#animorphs b-team

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

I am thinking about my Animorphs B-Team OCs again and how the story has shifted focus. I think I am going to make another attempt at writing the story with a new framing device and a different narrator, switch up my narrator order.

Also thinking about how if the Andalites and Cassie still want all the Yeerks to become animal nothlits after the war, Nissim 711 would immediately morph into an Andalite and give the Andalites two hours to reconsider. After all, it's not like they have an Anti-Morphing Ray they could use to stop him.

That would catch their attention, probably. The ray, not the single Yeerk with an attitude. Hmmm.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Question for you; how do you think the rest of the war would have shaken up if Jake had actually killed Tom in #31?

I'm sure Jake's home life and ability to lead would be impacted, possibly Rachel too. And the whole end of the series would definitely be different.

Would to Yeerks even notice that Tom + his yeerk are gone? Since they pretty much sentence that yeerk to death anyway

Okay, so let's be clear: it wouldn't be Jake killing Tom. It'd be Marco. Jake spends the entire book alternately fucking up (e.g. demorphing in broad daylight 10' from Tom) and begging Tobias to tell him what to do. Marco spends the entire book actually leading the damn Animorphs. When it comes down to the wire, Jake stands there and has a (fully understandable) panic attack while Marco runs around coordinating not only Plan A to land Tom in the hospital but Plan B to kill him, and possibly Plan C to burn the house down.

So. Marco kills Tom, thereby saving Steve's life and also the planet.

• Jake falls apart. Saving Tom has been his reason for existence since the first battle, his only guiding star during the worst of the war. Not only did he lose his brother, but he tore his family apart.

• Marco falls apart. There are very few people Marco loves, but he would burn down the world for the sake of those few. And in the span of a few weeks, Marco has murdered one of those people, destroyed the life of the other. This war isn't worth it anymore. Maybe the yeerks deserve to have the planet, because there's nothing here worth saving.

• Rachel tries to keep the fight going, Tobias and Ax her only support. They've given up so much for this war already, and it'd be a disservice to every damn human on the planet to call it quits now. Every damn human includes Tom, for the record.

She held him down, a hand over his nose and mouth, knees on his chest, until Marco had forced him fully under the water. Together they leaned their weight onto his body, together they pressed him into the mud, until at last he stopped struggling. Then they left him there, floating face-down in the shallows, and staggered back to the woods to try and scrub the filthy water from their bodies.

Rachel's pretty sure Marco didn't see the tiny shape dart away from the side of Tom's head into the dark water beyond, in the half-second before he went limp. It was a fish. An eel. It was nothing at all. She saw nothing.

She dreams, often, about that nothing.

• Cassie stays on the team for now, because she won't consign all of humanity to die. But her friendship with Rachel is fraying at the seams. They snap at each other often, hang out rarely. Cassie worries about Rachel, and Rachel about Cassie, more than either one of them will say out loud.

• Tom was nobody. A dumb kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. The yeerk who died that day, on the other hand? That guy was everything, for the war.

• Tobias escapes the Community Center, and a yeerk called Sub-Visser Fifty-One inside a girl called Taylor, with seconds to spare. There was a mission to destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray, and it almost succeeded. Rachel doesn't have Marco's strategic mind, Jake's cold willingness to sacrifice a friend. She burns the building to the ground to try and destroy the prototype.

It doesn't work. In fact, it backfires — by the end of the month, Visser Three has quadrupled the budget for the devices.

The second generation is smaller than the first, more agile. So it's only two weeks before the inevitable happens.

• «Prince Jake,» Ax says, landing on his windowsill. «We must evacuate you and your family immediately. The yeerks have seen Rachel in her demorphed form, and it will not be long before they connect her to you.»

Jake sits up in bed, which seems to take an age. "They know." He probably means it as a question, but it comes out monotone.

«Yes,» Ax says. «They know. They are likely already on their way.»

"Oh." Jake turns over onto his side, curling into a ball. "Okay, then. Let them come."

«Yeah.» The gorilla shoulders open the door to Jake's closet, lumbering across the room. «We were afraid you were going to say that.» Grabbing Jake around the waist, Marco slings him over one shoulder and heads for the stairs.

• Jake, in true Jake fashion, becomes the one to explain to his parents what actually happened to Tom. Not a freak accident. Not a product of stress and bad decisions and swimming alone. Nothing to do with the empty whisky bottle Cassie thought to plant near the shore, hating herself for having thought of it.

• While the others languish in the hork-bajir valley, Rachel and Cassie take the morphing cube and travel to the San Dimas Hospital's long-term recovery ward. They travel to the San Luis Obispo School for the Blind. They travel to community centers and closed workshops, and they recruit all the help they can get.

The number of Animorphs doubles, then triples.

The number of controllers increases one hundredfold.

• Cassie broaches it just once. "Tobias," she says. He's the only one left she can trust, it seems like. "You remember what happened with Aftran? How we were able to help her, so that she didn't have to fight anymore?"

But of course it doesn't work. Tobias respects her enough to call for a vote, that's it. Rachel is flatly against. Ax is so betrayed that Cassie would even float the suggestion, he flees to the far side of the valley and won't speak to her for weeks.

"I can see where you're coming from," Marco, of all people, says to her. "But there are too many ways it could go wrong."

"I know," Cassie says miserably. "I know."

"If..." Marco looks toward where Ax went, checking he's gone. "If it comes to peace negotiations. I think we should offer. In exchange for being left alone. But until then, we can't afford to risk our biggest advantage."

"You're right," Cassie says. "And thanks for thinking about it."

Jake is technically there for this entire conversation. At one point he even lifts his head halfway, when Cassie reaches out to put a hand on his arm.

• Visser Three declares open war on Earth. The first nuclear bombs fall the following day.

• Mass evacuations of human-controllers are going on as quickly as the yeerks' ships can move. Rachel and Ax sneak on board one Pool ship transport, sabotaging its engines so that it spirals out of control while still in atmosphere.

It's a double victory: the Pool ship slams into a Blade ship on its wild wavering trajectory. All in all over 100,000 controllers die in the crash.

It's a half victory. Only Ax makes it home.

• War-Prince Asculan-Semitur-Langor declares war on Earth. Antarctica disappears in a flash, and Australia is swallowed by the sea.

• James Bly, Commander-in-Chief of the Earth Resistance, sues for peace. He surrenders the skies to the andalites, surrenders the forests to the taxxons. He surrenders 10% of the surviving human population to the Yeerk Empire.

• Quarantine, the andalites assure James. Just for now. Just to keep the yeerks contained. It's only a quarantine.

[lakesbian]

OH have you finished all of animorphs then? Any general wrap-up thought on the characters n their arcs if so?

oh boy okay that's a big ask because the lack of specificity means i'm inclined to be comprehensive. i'm gonna force myself to be brief

jakey: very coherent arc from "i'm not the leader why are you guys saying i'm the leader stop saying i'm the leader" to "Subhuman. Flush 'em." it's good. i also like the chain where he's like. initially invested for saving his brother > tells marco he can't make calls about his mother because he's too close to the situation and is frankly an ass about it while hypocritically insisting he can handle the yeerk controlling his brother trying to murder his father, relieved when the animorphs take the difficulty of having to make the choice away from him but still views it as an indictment of his leadership capabilities > during the evacuation of the families he almost like...overcompensates w/ under-prioritizing himself and his loved ones, irrationally prioritizes everyone else's families being moved out first despite the fact that it would have made more tactical sense to do his first > he loses his family over this and it breaks him

rachel: problem w/ rachel is that, unbeknownst to me when i started reading, multiple of the books for her just had no idea what the hell or fuck they were doing, and were wildly out of character. ignoring the books that were fake and didn't happen, her arc is good. the thing is that "we might have to do something terrible, too. get rachel" is the crux of her Issues and the ghostwriters didn't need to do any of that other shit. the fake and true rachel books would've been served better by exploring the fundamental divide btwn her and cassie as people i'm sure you know what i mean

marco: probably the most consistent/strong arc? it's good. reading the end part was like

marco: i haven't seen jake in a few months. i still worry about him of course, just...from my hot tub me: that seems not true marco: okay so he hasn't seen ME in a few months but i have been continuously accidentally-on-purpose spying on him, and also sometimes i turn into a lobster in my fountain to cope me: okay yeah that's true

i like his fundamental internal conflict of. Being a person who is very capable of seeing, as per his iconic monologue, the bright line from a to z, and also continuously kicking the part of him that's horrified & upset by how that line impacts himself/the things personal to him under a rug. and despising when people pity him or acknowledge that he's upset/hurt because it reminds him he's got all that shit under the rug and distracts him from the bright clear line. really really good character writing how he's completely okay with constantly yelling and crying about how he's the most scared and afraid boy ever because fear over physical things is pragmatic, but he can't tolerate having it acknowledged when he's upset by something he knows to be necessary, because that's Not pragmatic. it adds flavor

cassie: i think it's funny how some of the other roles on the team are "the leader" "the lieutenant" "the axe-man" (<- not to be confused with the ax-man) etc and she's The One With A Continuously Functioning Moral Compass, Nerd #2, and The Emergency Lisa*. i've been told that the cassie books are either some of the strongest in the series or absolutely nothing but the thing is that i like the absolute nothing ones because i think the shenanigans are fun. so overall she's got great books. the struggle of a character who finds the moral compromises she's forced to make while participating in a war genuinely psychologically intolerable but still keeps being sucked in further is good & a nice sort of foil 2 some of the other morphs. i do have. And this has to be said despite being somewhat tangential. i do have the firm opinion that. rachel and cassie v much come off like they should be the classic "people who were bffs as kids and start becoming distant/incompatible as teens but are ignoring it and will be insisting on hanging out/calling each other bffs for several more years until something causes a bigger schism" dynamic & it would add a lot more if the text was aware of this fact and did something about it. but that's a longer post for a later time

tobias: his stomach flipping over while he tries to deny that the hawk-boy form of himself ellimist is showing him is him is perhaps one of the most stark scenes in the entire series and i think we should all be drawing it more. it's nice they put an abused autistic kid who doesn't feel like a human person in animorphs so that various children reading could have their brains rewired. i like how he's got a very heavy internal life. he's always Pondering. the torture plotline is a bit weakly written i think, his strongest moments are when he's doing an identity crisis thing. his dynamic with rachel is really good and the end of his arc does feel fitting. i think with how aximili is always going on abt how tobias is his shorm aka soulmate it would've been good if we saw more of the convos they were having or they had a more clearly Besties bond going on. although i DO like that aximili almost never shouts, someone (jake?) explicitly notes that when ax Does yell it means you'd better fucking listen, and to my memory the only call-caps moment aximili has is yelling "TOBIAS!" when he thinks tobias is critically wounded. more of that shit please. i would've also liked more tobias books in general bc he has one of the strongest narrative voices out of the gang

aximili: I was so mad about his very last book in the series being a shit ghostwriting moment. So mad you do not even want to know. entire plot of, like, book 8 all over again, except this time he's casually considering endorsing genocide for some reason. anyway i think there's a lot of interesting things going on in his head but his arc doesn't really wrap up well & there are a few ghostwritten books where he feels poorly done w/o having a rachel-type Really Iconic book that makes up for it. he works better early and mid series. he's also just a fundamentally hilarious character concept which is great. i'm sad that people lied to me about him being autistic compared to other andalites (he's not) but i like when he has axtism moments anyway. i would like to see 100 drawings of axmini get cinnamon roll now please

[hatingfromacrackedscreen]

One of my favorite things about the Animorphs rotating pov is how you get to see character development happening so subtly but from so many different angles. One of my favorite examples is with Cassie & Marco’s relationship, from when she left the team to the David Arc (books 19-22), and how it explains so much of their dynamic for the rest of the series.

Marco and Cassie have one of the most interesting dynamics out of the Animorphs because of how often they disagree over conflicts/strategy, but also because of the fact that they usually end up being the de facto strategists of the team (They also both are like, in love with Jake, which also leads to really interesting moments but this isn’t about that). Naturally this puts them at odds with each other often, especially during Book #19. Cassie quits the team and voluntarily infests herself so she doesn’t have to kill Karen, something that Marco doesn’t understand and also is upset about, because now he may have to kill Cassie. After book’s end Cassie makes it back to the team and Aftran begins the peace movement. There’s a lot of threads that contribute to spiral from the book, and Cassie and Marco’s relationship is one of the subtler ones. What’s important to note is that the next book, book #20, is a Marco pov. We get to see his thoughts, and all is not forgiven. He reminisces about the recent Cassie-related events, and says something along the lines of “yeah I’m not really chill with her after the shit she pulled with Aftran.” Which I support Cassie fully, but fair enough! Not only did Cassie voluntarily cause their biggest security breach at the moment, but also he thought he, a 14 year old, was now going to have to kill his friend, another 14 year old. I would be pissed too. (Also this is another great subtle narrative thread leading into the David Arc, which derives its most central tension from this same dilemma)

However the culmination of the Cassie Marco tension comes not from either of their own pov, but from the next book, book 21 which is a Jake pov. The Animorphs all morph bugs to break into a hotel that has a Yeerk conspiracy involved, and they come close to the 2 hour limit. They all morph back successfully except Marco (the weakest morpher) who is stuck as a several foot tall giant grotesque flea. Everyone’s freaking out, but it’s Cassie who’s comes forward, places a hand on Marco, and soothingly guides him through his sheer panic, and into demorphing back to his human self. After Marco breaks down and sobs on Cassie, and Jake even notes he’s never seen Marco cry like that. Which is significant since Jake has known Marco grieving through his mother “dying”. Jake doesn’t note it, because it’s a situation he doesn’t even know about, but in this moment Marco forgives Cassie. Marco never gives her shit for the Aftran situation again, either in his narration or in others. And I love that it’s something that’s not explicitly said by Jake in this book, or Marco or Cassie in later ones, but all of the resolution of that tension between them beautify resolves in a book that’s not either of their povs and doesn’t even explicitly mention it.

Not only is that a knack to Animorphs’ character writing, but it sets the foundation for their relationship going forward. It’s why Cassie still goes to talk to Marco in Book #35 through his issues with his dad remarrying, and he ridicules her a bit but hears her out. And then by series end, when Cassie gives the morphing cube away to the Yeerks, and Jake tells everyone. Is Mr. Marco “ruthless bright line from A to B” pissed at her? No he’s over it and back to being chums with her. Because that’s Cassie his bestie now❤️ And I love that no matter how often they’re at conflict later in the series, after the flea incident it never gets as serious in Marcos narration as it was to him before, in book #20. Animorphs’ character writing amongst multiple povs is just so so soo good.

[jodjuya]

Animorphs #36 - The Mutation

Jesus fuck, what a rambling pointless fever dream. This book was a Doctor Who episode wearing the flayed skin of an Animorphs book as a mask.

Animorphs versus Atlantis. 🙄

Inbred mutant human fish-people 🙄🙄

who use radioactive minerals as lightbulbs 🙄🙄🙄

and run internal combustion engines in their airtight enclosed underwater city. 🙄🙄🙄🙄

Can speak at least 5 human languages flawlessly, and presumably more. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Dissection and taxidermy of drowned human sailors, posed in a museum of life-size dioramas in order to study the ways of "The Surface-Dwellers" 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Dissection and taxidermy of Hork-Bajir Controllers, posed in a life-size diorama onboard the yeerks battle submarine 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

And this Hork-Bajir diorama is in spite the fish-people's stated-outright goal of repairing the submarine's damage and using it to wage war against "The Surface-Dwellers" (how tf you are going to do any of that shit with a bunch of Hork-Bajir corpses at every station of the submarine's bridge is utterly beyond me) 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Visser Three morphing into Magmar from Pokémon 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

The fish-people mutants are so catastrophically inbred that they're literally going extinct because their fertility has irrevocably crashed and burned. Their solution to this is abducting "Surface-Dwellers" as fresh breeding stock to inject some amount of genetic diversity into their population. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

and/or they "process" the internal organs of drowned sailors to extract their DNA, which they then magically splice into their own genome somehow 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

The Animorphs discover this thanks to being detained in the fish-people's library, which has hundreds of years worth of METICULOUSLY documented genealogies 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Which Ax can somehow magically read, comprehend, and analyse after a few minutes of flipping through some of the library's tomes (thank god there's an Autism Alien on the team or they never would have figured out this completely dumbassed plot thread) 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

The fish-people can successfully interbreed with "The Surface-Dwellers" (or otherwise somehow do their DNA-splicing shenanigans) but the resultant demi-fish-people aren't a solution to their population crash, as interbreeding causes the fish-people to lose their species' specialised adaptations for living underwater: webbed fingers and toes, drastically oversized eyes, and motherfucking goddamn GILLS somehow 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

So because this didn't fix their problem, plan B of the fish people is to take the yeerks combat submarine (which can also fly 🙄, turn invisible 🙄🙄, and cause its echolocation/sonar profile to appear as though it was a very large humpback whale rather than an alien spaceship 🙄🙄🙄), and use this to wage a war of conquest against "The Surface-Dwellers", backed up by their highly limited arsenal of human weapons looted from sunken human ships and submarines (including, Marco presumes, the nukes from at least one Russian submarine) 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

(how and why the fish-people think a war of conquest would fix any of their shit in any way whatsoever is not explained)

The fish-people are fully amphibious and don't cope well with being out of the water, yet on the other hand they have built their little city on 'land' (in the air bubble of their underwater cave kingdom) and are happily living their little lives out of water to some degree or another 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

The Animorphs discover the creepy museum of human-taxidermy dioramas, morph into owls to scope out the fish-people city, get captured by the fish-people the instant they demorph, and are then invited to a banquet hosted by the queen of the fish-people so that she can monologue exposition at them 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Also, the Yeerk submarine can fire its Dracon beam weapons underwater, despite it being previously established that the weapon technology they stole from the Andalites (Shredder beam) was originally designed to be fired in the vacuum of space, and that firing in atmosphere can cause a catastrophic blowback effect proportional to the atmosphere's density. Presumably they've successfully developed adaptations to mitigate that blowback effect for usage in atmosphere, but under water?! 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

The ghostwriting squad really fumbled the shit out of this one. Disaster of a book (derogatory)

[thenixkat]

"The Yeerks present such a moral quandary" No the fuck they don't. They're slave owners, fuck em. There's abolitionist yeerks who are actively fighting against the empire being slave-owning fuckheads, those are the only yeerks who fucking matter and the writers decided not to make them a bigger part of the story.

The majority of the so-called moral quandary comes from the writers being ableist as shit and going 'because the yeerks are disabled, if they don't use slaves to correct their disabilities then their lives are a fate worse than death'. Because the writers decided that the yeerks, aliens who have radically different bodies than humans, are disabled b/c they can't see or run. And decided to have the viewpoint characters, especially Cassie who is portrayed as the most moral and compassionate person on the team, lament how awful the lives of the yeerks are and how understandable it is that they don't want to give up having slaves.

Slavery is fucking awful. The yeerks are slave owners, if they refuse to free their slaves they can die about it. This is not a moral quandary. They are also literally not disabled just because their bodies are radically different than those of humans, don't buy into the writers' fucking ableism, and even if they were disabled they still don't have the right to have slaves and they can die about it if they refuse to free their slaves.

'But they're fed propaganda their entire lives!' Bigots who refuse to unpack the shit they learned can still fucking die about it. Like are you fucking white? Is that why you think bigots should be coddled and given second chances while they actively hurt people until they learn to not be shitty?

(the yeerks' Iskoort cousins are not a better solution. They're still doing slavery they just removed their slaves' ability to be upset about being enslaved and removed their ability to survive without their slave owners)

Like, yeah there's moral issues if you dipshits can't identify the writer being clearly fucking ableist in her writing and don't think slavery is that bad. Given how fucking white and ableist the Animorphs fandom is, yer bullshit doesn't surprise me.

[tathrin]

🧐 Do you spend much time researching for your stories?

and

💋 First kiss fics. Love em or hate em?

<3

From this ask meme.

🧐 Do you spend much time researching for your stories?

Uhhh...yes and no? I tend to do little to no research in advance, but if something comes up that requires detail or knowledge or clarification or what-have-you that I don't already have ready at hand off the top of my head, then yeah I'm off to the books/internet in a hurry. (Still wish I could remember what I did with my hardcopy elvish dictionary from years back...that would be very convenient to have now that I'm writing LotR again!) The hardest part is definitely trying to balance "I need to know this thing so that I can write the next part" with "I need to not let myself get distracted by looking up stuff so that I can write the next part" lol. Eternal writer's curse!

💋 First kiss fics. Love em or hate em?

Neutral? Romance isn't generally a big driver of my interests (which isn't to say that I can't swoon over certain couples) so for me whether or not there's a kiss involved is very much secondary to the emotional weight and process of the story overall. So I guess it also depends on the couple, actually, as I think about it more. For instance: Rachel and Tobias, a first kiss fic? I'm sure it's very cute, but it doesn't really matter. It would be a nice gap-filler, because it's something that we know must have happened off-screen at some point because the first time we see them kiss in the books it doesn't come across (to me anyway) as the first time they've kissed. Furthermore, their relationship has never really focused on "will they/won't they," or anything like that; we know they like each other, they know they like each other, every other Animorph on the team knows they like each other, every Hork-bajir in the valley knows they like each other, by the end of the war every Yeerk on the Blade Ship knows they like each other... Their smooches are a foregone conclusion, so a First Kiss Fic carries very little weight for them a far as character development goes. Probably very nice fluff, quite possibly some heartbreaking angst too, and certainly a fic that can be worth writing for many reasons; but as a concept, it's one that has very little character weight in that particular respect for the two of them. Whereas a Legolas and Gimli first kiss fic generally has more, because a lot of their relationship in canon is centered on them building a relationship — and we don't get to see most of the process, either. But they start out as allies of necessity with very little interest in or respect for one another's people, speedrun a super-tight friendship during the break in Lothlórien, and then the next thing we know they're all "you comfort me"-ing each other and promising "where you go, I will go" and preparing to start a fight to the death with 105 Rohirrim warriors over a rude threat and deciding to break into Elf Heaven together to live happily-ever-forever-after. So there is weight to it when they kiss first. We don't know when it is! We don't know what precipitates it! We don't even know if they do kiss, in fact: we know that they love each other intensely, so much so that a Dwarf is willing to leave Middle-earth for that love and the Lords of the West are willing to permit it! Whether or not there was kissing—or anything else—involved is equal parts unknown and, frankly, irrelevant; whether they do or don't has no bearing on the enormity of their love for one another. (That's one of the best parts of their relationship tbh, in my opinion anyway. How much it doesn't matter, because their love being unprecedented in its enormity and significance is canon regardless of whether they ever lock lips over it or not.) So for them, there's both A: more of a question in a first kiss fic (will they! won't they!) and B: more of a journey, too — because we know they do love each other, more than anything else in Middle-earth (and beyond it, too). But we don't know the details of how that love is expressed...and neither do they. Their whole relationship is a journey, and this is part of it! Maybe a significant part...or then again, maybe not. Maybe the kissing is hardly relevant to them, too. Maybe it's just one small sliver of how their hearts beat and their souls entwine. We don't know, and neither do they, and it's so much fun to find it out! So, to summarize (because it's clearly too late to be succinct) I'll say that my feelings for those fics are entirely situationally dependent. How's that for a long-winded non-answer!

Okay that was a LOT of fun to actually think about and articulate, thank you for asking! I was very "shrug emoji" when I saw that one in my inbox, but the more I got into it the more I got into it. Thanks!

[like-yknow-nyah]

this is a bit of a tangent, but hopefully still a discussion you'll enjoy - your last point abt hinata brushes up on something i can't get off my mind lately, which is hinata as an instigator.

hinata doesn't mock often, but he does get under people's skin completely unintentionally. it may be hard to notice sometimes because of the way it's framed in the narrative - usually he only has this effect on characters playing the part of the epispde's "antagonist," so it may just feel like a natural part of the story structure. but it happens in a consistent-enough manner that i think it's an intentional illumination of hinata's more grey facets, rather than "well they're the bad guys and he's the good guy, so of course they don't like him." hinata is a pretty archetypal shonen protagonist: plucky and optimistic in the face of challenge, a character that works really well in high-power narratives with a lot of hostile forces in play. but putting him in the midst of a very normal-high-school-guy-just-trying-to-compete-in-his-sport cast of characters brings forth the other side of that coin: arrogance and greed. TO BE CLEAR, i know those sound like negative words, but i think this is something that makes hinata a very GOOD character and, in fact, a better character than the flattened innocent baby cinnamon roll he's often reduced to by the fandom.

i think about that insanely good quote from animorphs:

People don't understand the word ruthless. They think it means "mean." It's not about being mean. It's about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from A to B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. It's about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.

i think hinata is one of the best embodiments of this perspective of ruthlessness. hinata wants to be the best - and fully believes he can and will be the best - before he's put in the work. and that rightfully PISSES A LOT OF PEOPLE OFF even though he's not trying to. these people who we see have worked hard and struggled physically, mentally, and emotionally for years to hone their skill are having all that written off by a guy who's still learning how to receive a ball because he has enough raw athleticism and too shallow an understanding of the sport to consider his technical failings. he brazenly tries to insert himself into spaces he hasn't earned access to because he simply Wants It That Badly. nothing is more important to him than how badly he Wants, and if he just chases his Wants hard enough, it'll be enough to win. the show even highlights this by naming the episode "greed"! we are meant to integrate this into our understanding of him.

he's this beautiful ball of contradiction: boundless (sometimes shakily-founded) optimism both for what he can achieve and what those around him (regardless of team) can achieve and a constant urge to share his intense love for the sport with others vs. the unintentionally cold certainty with which he places himself above others. it makes him a wonderfully rounded protagonist who is charming for his strengths and deeply intriguing for his faults, a fleshed-out multi-dimensional character worthy of the cast of this amazing story. and that's why it saddens me that it's a part of him that the fandom rarely ever acknowledges!! D:<

Throwing this conversation to the fandom's general wisdom: who in Karasuno is ever mocking towards people

Daichi and Suga don't do it a lot but we see them tease Asahi and laugh at Kageyama. I imagine they would enable each other because they seem to be on the same wavelength of when it becomes too mean

Asahi is incapable of mocking someone on purpose. I think it would be very funny if he mocks people on accident tho. (I do think he has it in him, it's just that he worries too much about saying it aloud.)

I don't think we ever see Noya mocking anyone? This is what prompted this reflexion btw. I think it's just not something he does. At all. Ever.

Tanaka laughs in people's faces but I don't think we see him actively tease people either. I feel like most of his active antagonizing of others is of the "I'm better than you suckers" variety but it's more about his ego than about belittling others.

Tsukishima is the resident mean girl. He has elevated mocking people into an art. He knows how to use it tactically. We know this.

Yamaguchi is Tsukki's snickering best friend. He might prefer when others mock people than to do it himself but he is a mean girl anyway.

Kags is a tricky one because he is blunt and easily angry, so he can be mean (tho only towards Hinata tbh) but I don't think he is mocking? But I don't think that is indicative of his character. I think with the right crowd he could learn.

Hinata is mocking. Not often because he gets too intense for the kind of detachment that goes with mockery but he does rile Kags up on purpose a lot of times. I think like Kags it's a matter of being with the right crowd. They make each other better on this aspect, surprisingly enough

Please share your opinions and proofs or counterarguments I want to hear it all

[potatoobsessed999]

This is a Very niche post but I cannot stop thinking about Cassie Animorphs as Curufin.

[soclonely]

The Clones at Kamino Elementary’s Scholastic Book Fair

Picture it, elementary school, 2002. You are watching the clock intensely. not because you can tell the time you just started kindergarten ffs, but just to build up the anticipation of the scene as you wait for your class’ turn to go to the library for the book fair. 50 cents jingles in your pocket as you anxiously await your chance to buy erasers that smell like artificial fruit and a poster of an elephant wearing glasses

Rex- The exhausted teacher who is pumped to drop off his class for a few minutes to shop while he beelines it for the staff room to get his 8th cup of coffee Echo- The parent on shift in charge of helping kids find the books they want. Tries to push them away from captain underpants and toward the nat geo educational books Fives- Buys the entire collection of Captain Underpants available anyways Jesse- Constantly asks “How much is this one?” while looking directly at the price tag Kix- The “Make it rain” kid. His parents send him with a $20. he buys the cheapest book possible, then treats the rest of his friends to chocolate scented pencils Tup- the volunteer working the cash register. Is the change exact? Who knows! Dogma- “OH SWEET THEY HAVE HARRY POTTER!” Hardcase- Bought that elephant wearing glasses poster and nothing else. Coric- Spends ten minutes deciding on a rainbow pen Bly- buys one of every book mark to give to his girlfriends on the playground 99- The sweet little school librairian hyping every single kid up on their purchases because it makes them happy, so who cares what they buy? Cody- Opens every book he is interested in and skims through the page.  Waxer/Boil- UH team Junie b jones box set purchase club!!! Wolffe- Spends his entire ass time at the animorphs books table. He would be obsessed and you cant tell me otherwise.  Boost/Sinker- Attracted to shiny things, crow brains (only buys books with attached charms or toys) Hunter- pocket full of the novelty scented erasers is all he needs. Wrecker- Sticker books and those little toys you could buy whose eyes pop out of their head when you squeeze Tech- Tries to refuse to buy anything because its “Not in his reading level”  but eventually breaks down when he sees a really cool nat geo book on robots Crosshair- Buys like three bendy pencils so him and his friends can whack each other with them in class later.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

I am trying to write a David POV for my good David / Animorphs B-Team AU, and I think I am making him too wordy. Gahhh.

[princeseerow]

oh man, i tried to classpect the animorphs once! never really finished, but from what i remember:

rachel - knight of rage

jake - rogue of blood

tobias - breath

marco - seer of mind or seer of heart

cassie - maid of heart or maid of space

ax - possibly light? i was always least sure of him

david - void

rachel is definitely a knight, probably a knight of rage. knights are said to protect their aspect or protect with their aspect, and rachel's primary motivations throughout the entire series are to protect the people she loves. (the knights we meet in homestuck also tend to struggle with facades and their sense of self which, like, hello?) rage meanwhile, while it can be the aspect of anger, also encompasses fear and skepticism -- sometimes healthy, sometimes not. one of the most important parts of rachel's character to me, besides her protectiveness, is the times we see she's afraid. not really afraid of the yeerks or even of dying, she's afraid of herself and who she's becoming, afraid of losing her friends and family, which is what drives her protectiveness. plus, the berserker getting the rage aspect is so on the nose that it works

jake is blood for sure, but i never settled on a class for him. it feels like a fandom cliche to make the leader a blood player but like. come on. he's absolutely blood! blood concerns itself primarily with interpersonal bonds, connections, and responsibility which is A) jake's main drive for the fight (ie, saving tom) and B) the reason he was chosen as team leader to begin with. the other animorphs primarily know each other through their relationships with jake, and in turn, jake can read his teammates so well that he could near accurately predict how anyone would respond in a given situation. if i had to pick a class for him off the top of my head, he might be a rogue. theyre said to steal their aspect for the benefit of others (whatever that means tbh) but i also just think it would be so funny if the "andalite bandits" were headed by a rogue

tobias is breath easily. its also kind of on the nose when you consider that breath players get air/wind powers, but more importantly, breath is the aspect of freedom and disconnect. thats just... tobias. i dont have to explain myself. thats tobias. and also importantly, breath is the opposite aspect to blood, which for the purposes of this analysis do well to help emphasize how opposite he is to jake.

marco i can see as both a mind and a heart player. theyre opposites, but its pretty common in homestuck for characters to embody traits of their opposite aspects anyway. mind is thinking and rationality, while heart is feeling and emotion, but mind and heart both have a lot to do with identity and self. mind is to obscure the self and heart players is to embrace the self, but then, part of a character's journey is struggling with what their aspect means to them; the comic's most popular heart player has very obvious mind tendencies after all. marco is the Thinking Man of the group but he's not a robot. he's honestly pretty susceptible to letting his emotions get in the way of his decision making, particularly when it comes to his mom. he's either a mind player with very strong heart leanings or vice versa. as for him being a seer of either, seers are the class of knowledge and observation, which make them well suited for being tacticians.

cassie is hard to pin down tbh. she has the feeling empathetic nature of heart for sure, but space being the aspect of creation just feels so fitting for her in a way i can't explain. either way, i'm thinking maid -- maids are said to be particularly close to their aspect which can be both beneficial and detrimental if they don't learn how to strike balance. maids are also commonly headcanon to be a healer class and i just like the idea of cassie being a healer of heart/self or healer of space/creation

oh, aximili. he's the hardest for me to classpect which is why he's last*. my only real argument for ax as light is that light is the aspect of knowledge, among other things, and he's the closest thing the team has to an IT guy and alien expert. no idea about class.

okay yes of course i had to do david. he was an animorph too for a while!

david is void definitely. besides being appropriately edgy-sounding, my reasoning is also kind of mean, and i love being kind of mean to david. so, his actions in the series are honestly pretty light-y. because, besides being the aspect of knowledge, light is also pretty attention-seeking which imo david's role as a traitor who tries to align himself with whoever has the most power in a given situation, only to eventually attempt to weasel his way into power himself... right up until he gets bested by those he underestimated and cast into literal obscurity. light's opposite, void, IS the aspect of insignificance and obscurity. it's the aspect of "nothing." and wouldn't it just piss him off to learn he was destined for nothing?

I know you didn't get into Homestuck but on the offchance your followers have opinions what would the Animorph's classpects be?

I will float this to the followers. People who know Animorphs and Homestuck - thoughts?

[lakesbian]

also you know how alec can't throw a punch for shit but has a Mean ability to claw bite kick scratch tear like a cornered animal. and like you know how "DO NOT PICK UP THE SMALL SCARED ANIMAL IT MAY BE SMALL BUT IT CAN STILL MAIM YOU" is a thing professionals are always having to say about small scared animals. yeah he would not pick to be something stereotypically scary he'd b one of those animals you're told not to pick up because they have surprisingly sharp teeth and claws. like a stoat. he's all abt the false advertising that shirt may look poofy but there IS a taser in that there scepter. and alec (animorph edition) may Look small compared 2 his team but he CAN climb down your shirt and bite really hard and not let go. so watch out for that.

[glowyjellyfish]

…and I just finished Ducktales! Here are some semi-random notes on episodes roughly in order:

1. Okay, i’ll admit I am a little sick of kids’ shows always feeling obliged to stick a Real Santa in, but Ducktales did it perfectly. Super appreciate that they even made Santa a contemporary of Scrooge, because what could be more fitting or accurate?

2. The last Fenton episode was great, poor tiny anxious Huey. And Fenton was not faring much better but at least he had a girlfriend to show for it. Also, Mark Beaks acting like a stalker with a crush towards Gizmoduck, which is peak Beaks right there. And I loooove that Huey brought in Louie to lie for him, and didn’t even think to tell him about Fenton! Lol Dewey knew because he was right there when Gizmoduck debuted, Huey figured it out quickly when Gizmoduck was in front of him fighting crime, and Louie never even had a scene with Fenton or Gizmoduck until that moment did he? L O L.

3. I am still a little bit salty that the Talespin episode didn’t even mention Launchpad, but i get why now, it was all about following in the footsteps of the mentors and there really wasn’t room for Launchpad. I will just politely headcanon that Stunt Pilot Molly Cunningham is friendly rivals with Launchpad’s sister. And maybe that Della got home and promptly told Launchpad he is no longer the worst pilot she’s ever met.

4. I’m impressed how many flashbacks they crammed into The Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck! And also, Poe! I don’t think even 1987 Ducktales ever gave us Person Poe. Aw how cool. I feel pretty bad for Magica with that story. Scrooge really was a bit of a dick to her, and I’m glad that’s the one he owned up and took responsibility for. As an Animorphs fan, you really do not want to accidentally lose a loved one in bird form. Birds have short short lives.

5. THE FINALE.

A. Definitely felt like we suddenly hit fast forward and had to cram a ton in at crazy speeds, but Ducktales pulled it off!

B. I cannot BELIEVE they crammed a gargoyles reference in there too, Frank Angones you madman. With the addition of Keith David this truly was the correct thing to watch after I finished Community s6. It was practically the same cast!

C. Impeccable division of teams, so that everybody went up against the appropriate villain, teams were logical, and banter was beautiful

D. DARKWING AND GIZMODUCK AND LAUNCHPAD. OMG. I still would like to have approximately twelve seasons worth of bantering between Darkwing and Gizmoduck, and Fenton and Drake, and all combinations in between. Launchpad is everybody’s sidekick, EXCEPT WHEN HE PUTS ON THE GIZMO SUIT AND GETS TO SHINE. AWWWW LAUNCHPAD.

E. Okay I’m going to ramble about Launchpad some more for just a minute here. First, Launchpad’s subconscious has been struggling to tell everyone this intel the whole time??? And without his double-o mission they would have been stuck at square one?!? HOORAY LAUNCHPAD HELPED! Also, who is the first character to say “isn’t family the greatest adventure of all?” or most of it at least, that’s right, Launchpad! He is the HEART and I love him and I am very proud of him.

F. Back to Fenton and Drake, I am now going to assume that both of my suggested scenarios happened. Fenton had a long day and said something like “ugh, don’t even talk to me about Gizmoduck!”, then Drake took that as his cue to start griping about Gizmoduck, and Fenton just awkwardly agreed to be polite at first, and Drake was like “haha, yes! He clearly hates Gizmoduck too! My new buddy!” Also, I find it hilarious that Darkwing refuses to consider the possibility that Fenton is Gizmoduck, possibly because he likes Fenton too much? Which is great. I loved the classic versions getting on each other’s nerves every which way in Tiff of the Titans, but this is an extremely lovable dynamic as well. Especially that Fenton got frustrated enough to try to just tell him. These guys are terrible at secret identities, and yet still Fenton somehow managed to have one from Drake, and from Louie. Somehow.

G. Hooray, I finally know the thing about Webby properly! And yes, there was a TON of foreshadowing and themes about nature vs nurture all over the place throughout this show, omg! Especially as other clones we have seen on the show were (usually?) exact duplicates, while there is no question that Webby is fully her own person, despite having clear streaks of Scrooge in her. Which, to be fair, also could have just come from growing up around him! I wish there was more time to get to know May and June, and I love the way Beakley just kinda… bluescreened and went off on her own over Webby.

H. Seeing Scrooge and Donald and Della together in action was glorious. Surely we saw it before, can’t remember, buuuuut still glorious.

I. also aaaaaaaa Huey’s woodchucking skills saving the day, the parallel with the villain coming together nicely

J. and all the kids getting to shine too!

Okay, I’m sure I forgot a ton of important stuff as I just sat down and started rambling. Now I can look at TVTropes and the whole rest of tumblr and AO3 and everything!

[whatthehelliswrongwithme]

Voltron Part 46

It’s the last 2-parter episode post!!! Oh my gosh, we’re so close to the end! This ones really long, sorry. So like, be warned... Season8 episodes 9+10... Enjoy! :

So, Allura took on that small red energy ball. And supposedly it’s the “Path of Darkness”

Prediction Nr.1: She won’t  actually use that thing and they’ll save the day, by the power of friendship

Prediction Nr.2: It’s the Set-up for Allura to fake-die at the season-finale again (~Cuz, thats sorta her thing~)

During that *way-too-serious* discussion about the Space witch situation,  everybody talked. Except for Pidge and Hunk, because they’re forever doomed to play second fiddle

Maybe I didn’t notice it in the other seasons, but a lot of the animation-frames look sorta unclean?

So basically, Allura is now Harry Potter in the second last book

Secretary Lady’s asking the same questions I do... I love her

This is a weird episode

Quote, Keith: “I think, we are the thots”

Moustache man, just said that Team Voltron’s in distress and Shiro had a *WAY TOO* calm reaction to that

Does he want to seee how it turns out? Did he bet 20$ or something?

This episode just reminded me, that the Paladins have a psychic link between them. They could have done so much cool stuff with that, why was it never used as a story-telling aspect?

Quote, Keith: “We’re all in this together”

Hey Y’all!!! It’s the return of “Keith as a Yoga Instructor-AU”!!!!

During that cheesy animorph-scene, our second fiddles had to share a screen

What sort of horror-movie shit was that lake/getting pulled into the nightmare-stuff scene?!?!

And why wasn’t Keith affected?

The fun-thing is: The shadows that attacked Pidge and Allura, respectively had an axe and a bow. Which were their weapons, during the DnD-episode!

Lance got attacked by sword-shadow-guy. You can read into that, whatever you want

Allura’s now got anger-issues to work through. On top, of ! still being racist against Galra !

That flashback of the first Paladins was just the first episode. Exactly. Downright to the “yellow Paladin is fat”-joke

Okay, If the shadow people are actually the original Paladins souls, it explains, why Kaith wasn’t affected

Allura’s dad really just said, “Moustache man, you’re her father now”

Message to the original Paladins: You’re dead, the series’ almost over, we don’t know you and don’t really care about you. Can you please stop talking?

And now, Keith’s having a really shitty day

Does anybody else feel, like Keith should talk with Shiro now. After all the other Paladins had their bonding-moment with the ex-pilot

Just like, even aside from a shipping-point. I feel like this should happen

Wait, so are the original Paladins back for real now?

That’s stupid. Why?

Does this mean, that now they’re the B-Team. And Shiro’s gonna be a Paladin again, but with the B-Team?

They’re entering Space witch’s mind. What will they find? Erotic photographs of Zarkon? Child-Lotor drawing a choo-choo-train? “Shiro” being a nannycam? Who knows!

.-•-°-•-.-•-°-•-.-•-°-•-.-~☆

They’re supposedly undetected, cause of some bullshit-science (Even though Pidge only talked about humans.......)

Quote, Pidge: “It’s just a theory” A GAME THEORY!

Now that Allura’s the leader again, she adapted Keith’s edge

So the OG!Paladins aren’t back for real. Only in this weird friendship-thought-realm, they’ve got going on?

One of the Robeasts getting recycled again..

What weird shit is this???

Do you think that this whole “adventuring in Space witch’s mind” is affecting her somehow? Does she have a headache? Is she just popping ibuprofen like they’re Tic Tac’s?

How are all these cinematic shots of the OG!Paladins in Space witch’s memories?

Why did they have to destroy those vines/memory veins(?)/brain wiring(?)  to see her memories?

Even the Kallura-shippers are getting fed! They held hands~

And now Mecha-Zarkon’s here again.....

I love the dynamic between Keith and Zarkon: Powerful, evil conqueror, whose thousands of years old VS:. Teen with a unhealthy diet of confidence and dumbassery

And they just keep on arguing, on who their pets favourite person is

(Can’t they just like, put Black in the middle of the room. Stand in different corners and look who she’s coming to?)

WhAt Is ThIS ePiSoDe?!?!?!!!

Young Zarkon is.....unsettling

When Zarkon said the names of the OG!Paladins: Those aren’t names! It sounds like he’s chocking on something. But those definetely aren’t names!

“Allura, what are you doing?” Well. It looks like, she’s taking away Zarkons bending. But I think, that that might be the wrong show

I just like to imagine, that after this whole ordeal, Allura’s forced to go to anger-management-classes, by the other Paladins

Space witch wants her happy ending. Okay, got that.

“She knows you’re here” Cue Symposium Magarum

Zarkon said some bullshit about his Galra lineage and about the Black lion to Keith. And just like, are we not going to acknowledge, that he was originally Red’s pilot?

“The power of 10 Paladins working together, is the strongest power in the universe” HoW dO YoU kNoW ThAt?!?!!

Once again, things are solved by the ~Power of Friendship~

Allura, it’s not your time to “die” yet, honey. We’ve still got 3 episodes left

[thenixkat]

It's not the most asinine thing I've ever seen someone put on one of my posts in defense of a piece of media I happen to be rightfully slamming

that dishonor goes to the fuckhead who hopped onto one of my Animorphs posts to claim that the Yeerks just *had* to enslave people because they're *too disabled to have a life worth living* if they didn't enslave and violate people to be their mobility and sensory aids.

(Me: [stares in descendant of enslaved people]

Me and my disabled friends: [stares in 'what the fuck kind of secret boss level of ableism is this dipshit on'])

but the notion that, because there are things that are worse than Dandadan in the realms of perv pandering, depictions and handling of SA, and child nudity that Dandadan should be viewed as a B+ (above average) in its handling of such is insultingly absurd.

(It's a viewpoint that ignores the very obvious that there's a *fuckload* of shit that handles perv pandering, depictions and handling of SA, and child nudity *miles* better than Dandadan.)

Like, there is a page in Dandadan chapter 3 that is 80% pussy shot by volume. For almost the entirety of the page the audience has a full view of a minor's forcefully exposed crotch because another character, who is an adult and who has sexual assaulted a different child offscreen earlier in the story, is manhandling this girl's unconscious body to maneuver her into a better position to sexually assault and murder her. This scene is *thankfully*, toned way the fuck down in the anime. Said child molester later gets to join the team as a comedic sidekick who's actions are brushed off as having had a *decent reason* [to sexually assault and attempt to murder more than one child].

And that's just my go to example of the shit that's wrong with Dandadan.

Why, the absolute *fuck*, would Dandadan be anything more than a fat fucking F- in its perv pandering, depictions and handling of SA, and child nudity just because shit like Where The Dead Go To Die exists? I don't have to lower my fucking standards because Dandadan skirts over a bar that's sitting in the frozen depths of hell.