How an Unlikely 1990s Series Becomes a Map for Fighting Today’s Invisible Wars...
We’re in a war, fighting for the survival of the human race.
You’re thinking. Yeah right. That’s okay. I know... I probably would’ve said the same thing once.
No way. Not a chance. If it’s true, where are the troops storming the beaches? Where are the bombs? Where’s the battlefield, the RPVs, and the cruise missiles?
…But it’s true. Every now and then the crazy becomes real.
And this is not a clean war, if there is such a thing. A war like World War II, where thousands saw the wrongs being committed and stood up to correct them. Where you attacked an enemy you could see, an enemy who wore a uniform and came right back at you, guns blazing.
This isn’t that kind of war at all.
[It's]... more subtle than that...
When I first read these words, they kind of sounded like they could’ve been written for today. About creeping fascism. About MAGA, maybe. About another deceptive political or religious movement, perhaps. About the way cult‑like movements don’t march in uniforms, or bedsheets, anymore — they infiltrate, they whisper, they spread online.
But these words aren’t from a think piece on our current politics. They were written in the 1990s, for the 31st book in a children’s science‑fiction series called Animorphs. I've been rereading much of the series for nostalgia-sake, but this is the first time I've read this entry. If you’ve never heard of this series, or only vaguely remember the covers with kids turning into animals, then you’re not alone.
Here’s why it matters: Animorphs might just be the most relevant, overlooked survival guide for our current moment.
What Animorphs Is About (and Why It Matters)
Animorphs was a 54‑book young adult series created by K.A. Applegate—the writing duo of Katherine Applegate and husband Michael Grant—published between 1996 and 2001. On the surface, it’s about five teenagers — later six — who gain the power to morph into any animal they touch. They use this ability to resist an alien invasion of Earth.
That might sound simple, even cheesy. But the genius of Animorphs is that the aliens — called Yeerks — don’t invade with spaceships and laser guns. They invade quietly, by slipping into people’s minds. A Yeerk is a slug‑like creature that crawls into a person’s ear canal and takes over their brain. From the outside, the person looks completely normal. On the inside, they are a prisoner. Their body and voice are being used by someone else.
The Yeerks set up a youth group called The Sharing, which looks like a community club. It’s fun, it’s safe, it’s welcoming. Kids sign up, families get involved — and slowly, piece by piece, more people fall under control.
The teenagers in the series — Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Tobias, and later Ax — discover the truth and are forced to resist. They can’t tell anyone. They can’t trust the police, or their teachers, or even their own families. The invasion is already happening, and no one believes them.
Sound familiar?
Book 31: The Compass
By the time you get to Book 31, The Conspiracy, the war has dragged on for years. Jake, the team’s reluctant leader, opens the book with the passage quoted above. He’s trying to convince the reader that the war is real — even though there are no tanks in the street, no uniforms, no clear enemy you can point to.
This moment matters because it captures the feeling of fighting an invisible war. A war where the biggest obstacle isn’t the enemy itself — it’s convincing anyone else that the enemy exists.
That’s why Book 31 is somewhat of a compass for where the series is headed. It points us to the reality that this kind of war doesn’t look like the ones we grew up learning about in history class. It’s not Normandy or Pearl Harbor. It’s infiltration. It’s narrative control. It’s disinformation.
And that’s exactly what our politics feels like today.
The Series as the Map
If Book 31 is the compass, the entire series becomes like a map. Because Animorphs doesn’t just identify the problem — it shows what resistance looks like. And it’s not clean. It’s not easy.
- Jake shows us how leadership is necessary, but corrodes when every choice is between bad and worse.
- Rachel shows us how the strongest and most dedicated can be the most energetic, inspired, and triumphant; but can so easily be consumed by violence and death.
- Marco teaches both strategy and cynicism as a survival tool, always asking: who benefits?
- Cassie embodies empathy, along with the painful truth that it can be weaponized and that compassion has limits.
- Tobias shows how trauma reshapes identity — but also brings clarity or purpose.
- Ax represents loyalty fractured by conscience. He helps us recognize the value of found family, and the cost of blind obedience.
Together, their stories form a guide. Not to victory without cost — but to survival when the enemy is everywhere and nowhere.
Animorphs teaches that to resist systems like the Yeerks — or MAGA, or QAnon, or any movement that functions like a cult — you need more than good intentions. You need strategy. You need empathy sharpened into a something dangerous. You need the willingness to act ruthlessly but strategically when it matters, even at great personal cost.
Why This Resonates Now
The Yeerks were never just aliens. They were metaphors for the systems that hollow people out: fascism, religious extremism, propaganda, authoritarian politics. Before we could put words to is, they were every movement that says “we’re here to help” while demanding absolute control.
The Sharing was never just a youth group. It was a stand‑in for how cults recruit, how authoritarianism spreads, how people are seduced by belonging.
Reading Animorphs today feels unsettling because it doesn’t read like the past. It reads like a warning we ignored.
The Takeaway (and series spoilers... sorry)
In the end, the Yeerk War doesn’t end with one clean battle. It ends because each member of the team makes a choice — a choice so costly that without it, Earth would have been lost.
- Jake, the leader, chooses to sacrifice his own brother, who has been enslaved by a Yeerk. Destroying the enemy ship that Yeerks is on also means destroying part of his own family. His choice means the loss of both his brother and cousin, Rachel. It’s a ruthless calculation, and it breaks him. But without it, humanity would not have survived.
- Rachel, the warrior, chooses a mission of near-certain death. She accepts the one-way assignment to take down a powerful enemy, almost certain not to return. She becomes a blade the others cannot wield, and without her sacrifice, the war would have continued. But she loses her life in the process.
- Marco, the strategist, chooses pragmatism over innocence. He becomes the voice who justifies the impossible, who says aloud what the others won’t. Without him, hesitation would have paralyzed the team.
- Cassie, the healer, chooses compromise. She intervenes to stop one of Jake’s most devastating orders from being carried out, pushing for a surrender rather than total annihilation. Without her, the war might have ended in ashes.
- Ax, the alien teenager, chooses humanity over his own people. His defection proves decisive. Without him, victory might have belonged to his race — but not to Earth.
- Tobias, the team scout/surveillance.... and the outcast... carries the grief and embodies the cost of the war. He is traumatized, and he's broken by the unbearable loss of Rachel, the one he loved, and becomes the witness to everything the team sacrificed. Though he remained bitter, unable to forgive, carrying grief that never healed. Without him, there would be no memory, no reckoning.
Each choice is devastating. Each choice leaves scars that never heal. But together, those choices end the war. And that’s the point: if even one of them had refused, the Yeerks would have gained the upper hand and won.
What That Means for Us
We are in our own invisible war now. Not with alien slugs — but with authoritarianism, disinformation, and movements that hollow people out while smiling to their faces.
The lesson is that survival doesn’t come from waiting for a clean, cinematic victory. It comes from choices:
- Choosing when to be ruthless.
- Choosing when to sacrifice.
- Choosing when to be pragmatic.
- Choosing when to compromise.
- Choosing when to resist.
- Choosing when to bear witness.
None of these choices are easy. None of them are pure. They all come with costs. But if we refuse to make them — if we sit back and hope it all resolves on its own — then the war will be decided for us. And not in our favor.
In my memoir, I use Animorphs and other books from my childhood to help chart my path out of the cult I grew up in. With Animorphs, I use it as a literary fulcrum to display my own developing callousness to the cult I grew up in and my family. To show how it felt to live under control, being told I must lead the congregation from an early age, and living with family that felt like sometimes they weren't speaking from their own, real thoughts.
Like they were under control of some parasite that found it's way into their ear.
Such things, like the fictional Yeerks, only gain the upper hand when no one is willing to confront. When no one is willing to make choices from their own gut and good sense, and instead of from social pressure and perhaps what appear to be social norms.
The same is true now.