#psychoinnocent

[featherquillpen]

Every time I listen to Hamilton’s “History Has Its Eyes On You” I can’t not think about Elfangor and Jake talking- Elfangor watching Alloran and Arbron be as good as dead and it’s at least partially his fault, while Jake takes up the role of leader and finishes this fight with his own sacrifices,,,

100%!!! Hamilton is incredible for Animorphs vibes because of all the young people putting their lives on the line to win a war and then dealing with all the terrible mess after...

[cotonworks]

★⌒ヽ summertime romance ⌒♡*:･。.  ♥ ━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━!!! for @psychoinnocent; I hope you enjoy your gift!!!  ♡ @fe-femsplash  ～ ฅ(＾・ω・＾ฅ)

[featherquillpen]

1, 12, 21?

Of these, I will pick 1, favorite fic you wrote this year.

There’s two answers to this question, depending on whether you mean my favorite one to write or my favorite in terms of quality. 

My favorite in terms of the final product is definitely Destroyer of Worlds, but the process of writing it was absolutely torturous, it took me all of 2018 to write, no joke. The apology scene in Chapter 1 went through three complete rewrites, I couldn’t figure out how the Animorphs would beat the Ralek River crew, everything was a tangled mess.

My favorite one to write was Dhiadokhos, because I got to cackle to myself as I imagined what would happen if you crossed together shark and spider genitals.

[featherquillpen]

So I'm sure you've gotten a similar question before but if not: what kind of research did you do when you decided on the settled forms for Dæmorphing? Like did you go through an animal encyclopedia or decide on a general family before going into specifics? I'm curious since I'm working on a HDM crossover and I underestimated how much thought had to be put into it haha

I did a RIDICULOUS amount of research for the settled forms of the main human characters of Dæmorphing. (Main characters include the Anifamilies but not the Valley new-frees, to give some perspective.) 

I never picked a family before going into specifics. I left everything on the table, which is why I think I ended up with some really fun forms like four-eyed butterflyfish for Tidwell and cabbage white butterfly for Melissa. For me it was super important to avoid stereotypes of what a character’s dæmon ought to be, given that a major theme of Dæmorphing is the disconnect between what people believe about animals and what they’re actually like.

I’m making it sound simpler than it is, but my method is this, more or less. 

1. Come up with a list of personality traits for the character. I don’t mean preferences like “hates mornings” or “likes math.” I mean patterns of behavior like “values privacy” or “can’t stay focused on one thing at a time.” Don’t forget exceptions and caveats like “lazy, except when it’s a project she’s doing for herself, not one she’s been asked to do.”

2. Organize the list into useful categories. By “useful” I mean things you can translate into animal behavior together. Put social traits into a category. Put boundaries and privacy into a category. Put work ethic traits into a category.

3. Translate the traits into animal behaviors. Often it’s not a one to one thing but a group of traits. Say you have traits like “values privacy,” “gets angry when people touch his stuff,” and “defensive.” All of those add up to an animal that lives alone on a territory it defends against all comers. But caveats are important too. “Gets angry when people touch his stuff, except his friends,” might suggest an animal with more porous territorial boundaries, or maybe an animal that defends a territory with a mate or a social group.

4. Find an animal that has all of those traits. This is the really hard part. There’s gonna be a lot of blind alleys. I usually start with one really unusual animal behavior to filter on, and then go from there. My starting point with Eva, for example, was that she’s super tough and can survive even the most extreme adversity. That pretty much cut me down to animals in the desert, tundra, deep sea, and mountaintops. But you will find animals that are perfect except for one thing and it will drive you crazy. I nearly picked eyelash viper for Marco because they’re territorial, they’re ambush predators, they have extravagant courtship displays, they use manipulative behaviors to hunt, and they have sensitive passive senses – but they’re just too solitary for him. It wasn’t working. So I had to move on.

In terms of where I do my research, well, it depends on the stage of research. Wikipedia is always great as a jumping off point, if you need to assemble a list of burrowing animals, for example. There’s lots of freely available articles on Google Scholar, if you’re willing to wade into the weeds of scientific language (I am.) I often find that zoo websites have really good information about animals. I’m also a big fan of UMichigan’s Animal Diversity Web, and for more specific groups of animals, Ultimate Ungulate and Primate Info Net. 

I’m also happy to give you advice as long as you come to me with specific questions like “Hey, do you know of a burrowing animal that is also an active chase predator?” rather than broad ones like “What dæmon does X character have?”

[featherquillpen]

First off, thank you for your advice on dæmon aus <3! And secondly, Jake+Rachel, "AU" more like a casual animorphs-day-off moment??

You’re welcome! And hey, any time the Animorphs get to be happy and relax has to be an AU, right?

It was Jake’s birthday tomorrow, and Rachel’s official present would be a dress shirt that actually fit him. Her real present was a squeaky ball, because Jake would morph off-mission when he really fucking needed a break. She tossed the ball far over Homer-who-wasn’t-Homer’s head, grinned, and yelled, “Fetch!”

[featherquillpen]

Commentary on “The Guided and the Lost”, specifically regarding Rachel and Jake’s reactions to the dæmon severing. It obviously means a lot to them and I’m sure it must’ve been a hard topic to think about !

Lots of Holocaust talk ahead.

I’m not the first person to write a dæmon AU to imagine the Nazis using dæmon severing in their horrible experiments. I actually got the idea from the Sherlock dæmon AU The Republic of Heaven. 

If Rachel and Jake were raised at all like I was, they grew up learning all about what the Nazis did in the Holocaust, including the Mengele experiments. The Darmstadt guillotine is something they would have seen in pictures in books, alongside pictures of the piles of little shoes and pacifiers the Nazis stripped off of babies before they went to the gas chambers. So I think that must have come to mind for them. 

I also wanted to channel the raw rage Rachel shows in MM3 just tearing up Nazis and going after Hitler even though it’s an alternate timeline and nothing she does on the beaches of Normandy will really matter in the end. That’s not the point, it’s about letting out this anger you build up over your life after being taught as a young child that your grandfather was ripped from his home and worked to death at a concentration camp. The emotions in the scene are all about Rachel and Jake needing to vent their feelings, not about what is called for by the tactics of the situation.

[featherquillpen]

Jake “I’m a Heterosexual Rachel Stop Laughing” Berenson strikes again and i cant stop laughing that went from angst to hilarious and jake pls talk it out with mertil or smth oh my god

Look, Jake is living in the woods, his family is a hot mess, he’s trying to be a child general of a multi-species army against a vast invading force, and it’s the nineties, it’s a difficult time to realize you might not be a heterosexual.

[pangurbanthewhite]

psychoinnocent replied to your post: Everybody’s gonna be so upset. Like I am hoping...

I doubt they’ll think that Fjord, Jester, and Yasha left intentionally because Matt confirmed that they left their stuff behind! So hopefully the rest of them will get a clue ;o;

OH shit, you’re right! I missed that line in the midst of all the feels.

That’s a relief, then. They can get straight to the rescue-ing. 

Or, more likely, the getting horribly lost until the guests show up to help them figure out who and what the fuck.