Culture

Thanks To ‘Animorphs’, Nothing Terrifies (And Fascinates) Me More Than Parasites In My Body

Can you believe they put Yeerks in a book for children?

by Katherine Doherty  29 October 2020
Animorphs parasites

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

For many years, I couldn’t sleep without drawing my doona most of the way over my head. It was a version of the compulsion people have to keep their feet under the covers, safe from the monsters lurking in the dark. In my case, though, I needed the protective powers of the blanket over my ears. It was, I was pretty sure, the only thing keeping parasitic slugs from slithering into my skull and taking over my body.

Obviously, I had been reading Animorphs.

Animorphs is a beloved series of children’s sci-fi books (and a less-beloved TV show) from the late 90s, perhaps most famous today for the cover images, which featured extremely dodgy images of a variety of young adults transforming gradually into animals.

Related
Twenty Years Later, The Animorphs TV Show Deserves A Reboot

Rather than the fun story about kids turning into animals that I expected,  Animorphs is a shockingly dark series about the horrors of war. There was plenty in those pages to scare the young audience — in their battle to save humanity from an alien invasion, the Animorphs commit some fairly horrific acts, waging battles with significant innocent casualties.

There is plenty of body horror in the graphic transformations they undergo too. One member of the team, Cassie, at one point transforms into a caterpillar with the intention of becoming trapped in that morph. Her sense of fear and helplessness, in submitting to the only option aside from “violence and brute force,” was pretty upsetting.

However, what really got to me was the main villains, the Yeerks. These slug-like parasites entered their hosts through the ear canal and ‘melted’ into the wrinkles of the brain, taking over everything that the person had been — controlling their body and imprisoning their mind. The infected people (called “Controllers”) appeared to continue living their lives, but everything they did was under the control of the Yeerk they hosted.

They scared the absolute living shit out of me.

The titular Animorphs used their powers to wage guerrilla (and sometimes gorilla) war resisting the Yeerk invasion, but it wasn’t the violence and conflict that spooked me. There’s plenty of stories about alien invasions, monstrous creatures, and power-hungry villains in other children’s literature, but parasites — starting with Animorphs, and then in other media such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps — kept me up at night.

The fear did not stem from the idea that others were not as they seemed — I did not think that my sister, sleeping soundly across the room, was a Controller, that my parents had been replaced with aliens. Instead, it seemed to be rooted less in the specifics of the story, and more a general fear of what parasitism represents. After all, most parasites in real life don’t take over the identity of the host, and yet my fear expanded to also incorporate non-fictional pests.

There are an admittedly disturbing handful of real-world parasites which are sometimes accused of ‘mind control’, most famously Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by cats which is thought to have infected around 30% of all humans. Studies have shown that rats infected with the parasite are less cautious, and perhaps even attracted to the scent of cat urine, increasing the chances that they will be caught and eaten by cats — an alteration in behaviour which assists the parasite in completing its lifecycle. T. gondii’s impact in humans is less extreme, of course, but there is evidence that it can cause changes in behaviour, including aggressive outbursts.

Most parasites, however, are fairly subtle in their impacts — they are simply predators, as E. O. Wilson put it, that “eat prey in units of less than one.” After all, prey which is not destroyed in the act of predation can support the predatory organism for much longer than if it died immediately. Leeches, intestinal worms, mosquitoes, fleas, mites — the parasites most of us encounter frequently may cause us discomfort or impact our wellbeing to an extent, but unless we are unlucky enough to contract a disease from them, they will not kill us.

Even more common are species such as Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis, often referred to as ‘eyelash mites.’ These microscopic creatures are not technically parasites, since they don’t generally cause even minor harm, however, people don’t necessarily appreciate the distinction. In my experience, when you inform unsuspecting people of the presence of mites inside their facial hair follicles (generally 2-6 mites per follicle, though sometimes many more!), they tend to be more revolted at the idea of the mites’ presence than relieved by how rarely it causes mange and other skin conditions.

The nightmares I experienced were rooted in a fear of the corruption of my ‘human-ness,’ the violation of what I understood as the boundary between ‘myself’ and the ‘other.’ The concept of the ‘self’ is often reliant on the existence of one unified being, and the nature/culture dichotomy means that we are used to seeing ourselves as fundamentally different and separated from the world around us.

The idea of non-human beings feeding upon and living on or inside human beings is something viscerally horrifying, no matter the level of harm done — the effects of this are seen in everything from $30 ‘leech socks’ to protect hikers’ ankles from a harmless nip, to the extinction of the Thylacine and elimination of other large predators from agricultural areas across the world, hunted for the threat they supposedly pose to human life and property.

The philosopher Val Plumwood was famously attacked by a crocodile in the mid-1990s, an experience that “forced [her] to rethink a lot of things — life, death, being human, and being food.” She wrote extensively on how the moment of the attack helped her understand that humans “don’t understand ourselves as ecological beings that are part of the food chain,” that we cannot reconcile the ideas of being both food and “more-than-food” (something which also plays out in the ways we mistreat the animals we do conceive of as ‘just food’). Whether it is the nightmarish, mind-controlling Yeerks, or simply mites that live in our eyebrows and eat the oily stuff secreted from our skin, the idea that we could be instrumentalised as food and habitat goes against the ways we are taught to think of ourselves as human.

“You” and “I” like to think of ourselves as individual organisms, existing only to where our skin ends, and with all other organisms existing beyond that. We hold a belief that we can interact with beings beyond ourselves, but remain at a basic level separate and different from them — individuals that can be separated from environment and society.

This has never been true.

We are less individuals than we are walking ecosystems, by number of cells more microbe than human. We play host to a wide variety of organisms, generally only noticing when this becomes a problem. This fear of the body’s permeability came back to me in full-force in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic — there is nothing like a plague to remind one that with every interaction, all manner of microorganisms and biological matter are entering and leaving our bodies. The idea that we are open and in constant exchange with the world around us, rather than a self-contained and self-reliant subject, is viscerally disturbing to our understanding of how the world is supposed to be.

In one of the novels, a Yeerk-infected family member invites lead character Jake to a meeting of The Sharing — a Scouts-like organisation acting as a front for the alien invasion, recruiting young people to become hosts (willing or otherwise) for the parasites.

“You could be a part of something … bigger,” he tells Jake, who responds: “But I don’t want to be a part. I guess I’d rather just be one person.”

Reading these books as a younger person, the implications of that offer were scary. While being a ‘part of something bigger’ is usually presented as a positive idea, it is usually with the understanding that those parts remain as autonomous beings. In this context, to be a part was to lose one’s autonomy, one’s position as ‘just one person.’  The idea of no longer being myself, but instead being subsumed into ‘something bigger’ over which I had no control and in which I would not be recognisable as an individual ‘I’ — it terrified me, because engaging with the idea that the reality of being ‘just one person’ includes being both made up of countless non-human organisms and forming an insignificant piece of the wider planetary system  is disturbing to a worldview that most of us were brought up in.

Understanding of ourselves as both organism and ecosystem, rather than the starkly, inaccurately separate category of ‘human,’ is difficult, it lends itself to a more sustainable relationship with the planet than how we currently live. The aggrandisement of the ‘human’ is used to justify taking from the world without giving in return, consumption without sacrifice. This sense of separation allows us to destroy ecosystems without recognising that we will eventually destroy ourselves. We feel that we are in some way made un-human by the presence of other life on and within us and are horrified by this.

In Animorphs, of course, the Controllers are — they have lost all autonomy, all control over their own bodies and lives. But this is not the reality of being infected, infested, parasitised. Today, I know that keeping my doona over my ears won’t protect me from other lifeforms making a home within my body — they are already there, and always have been.

But I also know that they are not making me ‘less’ human, but instead are part of what it means to live as a being in this world. Things will always live in, on and of us, and this is far less something to be afraid of than is  the idea of living as alienated individuals isolated from the more-than-human world around us.

Katherine Doherty is a writer and Environments student working on Wurundjeri country. She tweets @kteadoherty.