Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

miraculoussparrow asked: I'm reading a biography about a badass screenwriter Dalton Trambo, blacklisted during HUAC and sent to prison. He was cool. Anyway, my point is that one of the movies he worked on is titled Lonely are the Brave and the first thing I thought of was "That so describes the animorphs". Then I thought hey, that sounds familiar and remembered you screaming in the tags about "Too few in number and too proud to hide" so I figured I should tell you.

words-writ-in-starlight:

First of all, I’ve never been so pleased in my life as I am by this fact.  If every single person on this blog knows me as “that one person screaming about the Animorphs” I’m fine with that.

Second of all, I’m with you???? I’m so with you??  There are so many good terrible tragic Animorphs quotes in the world.  This one (the one you mentioned) is still my favorite though and I’m constantly screeching about how good it is.  Behold the brave battalion…  Hell yes.  That’s the stuff.  I should write a whole entire fic about how a rich Controller who saw the six of them go into battle at the end of the war commissioned a statue with the money their Yeerk made, and so there’s a statue in their rebuilt hometown of four kids standing back to back, one of the girls with a hawk on her arm and a young Andalite at their side ready to strike, with that quote on the base and the years of the War and not a damn thing else.

Fuck.

@drifteratheart wanted to be able to reblog my tags, so: 

#animorphs #BEHOLD THE BRAVE BATTALION THAT STANDS SIDE BY SIDE #TOO FEW IN NUMBER AND TOO PROUD TO HIDE #EXCUSE ME I NEED TO GO COLLECT MYSELF #but honestly that statue though #like i know there’s probably a handful of courageous statues of their battle morphs #and children hoist themselves up onto the wolf and imitate the roaring bear and take pictures with the gorilla #but i think that’s the one that their hometown should have #just…four kids and a bird and an alien child #scared and young and desperate #but yet standing #too proud to hide

I’m Very Serious about that statue.

miraculoussparrow asked: I'm reading a biography about a badass screenwriter Dalton Trambo, blacklisted during HUAC and sent to prison. He was cool. Anyway, my point is that one of the movies he worked on is titled Lonely are the Brave and the first thing I thought of was "That so describes the animorphs". Then I thought hey, that sounds familiar and remembered you screaming in the tags about "Too few in number and too proud to hide" so I figured I should tell you.

First of all, I’ve never been so pleased in my life as I am by this fact.  If every single person on this blog knows me as “that one person screaming about the Animorphs” I’m fine with that.

Second of all, I’m with you???? I’m so with you??  There are so many good terrible tragic Animorphs quotes in the world.  This one (the one you mentioned) is still my favorite though and I’m constantly screeching about how good it is.  Behold the brave battalion…  Hell yes.  That’s the stuff.  I should write a whole entire fic about how a rich Controller who saw the six of them go into battle at the end of the war commissioned a statue with the money their Yeerk made, and so there’s a statue in their rebuilt hometown of four kids standing back to back, one of the girls with a hawk on her arm and a young Andalite at their side ready to strike, with that quote on the base and the years of the War and not a damn thing else.

Fuck.

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

acrownofswords:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

Can we take a moment to appreciate the fact that K.A. Applegate might be the only sci-fi writer EVER who both (a) condemns the mass killing of aliens even if they are attacking the earth AND (b) shows why it’s sort of necessary in the situation?

It seems like too many other sci-fi stories go the route of Avengers or Doctor Who (S1) or Independence Day where a protagonist wiping out thousands of aliens is portrayed as uncomplicated heroism and we all celebrate at the end. Either that or they go the route of Avatar the Last Airbender (S3) or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S5) where the characters that don’t want to engage in violence don’t have to get their hands dirty because a deus ex machina comes along and prevents that from having to happen.  In both cases doing the right thing is also a matter of doing the easy thing.

Applegate, by contrast, doesn’t let her characters get away with an uncomplicated happy ending.  She doesn’t say “they were aliens so it’s okay to kill them,” and she doesn’t offer them a third way out of their impossible choice.  She gets into the hell that is war and doesn’t use the sci-fi genre to let her gloss over the dirty details.

Orson Scott Card also does this really well in Ender’s Game!

We’re going to have to agree to disagree about Ender’s Game, because while that book has a powerful anti-war message, it also [SPOILERS FOR ENDER’S GAME] features a main character who has no idea that he’s making decisions with real people’s lives at stake at any point while making those decisions.  Ender literally believes that he’s playing a video game when he annihilates the buggers and the human navy, and so none of those decisions near the end of the novel reflect the thought process of “oh god I have to end lives to save lives and there are literally no good answers.”  He’s actually more concerned with impressing his mentors and building up useful skills at the time than he is with any kind of moral quandary—which is, of course, exactly why everyone lies to him about it being a training simulation—but it’s hard to say what he would do when faced with the choice between consciously ending thousands of lives or passively allowing the potential for billions to end, because he never actually gets the chance to make that choice. [END SPOILERS]  Still an awesome piece of sci-fi, but…

But where I think K.A. Applegate goes a step beyond that into disturbing-moral-paradox land is that [AND NOW FOR SOME ANIMORPHS SPOILERS] when Jake and Marco and Ax make the decision to wipe out 17,000 yeerks because the alternative is the death or enslavement of 5 billion humans, they know exactly what they’re doing.  They’ve also been up close and personal with the yeerks at that point—Jake and Ax have both literally shared brain space with yeerks, however briefly—which means that unlike Ender they don’t have the option of dehumanizing the enemy, diffusing responsibility onto authority figures, or otherwise morally disengaging from their actions.  Applegate shows us time and again that what the yeerks do to their hosts, making them into “The most total slaves in all of history, because even their own minds [aren’t] theirs anymore” (#20) is an atrocity to the point where any halfway decent person cannot allow it to stand, pretty much no matter what it takes to end that atrocity.  [END ANIMORPHS SPOILERS]  Both stories have messages that are not simply pro-war or anti-war so much as they are about the impossibility of moral simplicity in times of war.  However, Animorphs features child characters consciously making impossible moral decisions under conditions of grey-and-black morality; Ender’s Game does not.

(via chromatographic)

Anonymous asked: An X-files reference... nice.

Book 14 is just a 150-page-long Scooby Doo episode and I love it dearly.  Horses and Andalites toilets and highly questionable amusement park shenanigans.  Also it is pretty much the last good times until 24, and then I think that might be…it.  So I hope you relished it.

I have to be totally honest with you here, I just finished the series (again) this morning and I’m seriously considering rereading the entire thing as a balm for my soul.

Wow! 15 was so good as well! Seriously, I love all the introspection we get about Marco and his mother. And tbh the relationship between Marco and the rest of the Animorphs is just so… good? Like, seriously, this is my jam.

I love the relationship between the whole team, I love it so much, they’re such a desperate little family of warriors, it’s so good, they take such good care of each other.  I mean.  No.  They don’t.  Because they’re at war and sometimes that takes precedent.  But they do their best and their best is so good I love them.

luckyladylily asked: Thought you might like this, in my head you are "That animorphs person". You made me get back into the series from when I was younger. Gradually making my way through the series again now. I Love your rereading comments.

This…this is it…this is the pinnacle of my life….

I was just wondering to my friend the other day if I qualified as an Animorphs Person now or not.

I am so gratified by this information.

readera asked: For the softer world Animorphs, any pair. M, L, O, and T. T is made for Ax, though. Have you heard of the podcast Morph Club Cast? It is two nerds rereading all of Animorphs. All of them, even the spin offs!

For some reason this ask got lost in the shuffle a billion years ago, but I am actually for real doing all of those prompts for the Animorphs because I have no sense of self-preservation.  I specifically have already completed O: No no, we aren’t breaking up!  You didn’t let me finish.  I’m gay for YOU. (And I’m queer for math!)  It has tragic gay Andalite smoochin’.  L and M are still up in the air and I’m considering having T be someone teaching Ax to cook, AKA The grand adventure of “NO AX THAT’S NOT FOOD”.  N is going to be a Firefly AU, though.

AND YES.  YES I HAVE HEARD OF MORPH CLUB.  I LOVE THEM DEARLY.  I DON’T KNOW IF MEGAN OR CAREY HAVE TUMBLR ACCOUNTS, BUT IF THEY DO, SOMEONE TAG THEM.  IN THE EVENT THAT EITHER OF YOU SEE THIS, I SCREAMED FOR REAL WHEN I DISCOVERED YOUR PODCAST AND I LOVE IT TO BITS AND FUCKING PIECES.

My thoughts exactly. I love this book, I love that scene, and I love these kids.

THAT FUCKING SCENE.

I just finished the books for the latest time this morning and like.  Listen.  My order of priorities is as follows:

1) Write the Ellimist Ex Machina post-war AU

2) Reread the entire series

3) 

Anonymous asked: C and F for the fandom meme? (I hope you're having a good day!)

From this ask meme!

C: A pairing you wish you shipped, but just can’t

Oh, wow, sit tight, all of these are entirely predicated on God my life would be easier if I shipped the most popular ship in the fandom.

Charles Xavier/Erik Lensherr: I got committed to the tragic friendship way too young to change my mind, but I have nothing against the ship.

Any configuration at all of Jim Kirk/Spock/Bones McCoy: I just…struggle?  I concur that Spock/Kirk is pretty gay in TOS and I want to ship it, and honestly Kirk/Bones should be my exact shit, but I just–look, Kirk is too in love with the Enterprise for anyone else to have a claim.

Buffy Summers/Spike: nope, nope, nope, nope, can’t do it.  Too rapey, too much sexual assault, even if I didn’t like Angel I wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Doc Holliday/Wynonna Earp: the show clearly really wants me to care about that pairing and like…I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, but I raise you Doc Holliday/Wyatt Earp and Wynonna/Dolls because Dolls is wonderful and Doc is so blindingly obviously in love with Wyatt and trying to work his issues out by fucking Wynonna, which, no judgement, because Wynonna is clearly trying to work out her own adequacy issues by fucking Doc.

Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter: I want to ship it just so I could stop feeling this level of seething wrath about it, I feel similarly about almost EVERY ship that the HP fandom likes, including literally anything that includes Severus Snape.

F: What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it?

I mean…I was a late-comer to the concept of internet fandom (the last…four or five years?) because of various reasons, but I’ve been a devoted consumer of any X-Men content I could afford to get my hands on since I was 7 and I’ve been collecting Animorphs books about as long, so there’s those.

Anonymous asked: you are making me seriously consider going back and reading the animorphs books we have at my house

DO IT.

DO IT AND TALK TO ME ABOUT THEM.

ALL THESE YEARS MY BLOG HAS BEEN NOTHING BUT A RUSE TO SUCK YOU ALL IN AND CONVERT YOU TO ANIMORPHS.

HERE IS A LINK IN CASE YOU DON’T HAVE A FULL COLLECTION.

Anonymous asked: *Finishes Book 13* *screams* OH GOSH I LOVE THIS BOOK VERY VERY MUCH. Like the Hork-Bajir plotline AND THAT ENDING!!!!!!! So good! I'm pretty sure this is my favourite book so far. AHHHH. I'm sorry I can't contain mY EMOTIONS BECAUSE THIS IS A GOOD BOOK AND I LOVE HAWK BOY TOBIAS. I LOVE PAIN. 1/2

And like the Hork-Bajir??? I… love them???? Bless them and all good wishes to them in their little Eden. Oh god and again another battle they won, and with like a damn good strategy rather than you know everything falling apart at the last minute. AND ALL THANKS TO MY BOY TOBIAS. And I really love how this book gave so much insight into his character. Sorry for the rant.

DO NOT BE SORRY I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH, I’M???  I LOVE IT?  TOBIAS GETS TO BE A HERO AND THE HORK BAJIR GET THEIR LITTLE EDEN AND RACHEL AND TOBIAS GET TO JUMP OFF A CLIFF TOGETHER, WHICH IS JUST THEIR RELATIONSHIP IN A NUTSHELL TBH.

AND HAVE I MENTIONED HOW MUCH I LIKE THE SCENE OF THESE SIX TERRIFIED CHILDREN AND THESE TWO REFUGEE ALIENS STANDING IN THE FOREST AND TAKING A MOMENT OUT OF THEIR BUSY SCHEDULE OF BEING HUNTED LIKE ANIMALS TO SHOUT FREE OR DEAD AT THE TOP OF THEIR DESPERATE LITTLE LUNGS.  LIKE, THAT IS THE THESIS OF THESE BOOKS, THAT IS WHAT EVERYONE IN THESE BOOKS BELIEVE, THAT IS THEIR CODE: FREE OR DEAD.

I’M GOING TO START CRYING ABOUT THIS?????

GOD OKAY I LOVE IT.  PLEASE, GUYS, IF YOU KNOW OF ANY ART OF THIS GIVE IT TO ME SO I CAN WEEP SOFTLY OVER MY F A V O R I T E SCENE IN THIS SERIES.