Sorry to do this to you, all of my awesome creative inspiration-generating followers who still have questions, but I am going to close my ask box for the next 2 - 3 weeks to try and clear out the 40-odd waiting asks I still haven’t gotten around to, some of which are months old. This blog is also the thing I do for fun/relaxation/sanity during my rare and precious spare time, and thus I need to keep its demands to a minimum or it will lose its beautiful sanity-inducing properties for me.
If you have Animorphs questions, http://ladysugarquill.tumblr.com/, https://miraculoussparrow.tumblr.com/, https://wtfanimorphs.tumblr.com/, http://fyanimorphs.tumblr.com/, and https://andalite-angel.tumblr.com/ might be interested in answering them.
If you have Animorphs headcanons, https://animorphs-hcs.tumblr.com/ will accept them.
If you want Animorphs fic, http://justanotherghostwriter.tumblr.com/, http://veteranfangirl.tumblr.com/, and http://derinthemadscientist.tumblr.com/ have all been known to help.
If your life has no meaning, you want to become part of something bigger than yourself, you like hamburgers and beach volleyball, you want to give back to your community, or you think Lore David Altman has some good points: http://the-sharing.org/
Explanation as to why I don’t answer some questions below the cut.
Most of the Reasons I Choose Not to Answer Questions
Hopefully this is helpful to people who are wondering. I try to answer most questions most of the time, even if just briefly (although, let’s be real, when have I ever been brief?) but there are some that I end up deleting. Here’s why.
They’re anonymous questions best answered privately, not publicly. This is the #1 reason I delete asks unanswered.
If an anon asks a question that I’ve already answered elsewhere, I generally won’t bother making an entire post just to let them know.
If an anon sends a question with personal or private information, I always err on the side of not publishing it.
If the anon asks a question I genuinely don’t feel like answering (see my posts here), I don’t bother to explain why I’m not answering it.
If the anon ask contains offensive content, even content that almost certainly slipped in accidentally (yes all relationships involving involuntary controllers are sexual assault, no I’m not going to post anything that mentions those relationships), I delete it.
If an anon is unclear—because of typos, because of long-winded wording, because of two questions in one ask—I can’t ask for clarification.
They’re looking for beta readers, RP participants, forum moderators, or long-term correspondence. I am a grad student currently teaching a class on the social psychology of media effects, studying for my university’s Ph.D qualifying exam, analyzing data from six or seven different ongoing projects, pulling together background research for my dissertation, writing a textbook chapter on violence and attitude change, and attempting to get eight hours of sleep a night on top of all that. I spend maybe 15 minutes a day on tumblr, and about 10 of those minutes are usually spent posting the ask reply I wrote using the Google Drive app on my phone while taking the bus to school earlier that day. I am sorry, but I do not have time to commit to anything more in this fandom than what I already do.
I don’t feel qualified to answer them. Some people ask about the history of the publishing industry, debate the relative morality of actions taken in peace vs. war times, or request AUs in settings with which I have no experience whatsoever. I’m very sorry, but most of those just go unanswered because I don’t want to say the wrong thing.
They argue about why the yeerks should become human after the war. As I explain here, I don’t have any strong opinions about whether the yeerks SHOULD become human, I just don’t think it’s realistic to think the yeerks WOULD become human. The debate was moderately interesting to me the first 15-odd times someone has brought it up, but now I’m sick to death of the whole thing (especially the people who mistake my position as saying that the yeerks becoming cetaceans is right, when I’ve only ever said the yeerks becoming cetaceans is realistic) because THERE IS NO CANON EVIDENCE ONE WAY OR ANOTHER so there’s no point in doing anything but agreeing to disagree. https://featherquillpen.tumblr.com/ and https://yeerks.tumblr.com/ both prefer to imagine a softer world then I do, so feel free to talk to them about the issue if you disagree.
They have to do with justifying the yeerks’ decision to invade other species. K.A. Applegate does an awesome job of creating utterly terrifying villains for her series, primarily through showing that the yeerks’ atrocities against other species simply cannot be allowed to stand. The yeerk hosts are described as “slaves” in almost every single book; Marco says “they are the most total slaves in all of human history, because not even their minds are their own” (#20). Over 20 books later, Jake still battles hypervigilance, insomnia, nightmares, and other PTSD symptoms from briefly becoming a controller (#26). Eva’s described as suffering severe personality damage, whereas Chapman’s depicted as having lost most motor functions—both as a result of yeerk control (#45, #2). Aftran and Illim both consciously choose to reject the yeerks’ model of hosts-as-livestock after personally experiencing the minds of involuntary hosts, showing that alternatives are possible (#19, #29). Ax and Aldrea mention the yeerks literally annihilating six or seven species they don’t view as “useful” (#4, #8, HBC). All of that is canon. Other interpolations of canon—that the yeerks effectively destroyed millennia of hork-bajir culture which will never be recovered, that the “voluntary” hosts are mostly strong-armed into joining as we see in MM4, that the hosts’ experience is the equivalent of locked-in syndrome or assault, that Eva and other hosts like her suffered sexual assault as a result of being controllers—have always struck me as relatively close interpretations of canon. If anyone disagrees... Sorry, but I don’t give a damn. If you want to defend slave owners because they happen to be slave owners born blind, do it elsewhere.
I just realized that if you are blogging from like a library and someone blocked an anon they got there, it might actually block you. Because your IP address is just saying where you computer is.
That probably explains the “this user I have never seen, and whose popular post I am trying to reblog has apparently blocked me” phenomenon.
Sometimes, I reblog things without comment when I find them interesting. Somethimes, I reblog them without comment when I agree. My bar of “What i find interesting” varies wildly from day to day; in general, when I blog a lot, it’s surprising lowered.
So, when a reblog a thing, does it mean that I agree with it, or does it mean I find it curious? I suppose you just have to guess. Either that, or read the tags, if i start doing that more consistently.
