#the animorphs all breaking up suddenly?

[swan2swan]

Instead, he resumed his lazy warrior’s swagger. <I suppose not. She is probably here because inter-gender staffing is some pet project Arbat sold the War Council on. Or maybe she is somebody’s niece and he got her fast-tracked through the academy.> Aloth gave me a significant look and laughed cynically. I had the feeling I had just missed something.

He doesn't like you!!!

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Animorphs

So in a different post I ranted about how a tiny non-distracting unfixable difference between two shirts is not an error in Jurassic Park.  IMHO, a continuity gap is only an error if:

It draws attention to itself and distracts the audience

It could’ve been fixed pretty easily in-story

It makes character, plot, or setting nonsensical

Animorphs has continuity gaps of its own.  And I have opinions about what we readers do and do not count as “error.”  First, an example that’s clearly an error:

I wondered if Tobias had heard my thought. I concentrated. Tobias, can     you hear me?

«Yeah,» he said, «I hear you.»

“Did you hear my thoughts before that?” I asked.

«No, I don’t think it works that way.  You have to think at me for me to     hear.»

—#1: The Invasion

Tobias briefly hearing Jake thought-speak in #1 breaks the rules of the setting; several other books (#2, #23, #31, #33, #46) clearly state that it’s impossible to thought-speak if one is human and not in morph.  It’s an easy fix; the re-releases and audiobooks delete this moment, and the graphic novel makes Tobias unable to hear Jake.  It distracts the audience; I’ve gotten 5 or 6 separate asks over the years of people going “I was rereading #1, and the weirdest thing...” It’s an error.  I can’t say what happened behind the scenes — K.A. Applegate toyed with a thread that was later dropped, or decided to introduce a limitation for plot fuel at a later time.  But it’s an error.

Second, an example that I don’t think counts as an error:

I returned to my life, feeling strange and out of place. That night Jake came over. We went outside.

"I tried morphing the Tyrannosaurus," he said. "Nothing. Didn't work."

"You could ask Ax. He may know why."

Jake laughed. "Yeah, but even if he explains it, I still won't understand it."

—MM2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs [Cassie’s narration]

The kids not being able to morph dinosaurs outside of the Cretaceous Era makes a lot of sense in context.  The whole book series would fundamentally change if they could use T. rex — that would become heavily a favored morph for many of them.  It kicks off all kinds of plot questions that demand answers: Where do the controllers think the “andalite bandits” got dino DNA? What anti-dinosaur measures would they be forced to adopt? Would the Animorphs’ whole strategy change around having those morphs? How would Rachel feel about everyone but Tobias suddenly having a much stronger morph than her? Would they even bother with contemporary animal morphs afterward?

If the kids are morphing dinosaurs all the time after ~#18, then the series loses a lot of its uniqueness.  Applegate has said that most of the inspiration for the series was about trying to help kids understand what it would really be like to be inside an animal mind, with as many animals as possible.  That’s part of why so many of the plots hinge on giving the Animorphs an excuse to learn a new morph (e.g. #4, #17, #27, #47, #52) so that we can experience the coolness right along with them.  That’s why the war is explicitly about fighting for Earth, nonhumans and all (#7, #23, #53).  If it’s not a menagerie of six different critters — including one immigrant from space — rolling up to battle, then it’s not Animorphs. No, it makes no dang sense that sario rip morphs stop working once the rip gets unripped.  But the series acknowledges it, and it allows us both to have a unique animal-based story (dinosaurs! Heckin dinosaurs!) without ruining its own premise.

Third, one that I find fascinating because it’s kind of right on the margin:

"What I don't get is why I have to be a girl wolf," Marco grumbled.

"We had one male and one female," Cassie explained for the tenth time. "If two of us morphed into the male, we'd have two males. Two male wolves might decide they had to fight for dominance."

"I could control it," Marco said.

"Marco, you and Jake already fight for dominance, and you're just ordinary guys," Rachel pointed out.

—#3: The Encounter

Later, Tobias’s narration uses the word “alpha” to describe Jake’s morphed behavior — howling and peeing to mark territory, challenging another wolf pack to protect his own.

There is scientific consensus right now, as of the 2020s, that the term “alpha” is an inaccurate descriptor of pack-lead behavior, and that dominance fights between adult males are almost nonexistent.  That although wolves usually run in a phalanx-like shape with one middle-aged male and female at the point, this isn’t the result of dominance fights but rather an effort to have the physically strongest wolves absorb blows from rogue prey animals or rival predators.  That the dominance fights observed in captive wolves in the 1970s were the result of an ecology error, putting wolves from rival packs into single enclosures.  Fox (1972, 1973) gave a reasonably accurate description of how wolves behave if you put a bunch of adult strangers in a zoo together: the young adult males fight, the winner of that fight wins first access to food, and the mate of the winner gets the most resources for her puppies.

However, time rolls forward, and advances like hidden cameras (and the resurgence of wild wolf populations) allow us to watch wolves without needing to capture them first.  Mech (1999) follows some such wolves around, and quickly realizes that dominance and submission aren’t nearly as important among wolves who chose to make a pack.  Stahler et al. (2002) figure out a better way to introduce stranger wolves in captivity, and get full cooperation among young adult males.  Nowadays drones and radio collars get 1000s of times the wolf data Fox had to work with, and reveal intense cooperation with little more than play-fighting among puppies.

The Encounter comes out 1997.  Mech publishes the first big takedown of the alpha concept 1999.

Did an error occur anywhere in this process?

No, in that Applegate presumably doesn’t own a Time Matrix and published a book based on the scientific consensus at the time about how wolf social dynamics worked.

Yes, in that the error is pretty distracting — I get drawn up short by it every time I reread #3, and I know others have too.

No, in that the error was corrected in the graphic novel adaptation.

Yes, in that the error is still present in the audiobook, and Michael Crouch delivers the moment about Jake being backed into a dominance fight with all of Tobias’s exasperated humor.

No, in that the error allows for some character moments, both silly (Jake peeing on trees) and sweet (Jake being ready to take on an entire rival pack alone, over a rabbit he doesn’t want).

Yes, in that the error takes away from one of the series’ most fundamental purposes, to educate kids about animals.

Anyway, books are great, science is imperfect, and I think the more we all engage with amateur criticism the more we’re all going to learn about what counts as an error in fiction writing with inspiration in scientific reality.

[ayearwithoutwater]

Twenty-four.

In my head, the subtitle to A YEAR WITHOUT WATER is “or, the men who loved me until they didn’t.” Although my reflections are structured around the narrative of one specific breakup, the broader purpose has always been to discuss how and why I loved the men in my life and vice versa.

My introspection on the topic began when I parted from my first actual boyfriend, but it’s a natural result of a youth spent reading and losing myself in my own inner world. I was a dreamy and idealistic kid whose imagination was stoked by book series including Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House, Gertrude C. Warner’s The Boxcar Children, and, of course, K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs. Reading taught me to imagine not just how things were but also how they could or should be, and it instilled within me the curiosity to want to know why. As I parsed my loss of who I'd considered to be the one man that got away, I thought about my third boyfriend and the baggage I carried with me as a consequence of that relationship.

In my mid-twenties, I dated a guy named Jun and wound up giving him more years than I have to anyone else to date. We had some good times, but it was a mistake I knew I was making as I made it, and I didn’t extricate myself from that situation because I was complacently comfortable. It was too easy to be able to rely on having him around, too easy to have a fairly agreeable partner for whatever I wanted to do.

I liked him, but I knew I was dragging out our relationship just to postpone the inevitable because the inevitable would be unsavory. So, one year became three, and suddenly we were living together to save on rent. It was a month before the coronavirus pandemic hit New York when he broached the subject of breaking up. It was another six before we were able to cancel our shared lease.

It wasn’t fair to him, either. I know he felt belittled or inadequate because his conversational input was limited to whatever memes and excerpts he’d read on social media about anything we’d discuss, save for music by Mariah Carey or K-pop artists. He once asked me whether I thought he was an intellectual, to which I easily answered no because, in all my years with him, I never observed him reading or learning about current events, civics, anything at all, not even the pop culture he so assiduously consumed. In a huff, his response was to create a dedicated Twitter account to subscribe to various news outlets. I told him that I didn’t expect him to become an expert on anything overnight, that I’d known before dating him that he just wasn’t the kind of learned person the word “intellectual” entails, that I had chosen to date him not for his intelligence but for his kindness. I know that that, too, must have felt like infantilization to him.

He never did log back in to that Twitter account, but I didn’t mean to patronize him. I was just frustrated that I could never have with him the same sort of discussions I have with all of my friends, about anything and nothing, and that he was only ever sycophantic in his back-and-forth with me. For his part, he thought I was uncompromising, uncaring, unaffectionate.

Honestly, he was kind of right. I resented feeling like the older, wiser partner. But, I only felt that way because I was arrogant and because I couldn't resolve the dissonance I was experiencing, that I wasn't brave enough to end our dead-end relationship. He wanted to be treated as an equal; I never saw him as one. It wasn't his fault that there was a two-year age gap between us. It was my fault for wielding that fact for my own self-aggrandizement.

I know he was probably thinking the same thoughts about our long-term prospects because, eventually, he was the one to initiate our separation. I didn't love that conversation, but I remember feeling impressed by his bravery in beginning the decoupling. He was finally standing up for himself, and he had every right to do so.

Jun wasn’t unintelligent. He was the type to lose himself in the Wikipedias of his interests, which I don’t deride when I specify that they were by and large limited to anime, manga, and K-pop. (I said earlier that I never saw him learning; I am, of course, an unreliable narrator.) He was fiercely loyal with a tender heart, qualities that supersede smarts. Obviously, our three years together weren't all that bad, but our interests just weren’t wholly compatible. He was a sweet and devoted partner, and I still had a hard time adjusting to his absence after we split.

I was twenty-four when we first started dating; I was twenty-seven when we stopped. After I had blocked his phone number so as to make permanent our disassociation, iMessage would glitch every now and then, and some of his messages actually slipped through the cracks. Even six months later, he sent me songs that he thought I'd enjoy. Alone in my studio apartment, arduously procured in the immediate aftermath of our pandemic breakup, I clicked the YouTube link he'd sent me and listened. He was right.

As I began dating my fourth boyfriend the year after Jun exited my life, I was determined not to make the same mistake of getting trapped in the wrong relationship. But, I over-corrected: I took too long to wholly commit to this new man who'd been all in from the start, and I left him feeling, frankly, unloved. My most prominent emotional baggage was a giant piece of luggage that screamed hesitancy, and I vacillated. I made not the same mistake that I'd made with Jun, but its polar opposite, and the end result was the same—yet another breakup.

Years later, I heard through the grapevine that Jun had found a new boyfriend who, perhaps ironically, shared my first name. I confess that the irony made me laugh, but it wasn't out of malice. I just thought he'd probably already made that connection himself and disliked it.

I went into my phone and social media settings to unblock him, even though he doesn't have my new phone number and likely doesn't think to check my online profiles, because he didn't deserve it. If he sees this, I don't mind him knowing that I'm sorry for how I treated him. All things considered, he was one of the good ones.

[duskys-dreams]

The LeafWings found us. Sundew and Belladonna landed and tried to talk to us. Their words were green, and ours were black. They were confused by how we looked, since it was modern day, but we were convinced they wanted to kill us. We ran.

I ran all the way back to camp, and took a moment to calm down in my cabin. I had my egg, and so did everyone else. I took Bennett’s and went out to the lake, where all the boys were, including Antfrost. I showed them the egg and started sailing away, and they all gave chase. I taunted them all the way to the island and left them there.

I got back to Mainland and told Mom that they were all on the island, and she didn’t care. She sent me to clean my room, because apparently I had left a mess for the girl who was living here. I pulled out a plastic dragon and three and a half Animorphs books. One was sliced in half, and using the other half as a giant bookmark. Another one has lost its cover, and I didn’t recognize it by the description on the back. It talked about how the Yeerk spies, the MacAgnuses, were living happily together as double-agents for the Animorphs. But then they get found out, and it’s up to Doug to rescue them, alone, with a broken wrist. Doug was their dog.

I was curious, so I started reading.

It was from the point of view of the husband. They were attending a Yeerk rally, but things weren’t going according to plan. They met another man and a teenage girl, both of which seemed to be interested in helping their cause. It was suspicious, but they badly needed allies.

The rally began, and they sat down at the front. They started with the pledge of allegiance, which was in the Yeerk language. Everyone would make a circling motion with their finger while chanting, which I assumed respresented the natural form of a Yeerk.

They talked about news in the Yeerk empire, mentioning how they suspected that there were spies among them. The MacAgnuses faked a concerned look.

At the end, they decided to do some... entertainment. They played a video/skit on the projector of Visser Three, in the morph of a bald man, blindly sitting on a bird’s nest. He mentioned how he felt something “sliding up his anus.” In the next shot, he pooped out the egg, and it was unbroken, in the shape of a butt. This was absolutely hilarious to the Yeerks.

After the rally ended, the MacAnguses met up with their new allies. Visser Three appeared, in the same human morph from the video, and joined their carpool. This wasn’t something that the Visser did, ever, but nobody dared speak up, not even the teenager who was typically very sarcastic and blunt.

They reached the MacAgnus house first. The wife went inside, and so did the man. But the husband stayed outside for a moment to say goodbye to the Visser.

The teenager muttered a spell, and suddenly the car doors locked. The husband knew that this was a result of the spell called “Break Disenchantment.” He demanded to know what she was doing, and she was surprised and angry that he wasn’t inside the house. The doors to the house were locked too, and the wife and other man were trapped.

It turned out that this was an ambush, and both the teenager and the Visser knew that they were the spies.

They drove away with the wife and man, leaving the husband running after the car. It was hopeless, he knew, so he went back to the rally. The only person there was waiting him. He was a familiar person, wearing a cast on his wrist. Doug.

[rollercoasterwords]

um. anyway. started thinking abt the erotics of the machine thanks 2 this andrea long chu essay where she talks abt porn and frames the gendered dynamic between screen + viewer in a completely different way than i've come across in any prior readings abt porn studies, which have usually been focused more on the content within the media and the ways in which porn acts as a site of patriarchal reification. but chu is focused on the relationship between the technology + viewer, and argues that the screen/tech itself feminizes by making the viewer dependent, needy, addicted, etc.

and that got me thinking about how anxiety towards the feminizing influence of technology underlies so much of our cultural imagination, which is particularly clear in sci-fi. ai/tech is almost always coded as feminine--i had just watched resident evil (2002) so my mind immediately went to the red queen, but there's also "mother" in alien (1979), the cyborgs in ex machina (2014), etc. it almost hearkens back to like...biblical adam-and-eve anxieties. woman is created from man's rib (scientists create tech) and then becomes more knowledgeable than him by eating the proverbial apple -> she becomes a dominating force, the active counterpart to the passive man who eats when she tells him to (tech surpasses the knowledge of its creators, begins to take control). like....how much of our anxiety about technology has these gendered dynamics underlying, this built-in fear of feminization?

also saw this game going around on tumblr which like. raises the exact questions here abt the erotics of the machine + gender and then i also read how to live safely in a science fictional universe by charles yu where the protagonist literally has a relationship with his feminine ai, so!! it's like now that the thought has been planted in my brain i'm just seeing it everywhere i go.

and then the bite + monstrous reproduction is like. something i've been interested in since i got into horror + specifically zombie studies in college; reproduction is often a central theme in horror, to the extent that there is basically an entire genre centered around pregnancy + motherhood (rosemary's baby (1968), mother! (2017), and lyle (2014) are the first examples that come to my mind). and with monsters, part of their monstrosity is often the fact that they don't reproduce as humans do, but rather reproduce violently + suddenly + in a way that breaks down gendered boundaries via The Bite. zombies, werewolves, and vampires are all monsters whose monstrosity is almost always bound up in this anxiety of the incorrectly-gendered, violent reproduction of their species. and i started thinking abt this whole topic again in part thanks to the werewolf article i shared yesterday, where bernhardt-house spends some time talking about bite-as-reproduction.

but then i've also just been thinking more broadly abt transness + monstrosity, partly bc i was reading lots of trans studies last week lol. but also more specifically bc i read this article by cassius adair talking abt animorphs + transness, and then subsequently read adair's paper on chronic transsexualism, where he talks about the medicalization of transness and the way duration is used as a measuring stick for the legitimacy of trans identity, with a lot of tie-ins to disability studies. having been diagnosed with "chronic transsexualism," he poses this question in the paper: what would "accute transsexualism" look like?

and that!!!!! just made my brain buzz!!! well the entire paper was brilliant actually but specifically i started thinking about how "acute transsexualism" is like. THE fear underlying so much transphobic rhetoric and also just a really deeply rooted cultural fear more broadly, bc the existence of "acute transsexualism" would essentially destroy the social construction of gender as we know it.

and so THAT got me thinking about how many examples of what could be read as acute transsexualism can be found in sci-fi + horror, representing this deep-rooted cultural impulse to Uphold Gender. thanks to the animorphs article my mind immediately went to yeerks, who themselves could be read as trans subjects (literally their only desire is to exist in different bodies) that forcibly + suddenly "trans" the humans whose bodies they take over. and then of course bc i had already been pondering alien (1979) in the context of feminine ai + gender anxiety my brain went straight to the xenomorph, which is perhaps one of the most salient examples of anxiety over incorrectly gendered, monstrous reproduction and would so exactly fit a horror narrative of acute transsexualism (feminine alien forcibly + violently impregnates masculine man, destroying both body + gender in the process). and of course there is my time spent with zombie studies, where zombies (genderless) forcibly + violently reproduce themselves in humans, thereby converting them to the same genderless (or, at the very least, incorrectly gendered) state of existence. AND now i've been spending half my time thinking about werewolves + transness, and the ways a werewolf transformation could be read as acute transsexualism (similarly to how adair draws connections between transness and animorphs).

anyway. truly i cannot get back 2 school fast enough all i want to do rn is think abt acute transsexualism + monsters + unfortunately. this is making me insufferable 2 be around. i need a room where everyone is trapped in there with me + forced 2 listen 2 me monologuing

yeah i've been getting really into the erotics of the machine lately. pondering the gendered dynamics of ai in sci-fi and what anxieties about masculinity underly that. also been thinking about how much monstrous reproduction is centered around the bite and of course the gender dynamics of that....plus a lot of pondering on transness + monstrosity + reproduction. yeerks. the xenomorph. werewolves. who wants me

[chipper-asks]

I don't know if you were already asked this, and I apologize if you were. But, do you have any recommendations on how to get out of art block?

I may have been asked this before and I don't remember, but i'll do my best to give some tips!

I feel like there are many different kind of art blocks? You can be uninspired, you can be physically out of commission, you can hate your own art, etc. Because of this there isn't just one way to work out of art block so let me shoot you a few things for you to try out.

Here's the first tip which is a sort of a blanket tip.

Don't feel bad about being in art block. You're not a machine or an ant. We're humans and we all need breaks no matter what the workaholic era we're in tells you. Your worth is not determined by how much you make in a week.

The worst thing you can do is feel guilty about not drawing. I've gone entire months without feeling a spark but when I least expect it i'm suddenly pumping out 1-2 posts a day. Just sit back and forget about drawing for a while. Sure you'll get rusty, but that's nothing a few sketch doodles wont fix!

Tip numero dos! This one works for me surprisingly well.

Give yourself responsibilities! Take on more chores, get more hours at your job, get a job, wait for summer to end and get homework (if you're still in school), (if you're out of school) take a course, run errands for your family, open up commissions, etc

While I was in school my inspiration knew no bounds. Art block was a fleeting thing because I had other stuff to do that was more difficult than having fun and drawing. I joined the HK fandom during my last semesters at college and I was making 1-2 posts a day for 2 months straight. This was because I had a good amount of homework that I could do but I just didn't want to do.

After college my inspiration tanked and for a while I struggled to find any interest in HK. Keeping my AUs updated felt like a chore. Interacting with asks was draining (this all was probably worsened by burnout after graduation).

But as soon as I opened up my commissions, I gave myself a responsibility to other people, and now suddenly my interest in HK is renewing and I'm drawing my ocs again.

Number three!

Consume consume consume. Is there a show your friends recommended that you watch? Hilda? Trollhunters? FMA Brotherhood? How about movies? How to Train Your Dragon? The Lord of the Rings Trilogy? Aliens? What about books! The Name of the Wind? Dragonriders of Pern? Animorphs?

Your brain might be bored! It needs fuel to make those good ideas. Enjoy media apologetically because you're not feeling bad about art block!

There is a restriction to this tip however! Consuming media from places like youtube, twitter, facebook, reddit, etc, will not recharge your inspiration.

Your brain is bored and watching ridiculous speedruns is super entertaining and fun, but its not going to work! Social media is an expert at giving you those easy happy chemicals but juuust enough so you're not sated and you want more. You'll click through youtube video after youtube video and by the time you're going to bed you're going to feel as grey as you started out that morning.

Stay away from social media if your brain is bored (looking at other people's art and fanfiction is okay tho.)

Those are all the tips I can think of from my own experience dealing with artblock! I may have more buried somewhere under the folds of my noggin but I think those are the big three.

1: Don't blame yourself for art block

2: Give yourself something harder to do

3: Watch/Read that thing you've been meaning to

[semper-legens]

99. The Threat, by K A Applegate

Owned: Yes Page count: 158 My summary: The Animorphs are facing their most vital mission yet. There are Yeerks targetting the world’s most powerful leaders. But they’ve been having trouble with their newest member, who just will not fall in line. Will David prove the secret ingredient the Animorphs needed - or the key to their undoing? My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Part two of the David trilogy, and great googly moogly, it’s all gone to shit. David upgrades in this book from kind of a shitty guy to grade-A Asshole, and everyone is in danger thanks to his stupid actions. One thing I find interesting about this trilogy is that, per Animorphs tradition, it has three different narrators, giving us three different perspectives on the same events. We started off with Marco, who was possibly always destined to clash with David thanks to their personalities. Now we’re at Jake, the more neutral party given his role as leader. From him we see that no, not just Marco, David’s causing trouble for everyone.

So what to say about David in this one? After losing his parents in the first book and having to crash in Cassie’s attic, he’s become a bit edgier just as a person. Which is, you know, not good for the rest of the Animorphs, as he does things that threaten to reveal them to the world or the Yeerks. He seems just a second out of step with the others, and the red flags continue to pile up.

In one instance, he morphs eagle, breaks a hotel window, and sneaks in there to sleep and watch TV. Jake condemns it, saying that they don’t break the law unless absolutely necessary, and even then try to make amends. What’s interesting in this whole escapade is that David isn’t really wrong? Like, yes, he probably shouldn’t have done it, but kid’s been through a lot and he’s living in a barn at the moment. I can’t fault him for wanting a bit of normality and comfort. And it’s not like the Animorphs have never done anything illegal - sure, for a good cause, but moralising about it as he does makes Jake at least a bit of a hypocrite, just saying.

Meanwhile, the Yeerks are continuing with their plan to infest the world leaders, and the Animorphs get completely trapped. I like this thread because it keeps both sides as being smart - the Animorphs figuring out the Yeerks’ hologram trap is shrewd on their part, and the Yeerks leading them into a further trap by pretending the conference is a day earlier is pretty smart for them. Often with kids’ media you find that heroes catch the idiot ball, or villains we’re supposed to find legitimately threatening are made to look stupid to justify the heroes winning, so kudos for not doing that here.

Which leads to the moral breaking point for David. He sells out the team to Visser Three - or at least, he’s about to, when the tide turns in the Animorphs’ favour and he switches sides back. This leads to an incredibly tense sequence where David lies that he was never really going to sell them out, nobody buys it, and Jake secretly orders a watch kept on David. But when Jake gets the message that David’s on the move, he’s too late - David wants out, he wants to be free, and he’ll kill the Animorphs to do it. He’s killed Tobias. He goes for Jake. It’s a hell of a cliffhanger, and the last straw that slips David into being morally indefensible. He’s too quick to anger and violence, wants to use morphing for his own gain, but killing someone? That’s over the line. Suddenly this kid goes from kinda shitty to legitimate threat, and we’re ready for the endgame.

Next up, we finish off this storyline, with the ominously-titled The Solution.

[scowlowl]

Hi c: I remember a post, I think it was from you, about long covid and getting it? Was that you? A friend of mine is struggling and I was wondering if you had any advice about what she can do :< Thank you!!

Oh no, I hope your friend feels better soon! That might have been me, I think I posted about it here a few times and there have definitely been twitter threads.

Standard disclaimer stuff: I am not a doctor. What I found helped me might not help someone else. Long covid is kind of fucked up to deal with because it seems to hit everyone in different ways, in different areas, and months later something that wasn't a problem before can suddenly become one. The long haul groups talk about it as something that feels like it moves around the body, like a total shit gremlin.

The thing that helped me the most initially was joining the facebook groups with other people figuring shit out. This was back April/May for me but they're still very active and full of people sharing resources.

Survivor Corps is I think the big one and they've been the ones reaching out to media and doctors to try to gain some recognition with the medical community initially (as far as I know, all kind of a blur tbh). There's also a long covid group here, and if your friend searches for like, long covid + the country they're in there are usually more local/regional ones for resources closer to home too.

Because we don't really know what specific mechanism is triggering a lot of the long covid stuff yet, most of us are just treating symptoms. Some people have been diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and I don't know diddly squat about that but it might be something for your friend to look into. My whole thing has been inflammation and my immune system basically attacking itself because immune systems are both very complex and compellingly fucking stupid. Not to victim blame the immune system or anything.

What helped me depended on what was going wrong at the time, obv, but it means it's a long list.

This is just going to be a brain dump, sorry.

- I never had pneumonia. Mine started in my throat, probably damaged my vocal chords, but never turned into pneumonia. I still had shortness of breath, pressure in my chest, and my oxygen levels dropped. I could breathe but with great difficulty and described it to the EMTs as "breathing is like work." It took all of my energy and focus to breathe in enough. If you are that this point, ever, like, literally fucking ever, call an ambulance.

- Tylenol for a fever. 

- Blood thinners if necessary, I never had any but we know now that a lot of problems are blood clot-related. Tbqh my blood is more thin now than anything but I always had anemia and some sort of “your blood is too small actually?” problem and we don’t know why. I just bleed a lot and bruise easier now. 

- If they try to tell you it's anxiety or in your head or you're not that bed, tell them to go fuck themselves and go to the hospital. Get tested if you can. A lot of the problems long haulers ran into was that we got sick before tests were available, or we were talked into staying home by the emergency workers, and we never got tested. This opens the doors for doctors to tell you it's all in your head, psychological, anxiety, allergies, etc. Just. Go when you first feel sick if at all possible. Get tested before it turns into long covid. 

- I was not sure in the beginning what "shortness of breath" or "pressure" actually felt like, and it made me delay calling for an ambulance for a few days as well. For me, it felt like there was an elastic band of pressure around my lungs. I couldn't fully inhale. My diaphragm was fucked in ways I still don't understand. My lungs also felt heavy, like there was a weight on them or like my lungs themselves were too stiff to inhale. That all counts as pressure/tightness/shortness of breath. So does air hunger, or feeling like you want to be swallowing air.

- I know I'm being super obvious but seriously shortly before I got sicker, I hit up twitter to ask what "pressure" was supposed to feel like because I couldn't tell if what I had "counted."

- Breathing: lying on my stomach with my chest propped up by pillow, in bed helped. So did  pursed lip breathing: here.

- I was prescribed salbutamol initially, which did help with the worst of the wheezing and opened up some of my lungs so I could breathe easier. When I went to the ER again a couple months later, they gave me like 5x the usual dose and sent me home.

- I'm also taking Flovent/fluticasone twice a day for asthma maintenance.

- Histamines are a problem for a lot of people. Some develop a histamine intolerance, which can be helped by eating a low histamine diet.

- Antihistamines helped me the most. I was taking Allegra-D daily. Pepcid AC also helps, because it targets a different kind of histamine. There was such a run on Pepcid when this started that it was actually impossible to find in my area and I had to order some online. 

- I was recently prescribed Singulair and it has been life-changing this past week or so. As far as I know it's not really an antihistamine but blocks/inhibits a particular receptor involved in inflammation that comes into play when allergies do.

- Electrolytes. I don't know why, but my electrolytes are permanently fucked and too low now. If I don't go through like a litre of gatorade a day (or whatever, pick your brand of supplements), I am even more tired and brain foggy than usual. Helps a lot.

- Inflammation is a major problem all around. Sometimes I go for the naproxen or advil and it will help any really major acute flare-up now (like, I can feel when my gallbladder is getting inflamed and about to spasm and I can cut it off sort of), but mostly it's also daily maintenance. I take cucurmin and black pepper daily.

- Other supplements: vitamins A & D, a multivitamin, NAC.  

- CBD oil. This worked wonders for me for a lot of the side-effects of covid, costochondritis and shingles pain especially.

- Diet. I mentioned the low histamine one above. Other people have had some success with a low inflammation diet. Some folks also have so many GI problems that they basically ate chicken and rice and slowly reintroduced foods to see what would trigger something. I appear to get super fucked by nightshades now, e.g. Alcohol is an absolute no. I had to cut caffeine for months because of my heart. (No caffeine/alcohol/red meat was my doctor's first and best advice for heart stuff at the time.)

- Speaking of the heart stuff, if your friend is dealing with that: electrolytes again. I have pedialyte freezies that I would suck on whenever heart palpitations started and it helped calm it down some. My heart was so, so fucked for months that whenever I ate or stood up or sat down it would hit like 140bpm and I had to spend an hour moving as little as possible or I'd just about pass out. There are a LOT of long-haulers now dealing with POTS and I can't really speak to what helps that in particular but if your heart is messing up at all: call a doctor. I still don't know how damaged my heart is from all of this because doctors and wait lists, etc. Get a jump on that.

- Insomnia was absolutely the worst I’ve ever had and I’ve had lifelong, “I’m awake for three days wee” insomnia. The Singulair knocks me right out at night, so that's a bonus, but there has not been a single night since getting sick where I didn't have to take something to help me sleep. I was on Zopiclone before getting sick, at least, but seriously talk to someone about insomnia if necessary. The sleep deprivation alone was making so many things worse.

- Brain fog? Brain fog. I don't have any or many answers for this. My short-term memory is wrecked and usually I'll remember something 2 weeks later, so I live my life on a 2-week lag now.

- Related to brain fog, fatigue. Don't fuck with it. Do not. Chronic Fatigue and Myalgic encephalomyelitis are both brought up often with long covid. I am dealing with it but don't know what to say about it yet because I haven't had a single doctor give a shit thus far. I've spoken to a relative who's an occupational therapist about it and her most helpful advice was about "energy envelopes," which is basically spoon theory. If you feel tired: stop. If you don't, or if you try to push through, we relapse hard and fast and you can pay for one day of walking 10 minutes too long with weeks of being stuck in bed. It's miserable. It will take longer to get back to normal. Some of us can exercise and feel amazing after; others are exercise intolerant and it wrecks them. (I feel best after like, 10 minutes of walking and sunshine right now, which is after months and months of being bedridden.)

- Treat mental exertion the same as physical. Doctors told me to drink Gatorade after mental work because it's still work, and it has helped a lot for whatever reason. It also helps to work on one thing at a time, take a break, switch gears, take a break, etc. I can't multitask anymore anyway.

- Eliminate whatever stressors you can. Stress will make everything worse. 

- It comes and goes. Every relapse was a bit shorter and a bit easier for me, so that now when I fuck up it's like 2-3 days instead of weeks, but it's a rollercoaster.

- It can be random as hell. For about two months my gallbladder just decided to up and die, basically, and we were talking about having it removed. And then it was fine. Hasn't bugged me again lately. I know I said it's symptom management, but it's also like... symptom chasing and trying to figure out what's happening every time the sun rises. This is also exhausting. Everything is exhausting.

- Brain shit. Some of us have serious trouble reading. Sentences swim together. Letters wouldn't turn into words. I took this as a Challenge and started reading children's books and then Animorphs again, like... slowly, as much as I could do without pushing it, and it's still not perfect or great but it was an okay place to start. Honestly the hardest part was the embarrassment and going from a PhD program to reading kids books, but. Do what you have to. Do what you can.

- Sticky notes and labelling things around the house so I could see them when I needed them. I am not fucking around when I say brain fog. I can open the fridge, know I have milk, know it is in the door, and literally not see it to find it. I will put the cream in the dishwasher. I will spin in circles in the kitchen remembering and forgetting and remembering why I’m there again. Sticky notes. Also: journals, index cards, write literally everything down if you need to remember something. Put it somewhere obvious. I like writing on the bathroom mirror for the important shit. (Don’t use lipstick.) 

- Unsurprisingly, a lot of us are struggling with anxiety and depression. Don't let doctors get it backward: it's not anxiety making us sick, it's being sick and ignored and fighting to be helped that's making our mental health worse. So many doctors tell us it's all in our head. I did not move across the country because I was too sick to take care of myself because of ~allergies~ or ~anxiety.~ Fuck off.

- So, so many people report that they relapse whenever they menstruate so if your friend is in that group, they might want to prepare to feel like fucking trash every 4 weeks no matter what they do. I don’t have any advice on this one, I’m sorry. There are a lot of people discussing it in the FB groups, though, and those are searchable for symptoms. 

- So... a tl;dr list of things that might help: anti-inflammatory diets, anti-histamine diets, pepcid AC, allegra or other allergy meds, vitamin A/D/E, multivitamins, electrolytes and gatorade, albuterol, fluticasone, zopiclone (or anything that helps with sleep), CBD oil, singulair, anti-nausea meds (buscopan), muscle relaxants (spasming gallbladder). Rest, so much rest, do not fuck with The Rest if you can help it. I also encourage just getting high and edibles as much as you can because it sure helped me chill out big time and I think was a big factor in my recovery, at least as far as helping me calm down and helping my heart were concerned.

- The actual most helpful part outside of what to take or do was other people. Friends would go out and get me things when I could not, including like, cat food deliveries and all. I had co-workers ready to step in to take over my work on days I could not. I had friends calling doctors because I was too tired to fight them or self-advocate. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say they helped save my idiot life this year. Literally. It's a lot to ask of anyone but it's also that level of support that some of us need, and there shouldn't be any shame in it. (I still feel bad about it anyway but what are you gonna do.)

Depending on where you live, some places are setting up long-haul covid clinics to help people. Reports are mixed: some demand you had a positive test even if you were sick before tests were available. Some people are getting a lot of help regardless. Some are being sent home and told not to come back anyway. It’s kind of a gamble right now but either way, there’s at least some medical recognition making headway now so my fingers are crossed.

Anyway you basically sound like a good bean and your friend is lucky to have you asking around. I have absolutely forgotten something at some point in here because, well, brain fog and no memory, but if you have any questions or want something clarified please just ask. Stay safe!

[unrestedjade]

fic writing meme: 1, 12, 17, 18, 21

Oh dang, that’s a lot! Think I’ll put this behind a cut to spare everyone’s dash.

1. The first fandom I wrote and posted for was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But! Somewhere in a landfill is a notebook with a very overwrought Animorphs fic about Ax falling in love with my very cool, original-character-donut-steel alien bat-centaur who can tell the future. Every day I thank the universe for not letting my family have internet access until I was 14. Actually, maybe the universe should have held out longer, but you can peep the cringe for yourself over here: https://www.fanfiction.net/u/173909/Fortuna

Yes, that is my old ff.net profile. My only regret is that I didn’t get a chance to back up my ask fics before the site suddenly decided to make a rule banning them and deleted them all. (Me, still salty over that 15 years later? Why, yes actually.)

12. A trope I haven’t tried yet but really want to? It’s hard to narrow it down; there’s a lot of “cliche” fanfic tropes I never let myself write that I want to indulge in this year. I’m thinking about finding one of those bingo cards to use or something. But since I grew up sneaking my mom’s romance novels, I think an arranged marriage would be fun to try if I have to pick just one.

17. The fic I’m most proud of should come as no surprise, lol. I still can’t believe I finished something as long and plotty as finaglc. Would love to manage it again someday. :’)

18. Line/scene dvd commentary: okay okay okay! So there’s this more-or-less abandoned DaphGan Legend of Zelda fic I was writing back in the day, that was just a loose serious of vignettes in chronological order. I had ideas for like 20 chapters and fizzled out because it turns out only about three people on the whole earth give a shit about DaphGan and I can’t write in a complete void of feedback. Anyway, I researched medieval boar hunting techniques because I desperately wanted an action scene culminating in a ~bad omen~ and here it is, so scroll by if you just want to see the last question in the batch:

Within minutes, they were deep enough that the forest canopy closed above them, far above Ganondorf’s head.  In the cool and the dim, and with the rustling of leaves in the breeze overhead sounding almost like waves, Ganondorf felt as though he were at the bottom of a great, ancient lake.  Mist lay in a thick blanket on the ground as high as the smaller horses’ barrels, and a carpet of dead leaves and needles deadened the sounds of their movement.  The hunters had fallen silent.   About that, he had no complaints.

(I recall being inordinately fond of the underwater imagery, because I’d been struggling for how to conceptualize a thick forest for a person who’s spent most of his life in the open desert.)

Save for ferns and scattered herbs, there was little in the way of troublesome plants or low branches beyond the border of the forest, and Ganondorf realized that King Daphnes’ suggestion the day before had, in truth, been polite censure of his clothing rather than any practical concern.  He frowned, and put the thought aside.  It did not matter.

(I was not at all subtle about the Hylians picking at the Gerudo envoy’s appearances, which I think I could handle a little better now, but alas...)

He thought instead on the many sounds surrounding them, his ears straining to hear every one.   There was birdsong, in patterns and notes he had never heard.  Small creatures rustled in the trees.  Water gurgled somewhere out of view.   The woods were full of life in every direction, and Ganondorf quietly marvelled at its richness.

All of this, for the sport of one family?

(This piece of writing is old enough that I was still using the now-defunct “two spaces after a period” rule, wow. Also, hello there, years-old misspelling. :/)

They kept to a walking pace for an hour or two, hushed but alert.  The dogs picked up a scent, the party wheeling around to follow after them.   Ganondorf rode alongside King Daphnes.  The man’s eyes were alight as he looked down the deer trail ahead of the dogs; a small smile of anticipation grew on his face.  "They have something, eh?” he said, in a whisper.  “What did I tell you!”

The lead dog threw its head back, baying.  It launched itself forward and the rest of the pack followed suit, tails held high like flags.

An enormous boar, all sinewy muscle and bristled hide, burst from a nearby thicket and was driven ahead of them.

“Aha!" The king spurred his horse to a gallop, the rest of the party just behind.  Ganondorf quickly found himself bringing up the rear.

The stallion seemed to find this as unacceptable as he did, for without his urging it picked up speed, long strides eating up the ground until the pair were level with the king once more.

(This bit started with the rest of the hunting party giving G-dawg mad shit for insisting on riding his stallion instead of a more appropriate horse, so I had to vindicate him, of course.)

Ganondorf’s eyes were now fixed on the boar.  He crouched low over the stallion’s neck, free hand fisted in the tangles of its mane.  They pulled ahead to run with the dogs, until even the dogs were falling behind them.

"Stay with it!"  The king’s bellow carried over the thunder of the stallion’s hooves.  "Keep running it!”

They ran.  The boar was fast and nimble, leading a chase through dense copses and over fast-flowing streams.  The world fell away until all that remained was the path they weaved through the trees, the rolling strength of the horse beneath him, the forest rushing by in a blur of green and loamy brown, and the boar.

Ganondorf laughed like a child, his heart light for first time since he’d come to this impossibly green land.

The chase ended when the boar made to leap over a fallen log and could not clear it, tumbling end over end.  The beast scrambled to its hooves, brandishing its long tusks.  It had reached the point of exhaustion, steam rising from its hide, muscles quivering with exertion.  It could run no longer.

Ganondorf held it at bay, keeping the point of his spear trained on it.  He did not wish to incite it to charge and risk his horse.  He simply looked at it, watching the boar watch him with wide, red eyes.  Foam gathered at its mouth, and he wondered whether it would die where it stood, if its heart had burst in its chest.

The baying of the dogs was not far off.  The hunters were closing in.

(Still a little puffed up over the juxtaposition of hunting being legitimately thrilling but cruel. Catch my bro getting swept up in the excitement.)

“Excellent work!"  Daphnes was at the head of the party, as he had been to start.  "Oh, well done, man!”

As the dogs circled, barking and snapping, the boar stood its ground, head lowered.  It made a few feints at the dogs foolish enough to attack, but as the hunters closed in it had less and less room to manoeuvre.   Ganondorf could see it rallying for a final effort, weariness flowing into terror and rage.

It roared, lunging, scattering the dogs.   Blood streaked its tusks.  A horse reared when its leg was cut by sharp hooves.  For a moment, it looked to Ganondorf as though it might break away again and escape.

In one practiced motion, Daphnes leapt from his horse and sunk his spear deep into the boar’s side.

Ganondorf’s racing heart froze.  Pain keener than any he had ever felt lanced through him, choking him on a silent cry.  He clutched at his chest, groping for the spear-head that wasn’t there.  His own spear fell from numb fingers to the forest floor.  Terror and agony, all-encompassing, swept over him in a crushing wave.

None of the other hunters noticed his distress.  All eyes were locked on their king’s struggle with the beast.  The boar screamed, running against the spear as if it would happily run the length of it to reach Daphnes with its final breath.  The cross-tree of the spear and the strength of the man wielding it kept the boar’s tusks far from its target, however, and for every drop of blood that spilled from its side a portion of its strength bled away with it.

After what felt far too long, the boar collapsed.  It’s screams had faded to rattling breaths, and when Daphnes stepped forward, knife drawn, it did not resist.

It was on Ganondorf that its red eyes rested when its throat was cut, in some mute accusation or seeking solace, he could not say.  The pain in his chest receded when the final gout of blood ran out onto the dark earth.  By the time Daphnes stood from his task, wiping his hands and blade clean on a rag, Ganondorf might have believed that the pain had been a trick of his imagination.

(This thing with the dead boar was meant to keep coming up in small ways throughout the rest of the vignettes as a harbinger of G-dawg’s ultimate failure and doom along with being an illustration of how he twists and suppresses himself for the sake of pleasing Daphnes, but of course it’ll probably never happen now since I’m five years out. I really did like this idea, though, and this scene was super fun to write. Except for now I’ve noticed another old typo. T_T)

21. The fic that got away? Lots; I actually have a horrible track record for finishing long fics. The one I’m most bummed out by, that I still think of from time to time, was actually a fill for the old Transformers Anonymous Kink Meme on LJ. It was Animated-verse pre-war Ratchet/Ultra Magnus with a detour into Ratchet/Megatron. I was about two thirds of the way done when something happened in the community that I can’t recall anymore derailed me, and I never ended up finishing it. Sometimes I think about scraping it off the meme to at least archive what I had done on Ao3 or something, but I probably won’t lol. It would take forever to track it down since this was back in like, 2012.

[warriorlid14]

Ani Reread Book 1: Part 2

Aaaand we’re back for more traumatizing fun. You know what? I’m going to start rating these on disturbingness/times I went “oh my god these poor kids”. From 1 being “the animorphs finding an andalite toilet” to 5 being “IS ONE OF THESE KIDS SERIOUSLY BEING TORTURED ON PAGE??” Anyway:

“We were always kind of close. At least, until the last year or so.” Oh no. Oh nooooo. For some reason I always thought Tom was taken a couple of months before the series started, but it’s been a year?? Oh, my dear child. Also, Jake :(  I promise your brother still loves you very much.

“It’s just sports.” ... “Just sports?” Aaand we’re taking a short break from Animorphs to bring you a conversation between Hermione and Harry.

“The article went on to say that the police had arrived on scene and founda a group of teenagers playing with fireworks.” And yet again, we bring you a conversation between Arthur Weasley and muggle authorities. Also, I love that fireworks is the explanation for everything.

“Why would the police be... I mean, why would they lie?” Oh, baby.

Marco, about who could be a Controller: “Math teachers, for sure.” :)))))

Jake’s silent understanding of Marco and his situation gives me joy. And also sadness, cuz, ya know, Marco.

Animorphs says ACAB.

“Well morph back Tobias... Tobias hesitated.” Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing.

At some point in the series, I started skipping through the morphing descriptions... I was just reminded of why. 

Here goes one for the drinking one: drink anytime someone mentions thermals.

“I hadn’t ever seen Tobias so happy. I mean, Tobias has a pretty lousy home life. Thinking about it, I suddenly had this feeling...” FOREHSADOWING.

“I think the Andalite maybe meant more to Tobias than to the rest of us.” :)

“You want to get into this fight against the Yeerks?... Fine. Let’s see how much you want to do it when it turns out it’s your own brother you have to destroy.” Marco is a Slytherin confirmed.

“You couldn’t really picture Visser Three or a bunch of Taxxons playing volleyball.” Yes, I can. Very vividly. It’s great. Also, I wonder how many adults are concerned of how much The Sharing is like a cult. I mean, there’s even levels to it and everything. Idk, maybe those who are vocal about it are immediately turned into Controllers.

“Once you become a full member... The whole world changes.” SERIOUSLY. Also, am I a terrible person for cracking up at that?

Oh God, Tom. Idr who it was that brought this up, but I agree: One of the things that I love about the Animorphs is that they never once look at a Controller and go “Fight the yeerk! You can overpower it! You just have to try hard enough!” Because that’s not how it works. It is true that sometimes, under extreme duress, the host can maybe regain some very limited mobility. Ex: moving their arm for a few seconds, twitching, trying to move any limb. But one, the Yeerk can immediately shut it down. Two, it can easily be explained away. And three, the host will suffer for it harshly. This one tiny twitch where Tom tried to warn his little brother against joining the Sharing? Probably cost him extreme mental anguish at the hands of the Yeerk. Not to mention that it only works because Jake already knows about the Yeerks. Otherwise, he’d chalk it up as a weird twitch from Tom. (Yes, there’s a whole thing with the Chapmans, but I’ll bring it up in the next book.) The yeerks aren’t something you can defeat with the power of love or extreme willpower and I love that this series never painted it as such.

“Still, Tobias hesitated. ‘I hate changing back.’“ Ahem. FORESHA-

The Cassie/Jake is strong in this book.

Hey, look! Their assistant principal actually is evil.

“When everyone else was out of the hallway, I just climbed into my locker. I tried to act cool about it, just in case anyone was watching.” Ah yes, let me just casually SHOVE MYSELF INTO MY OWN LOCKER.

Aw, remember when the worst thing that happened to these kids was accidentally eating something gross while in morph? 

“No one gives a rat’s rear about me.” “I do.” Aww, baby Rachel/Tobias.

“You’re my best friend, you jerk. Like I’m going to let you go face all this alone?” I love Marco so much.

“Just tell them we’re Animorphs.” “Tell them we’re what?” “Idiot teenagers with a death wish.” ICONIC.

Aaaand we’re stopping there because I  gotta run. I don’t think these will usually be three-parters. Part one here.

[katelynrushe26]

Welcome to Everworld

If you were a kid in the '90's, chances are you crossed paths with the book series Animorphs in some way. Written by K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant, this sci-fi/action epic about kids turning into animals to fight off an alien invasion was one of the Scholastic Corporation's most popular IP's of that decade, rivaled only by Goosebumps. It had sixty-four books, numerous video games and toy lines, a TV show that ran for two seasons on Nickelodeon, and even cross promotions with fast food chains like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut that sold Animorphs collectibles with their kids' meals. An official graphic novel adaptation is now in the works, and the series still has a devout fanbase.

And rightly so. I started reading Animorphs at age nine, and to this day, it's easily one of the most powerful and formative works of literature that I've ever read. It was funny but tragic, relatable but imaginative, entertaining but horrific, and it often hit you with a sobering dose of reality that made the message of each book stay with you long after you finished reading. Best of all, its mature themes and ideas about the morality of war have made it just as meaningful and relevant to read as an adult as it did as a kid, so I highly recommend the series.

With that said, I want to discuss another book series that Applegate and Grant wrote during that same time called Everworld.

I occasionally saw ads for this series in the backs of the Animorphs books (exactly four of them), but the ads were always vague, and eventually those back pages were used to advertise other things. A promotional CD called The Everworld Experience was given out in bookstores upon the third Everworld book's release, but if the series was ever sold in Scholastic's monthly school catalogues or at any of its school book fairs, I can't find evidence of that. Botton line, it barely had any of the exposure or success that Animorphs did, and the series came to an earlier-than-planned conclusion after two years and twelve books.

This is a real shame, because now that I've finally sat down and read all of Everworld, I think the series is great. It deals with four Chicago teens (David, Christopher, April, and Jalil) who are dragged by a witch named Senna to a parallel world where the gods, monsters, and famous figures from all of Earth's mythologies live at constant odds with each other. The teens exist in this place, called Everworld, and on Earth simultaneously, with their consciousnesses jumping back and forth from one world to the other whenever they go to sleep. In addition to staying alive, their main goals in Everworld are to save it from an invading alien god named Ka Anor and to keep Senna from transporting more dangerous people to—and from—Earth.

I should start by saying that Everworld was written for an older audience than Animorphs; for high schoolers instead of middle schoolers. As a result, it has a much darker and grittier tone with less, shall we say, innocent protagonists. It shares a few themes with Animorphs, such as the stress of leading a secret double-life and having to compromise personal values for the greater good, but it also deals with themes like letting go of old perceptions as you grow up, realizing the cost of your deepest desires, and deciding whether to keep to the safe life you know or venture into a greater unknown.

Everworld's premise is clearly a metaphor for coming of age, a representation of the crossroads between childhood and adulthood where you need to start finding a direction for your life. For all of its fantastic settings and elements, the series is really about the four main characters' internal conflicts, not the external conflict around them. The external conflict is just a device that serves to make the characters deal with their internal conflicts, and this is important to keep in mind when reading the series. We don't see much of how the teens change Everworld by getting involved in its dealings, just how much deciding to get involved changes them.

As for the characters themselves, I think we're given a pretty well-rounded and relatable main cast. We have David, the self-appointed leader who feels unfulfilled in his normal life and is desperate to prove his worth due to his toxic masculine upbringing; Christopher, the less-than-sensitive class clown who leans on immature humor and sitcoms to cope with his problems; April, the wily, religious idealist who takes care of business when she needs to; and Jalil, the level-headed skeptic who tries to learn the science of everything so he can master it. A huge part of the overarching conflict is these four learning to get along and work together, and once that starts to happen, they become a fun group of friends to go through all of these crazy adventures with.

I've read complaints that some of their early character flaws (especially Christopher's tendencies towards xenophobic humor) turn off a lot of readers after the first few books. That's understandable, but the point of giving the characters those flaws is that they eventually see the error of their ways and reform. I don't approve of Christopher's intial brand of humor, but I actually like him the most out of the four because he undergoes the biggest and most dramatic transformation throughout the series. You see how finding a life goal in a world where he can't tune out reality so easily makes him a better person.

The other major character is Senna the witch, who really serves as the main antagonist of the series. Not that she's a villain; a major part of the story is trying to figure out her motives and allegiances, since she seems to help the four leads as often as she gets them in trouble. We even get a book narrated by her eventually, and that does a great job of swaying you to feel one way about her right before the series yanks you in the other direction. She's not as complicated as Snape from Harry Potter or Gollum from Lord of the Rings (even though she does shape-shift into him in one rather amusing scene) but I found her arc just as engrossing and its conclusion extremely rewarding. The whole series is worth reading just to get that rush at the end.

And that level of engagement is the ultimate reason why I recommend Everworld. It's one of the most immersive works I've read in a while, both in setting and tone. It takes you right back to the '90's from Page 1 with its now-nostalgic pop culture references and laid-back view of the world, and then it slowly pokes at that bubble with an ominous undertone until all hell finally breaks loose. The descriptions of Everworld effectively capture the feel of every location and threat, and Applegate and Grant's tongue-in-cheek humor goes a long way in keeping the series self-aware enough to avoid turning hokey. One of my favorite parts is in Book 4 when the teens try to catch a wild boar for food, only to have it beat them up and then suddenly order them in English to give it what little food they do have. It becomes a running joke after incidents like this for David, Christopher, April, and Jalil to mumble, "W.T.E. Welcome to Everworld," and then move on with their business.

Also, borrowing so many of its settings and characters from preexisting mythologies (with the authors' own creative twists, of course) builds anticipation as you wonder what other pantheons the series might explore as it goes on. It also gives the protagonists some prior knowledge going into each conflict, especially when some of them start using their "visits" back to Earth to research mythology. This helps endear them to readers by showing their proactive sides, as well as their overarching growth throughout the series as they start trying to help Everworld instead of escape from it.

What's interesting though is that the scenes on Earth are also very descriptive and immersive. It's easy in cross-world narratives like this for the "real world" to take a back seat to the more creative fantasy world, but the Earth scenes in Everworld have their own overarching story that also builds into a genuinely suspenseful conflict. This really sells the idea that David, Christopher, April, and Jalil still have some grounding in their normal lives that keeps holding them back from fully embracing their new lives in Everworld.

With that said, I do wish that their families had more of a presence in the series. The families in Animorphs were very well defined and prominent in a lot of the B-plots of some books. This made us like them almost as much as the Animorphs themselves by the end of the series, which raised the stakes tremendously whenever things started to escalate. In Everworld, we see the families occasionally but get very little sense of their personalities or the teens' relationships with them.

I don't think either of David's parents ever makes an appearance throughout the whole series, and I actually forgot for a while if Jalil's mother was even alive until he mentions her in one of the other characters' books. Things like this make it hard to feel the full emotional weight of certain events near the end of the series. I guess the idea is that teenagers going through major life changes like these just aren't always that close to their families, but it still feels like this particular element of the story could have had a little more focus to sell how torn the characters are between their two lives.

It's worth noting that Christopher's parents and brother probably get the most character out of all the families, with scenes as early as the second book showing their interests and personalities as they banter with him. Given his similarities to Marco, the main comedic character from Animorphs, I'm starting to think Christopher was the authors' favorite lead as well.

Also, one of the Earth antagonists in Everworld is named Mr. Trent. This was also the human alias of the main villain on the Animorphs TV show, which predates Everworld. I can't find any information on how both of these characters came to have the same name, as Applegate and Grant didn't write the TV show, but it certainly has me conjuring all kinds of theories about the two book series existing in the same universe.

So why wasn't Everworld more successful if it's so good? Why didn't Scholastic advertise the hell out of it to at least try and hook the millions of Animorphs fans back then?

Sadly, I think the answer lies in the reader demographics. When you're dealing with kids, a couple of years can mean a huge difference in maturity and what's considered appropriate material for them. Animorphs was surprisingly graphic and intense for a children's book series, but it was still written for children. I can't recall a single swear word ever being said in it, and things like drugs, sex, and xenophobia were either very vaguely implied, disguised in metaphors, or presented as problems that the alien characters (not the humans) struggle with.

The very first Everworld book features flashbacks where David recalls seeing a camp counselor molest a child and hearing a football coach call a player the "F" word for not being tough enough on the field—and they don't just say "the 'F' word" in the book either. Add a few dollops of religion, sexuality, infidelity, teen alcoholism, and other adult language throughout each book, and there was no way Scholastic could promote this series to the same kids who read Animorphs. The Everworld books don't even have that bright red Scholastic logo at the bottoms of their covers; there's just a tiny, inconspicuous logo on the spine and an even less conspicuous trademark credit on the back.

Again, I can't currently find any information about this. I'm very curious to know how this situation came to be though. Did Scholastic give the authors more leeway for Everworld because of Animorphs' success and then found out too late how far the pair had run with that? Did the company want to experiment with publishing more adult material but then started getting cold feet closer to Everworld's release?

The worst part of this, if it's true, is that Scholastic may have been right to worry. According to some of the YouTube comments and online book reviews I've read, a lot of kids who read Animorphs in the '90's were barred by their parents from reading Everworld. Some say their parents found the series too dark and inappropriate. Some say their parents took issue with it for religious reasons, due to all the pagan deities that it shows to exist. One person even said they were almost barred from Animorphs too after their parents vetoed Everworld. Not the kind of thing a Scholastic executive in 1999 would have wanted to hear.

I know that Scholastic would go on to publish the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series over the next decade, and both of those saw their share of controversy too. All things considered though, I do side a little with the parents when it comes to Everworld. The topics that I listed three paragraphs ago are important for teens to discuss, and it's realistic to include them in a story about teens, but I feel like the series presents them a little too bluntly for me to totally disagree with the parental discretion. There's an entire book about a lustful underworld goddess who does nothing but capture men and force them to "please" her under threat of castration, and there's an ongoing subplot where April questions what the existence of all the different pagan deities in Everworld means for her own Catholic beliefs. Even if this series had come out today, there would be a legitimate reason for the concerns.

I'll never say to bar your kids from reading anything, but here's a thing to consider: the main characters in Animorphs are roughly thirteen years old at the start of the series, they're sixteen by the last book, and the Everworld characters are sixteen throughout their series. Maybe letting your kids read Animorphs first and giving them a chance to mature alongside those characters is a good gauge for when you think they'd be old enough to read Everworld.

And if they decide for themselves that they don't want to read Everworld, then that's them choosing a direction in life, just like the series would want them to make.

~

[friendshiptothemax]

Hey guys! Sorry for taking a while to get back to this! Spent time hanging out with my fam, but now I’m back. My episode party in LA was pretty sweet except that the grill caught on fire and we had to extinguish it out! My parents’ party in Texas was also awesome. My dad didn’t know I was coming, and when my best friend and I pulled up, he started to tease her for being early before he saw me and he got all choked up!! Also my high school creative writer came, and my dad’s best friend showed up in Red cosplay (and when we opened the door he was down on his knees facing away with his hands behind his head and said he’ll only talk with Elizabeth Keen, which was v. funny). An awesome episode weekend all around! I also loved the reception from you guys – I got a lot of really sweet comments from you that I really appreciated. You guys are the best!

Now a few little BTS details that I promised:

The thing I’m most proud of that made it into episode 618 is the Weepies song at the end. Something a lot of people know The Blacklist for is our music – JB loves to pick out the perfect songs for each episode. I put The Weepies in my very first draft and was delighted to see them make it all the way to the final cut – it’s actually quite a high honor from JB, that he likes my taste in music!

My other favorite thing is the Ms. Pac-Man stuff. When I started writing the outline, all that was written there from Aram when Ressler gives him the quarters is “What’s this?” I think Aram is a really fun character, and I wanted to give him something more distinct to say, so I put Aram saying he used to hold the high score in Ms. Pac-Man. What is really cool about that is the second part, at the end of the scene, where Ressler calls it back, was added by the Johns later. It was a fun “yes-and” – they saw my original joke, and they liked it enough to build on it! Even more flattering? They’ve shot a callback to it in another scene this season! I’ve created a part of Aram’s character, y’all!

So a few notes on the development of the episode. Typically, when lower-level writers/assistants pitch for the show, we don’t know the specifics of where the plot will be in that episode. We might know the general arc, but not exactly what the B/C/D stories in the episode will be, and I was no exception. My idea was specifically that there was a true-crime podcaster who was killing people to make it look like the crime was resurfacing. The seed of this idea was my love for this true crime explosion that’s going on right now (if you love Serial, Making a Murderer, the Keepers, etc, my go-to recommendation is Criminal, which is a really excellent podcast). What intrigued me is that you listen to a true crime podcast, you are putting an extreme amount of trust the podcaster to give you all of the facts – when they might have biases you don’t realize.

My original idea had what I called the “wrong things for the right reasons” ending, where in the end, we find out that Tobias is innocent, the professor is guilty of the original murders, and Kimberly has been committing the new ones because she fervently believes the police got the wrong guy and is willing to go vigilante to correct their mistake. This is what I pitched in the room, BUT, from pretty much that first pitch, JB got really excited by what I call the “spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman.jpg” ending, where Kimberly kills people because she believes Tobias is innocent, but after she gets him out, she learns that he really did do the original murders.

The Spiderman ending stayed for a really long time! We were well into breaking the episode when we realized it didn’t really work – it made the final two acts SO CLUNKY. There had to be a scene where they each realized the other was a murderer, learned why the other did it, and we got their perspective on how they felt about the other being a murderer. Which was A LOT. It also left us without an innocent person for the FBI to be rushing to save (we call this the “muffin”).

At one point earlier on we had discussed the version where Kimberly had been the killer all along, which I hated when we initially discussed it. I couldn’t get my head around why, if she’d gotten away with it all of those years ago, she would not only return to her old ways, but also make a podcast about it? It seemed like a very broad villain move to me. But then, when we were banging our heads against the wall trying to get the Spiderman ending to work, someone suggested that she had done all of this, from the very beginning, out of love for Tobias and suddenly it was like *angels singing sound effect* and everything fell into place!! It’s funny how that works sometimes – I’m sure some of you fic writers can relate! Sometimes it seems really hard until just one little puzzle piece makes it all work. And thus you got the ending you saw on screen.

In my position as script coordinator, I name probably about a quarter of the characters on the show, so I didn’t have a ton of names in the bank that I really, really wanted to use, but I did get a few special ones in there. Tobias is for Tobias the Animorph, who I knew I was going to get a tattoo of to celebrate my first episode (he doesn’t have a canon last name, but I have used Tobias Carlyle in fic before). Kimberly is for my college roommate, who has done some radio work. I wish I could have used her full name, but her last name is REALLY FUCKING METAL. Imagine that her name is, like, Kimberly Swordsteel. It’s not quite that, but you get the idea. I knew the Johns would never let me get away with using it, so I just gave her a random last name (she was still honored!). I wish I could have named the professor after one of my faves, but since he was a creepo obviously that would not be a compliment, so I named him after Anne McCaffrey, the author of Dragonriders of Pern. Everyone else is just a jumble of first and last names from my Facebook feed.

Anyway, I hope you liked it! I had a great time writing it and an even better time watching it on the TV! I decided I wanted to be a TV writer back in 2007 when I was in the height of my Heroes fandom, so that I can say I wrote an episode of something on NBC twelve years later is pretty fucking surreal! As I’ve said in other places, James Spader is a master of his craft, and it was an absolute honor to have him perform words I wrote. I couldn’t have been luckier for my first episode.

I’m also really excited because I’ve been asked to record DVD commentary for this episode, which I’m looking forward to! :)

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

So when is Tobias a "Rules Lawyer" canonically? Seems ficcy.

In #8, when Ax tells Tobias that he has no choice but to go die trying to kill Visser Three, they have this conversation:

Ax: «I can't. I can't ask for help. Jake is my prince now ... or was ... he might forbid me.»

Tobias: «Wait a minute. You mean Jake could just tell you no, and you wouldn't do it? What if he ordered you to answer all our questions? Then what?»

«Everyone must have someone over him. That is Andalite custom. Each warrior has a prince... He could not order me to break our laws.»

«And Jake is your prince. I guess he's mine, too, in a way...Don't you have a duty to tell your prince what you're doing?»

«...Tobias? I have to do this. You promised to keep my secret.»

Ax goes toodling off to go off Visser Three and die nobly for the cause... and Tobias shows up with all the other Animorphs in tow.

«You told them, Tobias,» I accused him.

«Yeah, I sure did... I guess Jake is my prince, too. He ordered me to tell him. I told him to.»

If that's not rules-lawyering — technically Tobias has to tell Jake where Ax is going in order to follow Ax's own andalite rules, even though Tobias is usually the first person to point out that Jake's not a real prince — then I don't know what is.

Let's also not forget that Tobias only regains the ability to morph because he forces the issue with the Ellimist, midway through helping Jara and Ket escape in #13.

«Okay, that does it. Stop,» I told the two Hork-Bajir.

They stopped. The two big monsters just stood there in the dark between trees and waited.

"We go now?"

«No.»

"Taxxons coming."

«Yep,» I said. «l know.»

"We go now?"

«Nope. Not until I get some answers,» I said defiantly. «This little parade stops right here until I get some — »

Tobias announces to the Ellimist that it's obvious the Ellimist needs him, so he's going to refuse to offer that needed help unless he gets compensated.

"You're trying to save the Hork-Bajir race from the Yeerks?"

The Ellimist smiled again and shook his head. "We do not interfere. We do not use our power for one species against another."

"Bull," I said. "...You want my help?" I asked the Ellimist. "Fine. Then I want yours. You're just about all-powerful, according to Ax. You can make entire galaxies disappear if you want... You want me to lead these Hork-Bajir to this place you've put in my head? Fine. But I want to get paid for my services."

It's not nearly as clean as "the Ellimist let Tobias morph in exchange for getting the hork-bajir out." It's that the Ellimist tries to simply get Tobias to do it out of the goodness of his heart, and Tobias is like "screw you, pay me." Also, he's gutsy to try and change the terms of the deal when he does. Beggars can't be choosers, kid.

It becomes a whole issue, but in the opening of #21 Tobias steals a pair of swim trunks and a t-shirt for David:

«Remind me we have to return those to the Kahuna Beach Shop...»

"You stole them?" Cassie asked.

«No, I borrowed them. Besides, I'm a bird. Birds are not capable of stealing. What are they going to do, arrest me?»

Gotta love how Tobias goes from "am I a bird or a human?!?!!?!?!" in #3 to "I'm whichever is more convenient for the situation, birds can't steal" by the mid-series.

There are a couple sequences in #23 with Tobias being suddenly aware that he's dancing between identities. He starts out helping Toby with "what Jake doesn't know won't hurt him" but eventually realizes he has to tell the other Animorphs about the hork-bajir raids. He's being literal when he responds to DeGroot's offer of guardianship with "you can't lock me up," and he's not entirely playing a part when he says "my so-called 'real father' shows up and he's some lunatic... no money, right?" Like, he gets it's not entirely Elfangor's fault they had no relationship, but he's also aware that the will in question doesn't do shit for him but raise a lot more issues.

Also, if we wanna talk about Tobias's harsher side, in #33 there's his reaction to hearing Visser Three tell Sub-Visser Fifty-One/Taylor that he'll execute her if she doesn't get Tobias to spill his guts:

«He's going to kill you. Feed you to the Taxxons. Or do the job himself... You've failed him. Visser Three won't tolerate failure. You know that. But I guess that's life in the happy little Yeerk Empire.»

She looked hard at me. She knew I was trying to provoke her...

«l won't give in,» I said. «Do you know why?»

"No."

«Because if I surrender, you'll live. And if I resist, you'll die. And I want you to die.»

So yeeaah, even three-quarters dead and actively hallucinating Tobias resorts to "I'm sorry, ma'am, but it says right here in the List of Visser Three Policies that your continued existence depends on my cooperation, and therefore screw you."

Also, this gem from the tank sequence in #51:

"Is the guy a total idiot?" Tobias cried. "He's playing chicken with a tank. A tank!"

"He is bigger."

"Yeah? Well, we're better equipped."

The big gun rattled. Swung to the right.

"You can't shoot him, Tobias!"

"He doesn't know that."

Anyway, there are definitely other examples I'm missing, especially with that "if Jake never knows Jake never has to worry about it" attitude we get in the car-commercial-crashing in #3, sabotage in #46, nuclear-weapon-sabotaging in MM2, and so on. But point being, Tobias has perfected the idea of malicious compliance.

[hermitknut]

The Animorphs Ending

Alright, so I guess I’m finally writing this out.

DISCLAIMER: I fully support K. A. Applegate’s right to write her story however she likes; this is about my feelings on the ending and not any kind of should/shouldn’t bullshit. Also, while I am up for discussing this with anyone who’s around - I would love to hear your thoughts! - I am not interested in anything that starts “but you’re wrong because”. I am not wrong, because I am not talking about objective facts, I am talking about my very subjective feelings, and I know what those are.

Phew. Okay. So the short version:

I don’t like the ending. I felt let down and jarred out of the story, and upset in both the right way (fine) and the wrong way (less fine). 

Long version with MAJOR SPOILERS (skip now or forever hold your peace):

I’ve read a few things defending the ending of the series (including Applegate’s response to fans), and while I see where they’re coming from, I feel like there’s something missing. The argument is always framed like this:

“The ending had to be this way because it respects the reality of war in the same way as the rest of the series, and any tied-up-in-a-bow ending would cheapen it.”

vs

“But I wanted them to be happy! Why can’t everything be okay?”

I kind of agree and disagree with both of these points, if I’m honest, and this is how it breaks down:

1. Sure, I want the characters to be okay. I’m deeply fond of fluff, I like happy endings, and I will always be sad when I don’t get them. 

2. I also love animorphs BECAUSE it doesn’t flinch away from the reality of war, it doesn’t cheapen things by giving easy answers, and that’s incredible.

3. Depicting that reality is extremely important, but hope is part of that reality too, and it was very hard to see in the ending. 

Firstly I have a lot of low-key resentment, I guess, based on the overriding preoccupation at the moment with “misery as realism” - I don’t think Applegate is particularly guilty of this, honestly, but because so many other things are at the moment I’m kind of fed up with it and it means my tolerance for anything similar to it is lower. I appreciate that Cassie kind of got out okay, but we don’t see much of her in the ending, so it was tricky to lean on that. We’re mostly with Marco (who is clearly not okay but kind of in denial about it) and then Jake and Tobias who are definitely not okay. I would have liked to see a more even view of the four of them, if I was stuck with the events as they are.

So I wasn’t in a good place to enjoy that ending as it was, which was unfortunate.

Secondly, the time jump. We spent fifty-odd books going incredibly slowly through this really carefully-done character development - when you reread, particularly, you can see how everyone falls apart in their own way and adapts to handle what they’re going through. Then suddenly, the war has ended, we’ve jumped three years (and after that, another two), and all of these characters have jumped three years in character development - and it honestly jarred me almost completely out of the story. I knew who the characters were but I wasn’t attached to them anymore. Partly this is the limitation of the form - the short-read format doesn’t really allow for the kind of character development that I needed in anything less than, say, ten more books lol. I do understand that. But it is what it is. “Show Don’t Tell” is a pretty dubious rule, honestly, and I don’t stand by it generally, but in this case it didn’t work for me to be told how things and people had changed. It didn’t feel real. Which was frustrating, because we’ve had a time jump before that was done really well - #41: The Familiar, where Jake gets thrown forward in time to The Dystopian Nightmare.

What this all meant was that when we got told “Tobias is still living out in the woods alone” and “Ax has gone missing” and “maybe they’re all dead except Cassie now” instead of being upset as in “oh no that’s so sad!” I was upset as in “well I wanted to care but I don’t???” because I’d become disconnected from the narrative.

[Sidenote: I think that fandoms in general don’t talk about that distinction very often (or at least, I haven’t seen it): that difference between “I’m sad and upset because sad or upsetting things happened to my characters” and “I’m sad and upset because the author has (unintentionally, usually) lost my trust and I feel let down”.]

I guess what I wanted from the ending was the same closeness we’ve had all the way through the series. I wanted to see Marco, Tobias, Cassie, and Jake get back to earth from the poolship, I want to see what happens in the days after the war, I want to know what it was like for them to deal with that, and ultimately I am way more interested in that however it turns out than I am in things that happened a few years later. 

Another part of the ending that I want to talk about is Rachel’s death, because here we go: 

Rachel’s death, along with all the other Actual Canon Events of the ending? I’m fine with them. I think they were perfectly reasonable choices. 

My problem with the post-three-year-jump stuff is as discussed above - it’s to do with how the story is told, not events themselves. 

My problem with Rachel’s death is trickier, because on the one hand I think it’s appropriate that a major character died given the seriousness of the situation, and on the other Rachel was the one character I was really interested in seeing post war.

Rachel is the girl who is too angry, too aggressive, too violent, too scary. And she knows it - the others make sure she does. She gets told in one way or another, over and over, “you’re not going to be able to cope with life outside of war because you love this too much”. And I wanted so badly to see Rachel live out the end of the war, and have to face this. Is she too violent? Is she really any more violent than any of the others, or is she just less likely to pretend it away? Having been forced to face her own inner darkness in a more direct way than the others (who all in one way or another euphamise or dodge around when they deal with it), what does that mean for her recovery post-war? 

So in a personal way, I’m sad that we never get to see that, as it was something I was hoping for; I still do understand the choice of killing her off, though. 

This has been massively rambly but hopefully makes a degree of sense. In summation:

Yes wrapping everything up in a neat bow and giving us a happy ending would have been a terrible idea. No that doesn’t mean I feel like the ending as is did everything it was trying to do.

(And yes, I’m writing an extended fix-it fic. Because that’s what I do.)

[chad-buskin]

disjointed rambling about the epilogue

This is kinda late but here goes.

I'm not exactly shocked that this is something Hussie would write, though I am a little surprised it's something he would actually make public, given that I thought he had gone fully into "sellout mode" and was just going to give the fans whatever they want because he needs their money to finish making Hiveswap. In that context the epilogue seems like a pretty bad business decision, more likely to drive away fans than reawaken their interest in the comic. It's also surprising that he would bother to wrap up the remaining plot threads only to open up a new storyline and leave that one dangling, unless this isn't actually the final ending of the comic (but in that case why call it an "epilogue"?) -- or unless he's planning to tie the remaining plot thread into Hiveswap somehow (??).

(The epilogue actually reminds me a bit of the ending to the Animorphs series, where in the final book they win the war, and then we get a long, depressing interlude where the characters try to adjust to living normal lives and they all drift apart and fail to cope with their PTSD in various ways, and then suddenly a new threat appears and the series ends on a cliffhanger. I think everyone hated that ending too.)

Anyway yeah, given that this is Hussie just doing what he wants and not trying to pander to fans in any way, it's not surprising that the idea of "character development" basically turns out to be a joke, since I've always had the impression that Hussie viewed the entirety of Homestuck as a joke, and playing with the readers' emotions was just another part of that joke to him. So whatever. I kind of admire him for finally giving up on sarcastic pandering and just writing whatever the hell he wants to write, even though it doesn't give me what I most wanted to read. Obviously framing the epilogues as "fanfic" is a concession to the readers he knows will be disappointed, encouraging them to write their own endings if they don't like his.

About Dirk though -- while as a Dirk stan I don't really want him to be "the villain", it doesn't strike me as particularly ooc or anything. Almost everything Dirk does in the epilogue seems believable to me based on what we know of his character (given the circumstances; for the main exception, see below). I know some people are theorizing that Dirk's personality has been like infiltrated by Caliborn somehow, and are pointing to stuff like his mocking Dave and Karkat as "incels", misgendering Roxy, etc as evidence; but tbh that stuff is totally in keeping with how I've always seen Dirk's character. I've always thought he had a certain amount of "toxic masculinity"/internalized homophobia/etc going on. Especially given that I see Dirk's narration as representing his inner thoughts and not something he would necessarily say out loud/to his friends' faces, that stuff seemed very believable to me. Just that whole thing of like... expressing self-hatred by internally mocking other people who share qualities you're ashamed of in yourself, or making *ist "jokes" and actually having no idea whether or to what extent you mean it “ironically” is just, like... a thought process that's very familiar and relatable to me personally, tbh. 

The one major part of his characterization in the epilogue that doesn't ring true to me is his attitude toward Jake. I get that he's supposed to be bitter about their breakup, but the contempt he expresses is so OTT it doesn't seem compatible with the Dirk we've gotten to know through Act 6, who seemed to genuinely like and care about Jake. This is the part I really can't justify without resorting to the "he's merged into his Ultimate Self" theory.

Back when the Ultimate Self stuff first started coming up in the comic -- when the characters were presenting the ultimate self as like the true self -- I posted about wondering what that meant for Dirk, given so many of his alternate selves seem to be giant dickwads? So yeah, if the theory is true, it does confirm that Dirk’s Ultimate Self is actually a huge asshole.

But since the narrative (still!) breaks off without an actual conclusion, I can't really regard this as like "the final say" on Dirk's character or complain that he "ends up" as a villain bc like... we're still not told how the story ends!

Anyway yeah, that's why I don't totally hate the Meat epilogue and what it does with Dirk.

Candy is pretty much garbage, though.

[obsidianwolfxredux]

Reread Animorphs megamorphs 2

So i just finished the second megamorphs and it is a frustrating book I mean just by rule of cool it wins with Dinosaurs but it also was so clearly an event book that was clearly done for marketing that it kind of stumbles around a lot. It was clear form the beginning that any dinosaur morphs would be lost but no real explanation was given for it or why Tobias suddenly couldn't heal. Which frustrates me cause there was a simple explanation involving the sub. Simply say they were irradiated by the sub explosion then have Ax explain that because they were in morphs at the time they wouldn't suffer long term effects but until the morphing tech expelled all the radiation there ability to heal or acquire new morphs would be limited.  Just have him say any morphs acquired during the period (set it at for longer than you plan to have them in the past) wouldn't take and would fade with the radition. IT would allow the drama of Rachel carrying an injured Tobias around and let them morph dinosaurs while not breaking things in the future. Next lets talk about the Mecora and nesk problem.  The jokes about broccoli being stupid but I actually like the tragedy of the animorphs having to prevent the Mecora from being saved from a situation they unintentionally create by shifting the balance of power between the two races. The problem is since it happens in this side book it doesn't really come up often enough. This is the type of thing that should have been an issue. Especially in what should have been CAssie's arc this is one of the few books that actually almost addresses her nature as a hypocrite with her reasoning that she could blame Tobias so she didn't have to blame herself. Not to mention her speech to Marco which should have been the beginning of an arc where they were actually debating things and challenging each other instead it peters out like all possibilities for growth for Cassie. I suppose it is fitting that up next is one of the worst most infuriating books in the series IMO The Departure. More on that when I've reread it.