Animorphs: The Reckoning

[PoignardAzur]

So, here's the pitch: Animorphs: The Reckoning is a retelling of the Animorphs saga with higher stakes, smarter antagonists, and a harder sci-fi interpretation of the morphing powers. But it's mostly about teenagers desperately trying to fight off an alien invasion. Where canon Animorphs was slice-of-life-ish and had a very strong status quo, The Reckoning has a faster pace, character deaths and world-changing events. This is no fix-fic, though: the author is clearly an Animorphs fan, and there are tons of re-imagining of canon elements, small winks, nods to the Chronicles books and other stuff. There's even a mention of Visser 3 making outdoors excursions to gallop through grassy fields cleverly worked in one chapter. The fic can be summarized with this quote:

"You know who does have brains, though?” Marco continued. “The Yeerks. Maybe a thousand of them already. A thousand human brains, a thousand slaves, except those slaves can’t even think without their masters knowing about it. There is nothing standing in their way except us—did you get that? This isn’t some movie, where humanity’s going to rise up and pull some bullshit trick out of its ass. The Yeerks are winning. Did you not see Elfangor get eaten? Do you not understand the stakes? He was coming to destroy the planet because he thought that might be the only way to stop them."

Anti-recommendation: be aware that the story comes from r/rational, and takes some inspiration from stories like Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality; personally, I think that The Reckoning doesn't has the same writing problems HP:MoR had; to me, the characters feel diverse and compelling and close to their canon counterparts, and none of them really feels like an author surrogate. But a few people have said the characters felt different in a way that put them off (Tobias in particular is pretty close to being an OC sometimes), so... keep an open mind, I guess.

Anyway, I highly recommend it to anyone looking for Animorphs fanfics (and even people who never read Animorphs in the first place). There are infrequent updates, but so far it looks like the story will be completed, and every new chapter is definitely worth the wait.

[mainstreet52]

Personally I find this fic rather irritating overall, but not so much so that I'm not willing to keep reading it as it updates. There's not a whole lot of Animorphs fanfiction, of course, so that really does encourage my continued reading.

As someone that has loved HP:MOR, Luminosity, and The Origin of Species, this one... honestly, misses the mark for me as a rationalist fic.

I've got a few gripes here:

1) Too many OCs running around. Garrett is cool and all, but... eh. After him, it's just... exploding numbers of characters. Which brings me to...
2) Exploding plot. While I sort of get what the series is trying to accomplish, this is a series I can read a chapter and understand less about the overall plot than I did beforehand. Too many things happening at once. (Wheel of Time fans will understand this and possibly love it. I loved WoT too, but this was a gripe there as well for me.)
3) Too much unnecessary canon killing, especially with regards to morphing. One thing HP:MOR is great at is being very deliberate and careful with the divergences it makes in the base universe. I'm not talking about the plot itself so much here, but... honestly, this fic changes morphing to be practically unrecognizable from KAA's original form, and overpowers it, and how it's used is... not something I'm a fan of. OP calls it a "hard sci-fi interpretation", I feel like the efforts to do this are too much. Sometimes less is more, and I can come up with ways to make it a hard sci-fi without half of this and it still will work from a perfectly valid hard sci-fi perspective.
4) This may be a bit by design, but it feels like the rationalist aspect is played up a bit too much, to the point where entire chapters are spent making minimal decisions, in part because of paranoia due to the rationalism combined with overpowered morphing (which V3 also has access to, so the paranoia is not unjustified here, but it still makes for difficult reading.)

That being said, there's not a whole lot of Animorphs fanfiction being actively updated right now, and this is probably still worth a read.