aximili-esgarrouth-himbo - Tumblr blog

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Not sure what it means if you often got yourself to sleep aged 7 by imagining a scenario where they try to put a Yeerk in your head, only to find it didn’t work, then put in a second one without ever removing the first one, only for you to be too strong for that too, and the process repeating (potentially with them using a whole ass water pump to try to get even more yeerks in there) until you fight them all off with yeerk tails hanging out both ears, still totally unaffected

Did anyone else spend a SIGNIFICANT chunk of their childhood worried that if they were infested by a yeerk they'd give away all of the Animorphs' secrets or are you normal

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Hork-Bajir Controller in charge of Pool Safety: So that takes care of all the pre-meeting meeting business. Let’s all say the oath before Visser Three gets here. I pledge to keep my area clean of body parts and other debris, to protect my brother Yeerks from invaders, and most importantly, if I see an Andalite Bandit demorph to human,

All in unison: NO I DIDN’T.

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I mean, he is a native English speaker in the USA, so he’s just kind of doing what people do when they are born into the language majority, especially for a language area big and colonial enough that everyone on the edge of it gets pulled in at least a bit - you also get Russians who know logically that of course, not everyone speaks fluent Russian, but emotionally do still sort of believe that sufficiently loud and slow Russian will get through, for the same reasons. Тобиас would have 100% tried to speak Russian to Elfangor with just as much confidence

Oh goodness, Tobias is doing the “if you speak English loudly and clearly enough, people who don’t speak English will suddenly be able to understand you” thing.

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So new Animorphs graphic novel came out today…

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“My echolocation is so quiet, but easy to hear if you’re paying attention. It’s so squeaky and cute. Absolutely adorable. Just put your ear a little closer... no, a little closer than that... just a little closer and you’ll hear it any second”

I needed an excuse to use a diff brush and my yeerk post was picking up again so

Anyways i think yeerks make little squeaky noises to echolocate. Pretty quiet but easy to hear if you're paying attention.

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Ugh the thing about the Howlers is like. What’s horrifying about the Howlers. The weird devastating natural weapons that are hard to predict and pin down. The body horror. The frightening level of team cohesion; the way that they move as one entity, without hesitation, without ever breaking ranks, and what they move toward is your death. The fact that they are apparently incapable of surrender or even of pausing for a moment in their relentless pursuit of their objective, no matter what damage is done to them or what damage they do to their opponents. And then ultimately, most distressing/unsettling of all, the reveal that these killing machines are children. This is just the Animorphs.

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Now I'm having Ax Animorphs emotions. He's so far from home and he's so young and he's stranded and he finds a group of friends in this strange violent place who would kill or die for him and the first thing they ever do is swim to the literal bottom of the ocean to rescue him and then the second thing they do is refuse to say his name. He doesn't hear the word Aximili for what. Two years?

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One of my favourite forms of AU pondering for Animorphs is literally just “what if they’d been literally any nationality other than American?” - even them being Western European would have changed so much about them, but them being Eastern European? Perhaps from the even more eastern parts of Russia? Central Asian? From Oceania? African? South Asian? Or of course, East Asian or South American? Even their basic ethical reasoning is at some points relatable in a way I think is close to universal, and at some points so profoundly American it immediately slaps you into wondering “yeah, but what if people from my hometown had navigated this?”. Animorphs has been translated into Vietnamese and I want to know what Vietnamese fans make of it, but I also kind of want an entire series of actually Vietnamese Animorphs. How would they have interacted with the “Space Americans” Andalites, if they weren’t themselves “Earth Americans”? I get that part of the whole point of the series is to show Earth Americans being confronted with Space Americans and getting mad about suddenly being the outsider in that situation, but I’d still read at least one mirror series per continental mass.

The cognitive dissonance on imperialism in Animorphs though. Marco’ll spend three pages waxing bitterly sardonic about how the Andalites and the Yeerks are fighting each other for control over other people’s homeworlds with lethal disregard for the people who live there and then Jake’ll say the sentence “The leaders of the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, England, and France were meeting in secret to try and work out the problems in the Middle East” with what seems to be a completely straight face.

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just found out about the vietnamese animorphs covers and they're now my favorite things in the universe

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Did you ever have different opinions on the characters? When I was younger (in middle school), Marco not wanting to fight until he saw Visser One made me dislike him. I also adored Rachel and idolized her violence without understanding what it really meant.

It’s funny you should say that, because Cates and I spent the better part of our most recent podcast episode (about #19) grappling with the reality that we’re both former Cassie-haters who grew up, learned more about media studies, and started to question our own hating.  Because we both started to wonder if the attitude “ugh, why doesn’t Cassie just murder a helpless child and a non-combatant to convenience herself?” is maybe just a little bit problematic.  And we started to question why we’d both held that attitude in the first place, and why that attitude remains pretty normative among Animorphs fans.

Which is why it’s super-interesting you mention your younger self having been annoyed with Marco for initially not fighting and unable to question Rachel’s  war crimes.  Because there’s that same tendency to assume that the characters should just be working as hard as possible to solve the plot, and who cares if they have to murder innocent prisoners of war along the way.

Because I think that that speaks to the way Western media, especially Western sci-fi/fantasy children’s media, tend to approach violence.  I don’t think that everything from Power Rangers to Kids Next Door to Kim Possible to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes necessarily intends to convey the message “violence is the solution to everything, and the way good triumphs over evil is by punching it.”

HOWEVER, there’s a consistent thread throughout all the plots in all those shows, and it’s not one of de-escalation.  Even the relatively family- or character-driven plots of Teen Titans are about Cyborg resolving his argument with Robin… so that they can work together to punch Slade.  Or Raven learning to believe in herself… so that she can go punch Trigon.  Even Avatar centers Aang’s and Korra’s development around their ability to access spiritual and elemental weaponry.  In all of these cases, the ability to commence or resume violence is portrayed as a personal and team-level triumph.

So in #1 when Marco tries to pump the brakes on becoming a child soldier and watching his friends get killed, he’s failing at the plot by the standards of 99% of stories about child superheroes.  He’s in a sci-fi children’s story, dammit, and he needs to go murder his mom and a bunch of other innocent bystanders if he wants to be a contributing Animorph!  And when Cassie first leaves the team over her own willingness to kill without reason in #19, then spends the entire book finding ways to avoid killing, she’s failing her team.  She’s a teen superhero, and she’s supposed to solve things with violence!  How DARE she attempt compromise, reconciliation, or de-escalation as alternatives to murder!

That’s the knee-jerk reaction we’re primed to have by the culture in which we’re raised.  And it’s still the reaction a lot of people have to Cassie especially.  But I think it’s good to change one’s mind in light of new information, and that we can and should question the ways we’re socialized by mass media.

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Not gonna lie, the part that makes Animorphs’ school feel so unlike middle/early high school for me, besides all the American elements, is the fact they can go into bathroom stalls to morph and not have to stand there desperately trying to block out the sounds of their classmate being ineptly blown in the next stall so they can concentrate on essence of lizard. And I don’t think including that sort of age-realistic engagement with sex in a fanfic would be even a particularly horny detail, it’s more in the “dick jokes” range than “actual titillation” range, because teenage sexuality is retrospectively hilarious in its gremlinosity. I would personally be kind of weirded out and stop reading if someone wrote a fanfic where it sort of seemed like you were meant to be titillated by someone’s 13 year old wiener action, but equally it is genuinely a little strange how little time the Animorphs spend being awkwardly horny. (I’ve always assumed the device of “this is a record I’m keeping for posterity” is what explains it, because although they admit to various embarrassing thoughts, they probably all draw the line at “you know what, nobody needs to know I thought ‘oh god, this might be awakening something in me’ while my best friend was half dolphin”.)

Can all the adults in the animorphs fandom take a second to step back for a second and remember they’re 13-16...

Thank you.

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me, on my deathbed: i know i shouldn’t take the Young and the Restless moment as Serious Characterization but isn’t it interesting that Ax’s interest in soap operas/human relationships (and kissing!!!) only starts after learning about Elfangor and Loren

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Alright, you got me. Ax is a himbo.

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i think its kinda wild that when marco “died” there was almost no mention of this impacting anybody’s life outside of the war. like, did jakes parents not know that his sons best friend died? was there a funeral? and if there was you would think that would be interesting enough to document, or at least something marco would want them to document

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Currently reading The Andalite Chronicles and I found this part really funny:

Like, they literally thought she was taking her whole foot off and started panicking. One of the most advanced races in the galaxy, everybody!

Alternatively:

Elfangor and Arbron, looking at Loren’s shoes: <WHAT ARE THOOOOOSE?!>

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As someone from a family where a large proportion of the current generation have at some point gone "hm. I think I'm a bit on the autistic spectrum, and weirdly, it seems everyone on Dad's side is too", I really like the headcanon that Elfangor has the same kind of family. A lot of people twig Tobias and Ax as being a bit on the spectrum, but not so much Elfangor - but as someone who was "the weird older sibling who managed to hide going hitchhiking for weeks", and considers this totally coherent with being a non-stereotypical autist, I see this type in Elfangor as well.

The "absolutely not, we have rules against that" - and that sense of "how we should be doing stuff" being more important than actual social coherence with "his own" people? The finding human affection weird, but still adjusting fast (because affection has always been weird, and this isn't a huge shock)? The desire to share what he knows leading to humans making technological strides? The not picking up tail-fighting skills from explanations others found easy, despite being perfectly good at it once he had a chance to try for himself? It's all just quite relatable.