kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight

Wahoo

The Thief is a great read that I really enjoyed!

every book in the series that followed it made me deranged and I mean that in the most positive way possible

there's something to be said about the choice to use "prince" as the main signifier of military rank for the andalites. because it kinda obscures the truth of the situation, doesn't it? a group of kids getting magic powers from an alien prince sounds whimsical and delightful. a group of kids getting pulled into a war by an alien colonel sounds tragic and horrible. the slow reveal of what "prince" actually means over the course of the early books is perhaps the most underrated twist of the entire series, because it fundamentally recontextualizes the entire premise of the series without the reader even consciously realizing it.

Including OP's tags cus they were good

Remember, kingdoms are always neutral-to-good and empires are always evil. Princes are what the good guys have. Bad guys have military rank.

"Frightened though they were, some of the animals Andalites might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Prince good, Corporal bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion."

the right mountain goats song will find you when you need it most

MBMBAM Question Asker: I'm an electrician, what can I say that's cooler than "Fuck!" when I get shocked? I get shocked a few times a year.

Griffin: Hey, that's pretty goo-

Travis, the only brother to work in a trades-adjacent job to my knowledge: turn off the power before you work on it

To The People I Pass On The Train At Night - Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

"Meanwhile in Tucson"

For those who don't know Spanish: "Chinga tu madre" is a common swear for "F*** your mother." They changed it to say MAGA instead of mother, obviously. The second line is "No more orange."

Fuck everybody else and Happy Birthday Mr. Brightside!!!!

source

I have NO IDEA what I just watched but my life has been enriched and my day has been made

It’s Library Card Sign-Up Month! Queer Liberation Library memberships are TOTALLY FREE to everyone and anyone in the US — so go apply, get your QLL card, and get reading! 📚🌈

Well, I was going to wait to buy the beautiful British versions of these books, but they all aren’t going to be out until late 2024, and Book Outlet had five of them for $4 or less so here we are

the most harrowing animorphs book is the one where the animorphs, who are already child soldiers, are unknowingly forced to fight and kill alien children

yes, this happens

The “good” godlike figure tricks them into it and, the series representation of true pacifism chooses not to tell them what’s going on so he can use them as the tool of vengeance that his pacifism prevents him from becoming himself

#every time I learn something new about animorphs I regret ignoring the bin full of them in primary school#seriously I should have read them but I thought they were lighthearted based on the wackass starfish cover#very embarrassing but yes it was a classic judging a book entirely by its cover sitch#welp better late than never 

From memory I think that starfish one is the one where a teenage girl beats someone up with her own severed arm and also pins a random teenager to the wall in the mall (by her clothes) using steak knives, but more importantly, they are all available online for free with the writers’ blessing.

every

#I’m sorry Animorphs had a WHAT#A WAR?#I never got to read it but I always thought it was a fun and lighthearted story or something#I need to read it 

It’s um

I hate to be the one to break this to you but Animorphs is in fact a war story. The story does not exist without the war. It is specifically a story abut child soldiers being enlisted to fight bodysnatching brain slugs, meaning that almost every time the kids kill a ‘nasty invading alien’ they are also killing an innocent slave. Concepts of the morality of child soldiers, offense vs. defense, what counts as acceptable losses/acceptable collateral damage and whether it’s acceptable to slaughter enemies while they’re helpless, things like chemical warfare and the rights and protections that should be offered to displaced war refugees, as well as war not having ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and most actors being victims of their circumstances and societies, are heavily explored. (As well as trauma – these kids have SO MUCH PTSD. The first suicide attempt takes place in book 3 and things don’t really improve, especially after the torture book.)

I once did a quick tally and found that of all the “main” species in the book (humans plus any alien species that appears in three or more books), only three species do not explicitly attempt on-page genocide in the series. They’re the three species who we are introduced to in the first book as the antagonists.

I’ve done this rant before but animorphs radicalized me farther than anything else. I remember setting the last book down at the age of maybe 12 or 13, the book ending with a member of the main cast dead, warcrimes committed in the name of freedom, every character covered in scars both physical and mental, and I thought to myself “I don’t want to join the army anymore” Those books hit their target audience in me and they changed me forever. If not for them, I probably would have joined the army at 18 and royally fucked up my life

I dunno, I feel like the Yeerk’s whole MO is genocide. Just falling under alternate definitions of genocide than “mass murder”, more under the “mass enslavement + rape + being forced from their homes” definition.

The Hork-Bajir and Taxxons are fairly innocent, though.

Yeah the future we’re shown if the yeerks win is a cultural genocide, with all humans kept in basically closets like they’re objects when they aren’t being driven around by brain parasites or arranged to reproduce.

But meanwhile the ostensibly “heroic” race attempting to wipe out whole races just to weaken the yeerks - denying them more dangerous hosts - is a concept I’ve not even seen done in a lot of adult-aimed science fiction even though we see shit like that in actual real life. Wiping out populations because they could hypothetically harbor or become more enemies. In fact that’s part of all war and still gets glossed over and ignored by most media about war, unless of course they have the evil villain side do it. Here it was bluntly addressed and it disillusioned the entire main cast to the very concept of there being a “good side.”

Fidencio Fifield-Perez (Mexican, d.o.b. unknown) - The Garden (2023)

i also found this which I drew back in June when it was the hot meme and then I looked at what I had created and was like “oh this is some real ‘audience of one’ shit” so it went in the drawer. but you know what, the important thing is I make myself laugh and I still think this is funny

my “if something bad happened to them i’d kill everyone in the room and then myself” gang from the masquerade series (…..yeah i’m still in denial over [redacted] shut up)