#more animorphs/ben 10 comparisons?? it's more likely than you think

[hapalopus]

If you have to write a clone story like Animorphs' "The Separation" or Ben 10's "Duped" please place the story at a point where the character is facing some intense internal struggle, and actually use the cloning plot device to explore how the character feels split. Don't immediately separate the clones and have them face wildly unrelated problems - make the two halves undergo some kind of contrasting/complementary development, so the viewer actually understands the character's internal conflict better.

#more animorphs/ben 10 comparisons?? it's more likely than you think #both are episodic scifi teen stories whaddaya want from me #ben 10 #animorphs

[princeseerow]

well i cant sleep anyway so im just gonna go ahead list all of the superficial comparisons i can think of between ben 10 os and animorphs

similarities

i mean most obviously is The Premise Of The Series which i cant say is super unique, but: kid(s) are the recipient of cool alien tech as a result of a crashlanding that allows them to transform into other creatures

also because of limitations of the technology, but really just plot reasons, they can only stay in the form of the other creature for a limited amount of time before they have to turn back

and then theres the fact that the series follows an average white american teenager who is unwittingly saddled into this situation with his quicker-to-anger cousin who is surprisingly good at kicking ass. i mean you know, and the animorphs has other main characters but the jake/ben and rachel/gwen parallels are there

they encounter someone who briefly joins their endeavors as the newest addition to the team only to eventually have to turn on this person for being an overwhelming piece of shit who tries to literally kill at least one of the team members (david, kevin -- also kinda funny that they both have stereotypical bad boy aesthetics but thats just kinda narrative shorthand for being untrustworthy)

on that note i guess the auxiliary animorphs and the plumbers kids have even looser parallels if you dont think about it too hard but... thats pretty heavily ben 10 uaf territory and i said im not going there yet

ok but hypocrite that i am i do want to bring up one more similarity that only becomes canon in ben 10 ultimate alien and onwards, which is that one of the main characters (tobias and gwen) is revealed to have alien heritage. and i mean technically ben does too but it doesnt manifest because something something gender

theres a definite comparison to be made between the ellimist and azmuth, as being guide like figures to the young heroes, who are directly or indirectly responsible for leading the heores to their Inciting Event in the first place. theyre also similar in that i dislike them both.

differences

ben from the start actively wants to be a hero and help people even before he finds the omnitrix, whereas none of the animorphs really show signs of this pre-elfangor, and some of them only continue with the war effort out of a sense of personal duty to people in their lives

on that note, because of the mostly villain-of-the-week style of ben 10, there arent a lot of overarching familial stakes for him (and hes also not fighting a literal war). like, as near as i can recall he never has any family members who are personally victimized by vilgax, and if he ever does then certainly not for the same length of time as eva or tom are in animorphs. aside from gwen and max, the tennyson family at large doesnt have much of an impact on the plot on an episode-to-episode basis

and on that note, ben and gwen find themselves in world-saving situations a lot more frequently, whereas the animorphs are, u know, fighting a war. but i also feel like the animorphs' successes are more emotionally impactful than ben's overall, like uhhh, i cant really seem to put it into words that well, but a lot of ben's battles dont involve other people more than just incidental damage. like he can save a whole city full of people on the tennyson summer family road trip but he doesnt know these people, and theyre usually off to a new city by the next episode anyway. the animorphs are constantly at risk of potentially having to hurt the people they love to save them.

okay this next point is kind of a similarity AND a difference so its just gonna go here. anyway, both the animorphs and team tennyson (that is, just ben gwen and max for the purposes of this list) have a certified Alien Expert in their groups. the difference here is that max takes a really long time to actually tell ben and gwen that he has prior experience with aliens which in hindsight is kind of really funny. its like if ax spent the early books after joining the team just straight up pretending to be a human inexplicably and somehow not once ever letting onto the fact that hes an andalite

#chattering #its. kind of inane ramblings its almost 8 am and i havemt slept yet lol #i rewatched the first few episodes of ben 10 os instead of finally continuing with omniverse #just bc i wanted to and the theme song is better