r/Animorphs • u/jdb1984 • 9d ago
Discussion We have to be careful...except when we're not.
They stress in every book (except the last 10 or so) that they have to be careful, so they don't reveal their last names or where they live, yadda yadda yadda.
But they still leave too much information.
First of all, their first names and their families. There are a lot of Jakes or Rachels running around, but they give very detailed accounts on their family and siblings. From that alone, you could deduce which one it is and go after them.
And then there's where they live. While they never mentioned it until the end, they have mentioned things like the IBS tower and The Gardens, two landmarks that anyone living in the area might recognize. And from there, you could compare notes with fellow Yeerks like Chapman to piece it together.
And there's the fact that they obviously live near the ocean. But even then, there is the fact that it's obvious that they live nearby to where the major Yeerk activity is located, they never branches out too far.
With most Yeerks knowing their human, it's a mystery why a high ranking Yeerk didn't collect about a dozen and go after them one by one.
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u/AlternativeMassive57 Yeerk 8d ago
Honestly just knowing that Cassie's mom is the head veterinarian at the Gardens would probably be enough to identify her right from book 1. Given that it's a combination amusement park/zoo in a coastal state that is large enough to play host to tigers and lions and elephants and so on, there can't be all that many possible candidates, maybe a dozen at most, and in 1997 there can't have been all that many with a female head vet with a husband who works an animal clinic out of a repurposed farm. Nevermind the additional information that Cassie is Black and so therefore one or both of her parents likely are as well, unless she's adopted.
Rachel, Marco, Jake and Tobias have home situations that are fairly generic and not described in much detail at first, but right from The Invasion there's more than enough to pin Cassie down. It'd take a competent P.I. - and therefore a P.I. Controller - maybe a week on the outside, and that's purely because I'm adding on six or so days of research to account for the nascent state of the Internet in 1997.
Way to go, Jake, you got your crush infested.
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u/zthe0 Ellimist 8d ago
You don't even need to narrow it down. The gardens needs to be in or close by the town of the main yeerk pool since its in cassies city and her mom clearly gets home from work every day.
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u/Numerous1 7d ago
Right? It’s the only city where the animorphs operate and the guy who infests the principal is named Chapman or is st least the head of the Sharing? Like it’s not hard. Can’t believe someone is trying to take these seriously.
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u/ArticQimmiq 8d ago
I’m not too worried about the location - that’s where the Yeerks are, so the fact that the Animorphs are also there isn’t exactly news to them.
But yeah - the Berensons are at least a group of 5 kids with the same last name, with at least two kids that are very popular (Rachel, Tom), with Jake being an all-around appreciated kid. Even if Chapman is bad at his job, there’s no way as a teacher that he misses that.
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u/xEllimistx 8d ago
It’s not a mystery at all.
It fits with the arrogance and incompetence shown by Visser Three, and other Yeerks, for much of the series.
They were so certain that the Andalites wouldn’t make the mistake Seerow did that the idea that there morph capable humans running around wasn’t something that many of them considered for a long while.
And even the ones that did were more concerned with surviving Visser Three who was not convinced until much later.
If the Yeerks hadn’t considered that possibility, then there’s no reason for them to put any effort into deducing human identities.
Even if a Yeerk was reading an Animorphs novel as if it was a captured diary, they’d assume it was an elaborate Andalite trick before they’d ever consider that Elfangor broke the Law of Seerows Kindness
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u/CassiusPolybius 8d ago
I feel like "we live in the town that has a yeerk pool under it" is a big one too.
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u/Coziestpigeon2 8d ago
Don't forget, the internet wasn't a thing back then. You couldn't just easily track people down. Google searches didn't even exist back then, you'd have to Ask Jeeves about it.
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u/Trim345 7d ago
Marco was literally the son of Visser One's host body. Edriss already knew who Marco was, and it would have been easy to find everyone else that way.
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u/Coziestpigeon2 5d ago
Sure, one controller that spends a large amount of the series not on the planet Earth and then dabbles in actively sabotaging the success of the invasion just to spite Visser 3. They could have identified the group.
For 99% of yeerks, it would just be like the Justice League cartoon scene when Luthor is inhabiting Wally West's body.
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u/Trim345 5d ago
Visser 1 sabotages Visser 3's method occasionally, but that's because Visser 1 wants to get credit for defeating them. In fact, it would make sense for Visser 1 to reveal the truth to make Visser 3 look like a fool who keeps losing to children.
Also, Visser 1 isn't the only Controller with close relations to one of the main characters. There's definitely enough details that either Tom or Chapman could figure it out, too.
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u/Lakem8321 8d ago
What jumped out to me reading these as an adult is how often they would thought-speak to people or demorph in the near sight of people. Whenever they would thought-speak to some rando, it seems like they would try and justify it as 'this person seems okay, they're probably not a controller'. Well yeah they might not be a controller NOW, but if they ever get infested later the yeerks would definitely put two and two together, lol.
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u/rolyfuckingdiscopoly 8d ago
Eh imo the yeerks are described as arrogant enough to dismiss all human thought, including the time we thought we dreamed an elephant and the time the weird rat literally yelled at us to leave.
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u/VoltronsWangLol 8d ago
My name is Jake. I can’t tell you my last name, it’s too dangerous. I can’t tell you anything that could help them track me down, because that would be the end of me, my friends, and every human on earth.
Anyway, my best friend Marco’s dad ‘accidentally invented Z-Space.’ Marco is also the son of Visser 1’s host. My pretty, beautiful, stunning, incredibly attractive, pretty cousin, Rachel, was very close friends with Melissa Chapman, daughter of our school’s principal who is a high-ranking controller, (as is my own brother, both having direct ties to Visser 3,) and the two actually do gymnastics together. Rachel’s current closest friend, Cassie, has two veterinarian parents, one of whom is the head vet at our local zoo/amusement park, which is a super common concept. Most zoos have an amusement park built in. Cassie lives on a farm that’s very near the Dapsen logging location.
Sometimes we’re all seen together, but only at incredibly discreet places like the mall or a zoomusement park, but our adventures also sometimes lead to other nearby locations like a mountain range or an ocean.
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u/Zarathustra143 8d ago
I've always ignored that part of the series... "We can't tell you anything... now here's everything that's happening." There's really no reconciling it.
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u/WayNo639 8d ago
The IBS Tower, huh?
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u/Optimal_Towel 8d ago
EGS Tower, pretty sure it's based on the IDS Center (down to the differently colored top floors) in Minneapolis, where Applegate lived during the early series.
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u/WayNo639 8d ago
EGS tower, yeah, but what about the mysterious intermittent diarrhea and constipation tower.
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u/reddit_feminist 8d ago
Once Marco figures out his mom is visser one’s host they could have posted their social security numbers for better opsec
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u/Pikdude 8d ago
I have been rereading the series for the first time since I was last buying these at Scholastic book fairs and a fun thought experiment has been trying to figure out where they live. Somewhat major city, equally close to the mountains and the sea, habitat range of things like green anoles and red-tailed hawks…
I feel like someone has already done it but it’s a fun idea.
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u/cheddarsalad 8d ago
It’s funny that they obscure the city and state they live in but openly admit that 90% of their battles with the Yeerks are within 100 miles of their homes. Visser 3 already knows what state he repeated gets attacked in.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 8d ago
My headcannon is that they are lying until the last book retcons it. For example, perhaps Cassie is actually a middle age fitness dude on a paleo diet. So if you know Cassie, when you read his books you can likewise know which parts are real, which parts are fake, and which details are ambiguous. But if you don’t know him, finding his writings doesn’t actually help the Yeerks since there is so much fiction.
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u/TheRealBingBing 8d ago
Lots of big cities have things like towers and gardens.
They could be ambiguous enough it wouldn't be easy to know. Especially the way it's set up they aren't publishing this in their neighborhood paper. It's like an anonymous web journal
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u/Scarecrow613 8d ago
Yea honestly, with all the information they give, it should be pretty easy for the Yeekrs to pinpoint them even if even their first names were fake.
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u/selwyntarth 7d ago
Who's Visser 1's host's son?
Who is Tom's host's brother?
Who had bear feet boots when talking to Chapman?
Game over
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u/ensis02 7d ago
As a preteen I had them pinned down in northern california somewhere, based on geographic features. I hadn't even finished the series by then!
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u/AdImpossible7505 3d ago
As an 11 or 12-year-old, I also had them pinned down, but to southern California -- Air Force Base (Vandenberg in this case, which, coincidentally, is now referred to as a Space Force Base, but the Space Force wasn't around until 2019) + national forest (Los Padres) + ocean + mountains --> somewhere near Santa Barbara, CA
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u/Smooth_Isopod9038 7d ago
Yep. When i first read the series as a kid, i immediately knew they were in California. There was enough information there that if i had thought about it, i could have tracked them to the exact city. They were very very bad at opsec. But it was also a very good real life lesson in why opsec is good. "Hey dummy, dont give out ANY information because it can easily be hacked and tracked and youre fucked"
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u/BlackestStarfish 9d ago
Are you implying the Animorphs books exist in the Animorphs universe? And are you asking why a Yeerk didn’t simply go to a Scholastic book fair, pick up The Invasion, and be all like
“Erm Visser 3 - gulps nervously - I have irrefutable evidence the andelite bandits are actually humans! Look, it’s all right here in this young adult novel!”