#joysweeper

[cadere-art]

Commission of a boar tattoo for @joysweeper.

[aromanticofficial]

When I was a kid I read Mercedes Lackey's Tarma and Kethry stories, about two women in the most intense QPR, and imprinted on them as having the highest love possible. Kethry is straight and Tarma is ace. They want kids and Kethry offers to one night stand it but Tarma knows what she really wants is a man she can have romantic love with. So they have this background element of trying to find a unicorn third who's good with Kethry but can respect how Tarma is going to remain her most important person and understands that any children will also be Tarma's. And they do in fact find such a man, who platonically loves and is loved by Tarma, and it's a polyamory situation. There are a lot of reasons to not read those stories. They were written in the eighties and wowwww there's a lot of SA. These two are compelled to defend and avenge women but there's a lot of misogyny towards most of them, and just some bad moments. Still. I'm glad they exist, and permanently annoyed/angry with how consistently allos respond with disgust and claims of homophobia because they can't imagine two women loving each other without being in an exclusive romantic relationship.

toxic queerplatonic yuri from the 80s for the win

[felt-texture]

Hi! I like your style, that adorable crab included. Would you be willing to draw a mostly non-anthropomorphic spider on commission?

yeah definitely! i love to draw all kinds of animals! answering this publicly so everyone knows.....I'M DOWN

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

David's actual return was... bad. What would a good return have been like? As a kid I always expected someone to find him and for him to end up in Yeerk custody and that'd be how they found out who the Animorphs were. I do kind of like Crayak using him but just to get to Rachel, because it'd be a bad idea to give any power to David.

I really like that idea of David finding a way to tell the yeerks about the Animorphs!  It even fits with the existing structure of the series – he returns in #48, and the yeerks find the Animorphs in #49.  

My own suggestion for how to make The Return better?

Make it not a dream.

I have a peeve about dream plots, I’ll acknowledge.  I think that at best they can be an opportunity for an eensy bit of characterization, a heapton of setting, and exactly zero plot.  That said, there are also many scenes in #48 that are potentially scary/cool/interesting, if they just happened for realsies.

If the events of #48 really did occur in canon, then:

Jake and Rachel do what they’ve been threatening since #7, and have an argument that escalates into physical violence.

This helps set up Rachel going full Blood Knight in #52, and Jake doing the same in #53, because these two keep each other ethical-ish any time they butt heads over morality and are forced to defend their decisions to each other.  If the Berensons’ bond has fractured to the point where they’re brawling in morph, then each of them is lacking the other as a check on their behavior.

Marco and Ax’s intelligence analysis determines that (even though they didn’t know it at the time) the events of #46 were the final straw for the yeerks’ secrecy.

The conversation between Rachel and Marco at Ax’s scoop helps sell the idea that the Animorphs’ world is slowly coming to an end.  Too many humans witnessed too much on that aircraft carrier, too many hosts have escaped the yeerks, and the invasion is becoming an open secret.  It’s ominous as hell, because the Animorphs have an inkling that the start of open war will be the end of their ability to live at home with their families, and it’s highly effective at setting up the events of the next several books.

Rachel kicks the elephant in the room by pointing out that Marco and Ax get away with bloodthirstiness while she doesn’t, because gender.

Rachel basically comes out and tells Tobias that Marco is every bit as ruthless as she is, and that Ax is just as quick to kill.  And she’s not wrong.  But Marco and Ax kill coldly, they kill rationally, they kill from a distance, and they kill as boys.  Rachel kills quickly, she kills angrily, she kills up close, and she kills as a girl.  Therefore, their friends don’t tell Marco he’s “worrying” (#22), “terrifying” (#35), “out of control” (#37) or “psycho” (#52).  Their friends don’t get into screaming matches with Ax or act frightened of him.

But Rachel’s a girl, and nice girls are supposed to control their emotions.  Nice girls aren’t supposed to enjoy growing into big strong creatures who can rip their enemies apart.  Nice girls should never be aggressive, and if they are it’s probably because they’re too emotional.  It’s a good point, one I wish came up more often.

Crayak’s deal with Rachel comes due in a way that none of the Animorphs could’ve predicted.

If everything with David is canon, then there’s a fascinating follow-up to Crayak’s offer in #27.  Crayak isn’t just drawing on Rachel’s violent side, he’s drawing on her Achilles heel: that David gets under her skin.  It’s a great wrap-up to the Crayak plot.  It shows that Rachel’s the Ellimist’s favorite not because of her natural-born gifts, but because of her choices.  She’s capable of ruthless violence, but whenever possible she chooses compassion.

There’s also the fascinating ambiguity in the line “kill your cousin,” and the fact that Rachel interprets it to mean Jake — and of course she’s about to kill Tom.  Dozens of fandalites have expended gallons of ink on the question of how to interpret that motif, but it has far more impact if Rachel truly is talking to Crayak in this book as well as in #27.

Cassie’s forced to confront what they did to David.

Leaving aside Rachel for a second, there’s a ton of potential for how this book could change Cassie going into her Big Character Moment in #50.  She never feels the level of guilt over David that Rachel and even Jake do, I think partially because Cassie’s morality isn’t nearly as human-centric and therefore not nearly as horrified by the idea of making a human into a rat.  But if Cassie’s confronted with the reality that she designed and executed a plan that ended with a kid her age trapped in what he considers to be a fate worse than death, then the implications for her character development are almost infinite.

Rachel embraces an unpretty female power fantasy.

I love mecha-Rachel.  Mecha-Rachel is big and ugly and strong, capable of ripping her enemies limb from limb while still being fundamentally Rachel-shaped.

Rachel, maybe more than any other Animorph, has to put up with society telling her that her body is wrong.  Everyone from Marco to her gymnastics coach feels entitled to tell her that she’s too big and tall for a girl.  Everyone from random guys on the street to her own classmates feels entitled to sexualize her body because she’s female.  Rachel doesn’t feel mismatched or dysmorphic the way Tobias does, but she is aware of (and fed up by) the expectations of what her body “should” be.

Mecha-Rachel is unfeminine to the extent that she takes up space — a lot of space — and takes no prisoners.  But she’s still got the aspects of femininity that Rachel loves, from flowing hair to long nails.  Mecha-Rachel is exactly the kind of shape that makes morphing so fun to fantasize about, especially for little girls.

Rachel kills David.

This is maybe what I want most out of #48: for Rachel to kill David for real.  Because, as she tells Cassie, somebody has to do it.  Because she’s strong enough.  Because she’s compassionate enough.  Because she understands David.  Because she understands herself.  Because she’s been a rat, and she’s been just like David in lots of less literal ways.  Because she doesn’t know what the right answer is, so she’s willing to respect David’s wishes for lack of a better way out.

Visser Three gets kidnapped and thrown out of a pokéball and beheaded and then gets better and yet also mysteriously thinks that it’s not suspicious at all one of the andalite bandits looks like a giant human, oh and also there are sentient rats who speak their own rat language.

On second thought, we can leave out all of this nonsense.

Honestly, 99% of my frustration with this book comes from the fact that I can’t tell how seriously to take it.  If it’s just a dream, then a fat lot of nothing happens in the war between #47 and #49, and Rachel’s last book before her death also contains a fat lot of nothing.  If it was something that happened in canon, then I think I’d really enjoy everything in this book except the (non-David) sentient rats.  With only a few tweaks — the first scene taking place in California not D.C., the fight with Visser Three getting cut, the sentient rats getting swapped for more human minions — it works pretty well as a real Animorphs plot, one that helps smooth the transition in both tactics and morality that occurs in the last ~10 books.  This book has some genuinely cool stuff in it, and I want that cool stuff to be part of the real events of the story.

[c-rowlesdraws]

@joysweeper replied to your post “Lightly cursed thought for a Tuesday evening: would it be appropriate...”

this is just reminding me that a couple of the books say andalite upper torsos are naked and I appreciate how most fanartists go "nope!"

@revretch​ LMAO YEAH WHAT?? I don’t remember that at all, and Ax even trims Tobias’ chest fur after Tobias morphs Andalite in book 43! I’m pretty sure they have fur all over and aren’t half naked, but still, please say it’s not so!

[featherquillpen]

My headcanon - Most Andalite spies are vecols, women, or vecol women. This is known by few people outside the higher echelons of the fleet and most Andalites would find it scandalous. The Yeerks believe the Andalite Bandits are spies (except for Ax, whom they rescued) and Esplin through Alloran, specifically, is convinced that most of them fight in morphs because their normal bodies aren't as combat-capable.

I 100% accept this headcanon and would absolutely love post-war fic where Ax gets to meet these cool spies

[threadsketchier]

Have you ever heard the song Rising Greatness by Alela Diane? It has some lyrics that make me think of Luke and Anakin, namely all the "There is good, there is good, there is still good in me and you".

Noooooooooooo I had not until now and

[jedi-order-apologist]

I wanna say Scout for the character ask? She... appears in books other than YDR but they're Traviss books that miss the whole point of the character and have her happily adopted by Mandalorians who hate the Jedi, and apprentice to an extremely self-hating Jedi, and it's supposedly a happy ending.

How I feel about this character

I like Scout! The way she knows herself, her limitations and disadvantages, and works with and around that, her absolute determination, resilience, and willpower. How much she fiercely believes in her place among the Jedi, as much as she’s struggled for that place, and how much she openly claims them as her family (so I really don’t understand why anyone thought putting her of all people in Traviss’s hands was a good idea but whatever I refuse to consider Traviss’s works as part of my conception of Star Wars anyway). She's an inspiring example of someone getting somewhere through hard work.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Hmm...I’m going to go with none, because even though she and Whie had a bit of an attraction to each other, I don’t really ship them. I’m okay with it as a bit of a puppy crush thing though.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Her and Whie. I also liked her brief rapport with Solis.

My unpopular opinion about this character

As much as I like her dedication to becoming a Jedi, I do wish the Agricorps wasn’t always treated as lesser, which her story contributes to. I understand why it would feel that way to a kid, but it does kind of suck that we only really get lip service towards the Agricorps being valuable, but only ever seeing people dreading being sent there.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

It’d be cool if they did bring her back into canon somehow! It’d be interesting to see how they’d approach the idea of a “weak in the Force” character without the age limit thing hanging over the kids’ heads.