allthebrokenpromises

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I didn't wanna derail the other post but I still wanna spread some love for my favourite subject...

Reblog if you've ever felt genuine joy or excitement from doing and/or thinking about math

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What if Jake’s not actually bad at basketball?

That is to say. What if the school coach was a Controller who deliberately kept him off the team, knowing there was already another Controller in his household, to try to push him towards joining the Sharing?

Explanations this fandom has now proposed for Jake being cut from the basketball team, in no particular order: Ellimist shenanigans. The coach hates him for some reason. Everyone's expectations for Jake were too high, thanks to Tom. Sharing shenanigans (possibly to help Temrash 114). Jake really does suck that bad.

So. To the polls!

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the iliad (tr. Samuel Butler) // animorphs #21-22

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I see you are quite the Animorphs knowledge authority.

Do you happen to know how Hork Bajir legs work?

Because they are described as "bent backwards" but also they seem to sit on objects (rocks, metal benches) almost like a human person. Also they have "knee blades", what are they good for? How do they not get in the way?

Oooh, wild speculation time!

Knee blades: work like crampons. Only instead of giving a human stabby toes to aid with climbing, they give the hork-bajir stabby ankles to help them grip trees. Among other things, this would enable hork-bajir to hold on with their legs while both hands are free to harvest bark. We know from #13 that Jara and Ket don't usually sit; they usually crouch. So my guess is that their legs fold up into a semi-relaxed position with the blades pointing out from the ends of the joint (where a human's kneecaps would be).

The knees themselves: my headcanon is that hork-bajir have that big "ankle" joint (like dogs) and that big "knee" joint (like elephants) and that ball-and-socket "hip" joint (like humans). So where a human's leg is sort of an L shape that can become a | or a < as needed, a hork-bajir's leg is sort of a Z shape that can become | or ≤ as needed. So the foot bones on a human are stretched out into the lowest part of the hork-bajir leg, the toe bones become the foot, but the tibias and femurs remain approximately the same size. The appearance still reads as "backward knee" to us humans, just like technically dogs have some ankle stuff going on but it still looks like "backward knee" when we watch one sploot on the ground.

There are a bunch of Scholastic-generated images of hork-bajir, some of which are more "we had about 10 minutes to airbrush a picture of Some Guy before this went to press" than others. But the one that best aligns to my headcanon is this one:

There, Dak Hamee has two "knees" on each leg, and they go in opposite directions. He also has human-like hips and an ankle-like joint that allows him to flatten his talons fully on the ground. There are no blades on his legs in that drawing, but from book descriptions I think there would be one on the end of each of his four "knees." The hork-bajir on the tree in the background also appear to be holding on with their legs and tails. One also has both lower legs fully extended so the lower "knee" joint is fully straight the way a dog could never full straighten out the middle joint of their back leg. So if interpreting canon is a mix-and-match game anyway (since the book art never perfectly matches the book descriptions), then that's my headcanon for how hork-bajir knees work.

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Animorphs/Ratatouille crossover. “Oh so a yeerk gets really into cooking and – ” No. The other way around. The yeerk invasion is a bunch of unusually intelligent Earth rats who learned to control humans by pulling on their hair.

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You may think that turning into animals sounds like a fairy tale. But it’s not. It’s more like a scary tale.

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everybody’s always so worried about short kings getting carried off by predatory birds i’ll have you know the birds are Not planning to eat them and i know Several men under 5’6” who have had full and happy lives after having been raised in a nest

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From the Earth Diary of Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill:

At the end of battle today Prince Jake said that we had “snatched victory from the jaws of the feet”. This is an exceedingly baffling human phrase for obvious reasons. I will have to write another letter to the Association of Perplexing English that Marco directed me to.

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In the peak of my ability to infodump I gave one of my friends the cliff notes of every single book (mostly) in order a couple of weeks ago. He claims it took 8 hours - I’m pretty sure it was six - but my jaw hurt by the end of it either way. It took me until #43 to mention Taxxons at all - I skipped Andalite Chronicles and I’m pretty sure that’s the only point on this list I missed - and I word for word quoted the bright clear line passage because what set me off was explaining that when my older brother gave me The Invasion to read he was reading #30 and really should’ve thought twice.

Just spent the morning telling a coworker why I love Animorphs so much and I think she's going to check it out. Just thanking you for rekindling my passion for the series, which may have just gained it another fan!

I love talking with random adults about the Animorphs series. If they're within 5 years of my age, then odds are they have this half-a-memory of "those Scholastic books with the awful covers? And wasn't the one kid stuck as a bird, like stuck forever as a bird? And oh god, those brain-parasite things gave me nightmares..."

If they're considerably older or younger, then that's when things get really fun. Because you only have like 90 seconds to Pick Two:

Teen superheroes fight aliens, but so disturbingly realist it makes Watchmen look romanticized

Maple-and-ginger instant oatmeal

War epic about there being no moral answers even during "righteous" defensive battles

You know what a "thermal" is? Trust me, you will soon.

Complex and loving battle-forged-family dynamic fleshed out by a rotating first-person point of view

"Do you hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?"

"[D-Day] landing craft were still disgorging men. Like cattle going down the chute to the slaughtering floor. But, of course, cattle don't know what's corning. Humans do. They saw the bodies of their fellow soldiers. They heard the explosions. They smelled the death. And they still came. War is obscene... but individual soldiers are the very best of humanity."

Speaking of cattle, there are these mind-control hamburgers, only it turns out when you morph a steer its balls grow back...

You ever have that nightmare where you can't even control your own breathing, much less your fingers or toes? You ever want to read a whole book set inside that nightmare?

American-flavor anti-imperialism that anticipates the War on Terror disturbingly well

Okay, so there's this space prince, and this space prince's little brother, and the little brother's half-human nephew, and the half-human nephew's girlfriend, and the girlfriend's cousin, and the cousin's best friend, and the best friend's ethical counterpart... and together they fight crime!

Ya like caterpillars? You ever want to imagine one that's 15 feet long and an autocannibal?

... and there was only one tail blade!

1990s nostalgia, but also uniquely 1990s-brand horror

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the three types of villain:

wants to be a carnivorous horse

wants to be a tradwife

really hates Shakespeare

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From the Earth Diary of Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill:

At the end of battle today Prince Jake said that we had “snatched victory from the jaws of the feet”. This is an exceedingly baffling human phrase for obvious reasons. I will have to write another letter to the Association of Perplexing English that Marco directed me to.

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“How do you hate a creature for doing what it has been taught to do?”

- Jake, Book #26: The Attack, pg. 133 (by K.A. Applegate)

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To pose as Aria and be Normal, Visser 3 would have had to consume human food. What happened when Alloran experienced the glories of taste for the first time? There must have been chaos for a few moments at least.

I imagine that the first time Alloran tasted human food was rather muted, as he would have been a Controller at the time, and Visser Three already had a habit of eating people who displeased him. Since we can safely assume most of Visser Three's monster morphs have a sense of taste (it being a vital sense for detecting poisons), Alloran's first encounter with taste was probably something kicking and screaming, not pizza or barbecue.

So, I figure there are several potential outcomes for Alloran when it comes to food:

One, Alloran is too traumatized by the experience of eating other people (including Elfangor) to want to eat with a mouth ever again.

Two, Alloran can distinguish between "Eating people" and "Eating pizza" and does allow himself to enjoy human foods when he's finally free.

Three, Alloran enjoyed the sensation of taste every time he encountered it, regardless of whether it was a person or pizza, and he is reluctantly the first Andalite vore enthusiast. (Dear god what can of worms have I just opened?)

Four, some complicated mixture of the first two options, where post-war Alloran tries to avoid eating as much as possible due to all the negative experiences with Visser Three, but slowly comes around to trying things on his own terms because he is free and has his own agency now, and discovers a profound love of cheese sauce. (This is my personal headcanon.)

I could keep going, since really there's any number of spins you could put on this. Maybe Alloran is a dedicated Vegan post-war. Maybe Alloran enjoyed eating Human food, but Visser Three only let him have access to the sensation of taste as a reward, or when eating people. Maybe Visser Three used the sense of taste as a weapon against Alloran. Maybe Visser Three used it as a reward. It really depends on how you choose to interpret things, I guess!

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Rachel’s relationship with shopping isn’t actually about her feeling validated by it.

She’s not an airhead fashionista mall-crawler in her own narration, or in her interactions with Tobias and Cassie. She treats shopping like it’s a challenge, like it’s a game to be won with the sales and the deals. She dresses up for social clout and power, not to fit in with a trend.

canonically, she’s not particularly concerned with popularity. she’s not on the cheer squad, she doesn’t hang out with shallow girls, she avoids the pitfalls of parties and dates that other preps would get tripped up by. she thrives on showing up to the homecoming dance with the Hot Mysterious Boy on her arm while also being the hottest girl in school, but it’s a performance. her femininity isn’t rooted in gender presentation - she feels more herself in the body of a male eagle or grizzly bear than in a pastel pink mini with a made-up face. she’d never go out dressed in something ugly or badly fitting, but it’s not just because she has standards

her relationship to the mall, and to fashion, and to shopping, is about putting on a facade. it’s fun to play dress-up. it’s fun to take up space and command attention. it’s exaggerating femininity for the purposes of personal enjoyment. it’s drag, almost. 

and you can see this in her internal narration! she uses the mall as an excuse to spend time with people and scratch an itch, she’s not constantly worried about her hair or her makeup - and those do take effort to maintain, particularly if you have a foundation that loves to settle into all the fine lines. Jake and Tobias and Cassie see more in her before her polished facade, Marco’s the one who primarily characterizes her as “Miss Teen Model” and a mall-crawler, and that’s because Marco really wishes he could get the kind of positive male attention Rachel gets.

If Marco were Rachel, he would be shallow and obsessed with looking pretty and flirting with boys, so Marco assigns that importance to Rachel in his own narration. but she doesn’t like Flirting With Boys, and he doesn’t like girls or really understand the high of being the hottest person in the room, so they’re always at cross-purposes. Tobias is, as usual, the only one who sees all of Rachel at once, and the only one who ever truly glories in how herself she is when she’s in morph.

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I’ve finally settled on a design for human Tobias! And I’m feeling confident enough to post him because he is my son and he’s adorable. I call this one “Showing Your Bird Boyfriend That A Few Days Before He Permanently Became A Bird You All Went To The Beach And You Took A Photo Of Him Which He Forgot In All The Following Trauma” and it’s traditional art because my digital drawing skills straight up suck. I’m currently confined with plague so I may be posting my designs for the the other animorphs in human form over the next few days as well.

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I’d bet made one up. He wasn’t hugely willing to kill humans even when they presented a threat, and he’d have had to kill Henry whatshisface to ensure he wouldn’t get caught. And after all he’s living in Animorphville, California. People go missing or die in freak accidents all the time, so there’s a severe shortage of workers and nobody’s gonna check his references. Gafinilan and Mertil probably spent the first year or so living in a scoop with a little space garden until he somehow managed to make enough money for a house (I assume he owns it or at least has a mortgage) and again, enough weird stuff goes down in this region that nobody was particularly phased by him moving in.

Did Gafinilan steal someone’s identity or did he make one up out of thin air?

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I haven’t really kept up with the starkid fandom the last year or so, so I mostly based that bit off of my initial watch of Black Friday and how I felt looking in the comments on youtube while watching it. It really annoyed me at the time because it felt like the fact her powers were the strongest was because of her disability, but you make a good point she does struggle significantly with them and other people do turn out to have similar powers. I still think my old interpretation of it is important because while Hannah is a well written character she can seem like she’s only autistic-coded as a plot device since she’s the first one to display powers. I’ll admit my view was coloured a bit by instantly assuming she had powers in association with her disability rather than seperate to it because I hadn’t seen many characters that weren’t at that point.

(Just a warning my internet cut out when I tried to post this ten minutes ago and I copy-pasted it from a screenshot so there may be spacing issues.)

A trope that consistently ruins media for me is the good old “that’s not a disability, it’s a super power!” It makes me madder because when it turns out that while the disability a character has isn’t ‘cured’ it’s associated with them being the Chosen One of their universe.

Take for example, Team Starkid’s Black Friday. It’s a decent musical, an engaging plot, but Hannah as a character is something that I really can’t take. She has difficulty coping with the world around her because SHE’S SOME KIND OF INTER-DIMENSIONAL CONNECTION AND THE ALIENS ARE FIGHTING WITH HER AS A WITNESS. Meanwhile a lot of the audience is going “look, she’s stimming! Autistic icon!” Thing is, she isn’t. She may have been written to display autistic traits, but she as a character is NOT AUTISTIC she’s MAGICAL and this is NOT OK. If people are recognising a character as representative of a group of people when the character is actually just written with magic powers to serve the plot, it’s not ok. People with real disabilities may be capable of things normal people can’t easily do, and they may not. But one thing’s for sure MY AUTISM IS NOT A MAGICAL SUPERPOWER.

It is a truth widely acknowledged that in fiction disability is often cured, and this is harmful to people with real disabilities. I would argue that disability actually being a superpower is more problematic than curing it, because it doesn’t just go away, it’s helpful. It’s called DISability for a reason. I complained about this to a friend with ADHD and he said “it’s essentially telling someone who's hallucinating that the toaster is talking to them” which isn’t entirely accurate but still follows my line of reasoning so I’m including it. I will now be going through some good and bad examples.

Encanto: Bruno’s OCD. Not the most nuanced portrayal of OCD as I understand it, but a win for it not being either ‘cured’ or plot relevant. It’s not explicit to audience members who don’t enjoy researching their media, and it’s a slightly stereotyped portrayal, but it’s still good. B+.

Nino Kuni (the movie not the game): Does a decent job of actually addressing the impact of disability but turns out to be plot relevant and as a result is cured in the end. C.

Percy Jackson: ADHD and Dyslexia turn out to be plot relevant disabilities and superpowers because the characters belong in an environment that is catered to their disabilities. Characters still struggle with their disabilities at times. Percy is surprised when Annabeth, a person who has spent her life in an environment suited to her disabilities struggles with the same things he does outside this environment because she seems so put together. I like it. A+.

How To Train Your Dragon (movies): Main duo are missing limbs. This limits them in some ways. They are vikings, so they don’t really care and do things anyway. A.

Bubble: (Netflix movie, recentish, what prompted this rant) Main character has an Auditory Processing Disorder. This is initially shown as a superpower, though it’s shown to have an impact on his life. (I have a lot of other bones to pick with this movie btw but I’m trying to focus on the disability representation) He talks about how he struggles/has struggled with sound significantly (for maybe five minutes). He has noise cancelling headphones to help him with this.But when he takes them off he’s in tune with the magic of the city or whatever. Shortly after he opens up about how he has issues with sound, he loses his headphones. Everyone else suddenly remembers he has issues with sound while he is sitting at a loud party and ask if he’s ok with the noise. He shrugs and apparently has no non-magical hearing issues for the rest of the film aside from one half-hearted effort at blocking one ear while doing a war cry. Garbage. F. Also the Group Dad is missing a leg he lost in an accident. He’s very hardcore, runs with a limp, shatters his prosthetic, is fine with it because this movie is barely an hour and a half and doesn’t believe in giving anything depth aside from pounding it into your head that it’s the little mermaid.

We do undeniably need more representation of disability in major media, but it needs to be the right representation. This magical chosen one powers cop out is beyond harmful when characters display traits of a disability because while people won’t take it entirely literally, at least when they claim you need a cure they don’t act like you can do things they can’t so shouldn’t complain. Fiction writers apparently see disability as a character flaw, and the rule of fiction is heroes must overcome their flaws.

Feel free to correct me or add to this obviously, I just felt it needed to be said and I can’t speak for everyone.