Venti taking shape 🍃🕊

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

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

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

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

What if: the animorphs were trans

I think I've written most of them as trans before, but I could also see each of them having a different experience with trans-ness.

Jake: Would just not bother to start performing femininity? Like, he'd mean to get around to it some time, but then he'd be at puberty and still wouldn't have bothered. And it's just so much easier being a boy. It requires less mental effort. His brain just defaults to boy-ness, and anyway he's bored of this subject already and wants to get back to fighting yeerks now.

Rachel: Is not only the girliest girl ever to girl, but has read all the feminist theory. She has clear opinions on her name, her clothes, her earrings, her hormones, her makeup, her hair... This is a girl who gets gender euphoria from spending up to an hour crafting her look each morning, and will never be caught with lipstick that doesn't color-coordinate with her blouse. There are a lot of TERFs in her town who keep ending up mauled by grizzly bears, but that's not Rachel's problem. She hears it was some other grizzly doing all that.

Tobias: Arguably he's already genderqueer and/or trans in canon, but he'd be the polar opposite of Rachel when it comes to talking about gender. He just is a boy, okay? Except when he's not. And that's just how it is. His gender is hawk. And sometimes it's hork-bajir. And sometimes it's andalite. And sometimes it's human. And if you ask follow-up questions he's going to disappear up a tree and never interact with humanity again.

Cassie: She's happy in her own body. Overalls are comfortable, dresses are fun, and anyone who can't figure out her pronouns at a glance isn't her problem. Okay, that one guy (#14) who called her a "boy" deserved to get kicked in the face, which is why she kicked him in the face. But everyone else trying to figure out her gender has their own problems, and she's not here to solve them.

Ax: Again, arguably not-cis in canon (his human body is implied to be intersex) but he'd be gung-ho about his gender just like Rachel. Andailte masculinity doesn't line up with human masculinity (e.g. Elfangor's comment about how Real Boys don't like STEM), so it'd be a lot of Ax Doing Boy Things in a way that doesn't make sense to Americans. But if gardening or sharpening his tail or refusing to learn math is what Ax is feeling, his friends aren't likely to question it.

Marco: ???? TBH I'm stumped. He both pulls genderfuckery (having long hair, being a clothes horse, going in drag in #51) and obsesses over being masculine enough. Him being the resident bicultural bisexual probably has something to do with it, but...??? Other fandalites, send help.

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

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

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

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

OG text for context/completionism:

Lazy Tobias doodle

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

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

when u have to live with the fact that the blood of millions is on ur hands but at least u get backstage passes to ur favorite band :)

Nina: “Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

Fabian, with zero hesitation: “Of course! I would build you a little home in a jar. With a little house. And I would talk to you everyday :)”

listening to the walking away from the war playlist and specifically to Deserter's Song by radical face and thinking once again about Animorphs because of my personality traits and also flaws, and experiencing specifically the line ''to fall was not my fear, to make one fall was'' and thinking about the fact that cassie animorphs was terrified of killing and marco animorphs was terrified of dying and in book 19 cassie said ''i'm never killing again, i'm done,'' and marco snarled at her ''when i said i didn't want to fight this fight, you all called me a selfish coward'' and cassie met his eyes and said ''so i'm selfish. so i'm a coward.'' what's a coward.

how does ax... sleep.

[id: three scribbled diagrams of Ax from animorphs, asleep. In the first diagram the deer-like part of Ax's body is loafed. He is beside some kind of half-length bed, which is just tall enough for his humanoid torso to rest on. Ax is bent at the human waist so that his human and deer backs make a straight line, and he is flat against the bed. In the second picture, Ax is sleeping stood up like a horse. He is standing beside a wall, and his human torso is leant so that his head and shoulders are cushioned by a headrest built into the wall. He is holding a teddy bear. In the third diagram Ax is once again in loaf position, but he is asleep across an armchair, and his human torso is cuddled against the chair's arm. In all three pictures, there is a small letter 'Z' above Ax's head. end id.]

i talk a lot of shit and genuinely love the casual hyperbole that characterizes the genre of Being Insane About Things On Tumblr, but it's important to me that you all know that i am never exaggerating when i talk about animorphs. not because i respect it too much or take it too seriously or want to avoid misleading people. i am never exaggerating when i talk about animorphs because i am neither creative nor fucked in the head enough to come up with whatever the next level would be beyond animorphs.

i had an idea yesterday :3

I saw your tags on your Percy Jackson post and I would LOVE to hear your thoughts on the Umbrella Academy 👀👀👀

The tags: #i think both types of stories work#you just have to be CONSISTENT about it [side-eyes umbrella academy]

There's a lot I like about Umbrella Academy, and there's a lot that I forgive in Umbrella Academy because it's a comic book adaptation and most comics have similar problems. BUT.

In S2E9, when the Handler shoots live ammo from a real gun at a child, it's portrayed as sweet and harmless —bullets are just background noise (e.g. James Bond) and this show has slapstick stakes. In S2E10, when the Handler shoots from a real gun at six adults, they have a graphic drawn-out death scene — bullets kill people (e.g. Pulp Fiction) and this is a much darker type of show.

Klaus gets kidnapped and murdered in S1, and his siblings roll their eyes about how he's irresponsible. Klaus gets accidentally killed in S3, and his siblings react with devastation and horror. Violence is funny, when it's Five killing 20 of his coworkers. Violence is horrifying, when it's Viktor killing Pogo. So on.

You can't have it both ways. It creates mood whiplash. It makes the characters feel callous. It can feel like no events ever matter, so there's no point in caring. I can't tell how seriously to take any given scene, because the same sequence of actions is sometimes treated as comedy and sometimes as tragedy.

aximili esgarrouth isthill would do absolute Numbers on this website fr

ideal animorphs adaptation is a show clearly filmed in cali, but all the streets or schools or malls or last names have a giant [REDACTED] sticker over them. Thus it can maintain the exact amount of information the books gave us.