Upsetting Day: Vegemorphs

Vegemorphs is an Animorphs parody about vegetables. And pride.

Not on a text level—the angle never evolves beyond “snarky teen becomes snarky onion.” But I’m convinced that twenty words in, the writer felt the weight of his sin. I sympathize with Leif E. Green, despite his war crime of a pseudonym. Real arrogance would be attaching his Christian name to this.

Ah, Chris Steinbach was proud of this. Then he looked upon his works and despaired. Relatable. I’ve gone drinking and woken up next to an ugly manuscript.

The publisher, Troll Communications, died. Surprising, since legally distinct clones are an evergreen scam. Every Walgreens has a DVD rack daring James Cameron to take a swing. Parodies enjoy plenty of cover, as long as apartheid fortunes aren’t at risk. Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg wrote ten insults to Yahweh before turning into pillars of salt.

Before mocking an Animorphs cash-in, we should speed-mock Animorphs. You might remember covers like this:

Or this:

That’s Animorphs, a sci-fi franchise about teenagers fighting a galactic superpower by turning into cats. It’s over fifty books long. If that sounds drawn out, imagine destroying Rome as a moody trout. Every page these kids spent outside of Martian Guantanamo Bay was a military miracle.

Admirable, honestly. Most children’s/young adult/profitable spec-fic gave their protagonists a steroid-era upper hand. Publishers thought readers couldn’t handle dramatic tension until retirement. But the kids in Animorphs were fucked. They had the power to turn into our thumbless dinner. The enemy had guns.

Along with some body-snatching nonsense for flavor. Which didn’t matter. Giving Yeerks mind control was like giving a global hegemon remote control jets, or a button that offloaded inflation onto everyone else. They just looked inept.

Bizarrely, the series ended exactly like Attack on Titan: the hero got a boner for genocide, murdered half the cast, and spent the last few pages crying about it. All of my adjunct neurons are searching for a reason this happened twice. Ideally, one I could teach trust-fund alcoholics for slave wages. Two motives make sense to me:

If more franchises pull this, we’ll have the best trend since separating wells and toilets. Forget loving, fatherly Kratos. It’s time for omnicidal Barbie. The next Cake Boss should purge the competition and become Cake God.

Boy, isn’t a quick brand parody easy? It’s a good thing I don’t have to blow that out to sixty thousand words. Unrelatedly, here’s Vegemorphs.

That’s the opening. Where fiction often peaks. The reality of hooking agents, editors, bookstore browsers, bookish Hinge users, and BookTok warlords makes openings critical. They’re usually the most approachable/carefully rewritten/least offensive part. Unless you alphabetize short stories like an idiot.

Leif starts with “the fungus among us,” and slaps that bad boy on the cover.

It’s a parody of Animorphs’ “hide this letter, or Earth becomes a Jamaica-tier vacation colony” format, and I’m game for that. I believe great jokes about vegan insurgencies exist. But they’re not here. This is Leif’s big pitch for your book fair tickets, and the shtick’s already collapsing like an island that trusted the IMF.

Here’s the trick. The parody above isn’t as awful as it gets. Rupert Murdoch tries a fundamentalist Daily Show every few years. But it is complete. There’s nothing left. Your brain has already filled in “broccoli instead of seagulls, puns instead of ideas, and flavored vodka instead of acclaim. Got it. Back to watching bug fights.”

But the contract’s signed, the money’s gone, and editorial knows where Leif sleeps. Only fifty thousand words of plagiarism can keep his fingernails attached. And thanks to preteen impulse control, I own all of them.

These intros reach for laughter and grab air. It’s just names and genders, like orientation at Jesus camp. I don’t know why you’d write an entire novel as teenage Mike Pence, unless you were me as soon as I finish this article. Leif’s on page two of chapter one, and the comic overlap between “vegetables” and “child guerilla warfare” is nearly tapped.

Ah, young love. Kyle’s cousin is nearly tied with his lab-grown love interest. If Randi had better hats, or Olivia never skimmed a Steel Panther music video, we’d be reading a very different book. And better. Animorphs-meets-fiber-meets-incest-cravings is just enough hyphens to feel fresh.

Many of you are dorks in my age bracket, but with memories untouched by six years of Jersey tap water. Quick question: is this a sloppy parody of women in Animorphs? Or an original failure? I have different punchlines for each scenario:

Dealer’s choice. I lean towards the second, but Animorphs’ K.A. Applegate embraced the money in shipping. Fictional love lives offer a comforting fantasy, like recycling. So she included the romance between a tomboy and a bird. Either way, both series should have men joining the aliens because dating coaches said it would fill the void.

With the team together, Leif ramps up the vegetable content.

I’ll never forgive Bezos for ruining dick-shaped spaceships. I could’ve given this book a point. But Jeff stole a color from the rainbow and replaced it with divorce. Spaceballs didn’t deserve that, and neither did Vegemorphs.

Anyway, a giant piece of bipedal broccoli hops out to recruit the first diverse underdogs he can find. Leif is booking to wrap this plot up in time to pitch Disney.

Stereotypically, both young and fictional people are better at taking things in stride. This leaps past sanity. No drama club takes enough drugs to peacefully mumble through first contact. These children would worship, murder, and devour this creature, in that order. Followed by the Pentagon doing the same to them.

“You’ve eaten my sons for years” is the best potential joke in this mercury-filled comedy tomb, and Leif throws it away. If the Vegetable Reconquista began here, I’d give this book a C- and go back to writing Ryu Hayabusa love poems. Leif could even keep the puns going and call it Green Dawn.

In case you mostly played outside, this is more Animorphs plot riffing. Leading to the trap hiding in every parody: it’s easy to end up with a bad remake instead. Jerkks only add a pun and disgusted spellcheck to the Yeerk concept. If Leif had anything to say about them, he left it behind in HilariousCornBookOutline.docx.

And Leif’s starting to break. Instead of hackilly spoofing scenes, he’s summarizing them. This is great news if you’re me, and rooting against the word count for your health. But if you were enjoying Vegemorphs, the pacing dies going forward. Which is fine, since you’ve already found inner peace. You can enjoy anything. I could play Guantanamo Bay security footage at half speed, and you’d compliment the cinematography.

I’m convinced therapy jokes died six minutes after the first patient. Clowns must have raced to write the best Frank Mesmer joke. Which was “Men will literally escape Elba and refight World War 0.5 instead of going to therapy.”

Failed Terry Pratchett clones have a specific wavelength of non-humor. As a semi-successful clone, I know it well. A character meets a dragon, rolls their eyes, and says “Fire lizards? Really?” Then that joke trickles down to Steam games, Critical Role knockoffs, and cosplayer pick-up lines.

One might argue it’s more realistic. No. If Frost Giants showed up tomorrow, I’d have a Lovecraft fear-stroke before any one-liners. And one-liners are my job, hobby, and disorder. The panic orgies canceled in 2000 and 2012 would spill out into the streets.

What’s your tragic flaw? Mine’s pride. Because of it, I would rather get alien herpes than onion lycanthropy. I don’t care if it’s a high-larious super onion with Hulk hands and seeds that retroactively cure cancer. I’d walk into an Alabama gun show looking, sounding, and acting like myself.

I have to give Leif a tiny, rusted trophy. He taps that emotion successfully, just once.

Writer bushido demands I include this exchange. It’s the funniest thing in the book. Immediately reversed in the next line, but I give it a B. Ironically turning into an onion is like streaking through the Pentagon. No punchline can make the rest of your life less painful.

Normally, explaining a joke strangles it. This one died in committee, so we don’t have to worry about that. Vegemorphs’ basic hook is “Animorphs are the 23rd dumbest money printer in publishing. They’re an entire team of the shittier Wonder Twin. The coolest possible Animorph is just a depressed Beast Boy.” All of those words are true. But your parody has to show that, instead of your impossible depth of fungus wordplay.

In my wild youth, I’d have taken an Everclear Bomb for every pun. Now I simply come to the book toasted.

Anyway, aliens have a different sense of scale. “Jerkk” means “genocidal star tyrant.” Galactus is a “meanie,” Baron Harkonnen is a “bit off,” and Dick Cheney is a “war suspect.” Fun Gus’s first victim is our exposition machine:

Given the audience, this became someone’s lifelong recurring nightmare. “Broccoli snuff” wasn’t the read I got from the cover, but it’s not a terrible direction. Especially since Leif has just enough of his mind left to separate violent death and puns. For now.

Our heroes leave their mentor for dead, and flee back to the warm womb of suburbia. Then Cary warps his flesh into a plant-human chimera. That’s not the biggest change.

Cary’s all in: he fucks plants now. Fair enough. Let’s leave “burn the deviant” jokes behind with SomethingAwful and my Baptist relatives. What’s unnerving is alien magic reshaping your kinks. Pray that DARPA never cracks that one. We’d all wake up with a fetish for incumbent senators.

In case you don’t read failure for a living, and aren’t keyed into Clozapine worldbuilding: vegetable hybrids have arms, legs, and plant telepathy. Like werewolves, without the intrigue. They also have a pure vegetable form, in case they need to hide from hungry Americans. For example:

Leif must be out of puns. Nothing else makes sense. He can’t turn more of our universe’s finite energy into linguistic whiskey dick. Real aliens are dying for this.

Half-assed puns are comedy’s second most prideful sin, behind hosting Real Time. They imply your brain’s runtime errors—things that almost sound alike—deserve celebration. I’m not calling Leif dumb. He didn’t even try. His dumb thoughts probably involve redefining incest to leave out first cousins.

I’m convinced ancient emperors invented puns. Minds pickled by wine and bread mold, keenly aware that we could either laugh or face this week’s new torture device. Today, puns are the device.

Something inside me just cracked. I can see the same world as Eren, Jake, and Punished Bear. Puns can only be stopped with blood.

Should books for kids feel this wooden? You can do anything–your audience literally doesn’t know rules exist. Dr. Seuss forced generations of teachers to explain that saying “gluppity-glup” makes strangers attempt the Heimlich maneuver. Yet Leif remains religiously dedicated to cliches.

Except the one where action-adventure leads are cool.

There’s a whole subplot about the hero being a worm no one respects. He resents everyone else’s joy, like a divorcee stuck with his finest horse. You know the formula: twenty chapters of whimpering self-pity, ending in two pages of self-actualization. The cure to morphing dysfunction is love or whatever:

The Avengers assemble, just in time to battle…Kyle’s brother. Mold Darkseid falls out of the book. Most of Vegemorphs is about hiding veggiepower from people that don’t give a shit. Leif gets that Animorphs had cloak-and-dagger subplots, but all he can remember from Bond films are quips and lust.

Thus, puns.

What has man accomplished to earn mercy? Art? A medium for puns. Technology? Transmission for apartheid profiteers’ puns. Faith? A lie that never stopped one pun from finding mortal eyes. Comedy? The sin that called the first pun to the first Garfield jokebook.

Death, like art and language, means nothing. The broccoli prince is still alive and dragging the story forward by the ankles:

We are so, achingly close. I like the setup (terror), I like the response (screaming), and I can ignore the exposition (mostly). Then “Beet it” teaches me the rage that made Cain strike Abel.

Anyway, Vegemorphs can blast keratin at people now. The produce aisle is sick of your shit, and fixing your macros by force.

Antifungal lightning. To us, it might look like Leif’s written himself into a corner. But maybe he loves his cage. He’s inventing powers I’ve never seen, despite spending my college fund on cape comics. Spore-killing beams could work in Swamp Thing, but DC editors are sworn to protect Alan Moore’s frown.

Armed with anti-suspense lasers, the Vegemorphs rush into nothing. I’m not dodging lines about Kyle’s hot cousin, his hair metal love interest, or whoever Tomato was. They barely exist, save as reminders that Vegemorphs has the same angst headcount as Animorphs. Tense non-action leads the gang back to Kyle’s house, where momentum goes to die. Body-snatching is afoot.

We’ve come kicking and screaming, micrometer by micrometer, back to direct parody. Animorphs churned out countless “I-know-that-you-know-that-I-might-know” scenes with the body snatchers. This scene points to that drama and says, “Dramatic irony? What a waste of valuable pun time.” And after all we’ve been through? I’m proud of Leif. He’s burned his target without eggplant wordplay. Earning his first invitation to the annual comedy orgy.

Okay.

The above blow to my wounded soul opens our final conflict. Our heroes finally crash alien bible study, armed with carcinogenic wordplay in each fist.

That’s right. If you have unjacked baby ankles or scarlet devil nails, Leif says you can choke. The vain yet squatless must be humbled. Joseph Heller hated war, Philip Roth hated Philip Roth, and Leif hates polyester.

At some point, we were parodying Animorphs. Then we were remaking it. Now we’re in the finale of a third, somehow shittier book. I don’t know where Leif is taking us, but I hope it involves sore-covered fashion victims covered in thick ropes of medication. That’s what my childhood imagination liked.

Beautiful. I think I finally get Vegemorphs. If I invent a false memory of Animorphs, it appears in this book. Remember when the placebo meds in Animorphs became giant, masquerade-shattering kaiju? And let a child die?

This bit’s ahead of its time. For fifteen years, every blockbuster has ended in both sides sprinting across an open field. It’s the long-term influence of Return of the King and Dodgeball. Leif saw hints of the world to come, and made damn sure to invest in future cliches.

Why aren’t I mocking Cary’s hentai death? Because nothing dies in Vegemorphs but my inner light. Cary returns in half a Liz Truss:

It’s the last scene of the last chapter, and Leif’s still pretending Tommy was in this book. He wasn’t. Trust me, I’d remember anyone with a pun-free scrap of dialogue. Whatever tomato-focused spinoff lurks in editorial has to start from scratch.

This isn’t strange. You’re strange. On Veggie-Earth, the bond between child soldier and royalty is sacred. Abduction is a meat-world problem.

I’d love to meet Leif. He’s got a sense of scale where meatheads and spendthrifts deserve to lose their children. Imagine the fate of murderers or landlords in the Vegeverse. It’d take a while to convince him I’m not a cop, but the conversation could fill this column for a year.

Perfect setup for a sequel. There’s no sequel.

A lot of these columns are about talent vacuums, including this one. But I have sympathy for ending up here. Leif summoned a publishing djinn and offered it “Animorphs but Animorphs.” Then the trickster demon accepted, just to watch him writhe. Something survives after writing this many puns, but it’s not human. Therefore:

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