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

the other thing is that largely, The Locked Tomb is just written like homestuck. the drama, the jokes, the non-committal to its own chosen genre voice. it reads like Homestuck! Tamsyn Muir was (is!) a really fantastic hs fic writer, and she gets the tone spectacularly. it fundamentally carries over into The Locked Tomb. some of the funny turns of phrasing are just borrowed/inherited wholecloth from homestuck even

i know most locked tomb fans say “they wouldn’t touch homestuck with a 100ft pole” but the whole book is such a deep love letter to it that i can’t help but think you’re actually scared that you WOULD like homestuck. i mean, homestuck is so deeply injected into this text that you may as well say “i just wouldn’t ever put sugar in my body” while eating a donut.

give it a try. maybe you’ll see what Muir liked about it. maybe you’ll get the worldbuilding more (i see a lot of people calling it confusing, but the homestuck fans always seem to disagree!). maybe you’ll just have a richer understanding of your favourite book. literally what is the harm?

Okay. I have to take this bait. I am very much a TLT fan, and I was very much a HS fan, and this topic is one I think of often.

First, I want to say, the tone, writing style and genre conventions established in HS fic evolved far beyond the source material. TLT does not read like HS, it reads like HS fic. People who were in the HS fandom find it less confusing, but the experience of reading homestuck is not what makes this the case. It's the experience of where the fandom took the concepts from the comic, how things the comic presented as absurd were used to build out worldbuilding, and metatextual writing styles developed as a way to turn the joke premise of the comic into a unique art of storytelling. When I meet TLT fans who haven't read Homestuck and want to know if they should, my default answer is, "no, it won't help." I direct them to articles about the quadrant system (because people shipping Cam/Pal flushed really bothers me) and explain that if they really want to understand HS in TLT, they need to read the fic.

Second, it seems to me that by focusing on the HS influence in TLT, you're overlooking the extreme variety of other sources that are built into these books. Starplatinumnun's reading order gives a much fairer sense of how deeply intertextual TLT is, and even then, you will find dozens of comments saying "you forgot about [x]." TLT isn't HS fic with the serial numbers filed off, it's a piece of literature that's in dialog with a vast literary canon of which HS is just one part.

Anyway, I am chipping away at my Guide to Homestuck in The Locked Tomb and someday hope to actually post it. I'm still working on the world's worst section: Influence of Hussie-Fandom Interactions in the Character of John Gaius.

homestuck is ultimately a story about how you are cosmically fated to play that damn game your friend really wants you to play

by the way, if anybody following me is interested in cosplay, making prop replicas, sewing their own clothes etc then you should definitely check out this Humble Bundle of how-to-cosplay books

it has basically everything a cosplayer (or somebody adjacent to costuming) might want, and then some -- i'm talking sewing, fitting, making foam armours, wig styling, smocking, tailoring, etc etc etc there's seriously loads of different books, and it's at a pay-what-you-want rate, PLUS it helps to support myself & charity (you can even choose where your money goes)

the bundle is only on sale until the 18th of May 2023 so get it while you can & signal boost so other cosplayers & costumers can see!!!

playing a ttrpg is like being in a very exclusive fandom of, like, six people

shout out to blorbo from my mind

terfs are saying “JKR is supporting Ukraine so much though” no bestie, she said she would match donations to HER CHARITY up to a million. like she’s one of the richest women on earth, and the best she can offer is One Million of her own money but ONLY IF you the humble reader pay her tax evasion scheme money too

with the recent announcement of the release date for Craptastic Beasts: Dumbledore’s Closet, here’s your reminder to not go fucking see it. Don’t give this terf your money. She WILL spend it on funding transphobic organisations and trying to strip trans women of their rights.

i think the difference for me between the neil patrick harris count olaf and the jim carrey count olaf is that nph olaf has a lot more scope for drama and nuance while the jim carrey version is more singly comedic

and this is more a direction thing than an individual performance thing, it seems with carrey that they had a ‘leave the camera rolling and let him do some funny stuff’ kind of approach, which works for a wholly comedic performance but undercuts any tension or threat the character can form, whereas nph’s olaf is still darkly funny as in the source material, but he comes across as a more credible threat as there’s less of the 100% comedic material

i also think that the director of the movie was going more for wacky comedy than dark comedy. a series of unfortunate events does have a lot of comedic elements, but it is more of a dark comedy than anything else, which i think the netflix show understood better

my girlfriend wanted more than the amount of children you can adopt in skyrim so she taught herself how to mod it so that you could adopt them all, and uploaded it to a skyrim modding community so other likeminded player could utilize her code.

months later, an update was added to skyrim that was basically her code, verbatim, lifted directly from the mod, without credit or even permission. this made her so angry that she, at age seventeen, booked a flight to maryland, went to bethesda headquarters and demanded to see todd himself to yell at him.

of course, she was immediately denied this request and escorted out of the building because she was a scary six foot seventeen year old canadian lesbian who had flown all the way to yell at a man who probably had no idea her code was stolen, but she is still legitimately, 100% furious with him to this day

i fucking love her.

FACE YOUR CRIMES, HOWARD

i’ve long since retired from collecting fake internet stories but this stands out in my mind as one that’s just so bold faced and iconic because at no point in skyrim was there an update that allowed you to adopt more than 2 children. i love this post