calme_rut

Anonymous asked:

AU where Tobias is trapped as a social bird like a crow instead of a solitary predator. Bonus: Does he create the Crow Air Force by accident?

zudz:

elzebrook:

roach-works:

roach-works:

c-rowlesdraws:

roach-works:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

Yet another objectively excellent AU idea that has me stumped. Any fellow fandalites have suggestions about Tobias the Corvid?

tobias the corvid would absolutely just move into cassie’s barn. like her parents are vets, they wouldn’t be phased by a weirdly sociable crow– probably it was raised by humans and then released or got lost, which is illegal but does happen. and then just like. oh the crow knows a couple english words? yeah crows do that. the crow is attentive and sociable? crows do that. the crow likes riding cassie around and is extremely fond of her friend rachel? crows do that. cassie’s friends talk to tobias like he’s actually contributing to the conversation? kids do that. tobias can now caw several swear words? kids and crows unfortunately do that.

instead of angsting over the circle of life and making an extremely painful peace with his own predatory nature, tobias is now half-resident half-employee of cassie’s barn. her parents snuck a couple of baby mourning doves into his roosting box and like what is he gonna do. NOT stuff bugs into the little gummy bastards. come on.

Oh no. Oh no this is wonderful and I feel my brain growing new neurons about what this would do to Tobias’ inner journey, going from an abused, abandoned, lonely human boy to that same boy in the body of not a solitary hawk, but a social bird— a bird with a home, with not just a circle of human friends bound together by their shared terrible secret responsibility (saving the earth) but parents (Cassie’s) who love him and compliment him, who give him other vulnerable abandoned young creatures to care for… Tobias drawing gasps and laughs from human passerby when he hangs out with his friends and caws swear words, the formerly awkward, invisible boy now a bird considered charming and charismatic by nature… let alone what interacting with other crows would do for him. Intensely social, intelligent birds who might especially include him in their antics because of his clear intelligence, giving Tobias a supportive peer group for the first time in his whole goddamn life. Tobias as One Of The Boys (neighborhood crows). The Crow Squad helping the Animorphs at his request by harassing Controllers and sharing intel, because this Tobias guy is their bro and they’re having fun. Tobias with a full social schedule between crow gang time and Animorphs time. Tobias being the Jake of his little gang, feeling responsible for their wellbeing. And, crucially: a crow’s instincts easing his social anxiety. Crow Tobias!!!!!!!!

Ax and Tobias and Tobias’s sixteen other crow friends going to McDonald’s. Tobias demonstrating for a very appreciative audience that MONEY can be exchanged for FRIES. Ax and the sixteen other crows taking careful notes and asking important relevant questions like, can you take the MONEY back afterwards to get MORE FRIES. Which works if you are a crow but not if you are a human, sadly.

Meanwhile everyone at the kids’ high school is deeply delighted that every single crow for miles around apparently hates vice-principal chapman’s guts.

ALSO CONSIDER: tobias spending his time locating yeerk pool entrances and just screaming the mob call at every single controller who goes in. like by six months into the war controllers know that the andalite bandits have been employing inconveniently intelligent earth crows as decoys and collaborators. they also by now have a trauma reaction to the mob call because sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes twenty crows show up and dive bomb you and shit all over your car, and sometimes a tiger jumps out of the fucking bushes.

so like trying to just squeeze in your little two hour Don’t Starve lunch break between unnecessary office meetings sucks badly enough. then you get jumpscared by THAT FUCKING CROW. it’s not great for morale.

‘won’t humans think it’s weird that crows are just randomly attacking people outside of this drive thru?’

tobias first constructs a nest on top of every yeerk pool entrance. THEN he goes ham on the controllers that have to approach it. perfect cover, ironclad excuse, gets the other crows extra upset on his behalf, requires whoever runs the actual cover business to call some kind of pest control to resolve the situation, which they don’t want to do because there’s a fucking secret trap door directly under the nest.

I think the meme is backwards. But the big version is just crow shenanigans, and the alien war is only 10% anyway.

curligurl0896 asked:

What about an Animorphs AU that takes place in a really fucked up part of history?

Like say, an AU where they're all living in the Deep South during the Civil War-- I could imagine them struggling to hold together the belief that slavery under the Yeerks is a terrible thing that should definitely be stopped, yet somehow their society's brand of slavery is A-OK (especially if one or more of them are in a family that owns slaves), the attempts at justification ("But we're good slave owners, we treat our slaves with kindness, obviously it's OK, obviously it's not the same thing!") and the slow realization that it's really NOT ok, especially when Cassie, who would almost certainly be a slave herself, proves just how valuable she is to the team and as a human being in general (not that she should have to do that, but you know...)

Or, alternatively, an AU that takes place in Nazi Germany, where in addition to having to worry about fighting off an alien invasion Jake and Rachel also have the additional worry of the very real possibility of getting captured by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps. I can only imagine how much harder it would be for Jake to lead the Animorphs while also having to deal with that, but like also how Tom's Yeerk would manage to make it to the Yeerk Pool every three days, let alone do whatever Yeerk stuff he gets up to, while having to deal with that-- maybe Tom wouldn't even be infested in this AU because having a host who has to hide in people's attics constantly lest they get captured and gassed to death, or some other horrid fate, would be far too much trouble to be worth it. Also, perhaps Jake would be much more reluctant to condemn 17,000 Yeerks to death during an era where his own people are experiencing genocide.

But yeah. I feel like there are so many good opportunities for this kind of thing.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

I remember there was a fic on FanFiction.Net that involved the Animorphs getting transported back to Nazi Germany and trying to figure out how to survive. I know it was a major plot point that they could pass Tobias and Rachel off as being Caucasian/German/Arayan/whatever, but that they had to figure out how to hide everyone else in morph. Also I’m pretty sure Cassie hijacked a train at one point and (with Ax’s help) drove it to a non-occupied country. Anyway, I can’t find it now. Does anyone else remember what it was called or where to find it?

Also, I don’t know if this AU counts, but it is set during the 1960s.

Also also: anyone else have ideas for an Animorphs AU set during a major historical war or ongoing atrocity?

@liwaletheia

Would love to know where to find the WWII fic because I’ve learnt German

Reblobing in the hope someone has a link!

intothestacks:

nynehells:

YOU FORGOT THE BEST PART

Animoooorphs!!!

colemanengle:

🐅🐘🦅🛸🐎🦍

(via thejakeformerlyknownasprince)

Anonymous asked:

If each Animorph was trapped as a Nothlit because they were enjoying the morph too much, which animals would it be??

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

It seems like the most consistently fun morphs are (roughly in order): dog, dolphin, housefly, raptor, and seagull. I don’t know of any of the kids really disliking any of those morphs, outside of Tobias’s reluctance to have to morph dolphin in the water and Jake’s newfound aversion to fly after #16.

I think that gull or dolphin might be the most distracting, since those are both morphs where the kids end up off-mission a bunch of times due to wanting food (as gulls) or to goof off (as dolphins). That said, Marco also notes there’s a dangerous side to dogs’ devil-may-care attitude, since he’s aware that he comes within milliseconds of getting hit by a car but can’t bring himself to care (#10). Cassie notes something similar in #9, that dogs are the only animal silly enough to walk right up to a skunk doing a threat display.

However. There’s only one morph with a canonical record of being so appealing it actually trapped someone in morph, and that’s raptor.

@zacolyn

#If you mean Tobias we know he wasn’t trapped in that morph by choice#he was stuck and couldn’t safely unmorph before time ran out

It’s… complicated. But not nearly as simple as him not being trapped by choice. Tobias morphs way before that first battle, and doesn’t demorph even when Jake tells him to, because “I never want to change back;” Marco accuses him of “becoming something different to leave behind their pain… like spending all their time as a hawk” — all of that is before he gets stuck.

In #15 Marco implies that Tobias chose to be trapped: “he made the choice to live as a hawk.” Same for Cassie in #50: “Sometimes we think Tobias is happier as a hawk. That he let himself be trapped, on purpose.”

And in #43 Tobias remembers that day as:

The others had escaped already… Had I missed the deadline? Had I been more than two hours in morph? Couldn’t have. Can’t have. No. I’d be trapped forever. A bird. Independent. Free. Alone. Forever.
Images of the human life I’d led til then flooded my mind… My apathetic aunt. My alcoholic uncle.
Then, something brighter, something powerful surged up in my mind. Something else. Shoring me up. Drawing me in. A wave…
What? What had I felt then…? Weakness or strength?

So if I had to paraphrase all that, it’s that Tobias could have risked his life in a desperate bid to get out of the yeerk pool in time to demorph, but decided that his human life wasn’t worth maybe-dying to get back to when he’d be okay as a bird. Because he loves being a bird, more than he’s ever enjoyed being a human.

l-egionaire asked:

You describing the Animorphs as "codependent platonic polycule" just gives me images of them, after the war, living together and just sharing trauma.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

The future we deserve! The future THEY deserve! Marco grumbling about the number of times he’s stepped on a mouse-bone pellet while barefoot, Jake keeping three different coats near the door so that he can make sure no one ever leaves the house without, Rachel patrolling every 12 hours because she’s just hoping to find another loser with a video camera in the bushes she can beat up bare-handed without bothering to morph, Ax being able to dial six different pizza and Chinese delivery places and as soon as they pick up they just go “the usual?” and then hang up, Cassie quietly turning into a real estate mogul because she keeps buying more and more and more property to house the rescue llamas and rescue bison and rescue chimpanzees and rescue jaguars, Tobias installing a 40’ tree in a 100’-diameter in a pot on the roof so he has somewhere to sleep at night… I want this. So much.

lumaxmayclair asked:

In universe, how long d'you think does it take for someone to write Jake Berenson: The Musical? And what's everyone's reactions once it premiers?

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

I feel like everyone would go into the musical with no small amount of trepidation, because a) musical, and b) actual war. That said…

Act I, Scene 1: Our protagonist, Jake, comes onstage alone. He sings a song about the aching loneliness of leadership. Not only does he have to decide how to lead his friends, not only does he have no one to confide in, but now his entire family are controllers. He’s worried for his parents, but feels he cannot confide that worry in anyone.

Out in the audience, Cassie reaches for Jake’s hand, tears sparkling in her eyes. As soon as her hand rests on top of his, he jerks awake with a mumbled apology about how slow ballads aren’t his thing. He asks Cassie what he missed. This pattern will continue for the entire rest of the show.

Act I, Scene 2: We meet our narrator, who for some reason is one of the Trekkin’ Trekkies from the battle for the hork-bajir valley. His name is Angelo and he’s a fictional character, but he introduces four other Trekkies, meant to be the Carpenter family, as the Geek Chorus. The play apparently considers this deeply clever.

In the audience, Tobias glances over at Ax, who holds up an ASL 84: their time left in morph. Next to them, in a not-quiet-enough whisper, Cassie is reminding Jake who the Carpenters were. Yes, she’s aware they met the Carpenters before his parents were infested. No, she doesn’t think the writers care. This seems to be an artistic interpretation of — Would he just watch the show?

Act I, Scene 3: The actor playing Jake calls his five friends onstage. They’re all currently humans, so the Geek Chorus introduces them so that everyone will know who is who. Together, they sing a song about the hopelessness of the war, the power of friendship, and how all they have is each other.

Marco leans over to nudge Tobias. “Love the hair,” he whispers, referring to show-Tobias’s elaborate dark-brown coif. Tobias gives him a real smile in return, not because he likes fictional-him’s hair but because he’s secretly pleased that the show so clearly put effort into casting himself and Ax to look alike. Doesn’t matter that they don’t actually share any DNA; family is family.

Keep reading

Everyone’s review of the show:

Cassie: They tried really hard, which is nice? Musicals aren’t really my thing, but it’s clear they put a lot of love into this one.

Jake: The brownies were the best part. No, seriously. They were.

Ax: Prince Jake is correct!

Marco: Could we get a production where Visser Three wins instead? Just, like one little performance where he gets to be the winner? Like an audience choice kind of thing?

Jake: Seats were kinda uncomfortable, though. But it is not easy to get the perfect balance of orange with dark chocolate in a dessert, and these were just—

Tobias: You guys do know that red-tailed hawks aren’t literally red, right? It’s like a russet orange color. No offense to your props guy, but… well.

Ax: Not only were the brownies gooey and chocolatey, but they were served in delicious wax paper that crinkled nicely as you ate it!

Cassie: I liked it better than Our Town. People really like Our Town, right? So maybe if anyone from the show asks, just tell them I thought it was better than Our Town.

Marco: Actually, Visser Three deserves his own musical, now that I think about it. Call me, I have money, I’m a very famous actor. Let’s make it happen.

Tobias: See, I have a playbill autographed by the entire cast. They were really nice about it, even after I hid in the potted plants for half an hour in response to their request to have me autograph one of their playbills.

Jake: And the bake on them was spot-on — do they make them in-house?

Ax: If so, we must get the recipe!

Anonymous asked:

What if Animorphs was set in the 1980s?

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

roach-works:

thekijs:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

I’ve never been — missed them by over 2 years! Does anyone who knows the era have thoughts?

Not a lot changes.

Information gathering gets a bit riskier, because there are far fewer digital resources so the kids need to physically access things like libraries, data centers, and archives to get records and blueprints. Those resource being in a fixed physical location rather than available online thanks to Andalite hacking means its easier for the yeerks to secure them or set traps, but that’s not anything the kids haven’t overcome before.

The flipside is that the SciFi tech the yeerks brought with them stands out a lot more. They’d be forced to either rely on the more primitive, wired human systems, or risk a simple frequency scan from whatever gadget Ax cobbled together at Radio Shack pin pointing any yeerk controlled facility in town in town by checking for a building that has wireless signals more advanced than radio. Additionally, tutoring the human kids in the techniques to bypass human security systems gets much easier. Most of the Animorphs will end up passable hackers and phone phreakers fairly quickly just because the sophistication of human tech that can make it entirely obtuse to the layman just isn’t as dense yet.

if anything the starting gang of animorphs would be larger– mall arcades peaked in the 80s and started to decline in the 90s, as home videogame consoles got cheaper and more sophisticated. there could have been any number of classmates and more casual friends to the core group that were tagging along for a mall night and then roaming around the abandoned construction site, in the 80s vs the 90s. in the 2000s, it starts getting pretty unlikely, and by 2020 it seems impossible that 13 year olds would be allowed out at night at all, let alone that there would be a mall to hang out at.

@roach-works #2020 animorphs: it’s just marco#and he’s mad as hell

Seriously tho, this is why I’ve never wanted a modern AU. Animorphs’ concept fundamentally doesn’t work in the hyper-surveilled childhood of the modern U.S. Five 13-year-olds being left to walk home alone at night? Puh-leeze; even if their parents did okay it, the cops might still pick them up for loitering.

We have LITERALLY made it illegal for kids to exist in public without adults 99% of the time. Even if they found a different way to meet Elfangor, they’d never be able to get away for missions. Even if they did get away, they’d be caught on camera and exposed within days. Even if they went without being caught on camera, they’d be effortlessly caught if they brought their phones (100s of trackers log which phones go into which buildings, even if they’re off) and they’d be effortlessly caught if they didn’t (adults would lose it if they’re out of contact that long).

We shrank childhood down to nothing, and then we have the audacity to complain that kids these days spend too much time looking at screens.

carvingclown:

These kids went through some stuff huh

(via thejakeformerlyknownasprince)

thespacegoat2 asked:

What would have happened if Jake was an only child?

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

thekijs:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

thekijs:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

This one feels like too much of a departure for me. Does anyone else have thoughts about how Jake would be different?

It’s a tpk, and probably in the first book or two.

Tom is the only example of someone who is personally close to the Animorphs being a Controller. Without that very explicit object lesson right in Jake’s home they’re left with nameless and mostly faceless adults from the construction site, and their high school principal - people who are already mentally categorized by most youth as Other or Antagonists to be avoided or resisted.

This means that there’s a subconscious impulse to categorize being a Controller as something that happens to Them, never to Us. So they’ll reach out for help, tell people they trust about what’s happening, spread the warning.

Marco, and probably Tobias, would still advocate caution but without the example of Tom, Jake won’t take it seriously enough, and Jake is the leader, right from the get go, whether he likes it or not.

And so they’re exposed and caught, possibly before they ever even get battle morphs from the Gardens.

Horrifying, and I love it. They blame the victims, they assume most controllers are voluntary, they say “an adult needs to handle this” and act accordingly.

Exactly, and it had to be Tom, too.

None of the others has siblings old enough to be targeted by the Sharing, and if one of their parents was a Controller then continuing to live at home becomes much too risky. They don’t have the experience or resources to manage that initially and while Tobias could (obviously) manage just not being at home anymore, his relationship with his guardian is too antagonistic to drive home that being made into a controller can happen to anyone and absolutely too removed from Jake to have the needed impact.

Tom being a controller is one of the ‘for want of a nail’ moments that the outcome of the whole war turns on, and I think there’s serious potential there for a time travel scenario where Jake has to confront that fact, and his own naivety at the beginning, and ultimately has to actively choose to not change the past, to not save Tom and keep him away from the Sharing, knowing the hell he’s condemning his brother to.

YES. Tom’s role drags Jake into the war, Jake’s role drags Marco into the war, and Jake and Marco’s commitment is part of what drags Cassie into the war. We’re quickly in a situation where Tobias tries to fight the war alone, if Jake doesn’t act as the fulcrum of the team.

pisaurafan asked:

what do you think wouldve happened if nice rachel and mean rachel didnt merge back and stayed as 2 separate members of the team until the end?

sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

I can’t figure a way out of this one without a total party kill, courtesy of Mean Rachel. Does anyone else have an idea for a way out?

Mean Rachel and Visser Three realize they have so much in common, get married, and elope to the Anati homeworld where it’s legal for married couples to have an odd number of torsos. Marco then hits Nice Rachel in the head with a shovel, causing her to revert to Regular Rachel, because everyone growing up in the Nineties knows the cure for a traumatic brain injury is another traumatic brain injury. After that works, Tobias suggests they hit Taylor in the head with a shovel too, just in case.

sandmandaddy69:

(via androidtrashfire)

yeerk:

and you’re pleased as fuck because you don’t care about the primitive human subject material anyway but you have to keep your host’s grades up because it would look bad if a high-ranked member of the Sharing started failing US History and also this gives you more time to lie on the ground at night and just listen to the crickets chirp and the watch the tree branches wave 

(via thejakeformerlyknownasprince)

Anonymous asked: My host wont stop repeating this song? I don't know what to do, no kind of punishment seems to work. should i retaliate by singing another song?

yeerk:

yeerk:

This is a pretty common problem, believe it or not. Once humans realize that their screaming is having no effect on your emotional state and their attempts to regain their minds are fruitless, they tend to just spitefully attempt to cause their Yeerk discomfort in any way possible. Since songs and other rhythmic cultural melodies are easy for them to remember and replay on autopilot, but excessively irritating for you to hear over and over, humans like to think they’ve found the perfect strategy for making your life miserable, and maybe even distracting you enough for you to get a message out.

In my experience, the only solution is to fight fire with fire. Because of their subpar mental processing abilities, many humans can’t simultaneously listen to a song and thing about another tune. Try figuring out what music they find most obnoxious, grating, or humiliating, and focus on it when your host starts their shenanigans again (I recommend this song to start, but there are lots of options). All music is equally irritating to you, but if they realize their petty annoyance strategy will cause them irritation too, they might actually stop.

Good luck, anon, and may the Kandrona shine and strengthen you!

Anonymous asked:

if you were in a life/death situation and you had to pick a single animorph to save your life, who would you pick? i’d go with rachel. (probably not pick marco because i don’t think he’d save me).

mossadspydolphin:

warriorlid14:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

Definitely Cassie. She’s the best morpher, the most likely to save a random civilian (to your point about Marco), and functions the best of any Animorph when forced to work alone. Also, I’m pretty sure I could talk her into letting me morph (assuming she has the cube along) as the best way to escape the situation.

Rachel: will probably save me, but will insult me the whole time and won’t care about roughing me up in the process

Marco: probably won’t save me unless he’s feeling particularly heroic that day

Jake: if it’s in the beginning of the series? Would probably save me. Later on? Wouldn’t take the risk

Tobias: would probably save me but only if he snaps out of his dissasociative state fast enough

Ax: idk man, sounds like a human affair. Best not get involved

Cassie: Will win the fight as a whale, but she won’t be happy about it