(no subject)

Karen says:
*BEDWARD AND ELLA GOT ENGAGED?
*...
*Bedward

ANIMORPHS NOSTALGIA

So. Recently I was reading TV Tropes. And idk how, you know how it goes, I ended up reading about Animorphs, and specifically the ending. And Animorphs had been one of my first fandomy obsessions and I had this OVERWHELMING URGE TO RE-READ THE ENDING so the last couple nights I reread the last three books (also the last two books had a much better style than the third-to-last which was ghostwritten, like, there was enough of a difference that I really noticed, idk if I noticed the first time I read the series but back then I didn't know that a ton of the books were ghostwritten -- WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST HAVE WRITTEN THEM ALL KA APPLEGATE?).

It blows my mind how much Animorphs is like Torchwood. Like Torchwood, for the first two seasons there's a lot of devastation but also a lot of lulziness and involves a lot of dismissal of technology-related plot holes for the sake of entertainment. The first 44 books of Animorphs is like that (but the humor, obviously, isn't so adult). Then you hit the final arc and it's like Children of Earth. Suddenly they have to go into hiding, the war is public, and they have to face moral dilemmas like, is it worth it to kill a ton of innocent people in one blow if we'd be bringing down a ton of the enemy with them? (for that particular situation, they end up basically saying yes -- for YA books they start to get pretty dark). And a la Torchwood one of the original 5 Animorphs (plus a bunch of people associated with them) dies -- not only one of the Animorphs, but half of an OTP that most of the fandom (as far as I know) was supporting.

SO MY FAVORITE ANIMORPH IS JAKE. Was and still is in these last few I just reread. The Torchwood anology doesn't really go as deep as the characters (well I tried to do that in my head but then I got like Jake = Jack and Cassie = Gwen and that made Jake/Cassie upsetting so I stopped) -- If I equate Jake with any other fandom I'd say he's a lot like Melchior (and Tobias is rather Moritz-y, yes?) except a billion times more awesome. They're of even sort of the same age (Jake is 13-16 through the course of the war and Melchior is 14/15). Melchior practically has a breakdown because he made an impulsive decision and got Wendla pregnant and then she died. Jake practically has a breakdown because he made an impulsive decision that he knew would kill tens of thousands of living, thinking creatures. On top of his guilt over every other mistake or difficult decision he's made which were usually life or death situations. Yeah, Melchior, suck it. It makes me sad because Jake really doesn't recover after the war ends.

( ONLINE BOOKS MEANS I CAN POST AN EXCERPT (spoilers except this series ended in 2001 so whatever) )

I don't know if it increased my love for Jake or was because of my love of Jake but Shawn Ashmore used to be my celebrity crush. He's still hot (thx jaymee). (He played Jake in the TV series that TV Tropes probably correctly calls "unmourned" -- it was one of those what-have-you-done-to-my-poor-defenseless-canon we-don't-talk-about-that-adaption deals). Now he's, I think, most famous for playing Bobby in the X-Men movies.

So yeah. Jaymee tells me there are some gems of fanfiction in this fandom and I can believe it -- it's got such an epic story (as TV Tropes says, "Much, much Better Than It Sounds, it supplanted Goosebumps as the most popular children's book series of the mid-'90s till the Millennium, despite its incredibly dark setting and content. Or perhaps because of it.") that has incredible potential to be written in a more mature fashion. And actually the author, KA Applegate, in her note to the fans at the end of the last book, gives a shoutout to fanfic. A+. SO. If anyone has any good Animorphs fanfic to recommend to me, go ahead.

Also: if Animorphs were a musical, WHO WOULD YOU CAST?