thirty-one

k.a. applegate changed my life.




i must have been nine, or ten, when i first came across applegate's animorphs series, and it captivated me. the story goes something like this: after meeting a dying alien, a group of teenagers are given the power to morph into any creature they touch, and have to use this power to save the world from a body-snatchers style alien invasion that is happening, in secret, all around them. the bad aliens (yeerks) have greater numbers, more advanced technology and a whole friggin alien empire behind them; the american teenagers have pluck, the power of nature and some pacifist, canine-like android friends.

guess who wins.

okay, okay, so the unlikeliness of the final outcome isn't the real point, i know. there are some brilliant ideas on the uncertain nature of morality in war; the dehumanisation of oneself and one's enemy; sanity; how different individuals react and cope with war (each book is told in first-person, and applegate cycles through the six protagonists across the series). perhaps more important than this thought provoking, moral-questioning aspect, however, is the fact that THEY CAN TURN INTO ANIMALS. how fucking cool is that. yeah, they almost got killed in every book, their families were hunted down, they were traumatised by all the death etc etc but they got to be cats! all kinds of cats, from domesticated kitties to big old tigers! how hard can war be anyway, when you have intervals of felineness?

okay so obviously i dont actually think that, but the amazing coolness of animal-morphing was a big part of the books' appeal. i was a bit of a loner child, a little bit at odds with myself, and the idea of transformation was arresting; the descriptions of experiencing the world through the body of a totally different creature had such a powerful effect on me as to be almost intoxicating. i spent hours imagining myself as the different characters, being a hawk, a wolf , a cockroach with and through them. i used to make lists of the top five animals i would choose to become, if someone came along and told me they'd give me the power to turn into five different animals, because you never know, it might happen, it so might happen, at any moment soon, right, right? i even remember ambitiously trying to turn into a peregrine falcon one afternoon, just in case i unknowingly had the morphing talent (okay, so there may have been concrete reason for my loner-ness).

like anything you love as a child, i grew out of the books. i forgot about the animorphs and their battles. but yesterday, reading my book about whales and, more specifically, about the sperm whale, i suddenly remembered the total, uncompromising love i had once had for these books (the mysterious sperm whale was often on my top-five list; they are puzzling, amazing creatures, and we know very little about them). it took my breath away, that forgotten love, and for the rest of the evening i basked in it, carefully prodded and poked at it, laughed and gasped again at the characters and stories.

it was really wonderful. here's to old favourites, to all those tales and fictional friends that make up a part of life, and a part that is just as important as all those people and events in 'reality'. what books/films etc etc did anyone out there adore as a child, what characters were as close as friends?