Liylac-Pantherra-Untsya

Just a sweet Andalite, from transsexual, Pennsylvania. I've come to write fanfiction, do conlangs and worldbuilding in the Animorphs universe, and generally be a crazy cloud artist.

[succulentul]

happy happy 30th birthday to the book series that changed my life!!!

animorphs is my all-time favorite piece of fiction and i’m in the middle of this huge painting for it, but figured i’d post this WIP anyways since its june 1! hopefully the full piece will be done by the end of the month :-)

[guiltfactory]

the "my favorite character did nothing wrong" mindset is completely unappealing to me because i love thinking about all the things my favorite characters did wrong

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

This is more of an assessment than a question, and I’m rather new to the Animorphs fandom, where—unlike in bigger fandoms—it’s much easier to find stories so well written that they rival the book series itself. I’ve also come to learn that there are basically two types of post-war Animorphs fics: one in which Rachel remains dead, and one in which she survives or returns.

The former can explore the impact her death has on the people around her and offer meaningful insight into how they deal with grief and try to move on with their lives.

The latter offers a great opportunity to explore how someone like Rachel—who molded herself into the perfect weapon of war—struggles in peacetime, and how this affects her relationships with friends and family.

Then there is the very rare third type, where both things happen: Rachel dies but somehow returns—like in Eleutherophobia, where her return does not nullify the impact her death had while also exploring how Rachel's life during and after the war could be considered a tragedy of its own.

To sum it up, being part of this small but dedicated fandom is awesome!

I agree that this is one of the nicest fandoms I've ever been in, which I'm reminded of every time I step a toe into any other major franchise. I think it's a bunch of factors (lots of lovely people here!). But a big one is Animorphs being out of print for decades, which means that:

most of us are old enough to have some perspective on the fact that no fandom argument is ever that important

there's no room to bicker over how the series will end or what will happen next

shipping wars could still happen in theory but won't have the vehemence of debates over whether something is secretly canon

it predates the current culture of harassing creators on social media to try and force the direction of canon

Like, there are still arguments about what goes into the gaps within the text — the cynical view of Eva/Peter vs. the more romantic read; my hopeful view of the ending vs. others' annoyance with its ambiguity; my jaded assumption that the yeerks will all become cetaceans after the war vs. others' optimistic view of yeerks all becoming human after the war; etc. But most of those are pretty mild, because we recognize they're low-stakes and will ultimately go unresolved.

I do remember it wasn't always this way. Like, in the forms of the 90s and 00s we had Marco/Rachel vs. Tobias/Rachel shipping wars (Jake/Rachel was the weird dark horse), and I don't like thinking about the arguments over Cassie back then. But people have mostly matured, and learned not to get too attached to the version of the story that exists in their heads when lots of other versions are equally valid. If Star Wars is the object lesson in fandom becoming so calcified it literally can't be pleased anymore, then Dracula's the counter-example where we all agree that canon is deeply flawed and aberrant reading is part of the fun. And I feel like Animorphs is way closer to the Dracula end of the spectrum these days, and I'm so SO happy about it.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@jadedresearcher

#I think I was lucky#then#that it literally never occurred to me#to look up my favorite book series#on the internet#while it was still ongoing#honestly i keep having to remember fandom is a thing that might even exist when i find a new media i like#media solipsim: i am the only fan#the creator is making it just for me#this is great#but also#if i happen to find another person who already likes it#now i know what to talk to them about#this is ALSO great#and ALSO ALSO#if i find someone who DOESN'T know it#who clearly would#like it#i get to recommend it to them#and vicariously re-experience it through their eyes#if they tell me about it as they consume it#which#is why#the watcher#doing an animorphs live blog#for the whole zampanio fandom in my discord server#for multiple years#has been#incredible#can't believe it finally ended

Yes! I agree that the fandom is often most toxic when the series is ongoing, and it goes through this like cycle of: Pressure/Conflict => Calcification into Only One Correct Take => Softening over time => Re-framing. As long as there's no new canon content coming out, it's possible for all the steps to occur, but if the series is getting eternally Frankensteined back to life à la Star Wars, the Conflict and Calcification stages are nearly impossible to overcome.

[ferncloud]

ive been waiting for this moment all my life, but its not quite right

[tasoula14]

Claire and Chris Redfield ⛓️

[mockva]

Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught

[mexicain-sans-frontiers-v2]

[the-davest-of-uncles]

*gets back to the nest* baby you are NEVER gonna believe how i got this fish

[lakesbian]

i genuinely love that the way k.a applegate resolves the issue of needing the alien on the team to be able to drop plot crumbs without totally solving everything for the human kids is by making aximili-esgarrouth-isthill a jock who only tangentially paid attention to when his teachers were explaining, like, the andalite equivalent of how to find the cosine of a triangle, and now he's in an astronomically rare circumstance where the fate of an entire species depends on him remembering how to do that. and he's cold sweating trying to recall the answers to homework problems he didn't do. and also he's always lying.

[lakesbian]

ax is literally experiencing like if you got teleported back several hundred years and everyone was expecting you to explain the precise mechanisms of how cell phones work to them and if you don't come up with a sufficient explanation they're all going to die. And he's not enjoying it.

[lakesbian]

every day this happens to ax

[scrollingdown]

The one time he did correctly solve his homework problems, the plot immediately became about UNsolving them.

[thelesbobaggins]

“that character is a war criminal” that character is from a fictional fantasy world and did not attend the geneva convention

[hapalopus]

Another W for Animorphs! The series ends with them actually being tried at the Hague for breaching the Geneva Convention. The Animorphs are found not guilty because they won the war. They resent the court for not punishing their numerous human rights violations and mass murders.

[cursed--alien]

Wait, why does winning make you not guilty?

[hapalopus]

I misremembered it as the kids being tried, when it was only their enemy, but yeah, idk man, ask the Animorphs Hague ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They aren't war criminals because the people who decide who's a war criminal didn't want them to be war criminals. Wonder what lessons we can learn from that :))

[nana-glass-chillhop-radio-hour]

Huge plot point in the last book is that one of the main characters has a courtroom breakdown when they're prosecuting the commander of the invading alien army for warcrimes because the defense said 'hey the main character did war crimes too' and it's so bad his best friends/comrades in arms abduct him temporarily to try to convince him that 'no our acts of war were justified because we were defending earth against a hostile invading force' and he's like 'well yeah but we killed innocents and that's still morally indefensible though' and his friends tell him 'well okay be that as it may you need to stop being too depressed to function so we can put the other guy's ass in prison forever'

KA Applegate was on the 'war is hell' train for fuckin decades man

[the-haiku-bot]

KA Applegate was

on the 'war is hell’ train for

fuckin decades man

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

They also committed a bunch of other crimes too. Like, yeah, there were war crimes and war crimes are bad, but they also committed trespassing, vandalism, breaking and entering, identity theft, fraud, molesting endangered species, illegally entering Australia (and maybe Canada?) without the proper paperwork, and I am pretty sure that causing the K-T Extinction Event counts as Cruelty to Animals. Just to name a few!

[do-not-fold-spindle-or-mutilate]

They didn't cause the KT extinction so much as... choose not to prevent it. Like, the ant aliens caused it. The animorphs were asked to prevent it by people who didn't know doing so would erase their entire species.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Tobias takes the credit for it, therefore I am giving him the credit - unless it's a Monday. Then I tend to go with the idea that they might have never gone back in time at all and just shared a hallucination together via thought-speak.

[shinelikethunder]

[sees blorbo skulking around the closet where the weight of the world lives] hey! get out of th--what have you got on your shoulders? oh my god not again. drop it! bad!

[theevarquill]

On Animorphs Fanfiction

So a couple years ago I decided it was time to put effort into a very silly Animorphs fanfiction. I now have 60k of it up on A03.

I also, for some godawful reason, have another 120k written but not yet posted (because it's all in disconnected and isolated pieces that don't have the in-between connective tissue yet set up properly.)

And it's all because of this little shit:

'Let's put the twist reveal right on the cover! I mean, those idiot tween readers don't know anything, the clueless little shits. It's not like they can read, they're dumber than rocks! Stupid rocks! We can totally get away with it!' - Scholastic, probably

It is far too much work for a free fucking project. The outline is seventeen goddamned pages and has the kind of effort put into it that a smarter person would reserve for paid structual and copy work:

This is 15% of the outline. Proof that writers of fanfiction should be treated with first-line atypical antipsychotics before being given access to any writing implements.

Now this fanfic project started because my dumb ass went and re-read the Animorphs series in my mid-30's. I got to book 19: The Departure and threw a tantrum at the end the same way I did when I re-read the series in my early 20's and the same way I did when I originally read it at like... idk, 12?

My basic issue with the end of this book is that its stupid Deus Ex Caterpillar ending is a cop-out and pretty much a total themic betrayal of everything that the series had been building up to at this point. I do understand what the authorial intention was: Cassie is a special little snowflake who uses the awesome power of too much empathy or whatever to make love and understanding shoehorn their way into the narrative in the most eye-rollingly inauthentic and inorganic way possible.

And I do get why no one gave a fuck: I mean, what were you gonna do as a reader, go cry about it? Your next best possible option for tween reading at this time was Goosebumps. Motherfucker, shut the fuck up and consume your deux ex total bullshit ending Animorphs book. It's not like you had a ton of age-targeted media options anyway.

So. Be me, a couple years ago: exhausted, burnt out, crotchety, sick of everyone's shit, and so full of piss and vinegar it's probably an undiagnosed medical condition (call your doctor if you experience symptoms of priapism for more than four---) and sort of desperately hoping that I can emotion-mine some remembered childhood nostalgia out of that old kids-turn-into-aliens-to-fight-animals (or was it the other way around?) children's book series.

I sat down to read it, and ---holy shit!--- I knew in theory that the series holds up for the books that were written by the original authors, but this shit slaps!

And then I got to Book 19, and I got to the end, and fury filled me, because this quite emphatically did not slap. This was unslappage of the highest order. If this ending was any less of a banger it would read like a moldy sheet flapping on a slackened clothesline.

Assuming this feeling would pass, I let my rage consume me. But that was not the end, no: that was only stage the first of my grief process at how shitty that book's ending is. Next, after rage, came that terrible sense of purpose where I abruptly realized that oh no, I probably care about this enough to write content about it!

I went to my computer. I sat down. I opened google docs. I turned on music. I started typing.

In one night I somehow wordvomited almost 9k of fic fever dream onto the screen.

Now, that's not really impressive. A drooling toddler can bang her little dumb fists against a keyboard all day and put out an awful lot of text, none of which I would read at anything less than loaded-with-safety-off gunpoint. But in this case I produced serviceable prose that didn't immediately make me want to commit ritual suicide by way of self-immolation. I decided that was a plus.

In a fit of temporary mental illness I put that shit up online. I guess I forgot the whole maxim where no one will ever love your dumb bullshit as much as you will. But, surprisingly, people did not call for my immediate lynching and/or placing into the stocks in town square. Horribly (for me) they did something worse: I was given encouragement.

Because mommy and daddy never loved little baby TEQ enough, this was basically the equivalent of inhaling salvia-laced catnip mixed with the choicest smokeable rock crack-cocaine. What started as a silly little anger-fueled nonsense alternate divergence quickly became something that I went "well, fuck. I bet I can make this all internally coherent and slap."

And things went well! I banged out story 1 in three months or so and patted myself on the back!

And two weeks after I finished story 1, while on a walk only two blocks away from my house, I saw something fucked up that ended with the city coroner and a body bag. I didn't write for four months.

When I did start writing again it was difficult to get back into it. To encourage myself I started picking outline scenes and creating them with no regard for anything like sequence or in-story timeline. The result of this is that I have the entirety of the story and epilogue mapped out, and over half of it written, but I can't actually publish any of it because I still have some early foundational sections unwritten. These early sections are taking sixever because SO FUCKING MUCH depends on them. I'm trying to thread multiple concepts and layers into prose that can't go on too long or expand too much without it losing the feel of the original series. This is fine for Cassie POV, because [SPOILER REDACTED], but the other kids (for reasons that include tone and major takeaways and themes) need to feel solidly like they have been ripped from a version of canon that got published in an alternate mirror reality. It needs to feel like Animorphs or it won't make the points I'm driving at. So now I have another 120k of writing across almost 3 years in-story time and I can't actually use any of it until i get my shit together and write a cogent, coherent plan for the next like 7 chapters of Scramble, because if I fuck that portion up I might as well just delete the whole damn story project, and that's intimidating. I finally got the first couple chapters of Scramble out in June or so of 2025, almost a year after A19D started publishing. In October I came back and updated it so that at least 14 chapters are out. We're now right at the point there where the story turns away from infighting / straight recap with natural team exposition and goes into rewarding the reader for sticking with it with lots of crucial information and de-escalating panic stakes. Interspersed with the knowledge dumps will be some great low-pressure bittersweet team bonding moments.

The information given will also retroactively turn the end third of A19D and the beginning third of Fatality into a tragedy, as the audience (and the rest of the group) will know more than Cassie does. I've decided to start ranting and rambling about the project here, because goddamn if I can't go off on main (I say, while on a fandom-and-fic-specific alt) about this stuff my head will explode. I have other people to talk to about my original projects (which also slap btw), and I feel it's ethically about the same as waterboarding to inflict my fic divergence shit upon people already patient enough to listen to my nonsense about my originals.

But I'll end this here for now because it's getting less funny and more winding and introspective as I run out of steam.

[pyrochord]

MARCO

slay the princess / the oresteia / lose a battle, win the war / after the movie / the 100 / wikipedia / i'm free

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Remember when the Ellimist was like “how about we pit seven of your ultimate killing machines against my six accident-prone teenagers and a hardwired pacifist” and Crayak was like “there is obviously no trick here, I don’t see how this can possibly go wrong”.

[warriorlid14]

From then on, anytime they’re in a tough battle, Marco shouts “quick! Jake and Cassie! Start making out!!”

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Animorphs’ enemies, ranked on the basis of how well Surprise Cassie/Jake Makeouts work against them:

Andalites: Think human orifices are disgusting, and will almost certainly be distracted by the horror of such orifices rubbing together (if they’ve never morphed human themselves) or curiosity about whether the insides of others’ mouths actually taste that good (if they have morphed humans before).  Highly effective strategy, should be used on all occasions.

Human-Controllers: Slightly more likely to believe that these two are ordinary human teenagers who just happen to have wandered into a Secret Yeerk Base by accident, if they do happen to see said teenagers sucking face in a dark corner.  Might attempt to capture said teenagers anyway, so this strategy is a bit riskier in context.

Hork-Bajir-Controllers: May be momentarily distracted by the question of what the fuck they’re even witnessing, but will be otherwise unaffected.  Should probably consider alternative strategies.

Helmacrons: Probably won’t even notice.  Entirely ineffectual.

Taxxon-Controllers: Will no doubt assume that a) these two humans are eating each other’s faces, b) at least one of the humans must therefore be injured, and c) they should therefore eat both humans with all due haste.  DO NOT ATTEMPT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

[goodgrammaritan]

The leopard from The Departure: Bigger target. Might think twice before attacking.

[mercifulmother]

– Animorphs: The Reunion, K.A. Applegate

[mikkeneko]

PSA to fan creators who don't have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.

[amarguerite]

Via @watertightvines

[wildjuniperjones]

Here's the link. It was actually not immediately easy to find, so I thought this might help.

[druidshollow]

you've some dangerous eyes out for you, boy

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Oh geeze, now I'm imagining a Rachel from a universe where she lived after the war coming to the canon universe through a Sario Rip.

Things Rachel would do if she suddenly found herself in canon-verse ~10 years after her canon death:

Put on white face paint and show up in Marco's room at 3:00 in the morning. This would be her way of announcing that she's back, and if she half-kills him from sheer terror then that's a sacrifice she's willing to make.

Find Tobias and drag him by the ear (symbolic ear) into interacting with other people on a regular basis. This effort would probably be aided by Toby, who would both kidnap him to visit the hork-bajir settlements on the regular and also throw him at human activities.

Buy a pool noodle. Get it wet. Ambush Jake. Smack him repeatedly in the head with it, yelling "I! Told! You! Not! To! Blame! Yourself!" [wet squelching noises]

Go for smoothies with Cassie, and promise (on a bed of lies) that she won't threaten to cut Ronnie's balls off if he ever hurts Cassie.

Find Ax. Confiscate the keys to Ax's Dome ship. Tell Ax that he's taking a month-long (one of our months) vacation on Earth. Put in a ransom call to the andalite homeworld, telling them they can't have Prince Aximilli back until every Earth resident who wants to morph can damn well do so.

Morph elephant, uproot her own memorial statue, and carry it to the nearest marine biology research center to be melted down to make artificial reefs.

Nap. She's earned it.

[topherchris]

[knuckledust3r]

please

[lilacnothlit]