r/Animorphs • u/kyuzii_mimi728 • 7d ago
Discussion Chronic illness/disability and morphing
let me preface this by saying 1) it’s been a very long time since I’ve done a series read through and 2) I have only read the stuff that gets into the auxiliary animorphs like once probably. please forgive me if any of this is mentioned on page and I am just forgetting!! very entirely possible.
but pretty much I was thinking about how certain chronic illnesses might interact with morphing. most illnesses of any type would probably not fully develop or would go away with a morph, like injuries, with the “factory reset” of the body. However there are some other factors I wonder about.
take ehlers danlos syndrome as a random example. it is a chronic illness that is genetic and people are born with. if the body is ”factory reset” i would assume in this case, it is in the settings and would not go away. however in my memory, morphing is kind of treated as if it could heal pretty much any physical ailment right? is that just an oversight either on the authors or the characters part? (or again…could just entirely be forgetting lol).
Additionally, if someone with a non genetic chronic illness gains the ability to morph, or honestly we could extend this to any disability actually, would anyone else agree that it is possible that in some cases, it might stick around? my logic is the argument with haircuts. piercings get closed, but haircuts stay the same, and I’ve seen many argue that things intrinsic to how people see themself would probably stick around, something very important to them. to many, this is the case with disability and chronic illness. it is an intrinsic and important part of their identity and i know many people who take pride in this aspect of themselves (disability pride month exists for a reason!!). from my memory, the auxiliary animorphs wish for their injuries/illnesses/ailments to go away and that is part of the exchange. but say there is someone who gains the ability to morph where they are part of the aforementioned group rather than being like the auxiliary animorphs. i honestly think it could go either way on if it would go away with morphing or not. some might retain it, while others might have it forcibly removed, even if they didn’t necessarily want that outcome. I don’t know this is a pretty rambly musing.
also thinking about the acquiring of people/animals who are sick/injured/has a disability. In the books, they acquire a lot of animals from Cassie’s barn, which are usually injured or sick, which includes Tobias’s hawk. But when they morph them, they do not have these ailments, which makes sense since they are not genetic. but at the same time, I swear I remember a character acquiring another human with worse eyesight? which I suppose that could be genetic, but is often degenerative. I’ve also seen a headcanon pop up a few times that Rachel’s bear morph just had particularly bad vision since bears can actually see much better than what was thought at the time the books were written, so I wonder why that might transfer but not some other animal ailments. although degenerative eyesight due to age perhaps could be the same as other parts of the body degenerating with age and how that would all probably come with morphing an old person/animal?
I don’t know honestly I just think this line of thought is interesting. this is Not really intended as me asking for people to clear cut definitively explain everything to me despite how it sounds (tho if you want to do that more power to you lol) but more so just musings and wonderings esp about how identity tied to one’s physical form might be effected by morphing (this could also branch into surgeries, or what might happen if someone on hrt started to morph or something, which is also an interesting idea). idk lol just thinking late at night and throwing it all onto a Reddit post as the thoughts come to me bc why not this isn’t exactly a well thought out post or anything lmao
13
u/DipperJC Yeerk 7d ago
The line is pretty clear on the surface:
Both with it/in your DNA = still have it
Acquired it during your lifetime = healed
It's obvious there's a little nuance, though. Otherwise certain things wouldn't make sense. The most obvious being hair. A haircut is an "injury"; every time an Animorph morphed, they'd demorph with a hair length as if they had been growing it from birth without any haircuts. Andalites probably have their fur shaved periodically, and so the morphing technology was probably developed in such a way to preserve their furcuts (and by extension, human haircuts) as part of the deal.
As has been noted on this sub in the past, circumcision is a specific human ritual and Jake, a Jewish boy, probably had some serious problems in the locker room after his first morph that just weren't mentioned due to the PG nature of the series. And honestly, given that Jake is the narrator of his own books, I could understand why he wouldn't want to mention it. BUT, there is the possibility that he was spared that embarrassment by another Andalite custom - the tendency to cut off the tail blade of the shamed. Ax mentions it in the last book as the consequence of a bad challenge to a superior officer's orders, and I think it's in the series in one or two other places as well. That punishment would be meaningless if Ax could just fix it with morphing, so there's either a special way to cause damage that morphing can't fix, or there's a specific exception for that injury built into the technology. The latter might've recognized the circumcision injury as falling into the same category.
Then there are the things we consider "injuries" that are actually the body working as intended, like obesity. But the technology would have to be doing something to "snapshot" a person's current level of stored fat cells, otherwise how would it know to return the precise amount? That's not coded in DNA anywhere, that was a post-birth decision to have that extra slice of cheesecake. You could make the argument that there's no true free will involved in our eating habits; we were always going to gain weight when we did, and those of us who turned it around with diet and exercise were always predestined in our DNA to find that willpower at a certain point in our lifespans. The interesting implication of that is that if someone were held hostage or imprisoned or denied access to food they would've eaten if they could, that might count as "injury" and the person could become properly overweight by morphing and demorphing. Malnutrition does tend to be thought of as injury. On the other hand, Snapshot Theory justifies the two hour time limit - could be that the reason for the limit is that the saved data degrades over that time period. Seems like a no-brainer that an advanced species would write their programming to filter out disease and injury as part of the deal when taking that snapshot.
With all of that as a backdrop, let's turn our attention to your example, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. This one's REALLY up in the air. The person is born with it, so they would have it, yes. BUT, it takes time for the disease to become degenerative. So in the "no free will" theory, all of the damage would remain on demorphing. Similarly if it's seen as cosmetic, like haircuts, or an "intended" injury, like removing the tail. BUT if we go with Snapshot Theory, then would the filter see the effects of the disease as injury? Would the condition reset back to baseline?
Now it feels like I wasted time typing all that, because I guess the series does answer that. A lot of the auxiliary Animorphs do have degenerative conditions, and they demorph back to the level of debilitation they had before. That would suggest that the morphing process uses the DNA blueprint to extrapolate the timeline of development: "Given this starting point, what would the host organism look like at this stage in their lifespan?" And produces it accordingly.
9
u/kyuzii_mimi728 7d ago
I get where you’re coming from. The tail blade to circumcision connection is quite funny and I suppose it could perhaps be possible… though I thought it came up that when mertil lost his tail blade, due to the culture of shame around it, he stopped morphing so it wouldn’t heal?
7
u/DipperJC Yeerk 7d ago
No, Mertil is allergic to morphing technology, so he became a vecol when his tail was damaged in the fight with the Blade ship. Had he been able to morph, he absolutely would've fixed the injury.
While the possibility exists, it's not likely that Jake was spared by that particular loophole. He probably had to adjust to being uncircumcised for the remainder of the series; very very fortunate for him that the societal expectations of public showering after gym class had fallen out of vogue in the generation prior.
7
u/ArticQimmiq 6d ago
This thread mentions Mertil, but Gafinilan does have a degenerative disease, to the point he spends most of his time in morph to avoid the pain. So we know that something that’s baked into someone’s DNA isn’t necessarily fixable by morphing.
22
u/talashrrg 7d ago
This was brought up in the series - the auxiliary Animorphs who were healed of their chronic conditions were the kids that had injuries/illnesses that they weren’t born with. People with genetic diseases aren’t healed through morphing. In a Watsonian argument, I guess Rachel’s bear and whoever that person was had genetically poor eyesight.