#he's like an animorph

[megwillart]

Venti taking shape 🍃🕊

[kooldewd123]

there's something to be said about the choice to use "prince" as the main signifier of military rank for the andalites. because it kinda obscures the truth of the situation, doesn't it? a group of kids getting magic powers from an alien prince sounds whimsical and delightful. a group of kids getting pulled into a war by an alien colonel sounds tragic and horrible. the slow reveal of what "prince" actually means over the course of the early books is perhaps the most underrated twist of the entire series, because it fundamentally recontextualizes the entire premise of the series without the reader even consciously realizing it.

[strawberri-draws]

shuichi posting

[confused-stars]

shoutout to Jake Animorphs for being kinda uninteresting for like forty books and then hitting you so hard when he fully snaps and steps into his role as a hardened military leader at the age of sixteen

and then suddenly that sweet, stressed-out kid is just gone. he only exists to win wars anymore. it makes you realize too late what was lost

[sage-nebula]

Something I've been thinking about over the past week is that Rachel's expectation over whose death would fuck Jake up the hardest vs. whose death actually fucked Jake up the hardest wasn't right, and how that says so much about their characters and how it also hurts really badly.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that Jake wasn't affected by losing Tom, because he very obviously was. Tom was his entire reason for joining the war in the first place and part of him held onto hope until the end that Tom could still be saved. And I'm also not saying that Rachel didn't think Jake didn't care about her at all, because that's not true either. She knows Jake does, but that he's doing what he has to do.

But when you think back to the conversation they have when Jake gives her the assignment, and he tells her that he won't have a way out for her, Rachel's concern for him isn't how her death would affect him, but Tom's. "It won't just be the yeerk. It'll be Tom." And while she acknowledges that of course Jake doesn't want her to die in her opening narration in book #54 and is making this call because he has to, at the same time there isn't a sense that Rachel thinks her death is going to be the one to hit him hardest here. It's Tom's, she's sure of it. Emotionally, Jake could afford to lose her, but Tom? That one gives her pause.

But one year after the war . . . again, Jake does still mourn Tom, obviously. He carries the guilt and grief of everything. But one of the strongest images of #54 that has always stuck with me is Jake sitting at Rachel's grave for several hours at a time, after hours, with regularity. It sticks out to me because you know Tom must have had a grave or memorial as well, I'm sure Jake's parents would've had one set up, but in all of Marco's stalking he doesn't see Jake sit and visit with it. Jake doesn't visit Tom. He visits Rachel.

And it just, to me, speaks to a complete subversion of Rachel's expectations, which were predicated on her own perception of how the rest of the team saw her. They "loved [her] in their way" but she was also a monster, blood thirsty, the garbage disposal, the one to do the dirty work. And she was as fine with that as she wasn't. (It was the biggest point of inner conflict for her—the war between her fear and her need to appear brave, her need to protect her friends from the gruesome vs her revulsion at what her actions said and made her out to be, etc.) Jake cared, sure, but also he saw her as a blood knight who might as well die in battle because that was her role, that was what SHE did, better her than anyone else on the team. Jake knew that, it would help him recover from his correct choice, far more than he could ever recover from losing Tom, who—unlike Rachel—was wholly innocent.

But Jake didn't recover. Because yes, he loved Tom and Tom was a wholly innocent victim from day one. And Rachel was overtly aggressive, and reckless, and part of her scared him, as much for her as anything else. But also, he talked to and fought and bled beside her for three traumatizing, agonizing years. They saw the best and worst of each other. Jake left her in charge when he had to leave on that trip. They talked about leadership after, about hard choices, understood each other on a level that would lead to that final choice in the last battle. Rachel couldn't see it because she couldn't see her value in the team as anything other than the brute and garbage disposal, but she WAS more than that, to Jake. She meant so much more to him than that, and it hurts so bad that she didn't realize it.

[cordycepsbian]

funny blue boy

[radiantmists]

reading animorphs sequentially instead of in whatever random order you can get your hands on them is such a trip because you can see these kids getting progressively better at war and worse at being happy, you can see how traumatic events from one book echo into the next ones but never quite get dealt with because these kids have no real way to take care of their mental health, you can see their relationships deepening but simultaneously gaining friction and faultlines as they learn just how far they'd go for each other but also how far they'd go in general...

obviously this series was meant to be episodic in nature, and i actually think that might be the better way to first encounter it, but the arc of the series in publication order is extremely well-crafted

[jq37]

no but seriously the whole david thing was so fucked up, and it's especially wild how it comes right after book 19 and cassie's deal with aftran, where we are shown the "humanity" of the evil brain slugs, and then right afterward we get three books showing just how evil these kids have become just by virtue of the way they've been forced to fight (do you think they'd turned fourteen yet, when they exiled a kid their age, because they'd forcibly recruited him just as they'd been recruited, and he didn't handle it like they did?)

This has been sitting in my ask box for a bit because I wanted to fact check my memories but woof. I don't know that I would have handled David any better at 14 or now for that matter.

Especially after the Saddler incident. Like we saw some humanity from a Yeerk in book 19 and then some REAL Yeerk behavior in David choosing to steal this poor kid's identity and life--literally throwing him down an elevator shaft to finish him off. Not just any kid either--Jake and Rachel's cousin. Their obnoxious cousin who sucked but still. Their flesh and blood family.

The thing that really gets me about The Solution is, at the end of the day, it's Cassie's plan. Cassie, the kindest most empathetic member of the group, is forced to use that empathy with brutal efficiency to figure out how to play emotional chess with this fellow kid huge amoral liability and it works. It works exactly according to plan.

But she has to live with that. Cassie, the tree hugger, the vegetarian, the one who was willing to sacrifice her life for one stranger three books ago has to live with the knowledge that she did this (knowing full well what the lifespan is of a rat as opposed to a human boy) and she has to live with that knowledge for a long, long time.

Anyway I don't know about evil, but ruthless? Oh yeah.

[theidiotabides]

Finally got around to reading the graphic novel adaptations & just read The Message & uhhhhhhhhhhh

Was nobody going to tell me that they got Ax's NAME WRONG????

That's a typo, right? That's gotta be a typo, but like -- not to be a copyeditor on main, but I actually am a copyeditor, and I just -- how THE FUCK do you miss THAT? It's TWO LETTERS off, too! What the fuck?

It's the only time his full name is said in the book, so there's no other instance to compare it to, but surely they didn't just CHANGE HIS NAME, right? Why would they? Do I have a misprint copy or something? WHAT IS HAPPENING. I DEMAND SATISFACTION. SCHOLASTIC, EXPLAIN YOURSELF

OG text for context/completionism:

[grandwretch]

ok so I've had an au in my head forever called the deserters where Marco, to his horror, survives the last suicide mission and goes a little crazy so he steals the time matrix and uses it to stop ax from being absorbed

what follows is marco trying to convince ax not to go back to the andalites while also dodging everyone who wants to kick his ass, including his own teammates, but I've always had problems with the beginning

HOWEVER...

"My name is Marco Alvarez, and I am my father's son," do kinda hit as a first line I won't lie

[kyuziipon]

Lazy Tobias doodle

ID: [a digital drawing of Tobias from animorphs. He is in human morph and sitting on the floor, loosely hugging his knees. The blue faded face of a hawk floats behind him.] /End ID

[kooldewd123]

list of other human inventions I think ax would enjoy:

- lawnmowers. of course, with humanity having much denser cities than andalites, it makes sense to create devices that can capture grass so they can share it with people who have less room to graze. what he doesn't understand is why humanity would invent something like this when they don't even eat grass.

- rubik's cube. stereotypical, i know, but it's too good a mental image to not mention.

- baking soda volcano. he'd have a good laugh at the idea and then when he realizes they're being serious he'd explain that andalite children make, like, nuclear batteries or something in school instead. then he'd try to drink the vinegar.

- those gag glasses that turn your vision sideways or upside down or whatever. he's used to having four eyes, so they don't faze him in the slightest. in fact, he thinks it's amazing that humans invented something like this to overcome their disability of only having two eyes, and he doesn't understand why everyone doesn't carry one around all the time.

- one of those giant jelly belly containers with every single flavor in it. i mean come on, this one's obvious.

- the bible. hear me out on this one: it's the most popular book on the planet. surely that means it would be a great way for him to learn about human culture (he thinks). of course, without context, he just ends up even more confused than before, but at least there are a lot of old-timey words in there that are fun to say. like "parable." or "byzantium."

[transmandayoung]

finished the first animorphs book

[kingcriccket]

not to post about animorphs but tobias is very much a link situation where its like. you can think of him as a trans man and you can think of her as a trans woman and you can think of them as nb and all of them are true. but if ur thinking of him as a cis guy you are incorrect <3

[mephiles-the-jester]

hey did you know if you put vallis cineris as the password in thisisnotawebsitedotcom.com ,,,you like,,,die instantly waow technology is so advanced,,,,

also completely unrelated screenshot of that one bill cipher qna that i,remembered