#eleutherophobia meta

[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]

Truth.  Eva would probably point out that there is a common cause between the Visser One thing and the Matter Over Mind thing — having access to Visser One’s files meant she had the ability to find all the zombies when the war ended— but also she’d grind her tooth enamel to pulp over the people who’d call her “Visser” or “Edriss” to her face.  A-Town’s obnoxious, but at least A-Town doesn’t commit that particular error.

So regarding A-Town, how do the people working on it feel about it? Everyone has to make a living, but are any of them uncomfortable making a low budget show that somewhat trivializes the people who save the human race?

I think they would say that the history of comedy has always been the history of mocking the unacceptable and exposing the taboo. All in the Family responded to the Civil Rights era by creating the world's most bigoted bigot and then inviting everyone to laugh at him, even knowing a nonzero percent of viewers were going to agree with him. The Chair and Abbott Elementary are 2020s efforts to point and laugh and cry at terrible current events. There's specifically a tradition of "war is absurd" as a comedy premise: Catch-22 for World War II, Blackadder Goes Forth for World War I, Dr. Strangelove for the Cold War, so on.

So part of why Marco appears on A-Town, why Tom doesn't mind the show, why some Santa Barbara residents watch it, is that it's letting you laugh at something that would otherwise make you scream in horror. Blackadder Goes Forth has a scene where a WWI general sets a 12"x12" square of sod on a table and says "took a lot of turf today"; the conversation reveals that the square foot of grass on the table is the entirety of the ground taken that day. It's mocking a horrific reality — that the British regularly sacrificed 1000s of lives for a few yards of battlefield, and that "winners" of WWI battles often had to be determined with a yardstick — but it's making a sharp critique of the powerful, and it's a solid bit of shock comedy.

Most people watching A-Town know that Daisy A. fixing her manicure in line to be reinfested, only to be sent home due to a paperwork error, is not an accurate depiction of being a controller. But its point, about the yeerks' kidnappings being arbitrary and their leadership being incompetent, would land well with a lot of ex-hosts. And the fact that the show takes the time to distinguish that Daisy and Zeptron 420 are two completely different people — something that I suspect some other postwar movies would neglect — is at least part of the reason for Tom's tolerance for the show. It's not great that the show chooses to convey that point with the Girly = Evil; Goth = Good trope, but at least the dramatic costume changes convey that Daisy's personality is not Zeptron's.

That said, Jean and Jake and everyone else who hates the show also has a point. Jean especially finds it so upsetting because half the jokes rest on an enthymeme of "Obviously Jake Berenson's parents are the most clueless idiots ever to breathe air." A-Town aspires to, like The Americans, show the hollowness of the suburban American ideal — that's why its sets look straight out of Leave It to Beaver — but that leaves Dr. and Mr. A mostly being the butt of the joke for their negligent and incompetent parenting. For Jean, that hits a little too close to home, in a way it wouldn't for Marco watching his fake-self fight taxxon puppets by holding up a stuffed skunk, or Tom watching his fake-self swap lipstick colors every time someone new controls her body.

So if A-Town aspires to be Blackadder Goes Forth, it lands closer to being South Park: sometimes funny and pointed, sometimes lending support to the bigoted views it tries to critique. Like South Park, the conversation about it will probably acknowledge its real social contributions (exposing Scientology, excoriating nationalism) while also showing the real harms to vulnerable people from the show's brand of comedy (turning "gay" into a catchall insult, resurrecting antisemetic myths). Like South Park, A-Town tries to mock things that need mocking, but it also spends almost as much time punching down as it does punching up.

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

hi sol!! would you ever consider writing more about the conversation regarding ex-hosts being classed as pows? and would tom be a big part of that - considering how morpher hosts were held captive during feedings? really love how you incorporate politics into eleutherophobia!

Honestly, not really. Having done a fair bit of research on the relevant U.S. laws and history, I can say with reasonable confidence that:

A) Yeerk hosts do fit the definition of "Prisoner of War" as pretty much everyone ever uses the term, and

B) Under the circumstances, the U.S. government would acknowledge that when hell freezes over.

What it boils down to is that the Yeerk-Human Conflict does not meet the formal U.N. sanctioned definition of a "war." Which is to say, an armed conflict between two or more recognized sovereign nations that declare they are at war with each other. If that definition sounds ridiculous and like it excludes everything from the American Civil "War" to the American-Korean "War," that's because it is ridiculous and too strict and kinda outdated.

Ergo, I think that in a post-war world (post-"war"?) the U.S. would do that thing it does where it pretends that a concept meets a legal definition when doing so will save them money, and pretends that that same concept doesn't meet that same definition when doing that will save them money. (See: tomatoes and "vegetable," X-Men and "human," Hobby Lobby and "person.")

Recognizing the controllers as POWs would lose the U.S. government money and votes for a few reasons. First, there are all the restitutions and rights they would suddenly owe to ~200,000 of their citizens, which would massively drain the bank. Second, there's the issue of where to draw the line: between voluntaries and involuntaries? Between humans and hork-bajir? Between morphers and non-morphers? Any of those has problems. Third, there's the general unpopularity of the ex-hosts. As a population they're known for being creepy and criminal and robotic, and for an unknown subset (maybe all of them, is the rumor) having chosen to betray humanity and help out the yeerks. Maybe some of them complain about having had no choice, but look at Vicky Austin and the, like, one other known instance of successful rebellion. Why didn't everyone just do that? Fourth, the general population wants to move on from the war and quickly redraw boundaries around what card-carrying American-born human citizens can and cannot have. Trying to raise a big stink about everyone who ever got involved in the war just seems like a waste of time, right? The hosts are relatively well-liked and tolerated in southern California because of sheer per-capita numbers, but c'mon. That's California. We can't run the whole country that way.

Anyway, add all of that up and I think Congress is going to be spending a lot of its time going "we're very sorry, Ms. Alvarez, but the Yeerk Empire never actually declared war on the U.S. so there's simply nothing we can do." Like a lot of decisions I'm making with Eleutherophobia (yeerks as cetacians, involuntaries being treated like voluntaries, etc.) I'm going for what I consider to be realistic given the tone of the series rather than what I would necessarily consider ideal for the characters.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Non-1990s Eleutherophobia Playlist

[Posted in honor of the person who (jokingly) asked on AO3 if I had any non-90s fic-writing music.]

This is for my Eluetherophobia series about the post-war life of Tom Berenson.

“Human,” Rag ‘n Bone Man (2016) I'm only human after all/ Don't put the blame on me/ Don't ask my opinion/ Don't ask me to lie/ Then beg for forgiveness/ For making you cry/ 'Cause I'm only human after all

For me, it just perfectly captures Tom’s “Fuck you, I never fought in any damn war” attitude: he’s accepting exactly 0% of the credit (and by extension, 0% of the blame) for anything that happened between fall of 1996 and spring of 2000.

--

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” REM (1989) It's the end of the world as we know it/ And I feel fine/ Time I had some time alone/ The other night I drifted nice continental drift divide/ Leonard Bernstein, Leonid Brezhnev, Lenny Bruce and Lester Bangs

It’s all about the American pop culture response to the end of the world (as we know it).  How can I not throw it in?

--

“Brand New Numb,” Motionless in White (2019) I’ve got blood on my hands/ No guilt on my conscience/ The war in your past... I am the enemy/ Here to save the day... Give me liberty or death/ Charge me more and give me death/ I said give me liberty or/ Ah fuck it, just give me death

Similar to “Human”, I love how it captures Tom’s weird liminal position after the war.  He’s seeing the Animorphs from a yeerk perspective, but he’s been on the Animorphs’ side all along.  And fuck it, he’ll take death over liberty at this point.

--

“No Strings on Me,” BL4CK M4SS (2015) I have no strings to tie me down/ To make me fret and make me frown/ I had strings but now I’m free/ There are no strings on me

Yes, it is an EDM cover of a Marvel cover of a Disney’s Pinocchio song.  But It’s also the creepy-yet-defiant version of a classic Disney song about being an unmoored puppet.

--

“Fire,” Barnes Courtney (2016) Lonely shadows following me/ Lonely ghosts come calling/ Lonely voices talking to me...My mother told me: son, let it be/ Sold my soul to the calling.../ Oh give me that fire/ A thousand faces staring at me/ Thousand times I've fallen

Shout-out to Cates for pointing me to this one, which fits Ghost in the Shell so friggin well.  For me it captures Tom’s desperation to have any kind of direction to his life, heedless of Eva’s trying to warn him that the world isn’t as easy to divide into heroes and villains as he’d like to think.

--

“People Like Us,” Kelly Clarkson (2012) People like us we've gotta stick together/ Keep your head up, nothing lasts forever/ Here's to the damned to the lost and forgotten/... We are all misfits living in a world on fire/ You gotta turn it up loud when the flames get higher

This one just screams to me of Eva and Tom and their zombie collective.  No one else gives a hoot about the ex-hosts, so really they’ve got no choice but to look out for each other.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

My fave parts of your fic are somewhat contradictory, so I wanna thank you for writing so well that I can hold both in my heart. One of the two fave parts is Tom losing it at Jake and blaming him for not saving any of the Berensons during the war and how Jake just ends up crying. My second fave bit is when Tom gets furious at all the Animorphs for dumping their crap on Jake. (Gave me such secret vindication I felt ALIVE). Both of these are irrational anger responses, but they're both so NEEDED.

Thank you! I really wanted to incorporate Tom's temper into Eleutherophobia as much as possible. Because a) he's a Berenson, b) there are canonical mentions of real-Tom being prone to anger, and c) rage is one of those symptoms of PTSD that seems to get less talked about.

And I didn't want it to be in the form of Tom occasionally getting righteous-angry and then everyone forgiving him. I really wanted it to be him being irrational and straight-up wrong a decent percent of the time. Sometimes he recognizes that he was wrong in the moment (like when he "takes it back" after his flash of anger at Marco and Rachel in Thing from Another World) but sometimes he doesn't realize how his actions impact other people (like the kitchen scene in Ghost in the Shell), even if he does offer an apology after he's cooled down. I wanted him to have the kind of anger that sometimes breaks things and ruins things and makes him unable to see straight.

Like, there are a lot of limits to Tom's perspective. He actually supports Jake flushing the Pool ship, without ever really thinking about what Jake did or why. He has no idea that Jake would ever be traumatized by that decision, wouldn't understand it even if Jake explained outright. Tom's conception of Jake's trauma keeps coming back to "oh yeah, that one time he had a yeerk in his head for three days, must be why he's in a rough patch." Tom has no freaking clue what a blip on the radar controller-ness was for Jake, or that so much of Jake's trauma comes from Tom himself being hurt and in danger, because Tom just doesn't get things like that. Tom's worldview, for better and for worse, revolves around yeerks being the source of the world's problems and Jake being their solution. He tends to lash out at things — Margaret, Marco's vulnerability, Jake's guilt — that threaten that view.

[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.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

i love your commentary on the symbolism of the animal forms!! do you have any on tom in your fic series, regarding the way he uses the morphs that got handed to him like the king cobra or even morphing eva or stuff like that?

Honestly, I liked having Tom stick with the king cobra morph for my fics (even though he wasn’t the one to acquire it) because I like the contrast it provides.  None of the Animorphs’ battle morphs is anything quite like it.  The king cobra is a fragile speedster — able to dole out five or six hits in the time it takes for everyone else to get their first attack in order, but unable to take a hit in turn and incapable of sustained combat.  Although tiger is also quick to attack and quick to tire, and hawk is also better at dodging than absorbing hits, neither is as stealthy or as blindingly fast as king cobra.

Plus, there’s a whole other layer of contrast with the Animorphs being small (Marco, Cassie) or clumsy (Jake, Tobias) as humans and then big and bad in their battle morphs.  Tom is canonically quite large and strong in his regular human body, so it’s a lot more fun to play around with him having a relatively small and delicate battle morph whose major strengths (being dexterous and well-camouflaged) compensate for his human self’s weaknesses.

I also like that the king cobra’s specific brand of attack also gives Tom non-lethal stopping power — if he’s fighting a morpher.  King cobra venom is debilitating almost instantaneously, but can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 48 hours to kill.  (Apparently that setup optimizes snakes’ ability to hunt, according to evolutionary biologists.)  Ergo, I liked equipping Tom with the default strategy of poisoning the fuck out of opponents and forcing them to demorph — in the process buying himself time to get away or get reinforcements.  It’s not a strategy the Animorphs can really use, since they’re usually fighting non-morphers and want to avoid killing hosts, but if Tom’s facing off against Margaret or Rachel then he definitely doesn’t have that problem.

However, you asked about characterization.  Obviously I’m not going with the cultural analogy (snakes = eeeeeevil) because goodness knows K.A. Applegate never takes that route.  I also didn’t go with the emphasis in #20 on the cobra as calculating and cold, because honestly that’s not Tom.

What I do feel fits Tom is reptiles’ tendency to have two speeds: blindingly fast 1% of the time, glacially slow 99% of the time.  The saying “dead snakes still bite” refers to the fact that any given snake looks dead to any given mammal, until you get too close and an eyeblink later are poisoned to fuckall.  Tom probably doesn’t look dead most of the time, but he looks bored and/or distracted and/or harmless any time he’s not actively behaving like a non-zombie.  But that blank half-asleep look is an illusion, of course.  Because underneath that slow-moving exterior is a mind that’s quick to draw conclusions, quick to anger, and quick to strike back with deadly force if threatened.