Series re-read The Ellimist Chronicles

[buffyangellvr23.livejournal.com]

This is the last of the special books, not counting the Alternamorphs, which I'll still throw up at the end, just in case any newbies want to comment. It tells the story of how the Ketran named Toomin...or at least, that was his game name...eventually became the powerful being known as the Ellimist. It tells how he encountered Crayak and ended up in the game they play. It's a long, winding tale in which he touches a lot of lives and sees a lot of things in the universe.

It also gives away the fact that one Animorph will die before the series ends, although Applegate kept it vague as to who it would be. I asked this the last time, but did anyone guess it would be Rachel?

Comments

[blessedpsycho.livejournal.com]

When I first read it, I got the impression for some reason that it was either Jake or Marco. Rachel dying was a HUGE surprise to me.

The Ellimist Chronicles was definitely my favorite of all the books.

[natural-blue-26.livejournal.com]

:driveby icon love:

And yes Craylak always wanted Rachel so much... I think his obsession with Jake/Rachel made it obvious really early in the series that it could only be obe of the two of them... and you can't kill the leader in a kids series. Example: Harry Potter can't stay dead and a series that starts with "My name is Jake" can't kill Jake.

[buffyangellvr23.livejournal.com]

What other factors? Just curious.

[natural-blue-26.livejournal.com]

Ditto. What examples do you see? Love Rachel as supposed 'happy yet convenient accident' plot discussion ;)

Unless you're referring to the fact that Rachel was willing to, what, stab a future possible version of herself (been a looong time since I read 7, could very well be out of order here) so early in the series? Ellimist testing whether given the option Rachel wouldn't leave the group way before the blood thirsty section of her personality dominated? The fact that she gets split in half physically/mentally later in the series and her sense of duty still manages to be stronger then her mind-numbing fear? Etc?

[mattiris.livejournal.com]

Skip your classes! I'm finding this fascinating.

[karma-fucked.livejournal.com]

Me too. I was positive it was Rachel even before that book. Not so much "it will be Rachel" actually, but rather that I knew if one character would die, it would be Rachel.

It might just be a trope--that the strong female makes it just to the end and dies--or that I couldn't see how KA would take her character after the war, which sucked because I would have loved to see Rachel's reaction to the media frenzy afterward.

It was often said by other characters that they couldn't imagine what Rachel would be like after the war, that she seemed to thrive on it...and that basically meant, to me, that she would die.

That said, before MM4 and TEC, I could have seen everyone living too. Maybe. But Rachel was always my bet for most likely to die.

[staysleeping.livejournal.com]

Honestly this was probably my least favorite of all the “special” books. However, I like how the “all-powerful” Ellimist is given a more “humanistic” perspective and more relatable to pretty much all the other characters we’ve come to know (their struggles, “growing up”, hard choices, etc). Also, I like how his story tied in with the ending of the series and his conversation with Rachel. Anyways, I wish they would have written another Chronicles book (weren’t they planning on doing a 5th one originally?), I really would have liked to have had a Chee Chronicles focusing on Eric (specifically life with the Pemalites, Howler attack, aftermath, etc.) or maybe one focusing on a controller, maybe Tom (?) I know they touched on that in a way in Visser a little, but still it would have been interesting to have had an entire book dedicated to one of the host’s perspective…

Oh, yeah. I guess for me I always thought it would have been Rachel or maybe Jake (especially since at the end of MM4 we learned that they were the only two who were the “happy accidents” or whatever.) Anyways, we knew it wasn’t Ax since he wasn’t a human child or *technically* an Animorph. I couldn’t really see Cassie “raging” in the beginning or Marco at the end really “accepting” the end and asking if he had made a difference. Tobias, I dunno, he’s too much of a tortured soul to have died imo.

[linaliem.livejournal.com]

I didn't, because Rachel was my favorite character and therefore she couldn't. lol. I was convinced it was going to be Jake. In retrospect, as I've reread the series as an adult, it's quite obvious. Rather disappointing too, I think, because I would have been very curious to see what would have happened to her, as what she would have done after the war was far less obvious than for the others (of course, this was why she was the one to die).

Regarding the book- I love that their god-figure is basically a video game player with life. Awesome.

[karma-fucked.livejournal.com]

I didn't, because Rachel was my favorite character and therefore she couldn't.

She was my favorite character, so I assumed she would die.

[alakazam17.livejournal.com]

I honestly didn't try to think of who it was when I first read it, instead thinking it was more of a general idea, an Animorph dying. I interpreted that bit to take place in a distant future, strangely enough, and didn't realize it was from just a few books further down the line until I had walked that line myself. XD

[anijen21.livejournal.com]

yay the last chronicles book! It's weird, but even now, after doing all of these reprehensibly comprehensive, obsessive comments, I still can't decide how I rank the chronicles books. Like they're all magically intriguing, emotional, well-plotted in different ways, but also frustrating, stupid, and lazy in different ways. IDK I mean I know The Andalite Chronicles is still my favorite, but after that? I really don't know.

Anyway let's get started.

Okay, so I was sure when I first started reading this book was that my main thesis was going to be something like "100 pages of incomprehensible soft sci-fi do not an exciting story make," but now that I look at this, the whole beginning of this book, that was neither requested nor expected, is kind of a problem on a multitude of levels.

Let me just...ugh, okay. I think one of the reasons The Andalite Chronicles is my favorite is that, at that point, the whole conceit was sort of a surprise, right? Like, "oh cool! Yeah, I liked Elfangor when he was in the first book, I'd love to hear more about him!" And then we heard more about him, and HOLY SHIT HE'S TOBIAS' DAD? Like the whole thing wasn't yet an expectation, it was a surprise.

As the Chronicles books went on, they became less about surprises and more about expectation.

I think The Hork-Bajir Chronicles was still mostly surprise. Most of the plot of that book was stuff we knew nothing about, stuff that was legitimately new, an expansion of the universe we were already familiar with, not a clarification or unveiling of a part we knew about but hadn't seen. We knew nothing of the Hork-Bajir other than that they were sort of dumb, ate trees, and were really nice. This book offered new information.

But it did also explicate mysteries we already had. Mostly, the Quantum Virus. We learned about that in TAC, and here we see it played out. And of course that whole plot was handled with the same kind of morally ambiguous, awesome double-sidedness that we've come to expect from AppleGrant, but still--they fulfilled an expectation. They didn't invent a whole new world.

Move onto Visser. By this point in the series, we had more questions, especially since this was one of the first in-depth looks we get into not only the Yeerk psyche, but their whole society of it. I mean we got glimpses of it in THBC, but even then, it was more a tease than true development. So here, I would say, the balance was shifting. NOW we're LEARNING about MYSTERIES already ESTABLISHED. Now we get to see how the Yeerks started infesting good ol' Mother Earth, something that was part of the very premise of the series that we never got to see until right now.

[anijen21.livejournal.com]

I don't really know if this is because the purpose of the Chronicles books was shifting, or if the whole Animorphs universe just got so out of hand that they couldn't invent new plots that had nothing to do with anything we'd already heard about without pissing everyone off a lot. I think it's more a symptom of the longevity of the series than anything.

But that doesn't mean that I can't be a little pissed with how the answers in The Ellimist Chronicles were handled.

In fact, that might be the only difference. I didn't want new information by this point in the series. I didn't need the Ket, cool and weird as they were. I wanted to know about the Ellimist--not in a context where I'd never seen him before, but in the context where I'd seen him and wondered about him. On his superdimensional throne, looking down at us peons with that whimsical sort of judgment.

In the Ellimist Chronicles, the Ellimist, who doesn't even concretely refer to himself as that until halfway through the book, doesn't even MEET Crayak until page 161 of 200.

The main forces of Good and Evil in the series, whose motivations and powers have, until now, been shrouded in mystery, DON'T EVEN MEET UNTIL THE BOOK IS MORE THAN 3/4 OVER.

Editing has been cited as a problem with the Chronicles books before, and I tend to agree. Loren and Elfangor taking a long, leisurely walk through the Time Matrix Universe could have been cut down to a paragraph. Lots of Visser was weirdly paced, summary where action should be and vice versa. But this? This, to me, is just...who did this? Who let this through? Didn't anyone stop and say, "you know, I'm not sure this book is about what it should be about," or was everyone just so apathetic at this point in the series that they said "whatever, get our cover artist and put this on the shelves"?

I'm probably being too hard on it. I didn't dislike the Ket. I mean, four rereads later, I still don't know what the fuck they were supposed to look like, and I only have a vague idea of what their whole culture is about (so though the crystals are somehow buoyant in the atmosphere themselves [lol really?], the Ket make artificially larger ones in order to increase the size of their "cities," which require the lift of their wings. The crystals are their source of food [I think?] and only recently have they begun finding artificial solutions to keep their crystals afloat, and then there's like the crystal-ship that all the nerds get to go on, until the Capasins come and destroy everything because they thought the game transmissions from the planet were real. Good diplomacy there, Ket.)

[anijen21.livejournal.com]

So the BIGGEST problem with the book, to me, is just the distribution of it. And I think a PART of the reason the distribution was so off was because AppleGrant started listening too hard to dumbass critics like me.

I keep seeing this crop up every once in a while, and maybe it's just because I have a very specific theory about alien sci-fi, but I've heard a lot of criticisms against a lot of Ax-narrated books and TAC that the Andalites are too "human-sounding." Like when Elfangor says "it pained my hearts," for some reason a human idiom doesn't work with alien biology. And yeah, when Ax says the Veleek ripped through something "like wrapping paper," you may be forced to question how he knows what wrapping paper is, but even though Ax maybe shouldn't know human idioms, you know who DOES know human idioms?

EVERY PERSON READING THE BOOK.

The idioms in the beginning of the Ellimist Chronicles were nearly incomprehensible. I didn't get most of them until this reread, and I'm pretty sure I still don't get all of them, but I get what they were trying to do. In order to create a believable alien race, they felt like they had to create a believable alien dialect. This works sometimes. When there's like one or two alien colloquialisms that define the whole race (Live Long and Prosper, grok, etc), it's okay, because as long as you know that one, you can figure out what they mean in pretty much any context. But here, so much of the book was defining all of these idioms in this backdoor, deflective way so it wasn't as condescending and obvious as Toomin saying "oh, by the way, a sire and dam are just my mom and dad," when it could have been focused on, oh, I don't know, developing the relationship between Crayak and the Ellimist.

Basically, IF YOU'RE ONLY GOING TO GIVE ME A 200 PAGE BOOK THEN PLEASE TO BE USING THOSE PAGES AS EFFICIENTLY AS POSSIBLE.

idk, my theory on alien sci-fi is that it's never actually about aliens. It's always about some specific aspect of humanity. Aliens are just an allegorical way to treat humans. Maybe this is "Jenny watches too much Star Trek" talking, and there are alien races that are more complexly developed than just describing or playing with one particular human trait, but I feel like the author always has something specific in mind when they write them. They either want to play with the idea of what would happen if x weren't an issue, or if y was, or if a was an issue but b wasn't, etc. What if humans could make cold, emotionless decisions and prayed to the gods of logic? What if there was no gender? What if our planet had no water? etc. And notice how so much sci-fi can do the same thing without actually inventing an alien race. The Fremen were humans, there weren't no aliens in Battlestar Galactica.

Sci-fi is never about aliens. It's always about humanity. All fiction is. Aliens don't exist, or at least, haven't been discovered yet, and when/if they are, I feel like this will be much clearer. So I don't really mind that Elfangor said his hearts ached, or that Yeerks use a very human empire to run their society. They're all just metaphors for shit we ARE familiar with.

Okay, so I know I've probably already written like 2 comments and I haven't even started on the plot yet, but these were my main issues with the book. Maybe there was just too much story at this point for them to do anything really good with it, idk.

[acts_of_tekla]

No, I think this is actually a really good point. It's always been one of the defining...tenets, I suppose, of good Sci Fi and Fantasy that it takes the reader out of the everyday world in order to comment on the everyday world. For example, The Mikado is patently not about Japan -- it is about then-contemporary England. It was set in Japan so that Gilbert and Sullivan could satirize and criticize England more harshly without getting lynched.

I think that in a lot of ways, that sort of symbolism and parallel is what makes great works of fiction great. Labyrinth isn't just a cult classic because of David Bowie's pants -- it's a highly symbolic and sophisticated bildungsroman that is worth watching over and over. (Or maybe I'm just trying to justify it to myself.)

I think that's the key to the success behind Pixar too. Luxo Jr. isn't really about a desk lamp; it's about a little kid -- or at least, that's how people respond to it emotionally. They just kind of disguise the little kid as a desk lamp. For all the talk about AppleGrant's aliens, I think the most important aspect is that we emotionally recognize them. Their societies have all existed on Earth, to some degree (well, the Taxxons are a bit of a stretch, but in AC we get a look at their inner workings as well, and I certainly sympathized a lot more).

[natural-blue-26.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with David Bowie's pants? (Stay awayyy from Labyrinth fandom if you truly think that btw... Because most of the people in that sandbox are *very* into Jareth's pants :P)

Totally ares on the Pixar Lamp thing... That goes way back to when it first showed up on Sesame Street playing with a bouncy ball.

The alien analogies probably would have been written differently if this wasn't a kids series too. A lot goes over middle schoolers heads etc and the mass target audience probably would have lost interest if they couldn't relate enough. (Oh if only they were redoing the series for an older audience...)

[acts_of_tekla]

*dryly* Obviously I have no problems with David Bowie's pants if I've watched the movie enough to develop a theory about the sophisticated symbolism.

[natural-blue-26.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry by mock!outrage translated very poorly from my head to screen on that first part of the comment ;)

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

I was looking up Labyrinth lyrics on songmeanings.net (if it's not self-evident, the lyrics are posted and people discuss what, if any, deeper meanings there are) and someone had posted a looooong comment on "As the World Falls Down" positing their theory about how Jareth represents fantasy and Toby represents reality, and how the line between fantasy and reality is blurred when you're a child, and how as an adult you can enjoy fantasy but you realize it's not practical to be lost in fantasy forever, and therefore the whole story is about Sarah's growing up and choosing to live in the real world, with fantasy properly in its place, instead of giving into her childish desires.

And I kinda sorta got that from it, but had never been able to lay it out quite so plainly.

But yes. Labyrinth FTW!

[karma-fucked.livejournal.com]

Sci-fi is never about aliens. It's always about humanity. All fiction is.

<3

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

IDK, I kind of felt like the harder-to-grasp-ness of this one was because it was the FREAKIN' ELLIMIST, you know? He knows everything about everything; of course he's going to express himself in ways that are going to be a bit hard to follow.

On the other hand his backstory felt so, so...contrived. Like "OMG they want us to explain his origin, but WTF are we going to talk about that kids will relate to and yet might also make sense? ...VIDEOGAMES, OF COURSE!" (And MMORPGs at that.)

The gaming bit and his race being killed off were kind of irrelevant, compared to the truly important experience this book described--the Ellimist's life with Father. THAT'S what created the Ellimist as we know him. So I think your idea about the ratio of portions of book to plot points is valid; it could have been better with less on Life On Ket, more about Father and Ellimist's experiences with early Andalites, etc etc.

[rena-librarian.livejournal.com]

I didn't guess it was Rachel, because I was late to the fandom--I already KNEW good and well that Rachel dies in the end by the time I got this far.