I was never really a Goodreads-er, but I did always like those gif/meme reviews, so I’m going to try that here exclusively using gifs from my favorite crazy series, The Good Place. Spoilers for The Animorphs series!
We open at the top of book one, The Invasion, from Elfangor’s POV as he is dying. But then we snap back in time.
Elfangor and his friend Arbron are training to be Andalite warriors under the disgraced war-veteran Alloran. As a reminder, Andalites are centaur-like aliens and the main enemies of the Yeerks.
While on a mission against the Yeerks, they stumble upon a race of bug-like aliens who have kidnapped two human teens named Loren and Chapman. They learn that the bug-aliens also stole a powerful object called The Time Matrix, which is sort of like an infinity stone as it can manipulate time/space for its user, and are on their way to the Yeerk’s planet with the device. The Andalites decide to pursue it, fearful of what the Yeerks could do with the device. This leads to endless life-threatening shenanigans, like Arbron accidentally turning into a gross Taxxon alien…
Elfangor refusing his superior’s order to genocide a bunch of defenseless Yeerks…
and Elfangor and Loren the teen falling in love in the midst of all the melee.
In the first big twist, a Yeerk takes over the body of the disgraced war-veteran Andalite (showing us the origin of Visser 3)…
And he, Elfangor, and Loren all try to use the Time Matrix when their ship is in danger of getting sucked into a black hole…
But because all three of them try to manipulate it at the same time, they accidentally create a new universe that mashes Earth, the Andalite Planet, and the Yeerk planet all together.
Elfangor and Loren manage to escape this situation and use the Time Matrix to go to Earth. Ashamed of his role in the Yeerk war, Elfangor perma-morphs into a human and lives a long time as one, during which he and Lauren get married and he befriends both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and helps them invent Macintosh and Windows…
But then the friggin Ellimist zooms in and tells Elfangor that they need to erase this version of his life and put him back in the correct timeline otherwise:
So Elfangor is put back into the correct timeline, but not before learning that Loren was pregnant and he now has a son… who it turns out is Tobias the Hawkboy.
So…
That’s where we’re at!
Honestly, the super specials are not my favorite parts of the series – they’re a lot to slog through compared to the quick lil treats that the regular novels are. But I loved the Tobiaslore.