in canon because this meeting with her doesn't go so badly that she has to take charge of her own rescue, but Marco's still impressed by her quick thinking and resilience.
• Cub Cues Protective Parent: In Loren's first battle she's able to tap in to her battle bison morph's protective rage when Tobias is in danger by telling the bison instincts that predators have her calf.
• Dark Fic: Vanilla Animorphs is already very dark considering it's middle-grade fiction, but it does sometimes avoid using the word 'death', for example, and sometimes side characters (especially children) improbably survive or suffer Uncertain Doom - in particular, the heroes somehow manage to almost never kill humans, who're usually specifically said to be unconscious after a fight. One foundation of the source material is that all aliens, even the gross weird ones, are people and Not Always Evil, but it doesn't completely embrace that until late in the series, and the Animorphs are rarely disturbed by how many innocent Hork-Bajir they've killed. Dæmorphing tries to maintain a similar ratio of silliness, heartwarming moments, War Is Hell, and horror, but it doesn't flinch.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • Welcome Home gives Tom more focus than usual; he narrates for the first time, and we get to see his positive relationships with the Hork-Bajir.
  • Remainder is told entirely from the perspective of Marco's stepmother Nora, who hasn't narrated before or since.
• The Dead Have Names:
  • The voluntary hosts who colluded with their Yeerks to escape in Abel or Cain discover that their Yeerks were found out and killed for being host sympathizers, which makes all of them upset. The Chee helping to care for them creates a memorial stone with the names of the Yeerks.
  • In Welcome Home, Tom tells Jake the names of the Hork-Bajir he watched commit suicide to avoid being reinfested.
• Death by Adaptation: There are several of these.
  • In canon, the Animorphs interrupted Edriss-in-Eva before she could kill Darwin. Here, Esplin forces Aftran-in-Eva (who he thinks is Edriss) to kill him to prove she's still loyal to the empire, which Aftran does.
  • Alloran first suffers a Fate Worse than Death as he's severed from his guide tree, and then is killed by Arbat.
  • In The Abyss Melissa's attempt to get out of killing a Hork-Bajir Controller gets her killed, but not until the Yeerk crawls into her and starts spilling her knowledge.
• Death Faked for You: The Animorphs and the Chee fake Tom's death in Abel or Cain by making it look like he drowned, so they can take him to the Hork-Bajir valley and free him.
• Death of a Child: There are a lot of these through the series, one of the more marked ways that it's darker than canon. For example, in Visser Edriss is presented with her son Darwin and told to kill him to prove that her loyalty to the Yeerk Empire is more important than her feelings for the child she bore through a previous host, but the Animorphs interrupt as she's stalling. Here, Edriss is dead and Aftran and Eva have to pretend to be her, and there's no merciful way out, so Aftran kills him.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • In canon, Tom's second Yeerk (or possibly third or fourth; there's really no telling if Tom got passed around or not) was one of the main players in the final battle. Here, he's unceremoniously killed off halfway through, and if this wasn't the Yeerk who pulls a treacherous Enemy Mine in Animorphs: The Answer, they aren't in that same position at the end of the series. Instead, Taylor and her Yeerk take the closest approximation to that role.
  • While Erek makes regular appearances, he doesn't deliver the Animorphs exposition as often as they have many other contacts, Chee and otherwise, who can bring them issues in his place. He fades out almost entirely after Aftran confronts him about imprisoning a Yeerk inside his body, and he's completely absent from the final battle.
  • Taylor and Sub-Visser Fifty-One appear as in The Illusion, and get away as in that book, but there's no clear analogue to The Test where she returns to work with the Animorphs in an apparent Enemy Mine that is actually a trap and a way to eliminate much of the Peace Movement. She does come Back for the Finale; with the virus making it impossible for Yeerks to control involuntary hosts, Taylor being a voluntary Controller creates a significant advantage for her and she is able to depose Visser Five.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation:
  • In canon, it's strongly implied that Rachel killed David near the end of the series. After he betrays them in The Cowardice of Lions, Aftran tells Cassie that turning David into a rat and leaving him in solitary confinement would be too cruel, so Cassie comes up with a plan to kill him instead. Rachel deals the finishing blow on his dæmon, managing to kill him instantly in a moment of happiness.
  • Not only does Edriss 562 die much sooner, but she's quickly killed in the Chee's underground dog park when Eva impales her on Mercurio's beak, instead of Marco stepping on her while she's dying of Kandrona starvation.
  • In canon, Tom's second Yeerk was killed by Rachel along with his host. In Abel or Cain, the Animorphs kidnap him and offer to kill him before he dies of Kandrona starvation, while the real Tom gets to be free.
• Different World, Different Movies: Various existing works of fiction are referenced, but all the characters have dæmons.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: When Tobias morphs a Yeerk and infests Loren to see if she's trustworthy, he accidentally comes across her memories of having sex.
• Disposable Vagrant: In The Guided and the Lost, the Animorphs learn that the Yeerks have figured out how to sever people from their anchors, and have already successfully separated several homeless humans from their dæmons (and Alloran from his guide tree). They're able to save one of the humans before she can be severed, who then becomes a refugee in the Hork-Bajir valley.
• Ditto Aliens: Defied multiple times, though often it's difficult for humans to be able to tell aliens of a specific species apart until they're more familiar with them.
  • When Mr. Tidwell morphs a Yeerk for the first time, he notices that Illim has one palp shorter than the other and a reflective patch on his front.
  • The Animorphs use the frolis maneuver to create Hork-Bajir and Taxxon morphs because their allies think it'd be too weird to have someone who looked just like them walking around.
  • Jake can't distinguish Tom's Hork-Bajir morph from any others at first, but soon comes to recognise it.
• The Dividual:
  • Ax considers humans and their dæmons to be one being in two bodies. A Yeerk who controls a human controls their dæmon as well. In a chapter reflecting part of The Visitor, when the Chapmans resist their Yeerks, instead of twitching and clawing at themselves their dæmons attack them and shout about not infesting Melissa.
  • Some voluntary Controllers have a particularly close form of Symbiotic Possession and at times feel as if they're one person - Taylor and Korin most prominently, Cassie and Aftran, sometimes Eva and Aftran despite Eva's hatred of being infested.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Having a large dæmon is akin to a physical disability in certain ways; people with them need special accommodations such as ground-floor classrooms and can't ride in normal-sized cars.
  • The author's notes for The Abyss liken the quantum virus to COVID-19. The symptoms include reduced or increased senses of taste and smell, and the Yeerks aren't sure how serious it will be at first.
• Dug Too Deep: The Taxxons once lived on a world that had oceans and marshes, meshing with how canon shows them to be good swimmers, but in their mythology, which mentions them "digging too deep", they set off some kind of catastrophic climate change that dried out their world and started the Endless Famine and the curse of the Hunger, which was exploited by the Yeerks as desperate Taxxons seized any possible advantage.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: A couple from Make a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul:
  • The description says that the Animorphs can't reveal their last names, and it's implied that their dæmons go by pseudonyms. Later fics ignore this, and the Animorphs' surnames are frequently mentioned even before the Yeerks figure out who they are.
  • The cop-controller grabs Quincy (Cassie's dæmon), something that incapacitates her but has no further effect, and she barely thinks about it afterwards. Later, David touching Marco's dæmon is a traumatic experience that, even as he mostly recovers over time and with help, is a terrible memory.
• Emotion Control: Some Andalites are good at djafid, or projecting images and emotion with thought-speech. The emotional effect is compared to hearing a capella music in an unknown language, not direct control - emotions are suggested but not exactly imposed. Esplin's constant aura of malice is compared to singing The Imperial March at all times.
• Empathy Pet: Not that dæmons are pets but they frequently reflect the emotional states of the humans they're part of. It's most obvious with unsettled kids, whose dæmons will become larger, more dangerous animals when they feel threatened or angry. Peter's cuttlefish Mirazai, who was colorful before Eva vanished, was always in black and white for two years afterwards and only gradually took on vibrancy again, something Marco realizes watching her ripple colors while Peter dreams. After settling, Abineng regularly paws at the ground and brandishes his horns expressing Rachel's aggression, Quincy hides in Cassie's shirt when she's feeling guilt and uncertainty and bares his fangs in the rare times when she's feeling cruel or vindictive, Diamanta often hisses or rattles to express Marco's displeasure or winds around him if he's agitated, and Merlyse hops in pointless circles around Jake's feet when he's feeling some perfectly ordinary teen angst.
• Empty Shell:
  • Morphs have no consciousness of their own, and are controlled by the morpher's brain in Z-space, which is why human morphs don't have dæmons.
  • Defied in Prometheus in Chains. Temrash 114 claims that there's "nothing left" of Tom and Delareyne, but Merlyse points out that Del settled around the same time that Temrash claims Tom was "broken", which wouldn't have happened if he had no personality to show.
  • In Damned Are We Among Women, Eva notices a Hork-Bajir who's entirely passive when her Yeerk is feeding, unlike most of them who are more resistant, and speculates that she was infested starting at a very young age.
  • People who have been severed from their dæmons - or Guide Trees - are limp and quiet, truly broken beyond repair.
• Epiphany Therapy: Defied. Rachel understanding she has anger issues doesn’t fix them, not even when two allies die to keep those issues from getting her killed. Tobias finding a real family doesn’t fix the damage his aunt and uncle did. Marco’s extra-strength PTSD can’t be vanished.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Visser One loved the kids she had while infesting Allison Kim in her own fucked up way - protecting them is her price to not take her secrets to the grave. The Animorphs and their allies agree but don't seek out Darwin and Madra. It seems like Edriss wasn't keeping tabs on them anyway, so it would have been one more major effort to try to find them. In one of Esplin's schemes, Eva and Aftran are faced with one of those kids and told to kill him to prove their loyalty. It's either do it or be killed themselves, so Aftran shoots his dæmon.
• Everyone Has Standards: In The Cost of the Fight Cassie comes up with the idea of using Estrid, the lab on the Ralek River, and the Yoort DNA that Tobias and Marco have in their morph repetoire to re-engineer a Quantum Virus that neutralizes Yeerks' ability to control hosts against their will. Aside from Lourdes, the Chee break from the Guardians of the Galaxy over this. The Pemalites were destroyed by a Howler virus and the memory is still fresh.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: Poetry's Andalites are aware of the concept of clothing and will wear protective personal equipment when warranted, though they still wander around naked the rest of the time.
• Fantastic Religious Weirdness: Loren wonders if Jesus died for the sins of all sapient beings, not just humans. There are also several religious rituals related to dæmons; Christians believe that dæmons are closer to God, while Jews self-mutilate theirs at funerals (similar to ripping garments in real life).
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: Ax invokes the Andalite equivalent while arguing with Estrid - pointing out that she's already massively broken their laws with her bioweapon.
• Fix Fic: While the series has some aspects of a fix-it, such as addressing continuity errors and solving problems in some very different, less immediately disastrous ways, notably this also makes a great number of new problems appear and makes the threat posed by the Andalites even more explicit. The changes also mean they don't have the same means canon used to defuse the Andalite threat.
• Foil: This series draws parallels between the Hork-Bajir and Chee. Both are artificial races who were created to be harmless and can see the Dust, but the Hork-Bajir are short-lived, were forced to learn how to fight, and never let their souls get damaged; while the Chee are immortal, couldn't fight even if they wanted to due to their programming, and disabled their ability to see the Dust, damaging their souls in the process.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Tom gets along with the Hork-Bajir more than the other humans in Kref Magh. It's implied that he semi-deliberately becomes a Hork-Bajir nothlit for this reason.
  • At the end of Welcome Home, Tom asks Tobias if there's a weapon so dangerous that no-one could be trusted to use it. This sets up the quantumn virus plan in Destroyer of Worlds.
• The Four Loves: Andalites recognize several major forms of love - shest orf, the stable love between partners who can be parents; shest valeet, the clear light of understanding between shorms; shest dath, the passion and romance between lovers; and shest kala, the love between parents and children. For the Herdmoot, they have to present the Andalites with examples of forms of love between Andalites and the major species present on and around Earth. Loren and Toby-Sirinial-Sky("Tobias") plus Ax have the most solid case with shest orf between Loren and Elfangor, shest valeet between Toby and Ax, and shest kala between Toby and Elfangor. Jara and Kalij("Toby") Hamee come with shest kala as descendants of Aldrea. Arbron and Judicial, an Original Character Taxxon who helped him to feel that being a nothlit didn't mean his life was over, come with shest valeet. And Illim and Estrid come with shest kala.
• Freedom from Choice: Much of the appeal of infestation to Mr. Tidwell is that he just lost his wife and alone struggles trying to manage his emotions and his life. As soon as Illim shows remorse, Mr. Tidwell asks him to try reforming other Yeerks, then forgives him completely and their relationship becomes codependent.
• From the Mouths of Babes: In The Presence of Justice, when the free Hork-Bajir arrive on the Pool Ship, Sky Hive (a telepathic mass of fungi with the curiosity of a child) asks Eva if their leader is another queen she wishes to mate with. Everyone is either embarrassed or confused.
• Godzilla Threshold: In The Presence of Justice it turns out that Ax's parents, after finding themselves completely unable to even get back in contact with Ax through normal channels, actually contracted with a Kelbrid to go and retrieve him, or his body if he'd died, from Earth. When he calls they adjust the terms of employment so that the Kebrid is instead present at the Herdmoot to help ensure that the Andalite military doesn't scorch Earth from orbit.
• Going Native: After living with the Hork-Bajir for months and not getting along with the other human refugees, Tom learns their language and is accepted into their culture. And then he becomes one of them.
• Good Running Evil: After The Bright Clear Line, 'Visser One' is actually Eva and Aftran 942 working together. They're able to work towards some good and sabotage some Yeerk efforts, but have to maintain their feigned identity and remain in power.
• Graceful Loser: Tom's Yeerk sneers at the Animorphs, saying that he's broken Tom and so they haven't saved him, but accepts the Painless Death for a Price that they offer and admits that their effort was well done, very tidy; his superiors will never look for him.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: How the Andalites see the war, how the Yeerks see it (with "kill" replaced with "enslave"), how the team starts off seeing it until Aftran shows up.
  • By the endgame the enemy is everyone who sees things this way. Quoth Cassie: “It’s us versus everyone who thinks that everyone else is just meat.”
• Handy Helper: Humans use the senses of their dæmons subconsciously by default but can learn to access them consciously, going into "four-eye". This intersects with disability as dæmons are able to lend their senses to their other halves, and speak if their human halves are incapable. Instead of having a guide dog after she was blinded, Loren relies on her zebra duiker dæmon Jaxom and so has greater independence, though as a small (but too large to easily carry) nocturnal antelope the sight he gives her is blurry, monochromatic, and low to the ground and so she still uses her hands to read or locate ingredients to cook with. Loren mentions that there are a few truly blind people out there, whose dæmons settled into sightless animals.
• Heel–Face Turn: In The Presence of Justice we see that Tobias's neglectful uncle Leo of all people is part of the anti-Yeerk resistance. He had been infested and realized that the "nephew" he'd ignored and disdained could have saved him, and would have if there had been any love between them. Rachel, incenced for her girlfriend's sake, tries to pull a Heel–Face Door-Slam but other members of the resistance stop her.
• Heel Realization: Part and parcel of Yeerks joining the peace movement. The Empire's culture is so deeply racist that most Yeerks don't quite get that they're hurting actual people. See Illim in Hospitality and Aftran in Seeing in Color for examples. It takes Ax longer to be fully disillusioned with Andalites, but he gets there.
• Hive Mind: Kelbrid are this, being schools of aquatic slugs that share a consciousness.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In The Presence of Justice, half of the Animorphs and Gonrod go on a mission to a mundane human prison. Marco is horrified to see so many people his age incarcerated there just because they're Hispanic, while Gonrod is shocked that humans arrest minors.
• I Always Wanted to Say That: Arbron is delighted to get to invite the Animorphs to come with him to a secret base.
• I Just Want to Be Free: The motivation of basically everyone. Even the Andalites profess to treasuring freedom but do not lack it, as a species.
  • Most Empire Yeerks, thanks to a horrifically toxic culture, believe that they can only be ‘free’ with a host and don’t care what the host thinks or see them as a person.
  • The Animorphs, free Hork-Bajir, and the Guardians in general are fighting to keep their (sometimes adoptive) planet free from imperialist bodyjacking brainslugs.
  • The Yeerk Peace Movement wants to be free of the fascist government that would destroy them for daring to care about other species and not want to enslave them.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
  • All the chapters of The Cowardice of Lions except the last contain "lion" in the title.
  • Love the Warrior's chapters are named after Bible quotes, while Abel or Cain's are all Jewish funeral rites.
  • The chapters of Bridge to the Stars and Destroyer of Worlds are named after Yeerk and Andalite idioms, respectively.
  • The Bright Clear Line's chapters are named after chess terms.
  • The chapter titles of The Abyss all begin with a number.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Visser Three tries to out Visser One as a ‘host sympathizer’ by demanding she shoot one of the children of her previous host dead. Visser One wasn’t a sympathizer in general but was attached to that life and those children … but by this point she has been kill-and-replaced by Aftran, who decidedly is. Aftran does it anyway.
• I'm Having Soul Pains:
  • In Prometheus in Chains, Temrash kicks Merlyse ten feet away from Jake while he's in control of them in order to torture them. Humans and dæmons feel immense psychic pain when they're separated from each other.
  • Other species have different "anchors" or connections to Dust which can be strained in their own, less acute ways.
    • Andalites can be far from their Guide Trees for long periods of time but after about two years they suffer the galan maheet, which flattens their personalities out, makes memories lose their color and detail, and causes a low-grade despair. After passing his galan maheet Ax has to actively produce more Dust, mainly by sharing his culture and spending time with his family, to manage the condition since he can't exactly return to his Tree.
    • Yeerk anchors are true connections to their hosts and poolmates, but the Yeerk Empire fosters an attitude of distrust of other Yeerks and a disregard for the personhood of hosts. It's so bad that even the Yeerk Peace Movement members rescued and taken to the Aftran Plism Pool, who reject so much of Imperial doctrine, are suffering just as much as Ax.
    • Taxxon anchors turn out to be their Living Hives. They suffer from the Hunger even when inoculated with a Hive's microbiome, but losing it makes it far worse, and therefore entirely dependent on the Yeerks.
    • Whenever someone in Hork-Bajir form, able to see Dust directly, looks at a Chee they're confused by what they see. It doesn't look quite like the "broken roots" they can recognize in Ax and in the Yeerks, but there's something weird going on. It turns out that in reaction to the Pemalites dying, the Chee shut off their own ability to see Dust - which they do in a way quite distinct and different from how the Hork-Bajir do - to spare themselves the pain. It means that even Chee who want to help people stay at a certain remove.
• Innocently Insensitive: Peter nearly sets off a panic attack for Marco when, lovestruck, he talks about Nora and how she just seems to get him and is so good at calming him down, just like Eva had been. Marco knows his mother was argumentative and strong-willed, and her personality shifting was because Edriss had infested her and wanted a harmonious home life. Peter having loved and preferred Edriss's act is also innocently wounding to Eva, who tells Marco that while she'll always love Peter she can't get back together with him. That he had been at his happiest with their marriage when she was imprisoned in her own body is something she can't forget.
• Instant Expert: In The Abyss, Melissa has the morphing power which is a problem when she's infested. There's only a brief moment between the Yeerk forcing its way into her and the host it just left killing both of them, but she's partially morphed and the Yeerk is able to use thought-speech to transmit pretty much everything it finds in her head, including complex plans and maps, to the other Yeerks. This is not a degree of thought-speech utility that Melissa or even the Animorphs have; it's something Elfangor did, a grown adult who'd been thought-speaking for decades.
• Instant Illness: In the Abyss the dreshked virus is released into the main Yeerk pool and later that day Yeerks are starting to feel the effects, though it does take longer for it to affect everyone. Three days after release, some Yeerks are having lapses in control over their hosts.
• Internal Reformist: A Peace Movement Yeerk who chooses the name Helen refuses any chances offered to her to evacuate and ultimately dies of Kandrona starvation. This is in part because she had the stubborn hope that by demonstrating mathematically that the Empire's ways were wasteful and self-sabotaging she could affect change.
• Interrupted Suicide: In The Presence of Justice, Ax drags Estrid kicking and screaming out of the Ralek River after witnessing her attempting to commit an honour suicide.
• Interspecies Adoption: Mr. Tidwell (a human) and Illim (a Yeerk) adopt Estrid (an Andalite) to show that there can be peace between their three species as part of the end-of-war negotiations. None of them are really happy or enthusiastic about this but they understand that it's important to have this connection, and Tidwell and Illim can pity a child in her position and think Estrid could use a stable support.
• Interspecies Romance: Besides all the instances of this from canon, Ruby (a human) falls in love with a Hork-Bajir. Downplayed because this Hork-Bajir is Tom, who used to be a human.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: As in canon, the Animorphs start out by referring to Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, and Yeerks outside of their hosts as "it". At some point Jake realizes that he's thinking of Hork-Bajir as being male and female and wonders when that started. They don't undersand Taxxon genders even enough to tell them apart, so as they get better at regarding them as allies Jake thinks of Seaside Hive's Queen Judicial as "she", and all of them regard other Taxxons with they/them pronouns.
• Kids Raiding the Wine Cabinet: When the Animorphs are forced to retreat to Kref Magh they snatch a bottle of limoncello which comes out a few times and is passed around.
• Kill and Replace: At the climax of The Bright Clear Line, Eva executes a captured Visser One, and works with Aftran to impersonate the Visser, allowing them to act as a mole at the very top of the invasion.
• Kill the Host Body:
  • Happens a lot. The Animorphs don’t really have the ability to kill Yeerks any other way, and Aftran reveals that not killing but inflicting severe damage is actually worse - the Yeerk will survive but the host will be killed as useless. Not doing this to Human-controllers gets called out for the specisism it is (though as in canon a Tap on the Head quickly renders human-Controllers unconscious without injury) and is one of the things that leads to them being identified as humans.
  • However, just as in canon the Yeerk can survive for a short period within a dead host's brain, though it seems like they can't extract themselves and have to be cut out to be rescued. This happens to Visser Five, allowing him to survive when Alloran is killed.
  • The Free Hork-Bajir have not having to do this down to a fine art, though they can only manage it on Hork-Bajir they've captured. They can cut a skull open and physically reach in and pull the Yeerk out. Good Thing You Can Heal, but even then some don't live through it. Hork-Bajir prefer to offer a Painless Death for a Price and typically the Yeerk, once convinced that escape is impossible and they have only a slow death by starvation to look forwards to, will leave the host and be killed.
• La Résistance: The greater umbrella organization of anti-Yeerk factions, the Guardians of the Galaxy.
• Let Them Die Happy: Cassie's plan to kill David manipulates him thoroughly to murder him painlessly in a moment of joy, rather than them having to hunt him down and kill him violently. He's set up to think he's struck a deal with Visser Three to get his parents back, and the "Visser" lets him meet them uninfested as a show of good faith. Really he's looking at four Animorphs morphed into his mother, his father, and a hyena and a hippo that are close enough to their dæmons. He runs unsuspecting into his parents' arms, his dæmon whimpering and snuggling theirs, and Rachel kills him in an instant by biting his dæmon's neck with her hippo jaws. David's body is still smiling.
• Lighter and Softer: While the War Is Hell trope is in effect just as much as in canon, Dæmorphing nevertheless makes a number of changes so that the Animorphs are a little better off, and things aren't quite as bleak until their alliance with the Chee breaks as they start moving forwards on using Estrid to create a virus for the Yeerks, that is, at which point the darkness encroaches again. Still, it's different darkness in many regards.
  • Tobias has closer relationships with several different people, so his life has more joy and less isolation in it, plus he's never singled out to be tortured - and because he acts as Ax's dæmon whenever Ax is in human morph, he stays closer to humanity even before meeting Loren.
  • Ax connects with his sister-in-law Loren, and with the free Hork-Bajir, and later with Mertil, so he's not as lonely.
  • Marco's mother is saved from Edriss, and even if she then walks back into danger with Aftran in her head, it's a different kind of stress and they can sometimes send a message back and forth.
  • The Animorphs manage to save Tom, so even though that leads to its own woes Jake isn't tormented knowing about his brother's suffering.
  • Rachel is able to stay more in touch with her inner joy and protectiveness, not lashing out as readily. She reconciles with Cassie more fully than in canon, and Cassie promises not to judge her.
  • Cassie has a very hard time either way, but the other Animorphs are more sympathetic to her points of view than in canon, and the major ethical decision she makes in this series, which parallels her giving the Yeerks the morphing cube, is something entirely different. It means entirely new problems for her, but at least the anger of her fellow Animorphs and the paranoia of random animals being enemies in morph aren't among them.
  • And thanks to Loren's efforts the kids all get therapeutic talks with Chee until that alliance splits, so they're not quite as trapped in cycles of trauma.
• Literal Split Personality: Humans and dæmons are described as two halves of the same mind, and frequently have inner conflicts when making difficult decisions.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Averted; the hundreds of stillborn Yeerks in The Presence of Justice are treated as a tragedy.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!":
  • The first two chapters of Welcome Home are just a long string of Oh Crap moments as various people find out that the Empire knows the Andalite Bandits are humans, starting with Eva and Aftran and continuing on to the parents - who are also finding out that the war exists as they're being evacuated.
  • The Abyss starting with Melissa inadvertently causing the Yeerks to discover Kref Magh, continuing with Estrid's virus developing and her testing it on the Aftran Plism pool and subsequently being attacked by Ax, and ending with it having been released into the central Yeerk Pool with wide-reaching effects.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Tom becomes a Hork-Bajir, who only live for about twenty years, and then falls in love with the human Ruby.
• Meaningful Name: Ket names the two Toby clones "Tashir", which means "we will climb", and "Tekat", which means "we will leap."
• Mercy Kill:
  • When Visser Three brings Edriss's son Darwin to "Visser One" to cause a Shoot Your Mate situation, Aftran thinks about the Hork-Bajir and Animorphs' insistence that free is better than dead and killing a host who can't be rescued is a mercy. She doesn't believe it, herself, thinking it's really just something they say to feel better about their own violence. She kills Darwin anyway.
  • The Abyss is kicked off when Melissa spares a Hork-Bajir-Controller, allowing the Yeerk to seize and infest her and reveal several of the Animorphs' secrets. The real Hork-Bajir then puts her out of her misery.
  • Discussed in Five Artworks About the Andalite-Yeerk War. A Hork-Bajir named Inta says they knew Steadfast, a Taxxon queen who died as an involuntary host. Steadfast begged Inta to kill hir, but the Yeerks gave Inta "poison" (probably sedatives) to prevent this.
• Mind Rape: A human out of morph touching someone else's dæmon without permission is a serious taboo. We learn why in The Cowardice of Lions; when David grabs Diamanta, Marco describes it feeling like David is licking his brain. In-universe, it's legally considered a kind of rape and called as such. However, while aliens or a human in morph (who is Sharing a Body with their dæmon) touching dæmons is socially significant it doesn't have nearly that kind of effect. Abineng and Merlyse supporting a sick Ax is merely a kind gesture and Chee or Hork-Bajir carrying dæmons is startling at worst.
• Minor Symptom Foreshadowing: The first symptoms of a Yeerk illness called dreshked are a general malaise, followed by becoming overly sensitive to smells, such that those afflicted feel the water has been tainted.
• Mistaken for Gay: Rachel's mother Naomi mistakenly assumes that Rachel is dating Cassie. While Rachel at no point says she’s not into girls she’s definitely into guys and is dating Tobias. Who turns out to not be a guy after all.
• Mood Whiplash: Jake's section in the first chapter of Destroyer of Worlds begins with him having a serious conversation with his parents about what happened to Tom, and ends with him feeling embarrassed about his sexuality.
• Most Definitely Not Accompanying Us: Played for Drama in Welcome Home. Jake tells Tom that he can't join their mission to rescue some baby Hork-Bajir... but it turns out Tom eavesdropped on their planning meeting and followed them anyway. Jake snaps when he realises this.
• Multicultural Alien Planet: All of the alien races have multiple cultures. For example:
  • It's mentioned that there are multiple Yeerk and Taxxon languages.
  • Garz, planet of the Iskoort, is home to all sorts of races who partner with Yoorts.
  • While most of the canon Andalites belong to a culture called the Great Gardens who terraformed most of their planet, Gafinilan is an Ixilan, who live on an archipelago and make bonsais of their guide trees. Gonrod is a Wurilit, who are slightly more integrated but still discriminated against in the Great Gardens.
• Mundane Utility: Dæmons have a lot of mundane "uses", starting in the first fic where Cassie's Quincy turns into a firefly to light the dark a bit. Their senses are frequently useful, in cases ranging from a dæmon watching for trouble to actively Seeing Through Another's Eyes (called "four-eye", learning this allows Loren to have more independence than in canon). Rachel sometimes rides on Abineng's back. Jake and Rachel's cousin Saddler has a horse dæmon and was riding her instead of a bike (and so he wasn't hit by a car and thus was Spared by the Adaptation). When a human is physically unable to speak well (sick, choking with emotion etc), their dæmon can speak for them. Also, someone can acquire an animal by touching it with their dæmon. Before settling, the kids can just have their dæmons become flies and land on large animals without the kind of stress and danger it often takes to touch them with their bare hands.
• Must Have Caffeine: The Animorphs start resorting to caffeine fairly early to try and deal with their gruelling schedules and the strange hours they have to use. In Abel and Cain Cassie gives Marco some tea that he really likes and they both complain about coffee tasting terrible - as kids, they find it overly bitter. By Welcome Home they've all adjusted and can down it black without sugar. Cassie refers to a coffee maker as the second-most prized item in Kref Magh. Up on the Pool ship, Eva takes caffeine pills to keep up with her own schedule.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Because Yeerks in this series are explicitly given a "spawn name" shared by hundreds or thousands of spawn-siblings, many Original Character Yeerks share a name with and therefore are spawn-siblings to canonical characters who are often quite obscure. Those with names dating back to Animorphs: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, such as Carger, are quite a bit older than ones spawned on Earth.
  • In The Bright Clear Line when giving Eva and Aftran the power to morph Jake starts to welcome them to the Animorphs, realizes they're not quite team members, and wonders if they'd be the Animorphs Auxiliaries, before Marco says to call them the Guardians of the Galaxy, which ends up becoming the umbrella term for all of the Animorphs' allies. In canon's endgame, the disabled kids given the morphing power are called the Auxiliary Animorphs.
  • Hork-Bajir children in Kref Magh sing "Oh-wah-oh-wa-weh-se-gunta-go!", the same song Jake witnessed in the Bad Future of Animorphs: The Familiar, which was sung by free children of many species.
• Named by the Adaptation: Several human characters are given surnames; David's is Finley, Tobias' is Calladan, Marco's is López Chen, Cassie's is Clark, and Loren's is St. Clair. Mr. Tidwell is also given the first name Julian, Tobias' human uncle is called Leo, and the Governor from The Absolute is named Celia Hernandez. Tom's second Yeerk is named Carger 8957 (though it's only mentioned once), the Yeerk Sub-Visser Fifty-One is named Korin 782, Erek's real name is Chee-naxes, and Arbron's full name is Arbron-Roaldwur-Ashul. The Hork-Bajir Valley is named Kref Magh, which means "green place" in the Hork-Bajir language, though "green" doesn't have all the same connotations to Hork-Bajir that it does to humans. The main Yeerk Pool under Santa Barbara is called the Grash Akdap Pool, while the one in the Pool Ship is the Hett Simplat pool.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: Removed from the vanilla series. "I said several words I can’t repeat" from The Pretender becomes "Oh, fuck me with a chainsaw."
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • Eva and Aftran, in guise as Visser One, manage to remain Visser One instead of being ultimately executed. They're able to use their position to share intel with their allies and sometimes pull strings, such as in The Guided and the Lost, that save the Animorphs. But this also means having to sign off on some harmful policies to maintain their cover. Esplin is demoted to Visser Five and so is under their direct command... which also means that underlings who just wanted to stay out of his way come to them with plans. Including one with the idea to test spilled blood from "Andalite bandit" battles for human DNA, something that that Controller would have sat on for a year otherwise - in canon it takes about another year before that testing begins.
  • In canon there are no consequences for Jake torturing Chapman in Animorphs: The Conspiracy. In this series, it results in Melissa not trusting the Animorphs, which makes going to stay with the human refugees awkward. And in The Abyss, Melissa has been unable to trust that the Animorphs have a point about the neccessity of killing, so willfully disregards orders to kill a Hork-Bajir Controller and is infested for her trouble.
  • With the Adaptational Villainy Estrid has keeping her sympathetic aspects out of sight at the start, the Animorphs and their allies treat her like an enemy, making no real effort to get her on their side. This means, of course, that she doesn't treat them as allies either, and goes behind their backs at various points, making her look ever more villainous.
  • Relatedly, Ax gets increasingly into a Never My Fault mentality, externalizing his guilt and acting as if Estrid is the only one responsible for the morally dubious plan the Guardians of the Galaxy are working on - something that Cassie came up with, and he and everyone else is helping to execute. This culminates in attacking her and going on a rampage, destroying her lab, before she can finish testing and refining the virus. Which has the unexpected result of drastically reducing the number of grubs that survive "birth". So, treating Estrid as if she's evil causes a lot of deaths.
• No Biochemical Barriers: As in Animorphs proper, aliens can breathe Earth air and eat Earth life just fine. However, Andalites have to graze all day just to feel full of nutrient-poor Earth grass. And while Taxxons can and do live on exotic meats and soils, this is not complete nutrition for them and even in the best of circumstances they feel catastrophic Hunger.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Hork-Bajir practice polygamy and same-sex marriage, while Andalites don't find same-sex attraction unusual. The humans have difficulty explaining to them why they find this weird.
• Non-Human Non-Binary: Some Yeerks, Taxxons (who have entirely different conceptions of gender) and at least one Chee. For extra complexity value Yeerks don’t have a native concept of gender because of their bizarre reproductive cycle and all Yeerks with a gender identity picked it up from another species and not all of them picked up human or human-analogous identities. Also, some Andalites are "split-hearted" and referred to as "they" and "daughter-son"s; often they are intersex, but ultimately it's about how they feel in their hearts rather than biological.
• Not His Sled: The series starts off with straightforward adaptations of Animorphs books but with dæmons, but gradually goes in a completely different direction. For example:
  • In Seeing in Color (based on The Departure), instead of going back to the Yeerk Pool and later Shapeshifter Mode Locking herself as a whale, Aftran decides to share a body with a Chee volunteer, sometimes going into Cassie's head for brief periods. Later, in The Bright Clear Line, the Animorphs manage to capture Eva and Visser One, convince the Visser to give up some information before killing her, and then send Eva back with Aftran in her skull to play the part of Visser One. From there the two try to quietly steer the Yeerk Empire and exploit vulnerabilities without giving themselves away or being deposed, but this has knock-on effects.
  • In The Cowardice of Lions (based on the David trilogy), the Animorphs kill David instead of turning him into a rat.
  • In Abel or Cain (based on The Conspiracy), instead of breaking Tom's leg and allowing him to be airlifted back to town so his Yeerk doesn't starve, the Animorphs and Chee fake his death so they can take him into hiding and kill his Yeerk, freeing him.
  • At the start of Welcome Home (based on The Diversion), the Animorphs evacuate Cassie's family last instead of Jake's, leading to Michelle getting infested instead of Jake's parents.
  • The permanent residents of the children's hospital never get the morphing power; instead, they join the war by becoming voluntary-ish controllers. This, combined with Tom's second Yeerk already being dead, means that the Yeerks never get the morphing cube. Instead, the Taxxons' salvation is reconnecting with their pre-Empire cultures (both in the traditional sense and in inoculating themselves with the bacterial/fungal cultures of their Living Hives), which helps them control their Hunger. The Yeerks don't have a salvation in the same way, as in "they get what they yearn for", but are rendered unable to be slavers. More sympathetic Yeerks decide that their desire to have different bodies and senses is actually an ableist belief imposed by the Andalites.
• Not Used to Freedom: It's mentioned that some Hork-Bajir are so accustomed to being controlled that being without masters scares them, and they have to be taught freedom. They tend to believe that the early human refugees in their valley, who were Voluntary Controllers whose Yeerks let them go, are this as well when they grieve said Yeerks. Many become quite uneasy when they discover that this isn't the case.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The Abyss completely shakes up the post-Welcome Home status quo as the war reaches its endgame. The Guardians of the Galaxy are forced to evacuate Kref Magh after the Yeerks learn about it, which had been their homebase ever since they had to flee their normal homes. The Hork-Bajir stop helping humans in order to focus on their own survival, so the Animorphs and human refugees have to shelter with the Taxxons. The main conflict is about how to give the Yeerks the quantum virus that will remove their ability to control their hosts without the hosts' consent, and it ends with the implication that the invasion will be exposed to the public soon.
• Obfuscating Disability: Used briefly by Tobias to make Visser Three decide he’s unfit to be a host in Carry On Wayward Son by pretending to have a bad leg. Used longer by Loren. As in the source series, the morphing power repairs her eyes and restores her sight, but she continues living her life as a blind woman for months. However, Eva and Aftran as "Visser One" are forced to act against the Peace Movement and end up starting initiatives to infest the disabled (including the kids who in canon become the Animorph Auxiliaries) to supposedly keep questionably loyal Yeerks out of trouble and unable to conspire in the Pool. This also means that in Welcome Home, Loren's low-vision friends are infested in an attempt to find her.
• OC Stand-in: This series fleshes out a couple of alien races that were only mentioned in passing in canon. The Ssstram (briefly mentioned by Temrash 114 in The Capture) were one of the first species the Yeerks conquered, but they're not seen on Earth because they're rare thanks to a population crash, and anyway Earth gravity is too strong for them. The Kelbrid, a warrior race that went to war with the Andalites so long ago that neither can remember what the other looks like, are colonies of psychically-linked, aquatic worms who travel outside of their ships in water bubbles.
• Orphan's Ordeal: In Welcome Home, Rachel risks death to rescue her Controller father. Fei Chiang, a Peace Movement Controller, saves her and is killed in the process - in her Posthumous Narration we see that Fei had told her daughter Mary about her Yeerk. Mary had wanted one too but Fei thought she was too young and wanted to wait and find her a Peace Movement partner. Unfortunately Fei took her to a doctor whose services were paid for by the Sharing, who infested her with a "petty tyrant of a Yeerk". Fei dies crying for Rachel to help Mary. In The Abyss Mary appears in a cage, snarling that anyone who works with those "traitors" in the Peace Movement is an idiot. Later in that installment, her Yeerk sends her against Rachel, who kills her.
  "My mom was Peace Movement and they killed her. You have kids? Huh? You want ‘em to end up like me?"
• Our Humans Are Different: It's brought up many times that dæmons are a fundamental part of being human. They find it weird that most alien races only have one body and don't have a way to externalize inner conflict, though people of all species do argue or debate with themselves at times. Because most male humans have female dæmons and females have male dæmons, there's also an expectation that having male and female aspects is preferable and keeps people "balanced", though it does come up that in ancient Greece men with male dæmons were highly admired.
• Our Souls Are Different: While the humans have dæmons, the other alien races have their own connections to the Dust, called "anchors". In several cases, creating more Dust by expressing creativity or connecting with others is either a part of their anchor or can ease the effects of a strained one.
  • Andalites' anchors are their guide trees, which can communicate telepathically over short distances and bloom when their Andalite emotionally matures. A guide tree will be connected to many Andalites throughout its lifespan. Andalites are expected to return to their trees roughly every two years, a limit called the galan maheet, to keep their emotional health up and suffer a certain flattening of personality if unable - Ax, of course, is unable and has to be diagnosed by the Hork-Bajir and instructed to regularly generate Dust to minimize the effects. One Andalite culture, shown in Shattered, makes bonsais of their Guide Trees in order to circumvent this.
  • The Hork-Bajir lack a physical anchor; instead, they can see the dust. The Arn created them with this ability partly to maintain Dust creation on their homeworld, and partly because physical anchors are a burden.^{For example...}Andalites have to return to their guide trees once every 27 Earth months or their memories, empathy, and personality shift in subtle but detrimental ways; dæmons create a lot of vulnerabilities and when Abineng settles as a large sable antelope, Rachel can no longer ride in cars or go upstairs. Turns out the Chee had this ability too, but they disabled it when the Pemalites went extinct because they couldn't bear the pain.
  • The Yeerks' anchors are other sapients, be they hosts or other Yeerks. Solitary confinement is a Fate Worse than Death for them, and all of the Empire's Yeerks are spiritually starving because they've been taught to close themselves off from others' feelings. Even the Peace Movement Yeerks who form the renegade Aftran Plism Pool, who are the Yeerks most able to see hosts as people and to trust in one another, have "broken roots" as severe as Ax's after going past his galan maheet.
  • The Taxxons' anchors are different instances of the Living Hive, a telepathic super-organism that grows in soil and helps regulate their hunger. The Empire's Taxxons are also spiritually starving because they're kept so far away from them. A group of rebel Taxxons smuggled a sample of Living Hive to Earth where it grew into Seaside Hive, and helped Aftran & Eva to smuggle another one onto the Pool Ship.
  • It's possible to change one's anchor. Approximately two years after Arbron became a Taxxon nothlit, he changed his anchor from his guide tree, which he was unable to return to, to the Living Hive. He lost some memories of his old life, including the names of his parents, in the process.
• Outliving One's Offspring:
  • Elfangor had an Andalite wife and two children after he was taken away from Loren, who all died of a disease.
  • The Animorphs fake Tom's death in Abel or Cain, causing Jean and Steve to think this happened to them. The author has said in the comments that this will almost certainly happen for real later down the line; Hork-Bajir only live for about 20 years, so it's highly likely Tom will die before his still-human parents.
  • The Abyss begins with the Chapmans wondering what happened to Melissa. She dies at the end of the chapter.
• Out of Focus: The author finds Visser Three/Esplin 9466 to be a Flat Character without much to him. He's certainly present regularly but confrontations with him are typically off screen. Visser One is in overall command of the Earth invasion instead, giving him less power overall. He actually gets demoted to Visser Five when a ploy to take down "Visser One" backfires. While he gets a moment of prominence after capturing Gafinilian, making him his host and taunting Mertil, it's short-lived. He later gets deposed by Taylor and stripped of rank, and his host, entirely.
• Painless Death for a Price: In Abel or Cain, the Animorphs fake Tom's death and take him to the Hork-Bajir valley. Toby, experienced with captured Controllers, advises them to offer Tom's Yeerk a quick death and burial in water if he leaves Tom immediately - Yeerks dread Kandrona starvation and it's also very hard on their hosts. Tom's Yeerk accepts. This is shown in other chapters as tending to work, if the Yeerk believes rescue or escape is impossible.
• Parents as People:
  • Since most of the Aniparents, apart from Loren and Eva who are both major characters, get evacuated to the Hork-Bajir valley a good year before the end of the series they get more focus than in canon, are cognisant of their situation, and aren't The Load to the same degree.
    • Walter is given the morphing power and participates in supply runs and scouting. With his wife taken and having to encounter life-threatening danger and moral conundrums himself, he ends up leaning on Cassie who reassures him and forgives him for having assumed her changing behavior in the past few years was thanks to drugs or teen rebellion.
    • Peter helps Ax construct things they'll need for the plan discussed in The Cost of the Fight. Nora teaches math to young Hork-Bajir and explains human ways to them. Marco is of course much closer to Peter and mostly ignores his stepmother, who he wanted to save entirely because she made Peter happy, but she does still care and worry about him. For his sixteenth birthday - or rather, the day after as he spent it on missions and returned utterly exhausted - she collected berries, those being the only treats available at that time.
    • Rachel's mom Naomi chafes in the valley, feeling bored and frustrated, but is mature enough not to take it out on the people around her aside from confronting Jake's parents when they try to bar him from leadership. Rachel rescues her father Dan by literally elephant-charging a newsroom and carrying him off, then getting his Yeerk to leave him. Severely rattled, he sticks close to his younger daughters, reading to them as much to comfort himself as anything else. Later Naomi and Dan, now acting like Amicable Exes to a degree Rachel's not used to, pore through legal documents and news reports hoping to break a story, or bring something to trial, that will hobble the Sharing financially and ruin its good name.
    • The only ones who aren't described as taking some active role or another are the Berensons, who struggle to adjust to Jake-the-leader and to Tom becoming a Hork-Bajir nothlit shortly after discovering he's actually alive. In narration Tom says that what he wants from them is assurance that they love him and will be there for him no matter what, and sometimes they give that. Jake, they alternately blame and put on a pedestal.
  • Ax's parents show up at the end of the series, in The Presence of Justice. They've been trying to get him back for the whole three years he's been away finally resorting to contracting with a Kelbrid. Ax introduces them to Elfangor's human widow and daughter-son, and they don't reject them outright but are stilted and awkward. In The Herdmoot we see that one had felt betrayed by their older son, wondering if he felt ashamed of his people. The other still resents that Elfangor didn't love his Andalite wife and children, who died "starved of his love". However, they don't put this on Loren and Toby. Poetry talks about them as privileged parents who genuinely love their children but are selfish in their focus on only them.
  • Estrid's parents are Alloran and his wife Jahar. Alloran dies without getting an opportunity to redeem himself. Jahar only has one scene, but much is taken from a fic by another author - she's a xenomarine biologist who feels strongly, is prone to outbursts, and lives with her shorm. Jahar is desperately afraid for Estrid on Earth and is completely bewildered to hear that she's taken a Yeerk as her father.
• Planet of Hats: Played with, Defied, and Justified with the various aliens.
  • The Yeerk Empire Yeerks all come from a single settlement and the empire ruthlessly cracks down on dissent. Several characters state that various dissidents would be perfectly normal elsewhere on the Yeerk homeworld.
  • The Hork-Bajir and Taxxon cultures from their homeworlds were mostly wiped out between the Yeerk conquest and other apocalyptic events.
• Posthumous Narration: Like in canon, this series has the Framing Device that all of the narrators are writing down the events in a journal, but there are several cases of characters narrating up to the points of their deaths, such as a Peace Movement Controller working on the same set as Dan Berenson in Welcome Home, and Melissa in The Abyss.
• Predators Are Mean: Thoroughly subverted, both with dæmons and with carnivorous aliens. The Taxxons with their insatiable Hunger are alarming and have a dark sense of humor, but are still people with motivations more complex than finding their next meal.
• Questionable Consent: Any host-Yeerk relationships under the Empire is this at best. Even with Peace Movement Yeerks, the hosts have no power, often don't have a real informed choice about being infested, and can't choose to only be infested part-time or to walk away. Peace Movement hosts are able to escape on a few separate occasions, but it means abandoning their old lives and becoming refugees.
  • Ex-voluntary Julissa, rhapsodizing on how being infested made her better at understanding people to shame Loren, doesn't mention whether her Yeerk's previous hosts consented to have the intimate details of their lives shared with her.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Touching someone else's dæmon is considered a form of rape. Marco is shaken up when David grabs Dia in The Cowardice of Lions, and this is the final straw that convinces the Animorphs to get rid of him. Actual rape comes up later. Eva doesn't get into it but considers the sex Edriss had with Peter to be a form of rape (both of Peter and of herself). This is also the reason why there are no Hork-Bajir-Controllers in the Yeerk Peace Movement - the Yeerks forcibly propagate them.
• Recursive Fanfiction: There are several one shots based off this, in addition to the author's own divergences.
  • Through Bars, showing a scene in The Tree Of Life from another perspective, has been canonized.
• Reformed, but Rejected: There are virtually no Peace Movement-aligned Yeerks with Hork-Bajir hosts - any who had one found a way out of that assignment as quickly as possible. This is because Hork-Bajir are captive bred. A sympathetic Yeerk giving their host up to the free Hork-Bajir, as in Mother Sky and Father Deep, is assumed to be participating in that and regarded with the same hostility as any other Yeerk.
• Religious Robot: Loren has a conversation with a Chee (a race of millennia-old alien robots) who practises a version of Christian faith. The Chee explains that their creators, the Pemalites, worshipped the divine spark of chaos that brought fun into the universe.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: Watching the human-shaped aliens on human TV, Ax decides that it's only natural that the underdeveloped minds of a species with no alien contact would imagine aliens as like themselves. Ancient Andalites had similarly imagined aliens that were like Andalites, but with four eyestalks, or green fur, or sucking, toothed hooves for consuming dead meat.
• Running Gag: Any time someone other than Jake takes charge, the others refer to that person as "Prince". Usually that's Prince Marco, but it's Prince Cassie at one point too. This ends up extending to Eva, who doesn't get or appreciate it.
• Self-Mutilation Demonstration: Jake makes the point that when you can morph, pain and damage don't really matter by having Ax cut his hand off.
• Sensory Overload: In Five Artworks About the Andalite-Yeerk War, the Taxxon art installation Steadfast is a Yeerk ship filled with caches of food surrounded by stimuli designed to cause fear and pain in Taxxons such as bright lights, dry air, and earthquake-like vibrations; if they want to reach the food they have to expose themselves to that stimuli, and they're aware that if they were starving and not inoculated with their Living Hives, their Horror Hunger would drive them at it anyway. Some criticise it for being torture for Taxxons but harmless to anyone else, others think it's a brilliant commentary on how the Yeerks didn't care about even the well-being of the Taxxons who were supposedly their allies, and an autistic human feels that it resonates because it reminds her of her Yeerk's callous disregard of her discomfort when overstimulated.
• Shapeshifting Heals Wounds: As in canon, but characters are more aware of and willing to exploit it, doing things like starting to morph after being wounded and reversing the morph as soon as the injury is repaired, rather than ignoring it because they'll morph later.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock:
  • Aldrea, Arbron, Elfangor, and Tobias all become nothlits as in canon, but Aftran doesn't become a whale, nor does David get trapped as a rat.
  • Instead, Tom ends up spending too long as a Hork-Bajir; and after Alloran is killed, Esplin infests Gafinilan and nothlits him in Alloran's body.
  • Loren becomes an Andalite nothlit in A Place to Stand's alternate timeline.
  • The author makes a point of averting this with the Yeerks and Taxxons; they took issue with two entire species self-sterilizing and essentially committing genocide on themselves being portrayed as a happy ending. Yeerks becoming whales - as they do in a lot of fanon - may or may not be able to have sapient offspring but regardless those aren't Yeerks. Taxxons becoming giant snakes can't create a next generation at all.
• Sharing a Body: When a human morphs, their dæmon disappears, and both of their consciousnesses exist within the morphed form. The human controls it most of the time, but both of them can silently communicate with each other and thought-speak to everyone else, and the dæmon may take over their body at times. They don't struggle for control unless there's severe internal conflict, because deep down human and dæmon are really the same person.
• Short-Lived Organism: It's mentioned that Hork-Bajir reach maturity at two years of age and rarely live to be twenty. The oldest in their legends was around twenty-seven, but just as most humans don't reach a hundred twenty one, that's an exceptionally long time rather than an expectation.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Mielan spawning are named after Jake's Yeerk from Voluntary.
  • Essa 283, the Yeerk who gets put into Dan, is named after Essa 412, which is what Tom's second Yeerk was called in Eleutherophobia.
  • Elizabeth from Sporadic Phantoms appears briefly in The Presence of Justice.
• Significant Name Shift: When Mr. Tidwell comes to trust Iniss 799, "Iniss" asks him to call him "Illim", the name that he took from a pre-contact tale of a wise Yeerk sage. He doesn't like any of his spawn-siblings.
• Sixth Ranger: After adding David, as canon did, and having to remove him, the Animorphs give the morphing power to Toby, though she makes it clear that she's not an Animorph and they don't consider her one. Soon after that they add Tobias's mother, Loren, to the team. Loren, understanding the stakes and being extremely motivated to help, has friction with her teammates sometimes but is a much better Animorph than David. Later in the series, Tom also receives the morphing power, but it doesn't last very long. Afterwards, Melissa, Julissa, Jamal, and Walter are given the morphing power too, though they aren't quite regarded as Animorphs in the same way. They do admirably scouting, retrieving supplies, and undertaking other missions that are vital but not quite as risky as the core Animorphs' missions, but when they have to resort to violence Melissa can't bring herself to kill and invites disaster on everyone as a result. Mr. Tidwell is given the morphing power just so he can escape an attack as a hawk. He morphs a bit after that, now and then, but it's rare and more for his own and Illim's sake.
• Smart Cetaceans: It's mentioned that few people in the world have dolphin dæmons; since dæmons can't take the form of sapient beings, this implies that at least some dolphin species are sapient in this setting.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Well, they're seen that way, especially venomous ones. After Dia settles, Marco can no longer convincingly play the harmless, clueless kid.
• Something Only They Would Say: When Toby and the Animorphs investigate the Ralek River, they ask each other questions to make sure the others aren't the ship's Andalites in morph.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In a setting with dæmons it wouldn't be possible for David to convincingly Kill and Replace Saddler, so according to Poetry Saddler was riding his horse dæmon instead of a bike and so wasn't catastrophically injured by a car. Also, Jara Hamee, Rachel, Tom, and some of the Campsite Rule (AKA the Auxiliary Animorphs) all make it to the end of the war.
• The Stations of the Canon: Are increasingly missed as the series progresses. The first few installments are essentially Animorphs + dæmons, but by The Tree Of Life the specifics of canon events have fully left the building.
  • However, various general events end up similar. The Yeerks still discover who the "bandits" are and the Animorphs take their families into hiding with the Hork-Bajir, it's just far earlier than in canon due to "Visser One" taking over, causing ambitious Yeerks who'd wanted to avoid the former Visser Three to present their ideas.
    • In Destroyer of Worlds the Animorphs make a decision that causes most of their Chee allies to abandon them, as in Animorphs: The Answer. Though since they were helping far more extensively than in canon, this loss is really felt. Since one Chee sticks with them, we don't have to find out if Jake will take hostages to force them to help, but not being forced in that way also means they don't sabotage any of the Animorphs' efforts as in Animorphs: The Answer. Cassie's realization and plan also parallels her allowing the Yeerks to have the Escafil device in Animorphs: The Ultimate.
    • In the Abyss having the safety of the Hork-Bajir valley breached is like the basis for Animorphs: The Resistance, though the cause is different and it's treated as utterly catastrophic instead of a one-off.
    • In The Presence of Justice the decision Jake makes to destroy the ground-based Kandrona generator, forcing most Yeerks on Earth to flee to the Pool Ship and surrender to the coallition, many of them starving along the way is quite a bit like Animorphs: The Sacrifice where the Animorphs blow up the Yeerk Pool and cause massive Collateral Damage. There are fewer overall casualties here, but because everyone fully understands that Yeerks are people they're not any happier about it than they were in canon.
• The Story That Never Was: Played with in A Place To Stand. None of the events happened but the information and memories acquired radically change the course of the series.
• Symbiotic Possession: The only kind the Yeerk Peace Movement believes is OK. Unlike canon, what precisely this means is explored in depth and several characters including a voluntary Controller go off on Loren for being disturbed by the idea.
  • Notable cases include Tidwell and Illim, Cassie and Aftran, and Eva and Aftran while impersonating Visser One.
  • Rachel and Tobias use morphing to do this with each other as well.
• Switching P.O.V.: Most fics have multiple narrators per chapter.
• Take That!: There are certain trends with dæmon-based alternate universe fics, including a preference for forms like birds of prey, big cats, and wolves - obviously cool, dangerous shapes for a soul to take, usually attached to cool, dangerous characters. Aside from unsettled dæmons taking them briefly, the only characters who have these forms in Dæmorphing are quite minor. Poetry notes that the only wolf dæmon is seen in The Presence of Justice, with a woman who's with an anti-Yeerk resistance movement but is shown making sandwiches for everyone, and her dæmon has a sparkly paper collar around his neck, made by her children. With how dæmons work in this setting, wolf (tight-knit family groups, highly social/codependent, territorial, cooperative, driven, persistent) is a great form for a very community-involved mom.
• Team Member in the Adaptation: Inverted with the "Auxiliary Animorphs"; while they get involved with the war in their own way and meet the Animorphs a few times, they never get the morphing power and are physically far away from the main plot. They call themselves the Campsite Rule instead.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Not all the groups in the Guardians of the Galaxy get along. The Free Hork-Bajir don't like the Peace Movement, the Peace Movement has its own internal divisions, former involuntary hosts don't always get along with former Peace Movement hosts, Eva hates being infested at all, and the Chee outright quit over the plan to use a bioweapon to make involuntary infestation impossible.
  • In The Presence of Justice several Animorphs work with human resistance and suffer the bad fortune of having to try to work with a group that includes the Chapmans and David's mother, all of whom know enough of what they've done to despise them. The Chapmans outright pull out of the operation and David's mother only goes along because she knows her husband is in the facility. Rachel also reluctantly doesn't kill Leo, Tobias's neglectful uncle, because other members who believe he's reformed stop her.
• Terrestrial Sea Life: Humans who've settled as aquatic animals don't need to keep their dæmons in water. They aren't 'real' animals and won't suffocate, but water is more comfortable and allows them to move. Tanks that can be worn on character's backs or put on wheels come up many times, and homes can be modified to have clear plumbing allowing a dæmon to swim freely from room to room.
• Theory Tunnel Vision: In The Herdmoot, Arbron's parents assumed he died years ago when his Guide Tree went dormant. Their fellows serving on the same Dome Ship give them condolences before they actually get a chance to watch the broadcast, which includes Arbron's fear that his parents would reject and revile him for living as a Taxxon. The two of them can accept that he became a Taxxon nothlit and tell each other that they would have accepted him, really, but he died years ago and another Taxxon is pretending to be him in the present. Taxxons are too repulsive to Andalite sensibilities for them to claim him as their son.
• There Are No Therapists: Defied. Thanks to the Chee and Elgat Kar, therapy is actually available.
• Threesome Subtext: Subverted. Poetry deliberately built up Jake–Marco–Cassie subtext and then it actually happens in Destroyer of Worlds.
• To Win Without Fighting: The Guardians of the Galaxy don't have the technology to fight the Andalites who are planning to blow up Earth, so like in canon they talk to them and try to appeal to the Andalite electorate and in this version, they stage a diplomatic meeting and leverage the Andalites' reluctance to look like truce-breakers to the Kelbrid. It works.
• Translator Collar: Most Taxxons wear these because they have difficulty pronouncing other species' languages; however, the translations are imperfect and have trouble interpreting idioms and honorifics.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: In The Presence of Justice Marco hears an Andalite asking for fourteen cordof to prepare and immediately yells <Fourteen of your Andalite cordof?>. Loren, well used to the "Earth minutes" exchange, yells right back that Ax is too far away to hear him.
• Voices Are Mental: It's noted multiple times that thought-speak voices sound like people's out-loud voices (when applicable); for example, when the Yeerks interrogate Loren under the assumption that she's David, Jaxom pretends to be him because his mental voice sounds more like a teenage boy's.
• Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World: Because Loren's able to convince the Chee to help the Animorphs more materially than in canon, helping them with homework and trying to provide therapy, the Animorphs are a little better at maintaining their civilian lives, but it does fall apart when their identities are discovered.
• Wangst:invoked Arbron has been a Taxxon nothlit for a very long time and has become used to it, but when finding out that Tobias is another nothlit but is able to morph he's suddenly eager, and crestfallen on discovering that Tobias's method isn't replicable. Arbron would like to know what's become of his parents, but has to admit that he can't remember their names. Transferring his anchor from his Guide Tree to a Living Hive was painful and scrambled his memories and self-image. That this is upsetting is entirely reasonable to Tobias, Ax, and Loren. The other Taxxons, on the other hand, grumble about Arbron's self-pity.
• Wham Episode:
  • Welcome Home starts with the Yeerks figuring out the Animorphs' identities, so they have to rush to evacuate their families. They save Cassie's family for last, causing Michelle to get lured into The Sharing and infested by a sub-visser. Then at the end, Tom becomes a Hork-Bajir nothlit.
  • The Abyss is a whole series of wham moments. It breaks from the status quo set up in Welcome Home. Melissa's infested, forced to spill a lot of vital secrets, and killed. The valley evacuates, the alliance between human refugees and free Hork-Bajir splitting as the Hork-Bajir can't spare the effort to help. The humans are just barely saved and have to take shelter within Seaside Hive, along with the Aftran Plism Pool. The Animorphs bring Tidwell the blue box and barely manage to help him escape. The Chee take the Campsite Rule on the lam and bring them to Eva's parents. Eva and Aftran get a sample of Living Hive and realize it's newly-budded and like a child. Toby has to kill an infested Hork-Bajir child. Estrid completes her virus, releases it into the Aftran Plism Pool kiling a young Yeerk, and is almost killed by Ax before Tidwell and Illim stop him. When the Animorphs go to release the virus Estrid tries to stop them. The virus is devastating to the Yeerks, whose infighting keeps them from mounting an effective response. Michelle breaks free from her Yeerk's control, tries to kill "Visser One", and ultimately stands with Eva and Aftran as Peace Movement forces try and take the Pool Ship.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Dissected in much greater detail than in canon. After helping to kill David Jake is nauseous with horror realizing how he's so upset about killing a human who seriously hurt his best friend but has never thought much about the innocent Hork-Bajir he's killed. In Welcome Home, during a battle against Hork-Bajir Controllers he encounters a Human-Controller and briefly starts his usual consideration when fighting humans, how to get her out of the way without killing her, before giving up on it. The host is present and probably unwilling, but that's the case with most people he fights.
• Wise Tree: Dæmorphing takes a concept which comes up once in canon - that Elfangor has a psychic Guide Tree that can't quite speak or comprehend events like a person can, but can hear and understand his feelings - and develops it into the Andalite equivalent of dæmons, much as in His Dark Materials bears have armor.
• The Worm That Walks: The Kelbrid are hive-minds of thousands of bioluminescent worms.
• Would Hurt a Child: Various characters and the series itself. Canon obviously has the Animorphs in constant peril, but dodges out of permanently killing them or harming other threatened children until the finale - in Dæmorphing, sometimes those threats are realized. It starts with killing David, as Aftran makes Cassie realize that trapping him in a harmless morph and abandoning him somewhere alone is not at all merciful.
• Xenophobic Herbivore: Andalites. The military might be mild or helpful to a few alien individuals they consider harmless, maybe, but they don't care about even whole innocent civilizations if those are in the way of something they're threatened by.
• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • As in canon the Animorphs are eventually discovered and have to take their families and flee to the Hork-Bajir valley. Because this series has Visser Three actually get demoted for failing to stop the Animorphs' plans, "Visser One" takes charge. With her not having such a repuation as a Bad Boss, a sub-Visser proposes that the "bandits" include multiple humans and presents a plan to find them far earlier than she did in canon - the Animorphs are burned a good year early. Jake's able to save his parents (leaving Homer behind to be taken in by the Chee), but Cassie can't save her mother.
  • In The Abyss Kref Magh is discovered and has to be abandoned. The Hork-Bajir flee into the surrounding forest, but everyone else has to take shelter within the Living Hive and the Ralek River. This isn't ideal for anyone, and the Animorphs have to find somewhere else to put the human refugees, and another way to keep fed.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: In The Presence of Justice, the Empire Yeerks know that their enemies value the lives of their hosts, so twice when they're cornered or subdued and face death they say something to the effect of "You won't kill us, you want these humans free." The second time, Rachel is present and says <Haven't you heard? I'm Rachel>. Oh, Crap! results.