 there's also an entire segment of one book where david is just his pants while he walks through the woods but let's not talk about that one this is the introduction song it's not very good but it's not too long all right so uh everworld now this series was written by k a applegate the same woman who wrote animorphs and it also came out around the same time as animorphs and it's not talked about all that much like around uh oh wow it's been almost six months now but uh yeah around six months ago i released my animorphs was weird video and in that one i was kind of just making fun of how yeah animorphs gets really odd and kind of stupid at points and i didn't really talk about how it is a good series and it does get really dark considering it's aimed at kids um and in the comments of that as well as in my own head i was thinking you know talking about everworld would also be kind of fun because in a lot of ways i feel that it's kind of animorphs older brother you know it's uh animorphs was no picnic to begin with mind you it gets really dark it talks about war crimes and there's horrendous violence in there and ptsd it's it's really dark and then everworld is darker it gets it gets so much worse at a few points it's like it's not exploitative don't get me wrong it's just whoa that considering this is aimed at basically teens whereas animorphs is aimed at kids they could get away with even more and animorphs got away with a lot to begin with so anyways there's a lot of similarities between the two of them beyond that though like just in terms of the way they're written obviously because they're written by the same person and the plot structure and i couldn't really think of a good way to tackle this series like everworld what went wrong or anything like that so i think with this one i'm just gonna try and do a discussion of the series as a whole uh i've recently reread a couple of them and not the whole thing admittedly but i remember it pretty well and i'm just going to talk about like the general idea what what it does right and what it does horribly wrong and maybe try and figure out why it's not really remembered and talked about the same way animorphs is so the premise of everworld is really fascinating to me uh because it's basically that idea of bringing all the different mythologies together into one world um what it is is that all the various mythologies and gods so like the norse gods egyptian greek keltsic deities all them uh they were originally on earth they actually lived here but then they fled for whatever reason and created a whole new world a whole new dimension which they call everworld and uh they also took along with them a bunch of their human worshipers and magical creatures like fairies and satyrs and mermaids and all that sort of thing and one day uh four teenagers who are all connected to a fifth teenager named senna they all just get dragged into everworld at some point and they don't know what's going on but now they're stuck there and well they're sort of half stuck there because when they're awake in everworld they exist in everworld but when they go to sleep they their minds sort of wake up in the real world because their bodies are still there going around live in life normally and every time they you know go to sleep and wake up in the new bodies it uh they get all the memories from everworld so they it's basically there's basically two of them one existing in each world and they both know exactly what's going on it's a little confusing but after the first book it's it's pretty easy to follow so when they're there for a little while they learn that their friend senna or friend senna i'll get more into that in a little bit but uh it turns out that senna is a witch and she was actually pulled in to everworld on purpose by Loki you know the Norse god of mischief and destruction and all that and and he brought her in specifically because he wants to leave everworld and at first you don't know what it is but you know something dangerous is coming and later on you find out there is this being called ka honor and they refer to him as the eater of gods and i believe that it's mentioned the gods actually originally fled earth because they felt ka honor was coming and well the name is pretty self-explanatory you know he is this powerful being who i don't know if they can actually are able to kill him or not but they are mostly just afraid of him because he comes in and he eats gods it's uh actually kind of horrifying we only see him do it once but it is really horrifying and it makes sense why they would want to just get away from him and so Loki brought senna in because her witch powers allow her to move things between everworld and our world or the old world as they call it and he just wants to escape along with all the other gods that feel like coming with him but the main characters don't care about that all all that much at least not at first because they're mostly just concerned with finding senna and finding a way to escape from everworld so the majority of the series is just them tracking down senna and trying to find a way to escape or trying to escape from other trouble uh or re-tracking down senna because senna kind of escapes from the multiple times because like i mentioned before she's not really their friend so the plot here is kind of structured similar to animorphs where most every book is more or less episodic but they all tie into one overarching plot line and unlike animorphs this one doesn't really have as much filler in the middle because as much as i like animorphs it's a long series and there's at least 10 books in there that really didn't need to be there because they don't advance the main story at all but everworld every book does have its own adventure don't get me wrong but the kids do make some progress in their quest and everyone and uh well the the main characters are another area where this is kind of similar to animorphs but man it gets so much darker because like i said they're older characters because this one's aimed at teens like animorphs i believe the characters in that were like 14 i actually don't remember but in this one they're closer to like 16 or 17 and so they actually do make references to sex they make some kind of off-color jokes about race and uh sexuality and stuff like that and they're old enough to have more world experience so they have their own problems like the first one the main the closest thing to a main character the series has is uh david and david is connected to senna because he is her current boyfriend which also allows her to manipulate him a lot easier not just emotionally but with her magic because that's one of the things she can do is she can get people to i'm not sure what the word for that would be but she can get people to do whatever she wants magically it's kind of awful but well again we'll talk about that a little bit uh but anyways david at first seems kind of like a standard hero dude you know he wants to help his friends he wants to help everybody that's nearby he's kind of obsessed with doing the right thing but to him the right thing is usually just being practical uh in fact when the group has disagreements david is usually like hey i want to do i want to save people too but we can't so we're just gonna have to cut and run like that sort of thing but despite that he is still really obsessed with being a hero and for the longest time it seems like that's kind of all there is to him but as the books go on you learn oh he was molested as a kid and so that's why he's obsessed with trying to save people because no one saved him and he didn't save himself so huh all all right then that's that's that's not something they would have gotten away with in anamorph's i should mention that this is also written like anamorph's in that uh every character or every book is told from a different character's first person perspective and each character gets at least one like senna gets one uh i think david gets three and all the other characters get two so we get into each of these characters heads is what i'm saying and we get to know them all really well same as anamorph's the next uh major character is christopher and he at first just seems like a jokester clown dude but after a little while you realize oh okay he's he's like this because he's really lonely and when he makes like off-color jokes about someone's race or sexuality or something it's because he's trying to keep some distance between them and he's also senna's ex-boyfriend which is how he's connected to her so he also is more under her influence than uh most people are but not quite as much as david uh but you know she does still cast spells on him and stuff later on and basically he is like i said lonely and kind of purposeless and he is afraid that he's gonna turn into an alcoholic like his parents so his humor is just a way of trying to deal with a really shitty lot in life that he feels he's been drawn and just like david he can get really cold and callous at times so you know he's not necessarily a super likable character but you understand 100% why he does what he does and you understand where he's coming from even when he's being kind of a dick and then the third guy is jaleel who is the only black guy in this group and he has a OCD obsessive compulsive disorder like he has to constantly clean himself uh at least in the real world and ever world his disorder is gone which is why he kind of likes being there but he's connected to senna because in the real world at one point she can use her magic powers to make his disorder go away and clear his mind and it was great but then she demanded that he be her servant basically if he wanted to keep it and he told her to fuck off so that's how he knows her and he is the smart one you know again this seems kind of a lot of these characters seem like archetypes you know that you have uh the stoic or maybe not stoic but you have the hero dude who always wants to do the right thing you have the clown now you have the genius or the brain wherever you want to call him but just like the others jaleel is a lot deeper than that like he has more of a moral compass than them and since he's black he does have a different perspective on things like racism and stuff that they're in or that they experience in everworld and he just absolutely refuses to be controlled so even when they uh team up with gods and such in everworld to try and find senna or whatever he is always trying to make sure that they stay as far on the edge of any alliances or anything as they can so that they way they can just cut and run whenever and just like the others you always understand him you always understand what he's doing and there's april who is uh senna's sister or half sister rather because her father actually cheated on her mother and that's how senna was born but and april is probably the simplest one that's not to say she's bad but she's kind of just really nice and she's not stupid or anything she's good at mediating conflicts uh and she's a little full of herself but it never gets too bad like out of uh those four i would say uh she's the most likable or actually no scratch that i i would say juliel is the most likable but april never really does anything too awful to anyone or suggests doing anything too awful to anyone so i will give credit to her for that and you know her books are pretty good as well and then finally we get to senna who is probably the weakest of the main cast because she gets uh dragged to everworld halfway against her will and then while she's there she notices that her magic powers are just a lot stronger and so she decides she just wants to take over everworld and rule everything and that's kind of all there is to her character she's evil and power hungry she's willing to torture and murder people and that that's kind of it like even though we get one book from her perspective that book doesn't really go into any sort of detail about what sort of person she is beyond that i went on about the characters a little longer than i intended to i apologize but you know it's kind of like animorphs in that every character is unique and every character has their own moments to shine uh but unlike animorphs this one is a little bit less focused on like fighting and destroying the bad guys because that's not their goal for the most part their goal for the first couple books is find senna like the first book is literally called search for senna uh and once they find her it's like okay we gotta find a way to make her bring us back to our world and then they run into trouble along the way there and they wind up getting caught up in some wars between gods and ka honor is coming him and his uh het wan allies het wan are like there's a couple of races that they refer to as aliens because they didn't come from our world they're not part of any of earth's mythologies they came from some other world and ka honor is one of them but because they're mostly focused on surviving they aren't really badass warriors or anything they're they mostly use their wit to get out of situations uh one example being how they managed to get this pocket knife made of this substance called coup hatch steel and basically it's just super magical steel like it'll cut through anything and it will never dull it will never rust anything like that but it is just a pocket knife it's basically like this or hell maybe even smaller than this which even if they can cut through anything it's not going to be that useful in a fight but they managed to use it to do stuff like cut down trees and escape from dungeons and stuff like that so that they use their wit is what i'm saying uh they also at one point i wouldn't say they invent electricity but they give electricity to the societies there and so people start uh embracing it and using it to create telegraphs and stuff and in fact they actually go to atlantis at one point and they meet another guy who's also from earth who has created a whole bunch of technology like that's how atlantis is such a technologically advanced place it's because it's led by a human from our world and the way he got there was there was a nuclear explosion and i don't know why k a apple gate loves the trope of a powerful explosion sending people back in time and or to another dimension but she does love that trope but as i said they're going through all these episodic adventures and the main plot is advancing uh the big one being caught on or like i said uh like at one point uh they become friends with a god named ganymede who is a greek one he's a one of zeus's lovers i'm sorry my hair keeps getting in my eyes i'm really not used to having it at this length it's really ridiculous and obnoxious but uh anyway yeah they see ganymede get eaten by ka honor and that's actually one of the moments where christopher really changes really changes his tune because at first he is you know like i said just the clown he's kind of an asshole but after that he really changes because he was friends with ganymede and he had to hear him get eaten alive so after that he's like you know what let's i'm gonna chill a little bit and also while this is happening senna keeps a sort of astral projecting herself back to the real world and she does that she's able to found a cult uh and she's and so in the second to last book she brings a militia cult of neo nazis into the world with modern weaponry and she uses them to try and take over and um well i know this series isn't quite as weird as as uh animorphs but there are moments like that that happen there's also an entire segment of one book where david is just shitting his pants while he walks through the woods but let's not talk about that one so then we get to the last two books where like i said senna brings in her army and starts taking shit over and the characters realize okay we have to stop this and so they kill senna at the end of the second to last book they kill her and they run off and so like her army is still there but now they're leaderless and because they killed her in the last book they um they're no longer in both worlds anymore because senna was sort of the thing that was keeping them connected to both um they're still their minds are still going back and forth a little bit but when they're in the real world parts of their bodies are like fading away you know like their hands will fade away while they're looking at them and they realize oh we're being pulled into everworld completely so if we're gonna escape we need to escape now but then they realize yeah we we aren't going to be able to we we can't escape we're just we're stuck here we're gonna have to do that and some of the characters are fine with that like i said julio no longer has ocd while he's there uh david really sees an opportunity to make a difference in everworld that he didn't feel he had in the real world you know he wants to be a hero and he doesn't feel like he can and christopher well one he has a girlfriend in everworld now and two he just feels like uh the old world had nothing to offer for him you know he was just gonna turn into an alcoholic and so okay i can understand why they'd stay and april kind of just doesn't really have a choice and also she doesn't want to face her parents since she's the one that actually killed senna so you know it works out pretty great um and so they decide okay we're gonna unite everworld uh before the cenites and kaon or can join forces because they probably will we're gonna have to destroy one of them and then go for the other so they go down to the underworld rescue thorn balder who were in prison there and then bring them back and they're deciding yeah we're gonna get we're gonna bring all the gods together we're gonna defeat the cenites we're gonna defeat kaon or and then everything's gonna be great and i remember the first time i read the last book i kept reading it thinking wow they're really gonna wrap this whole thing up in a hundred pages wow they're really gonna wrap this whole thing up in 30 pages wow are they really gonna wrap this up in 10 pages and then it just ends like it doesn't have a bad ending it has no ending like the the last page is just a newspaper clipping from uh chicago where the main characters are from and it just describes how all the kids went missing and it might be connected to senna because senna also went missing at the beginning of the series and man okay i know the reason why the author did it this way the author ka applegate was writing everworld and anamorphs and remnants all at the same time and even though she was utilizing ghost writers she was still having to outline this these uh pretty pretty in depth she was making very in-depth outlines and well even with ghost writers that's a lot of work and she was also doing like spin-off books like the megamorphs and she was releasing sometimes multiple books in one month and even though they're not that long it that's a lot of work i get it she was overwhelmed and so she's like okay we need to end everworld early but this is this isn't even a crappy ending this is no ending like had you just put it on hiatus for like six months or something and then come back with at least one more book you needed at least one more book because you can't just end with okay we're gathering up an army to fight the bad guys and then that's over like that's just that's no ending i know i keep saying that but that's not a bad ending that's no ending see anamorphs also has a pretty controversial ending i should say and i don't like it personally like i've read ka applegate's defense of it and i see what she was going for don't get me wrong i understand the message she was trying to send but i just feel like she prioritized sending a message over writing a good story you know what i mean so it just feels like really that's it that that's how you're gonna end it all right that's disappointing but it's not the end of the world whereas everworld like we didn't even get an ending you know it wasn't it wasn't even i guess you could maybe make an argument that it's ambiguous but but it just feels like there's nothing there to me that's really upsetting because ka honor was kind of a cool villain we didn't actually get to hear him talk or anything we just saw him at a distance as he was eating gany meat alive but it was kind of cool the fact that literal gods are afraid of him and they they're very hard to kill like they're not impossible to kill like a god can a god can kill another god and artifacts of a god can kill another god like in in uh the first or second book they try and kill uh the aztec god who it's a who it's a unpronounceable uh they go with a bunch of vikings i mean the main characters and they have mewnir thors hammer and they're able to use that to actually not kill him but they're able to sever his arm and he can't heal it he's permanently maimed after that and so like you know gods can die they're not totally immortal there is most of the immortal but the fact that they're afraid of this dude makes him really scary and powerful and really cool but we get very little of him and then we get very little of the cenites even though senna is gone they were still a threat and we don't get to see that main characters arcs wrap up so this is immensely unsatisfying okay this is one of the worst endings to anything that i've ever come across like if we're just talking books this would be up there with uh the two endings of fallen like because there's kind of two there was the ending of rapture which was the core series and then there was the ending of unforgiven which was the spin-off which is kind of sort of a sequel to the main series those are both awful don't get me wrong everworld's ending would be up there with them and if you were to go outside of books there's plenty of like tv shows and stuff that have had just god awful endings that i would compare this to or even say this is worse than because this just misses this doesn't miss the point this is this misses every point that you can possibly miss and i genuinely think that this is why everworld is not really remembered um all that much nowadays even though animorph still is because like i said written by the same person they came out around the same time and uh a granted part of it is probably that everworld was aimed at an older audience like animorphs was aimed at kids so you had kids reading it and teens and adults can kind of read it and still enjoy it nowadays whereas everworld kids were kind of left out of that one in fact i didn't read this until i was like uh 13 i think was when i first read the books and man i i don't even know where else to go with this like the characters are gathering up an army making alliances to defeat the bad guy and then it's over like we don't get to see them fight him or anything we don't even get like a flash forward to an epilogue to five years later where everything is fine now like it's not great but everything there aren't there isn't an existential threat to the world anymore and so um yeah i don't have a whole lot else to say you know everworld is a really solid series in almost every way there's a couple of little issues i have with it uh here and there like i said david spends the better part of an entire book shitting his pants at one point seriously why why would you why i don't get it um and a few of the bits with the gods while they were trying to show off how evil they are just felt kind of edgy rather than dark uh not all of them but a few and like i said that ending just really takes away from most of the enjoyment i feel when i remember this series because imagine if wheel of time ended without showing the last battle like you would feel like everything up until that point was kind of a rip off so um yeah i don't have a whole lot else to say about everworld it was really good series for the longest time that i read as a kid and even though it's similar to animorphs in a lot of ways i just don't think about it all that much and i think that's a damn shame and i think the window for actually making a proper ending has passed by now like the last book came out almost 20 years ago i don't think that k a apple gate really feels like crapping out one last book so that she can just say look it's finished i don't think she feels like doing that and yeah it's just a crying shame i don't have any real thesis beyond that thanks to everyone for watching my long-winded ramble of a book series that ended 19 years ago thanks especially to all my patrons and my ten-dollar enough guys oppo savalainen alex humba ashley watson avatumor b quinn brother san totes christopher quinton elizy violets emily miller evan stagall joel johnny st claire madison lewis benet ronnie tobacco crow tom beanie tofer wheeler vacuous silas and vaivictus all of you are the best i would not be able to do this without you and also everyone who watched this far you're amazing please like the video comment on it and subscribe if you haven't already uh all that stuff i'm supposed to say at the end here you know how it goes anyways uh bye