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(I am currently in danger of becoming homeless. If you can spare a few dollars, it would help a lot. PayPal.me/Guard13007)
At the moment, this is just a couple random lists I found, hastily copy-pasted. In the future, I plan to organize it a bit more and replace these words with my own.
Tptigger’s “The Tocsin” is my personal #1 favorite!
Animorphs: Facebook News Feed Edition by Ember Nickel. This is hilarious and whacky and has some great commentary on Animorphs’ imperfect continuity.
The Hork-Bajir Job and Teach Me How to Say Goodbye by Poetry (@featherquillpen on Tumblr). Both of these crossovers are extremely different in tone, format, content, and plot. However, both accomplish exactly what I always want from a crossover, by providing awesome characterization for the canon team and brilliant commentary on the ways they’d function in a situation very different from canon.
Take Me Out by neinlives. This one is just high-quality good fun. It’s set in a postwar world where the characters get to be happy, which I always love.
Elfangor’s Folly by KimHoppy. Probably my favorite long read in the Animorphs fandom, this is a full-series retelling of Elfangor sticking around to train the Animorphs that makes excellent use of subtly biased narration.
The Perspective: The best Animorphs fanfic I've ever read. It takes place during the endgame, and is about secondary and original characters. The main character is a homosexual controller kid, who finds himself on the front lines while all hell breaks loose between the yeerk empire, the Animorphs and the US military. The story is mostly about controllers, yeerks, and their interactions. The yeerks have interesting personalities, the YPM is well developed, and the whole plot is mostly believable. If you've ever read the Aftran books and thought "man, I wished the whole series had been nothing but that", I strongly recommend you read this. Only downside, it's unfinished, and the last chapter is an epilogue that describes what the author intended to do but didn't have the inspiration to write. Also, if you want to sleep tonight, don't start reading at 9pm.
Animorphs: The Reckoning: The second best one. It's not as focused on yeerks and controllers as I'd like, but as a literary work, it's close to perfect. Way, way closer than the original books. Think of it as "what if KA Applegate had taken her time to write the series, made all the characters smarter, and wrote a story that wasn't afraid to make radical choices and break the status quo?" To quote the author, "Visser Three is competent, the Yeerks are moving rapidly, and the Animorphs are actually trying to win, but are inexperienced and unprepared". Every day counts, every advantage is needed, everyone makes mistakes and no one can afford them. Also, you can see that the author is a big Animorphs fan, with many references and winks to canon, and plot points rewritten in very clever ways (the Ellimist in particular is awesome). Still being written, with a small fandom over r/rational.
The Agreement: I'm a sucker for controller stories. This is a short but pretty good story about Aftran, and the creation of the YPM.
Idyllic: One hundred different stories about Jake, from many different points of view. So if you ever wondered what it was like to be Tom when Jake was living the punk life and going back to bed at 11pm in torn, blood-covered bicycle shorts, there's probably a chapter in there that deals with it in detail. On the whole, it's not very dense, and there's no awesome moment with fun jokes or spectacular violence; it's more of a contemplative collection of short stories. Still, interesting, and mostly well-written.
Sacred Host: This is probably the weirdest Animorphs fanfic I've read that wasn't also lame or just loony. This is about a young controller girl, Teresa, who more or less starts a christian movement among yeerks by preaching to a Hork-Bajiir in the cage next to hers. The premise feels kind of silly to me, because the viewpoint characters treat Christianism as this unstoppable meme that can break empires overnight, and the story can be very preachy by moments, but I still enjoyed it. I'm mostly fond of the descriptions of yeerks and alien cultures, which feel very deep and well-thought. Warning, this story is not finished, and I doubt it will ever be, thought it's still updating sometimes.
Fear: The life of a controller girl during the undercover invasion. God I need more of those. Funny, pretty well-written, with engaging characters. The author made two other Animorphs fics: a one-chapter sequel to Fear, and an unfinished reboot of the series with older protagonists set in 2010. Both are short, but pretty good.
Home for Dinner and Weekends, followed by The Husk: The best finished Animorphs fic' I've read. Also a controller fic, notice a pattern yet? The Husk is about the infamous Binding of Isaac boss, who... just kidding. Both stories are about Eva Salazar (the last name is fic-specific), Marco's mom, and what happened to her before, during and after the war. Very well written, Edriss is both compelling and detestable as in canon. Also, we learn how Marco learned to play chess!
Morphing is Magic: This is way, way better than an Animorphs-MyLittlePony crossover ought to be. Also much more serious. Through boring implausible hijinks you will probably skip, the Animorphs find themselves in Equestria! They must move quickly, because the yeerks have already started invading the place. This takes place right after the Changelings arc, and offers a very insightful, developed, non canon-compliant look into the workings of Equestria, its military and the livelihood of changelings. Also, it's finished.
Source: u/CouteauBleu's recommendations
(Started in 2024-02-05.)