#the author grew up on animorphs! more!

[ao3bushwah]

128 chapters now, plus four more for patrons, but yeah, basically. this will power blast your boredom guaranteed (if it doesn't work you get your money back) (not your patreon money. the $0 you paid for the first 128 chapters or however many there are when you're reading this)

side effects may include staying up too late, saying "what the fuck derin" to an empty room, and knowing what day of the week it is.

so really what do you have to lose? click the link. read chapter 1. no harm in reading 1 chapter. it's 2500 words. at the average fiction reading speed for native english speakers that will take you ten minutes. you have ten minutes right? hop to it. here's the link again

001: JAVELIN

Did I do the meme right

88 chapters of space mystery

[mihai-florescu]

Hearing about popular childrens books in the english speaking world is funny. Warrior cats and animorphs werent a thing here but yknow what was? La Medeleni & Cireşarii. The first one is a coming of age series that follows 3 kids as they grow up, and it ends with one of the main characters knowing she has cancer, killing herself 2 days before she was to get engaged to the love of her life. In the epilogue the childhood home they grew up in, that shaped their entire story, is sold, and her brother and childhood friend decide to write the story of their memories to keep her and their past alive that way.

The other series follows a different adventure and mystery in every volume (from exploring caves to castles to the sea) and ends with the main characters discovering the poet Ovid's lost grave. The epilogue still haunts me, of the author speaking directly to the characters as everything is vanishing and turning to black around the streets they had treaded before, the protagonists knowing the end is near as the author puts them to sleep. "What will our friends say? Will you deprive me of them? I am nothing without them. You are cruel, the only one i could never conquer. You of all!" "It's time to part ways, it's late." (...) "Life flows. We are a second of the world's imagination" and then they wish each other a good journey, the end. One of the characters, the author's favorite, struggles even past the ending against the darkness, begging his beloved author to find one more adventure, one more story for them as he's fading away. "If only you knew how much i loved you!" "You're starting again? Can't you understand we're no longer in the book?..."

I want to reread these books soon with a new understanding than what i had when i was 10... what were the classic elementary school books you guys had?^_^

[sawthefaeriequeen]

Your 10 Most Read Authors

tagged by @queenofattolia

What are your ten most Most Read Authors? And how many books have you read by them? Also tag someone who you would like to do this! (Original Instructions (this option wasn't available for me): Scroll to the bottom of your shelves and most read authors is listed underneath. What I did: Exported my Goodreads library and did some Excel magic.)

What I did: reevaluated a lot of childhood faves and then looked at my physical shelves at who was taking up the most space.

1. It’s probably cheating but: Ann M. Martin and her cadre of BSC ghostwriters, all who probably wrote 30 BSC books apiece AND some of them wrote for Sweet Valley (which didn't list its ghostwriters) so I’ve probably read more of them than I realized. I read them all as a child of course. About 5 years ago, I participated in a fandom reread of the series!

2. More cheating? Katherine Applegate (and Michael Grant). 30-ish books. Mainlined Animorphs when I was in college.

3. Beverly Cleary, 19 books. My mom! I read the bulk of her books as a child, but I kept collecting Beverly Cleary books well into college.

4. Madeleine L’Engle, 18 books. The formative books were all read in my teens, but I really got into her fiction and had to get my hands on all of them in college. I still have so much of her nonfiction to read.

5. LM Montgomery, 18 books. Her prose was just what I needed when I was in college and floundering and feeling a real creative drought. I sometimes wish I’d read them as a child, but I was glad they were there for me when I needed them.

6. Judy Blume, 15 books. My other mom! I grew up with her; her books raised me. Read from childhood to adolescence.

7. Robin McKinley, 13 books. I finally got into her in my late twenties. Everyone was right.

8. Frances Hardinge, 10 books. An auto-buy. I discovered her books in my late twenties. She singlehandedly reignited my faith in the ability of middle-grade books to still have complex themes and be extremely freaking good.

9. Diane Duane, 10 books. Got super into her books in college. Another author who was there when I really needed it. Young Wizards speaks directly to my worldview. They are the only books of hers I have ever read so far, but wow she’s prolific.

10. Melina Marchetta, 8 books. My favorite living author, possibly? I have never not loved a book of hers. Discovered her right as I was on the cusp of graduating from college, and thank God for that.

tagging @dreamingthroughthenoise @disbear @pathless-wood @natural-blue-26 @youandthemountains

[jadeglas]

Ok, now that I've had a bit of time to get used to how Tumblr works again, I'm going to do a take 2 on my introduction, if no one minds too much. (mostly for clarification)

About Me

Name: Jade

Pronouns: she/her

ID: Pan Cis F (wife, mama, and storyteller)

Age: 30-something

Loves: music, stories, caffeine, warm carbs, alone time, cuddles, puns, crochet, folk lore, Minecraft, languages, and anthropology, in general

Currently learning: Spanish, my Instant Pot, healthy goal setting, and which style of outline can I actually stick to

Polarizing opinion: fan fiction is a useful tool for helping new writers develop their confidence and writing voice while also connecting with others about a topic(s) they are passionate about

My Street Cred

I love running and playing table top rpg's, especially D&D, World of Darkness, and Savage Worlds. I have LARPed, mostly WoD Vampire, but I haven't run one myself. I haven't run any games in a good while, but I mostly ran Fantasy and Modern Supernatural. My specialty was horror in either genre.

I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction and The Dark Tower by Stephen King (bc that series jumps all over the place, genre wise). I love Neil Gaiman, I've read up to book 30 something of the Animorphs (yes, the side-books, too), and, currently, my favorite book I've read as a "grown up" is Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick S��skind. (it's also my favorite book-ti-film adaptation). My favorite scary movie is Paranormal Activity (I love a story that's not afraid to take it's time building suspense), but my favorite romance movie is still The Princess Bride.

The last time I was on Tumblr I was heavily involved in fandoms, (The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Sherlock, Overwatch) and I posted fanfiction... I can't say regularly (I'm very undisciplined), but I did post stories multiple times.

Undisciplined is a good word for my previous writing style. I would write when inspiration struck me, and I lived to world build, but I never outlined or put any effort into prewritting. It was common for me to abandon a current WIP when I found inspiration for a new story.

Currently

My WIP spans a novella (30k words) and 5 novels. (I know, ambitious, but this time I actually have a plan in place) They'll all be romance novels with secondary action story arcs and the paranormal premise is that a recent global event has resulted in some of the population becoming werewolves! I have an evil mega-corporation who will, of course, be using doing shady and dastardly things, but I'm still not sure how the couples of each book will be connected. Right now, I'm outlining everything and the novella is giving me the most trouble (I've never tried to tell a whole story with so few words!)

If this series does well, I think I'd like to do another series in the same world, but with Vampires (romance/power exchange/politics?) or Fae (romance/horror). (No supernatural creatures will ever scare me more than the Fae)

I have an idea for a smaller series? It would still be paranormal romance, but polyamorous, and each book would be the MC falling in love with a new person, while also navigating how to keep her relationships with her other lovers healthy and strong. It's mostly strong vibes, right now, though.

Tumblr

Like I said in my first introduction, I'm here to get my writing passion back and be a part of a community (friend me and I'll send you all the platonic love and support you can handle!). I'll have an author website some day, and possibly start an email list before that, but this is where I can be me and where I can connect with like-minded folks. That being said, inconsistency is a bitch of a habit to break, so I'm thinking I'll have a posting schedule where I'll post on a different topic each day of the week, and then I'll re log and react to posts whenever I can.

Right now, this is what I have in mind:

Monday-- Inspiration (music, pics, ideas)

Tuesday-- Updates (me, my WIP)

Wednesday-- Self Care (bc we all need it)

Thursday-- Recommendations (tools, hacks, and sites)

Friday-- Story/book reviews (that I'm reading)

I have a lot of family and family-in-law that lives nearby, so weekends get crazy sometimes, but weekdays I can do.

All this being said, inconsistency is in my nature, so don't be surprised if things change from time to time.

And so on

Feel free to message me or ask me questions! I'd love to hear about your current WIP, whether it's OC or not, or talk about world building. If you have a published story you think I might like, Is love to hear about that, too!

Thanks for being patient with me!

I'll post again tomorrow, so you take care of yourself.

[lilacsolanum]

So as a kid I was so obsessed with Animorphs and also all but grew up in a library thanks to my dad. Because of that 10-year-old me knew how to search for an author in the library computers and read their other stuff. I read anything I could by K.A. Applegate, including her romance. I've always wanted to revisit it as an adult and see how fucked up it gets.

Turns out, one of their series, which was first called Boyfriend/Girlfriends, then called Making Out, now called The Islanders, has been released for kindle with """updates""" in 2015, and is absolutely wild. This book series is 2/3rds regular teen romance soap opera, 1/3rd psychological warfare between two characters named Benjamin and Claire aka More Nice Marco and Less Nice Cassie. It's amazing. I just started the second book. K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant, y'all are amazing.

[wingsoffireaus]

Okay so let's talk about Jerboa...

Again trigger warnings. But let me start off by saying this.

I actually didn't mind the chapter delving into her past so much. BUT I get if people are triggered or don't like it.

I mean I was shocked it was in there. But it didn't bother me that much. Guess that goes to show who I am though.

I don't know guys. Like it's bad. It really is. We've got it all here. Child abuse. Brainwashing (literally) and some loss if limb. But... I don't know. Like it took me back but...

Yeah it's probably bad that I just found it more fascinating than anything else. Like it's a very good dive into how ultimate power (and time) can corrupt you. Like... Ugh. I thought it was fascinating.

But.. I don't know. It's valid that people are upset over this part. It really is. But I grew up reading animorphs and let me tell you... That is some fucked up shit. Haha. Y'all think "oh those books with the silly covers? Psh what do they have?"

Haha how about. Child soldiers. Someone gets eaten in the first book. Mind controlling slugs. Racism. Ableism. Loss of limb. PTSD literal children being mind controlled by slugs. Cannibalistic giant centipede things. Genocide. Chemical war fair.

Oh and the series ended on one of the darkest cliffhangers I have ever seen. So yeah. Guys I've grown up reading stuff like this. It does not bother me at all. It probably should... But it doesn't. In all seriousness though guys Animorphs is an amazing series and I recommend it... But keep these in mind. To be fair they actually do have a lot of humor and character... Admittedly once the ghost writers took over it took a turn but .. we don't talk about that. But yeah. (There is an actual gay alien couple in the later books though. Being in the 90s they couldn't be obvious about it but... It's there guys. It's very obviously there. And the author's confirmed it. Not in that way. Like they did all they could do to confirm with out saying it straight out.

Anyway. Sorry Animorphs is a thing for me. I can't help but rant about it.

Continuing on. Yes this is a disturbing chapter. And I can see people being freaked out about it... But to be honest y'all can probably skip it. Actually here this is what pisses me off about all this.

Why does Jerboa exist? I literally think it's just because Sutherland came up with this fascinating character backstory.. but besides that Jerboa doesn't really do anything. Besides traumatizing children. She does that very well. Like I said earlier it didn't bother me. But I'm so fucked up that even as a child I don't think it would have bothered me. Again haha animorphs. But I don't think I'd let any of my nieces or nephews listen to that part. Maybe that's my protective side coming in I don't know. Meh. Ultimately I think it depends on who it is reading it.

So here's the thing that pisses me off. Jerboa took away animus magic. Cuz that's totally a great idea.... Fuck off man. I hate this trope. Why is this a trope? Why is this a thing? Let's take magic away! (But did anyone else notice she said only living Animi. Good job Tui. If you ever want to write a future book with Animi you can now.)

But just... Okay the obvious reason Tui did this was so they can't use magic to defeat the plants... But hey guess what? What you could've done is a spell where no magic can ever cause harm. Boom. Fixed it.

Then they can't use it to just kill Wasp. They'd have to find a way around it. Isn't that more interesting than taking it away? Like I'm sorry it's just... It's so boring and stupid.

This is exactly like when in fantasy movies they always have to leave the magic behind. Oh wow magical world. Oh wow friends. Oh no you have to go home but you're okay. Cuz being normal is good.

Cut it with the condescending crap! It pissed me off when I was 6 (seriously guys Narnia was an... Event when you watched it with 6year old tree) and it ticks me off as a 21 year old adult!

We're reading these books for the magic! Don't introduce it and then write it out so lazily! Even as a kid this would upset me.

But um yeah. So Jerboa? I kind of wish you didn't exist. Yes your backstory is... Deliciously tragic. And I'm just the sicko to find it fascinating. But y'know what. I could've lived without the taking magic away. No.

And another reason this upsets me?

Turtle. Hey anyone remember the end of his book. When he had a shut down when his magic was taken away? A vital piece of himself? No?

Well it seems like Tui has too. And it just... Fuck guys. I cried at that part! And I was ecstatic when he got it back. But nah guys.

Animus magic is too convenient. Better scratch that. Not try and be creative.

Blegh...

Oh wait... Hold on. Yeah so remember the ring? Yes the magic ring? That I'm kind of on the fence about? Guess what it adds another layer against Jerboa doing what she did. The ring shows the good magic can do. And then we had the crown showing the bad... I just .. I don't know I feel about this guy's. I just wish they weren't a thing. Cuz now I just feel like there could've been a dialogue about the good and evil of magic. But there's not really. Let's be real here. Once again one person made a decision without talking to anyone else. And I hate that. I want dialogue guys. I want conflict and then talking. You can't have one person be it all.

Cuz that's just as bad as one person running the show. But this is never gonna come up again. Just like Peacemaker is just gonna... Be Peacemaker. And it's all just... So upsetting I don't know.

I am so genuinely upset by these cheap cop outs guys. And I'm tired.

Anyway sorry guys. Prolly not the rant y'all expected. But I'm tired now. And emotionally drained from writing this.

Sounding totally cliche. I miss the magic of this series. But I feel like it's been getting drained from it. Literally and figuratively.

[little-droid]

Little Droid's Long Overdue Animorphs Re-Read: Intro

I was recently reminded of the existence of the Animorphs series by a stray Twitter thread. The tweet decried JK Rowling's downhill slide into TERF ideology. “Is K.A. Applegate a TERF? I bet not,” posited Twitter user @TransSalamander, quite correctly.

In recent years K.A. Applegate has spoken about being a parent to a trans daughter, is openly supportive of the diverse fan base her books have accrued, and encourages readers to interpret her characters in ways that are meaningful and validating to them. A positive model of a beloved childhood author interacting with the kids who grew up on her books, now grown adults looking to engage more critically with their media.

K.A. Applegate was practically a household name when I was a kid, at least where I grew up. When I think of the Animorphs, I am viscerally teleported back to being a scrawny nine year old, eagerly relaying the latest updates to my friends after a weekend spent in the children's section of my local library, frantically combing through the shelf above the Goosebumps books for the next instalment in the series.

It mystified my parents. As far as they were concerned, their child had been possessed by a demon whose only purpose was re-reading flimsy sci-fi novels over and over until the a new one could be snatched from the clutches of the librarians and the enthusing could be halted for another week. I don't think they understood what I saw in those well thumbed pages. I'm not sure they'd have let me continue if they did.

For those who haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, Animorphs was a children's sci-fi series published by Scholastic in the late nineties. It chronicled the story of five thirteen year olds who stumble across a crashed alien spaceship on the way home from the mall. They meet a dying alien who tells them of a secret invasion of parasitic aliens hell bent on taking over Earth by possessing its inhabitants Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. Without any other recourse, the alien gives the five teenagers the power to morph into animals as a way to fight the evil aliens and save their planet.

Sounds fun, right?

...Right?

There's a running joke in the Animorphs fandom that nostalgia for the series comes in only two flavours: people who've never read the books and remember the quirky premise and colourful covers featuring kids turning into animals through the wonderfully clunky medium of nineties CGI, and people who have read the books and grimace involuntarily whenever you bring them up.

Animorphs remains one of the most brutal explorations of violence, trauma and the horrors of war published in children's genre fiction. The series is famously unflinching in its willingness to present mature topics and grapple with morality in ways that are both accessible and honest for 9-12 year olds.  I honestly have no idea how the authors got away with publishing some of these, but nine year old me was hooked.

Despite my love of the series, I've never finished all of it. As a child I was limited to whichever books I could scrounge from the library, and copies became increasingly scarce as time went on. There's some gaps in my understanding of the canon, and I’d estimate I've only read about 2/3rds of the 62 total books. (I'm not counting the two 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books, these weren't well received and I don't plan to read these at all). I have however read the final book, so at least I know how it ends. Even if I wish I didn't.

Clearly, this is a situation which needs to be remedied. It's been twenty years since I picked up an Animorphs book, and that's twenty years too long.

I'm planning on re-reading the entire series, including the companion books, and writing up recaps as I go. I'm not intending these to be reviews as such. More along the lines of blogging my impressions, including both my recollections about the series as a nine-year old, and how my thoughts have changed as a queer adult with C-PTSD.

You are very welcome to read along with me. I'd love to hear from you.

Please note that even though this is a children's series, it contains blanket content warnings for: violence, trauma/mental health discussion, body horror, gore/graphic depiction of injury, and death.

Additional content warnings related to specific books will be posted at the top my recaps.

[birdthany]

So I got tagged in two different ask memes at around the same time, once by @subarulesbian and once by @mollyglock and I’m going to consolidate them under one cut because some of the questions repeat

First, the one I was tagged in by @subarulesbian​. Because this one is longer and therefore has more of the repeats 1. How tall are you? 5′6.5

2. What color and style is your hair? Right now it’s shoulder-length brown fluff. Think like Regina Spektor’s hair if she didn’t brush or style it and rolled around a lot in her sleep.

3. What color are your eyes? Blueish grayish.

4. Do you wear glasses? Yes, though I often go without them

5. Do you wear braces? Not since eighth grade

6. What is your fashion style? Don’t have much of one, but I like leggings, sweaters, and adding pins and patches to jackets and jeans. 

7. Full name? Bethany Johanna

8. When were you born? October ‘97, though for Reasons I consider April 22 to be my Birthday, and it’s the one I Celebrate

9. Where are you from and where do you live now? Massachusetts, near Boston. And Massachusetts, near Boston.

10. What school do you go to? I go to a local Comewnitty Cawledge. 

11. What kind of student are you? Not an amazing one. Usually I know all the material but my executive dysfunction and anxiety causes me to miss or lose a bunch of the assignments and/or tests, and my migraines make me miss class, so I end up with very middling grades.

12. Do you like school? Depends on the subject, the atmosphere of the class, and how understanding the professor is about the aforementioned issues I have.

13. What are your favourite school subjects? well i majored in philosophy so i guess that lol.

14. Favorite TV shows? okay i like hardly watch tv anymore but i will come out of my cave for better call saul, stranger things, westworld, and bob’s burgers. also i’ve seen scrubs and the x files all the way through like a hundred times each.

16. Favorite books? The Animorphs series. Lately I’ve been rereading ASOUE, too. Other than excellent childrens’ series I mostly read nonfiction.

17. Favourite past-time? Chilling, talking to friends, art, listening to music

18. Do you have any regrets? Hah. Haha. I guess I’ll say “being too tolerant of bullshit.”

19. Dream job? Last time I got an ask meme I said “head of a successful band and author,” and then I realized I was describing Gerard Way, but I don’t really have a different answer. I’d love to rescue guinea pigs professionally but that’s even less attainable. 

20. Would you like to get married? Theoretically..... Dunno how likely it is though. Because of Circumstances

21. Would you like to have kids someday? Not biologically, never ever biologically, but I’d like to adopt.

22. How many? 2 or 3, probably. Sibling relationships are important to me

23. Do you like shopping? If I have a gift card and a lot of energy, yeah. Otherwise, no. and I hate clothes shopping

24. What countries have you visited? I can name every country in the world, but I have been to none outside the US.

25. What’s the scariest nightmare you’ve ever had? Oh, boy. You’ve gotta be way more specific than that. 

26. Do you have any enemies? Not super sure. I think there are some people who would consider me an enemy that I’ve just moved on from thinking about at all.

27. Do you have a s/o? Noooope. Not gonna do that again for awhile, either

28. Do you believe in miracles? Probably? Depends on what exactly you mean, again. I’ll say probably. Now, the one I was tagged in by @mollyglock

★ nickname: Most people just call me Bethany, but my ex used to call me “Bread” and Jay sometimes calls me “B” or “Bthany” (pronounced like bee-thany)

★ zodiac: tauruś 

★ height: 5′6.5″. yes the half inch is important (I know I already answered this but I think it’s funny that I didn’t have to change Robin’s answer at all)

★ last movie i saw: hhhhh I.... uh..... Oh! It was Bohemian Rhapsody.

★ last thing i googled: “november 2018 movies” trying to remember what the last movie I saw was. Before that “regina spektor hair” to make sure I was remembering right for my previous answers

★ favorite musician: 

now the last thing I googled was “gerard way deviantart stamp” 

★ song stuck in my head: “Come One, Come All” by All Time Low. I don’t really listen to them, but it’s on my playlist of “songs that are weirdly hateful towards DJs” 

★ other blogs: This is it babey

★ do i get asks: Sometimes! More often I get posts sent to me from the Messaging function

★ following: 569 but probably like half are inactive

★ followers: 339

★ amount of sleep: Absolutely completely varied and random. Today it was a lot, tomorrow it might be none.

★ lucky number: 13, I suppose

★ what i’m wearing: Magic school bus T-shirt, Cape Cod sweatshirt, and Jeggings. Because I’m an adult. Oh, and a warm beanie-ish type hat.

★ dream job: Already answered!

★ dream trip: I really want to see the world eventually... I’d be happy going just about anywhere tbh, but I really want to leave the country. Somewhere warm with really cool wildlife like Australia would be awesome.

★ favorite food: Anything that combines tomatoes with mozzarella or chocolate with peppermint. 

★ play any instruments: I did violin as a kid and still kinda remember how to play it, I’m an amateur at guitar, and I did voice for quite awhile but my voice is different than it was before so I fuck up singing a lot now

★ language: I’m only fluent in English, but I'm also conversational in ASL because my mom is an ASL interpreter and her BF and many of her friends I grew up around are all Deaf

★ favorite song: I’m going to follow Robin’s example and pick a Danger Days song, I’m gonna go with Party Poison! It seems appropriate since that whole ‘verse but also that song specifically is why the Party Poison symbol is the one I had Gerard draw so I can get it tattooed 

★ random fact: Birds are my Brand(tm) but I love guinea pigs just as much, and I have Three of them. whereas I only have the one bird

★ describe yourself in an aesthetic: I have little-to-no awareness of my own appearance or vibe, I don’t really know if I have an aesthetic? I’d like to think I give off an artsy and loving vibe. I pretty much always have paint and/or animal fur/hay on my clothes, so it seems possible. 

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Can you review #35, the proposal?

Short opinion: Bless this book.  Seriously, bless it.  It has everything that makes Animorphs so good: off-the-wall humor, body horror, chilling tension, horrible technological accidents, 1990s pop culture, Tobias snark, apocalyptic omens, dog pee…

Long opinion:

This book is comic relief in its purest form—literally relief from the horror of the war at a time when we really need an emotional breath.  It’s probably the last book in the series I’d classify as being more light than heavy, but it’s still got plenty of heaviness in there as well. The end result is intensely enjoyable while also being incredibly disturbing.  (Like I said: Animorphs in a nutshell.)

For instance, there’s no small amount of angst and horror in here as well as humor and [found] family bonding.  The whole plot driving this book forward is the fact that Marco’s in a position where he cannot possibly do what’s best for his mom and do what’s best for his dad at the same time, which… Phew.  Too freaking real.  I suspect most people who grew up with two parents have experienced that particular brand of awfulness on some level at some point, and it sucks.  Part of what makes this plot so gut-twisting is that Marco feels he literally can’t turn to anyone for help: his dad’s ignorance of the conflict is its very source, his mom’s obviously “dead,” his friends can’t do anything about the situation and can’t even really empathize, and his stepmother means well but she is the problem.  Ain’t that just family conflict in a nutshell.  The people you most want to lean on for support are the ones who are making the problem.

William Roger Tennant himself also serves as a great reminder that, as Marco points out, Peter’s remarriage isn’t even the biggest problem they face by a long shot.  Tennant is one of my favorite minor characters (I know, I know, big surprise, all the yeerk hosts are my faves) because he’s this silly television personality who achieves almost heroic status in this book when contrasted with the yeerk controlling him.  As much as the yeerk is a megalomaniacal sadist with a hair-trigger temper, Tennant himself is the kind of sweet, gentle guy who genuinely cares about his pets.  He manages to fight the yeerk enough to save the life of poor little cockatiel-Marco.  Not because Tennant knows that that’s an “andalite bandit” he’s holding, but because he doesn’t want to hurt a cockatiel.  It’s a great little moment that goes a long way toward reminding us of the real stakes of the war, and that even ridiculous self-help authors with ponytails deserve to live their own lives free from control.

Anywhoo, this book is also freaking hilarious.  Marco’s narration is a gift to us all: during the whole sequence at the banquet he doesn’t angst about how everything that goes wrong could have possibly been prevented (*cough* Jake *cough*), he doesn’t worry about messing up Hansen’s day (*ahem* Cassie), he doesn’t lose patience with how annoying the plan is proving to be (Rachel), he doesn’t worry about What It All Means (Tobias), and he is not even slightly concerned with whether or not his behavior is befitting of a warrior (Ax).  Instead we get “"Does Batman go from bathroom to bathroom? No. Does the Silver Surfer surf the toilet stalls? No, he does not… Does Daredevil wear other people's dirty clothes? No” and “l am a talking half-skunk, half-spider. A skider. Or possibly a spunk.” We get Marco insisting that he and Ax are “really good friends” to excuse Ax sitting in his lap during the banquet.  We get extensive rants on the pretensions of the restaurant industry.

Plus, we get weaponized Yappy Dog Syndrome.  And weaponized dog pee.  And weaponization of the fact that toy poodles frequently have personalities created by Satan to torture us humans for the sin of having created toy poodles in the first place.  Every so often, as Marco says, the Animorphs really need a win.  In this book, the Animorphs finally get a truly straightforward win—in the form of generating the Sharing huge quantities of bad press through successfully smearing their spokesperson—by way of wig-stealing eagles, Hansen-terrorizing cockroaches, and killer attack poodles.  Because these kids are out to save the world, by gum, and they will do anything it takes to get there.  Even tolerate the existence of a nine-pound monster with a name like Euclid.  I really hope that Peter appreciates just how much his kid loves him and is willing to sacrifice for the happiness of that family.

[kevinkevinson]

Can u hc what each of the paladin's fave books/genres might be? 100% cool if u pull from your own faves/bookshelf :3 also music if you're up to it!!

First of all can I say how much I LOVE THIS??? BEST QUESTION EVER. Okaaaaay. Alrighty. Here we go.

Keith: Maybe my brain is completely influenced by fic but I really kinda love the idea of Keith being a literature snob. Complete Shakespeare nerd. If the author’s dead, chances are Keith’s read it. This goes along with the idea that classics are generally easier to access than new books, and I imagine Keith probably had limited access to books and would have read mostly stuff that’s public domain or handed to him in school. I would love for Keith to have been a library kid (hi sorry have you met me), one of the kids who use the library as a hangout space and a place for simple resources that aren’t super easy to come by at home. But maybe a library that wasn’t well funded and had a small childrens/teens section, so as a kid he had to reach for the adult books when he ran out of things that interested him.

Favorite book: Candide by Voltaire

Lance: Lance is my YA/middle grade soulmate. He’s read Harry Potter and the Percy Jackson books with all of his siblings. Imagine it being sort of like a rite of passage in his family: the older sibling is responsible for introducing the “next in line” to Harry when they turn eleven, but Lance loves it so much that he joins in every time (and sneak reads Harry to his younger sibling before it’s “their turn.” Many complaints that Lance is “ruining the family tradition by hogging it all for himself” ensue). Lance has at least one sister who’s a booknerd who keeps him up to date on all the new YA releases. One of the things he looks forward to is coming back to earth and finding out how those several trilogies they were following together end. Lance thinks Percy Jackson is the coolest book character ever created and that he could totally kick Harry Potter’s butt, but Harry Potter is more fun to read.

Favorite book: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

Pidge: Pidge has to be a sci-fi nerd. But a really, really picky one. She totally looks down her nose at most sci-fi because it’s “unrealistic” and reads a ton of nonfiction on any subject she’s interested in at the moment. She also refuses to get rid of her entire collection of Animorphs books she and Matt spent years tracking down together. This is completely self indulgent, but give me little Matt and Pidge finding old copies of their dad’s Animorphs books from when he was a kid and reading them together. Making fun of all the 90s references and poking at the simple writing, but getting sucked in just the same. Soon enough, they’ve made it through dad’s whole collection and realize he’s only got about 20 books here and they need to know what happens!! So they get on the internet and start tracking down the other books. Of course Pidge finds PDFs of the entire series but Matt insists they gotta “do this thing right and find a REAL LIVE BOOK” so they spend their time digging through eBay and meeting dubious strangers for craigslist deals. Soon they acquire the whole series complete with all the Megamorphs and Chronicles, but not the Alternamorphs because after reading the first volume they determined them “not canon and a waste of time.”

Pidge punches Lance in the face when he finds out she’s reading Animorphs on her tablet and starts making fun of her. No one makes fun of her again.

Favorite book: Dune by Frank Herbert (but it’s actually the Hork-Bajir Chronicles by KA Applegate)

Hunk: Hunk is the one who gets caught reading paperback romance novels and doesn’t apologize for it. And superhero comics. Hunk is my superhero guy. He gets Lance into comics as a casual fan and the two of them get into fights all the time because Lance will throw out a “who would win in a fight, Captain America or Wonder Woman?” And Hunk will go off on him like, “At least pick two characters from the same publisher who could theoretically meet in the same universe before you start throwing your hypothetical ungrounded fight scenarios at me!”

Favorite book: Young Avengers by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

Shiro: Shiro reads a lot of nonfiction, probably biographies and history. Military history for sure. Is anyone surprised?

What maybe no one suspected, however, is just how much Shiro loves Tolkien. Shiro is a Tolkien scholar. He grew up reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and cried when he first saw the Fellowship movie. (Based on a real life true friend who started bawling when he first heard Galadriel’s voice in the theater.) He’s read the Silmarillion six times.

Favorite book: The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

Allura: I have no idea what kinds of books Alteans have, but I imagine there being a well-loved Altean version of Tamora Pierce’s books that Allura adores.

Coran: Coran doesn’t have time for reading because he’s too busy chronicling his own life for his soon-to-be bestselling novelization of his life and times with the paladins of Voltron. Number One in intergalactic novel sales, critically acclaimed, just you wait.

[ktliterary]

What I'm Looking For: Aida Z. Lilly

I’m excited to be open to queries for speculative fiction in upper middle grade, YA, and adult; in YA and upper MG contemporary, I am exclusively looking for stories from LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and other marginalized groups; graphic novels for upper middle grade, YA, and adult from author-illustrators with a unique story; fresh, modern, and original contemporary adult fiction that fits in with my wishlist; and narrative non-fiction (but no true crime).

Across all genres, the writing, voice, and characters have to hook me and make me feel something. I want stories about the good, bad, and ugly of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I’m also interested in cults, the occult, mental health, and magic. I’m looking for the kind-of-weird and completely amazing! Good writing is the most important aspect for me. I love great ideas, but I really need the execution of those ideas to be brilliant. I want to be drawn in within the first few pages, and I’m okay with not having all the answers (at first anyway). I want to read the story only you can tell. I want to accidentally learn things only you can teach me.

I love all things speculative—well, except horror (touches of it in other spec fiction are fine though). What really catches my eye is SFF with real issues tackled in thought-provoking ways, like Grossman’s MAGICIANS series (and show). This shouldn’t be super shocking since I grew up loving the ANIMORPHS series. I like a big, diverse cast with love in their hearts and problems in their lives. Even though these kids had to save the world, they still dealt with familial strife, romantic problems, the failings of adults, and the emotions that accompanied the war and the “normal” lives they had to lead. So give me ANIMORPHS for adults with even more diversity.

On that note, I want feminist projects (especially where feminism is unexpected) and books written by and about people from marginalized communities. As a first-gen Middle Eastern American, I enjoy hearing other people’s immigration tales. If you have written the next KIM’S CONVENIENCE, EMAIL ME RIGHT THIS SECOND BECAUSE I LOVE YOU.

I want ALLLLLLL the queer SFF please! There is so little of it, and it is so needed!

I like mythology (especially when it’s written as beautifully as Madeline Miller does it), music (Juliet, Naked and Daisy Jones & The Six are some of my faves), unreliable narrators, multiple viewpoints, stories that take place at college/grad school, flawed characters, a sense of humor, friendships (complicated ones, too), L.A. stories, tales of NYC, puzzles (think more Dan Brown, less National Treasure), and the atmosphere of Carnivàle, Darren Shan’s CIRQUE DU FREAK, Euphoria, and New Orleans. Magic and superheroes are some of my favorite things, especially when those characters act in a very human way and have very human problems (The Boys, Hancock, Super Ex-Girlfriend). I love a good origin story (even if I’ve seen Peter Parker have three of them onscreen…)

My taste veers from AMERICAN PSYCHO to HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE (and lots in between). Engage me enough to make me laugh AND cry. Give me humor and heart (like Handler’s LIFE WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME); give me a character like Dr. Cox from Scrubs or someone Gordon Ramsay-esque, who secretly has a soft center. Conversely, I also want ALL THE DARKNESS. Because while I love the cuteness of Detective Pikachu, I also live for authors like Leïla Slimani, Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, who capture the ugly sides of human nature in sharp, acerbic light. I won’t shy away from your THREE WOMEN, TWEAK, EDUCATED, or MY DARK VANESSA.

Shows and movies I love: ALL THINGS STUDIO GHIBLI, Kim’s Convenience, Pose, American Horror Story: Coven, The L Word (both), Big Love, Fresh off the Boat (the book and show), Guardians of the Galaxy (and the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe), Supernatural, Lost, Modern Family, anything Mindy Kaling touches (books and shows), Workin’ Moms, Abrams’s Star Trek reboot, The Affair, South Park, Dexter (the books and show), Broad City, The Last Man on Earth (I nearly cried when they canceled this), Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Crash, What Dreams May Come, Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, Death Note, Straight Outta Compton, Monsters University, The Sopranos, How to Get Away with Murder, Stepbrothers, Zoolander, The Boondocks, Little Nemo, Selena, Shin Chan, Rent, Sweeney Todd, Dope, The Halloween Tree (the book and the movie), The Office, American Housewife, For Colored Girls, LotR, Mad Men, Mystery Men, Sons of Anarchy, Fringe, The King of Queens, Cloverfield, Super 8, Blade Runner 2049, Good Will Hunting, Adventure Time, Detective Pikachu, Good Boys

Books and authors I love: The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell (and his standup), Mira Jacob, Daisy Jones and the Six, There There, Eat a Peach, Convenience Store Woman, Double Cup Love, Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines, Born a Crime (and Noah’s standup), Tranny, The Hate U Give, Warcross duology, Leïla Slimani, Rainbow Rowell, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Time Traveler’s Wife, I Am Legend (the movie, too), The Amory Wars (and the music about them), Saga, Deadendia, The Devil Is a Part-Timer, Chuck Palahniuk, Kid Gloves, Zatanna and the House of Secrets, Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Wheel of Time series, Hyperbole and a Half, Bret Easton Ellis, Harry Potter (but not Rowling), Artemis Fowl, Riordan and friends, Life Will Be the Death of Me, The Interestings, Station Eleven, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking up with Me, Hey Kiddo, The New Kid, Furious Thing, Number One Chinese Restaurant, The Girls at 17 Swann Street, Ready Player One (and the movie), Wildwood, Red at the Bone, Juliet, Naked, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Fun Home, American Housewife, Madeline Miller, Gaiman, Christopher Moore, Haruki Murakami, Patrick Rothfuss, The Goldfinch, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Kevin Kwan, Dave Eggers, My Dark Vanessa, All of us with Wings, Graveyard Shift, Life of Pi, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, America for Beginners, The Storyteller’s Secret, Never Let Me Go, Priestdaddy, Educated, Three Women, Augusten Burroughs, Furiously Happy, Okay, Fine, Whatever, Fights: One Boy’s Triumph over Violence, The Usual Suspects (Maurice Broaddus), V.E. Schwab, The Silent Patient, Uprooted, Pierce Brown, The Enderverse, Blake Crouch, The Hunger Games, John Dies at the End

Maybe not the best fit for: Political thriller Gross out Horror (some touches are okay in SFF) Picture books Chapter books Animal protagonists Flowery language in fantasy Very technical or math-heavy sci-fi Historical fiction WW2 or cops or Civil War/antebellum “Inspirational”

What I’m Looking For: Aida Z. Lilly was originally published on kt literary

[spacedyevest]

my most hated poptimism fandom cliche in the weeks after everyone tried to cancel ungodly rich celebrity terf JKR was “anyways, stan Animorphs/Percy Jackson”, as if that’s just as good because the authors are more woke or have a woker audience or something. I’m sorry, but if you grew up *almost anywhere in the world* in the 2000’s and you have a book reading habit, HP is likely where you got it from. you don’t get to that level on accident. yes, there’s a difference between popular appeal and critical acclaim, but HP had both and those other minor-splash-in-Angloworld series don’t even play in the same league. it's unfortunate that she turned out to be this way and we can't retroactively erase the unfortunateness in any way (whether by claiming she was always bigoted or that HP always sucked), we have to face it head on.

and anyway, why do we have to have a weekly session about this? just have a running thread about how to counter her newest political activism and a recurring post about how to pirate her newest work because she doesn’t need more money and be done with it. I really wouldn’t worry about your Deathly Hallows tattoo; when you turned 18 in 2010 and got one, you couldn’t have possibly known we would invent a social norm that would require you to pretend you never liked it.

jkr’s terrible but i’m never gonna pretend that i never liked harry potter and that it was never good. harry potter rocked and odds are you had a blast reading it and engaging with it for most of your childhood and if jkr hadn’t revealed herself to be terrible most people would still be on board with it. i can understand taking a step back from that particular series because it’s a children’s series and because of the author and because the extensions from the 7th book are useless garbage, but like. rewriting history to act like you’ve always been above it is just as embarrassing as having your hogwarts house in your bio.

[rikka-zine]

Interview with PhD Candidate Brian White (Part 1)

I saw Brian White’s name for the first time on a tweet by critic Kotani Mari in September 2018. According to the tweet, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago who conducted an academic presentation about Tobi Hirotaka at a conference titled “The Nonhuman in Japanese Culture and Society: Spirits, Animals, Technology," which was held at the University of Victoria, Canada. 

I wondered at the time what it must be like to study Japanese SF outside Japan. I assumed most of the old books and magazines in the genre are not digitized nor easy to access from outside Japan. Fortunately, I got a chance to ask Brian directly what brought him to Japanese culture and science fiction. (I am deeply grateful to Dr. Pau Pitarch Fernandez for introducing him.)

This interview was recorded in Shinjuku, Tokyo in November 2018 during his one-year stay for archival research. The interviewer is me: Terrie Hashimoto. You can read the Japanese translation here.

Note: Throughout this interview, Japanese names are given in the Japanese order, family name first, then given name.

Brian White (BW): I grew up on the east coast of the United States. I was born in New York, but my parents divorced after I was born. My mom went to Pennsylvania and my dad went to New Jersey. I spent most of the time with my mom in Pennsylvania but regularly visited my dad as well. So where I grew up is a little bit complicated but it was basically back and forth between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Both of my parents are very intellectual and academic-minded. My dad has a PhD in Molecular Biology and spent some time working at a university before transferring to private industry. My mom, though she never finished college, majored in English Literature and always had a strong commitment to ideas about what it meant to be literary and well-read. She was always pushing me to read books.

I was born in 1988, so I was growing up during the boom of YA literature in the ‘90s. There were a few popular series in the US; one of these was called Goosebumps. And then of course there was Harry Potter, and also Animorphs, so you had Horror, Fantasy, and SF all together [in YA series]. Mystery books were popular as well, like Nancy Drew, though I guess that was from the '60s or '70s. All of those subgenres were present in YA. I really enjoyed Animorphs series. I found it extremely interesting because the main idea of the series is children who can change into animals and go and fight evil aliens. Stylistically I always found it fascinating how the author put you into the story and made you feel what it would be like to be a tiger, an ant, a falcon or whatever through first-person narration. That sense of being completely different creatures was very attractive to me. I read so much SF as a young child. I think that's why anime like Dragon Ball were eventually so interesting to me when I started watching them in middle school. 

I remember when I was in middle school, the only television network that played anime was called Cartoon Network and you could only get it if you had a special kind of cable package. And I just remember seeing advertisements for Cartoon Network on other channels and seeing advertisements specifically for Gundam Wing. I wanted to watch it so badly!  My parents finally did get upgraded to premium cable or whatever it was to have Cartoon Network. Unfortunately, they'd stopped playing Gundam Wing by then. I was very sad about that. But they were playing things like Dragon Ball Z and Gundam 08th MS Team - which was a kind of jungle warfare sort of thing - and things like Cowboy Bebop and Trigun, which my generation considers to be classics. I'm sure that others have other opinions of them, though. They seem to have become much more popular in the United States [than Japan]. It was eye-opening. 

So over the course of middle school and high school, I guess I drifted away from sci-fi literature itself, and more into things like anime and manga. I started reading manga volume after volume. I consumed anime and manga voraciously. I read a lot of Shonen Jump titles. I think the first [manga] I ever bought was Naruto Vol.1, and I really enjoyed that.

I moved into being interested in Japanese popular culture because of a few reasons. Maybe I should have mentioned this before, but I first started getting into Dragon Ball when my cousin came to stay with us for a little while on vacation. He brought a Dragon Ball manga with him, and it was the first time I'd ever seen a manga. I was shocked at how it was read, in my mind, back to front because it was in the Japanese reading order rather than the American order. This was just a “へえええ (Whaaat!)” moment for me when I was 12 or 13.

Shortly after that I found out that Power Rangers was Japanese. I had watched Power Rangers so much as a child.  I forget exactly which series it was, but the one with dinosaurs. That was my favorite television program as a child. And to find out that it was actually Japanese years later really shocked me. There's another, I think I hadn't even thought of it as anime at the time, called Speed Racer in English. I'd watched that and thought of it as just the same as Looney Tunes or Snoopy or something when I was a kid. And so to find out that these two shows that I had really loved were both Japanese, it was really surprising and made me want to learn more. I think that was one of the reasons why I became so interested in anime and manga.

The other reason was just that it felt different or I guess you could say exotic to me, living in a kind of rural town. I had always dreamed of getting out of my hometown, going somewhere larger. [Japanese popular culture gave me] a feeling of being connected to something bigger and maybe more exciting, a world outside that was very alluring to me. 

And then the time came to apply for a college. I really didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had good grades because my parents were very strict about doing schoolwork and getting good grades. [I figured] I could probably get into a pretty good school. I was going to try to get into a school that had a Japanese language and culture program and also a lot of other majors that I could try out. I ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania and they had a fairly good Japanese program there. 

I declared my major basically as soon as I walked in the door. I guess the professors didn't quite know what to do with me because most people go to the Wharton [Business] School or go into international relations and then also take some classes in Japanese as a second major or a minor. They were more used to that kind of student, I think. 

But I really wanted to do Japanese, so I took courses in Japanese cultural studies and literary studies and studied in Kyoto for a semester when I was a third-year student. All through that I kept an interest in popular culture. But just because of the way that the classes were structured, doing more mainstream Japanese literary readings, I drifted away from consuming SF very regularly at that time. As I was finishing college, I decided I wanted to do more in-depth research, perhaps involving SF in a broad sense. The thing I liked the best was reading and writing about Japanese culture and the sort of insights that gave me into how culture works more generally and being able to turn that around on American culture, that sort of thing. As I was looking around at what I wanted to do and how I could keep doing that kind of work, academia was the thing that came up. But there are a lot of people working on [popular cultural studies], so I thought I could maybe do literary studies and then also fold in film studies.  I really like working with film, and it was shortly before that time that I took a post-war literature and film class with Kano Ayako sensei (*means teacher or professor in Japanese). She was so inspirational to me in terms of what one can do, and that was where I encountered Abe Kobo for the first time. We read Woman in the Dunes and watched the film adaptation, and I was like ��� MY LIFE IS CHANGED. I was just so fascinated by his style. I read Woman in the Dunes in English, and I had a chance to read a little bit more of his writings in Japanese at home soon after, and I thought that they were just amazing. So I said, “Okay, I'm going to go to grad school and I'm going to get a PhD and write a dissertation about Abe Kobo and surrealism and politics of the 1960s.” That's what was thinking when I went to grad school. And a few things happened. 

For one thing, I found out that a lot of academics were already working on books about Abe Kobo that would be coming out within the next couple of years. So as for books and dissertations and all that sort of thing, from a business perspective, there wasn't going to be much demand for new professors who specialized in Abe Kobo by the time I finished.

I thought, OK, maybe it's time to rethink this, and I'd had this idea in the back of my head. I'm not sure where it started, but the one thing that I had been interested in talking about with Abe Kobo and the Surrealist movement was its relationship with technology and how technology interacts with the body within Surrealist literature. I was really interested in that relationship and so I started trying to push on that more. Around that time, I was studying at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies which is an intensive language training program in Pacifico Yokohama. I was trying to explain to a sensei there what I was interested in because during the program everyone has the opportunity to do guided research into whatever topic they chose. I was trying to explain my topic to my sensei, and because my Japanese wasn't great at the time, and also because I didn't have a clear idea of [the topic] myself, I was having trouble putting it into words. As I was rambling about technology and the body, he said, “You mean SF?”, and it was another lightbulb moment. What I was trying to talk about, it really was SF literature, or at least I'd have an easier time finding materials and finding [texts] that worked with the body and technology within science fiction. It was really because Abe was a science fiction-esque author that his work interested me.

I changed course in my third year of graduate school [and said], “Okay, actually what I'm going to do is study science fiction and think about how science fiction talks about embodiment and what sorts of bodies are presented within science fiction, whether you see women or racial minorities and so on.” As I started to slowly develop that thesis, as a result, I felt like I was always kind of behind in trying to catch up to people who have known what they're doing from day 1.

Since I started at the edges [of that topic], it's always felt like I need to read more and study more and do more and try to catch up... in that sense it's been a little bit stressful, especially because I'm now in this program with faculty who were maybe better equipped to help me a couple years ago than now. But luckily my advisors at Chicago are very kind and very knowledgeable about just about everything. Even if they don't know a lot about science fiction, they can help me in other ways.

But yes, it's been challenging to try to study [as a topic]. There aren't a lot of materials translated into English, especially, and there's not as strong a scholarly body of literature, so it's a little bit harder to know where to look. I've been finding my own way. However, I think there are more and more people who are starting to write about [Japanese] science fiction academically in the United States. It's been very helpful to start to talk to them and form that kind of community.  I don't know if you know the Parallel Futures series that's coming out through the University of Minnesota press. It’s a series of translations, and they did Aramaki Yoshio’s The Sacred Era (tr. Baryon Tensor Posadas, 2017). They're coming out with a bunch more, and I've had a chance to meet with the sensei who are behind it. Thomas Lamarre and Tatsumi Takayuki sensei are two of the three main contributors to that. Christopher Bolton might also be working on it. He was one of the people that put out a book about Abe Kobo and specifically looked at his works as science fiction. So that was a kind of the final deciding factor; I can't write that book because someone has already written it!

They're all working on that series and between that and other scholars’ work there's been more materials starting to come out. I know a number of graduate students as well - we're working on similar things. So on the one hand, it feels very exciting because it feels like we're on the crest of something new and exciting. But because it’s this new thing coming into being, you know, it's sometimes hard to find what you need because there just aren't a lot of people who have done that work already. Scholars working on the sixties have mostly focused on “serious” literature. So it's been interesting to try to bring the conversation back around to sci-fi. 

And it's been interesting personally to take a number of years off from sci-fi. It's been about ten to fifteen years since I was consuming a lot of SF literature as a fan. Since the SF I used to read was aimed at young adults, to come back into it as an adult looking at sci-fi aimed at adults in Japanese, it really feels very much like entering a completely new space. It's been fun to put that together and get an idea of what's out there and who's writing what and when, who the major authors are and what their classic works were like. It feels very spread out, and it's true that it was. But it's only unknown to me, right, so whenever I talk to people that have been consuming it, like Tatsumi sensei, for example, who's been reading it since it started back in the 60s, you know it’s very humbling because he just knows everything. I don't have time to read all the things that he has read, and every time I have a meeting with him and talk about what I'm thinking about, he gives me a suggested reading list three pages long. There's no way I could possibly finish all of it, but it's an exciting challenge.

(Continues to Part. 2)

[bluehedron]

The Sario Effect - Preview

This is a little text experiment. To see how fanfiction goes about in tumblr. And a bit of a motivation boast to me?

Long story short: this was posted months ago in FFN and AO3 but because of the lack of responses after the prologue, it completely devastated me to the point I felt I should stop. Thankfully, Artisan219, the author of Animorphs Reboot, gave me the courage and motivation to rethink, restructure and rewrite my fanfic. 

The work is still in progress, along with artwork to go together with it. But it’s a work I’m grateful to do and admittedly a bit scared - that it might not be interesting again no matter how many times I change the story. So hence, testing the waters.

I welcome feedback btw. I really REALLY wanna improve this fanfic tenfolds and if anything feels off about the writing or characterization, or a lot of things, then please let me know. It helps me tremendously.

For now, enjoy the preview.

“It’s been more than a year,” Cassie broke the silence. Her smile was small but it grew wider, slowly spreading towards us like an infection.

“Man, a year. We’ve been through a lot of crazy stuff,” Marco said. “How are we alive?”

“I still remember what you said,” Rachel droned. “Idiot teenagers with a death wish.”

“Ah, but now we’re idiot teenagers and an alien cadet with a death wish.”

“I beg to differ,” Ax protested.

“On the idiot or death wish part?” He shrugged with a relaxed grin. “Still, we’ve gotten out of worse things on top.”

I couldn’t deny that. We’ve had our moments. We disagreed, got into danger on a regular basis and somehow, we managed to pull it off. It actually made days like this that more special.

A whole year of an adrenaline-filled, terrifying, fur-feather-covered roller coaster ride. But there were also some good times. Short. But still good.

“Yeah…” I said-

FLASH!

<Where did you find that dodecahedron?> Ax demanded once more.

The Asian-American girl calmly shoved the blade away from her throat. Unfazed by the sharpness. "How should we know? This is the first time we've heard of this device."

<B-But you're the one who brought it to us!> Marco hollered.

"Why?"

Good question.

"We are your enemy."

FLASH!

"Jake? Jaaake!"

“Huh?” I jumped. Rachel was suddenly standing so close to me with a slight annoyed look.

“You spaced out there. You ok?”

Ok?

Was I ok?

No.

I knew what I saw.

"Looks like we have company," Tobias informed.

Sure enough, behind us was a kid standing at the site’s entrance.

My body stiffened. I shouldn’t worry about what I saw right now. There was no telling if this was a Controller passing by. I glanced at the others. They nodded, knowing what I wanted them to do.

“Alright, enough sightseeing.” Marco ringed his arm around Ax’s neck. Just act normal. “How about we go get you something yummy? That always cheer you up.”

“All the time, you mean,” Rachel added, trying to perk up. “Plan to invite him over to dinner?”

“Dinner?” Ax’s eyes glimmered brightly. “Do I get to eat a lot of food like I did at Jake’s house?”

“Now look what you did!” Marco barked. “Ugh, wonder if Dad hasn’t called in takeout yet.”

Even as we were leaving, the kid didn’t move. I realized closer that she was a girl.

Not like Rachel or Cassie on first impression. Her clothing wasn’t extremely causal or extremely fashionable, just right down the middle. The most noticeable things I spotted were a knit cap over her medium black hair and a yellow zipped parka.

I...glanced...at...her face...

The hair on the back of my neck stood on ends the longer I looked at this girl.

She wasn’t familiar. Never seen or met her before. So I shouldn’t be scared of her. She was a complete stranger to me.

But she looked chillingly like the girl from my ‘vision’.

No...she was that girl.

“Wait,” Cassie said. “Aren’t you El?”

“El?” Rachel uttered, sounding like she also knew her. The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

The girl gave a hard stare. Like she was on a very important mission.

She was staring at me.

“Hey, Jake. Are you alright?” I heard Marco.

I couldn’t stop shaking.

Why was the girl from my vision here?

Why did I even have a vision of this girl?!

And there was one thing this girl said in that vision.

We are your enemy.

[roughdraftsdotcom]

Animorphs was a Scholastic children’s book property from between 1996 and 2001, sold at countless elementary school book fairs across the United States. The books are striking for their David B. Mattingly covers, which depict the bodies of young teenagers shifting smoothly into animals: a boy’s arms slowly elongate and are covered with feathers, a girl’s smooth brown skin transforms into the rubbery grey form of a dolphin.

 In the text of the books themselves, which ran 125 pages or so per installment and alternated narrator point of view, morphing is neither slow or smooth. It’s grotesque���the “sickening crunch” of bones collapsing or grinding into new forms is, even in a series notable for its repetitive descriptions, mentioned frequently. These transformations, unlike the iconic cover art, are canonically disgusting. The books, after all, are set in adolescence.

 As a proto-trans kid, a kid without language for what it felt like to be entering an alien puberty, Animorphs absorbed me. As an adult, when I’m around trans folks around my age, I’ll try to sneak it into conversation, like a secret handshake for millennial transsexuals. More often than not, there’s recognition: lots of us, it seems, were devotees of these $4.99 trade paperbacks (I used to skip school lunch, save my money, and purchase them, one by one, as they arrived at the end of each month).

 Here’s the deal: it’s not just that these kids can turn into any animal they touch. There’s lots of other children’s literature where kids can change bodies: even Harry Potter, beloved by our straight and cis gay peers, has some “kids can change their bodies” stuff, and I’ve known a few transes who got as obsessed with the transgressive potential of Polyjuice Potion as I did with morphing.

 But in Animorphs, no one knows there’s a war going on. The enemies are parasite slugs who crawl into the minds of humans, control their thoughts, can make their hosts seem normal on the outside. One main character has a beloved older brother controlled by the enemy; another, a mother. In a cutting scene in the second book, a girl bursts into tears when it becomes clear that her parents, whose parasite invaders are distracted by their part in the invasion, no longer love her.

     Whenever I talk to trans people these days, someone wants to talk about Animorphs.

 Spoiler: it’s me. I always want to talk about Animorphs.

 If you don’t know, Animorphs was a Scholastic children’s book property from between 1996 and 2001—essentially, Bill Clinton’s second term, and a few months of W., before 9/11. This is also a period over which I went through puberty for the first time.

 Animorphs is about a group of teenagers who can turn into, in the book’s language, “any animal they touch.” This includes, at times, other humans. They have this ability so that they can fight alien invaders, a group of evil parasites that turn their hosts into facsimiles of their former selves. Despite the frequent scenes of fuck-you-up violence—many, many, many times, author K.A. Applegate will describe a tiger ripping into a giant alien centipede until it bursts, its guts exploding everyone, like you put a bomb in the belly of a whale—this isn’t Goosebumps, an adjacent and more popular Scholastic property, which existed for those kids who were thrilled by fear. By the second or third book of what would become a 60-text franchise, this is basically the story of a group of kids with really bad PTSD.

 And, of course, a group of kids whose bodies can change at will.

 Before we had a word for “trans,” some of us have said to each other, we knew the word “morph.” To morph is to transform into another being. It’s both painless and terrifying. Here’s how one character describes his friend morphing into a wolf:

 “A tail suddenly shot out from behind. I could hear the grinding of her bones and they rearranged. Her upper arms shortened. Her lower arms grew longer. Fingers shriveled and disappeared, leaving behind only stubby black nails. There was a sickening crunch as her knees changed direction. Her legs shrank and grew fur. Suddenly she fell forward, no longer able to stand erect.”

 I mean, basically that’s what it feels like to be a genderless child transforming into an acutely gendered body, like your whole being is undergoing a sickening crunch, something you can hear and feel and understand, but that isn’t painful, exactly, not something you can fix at the hospital. But imagine, also, being a kid, a tween, really, and reading constantly about changing your body. Into anything you can touch! You don’t have to be sitting at home and growing boobs, quite against your will, and writing fanfiction. You can become a wolf, running miles away, or a hawk, soaring above on thermals. Animorphs is how sad adolescent millennial transes learned what humans have known for millennia: that animal transformation stories are a way to access healing, and power, and escape.

 This isn’t, like, an otherkin thing, I promise.

 But what’s also significant here is that there’s a huge catch to this morphing thing: a two-hour time limit. Any longer than that and you’re trapped in morph. In the wrong body, per se.

 Such a thing happens to Tobias, the tragic male figure. He gets stuck as a red-tailed hawk, feels within him the hawk’s instinct to kill, to be predatory. In one scene, which shocked me upon rereading as an adult, while researching this essay, he tries to kill himself by flying, on purpose, at high speed into a window:

             “I was a brown and gold and red missile […]. Straight ahead, a wall. A blank wall where they were going to put a new shop. I was still moving fast. I could still hit it and wake myself from the nightmare.”

             He dodges the wall at the last second, only to be overcome by a different death drive: the hawk’s desire to break free of the inside of the mall. “The hawk in my head wanted the sky. It knew safety was up in the high blue. The hawk powered straight up. Straight up at the glass that he didn’t understand. The glass that would be like a brick wall.”

           But I couldn’t fight it anymore. The hawk had won. I had killed. I had killed and eaten. And I had loved it. […]

           In a second it would all be over. One more stroke of my powerful wings and the glass…”

 At the last second, his friend throws a baseball—these are young adult novels, after all, and contain inexplicable plot devices, like someone who would carry a baseball into a suburban mall—and shatters the glass just before the impact. But it’s hard to escape, when I read with my adult, transsexual eyes what I’d apparently missed as a not-yet-suicidal fourth-grader: that this is the story of a young man, trapped in a body that he doesn’t recognize, trying his hardest to die.

 Animorphs is, after all, a war story. And the bad guys aren’t out there, they’re in us, they seep into our brains and force us to act normal, to blend into everyday social worlds, all while we’re trapped inside, screaming to be let free.

[thespiderwriter]

    I grew up afraid to write minority characters.  For me this came from two primary places; the first was the idea pervasive to our culture that people who aren't white, cis, heterosexual, middle-class/wealthy, able-bodied, neurotypical males are "other" to such an extent that they're often seen as not fully human, or maybe human but in a different way.  Society insists that those who don't fit inside the rigid little sector it's blocked off as "normal" aren't really people in the same sense that those who do fit into the sector are.     Obviously, I'm not all of the above; however, society's belittling of marginalized groups is so pervasive that it's not uncommon for marginalized people to marginalize themselves (see: internalized sexism, racism, ableism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, intra ableism, intra racism, biracialism, etc.).     Growing up a tomboy in a primarily masculine household, I came to see women as lesser, and later fell prey to the many ailments inherited by young girls--the conflicting standards, the fear of being seen as inferior, the apologies, the feeling of being a burden, etc, etc, etc.  Unlearning these things was (is) a long process I won't talk about now, but I guess my point is that when I started writing novels at the ripe old age of nine, the only reason I felt comfortable writing girl characters was because I was a girl, and even still I had a lot of trouble at first with writing female characters that weren't either based off of real people or stereotypes.     The other thing that caused this fear was my limited experiential resources.     I grew up in two towns, one of them full of rich white people and the other full of not-rich white people.  In the town I usually say I'm "from," I had exactly one black classmate, and the only black classmate I had in the town I "grew up in" moved away after first grade.     I never thought of people who were different than me as really different.  They were people just the same as I was, and I recognized them as such, as I'm sure many people do when they meet "othered" people face to face, especially in their youth.  Even with my internalized sexism, I still judged every girl on her own merits once I met her--I generalized groups, not individuals.     But when writing, and trying to be socially conscious in our writing, we all have groups that we feel ishy writing about, not necessarily because we don't want to write them, but because we're scared to get it wrong.     As a kid I was afraid to write people of color--a pretty common fear among white kids, because after they teach you about slavery and genocide and Jim Crow laws in first grade the last thing you want to do is exacerbate that White Guilt everybody's always talking about, and you certainly don't want anyone to think you're racist or, even worse, to find out that you are, in fact, a racist.     The only way to keep yourself safe and cozy is not to bother, and say things like "I'll leave it to them to write themselves into a story."  As a little kid that feels very valid, especially when you grow up in an environment where racism isn't something you notice in your day-to-day life, and is instead subliminally flashed into your brain as you watch your all-white-with-maybe-a-token-PoC cartoons.     Sadly, leaving it to a marginalized group doesn't always work--how often do you see black authors being lauded?  For a book that isn't exclusively about white people?  When was the last time a female author got big in something that wasn't YA or Romance?  Do you even know of any books written by someone with a disability?  I guarantee you it's not from lack of talent or trying--unfortunately, the system is still heavily weighted in such a way that it's exponentially more difficult for a marginalized individual to make it big--or make it at all--than for a white abled cishetero male of the same or lesser talents, and the exponent tends to multiply if the author-of-marginalized-origins writes about characters who are also not white cishetero males.     Sometimes, when you're at a party and things are loud and crowded, the only way to get people to listen to the guest of honor is for the host to jump out with a microphone and shut 'em up.     I didn't know all that when I was little.  I just knew I wanted to write about superheroes and dragons and magic and weird science.     The funny thing is though, unlike a lot of people I've spoken to over the years, I wrote about people with higher melanin counts before I became afraid.  In part it was actually because I wrote about them that I became afraid.     I should probably explain:  My uncle is very, very racist.  I hate him.  I don't just hate him because he's racist, I have a lot of reasons to hate him, but this has certainly always been a point of contention between us.  I didn't always hate him of course, because when I was younger I was small and naive and thought that shared blood meant shared love.  Probably should've realized sooner how bullshit that was.     I was a creative little kid, and after finishing my second novel at age eleven, I wanted to tell everyone about it.  As I was going through the first edit, I stumbled upon something that didn't make sense and asked his opinion--in order to do this I had to explain the concept to him--four types of shape-shifters live on an island and fight amongst themselves, sort of Animorphs meets Warriors meets gorn-tastic political intrigue/adventure-fantasy.     Instead of helping, my uncle, being as uncouth as he is, decided to ask me which group were the "n" words--I was repulsed by the language, but was all at once struck by the realization that not only could the division between the shifter-types be construed allegorically as a division between the races, but that I had written people of color into my story--I hadn't thought about it as I wrote, I just sort of correlated fur color to human skin color, so shapeshifters with darker fur ended up with darker skin, and shapeshifters with lighter fur had lighter skin; it wasn't like any group was composed all of one human race or another, they were completely mixed-color societies, but I was still afraid.     I didn't go back and white-wash my draft, what was done was done, but I wouldn't write people of color into my drafts for a long time afterward because I was afraid of doing it wrong.  I don't exactly know now what I thought the "right" way was, but that was the only way I wanted it done; I was a conscientious child and didn't want to offend anyone, and since I was only just getting the hang of the internet I had no idea that there were places where writers gathered in bulk to discuss such things.     My resolve to write only about white cishetero abled rich men and women--or, even better, aliens and robots and monsters, oh my!--lasted until I discovered Tumblr as a thirteen-year-old.     I know, I know, Tumblr has a mixed bag of a reputation among the liberal crowd, but for a white girl in a town of 1,000 people, 98% of whom are white, and most of whom are also hetero and cissexual, middle-ish class, able-bodied, and neurotypical, Tumblr was the best place for me to break into a world that was, up to then, largely unavailable to me.  Today it's known as a toxic wasteland, and some parts are, but it was an important part of my development as both a writer and a liberal (in case you couldn't already tell which way I lean).     Within a year I was writing stories with "othered" individuals again--people of color, people with disabilities, people of a multitude of genders, sexualities, religions, you name it.  Through Tumblr, and the many websites it introduced me to, I'd found out there were tons of resources on how to write this group and that group and the other group, and I learned that it was okay to trust my own real-life experiences and those of my family and friends; every experience was valid.  And though there are going to be different characterizations and complications with each new type of character you create, it was freeing to find out that everything truly boiled down to something I'd known all along--people are people.  Nothing more, nothing less.     That's what it all comes down to.  People are people--we all have wants, needs, feelings, we all have things we care about, we are all our own.  What makes me different from someone of a different race has less to do with race itself than with upbringing and societal pressure and our personal likes and dislikes.     Fear can be good--I think, in my case, fear was good, because it drove (and still drives) me to seek out the information I need to avoid creating a caricature or a stereotype in place of a human being; fear led me to ask questions and make sure that I did (and do) everything in my power to not just keep from offending people, but to keep myself from harming myself and others with poor portrayals of certain out-groups, and to make sure that I use my privilege as a white person not for accolades and the like but to assist and teach, to encourage others to hear the voices of those whose voices aren't being heard, and to normalize what should already be, but is not yet seen as, normal.     Fear can also stop us in our tracks--and if you write marginalized characters, you're going to end up being criticized for it, even if you are yourself part of the group you're writing about!  But you can't please everyone; every time I write a sensitive male character, someone tells me he's not realistic even though I know for a fact that everything the character does is nothing I haven't seen my brothers and my male friends do, and every time I write a female character I risk being called out on her promiscuity or her aloofness or her hatred of babies because no matter how hard you work to go against a stereotype or humanize someone, even yourself, someone is always going to get pissy about it; that's how life works.     So yes, it's important for people without privilege to speak up and have their stories heard, and their voices are going to ring the most true and should hold more weight.     A story written by someone with absolutely every privilege there is probably won't be authentic, of course, but it's important for people with privilege to speak up as well--not to drown out the voices of your downtrodden kin (as some are, unfortunately, wont to do), but to help raise awareness and compassion and facilitate love and understanding and conversation in ways that some, through the horrors of a discriminatory society, are unable to do.   So write.  Whoever you are, whatever you want to write, write it; try to include marginalized characters when you can, because the sad truth is that there's not a lot out there, and even less of it is well-written.  Be careful, don't be too afraid--just don't be a dick, either.     And when you think you're finished with that manuscript; stop, wait a minute, fill that cup put some liquor in it--now pour it out, take a deep breath, and go look for some critique partners and beta readers that know what's what in whatever subject you've chosen, because no matter how well you think you know something, if you're writing from a place of privilege you're bound to make mistakes     The fewer mistakes make it out into the real world, the better it'll be for everybody.     And even if you're writing from a point of diminished privilege yourself, it never hurts to have extra eyes on the ground.  No two experiences are ever exactly alike, and you may not be as enlightened as you think--I like to think of myself as having cleansed myself of my internalized sexism, but on occasion I still catch myself mentally criticizing a woman for doing something I wouldn't think twice about a man doing, or using the phrase "like a little girl" in a derogatory fashion.     When we write only from our own experiences, we're also at risk of making every character's experience practically the same, which serves to homogenize the group and sometimes creates a new stereotype.  I don't think we need any more stereotypes than we already have.     TL;DR:  Don't be afraid to write marginalized characters, no matter how privileged you are; just remember to treat everyone as human beings, do your research, ask questions, and seek out the opinions of people with first hand experience before you go tell the world about how great you are (for writing something that may actually be offensive).