#LL mogadorians

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i'll be over here like vatborn have ✨️ ZOOMIES 😍 ✨️ and then the zoomies will be to Bite Murder Kill civilians

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

FSJDJDJSMSJDJFJ I KNEW PARTS OF A FEW OF THESE THINGS BUT OTHER STUFF I HAD NO IDEA ABOUT HOLY SHIT. THIS IS INCREDIBLE THANK YOU I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE FUNNIEST PART IS HERE

also,

oh my fucking GOD. i had never noticed that beyond some of the overarching antisemitic tropes like the Global Alien Diaspora Conspiracy thing--i'd always read adam's novellas as a really ham-handed metaphor for Queerphobic Right-Wing Evangelical Community--but now that you point it out i am starting to See It and WOW THAT MAKES SO MANY THINGS SO VERY VERY MUCH WORSE

mr. frey's wild ride never ends i am obsessed. i am Obsessed

Cannot stress enough how much of just. An asshole character James Frey is as a person it's incomprehensible how he exists as an entity

- He originally had a writing partner for Lorien Legacies who he shared the pen name "pittacus lore" with until two books in, when he pulled the rug out from under Jobie Hughes copyright wise and did it so thoroughly that Hughes can't even discuss the books on social media anymore

- All of his books come out of this intern ghost writer factory called "Factor Five" and there's no official record of who wrote what and who authored what side story and who edited which thing and I don't think they know. I think everything just gets passed around in giant paper stacks

- He's a racist idiot who doesn't know any of the four countries along the Himalayas exist. Especially not Nepal

- He blocked people on twitter for discussing ships back in the day which is hysterical

- HOW COULD I ALMOST FORGET THE MOST BONKERS THING. He wrote an autobiography called "A Million Little Pieces" about his battle with addiction and impulse control and his health...that was entirely made up. None of it is true NOT A SINGLE WORD. THIS BOOK MADE IT ONTO OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB. HE LIED TO OPRAH'S FACE!! I forget why he admitted it but subsequent printing have a label on the front marking it as fiction. Imagine bullshitting a sob story that hard

- He almost won a "Worst Erotica Award" in 2017 for his book "Katerina." There is a character that's killed early on in LL named "Katarina." And yes I read parts of "Katerina" and YES it's the same character. You can unpack that I'm not doing it

- Did I mention this dude makes most of his money off of copyright schemes? Because he does. That's what his writing company is

I know there's stuff I'm forgetting and there's things in LL I don't wanna unpack I just need you guys to know that this man makes no sense

[jimmycarterghostland]

The thing I loved the most about the Lorien Legacies series: The entertainment it provided. No matter what, these books were never boring. Sure, it had a bunch of flaws, but I was addicted to the LL series. I definitely don't like them as much as I did before, and I criticize them a lot. But they were so unique, had great heartwarming moments, an alien war, etc.

The thing I hated the most: Six and Marina letting their Mogadorian enemy Phiri Dun-ra live. Twice in two different books! They even refused to torture her. I will never understand that one. She was a sadistic, evil Mog, too. It makes no sense for them to have so much sympathy for her, especially when Six is supposed to be a Mog-hating ruthless warrior. And Marina is supposed to be in angry mode. Them not killing Phiri even got Dust killed! There are a lot of out of character moments that ended up being in the later books, actually. Like Nine being okay with Adam, even though Nine despises Mogs more than any other character. That was weird.

My favorite character: Five. I'm still annoyed that he wasn't the blonde girl everyone believed Five would be before The Fall of Five came out. I was disappointed when I found out he was a guy, especially considering Adam's first novella mentioned a second blonde girl who wasn't One. Five was supposed to be a girl. He was an interesting, tough character, though. I loved him.

My favorite Lorien Legacies book: The Power of Six. It had the perfect balance of action and "quiet" scenes. Plus, Crayton was awesome in this novel(and still alive). Olivia the Chimera was a cool, Mogadorian-killing beast. And the fights in this book were so great. Especially John and Sam fighting in the Mogadorian mountain base, and the fight in Spain. Nine, Crayton, and Ella were great additions to this series. I think The Rise of Nine was objectively the best book in the series, though. I just prefer The Power of Six more.

My least favorite Lorien Legacies book: I Am Number Four. It's not as good as the books that came after it.

Why you should read the series: It uses the Found Family trope well. You can tell the characters love each other as if they were family. There are great, unique fights. The plot is unique as well.

Why you shouldn't read the series: Many plot holes, inconsistencies, out of character moments, and some plot twists that should have been foreshadowed earlier but didn't get foreshadowed early enough. Another issue is that all the characters sound the same in their introspection. As in, this is a multiple POV book series, and every character uses the same vocabulary and has the same personality in their inner monologues. You don't get a good feel of how the narrators view things, unlike the A Song of Ice and Fire series, which has characters with unique voices, narrators who are distinct from other narrators in the series, with their own personalities and vocabulary. Also, the plot twists in these books are so freaking obvious. Some of them aren't foreshadowed early enough, though, and actually don't make sense. Like Henri saying in his letter that there was a Number Ten, referring to Ella, but in later books, Ella is revealed to not be a Number at all. This irritated me. You can tell the authors added this plot twist in without realizing that would screw up the established facts in the series. That happens a lot in these LL books. Also, the prose is bland and there are no amazing dialogue lines or any non-dialogue lines in this series. Nothing that might make you go "Wow, that's deep."

My rating: Two out of five stars. The books are entertaining. Unfortunately, they don't age well. They're badly written. The numerous inconsistencies are irritating and make it impossible to predict plot twists, because so much gets retconned(like the brown-haired Five being a guy when all signs pointed to him being a blonde girl). There is no beauty or deepness found in the prose. All the different narrators sound alike. Like, if all the narrators' names were removed from the pages, you wouldn't be able to find out which character is narrating the chapter, because their mindsets and vocabulary are all the same. There is no distinct character voice. If you want to know what I mean by that, I'll give an example. Picture a novel with two different narrators. An old man and a five-year-old boy. A good writer would make the 5yo use simpler words in his narration. Like mentioning a building he's walking past as "big" instead of "huge". Or maybe he sees dogs mating and thinks they're wrestling, while the old man narrator would know the dogs are mating, and maybe he refers to the building as "huge" instead of big. Stuff like that is what I mean by distinct character voice. The Lorien Legacies series doesn't have that. All the narrators have the same lexicon in their prose. Same vocabulary. And they view the world in the same way the other narrators do, which is a problem when you're writing a multiple point of view novel. I don't recommend anyone reads the Lorien Legacies series.

[loricconfessions]

submitted by: anonymous

[13yearsoflorien]

July 30th prompt

If you were in the LL universe, would you be Loric, Mogadorian, half alien, a Human Garde, or human?

[aroace-number-eight]

@bisexual-coffee-addict

Yooo new fanfic prompt just dropped

Enemies to lovers "who did this to you?" about scars? Great, of course. However, I raise you this: "I did this to you."

[lonewolfshayu]

Two things in the Lorien Legacies series that disappointed me:

1 Marina and Six didn't torture or kill Phiri. Seriously WTF. This was the biggest out of character moment in the series. Why wouldn't they at least kill Phiri? She was a very evil Mogadorian and ended up getting Dust killed. All thanks to Six and Marina. Plus, Marina was all about blinding Five completely, but wouldn't kill a Mog? Or torture her? Extremely bad writing. Which is crazy, because outside the continuity errors, LL had decent writing. IMO.

2 No Nine POV or Five POV for the main books. We had Marina and Six POV every single book after The Power of Six(no Six for The Fall of Five IIRC). No Nine. And no Five. The series massively failed by not letting Nine and Five get a spotlight. I don't see what was so important about Marina and Six to have them have POVs for nearly each book. Really, WTF.

They should've had Nine replace Sam for The Fall of Five. He could've replaced Six for The Revenge of Seven. She could've been a main character seen from a different POV(same treatment Nine got in the books) Ella was a cool POV, but because of novelty. I would've loved to see her actually fight. They should've replaced all of Ella's POVs with Five POVs. She didn't do MUCH. She was definitely the weakest POV of the series. Or maybe Sam. IDK.

Simply put, Nine and Five should've had POVs in the main books. Especially Nine. His narration in his novella book was massively interesting.

They really should've killed Phiri. Really, what were the writers thinking? Out of all everything, this makes me the most mad with this series. They don't kill an obviously vicious Mog? "We don't torture." But it's okay for Marina to try taking out Five's last eye??? A Loric ally. But torturing, or at least killing, a literal Mogadorian enemy is crossing the line. Phiri wasn't even sympathetic. She was a pure evil Mog with no love for the Loric. The writers letting Six and Marina spare her life was so full of bad writing that I still think about it to this day.

[aroace-number-eight]

More lists for myself because I am a forgetful person and I need to keep things in one place

AUs that I should look over sometime

Sirina Rapunzel AU (made with adamussutekh)

Age swap AU

Legacy swap AU

Witch AU

Ethan raises Five AU

Better Cêpan Rey AU

Avatar: The Last Airbender AU (made with adamussutekh)

Genshin Impact AU

Genshin Impact crossover AU??

The Umbrella Academy AU

The Umbrella Academy crossover AU

Five switch LL x TUA AU

Raiding Area 51 AU

Adam saves Maggie AU

HGA Coffeeshop AU

Pokemon Trainer AU

Pokemon Gym Leaders AU

College AU (made with aliensaregay, goddamnalientourists, and adamussutekh)

Loric Pantheon Deity AU

Elder AU

Pittacus killed Setràkus AU

Eight goes to college AU (more into adamussutekh territory because they know more about how to write parts of it)

Nine and Five friendship AU

Marina runs a diner AU

Marina Five and Ella are burnt out creatives visiting the same coffeeshop AU

Einar troupe assassin AU

Pirate and Mermaid and Merchant AU

Seven Deadly Sins AU

Demons and Exorcists AU

Hospital AU

Poker Champion Eight AU???

Eight and Five Comedian AU

Actor AU

Siren Nive AU??

Circus AU

Villain Five AU

Theater AU

Dead Garde Ghosts AU

Demigod Garde AU (consult with michaelyew)

PJO meets HGA AU

Garde visit CHB by accident AU

Road trip AU??

Samix Disney's Atlantis AU

Dancer AU??

Fantasy AU??

Maid Cafe AU???

Eight Reincarnation AU

Eight Resurrection but he's very traumatized about it AU

Voltron AU

Voltron crossover where the paladins return to Earth and see the whole Mogadorian thing going on AU

Free! Iwatobi Swim Club AUu

Nive Boxing AU

Henri/Malcolm parent the Garde AU

Found in Florida AU

Mamma Mia AU

Pittacus/Celwe/Setràkus and Lorien isn't killed AU

Cohn Dragonborn AU

Cohn Vemon AU (consult gentles-and-ladymen)

Will update later

[wannabeloric]

Hello people in the internet! I would just like to share my Lorien Legacies Google Drive library with y’all who are interested to read this AMAZING series!😁 Ive labeled everything for you guys already so you may know the order of the books without the need to search for it🙂 I’ve included all of the LL book series Im aware of (if I lack something please inform me so I may add😁) including the main LL series, The Lost Files, The LL Reborn Series, and The Legacy Chronicles.

For those of you who dont know what goes on in the Lorien Legacies series, it is basically about a small group of teenagers who are gifted with cool powers called legacies. They come from the planet Lorien which unfortunately has been destroyed by another alien race called the Mogadorians. The Mogadorians wish to eliminate all the Loric that have been evacuated to Earth. The Loric have been in hiding for a decade now from the Mogs, training and developing their legacies until it is time to fight back. Eventually, the Mogs have caught up with the Loric who were in hiding, slaying them one by one in order. It was time for the Loric to unite and find each other in order to avenge the planet Lorien, and protect their new home: Earth.

Attached below is the shareable link to the LL library I created. Enjoy future and fellow Lorics!!😁💙

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jE98nNQOgV5ugN4KmTKOiQJtHkoFRT8E

#TheLegaciesLive

[officialpittacuslore]

LL AU where Good Hentai prevented the Mogadorians from killing the Lorics and the Humans

[wereewtrrrtr]

(Best Seller) The Fall of Five (Lorien Legacies, #4) \Book By Pittacus Lore\

(EPub/PDF) Read The Fall of Five (Lorien Legacies, #4) - Pittacus Lore

  Read/Download Visit :

https://lixe54.blogspot.com/?book=15861491-the-fall-of-five

Book Details :

Author : Pittacus Lore

Pages : 355 pages

Publisher : HarperTeen

Language : eng

ISBN-10 : 15861491-the-fall-of-five

ISBN-13 : 9780061974618

Book Synopsis :

Read Online and Download The Fall of Five (Lorien Legacies, #4) .Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found hereThe Garde are finally reunited, but do they have what it takes to win the war against the Mogadorians?John Smith?Number Four?thought that things would change once the Garde found each other. They would stop running. They would fight the Mogadorians. And they would win.But he was wrong. After facing off with the Mogadorian ruler and almost being annihilated, the Garde know they are drastically unprepared and hopelessly outgunned. Now they?re hiding out in Nine?s Chicago penthouse, trying to figure out their next move.The six of them are powerful, but they?re not strong enough yet to take on an entire army?even with the return of an old ally. To defeat their enemy, the Garde must master their Legacies and learn to work together as a team. More importantly, they?ll have to discover the truth about the Elders and their plan for the Loric survivors.And when the Garde receive a sign from Number Five?a crop circle in the shape of a Loric .

Pittacus Lore book The Fall of Five (Lorien Legacies, #4).

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i keep having Thoughts about how in so many ways LL has so much potential to be a really hard-hitting, messy, no-punches-pulled exploration of what i call moral agency: not the agency to act on your beliefs, but the agency to have those beliefs at all. like, if you're being abused into internalizing a set of beliefs, or indoctrinated in such a way as to make you resistant to outside perspective, or having relevant information withheld from you even if you would be looking for it... you don't have nearly as much choice in the matter of what you believe as someone who isn't stuck in that position.

and like. the central antagonists alone are literally a massive, horrifically abusive cult that spans generations. and i really wish they had actually followed through on that, and done so with compassion for victims who might need to be held accountable, instead of treating them with hatred and dehumanization.

(and also, y'know. hadn't treated some characters who did bad things as if they had much, MUCH more agency, moral or otherwise, than they did at literally any point. COUGH FIVE COUGH COUGH COUGH)

there's just. so so so much interesting stuff to be dug into there, in a way that's deeply fundamental to the narrative where even a lot of stories about moral agency aren't, and i really wish i could scrape enough brain cells together to talk about it properly

[knaveofmogadore]

First Second Meetings

I don’t think I’m ever going to get over these nerds! It’s been YEARS since I’ve put out adive content I think! This is a rework actually of one of my older fics since lost to time, adapted to the current state of canon. This is my, what? Third first meetings fic for Adamus and Five? Frey needs to let them argue already so I can stop writing these

Five kidnaps Adamus in the middle of his third night back at civilization, and that sets off the beginning of a beautiful friendship, with a side of drama, war, and Einar.

Adam sat down on the bed with a relieved sigh. Nearly two years in the arctic, a sudden evacuation of Alaska, a surprise pick up from his friend John Smith, a non stop sting of diplomatic meetings and legal and not so legal fights, and a stress fueled sparring smackdown with Nine all added to two years of terrible sleep and seventy two hours of virtually no sleep at all. His exhaustion was evident in the heavy way he moved, the effort it took to hold his head up. It did not, however, dull the feeling of sitting on an actual bed, in an actual house, in a room that was actually sort of his. Adam fell backward with a soft laugh and sprawled. His head almost hung over the edge against the wall and his feet were planted on the floor. Uncomfortable though the position was and odd though it felt to be on a clean mattress with intact sheets, it was the safest he had felt in years. With a Mogadorian warship and a peacekeeper army near enough to wage war in the Academy’s backyard, that was a bit sad. Ironic even.

Adam sat up when he heard Malcolm Goode appear in the doorway. He smiled in that fatherly way he had. His face screamed stressed, but it seemed to fade in the face of Adam being even marginally happier than he was when he got here. Even at this level of exhaustion Adam can't help but smile back. This place was new, the HGA not something he would ever agree with, but he still felt a little bit at home. Safe. Cared about for the first time in a long time.

“Settling in ok?”

Adam nodded, “It still feels weird, but I promise I'm fine.”

Malcolm nodded back, satisfied, and rested his hand on the doorknob.

“Sam and Six are just down the hall, and I'll be asleep downstairs in my office, probably,” Malcolm looked at Adam in a way that he hopes conveyed that that was an invitation for fellow insomniacs, “so you're not alone here. Try to get some sleep, ok?”

“Yeah, I don't think that sleep is going to be an issue. I feel like I haven't slept in years.”

That didn't help the stress and exhaustion ease from Malcolm at all. He clears his throat and moves to shut the door behind him, before he stops and snaps his fingers.

“Right! I know it's going to be hard, but try and get up early tomorrow. Lexa is coming over to review the security over breakfast and she wants your input.”

Adam nods, “I'll try my best to get up before noon.”

Tomorrow was a rest day for negotiations, a chance for everyone to take a step back and think over legalities, and a chance for the garde at the academy to strategize about other threats. They also hoped it would be a good chance for the mogadorians to not only rest, but curb the tempers that were beginning to run short.

Malcolm smiled one last time and shut the door.

****

Adam shifted under the thin blanket in his sleep. He squeezes the pillow provided in his arms, opting to sleep without one. The mattress was not the most comfortable, which helped Adam get over how weird it felt to sleep on one after all this time. It helped that he was too tired to stay awake without great effort. Twenty minutes of shifting and then laying still and he was out like a light.

He was not usually a deep sleeper, a habit he could never afford growing up with his brother Ivan and his unstable father. He never had a chance to pick it up, either. Especially not since the war ended. Sleeping through being ambushed and even stabbed was a terrible idea.

Tonight Adam was beyond being roused by the soft opening of a window, the lack of footsteps, the even quieter breeze. What did wake him was the metal hand that covered the bottom half of his face. His eyes blinked open, and then he tried to scream and reach around to punch his attacker in the neck. His fingers crack against a solid metal jaw. He is fully roused then, awake enough to notice that he and his now kidnapper were floating out of the window even as he put up a fight.

After the second time Adam almost made his attacker drop him, he realized that it maybe was not the best idea to make someone let hi go while they were suspended several hundred feet above the ground. He quieted instead, and allowed the rogue garde, and they must be a rogue garde, John would never scare him like this and no one else would dare, to carry him by his armpits. It was as terrifying and death defying as the first time he rode a flying garde into the early morning, but Adam still found himself sort of enjoying the sensation. He was not going to die right away, or he would have been killed at any point so far. He allowed himself to enjoy, just for the moment, the feeling of wind in his hair, the sight of San Francisco and all of her lights below him. If he was with a garde he trusted, Adam would have smiled.

The peace didn’t last long. Just as Adam’s shoulders were starting to cramp like they would be stuck that way, a ship came into view. Not just any ship, a skimmer, and one that was in pretty poor shape at that. It hovered mid-air above the city, waiting to land. Wires trailed from the underbelly and flapped in the wind, the paint job needed a serious retouching, and the ship was more dented than would ever be allowed by an self respecting engineering officer.

Adam’s mind was already running through escape plans. It would be easy enough to pilot the thing once he could lock himself in the cockpit, he had been flying skimmers since he was a child. He had the blueprints for the ship already clear in his mind, exhausted though he was he could clearly map his way on and off even the rattiest looking model. He figures if push comes to shove he could blow half of the floor away with the smallest seismic wave. Maybe even by just stomping too hard.

The rogue approached the ship and opened the doors from the air. Adam had hoped that the ship would land, but at least this way he knows that they are probably alone, and the garde is holding him by one arm. The keypad sparks and the doors open. Adam waits, and the doors slide closed behind them. Just a few more seconds, the garde is close to, and then Adam’s feet touch the floor.

With an acrobatic twist that would make Six proud Adam shoves his hand against the garde’s chest and puts enough of his legacy into it that the wave sends the garde sailing into the opposite wall, where there were already considerable dents. Adam lands lightly on his feet and prepares for a fight, casting his eyes around for something, anything he can hit with.

In the meantime his attacker is back off his feet already. He clutches at his chest, and between his rage and the pins and needles feeling in his ribs he doesn’t notice that his hood has fallen down. Adam turns full bodied to the movement, his cockpit plan forgotten for the sake of not dying before he gets there, and then he freezes. His face pales, his expression stricken, his stance stiff and off kilter with the realization of how many garde, exactly, both have more than one legacy and can fly.

Five’s nostrils flare and he growls. For a brief moment before his metal skin takes over Adam can see black scars snaking across his cheek from his neck. He is beyond unhappy. There is murder in his eyes, barely restrained. Adam’s realization and one fact turned lie overshadows all of that.

“Five! You’re alive!”

Five charged Adam and lifted him by his shirt to slam him against the wall of the ship, then took him away just to slam him again. Adam grabbed into Five's hand. He tries his best to maintain eye contact as Five tries to crush him into the wall.

“Five,” Adam wheezes, “listen to me..”

“I'm done listening! I know you, Adamus, I know how you like to talk! I'm not gonna listen to it!”

Adam grasps Five's meaty metal wrist firmly, but not to pull at at. He just holds it. Five has murder in his eyes but Adam is unruffled, unflappable. He reminds Five of Einar and through some conditioned response this calms him enough to listen anyway. He does not ease up his grip, forcing Adam to talk softly and breathe shallowly.

“You..you're angry. You're hurt. You feel like you have been abandoned, I know how that feels..”

It was too soon for empathy, Five smacked Adam's back against the wall for a third time.

“Like hell you know how this feels! You isolated yourself and they still welcomed you back with open arms! You betrayed your entire race and you're. Still. Here!”

With every pause Five slammed Adam into the wall again. A dent is starting to form behind him, and black spots are swimming in his vision. Time for the tough truths approach, he decided.

“Do,” Adam wheezed in a breath, “do you think that you scare me? Do you think you're the first person to attack me in my own home? The first to try and kill me in the middle of the night? The first to pick me up and beat the shit out of me?”

Adam can feel Five's metal fist digging its fingernails into his skin through his nightshirt. He shook his hair out of his eyes to the best of his ability and looks down at Five's fist. He moves his hands up to cradle it and sends just a tickle of his legacy into the metal flesh. Small waves, barely as strong as the force of a splash dive into the pool. He knows the force has Five's hand ringing anyway with pins and needles, the metal of his skin amplifying the effects of Adam's legacy. Five's fingers loosen enough to give him more breath and his grip doesn't tighten again.

Adam sucks in a deep breath with a quiet gasp. He savours the feeling of being able to expand his chest and he swallows, trying to clear away the stickiness in his throat. His ribs ache with the strain but his head clears. The ringing in his ears subsides a fraction. His hair falls back into his eyes and he leaves it, better than Five not see his face. Empathy seemed to enrage him, so tears would also, Adam reasons.

“My entire life has been like this, from the day of my birth to this moment. Always afraid of screwing up, always under threat of consequences, never good enough, never strong enough, never coming from the right place.”

Adam's hands begin to shake around Five's hand and he allows them to for the first time in years.

“I was afraid, and then I was angry. I was angry that he could never see how hard I was trying, I was pissed that they just used me and tossed me back onto the trash pile once they were done, I was so, so angry that they thought they could hunt children like beasts and I never stopped being angry, Five. I'm still angry. It's what my legacy relies on.”

Five looks down, stops trying to meet Adam's eyes through his fringe to look at his shaking hands. The movement is the most anxiety he's seen come from any Mogadorian. Not anxiety. Not anger, either. Exhaustion. Distress. His eyes snap back up when Adam composes himself and continues talking.

“So I do get it. I have always gotten it. You're angry, you feel used and discarded and hated, you think that no one cares about you and that you're all alone in this world because there is one group if people in this whole wide universe that doesn't love you.”

Five's hand begins to shake and it puts Adam on edge, but there was no stopping now. He plows forward and pays it no heed. He makes a point of not looking up at Five's face in case he was wrong.

“That isn't how the universe works, Five. Just because the people you want to love you don't show you what you want, that does not mean you are not loved, cannot be loved. We make our own lives, our own destinies, our own families out of whatever and whoever we want.”

Adam looks up through his overgrown bangs and sighs tiredly at Five. His eyes are downcast, his shoulders slumped. Tears shine from the corners of his eyes and threaten to show over his cheeks. Adam taps his fingers against the metal of his skin to gain his attention. Tink, tink, tink. He looks up and searches Adam's expression for deceit.

“Put me down, Five.”

Five's fist tightens its grip instead. His flesh and bone and scarred fist.

“What if I wanted to kill you instead? That was a nice speech, but I still think you're dead wrong.”

Adam is untroubled, though his voice comes out tired.

“If you were ever going to kill me you would have done it when you took me. You don't play with your prey, we both know that. You were never going to kill me in the first place.”

Five slams Adam into the wall one last time for good measure. A petulant, last ditch effort to make Adam feel like he is wrong about Five. His own odd way of trying to enforce his own self deprecating thoughts, his own self hatred. Adam saw straight through it, even if Five did not. Maybe not yet, but he thinks that someday he will. He does not smile, no, but he suddenly looks less tired, more hopeful. Five no longer intimidates him, forget scaring him.

The change in Adam’s demeanor suddenly puts Five on edge. No one apart from Einar acted like they weren’t afraid of them, everyone hated Five, or was scared of him, but Adam seemed practically at ease in his presence. He hated that, he decided. Adam had no reason to feel anything for him but hatred. He hated that he acted like he could understand any of this. He hated that Adam could understand. Five betrayed his own people, the people Adam betrayed his people to help. There are few people who have more reasons to hate Five than he does.

Five growls and drops him.

“Stop that!”

Adam braces himself against the wall and holds his chest in both of his arms. His ribs throbbed and his back felt like Five crushed it into dust. A bruise was loudly and angrily forming over his sternum. He was a little too preoccupied in that moment to listen to anything Five said, too focused on standing up straight and not passing out from how suddenly tired he was. He looked up, not bothering to hide his confusion, when Five steadied him with hands on his shoulders. He coughed and looked to the side, revealing more scarring down the back of his neck. Adam shoved down deep an urge to trace them with his fingers.

“...Thank you.”

Five shrugged, “It’s nothing. Um.”

“Why did you take me in the first place? The only thing you could accomplish by removing me from the equation is war, and I doubt you’re helping someone experiment on garde.”

Five looked more flustered by the second. The longer Adam’s penetrating stare examined him the more he felt like he was being dissected. Adam’s eyes were a scalpel and prod, and Five was on the operating table. He was never someone anyone could successfully lie to. Five is taken back, for a moment, to when he had first met the other Loric garde. If Adam had been there he would have never gotten away with any of it. Five gives up on any secrecy right then and there. He also backs away from Adam a step, just in case.

“Einar is hoping to convert you to his cause. He figures that if anyone would back him up about the Earth’s governments not having the right to control the fate of the world and all of the garde in it, it would be you. He thinks you can get all of your people on his side.”

Adam’s sigh carries so much exhaustion that it makes Five want to lay down on the floor and sleep. He pinches the bridge of his nose and takes in, then releases, a long breath. He starts to say something, then takes even more seconds to calm himself and rethink. He does that two more times before he knows he won’t have a complete breakdown where he stands.

“The kid’s heart is in the right place, I think,” he begins, speaking evenly, carefully, “but his techniques, his ideas, his schemes are unrefined. They are dangerous even, especially ones where he interferes in things he has no way of understanding. Einar may come from mogpro, but he has never met a Mog, he has no idea what he thinks he’s trying to accomplish here.”

“Adamus..”

Adam talked right over Five. He is using this moment as a sort of release for all of the frustration he has been forced to shove down from the past two years. Later, he will feel guilty about taking it out on Five. Right now his careful speech gives way to his mounting irritation and diplomacy flies out the window, shrieking and trailing feathers behind her.

“It was hard enough getting the mogadorians on earth to follow my lead in renouncing Setrakus Ra, and even then the ones being evacuated from Alaska are just a fraction of my people now. Getting Vontezza to even listen to me has been a headache! The children of my people are in more danger now than they were when Setrakus Ra was in power, the mogs are no closer to not succumbing to extinction, and now you are telling me some child wants to add his hairbrained schemes to the mix?”

“Adam…”

“Tell Einar that he can eat the general’s sword scrap by scrap if he wants a Mogadorian’s help in destabilizing the situation further, and that is my final word.”

Adam finally quieted and held his hand to his side to quell the fresh pain in his ribs from shouting. Five stood there, defeated and at a total loss. He figured out halfway through Adam’s speech that he was not the target, and now all he wanted to do was fix this. Tentatively he reached out and rested his hand on Adam’s shoulder. He looked down at Five through his fringe and was hit with a small pool of guilt in his stomach at the remorse in his expression. Adam has shot the messenger.

“Let me take you home, if,” Five winced, “since, since your answer is no.”

The flight back was in silence. Five carried him bridal style this time, with extra special care given to his ribs and back. Adam enjoyed the flight more this time, in spite of the ache. With his head clear of escape plans and fear of death it was easier to appreciate the lights of the city. The wind flipped his hair into a mess and pressed a chill into his skin. Without thinking he pressed closer to Five. Five without a word dropped his metal skin. Adam pretended not to notice the scar tissue he could feel through Five’s shirt.

In spite of the ache and the chill and the circumstances, it was pleasant. Quiet. Adam thinks, possibly, that he could grow to trust Five this time around. Five thinks, maybe, that he and Adam could become friends once all of this is over. With the HGA coming into view, it did not feel like a final parting. It wouldn’t be.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i think one of the biggest reasons i refuse to take anything LL presents to me in good faith morality-wise is that just, everything about the vatborn--completely leaving aside the trueborn or mogadorians as a whole--is a hundred percent on par with what happened to lorien for sheer scale and depth of tragedy and horror. in very different ways, yes--apples to oranges, i'm not going to say one is worse--but on par.

and not only do neither the heroes or the narrative ever acknowledge this. they act like it's a good thing.

[cw: genocide, war crimes, racism, fascism, slavery, torture, child abuse, dehumanization, apologia for all of it after the cut. basically, the usual lmao]

or at least, a totally neutral and casual one (although they will still never call it what it is by name). the vatborn, who are universally abused, beaten, tortured, brainwashed child soldiers and actual fucking chattel slaves, aren't people. they are subhuman. their suffering doesn't matter. they can't be rehabilitated for any kind of peaceful life. they are barely more than mindless animals. they are vermin to be disposed of without a thought, while their actual slavers get far more mercy, compassion, and humanization than they do (which holy shit is saying something).

the only, ONLY person in the entire series who thinks it matters that they're people; that it's fucked up to have been taught that killing them in front of him as a small child was unremarkable; who feels uncomfortable with ordering them around and is worried about getting one of them in trouble; who questions the ideology he grew up in that said otherwise; is a deluded, naive, easily-manipulated, selfish race traitor who is treated with rabid murderous hatred for it for the rest of his life.

they and their culture--yes, culture, we see that they have developed some of their own under the trueborns' noses--are eradicated from existence because they 'didn't know any better,' and no one bats an eyelash before or after. it's fine because without their extinction they'd eradicate everyone else. and the method of their creation, both knowledge and resources, is lost.

there will never be another living vatborn again.

all of this is true, say the writers. all of this is fine. and to that i say: does any of that rhetoric sound familiar?

like. honestly, there are some REALLY strong foils and parallels to be made between the loric and the vatborn, right down to the scars versus the tattoos:

(which, of course, no one has jack shit to say about. in the slightest. then or ever. 🙃)

what they should have done--and i don't mean 'here's a way they might have handled it,' i mean the only thing they could have done, period--to make any of the protagonists actually decent people would have been to make them have a massive group-wide crisis the INSTANT they found out what the vatborn are. that should have been one of THE central conflicts in the series from that point forward. 'we are having to slaughter child soldier slaves, who have no choice in the matter, en masse in self-defense. we have no idea how to make it stop without letting ourselves be overrun. we have been doing this for a long time and we never even knew. fuck. jesus fuck' should absolutely fucking haunt a good majority of your protagonists, even if it takes until after the war when survival mode disengages for it to hit, or else you have a cast full of just plain evil cunts and i am not going to root for them no matter how many planets they save. fuck that.

like. for all the writers and characters hammer on about how ~we're not like them uwu,~ they ARE. the perspective we're meant to sympathize with IS the mogadorians, just reskinned with craft-beer-and-brick-pizza-ovens-appreciate-nature-uwu neoliberal fascism instead of ham-handed right-wing stereotypes.

(which, the 'respect for the planet and nature' thing? bullshit. the entity colonizes and terraforms the ENTIRE EARTH. it does this without asking a single ass human if they're okay with it; marina even points this out, which is immediately dismissed lol. the entity destroys pretty much the entire fossil record of the earth, all the way down. the writers don't give a fuck about respecting or preserving nature. it's just a cover for the sky-high platter of genocidal ecofascism they're trying to push through.)

one of the central themes of lorien legacies is supposed to be 'mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.' and one of, again, the central conflicts of the series from RoS onward should have been the moral dilemma of realizing that the vatborn are some of the living to fight like hell for, and having no fucking idea how to do that without giving everything else up for lost. instead the moral becomes 'fight like hell for the living, as long as they look enough like me and aren't Icky and i don't have any personal baggage about them, and also as long as they came out of a vagina.'

and like. the really insidious thing about how they frame the mogs versus everyone else--how they try to excuse and distract you from the evil shit the protagonists and their buddies say and do--is that they go 'well i mean sure, they're racist and ableist and genocidal and [laundry list of awful], and have less than no basic fucking decency or compassion toward the Acceptable Group of People, but also they're kind and caring and heroic and nice to other people!' whereas the mogs read as the authors having looked up a Traits of Fascist Societies checklist to hammer into their story without actually understanding how fascism works.

actual fascist societies aren't cartoonishly hateful, joyless, loveless, and sadistically rubbing their hands together over their Evil Plotting on every level of society, every day, with everyone around them. like. it doesn't fucking happen. i don't care how cultish it is, i don't care how rabidly hateful you can whip a movement up to be, you can fuck a society and its norms up horrifically but you CANNOT do that with 99% total success rate on that scale. you know what happens with actual fascism? with hate groups, with colonialism, with genocide?

most of them are, in some aspects of their lives, 'good people.' they pet puppies, they're loving spouses and parents, they're kind and respected members of their community. i'm nice, they think. i'm a Good Person. i care.

and they are completely caught off guard when they are held accountable for the other things they did with their lives, because it doesn't fucking matter how many puppies you pet when you make yourself complicit in genocide. you extend basic human decency to your family and people you happen to find likeable and acceptable, and none of whom you have emotional baggage toward as a group? cool motive, still a war criminal, still blood on your hands.

which, by the way, is another vile thing they try to push through here. 'i'm racist because muh war trauma so i get a blank check to commit atrocities, cut me some slack' is, y'know. famously not a justification used for any horrific mass war crimes in countries invaded by, say, the U.S. in the last few decades alone. vietnam? iraq? are those some kind of chopped liver?

and the fact that they try to hide this shit behind 'well they're genocide survivors and teenagers, you can't expect them to be mature about their war trauma 🥺' is just contrived bullshit to get away with this rhetoric, which is even more obvious when every now and then they try to act like the characters are in their mid-20s or something instead of, you know. 15-18. teenagers are not the ones making these calls irl, pal. they're not the ones devising war tactics or taking out tons of people by themselves in one go. they're not the ones making legislation about what to do with the enemies after the war. are there garde who have to wear a bikini for their photosynthesis legacy too, by any chance

(this is an ESPECIALLY bad look in the context of the vietnam war in particular, considering how frighteningly, violently, genocidally racist these books are toward every fucking east asian country in their line of sight lmao. like holy shit dude it's BAD and this is just another shit in the bucket)

(ETA: HOLY SHIT WOW THE VIETNAM PARALLEL MAKES THE THING WITH JOHN CATCHING A LARGE CONCENTRATION OF MOGS OFF GUARD TO INCINERATE THEM ALL WITH HIS FLAMETHROWER POWERS--BECAUSE 'NOW THEY KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE CAUGHT BY SURPRISE,' NO LESS--SO MUCH FUCKING WORSE EL EM AY OH)

anyway yeah, despite supposedly being a critique of fascism these books are fascist as shit, and it is impossible for me to look at the protagonists being Caring and Compassionate, and Fighting for Peace and Justice and Preservation of All Things Good in the World, without just seeing this:

as usual i have many, many more thoughts about this, and as usual they are for other posts because this one is hella long already, but tl;dr the vatborn deserved better and are pretty much the perfect distillation of why my approach to this series' authors and what they are trying to communicate with their story is 'stay back slut' lmao

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

reading literally anything to do with john and his balls-out violent racism (and ableism!) toward both adam and mogadorians in general from roughly RoS onward like

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so i've never really posted on here about him i don't think, but i dug up some art of one of my motherfuckers, korthec. he started life as a vatborn OC, then got adapted for tales of arcadia years later, and now i'm adapting him back; as a result the only art i have of him is akiridion!korthec, so while i plan to redesign him for LL-verse again, in the meantime have A He.

he is a nasty bastard who loves war crimes, murder, and cannibalism, he is husband, and i love him. thank you for your time