#taylor animorphs

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

here's a fun question: what do you think would have happened if the animorphs had found and offered taylor the morphing power before the yeerks found her and convinced her to join?

I dunno, what do other people think? If Taylor ends up on the same team with Rachel, would they bond over fashion together, or would Taylor get really jealous and competitive to the point of going Full David? I could see it going either way, especially if either of them figures out about Tobias's crush on Taylor.

[whiteratnothlit]

amiimorphs

[enzymedevice]

Compilation of a couple of Animorphs things I drew earlier in the year while my friend and I were doing a book club. Human morph designs for Ax and Estrid, and Rachel taking Tobias in Taylor morph on a gender-affirming shopping trip lol

[the-lady-mel-king]

Okay I am on Animorphs book 43 and if Taylor is not FUCKING DEAD by the end of this book

[grilledcheese-savage]

Read The Illusion (aka The Tobias Torture Book) and I gotta say… Isn’t Taylor’s backstory just The Ballad of Sara Berry but she’s all of the characters in the song-

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Have you ever written any stories that featured Karen or had Taylor uninfested?

Not really, outside of a cameo apiece in Ghost in the Shell. For Karen, I just have trouble getting her to the plot in the first place. Like, I can sneak Sara into the story by dint her being related to Animorphs, but any other elementary schooler is really hard to involve in a war story without simply killing her off.

And I never ever know what to do with Taylor sans Sub-Visser Fifty-One. Because her story has the potential to be a powerful comment on sexism-ableism, and yet is presented in a way that mostly reinforces that intersecting bias. The Sharing preying on people who haven been kicked to shit by American society is a deliciously disturbing detail, and I want that to be the core of Taylor's story. But the way that #33 and #43 talk about her is far more that she's vain and even depraved for wanting to continue being beautiful after the fire.

Taylor has potential to be like Phantom of the Opera, sexy in paradox with her lack of traditional beauty. She has potential to contain commentary like Till We Have Faces on beautiful women being treated as objects and ugly women being treated as vermin. She has potential to display both halves of misogyny as in Invisible Monsters. One of these days, I might even find a fic in myself that tries to capture that potential. But every time I start down that path, I get so upset with the way #33 treats her as ridiculous for wanting the basic respect afforded to non-visibly-disabled people, and I lose all motivation to write her.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Do you think that when you morph a person you get some of their personality traits? Cassie mentioned wanting to make bad decisions as Rachel, but I'm pretty sure she was kidding. Tobias mentioned Taylor being gentle, but idk if that was a Taylor trait or a human thing, like Andalites being optimistic.

I think the long answer to this has comprised literally millions of volumes of text over the entirety of human history, all debating how much we’re who we are due to genes and how much due to our personal histories.  And of course the answer is not additive but multiplicative: a genetic tendency to find it easy to learn grammar times early access to a computer equals a very skilled coder, genes that make you tall times encouragement to be athletic means NBA, etc.

But the short answer from Animorphs seems to be that the personality of the morph makes suggestions, that the morpher’s own mind can then listen to or set aside as the morpher wants.  So Cassie in Rachel-morph feels flashes of anger, but doesn’t act on those feelings that we see, and Tobias in Taylor-morph feels a desire to be gentle but spends most of that scene acting about as cruel as we ever see him be.  My read: the morph’s personality determines your impulses and automatic responses, but the morpher’s original personality determines your slower controlled thoughts and self-reflection.

So it’s like the classic saying “it’s healthy to be angry sometimes; it’s not healthy to act on anger right away.”  IMHO a morph’s mind determines how much anger you have, whereas the morpher’s original mind determines what the person does with that anger.  Or fear, or sadness, or joy, or empathy.  Obviously the morpher’s actions will be informed by that first emotional response, but they won’t be dictated by that response.

[whiteratnothlit]

my new crackship vriska x taylor who fw it