#lilaccatholic

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

For Spotify Wrapped, 4, 40, 44!

I, unfortunately for these purposes, am a dinosaur who has not yet seen fit to pivot away from CD players and YouTube lyric videos.

[heartblobs]

Hello! I was wondering, wcif the pretty marriage certificate on the wall in your most recent post? I'd absolutely love to have it for my own game!

Hello dear! That's actually apart of the Growing Together expansion pack. However, I tried to find you a base game alternative and I did find this, which honestly seems like a better My Wedding Stories pack if it still works!

[saintcolumbiformes]

If you're still doing the OC drawings, my OC Monika and her husband Oliver? Curly blonde hair, blue green eyes, generally Germanic features. Always either in her garden or chasing one of her children around. Broke af but cute af. Oliver has dark wavy hair and green eyes. Tall, wears Buddy Holly glasses, comes from a more upper class background but has embraced the simple life. Is a definite a Loves His Wife guy.

I hope I made them as adorable together as they sound!

[pandorasimbox]

I absolutely love your new Church stuff and I'm thrilled to hear about your upcoming Jewish minipack!!! Question, would you ever consider making some Catholic or Orthodox specific items? As a Catholic we have some really cool things like our candles and statues and art that I don't traditionally see made into cc that I'd love to decorate my churches with or just gave for everyday decorating that I think you'd do a wonderful job at making but if not I completely understand! Sorry if this is rude!

Hello friend! Thank you for your message and all the love! ❤ Your message is not at all rude. The Catholic Church certainly is full of beautiful examples of religious artistry, but I am sorry to say that I am not currently planning on making any more religious CC after the Judaism pack. If you’re looking for more Catholic-led church items, I can definitely recommend @aroundthesims‘s Church Set. The objects of faith included with it are beautiful.

[teanmoon]

Thought since you're doing a Get Famous story you and all your followers would want to know: pose player is back!

Pose player and teleporter!

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Okay please tell me about this animorphs stuff because it seems like a WILD ride

Animorphs is an extremely moody and morose series of serialized mid-grade novels from the late 1990s (opinions vary on whether or not it's moody and morose enough to count as grimdark). They were everywhere when I was a little kid; you'd walk into an elementary school classroom at the beginning of the school year and there'd be six or seven Animorphs books already lying around, as if they'd spawned from the walls and floor or something. Unfortunately, they were produced in a very disposable, one-and-done way, and they're now out of print and semi-difficult to find as hard copies; for that reason, the author, K.A. Applegate, has explicitly advised fans to just pirate them. I've been finding a lot of them at public libraries instead, though, because I greatly prefer hard-copy reading when at all possible.

Applegate was a Midwestern housewife who co-developed and co-wrote the bulk of the series with her husband, Michael Grant. In addition to Grant, the later half of the series employed a bunch of other ghostwriters as well, although Applegate retained creative control and regularly vetoed what the ghostwriters were doing.

The premise of the books is that a group of five ordinary-ish teenagers stumble upon a crashed alien ("Andalite") spaceship and are given the ability to "morph" into different animals, subject to a two-hour time limit. They use this power to fight a guerrilla war against another alien species, the Yeerks, who are little grey slug-like creatures who take up residence in the brains of larger species and override their free will. For the bulk of the series none of them is sure who in their own families is and isn't a Yeerk; they know for a fact that at least two of their loved ones are. There's an atmosphere of paranoia that leads to increasingly toxic codependency as the Animorphs slowly lose the ability to trust, take any interest in, or care about non-Animorphs, although they do keep fighting for humanity as a whole.

The Animorphs are:

Jake. The leader of the group. "A dumb jock trying to play General Eisenhower." Likes basketball and the Offspring (which he just refers to as "Offspring" for some reason). From a secular Jewish family, although not completely secular since they light Sabbath candles. His brother, Tom, is known to be a Yeerk.

Rachel. Jake's cousin. A skinny blonde shopaholic and semi-serious hobbyist gymnast who develops worse and worse rage issues as the series goes on. Is she a brave soldier for humanity, or a violent maniac who gloms on to a good cause so she can avoid confronting the darkness within her? Neither; she's explicitly, textually both! She's my favorite.

Marco. Jake's best friend. A typical "funny" late 90s/early 2000s teenage boy with all the tastes and interests we generally associate with that--video games, South Park, Howard Stern. All that's missing is Family Guy. Of ambiguous sexuality and appears to be in love with Jake. Able to suddenly get incredibly serious, even ruthless, when he has to. His mother, Eva, is not only a Yeerk but an incredibly important and high-ranking one. Eva is Mexican Catholic but Marco doesn't appear to be religious.

Cassie. Rachel's best friend and Jake's love interest. From a middle-class black family that lives in a big farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Both of her parents are vets; her dad runs a wildlife rescue clinic and her mom works at a shitty for-profit zoo. The idealistic pacifist of the group, although she's a "kill 'em and then cry over 'em" pacifist and gets regularly dragged for this in-universe. Appears to be Catholic and at least semi-serious about it.

Tobias. Rachel's love interest. A mopey bully magnet with an unbelievably toxic and chaotic home life who accidentally-on-purpose gets stuck in morph as a red-tailed hawk in the first book and retains that as his default body for the rest of the series even once he regains morphing ability thirteen books in. A dreamer who's able to use his own ambivalent identity to build bridges between all sorts of different groups, but also has almost as much of a killer instinct as his girlfriend and occasionally makes calls that are even more coldhearted than Marco's.

A few books in they're joined by Aximili, an Andalite cadet trapped on Earth whose storylines alternate between goofy fish-out-of-water comedy and dark military psychodrama. For this reason, it's difficult for both the other characters and the reader to understand how they're expected to react or respond to Ax. Ax is technically Tobias's uncle since we find out Tobias's missing dad was an Andalite who became stuck in morph as a human.

As the books go on the morality is complicated significantly; the Animorphs resort to more and more repugnant tactics, and we find out that although the Yeerks' government and military brass are pure evil, a lot of individual Yeerks are just folks who've been dealt a crummy hand by evolution and have fallen for propaganda that they're justified in overriding other species' free will to "solve" this. There are Yeerks who believe it's wrong to take unwilling hosts, and Yeerks who wish they could find a middle way between being conquering slavemasters and "slugs beneath the Andalite hooves". Unfortunately, not many plotlines focus on them.

So that's Animorphs.

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Would I even be me if I didn't say Gen/Irene for the ship asks?

Ship It

1. What made you ship it?

I mean. I'm enough of a freak that their QoA starting position Intrigued me but not so much of one that I don't like stories about people making each other better and choosing to do good. So.

2. What are your favorite things about the ship?

That Irene is both older and taller (this is a type of reversal of gendered expectations that I really like), that they're giddy little shits when they're alone together but stony and impenetrable around (almost) everyone else, and, again, that they choose to do good and make each other better even though they could very easily Make Each Other Even Worse instead. Both of them, at different points in the books, threatening physical violence at the prospect of infidelity is fun too in its way.

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

I haven't been into these books for long enough to know what opinions on them are unpopular!

Send me a ship and I’ll answer three questions based on if I ship it or not.

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Would I even be me if I didn't say 🔥 The Queen's Thief

I don't know if this is unpopular but I've heard it's controversial: The Queen of Attolia is an excellent book and Gen and Irene's love story starting off in a really grisly and upsetting way makes it stronger, not weaker.

Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion.