#eleutherophobia meta

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

[taps mic] [clears throat]

Eleutherophobia is not a fix fic.

It’s not a comment on any decisions by K.A. Applegate or her ghosts.  It’s not an effort to change the series to the way I think it “should” be.  It doesn’t reflect my opinions on Animorphs.  It’s just me having some fun playing in the sandbox K.A. Applegate built.

Rachel and Tobias aren’t a couple in Eleutherophobia because I think they “should” be.  I don’t think they’re “right” or “wrong” for each other; I think I was interested in writing them as a couple and so I did.  Yeerks aren’t cetaceans in my fics because I think this is the “moral” or “correct” answer at the end of the war; they’re that way because there was story fuel in that idea.  James being dead in my fics does not mean I think he deserved to die; Collette being alive in my fics does not mean I think she deserved to live.

These are all decisions I made because I wanted to see how the story would play out if I made them.  I happen to like the Animorphs series, and it would be utter hubris for me to try and “fix” the ending that many authors put years’ work into delivering.  I just wrote a different ending because I wanted to, because it was fun.  That’s all.

[kaaramel]

im currently inhaling all the animorphs fic and meta produced by @thejakeformerlyknownasprince and here is my way of saying ‘thank you for the delicious words’: a take on the monument to rachel described in one of their fics:

The statue looming over the headstone showed Rachel striding forward confidently with her head thrown back and her hair streaming behind her.  Her outstretched arms were a pair of eagle wings adorned with hork-bajir elbow blades, the foot she had planted on the front of the plinth ended in a grizzly bear paw, and her face was framed by halo-like elephant ears.  Her back leg managed to form half a dolphin’s tail without making her look like a ridiculous mermaid-thing, and she had an extra pair of many-jointed insect limbs sprouting from the middle of her body.

It was filled with movement and light like it was about to lunge forward at any second on its terrifying mishmash of body parts and kill anyone who dared look on it.  She looked like a cross between that headless angel sculpture from ancient Greece and one of the fiercer-looking statues of Shiva, only more like a movie monster than either of those.

if you like AUs exploring and deepening the horrifying implications of long-term alien mind control in an already grim series, and, simultaneously, achieving a slightly happier and more well-adjusted ending than canon, you should read eleutherophobia

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Character Ages in Animorphs Fic

In response to a few questions on my Eleutherophobia fic series, I wanted to spell out the logic of the character ages I’m using.

Jake is 13 when the war starts, 16 when it ends.  This one’s canon: in #53 he says “I was just thirteen when I started. I’m sixteen now.”

Tom is 16 when the war starts, 19 when it ends.  This is an educated guess.  In MM4, which is set at the same time as #1, “Tom” borrows his mom’s car and drives it across town, apparently legally.  So presumably he’s at least 16 when the war starts.  But Jake also says “Tom was going to live out the rest of his years till his eighteenth birthday locked in his room” if their parents found out he’s got a “handgun” (dracon beam).  So at least 16, but not much older, if there are “years” before he’s 18.

Rachel is 14 when the war starts, 17 when it ends.  This one’s pure speculation, but.  The reason I headcanon Rachel as a few months older than Jake is how she sees him early on in the war.  In #2 especially she seems to look at him like a little brother: “Jake is like me, being a little crazy... It bothered me that he was a faster diver than I was.” Later, when she tries to protect him by getting him to leave, she says “Sorry Jake, this time I’m the boss” and tries to dump him off, confirming with a fake plea and “If he had lied to me, he would answer now” — and then she’s shocked that he did lie and didn’t answer her.  Unlike the others, who start the war looking up to Jake for various reasons, Rachel dismisses him as a potential leader at first, and only gradually comes to respect him enough to follow his lead.  As somebody who grew up friends with many of my first cousins, I can relate to the struggle to see the ones younger than me as adults, even the ones that are within months of my age.  Throw in Rachel’s relative level of maturity, grasping almost immediately that “They’ll probably [kill] me but at least they’ll never find out about the rest of you” (#2) in contrast with Jake’s view (according to Marco) that the war is “some video game” (#1), and I just think it fits the characters.

Eva is 36 when the war starts, 39 when it ends.  More speculative still!  However, I like the idea of Eva coming from a relatively traditional gender role: we know she’s Catholic (Visser) and immigrated at a young age (#20).  We also know she’s “incredibly beautiful” (#15) with “shampoo-commercial black hair” (#30) and she had a somewhat troubled marriage to a genius astrophysicist (#15) where she did almost all of the housework and childcare (#5).  She’s also physically fit enough to climb mountains and sail sailboats unassisted.  So I headcanon Eva being younger than Peter, married by 20 and with a kid by 23, and having a pretty traditional marriage — Peter with the only income, Eva a full-time parent — before Edriss shows up.

Anyway, Jake’s literally the only character with a canonical age, and K.A. Applegate has said that there were no attempts to plot a coherent timeline for the series, so I don’t think that any of these are the One True Way to interpret Animorphs.  They’re just my preferred interpretations.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Was this line from your fic a Tortall / Tamora Pierce reference???

The reporter glanced down at the phone surreptitiously, and then back up at me. “And how do you feel about the recent Cooper-Trebond verdict, where the courts decided not to convict voluntary controllers of war crimes?  Doesn’t it worry you that these individuals will escape justice?”

Oh yeah, so! I should probably put a note about this in the Eleutherophobia series page. But. 100% of the original character names in Eleutherophobia are from other books; none of these names are meant to suggest those characters actually exist in that universe. I mostly do it this way because I hate naming characters and love allusions.

However, my taste in books is not everyone's taste in books, so I feel like a lot of people read my fics going "Kit Rodriguez, seems like a normal name, Cassie Day, rolls off the tongue, George Little, doubt we'll see him again... MARGARET WHITE? As in, Stephen King's Carrie Margaret White? What the heck?" Some allusions (G.T. Stoop) are a lot more obscure than others (Luke Castellan). Again, this is because I like naming OCs after books I like more than I like trying to make up my own names, not because there's some kind of massive Tamora Pierce/Chuck Palahniuk/Diane Duane/Joan Bauer crossover happening in the background of the series.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

how long did you have the Rachel reveal planned in eleutherophobia? from the beginning? or did it come to you while writing the series?

Oh gosh, I don't know. I toyed with the idea right from the start, but I also wanted to do a real reaction to her death. Most postwar Animorphs fics resurrect Rachel — and I get why, Rachel is awesome and the team dynamic isn't the same without her — but I wanted to write about the impact her death would've had on Jake and the others. So I was on the fence between letting her come back and leaving her dead basically from when I started writing the series in ~2012, and deliberately left both possibilities open for myself.

On the broad level, I hate stories unkilling characters and have been firm on never doing it in my own sci fi series; it feels cheap and disrespectful and like it feeds into Americans' compulsive death avoidance. But on the narrow level, Rachel is awesome and the team dynamic isn't the same without her, and so I really wanted her in the story. My beta Cates finally gave me a come-to-Jesus talk like "it's fan fiction. The whole point is self-indulgence. Get your head out of your butt and write Rachel into Eleutherophobia if you want to write Rachel into Eleutherophobia." (I paraphrase.) So I did.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

also, whenever i reread escape from LA i wonder how that alternate timeline went-- even with the info they got from tom and eva the animorphs wouldnt really have the advantage, but even beyond the practical matters of connecting w arbron + the peace movement early, the morale boost of knowing they could win AND tom and eva could end up alive and free has to be huge

Oh man, I don't even know. From the Animorphs' point of view, Escape from LA is just:

Get seen by Visser One and Visser Seventeen while doing an emergency demorph post-mission; V1 and V17 escape? out a window? a fourth-story window? and don't go splat?

Have brief but upsetting conversation about killing Jake's brother and/or Marco's mom, decide it'll have to be done

Spend a few hours chasing them around the city, and oh fuck oh fuck Tom can morph

But also, Marco thought to check and? there's an identical copy of Tom? at Jake's house right now? ???

Have a slightly less upsetting conversation about what the everlovingfuck is going on, interrupted by

V1 just shoplifted some oatmeal! which is... a good thing? a bad thing? V1 being an oatmeal addict is,,, new anyway

Wait 3 days, during which time neither V1 nor V17 goes for kandrona, nor does either one look like they're tripping on oatmeal

Have an ominous conversation with future!Tom and future!Eva, involving an Empire intel info-dump and both hosts accidentally implying at least one Animorph is going to die in the war

???

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Eleutherophobia Tom obviously hates Yeerks and seems to find Andalites intimidating, but how does he feel about other aliens?

On a broad abstract scale, I think Tom is kind of indifferent to the other alien species. He's very very pro-human, like to the point of identity fusion — he assumes all humans are his allies, sees himself as human first and individual second, would die for any human, takes the human side of any conflict no matter how wrong the human is, etc. The events of Ghost in the Shell shake him out of that black-and-white thinking to an extent, because before that he has almost no concept of a human hurting another human as badly as a yeerk can hurt a human. But he's still going to default to "humans good, everything else not my concern" as a worldview.

So if he ever spent a lot of time around andalites, I imagine he'd be a lot like Ax is around humans in the early books: dead-set convinced that no alien can possibly have come up with something smarter or more moral than what his species have already done. Like Ax, he'd have to get over it eventually, but that'd be his starting frame. And it'd probably be much the same with hork-bajir and gedds and venber and whatnot, where he'd have an attitude of "you guys are fine, I guess, but my species is better." So, benign indifference.

Two exceptions:

Leerans: would creep him the hell out. Way too yeerk-like. Would blast "please go away" signals at the top of his mental voice while moving quickly in the opposite direction.

Taxxons: would, if he encountered them post-body-swap, fascinate him like a kid in the lighting aisle of Home Depot. After staring in awe at the sheer hypnotic beauty of 100+ giant snakes in one place at one time, he'd eventually shake it off and start going around the room like "Hi, my name's Tom, can I acquire your DNA?" "Hi, nice to meet you, I was just wondering if I could pretty-please morph you?" "Hi, I just met you and this is crazy, but..."

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I’m rereading How I Live Now because I just finished the book of the same name (fantastic titling, the depth of the allusion was lovely) and that brief exchange about time travel in chapter four took me out. This time Tom gets to cryptically reference absurd happenings and never explain it. Of course he just went home and didn’t mention that that happened, of course the Animorphs don’t know about it

1) How I Live Now is on my list of sci-fi books that are just... life-changingly, life-ruiningly good. I'm a huge sucker for the ant's-eye view of the apocalypse, when there are heroes off fighting the eldritch abominations but that has nothing to do with our protagonists who are just trying to survive. That story is epic and intimate at the same time, which is not easy to do. So if I induced anyone to read it by accidentally advertising it in a fic, then that's wonderful news.

2) The moment in How I Live Now the fic where Tom passingly alludes to having time traveled and offers no actual explanation was part of my broad headcanon about him, that he never bothers to make waves or draw attention when he doesn't need to. He didn't go rushing home after the events of Escape from L.A. and tell Jake all about it; he called the Matter Over Mind office's security team, added a layer of screening to their mail without bothering to explain why, and then stopped to get a pizza on his way home to take a nap. If it'd ever come up he'd have mentioned it, but otherwise, why bother?

Broadly, I headcanon Tom as coming off like the single blandest, most boring person in existence. He doesn't draw attention to himself, he rarely smiles, he rarely raises his voice, he has a bad habit of trailing off mid-sentence and never picking back up... You can be in the same room as him for half an hour before you even notice he's there, and then your first thought will be "is that guy still breathing?" People who don't know him that well mistake him for being dumb as a rock and emotionless to boot. People like Jake and Bonnie who are fluent in his quirks know that he's often sarcastic without sounding sarcastic, and can be highly competent at everything from jump shots to logistics planning. But Marco can be forgiven for dismissing Tom, or else overlooking him entirely.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

for the idea of Tom and Bonnie having a small wedding and Eva officiating! that actually can be Tom's loophole to have Eva present while the guests are only immediate family. When one of my cousins got married they decided to have only immediate family as guests BUT he had his best friend officiate because technically the officiant isn't a guest. So I can 100% see Tom doing that so they keep the wedding as small as possible, but still with his Visser Mom

Hate to say it, but nope. That'd hurt Jean's feelings, it'd hurt Bonnie's family, and in this scenario it'd be valid for them to be hurt. Neither Tom nor Bonnie is in a situation where they can just tell their parents "stop caring" without seriously hurting them. As Jake points out in #31, his family's so close that (he wouldn't trade it but) there are no circumstances where Tom can just tell Steve to fuck off without Steve knowing something's seriously wrong. "Whoopsie we just happened to have Surrogate Mom do the ceremony" would be more passive-aggressive and way worse than just inviting Eva over Jean as a guest.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

That must be a fun new dynamic. jean being one of the few people in Eva's heart and Eva finally able to talk to her as herself. Jean having a growing resentment for Eva being the one her boys turn to for support over their own mother.

Yesss. I haven't written much of them interacting, but that's exactly the uncomfortable dynamic I'm imagining postwar. Normally-aloof Eva is unusually fond of Jean; normally-warm Jean is unusually bitter toward Eva. Aaaawwkwaaaard.

I might have to write more of those two talking at some point; I just haven't gotten around to it because it seemed too mean to Eva.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

oh my god, that most recent ask shook me, i didnt even process that tom might think that saddler was the seventh animorph. also makes his frustration with marco and jakes caginess in ghost in the shell during that scene hit different. but now im so curious; what do u think it would take for jake to come clean about david to tom? or like, in eleutherophobia, how much has jake discussed ab the more fucked up stuff the animorphs did during the war? (also its ok if u dont want to answer this!)

Yeah, I think Tom doesn't want to know so hard that he successfully doesn't know that the most logical conclusion — given the data he has — would be that Saddler was the brief seventh Animorph who got killed by Rachel. If he's asked what happened to Saddler, he'll say "I don't know." If he's asked what happened to Saddler with a gun to his head, he'll say "I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Jake does know." If you put a yeerk in his brain and then asked that yeerk what Tom thinks happened to Saddler, then the yeerk would go "He's pretty Rachel killed Saddler."

Anyway, Tom would never ask Jake about Saddler. Ever. He knows he could never un-know Jake's response, even if that response is just Jake going wide-eyed in shock and refusing to answer. So he doesn't know, and he never will.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I'm *pretty* sure I didn't already send in an ask for this, but I've been thinking about it for a while, so apologies if I did and you just haven't had the chance to answer and I forgot. You had a meta mentioning that while Tom thinks Cassie picked up a lot from being in his head, she doesn't actually know that much. Do you think there's anything outside of what we directly see in his narration that she happened to catch? (I'm also generally curious about her thoughts on the whole deal.)

Hope you don't mind but I'm going to save this one, because you're not the only person who's asked and I plan to talk about it a little in the next Eleutherophobia fic. So: I'll get back to you as soon as I finish editing the octopus and start posting it.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

In Eleutherophobia, what do Jake's parents think about the Matter over Mind group? Have they tried joining? What do they think about Tom and Eva's participation and activities for the group?

This hasn't come up in my fics, but I believe their mom is jealous. Ragingly, seethingly jealous. Kinda-dislikes-Eva jealous.

But Jean knows it's irrational, and she does her best to be a good mom. So if she has any say in it, then Tom and Jake will never know.

Because Jean knows that she missed a chunk of her sons' lives. Knows better than they do that she did almost nothing to help during a time they were being mangled and mutilated by war. Knows that they were being formed, becoming adults, during those years... and she wasn't there for them.

And neither one will let her be there now.

In some ways Jake is easier, because at least Jake will communicate with them. Jake dreams, Jake screams himself awake, Jake lets himself be held when she comes running. It's possible to tell what Jake is thinking. Jake is quiet when he's scared, loud when he's angry, sweet and solemn all the times in between. With Jake, at least, Jean saw the changes happening and had time to adjust, even if she had no idea of their cause.

In some ways Tom is easier, because at least Tom is good at pretending. Tom freezes, Tom goes blank, Tom stops mid-word, and when you do finally get a response it's in the form of him rapping knuckles on his head like he's restarting a stalled car. It's him making a joke about forgetting to wind his brain. Often it's him genuinely being okay, just distracted. Often it's not. But with no way to tell, at least you can pretend.

But neither one will let her in. No sleepy-eyed boys waking her after a nightmare. No hugs, no held hands, no tears where she can see.

Instead, Jean gets managed. Jean gets go back to sleep, Mom, it was only a bat. Jean gets just back from the hospital, oh, no reason. Jean gets don't worry about the window being open, Tom and I have it handled. Jean gets Jake and I are at the police station, we'll tell you later. Jean gets reassured. Jean gets told after the fact. Jean, she nastily suspects at times, gets parented.

Eva, on the other hand?

Jake let Eva in during the war. Tom let Eva in after.

Eva's their first call in an emergency. Eva was the only person Jake would lean on, during those last months of the war. Eva gets Tom eight hours a day, five or six days a week, when Jean has already lost so much of his time. Jake takes Eva out to lunch. Tom smiles without trying when Eva's name appears on his phone. Eva gets trusted. Eva gets asked for help. Jean gets parented.

And Jean would like the record to note that she is not a fucking civilian. She had a yeerk in her head, thank you very much. She has nightmares too, Jake. She's a zombie too, Tom. It's not like she can't handle the sound of a dracon beam or the sight of her son's blood. She does actually know why the window is open in the middle of the night and there are feathers on the floor, she is perfectly aware why flies have to be put outside, she is not a child and she is no longer naïve. She could be the mom they need. Even if she is late to the game when compared to Santa Fucking Evita.

But Jean knows that none of this is right, or reasonable, or fair. So she stays well away from Matter Over Mind. She sticks to small talk with her dead friend. She tells all this only to Steve, who doesn't feel the same but all the same knows how she feels. And otherwise, she keeps it all to herself.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

just remembering what you posted a couple weeks ago about eleutherophobia-jean’s jealousy towards eva, and like…she and marco need to form a book club or something. alternatively, jean is a writer on one of marco’s tv shows and they become best friends and everyone else hates it

Oh my god, Jean revenge-adopting Marco is the most wonderful idea imaginable.

Marco would go apeshit over performatively stealing Tom's mom. Like, every time they got together Marco would post on social media "Off to lunch with Mom 2, AKA the incomparable Jean!", followed by 12 selfies over their 30-minute break, followed by "Can't wait to continue to hang out with my second mom!" all afternoon. Bonus for Jean getting hired for some prestigious projects because everyone knows that anyone who hires assistant script-writer Jean Berenson also gets morphing mega-star Marco Alvarez for their cast. It's canon that Marco gets along pretty well with Jake's family, so those two are BFFs waiting to happen.

Oh, and Tom and Eva's reaction to all of this would be to glance at each other, shrug, and go back to helping zombies. Likely while never acknowledging they even know it's happening.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

One thing I love about Eleutherophobia is that it feels in-line with canon even thought the idea of Tom living "misses the point" - Jake wasn't the one to save him, Rachel is still dead, etc. Do you have advice for writing happier AUs?

Thank you! I think one thing I'd recommend, based on what I tried to do with Eleutherophobia, is not to try to fix everything. Like, I've said before that I'm trying to do a postwar AU that's as in-line with the tone of the series as I can make it. That includes the realism, the series' deliberately unsatisfying ending, and the fact that there are a lot of people who just don't get the war.

So I can have some fun with that, like laughing to myself as I throw in the mention of "the controversy surrounding Madonna's new single 'I Want to Be Controlled (So Baby Crawl Your Way Inside Me Tonight)'". But I can also get a little more serious with it, like when I'm ranting about the way the U.S. pulls all kinds of crap to avoid paying out benefits to the people who are supposed to receive them. And I can make it primarily a story about recovery, while also throwing additional roadblocks at the characters — Tom and Eva disagree about what "recovery" looks like, Tom gets a lot of his naïve ideas about good-vs-evil smacked out of him by Margaret, Tom and Jake have conflicting needs, Tom's an asshole without meaning to be, Tom's an asshole on purpose, so on and so forth.

Ergo, that would be my recommendation: don't give your characters everything you want them to have. Make them work toward some things you eventually want for them. Force them to discover that some of the things they want aren't that great to have. Let there be problems for them to solve, even if you're mostly just making a happy ending for your favorite blorbos.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Imagine if Eleutherophobia Tom was sario rip'd into the canon-verse, and didn't realise what was going on until he saw his own grave.

I feel like his response would be 10% "shame about other-me, hope no one's too sad about it" and 90% "I wanna go hoooome!" He'd probably be pretty copacetic about the fact that the dead guy is a version of him, but he's not the one who is literally dead. It's not like he'd be finding out that he will die in 7 days or whatnot; he's finding out that he could have died in a circumstance that he already suspects could've killed him.

So obviously, the first thing he'd do would be to find canon-Marco's address and show up in canon-Marco's living room.

Marco: What the fuck. What the everloving fuck?

Tom: Don't tell Jake.

Marco: Don't... What? What the fuck? Who are you and what are you doing in my living room?

Tom: If you tell your version of Jake about this, I feel like it'll probably just bring up lots of emotions that... Just please don't tell him.

Marco: For the last time, from the depths of my heart, who are you and what are you doing in my living room.

Tom: I'm me. Just from a different universe. And I need your mom's cell number.

Marco: I'm not telling you that! You could be a yeerk in morph for all I know!

Tom: Look, I... [morphs something else] [morphs back] See? Not in morph. Anyway, I tried Eva's number from my universe, but it didn't connect, and then I remembered that in my universe, I'm the one who set up her cell phone, and since your universe doesn't have a me anymore, I'm here talking to you. So?

Marco: Universe. You're from...

Tom: Another universe, yeah. And I need your mom to make a sario rip and send me home.

Marco: Oh, well, if that's all.

Tom: Don't tell Jake.

Marco: Yeeeeaaaaaaahhh, I see your point there. Let's just... make a hole in the space-time fabric and stuff you back into it before anyone notices. What's my mom have to do with anything?

Tom: My go-to response in any kind of emergency is to ask her for help.

Marco: [judgmental stare]

Tom: I'm still alive, aren't I? Which is more than I can say about that loser moldering in a coffin over in Restfield.

Marco: Wow, tell me what you really think about yourself.

Tom: See, in my universe —

Marco: TELL ME NOTHING. We are making a portal, we are stuffing you into it, and with a little luck and a lot of alcohol then I won't even remember this happened by the next time I see Jake.

Tom: Oh good. So about the sario rip...?

Marco: Darling, I don't know about your universe's me, but I am a Hollywood star. I have three demolitions experts on speed-dial, any one of whom can get us what we need.

---six weeks later---

Jake: So, wanna join me and Tobias on a probably-doomed attempt to rescue Ax?

Marco: Oh thank god, I thought you were here about that other thing.

Jake: What other thing?

Marco: Suicide mission to uncharted kelbrid space, you were saying? Sounds wonderful.