guess who survived till a ten day vacation? its me. i got a minisim about doors i wanna work on (i know, only thing thats been happening in east is animorphs lately, but i'm just doing what vibes) we made it to another weekend so time for book 11. cliffhanger is go. should be jake, huh... i have seen quotes on tumblr indicating this is probably where they eliminate david. time to download. wait maybe not. 21 is called 'the threat" and 22 is called "the solution" so its probably a rachel book that finishes it. ooo this is the one where he turns into his dog on the front page. homer. its late right now so i won't start reading but , i'm looking forward to it. its weird...making it to another christmas. its so damn cold here. records or some shit. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ did i not start reading this and somehow its the next damn week? wild. ~~~ okay so its another week. i DID want to read it but.. look i had the best idea i've had in a long while and had to ride that wave Zampanini sim was so cool. also, present for you: https://at.tumblr.com/jelloapocalypse/flamingsalyut-bogleech/eesjctupmj4o in case it rots: ```Here are some of the spoilers you missed out on by not reading Animorphs: Five children are forced to engage in guerilla warfare, espionage and repeated murder to protect their loved ones from alien parasites as they wait for the other, heroic aliens to finally arrive. When they do, the “good” aliens turn out to not give a shit about humans, caused the whole intergalactic war through their own shittiness and are willing to exterminate whole planets themselves to get at their hated enemies. A child repeatedly experiences his intestines hanging out of his body while in various animal forms A child is mentally tortured until broken and never gets better A child in the form of a fly experiences getting splattered and smeared against a ceiling until his friends who are also flies at the time can peel his body off and take him somewhere he can transform back into a whole human before his insect mind fades completely A child is shrunken and experiences having her eyeballs digested out of her head inside her friend’s stomach while she’s in the form of a tiny elephant The heroes are forced to permanently imprison another child in the body of a rat because he knows too much and they abandon him on a tiny island with only other rats and garbage for company. Rumors circulate that the island is haunted but it’s actually his psychic screams reaching distant boaters. A race of devastatingly powerful, violent aliens turn out to be mental toddlers who don’t know what they’re doing and are just bred to think they’re playing one big game before they’re killed at age three so they don’t learn the truth An alien spends a few centuries hanging from the parasitic tentacle of a much bigger alien, surrounded by millions of rotting corpses attached to its other moon-spanning tendrils. They engage in mental warfare until one finally absorbs the other completely. It turns out another seemingly “evil” alien race is simply driven to kill and eat everything in sight because it was separated from its original world where food was continuous and the entire specie’s life is the torture of perpetual starvation A peaceful robot willingly removes its inhibition against violence to help in the war, only to slaughter a huge number of alien-controlled humans so gruesomely that nobody dares think about or speak of it again and it is the only thing left undescribed in a book series that already describes entrails getting torn out and skulls getting smashed A child stays too long in the form of a flea and instead of turning back into a human, accidentally turns momentarily into one big, giant flea that can only writhe and moan because it shouldn’t exist and can’t live at that scale. The kids discover Atlantis, then discover that Atlanteans are inbred mutants who paralyze any humans they find, dissect them alive to figure out how their organs work, then stuff the corpses as kitschy museum displays for their children. An ordinary ant gets transformed into a human child. It has no idea what’s happening and is so overwhelmed by its huge new brain and sensory input that it can only scream until it dies``` okay there. now you have all the spoilers. ~~~~~~~~~~ okay so zampanini sim is done and i even finished reading my long online story (took a year), a Practical Guide to Evil (and man has it changed me) now i can focus on animorphs please and thank you? see how fucked up the david arc gets given tiny me is already upset? man that tagline that david has a secret, the obvious assumption is he was a controller all along and just good at like, acting nope much more mundane kids a dick its itneresting seeing jakes pov as they're all falling to their death. see, the thing is, this is just a weekend to him. its scary, sure but like. normal scary? this is the closest david has EVER come to dying and i just don't think any of the animorphs can really UNDERSTAND that anymore man its still crazy that all of this has happened to them in just months "" -tobias oh boy i remember david taking VERY CAREFUL note of that "“Hey, I was just kidding,” David said. “I guess I forgot you’re the only one allowed to make jokes, Marco.”" david playing up the "woe is me i'm the perpetual new kid" act ```Later I’d have to talk to Cassie about it. Cassie was a lot better at knowing what people were thinking and feeling than I was. She’d know. Hopefully. ``` and thats something i love about this series. if you're in the wrong perspective this book you're shit out luck, no deep char analysis for you wait right forgot to finish teh tip system in news, brb back and its the next day cuz the Watcher of Threads reminded me i was also summarizing west but i can't summarize west NOW cuz its lunch break and if i only summarize half i'll forget what i was doing so here i am instead reading animorphs rip A Pratical Guide To Evil, you were so useful to read as a habit on lunch breaks " Marco said. " oh man, thats another line that stayed with me thru the years wasn't aware i was anticipating it popping up at some point i'm reasonably willing to believe david is riling marco up on purpose, then being on his best behavior for a while so when marco does snap at him marco i the one who looks like an asshole jake went from wondering if david was a problem to wondering if marco was, and that is SUS to me but then i know not to trust david "As for David, he didn’t have a home. No home, no family. None that he could contact, anyway. He couldn’t even be seen in his own body. The Yeerks knew him and they were looking for him. So he went home with Cassie, back to the barn that is the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. She had made a place for him in the hayloft. Obviously, that wasn’t going to last. Another problem for me to try to figure out. Along with saving the leaders of the free world. David would just have to tough it out. " and the thing is i feel like this is yet another thing that lead to the upcoming tragedy the animorphs know that sometimes you gotta tough shit out for the greater good david is a regular damn kid who a week ago had no clue any of this was sleeping in a barn, getting brief torture on purpose, nearly dying, all that is going to be a WAY bigger hit to morale for him that it would be to them and they just can not parse it hell even him 'joking' about using the powers to steal and etc is just him being an audience expy like, i doubt the average animrophs fan was dreaming about being a child solder if they tried to make a self insert oc for it and the david arc goes "you who have never felt war, you couldn't belong here" maybe we're not as big of sociopathic dicks as david. maybe we wouldn't get a little too excited at the thought of torturing small animals to death but we wouldn't exactly do any better than him at helping the animorphs we'd never belong, not really, just like him its why the evnetual new animorphs are in tehir own teams, not expected to integrate with this battle hardened veteran team ```My mother said, “It’s your cousin, Saddler. He was riding his bike and was hit by a car. He’s alive, but the injuries are very severe. He’s in intensive care.” I’m ashamed to admit that my first reaction was not “poor Saddler.” Instead, I wondered what impact this would have on my plans. Partly that’s because Saddler was not a cousin I was close to. He’s two years older, and to be honest, kind of a jerk. When we were little and our parents made us play together, he was the kind of kid who’d break something and then blame me. ``` i feel like the tumblr fandom talks a lot about saddler, but i don't think he's important in the series? but yeah man, horrors of war, jake can't even feel an emotion for his cousin he sees his close cousin rachel nearly die horribly weekly, a car accident for a more distant one doesn't even register "This all left me feeling even more disturbed than before. I felt guilty for not feeling sorry for Saddler right away. I felt guilty for caring that his family would be staying with us. I even felt guilty for thinking it was a relief that my mom and dad would be gone for the next day or so. All that, piled on top of the fact that I felt guilty because while I was sitting around feeling guilty the leaders of the free world were possibly being infested with Yeerks. I felt like my head was going to burst. I felt like I needed to sleep for about fourteen hours. But I wasn’t going to sleep. Not that night. Or the next. In fact, it was going to be a long time before I slept again. " like jesus right? so much guilt piled up on top of all these stressors and late nights and he's not even in high school yet ```But, hey! What was that smell? Was that … yes! It was dog poop! Not my poop. But definitely dog poop! Where? I sniffed. Okay, over there. I trotted toward the source of the smell. Hmmm. Not fresh. This was old dog poop. At least a couple of days old. That didn’t mean it was totally useless. But fresh dog poop was really far more interesting. Stale dog poop was only slightly more interesting than cat poop. And let’s face it: No one cares about cat poop.``` god yeah that stuck with me too its also clearly a lie if my own dogs are anything to go by cat poop is the most interesting thing on the planet as far as they are concerned and i am cruel for jsut throwing it away ```I sniffed carefully at the ground, going around in a circle. I yelled, suddenly too angry to be dog HAPPY. Cassie said. I agreed. ``` cassie gets that david is where they all were MONTHS ago he's making the same mistakes they did because he doesn't know the 'rules' yet what sorts of things lead to disaster, what risks aren't worth it the sort of consensus the animorphs have built from experience ```I pointed at the broken window we’d spotted from outside. “You broke a window to get in.” David smirked. “Hey, a bird broke a window, okay? A bird used a rock to dive-bomb the glass. Is that a crime? I don’t think so. Officer, arrest that eagle? That’s not happening.``` yup, he learned the worst possible lesson from tobias' flippancy ```David stopped channel surfing. “How’s it end for me, Jake?” he asked. “I have no home, all right? My family wants to turn me over to the Yeerks. What am I supposed to do? Keep living in that barn? It’s easy for you, Jake. You have a family. You have a home. You all have homes. You all sleep in beds at night and watch TV and eat at a table.” “Not all of us,” I said. “Not Tobias. Not Ax.” “Ax isn’t even human. Neither is Tobias. I am. I’m human, like you and Marco and Cassie and Rachel, and all of you have homes.``` and there he goes depersoning tobias .... knowing what i know, fuck that guy and there we go, the fundamental conflict. david isn't a team player, he doesn't like following rules. he doesn't think jake can tell him what to do 24/7, he wants it to be like a school or job where theres off hours but its not war is 24/7, especially a guerilla war like this david fucking around on his own time could get everyone killed i find it interesting that, yeah, jake and the others skipping school IS a risk but... not one the yeerks would find suspicious? his parents are gone for a few days, of course he's gonna convince his friends to act up with him okay, jorb again ~~~ again! the fact that ax knows that desert storm is a war but not what a hat is is classic ```My backward vision showed the fleas, separated by more distance now, as the flesh beneath them swelled. But one flea was no longer well. One flea was oozing blood. Blood was squishing out through the armored plates. My blood! My morphing body must have created a semihuman artery! The sudden surge of blood pressure had burst Cassie’s insides. ``` fucked up. man you don't normally see how important discipline is in this team until you see david lack it. lacks the implicit trust for jakes leadership. he breaks when the rest stoicly wait, risking being trapped as fleas forever until jake gives the all clearly and david panicking almost dooms them all but none of them blame him (honestly why are they bringing a rookie on such an important mission? probably at least partially cuz they can't trust him to be unsupervised) (but still) ```“Fine. Let’s get out of here,” I said. But Ax hesitated. He turned his stalk eyes meaningfully toward the stainless steel tub. I knew what he was suggesting. It would be easy to finish them off right there and then. But if we did, the Yeerks might simply be able to replace them. And they’d be warned that we knew their plan. Besides, there was something wrong about killing defenseless slugs. I was pretty sure of that. ``` oh man! growth! he executed helpless prisoners without hesitation back in book, what was it 6? the one where that resulted in him becoming a controller for three days while the yeerk who had been in his own brothers head tortured him psychologically ah, memories oh course, doesn't stophim from doing it again at least one more time, that time he got tried for war crimes difference between those two times and this one is that in those situations executing the prisoners gave him a tactical advantage, and this time it would give him a tactical DISadvantage. he can't afford morals right now even if he is aware of them (unlike rachel) oh boy. davids deciding he's going to fight human controllers rather than try to flee. and then he threatens jake. foreshadowing the eventual lion vs tiger morph fight. oh god. saddler. i remember now. ```“Actually, I’m pretty free for now,” I said. “You heard about Saddler, right?” She hadn’t. So I told her about our injured cousin. About my parents going to help out. And about the fact that Saddler was not necessarily going to survive. Everyone made the right noises of sympathy. So did David. But while his mouth was making the right words, I saw something disturbing in his eyes. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.``` i remember how this plays out. david acquires him so he can have a safe"human morph" "I didn’t know David. I realized that now. I hadn’t really had time to get to know him. It had been one crisis piled on top of the next since we’d first learned about David finding the blue box. I knew each of the others. Name any situation. I could tell you exactly how Cassie or Marco or Rachel or Tobias or even Ax would react. But David remained unknown. Unpredictable. " yeaaaaaah. and reminder that i totally am claiming jakes fear is the Stranger okay so i get that all the animorphs have agreed previously that even morphin a DOLPHIN without permission is a little weird, much less a human. so david wanting to be saddler (again, STRANGER arc) is an obvious no-go for the existing animorphs BUT and hear me out here marco is just casually morphing david's pet snake without thinking about how weird it might be for david. and thats not nothing. yeah david is a huge douche but... they very much are expecting him to follow their culture without treating him like a true member of it. see i remembera LOT about the david plot, all things considered. but i genuinely don't remember how this president plot is gonna go south okay i am NEARLY certain that a 4 ounce lead weight going at 100 miles per hour would kill someone. they just killed people. theres NO safe way to "just knock" someone out with a head injury and even beyond that. oh boy. thats . thats a fast thing. to the internet https://www.quora.com/How-much-damage-would-a-100-mph-baseball-do-to-your-body-If-it-hit-your-head-could-it-kill-you-or-even-break-a-bone yeah this random quora post agrees it would kill someone, a 90 mph fastball injured someone permanently (though didn't kill them) still. man. theres a REASON you shouldn't give kids this kinda power. like, i get why it happened in the narrative but oh man do they not understand the risks of the things they do actually that was unfair of me age has nothing to do with it its "access to a global spanning network connection and an obsession with trivia" so what i really mean is "don't give anyone from the 90s the power to accidentally kill someone" hell probably the average rando now would think you could hit someones head and safely knock them out much less at 100mph oh and then a cobra bites a guy "just a little" and they hope its non lethal okay. i revise my assesment of the situation they know they're killing people. or at least are okay with it being a potential consequence. they're going out of their way to avoid being lethal on PURPOSE. and thats enough for their conciousnesses. gotcha. ah and then they break the 'don't morph humans' rule for controllers, showing david one more rule to break one more thing he can claim is a double standard ```There was something just wrong about using someone else’s DNA like that. Something … creepy. At some level, we were doing something very close to what the Yeerks were doing: We were taking control of a human being. Not their minds, of course. Because morphing just gives you the body and the instincts, not the memory, the thoughts, the soul of an individual. Basically, we were cloning these three unconscious men. Making exact duplicates of their physical selves.``` yup i really didn't catch onto the very blatant "morphing is a parallel to what yeerks do" messaging when i was a kid wish i could remember why the president is in two places at once is this a trap? yeah jake is foreshadowing it is see the thing is i'd be willing to believe the "president" cassie had seen had been like, a comedic impersonator that sort of thing happens all the time ``` Something was bothering me. Hovering just out of reach in my brain. I’d had that feeling before. That terrible feeling that I’d missed something. Unfortunately, like most premonitions, it was useless. Because usually that kind of premonition turned out to be wrong. ``` valid ```I felt like my brain was working in slow motion. Visser Three didn’t see Marco. His Hork-Bajir didn’t seem to be looking at Marco. And Visser Three was still planning to go after the heads of state. All of which meant… what?``` i don't remember and this is driving me nuts too cassie goes from nuzzling david to calm him down to biting him when he tries to surrender amazing ```Instinctively David jerked around, reaching for Cassie’s head with his own fangs.``` jake is giving david SO much of the benefit of the doubt. surely its just instinct making him attack cassie. surely. oh right, the hork bajir are a hologram too. thats the twist man there is something just TERRIBLE about the fact that the first animorph who gets a good solid hit on visser 3 is david okay but it IS nice that ax gets to take visser 3 hostage and feel his blade against his throat. 10/10 almost as good as the time cassie sprayed him as a skunk then they lied to him and said grape juice would fix it now visser 3 is offering david safety, knowing its him ``` I said. Then, one by one, I contacted Tobias, Ax, and Cassie. The message was the same: No one disses David. We all accept his story. We all play along like we believe it. ``` yeah. yeah. i think jake knows the score at this point. ```s story. We all play along like we believe it. David was saying, I said. Marco enthused. Rachel said. Then added privately to me, David seemed to relax as we flew. Then he went beyond relaxing. He started bragging. Cassie said. David said. ``` yeah. big k energy. now here's the thing. k's personality type i'm not a fan of. but k himself has grown on me a lot. i like... figuring out ways he can be happy AND still be himself but do less damage to others. all the blorbos really, are like that for me. and its ... an exercise in empathy for me to do it for k as well. but i don't gotta be nice to david man. worstie from my childhood book series. ```It went that way all the trip back to the barn. David boasting, us reassuring. And the truth was, I couldn’t be totally sure he wasn’t telling the whole truth. My instincts told me he was lying. That he’d gone over to the Visser, and only turned on him when, as Rachel had said, he saw how the wind was blowing. But I couldn’t be sure. All I knew for sure was one thing: We couldn’t act like we were suspicious of David. If he was lying, we’d just end up warning him. If he was telling the truth, we’d destroy any possibility of trust between us. ``` very much the parts of the spiral i hate the whole point of being a magnus archives fear avatar , in my opinion, is that terrible combination of "i am so so scared of this" and "i am weirdly drawn to it" and "i could do this to others" deciding the truth is whatever is convinient to you in the moment upsets me so so much. having to second guess if someone is telling me the truth or just a version of it stresses me out. but theres plenty of other things i like. but even then its complicated? i think being in an infinite fractal maze would be pretty cool! i also have a mini panic attack if i'm playing a video game and i get separated from everyone and get lost. i think whats different from me is when its SUPPOSED to be confusing. when everyone else knows where they are and how to move aroudn and i'm the only one lost i am a LOT less chill but if everyone were? finally, an experience for me anyways, time to book ooo a secret kept even from us. what did jake say to tobais and ax okay i remember this. Tobias is not dead. It was actually a real red tailed hawk David killed. (even tho its weird it would be out at night) but what i am wondering is: do they tell us that before the book ends. or did they let us think tobias was dead for the entire time we waited for the next book. ``` I yelled. he said with a laugh. ``` and there we have it. he decides that tobias (and ax) aren't people, therefore its fine to kill them. ``` I said. Ax said. ``` oh boy. OKAY. so not only did it end on a cliff hanger of tobias being dead, but jake is bleeding out as a tiger, with a very dangerous david-in-a-lion morph attacking him, as they both fall twenty feet. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! jesus.