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It's a very difficult thing to show in a children's book that has to reflect to a status quo and features space wizard poo poo, but it's clear Rachel is-- more than any of the rest of the team-- the example of humanity at its most ineffably human. Emotional, stubborn even, but also wildly compassionate and attuned to their own dark desires. Crayak thought this would make her exploitable, but Rachel proved consistently that she could integrate her worst tendencies into a force for good better than any other team member. That made her their greatest warrior. And also ensured she'd be the one who wouldn't make it home.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 03:58 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 22:09 |
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RIP to a real one edit - also as tragic as it is, Rachel at least was good and mattered and made a difference and, to some degree, went out on her own terms doing something she was willing to die for. Poor Tom, on the other hand, spent years as a slave and then died as a slave freebooter fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Mar 25, 2023 |
# ? Mar 25, 2023 04:42 |
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The massive balls it took to completely withhold non-Yeerk Tom and have him die as a puppet is one of the most impressively horrific things in the entire series. In absolutely any children's media made after Avatar: The Last Airbender there would be some mandated scene-- even a dream or Megamorphs scene-- of non-Yeerk Tom to twist the knife but also soften the audience's sense of "well at least Tom got to show up, at least once." But no. Tom never showed up once. Not once. Not really. He was a victim at the start of the series with the slimmest chance he'd be free, and after what feels like lifetimes of struggle and sacrifice the final answer is-- no. He was never free. Not even for an instant. It shouldn't be like that, but sometimes it is. That stuck with me.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 05:09 |
Tom made his choice in Book 1. He maybe could have gotten out, but he willingly chose to try punch a flame monster so others might escape. He didn't lack for balls.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 05:11 |
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Vandar posted:These two chapters just loving kill me. Yeah, the part where Rachel says "I wanted so much to live. I wanted so much to stay and not to leave" getting followed-up with her sincerely asking if she matters in the end just rips me open. Rachel is my favorite animorph for a number of reasons, but her final moments with the Ellimist are really what hands her that trophy.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 05:23 |
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mind the walrus posted:The massive balls it took to completely withhold non-Yeerk Tom and have him die as a puppet is one of the most impressively horrific things in the entire series. In absolutely any children's media made after Avatar: The Last Airbender there would be some mandated scene-- even a dream or Megamorphs scene-- of non-Yeerk Tom to twist the knife but also soften the audience's sense of "well at least Tom got to show up, at least once." I'd never seen that ruthlessly depressing of a character arc for a character up to that point in my life. I think the only other one that springs to mind from around that same era was the character of Jeri/Juri from Digimon Tamers, a character who starts out on the periphery of the show's circle of competence, slowly and determinately fights her way into it, and then is just ruthlessly smacked out of it to show you the absolute worst case scenario of what can happen in an otherwise typical "kids and monster friends" type show. Literally just "Okay, what happens if someone who's completely not ready for this poo poo falls into the cockpit, almost makes it into the groove with the real heroes and then reality catches up with them... and they don't take it well at all", and then she's just an absolute broken headcase for literally the entire remainder of the show and she never gets the typical triumph-over-tragedy resolution that most characters who go through that trauma tend to get. It was an incredibly disquieting thing to see, but insanely realistic. Because some people just don't rebound or recover from trauma. Sometimes people take a bad hit, and it just ends them as a person. Tom, similarly, took a bad hit from life and that was it for him. I've been waiting for the Let's Read to get to this chapter for literal years now because I've always been fascinated by Tom as one of this series almost purpose-built un-redressed grievances and open wounds, just because of how absolutely filthy dirty both him and Jake are done by this ending for him. And yet, realistically, this was probably always the way it was going to end for him. Getting Tom out alive and in one piece was always a miracle that seemed completely out of reach even in a universe where there are literal gods at work tipping the balance this way and that way to achieve otherwise impossible ends. And to my knowledge I don't think that KA Applegate or Michael Grant have really ever addressed the choice they made with Tom at the end of the series, or even over the course of the series either. I know Grant says he regretted letting Melissa Chapman slide into narrative oblivion after the second book, but I don't think anyone's ever asked them their thoughts on Tom, at least as far as I can remember anyway. You can see a lot of what Michael Grant would eventually decide to cover in his later books like the Gone series in just how lovely things end for Tom. He is very much a ruthless "lovely things happen to people sometimes, deal with it" kind of author. I hope Epicurius posts the closing letter from Applegate along with the final chapter, because that will definitely go a long way towards helping people rationalize the choices that were made all across this book and the books leading up to it, because they still basically stand by the sentiment they expressed in it, even if they admit now with the lapse of time that it was probably way to harsh and reactive to people's absolute outrage over the ending. nine-gear crow fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Mar 25, 2023 |
# ? Mar 25, 2023 05:58 |
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The one thing Tom does at least get is the knowledge that his little brother was the leader of the resistance all along - I can't imagine he wouldn't be immensely proud of him - and that his Yeerk's plan of betrayal failed, so Jake and the others are still alive and at this point it looks like they've saved the earth. He gets that, at least.nine-gear crow posted:I hope Epicurius posts the closing letter from Applegate along with the final chapter, because that will definitely go a long way towards helping people rationalize the choices that were made all across this book and the books leading up to it, because they still basically stand by the sentiment they expressed in it, even if they admit now with the lapse of time that it was probably way to harsh and reactive to people's absolute outrage over the ending. That letter is an absolute banger. A full-throated defence of serious/mature/grown-up writing, of the ultimate point of fiction to reflect things about the real world.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 07:12 |
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Yeah, these chapters are just as brutal as I remembered. I had a really hard time with this book as a kid, probably because I was 10 years old, and it stuck with me for a long, long time. I remember that up until this one came out I had obsessively read and reread most of the books in the series. Pretty sure I cried when Rachel died and definitely cried during some of the later chapters in the book. Its one of the reasons Animorphs holds such a near and dear place in my heart, it was the first piece of media I ever engaged with that affected me like that. And despite having read hundreds of books since, I still haven't really had a fictional character death hit me as hard as Rachel's does here.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 07:31 |
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To me, Tom's tragedy is even more heart-breaking. I think back to that moment a little while ago in the Taxxon cave where Tom is talking to Jake Jake has had enough and commands Ax to "take him". Yeerk-Tom is taken aback but I always think about what the real Tom had going through his head. A rush of hope of being free must have gone through him only to immediately be crushed again.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 08:11 |
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I want to bring up Harry Potter a minute for comparison's sake. I was 17 when the last book came out and some of my friends and I went to the midnight release. While we were in line, my friend was doing something with the music kiosks they used to have at Borders. Into the search bar she had typed, for anybody walking by to read, "SNAPE DIES AND IS GOOD" plus whatever page number that was. In that moment I realized that a) I was not mad at all, b) I thought it was funny, and c) I was pretty much over Harry Potter. The "everybody lived happily ever after, except some supporting characters, and also we nicked the best line from Aliens" limp noodle of an ending pretty much sealed the deal and I did not think about the series for over a decade until Rowling went all-in on transphobia. The furiously angry and frustratingly sad conclusion of Animorphs, the one that we are currently only four chapters into, is something I think about maybe once a week. Poor Tom. Poor Rachel.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 09:07 |
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Rachel, who had some pretty rocky books in the back half, goes out with the most devastating chapters of the series.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 13:23 |
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 14:53 |
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Rochallor posted:I want to bring up Harry Potter a minute for comparison's sake. I was 17 when the last book came out and some of my friends and I went to the midnight release. While we were in line, my friend was doing something with the music kiosks they used to have at Borders. Into the search bar she had typed, for anybody walking by to read, "SNAPE DIES AND IS GOOD" plus whatever page number that was. In that moment I realized that a) I was not mad at all, b) I thought it was funny, and c) I was pretty much over Harry Potter. The "everybody lived happily ever after, except some supporting characters, and also we nicked the best line from Aliens" limp noodle of an ending pretty much sealed the deal and I did not think about the series for over a decade until Rowling went all-in on transphobia. I avoided mentioning Harry Potter in my previous posts because gently caress that terrible series and gently caress the terrible, ableist bigot who wrote them, but yeah it's remarkably badly constructed. I remember being largely "over" Harry Potter by the 4th book when there was a lot of hype about a character dying, only for that character to be Mr. Whatshisface Jock guy we only got really introduced to in that book. There wasn't any real shading or development of him, it was just "oh we're supposed to care because... he's our teammate?" and it felt very narratively unsatisfying. Meanwhile a character we only saw the tiniest fractions of, Tom, was powerful enough to make an impact crater we still feel decades later. It feels almost ghoulish to praise it as narrative effectiveness directly, as though doing so would cheapen the power of what happened to this character who never existed. Much like nine-gear crow pointed out-- it's insanely realistic. Some people just get a bad hand for no good reason and that's it for them, and honoring that grim reality is what people are really talking about when they talk about maturity in fiction. freebooter posted:That letter is an absolute banger. A full-throated defence of serious/mature/grown-up writing, of the ultimate point of fiction to reflect things about the real world. Yeah Applegrant can be softer now about it and say it was too reactive, but it was absolutely true, and especially needed during a time of relative peace literally months before the US Empire was about to shits its pants globally for years on end.
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# ? Mar 25, 2023 20:31 |
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah Applegrant can be softer now about it and say it was too reactive, but it was absolutely true, and especially needed during a time of relative peace literally months before the US Empire was about to shits its pants globally for years on end. Because, for reference, we are now at May 2001 in terms of the real world timeline with this book. 9/11 is four months away. It's another one of those "you had to be there" type things, but for a lot people, myself included, the ending of Animorphs and 9/11 are weirdly inextricably linked in their historical and cultural memory. Because basically Animorphs ended, people got mad about it, Applegate and Grant published the "there are no happy endings in war" letter, everyone went "ok, boomer", then spent the rest of the summer talking about the ending, went back to school in September, and then . And then basically everything that they talked about in that letter came quickly, horrifyingly true, to an extent that I don't think even THEY ever envisioned it would.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 00:31 |
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There is a bit in the letter where they specifically say that a lot of the kids who read Animorphs will soon be of voting age, and draft age, and every time I read it I just think that there's a non-zero number of American youth who grew up reading this and then went off to die in Iraq or Afghanistan just a few years later. mind the walrus posted:Yeah Applegrant can be softer now about it and say it was too reactive I may be misremembering it, but I think by the time I read the final book, in Australia at least, that letter was being included as an afterword. I don't think it's anything they should feel the need to dial back on. I think it's entirely justified to tell e.g. certain kinds of viewers of Breaking Bad that no, they shouldn't be rooting for Walt by the end of the series; and I think it's even more important to underline to younger readers that no, not everything is fan fiction and Mary Sues and wish fulfillment and WWE Smackdown. And I don't really see how anyone could have read the entire series and thought that it deserved, or would have, anything other than a bittersweet ending. And it's not like it's a total bummer grimdark ending - they won! Earth is saved! And half the Animorphs do manage to mostly process their trauma and go on to live good, fulfilling lives after the war.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 01:38 |
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I'm not going to say that Animorphs was entirely responsible for making me the only anti-war fifth grader in my class (not that many people were pro-war; most were pro-war-not-interrupting Spongebob), but I have a very distinct memory of getting the paper off the doorstep sometime in late 2001 with a photo of smoke rising over Kabul and a big WWII-style headline reading "REVENGE" and thinking, "Hmm, we're not in for a very good decade." My parents, god bless 'em, took me aside at one point and kind of gently asked me if I knew that one of the girls in my class had nothing to do with the attacks, and I was like, first of all, she's Indian, but more importantly, she's 11.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 02:28 |
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Chapter 6-Jakequote:No one moved, I mean, really, what do you say at this point? Chapter 6-Cassie quote:Rachel dead? How could that be? How could that be real? So both Visser Three and Erek take the same position on the flushing of the Yeerk pool, as did, if you remember, Elfangor.,But still, Erek is wise enough to know that Jake is going to need Cassie, They are, as Cassie put it, victims/persecutors. quote:It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil-The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenetsyn Epicurius fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Mar 26, 2023 |
# ? Mar 26, 2023 04:53 |
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I like Erek's smug nature here. Feels appropriate. Nice touch with Toby's father. F to the real ones.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 05:18 |
quote:Cassie said, <We still need you. You’re not done yet, Jake.> Goddrat, Cassie. I say again, if she chose to use her insight into people for ill, she could be the worst of the lot.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 05:53 |
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quote:<My people may not agree,> Ax said. Good line. Marco knows that the Andalites can still annihilate the forces of Earth if they choose - but I like the exhaustion on show here, the short tempers, the sticking up for themselves. quote:<He’s a prisoner of war,> I said softly. <We don’t kill prisoners.> Also a good line. V1 is correct that what Jake really means is "we don't kill prisoners if I have to look them in the eye." quote:The Erek hologram disappeared. He was an android now, a thing of steel and ivory vaguely in the shape of a dog walking erect. “And I’m supposed to feel regret because Jake ordered his cousin to kill his brother and I didn’t allow him to massacre everyone else on the Blade ship?” And what does Erek imagine that Blade Ship is going to do next? This more or less sums up why I sort of admire but can never really respect or understand pacifism as an ideology; because it clashes with basic utilitarianism. edit - probably not a spoiler to say that this is the last appearance of Erek or the Chee, which always annoyed me a little but I didn't recall that it's prefaced here by the Animorphs explicitly saying that they'll want to keep their society a secret. It does make it an interesting thought experiment to wonder how they go about telling the full story of the war years while editing the Chee's contribution out, though... freebooter fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Mar 26, 2023 |
# ? Mar 26, 2023 08:25 |
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Another thing I liked, though it's not really in-line with the rest of the themes:quote:“Jake, I need your okay,” Toby pressed. “The Yeerks want you. They want your assurance.” The respect the Yeerks now have for this 16 year old boy, and drat did he earn it. Now he just needs somebody to hold him and have a nice cry but like Cassie said, there's a little bit more to go through.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 13:40 |
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freebooter posted:edit - probably not a spoiler to say that this is the last appearance of Erek or the Chee, which always annoyed me a little but I didn't recall that it's prefaced here by the Animorphs explicitly saying that they'll want to keep their society a secret. It does make it an interesting thought experiment to wonder how they go about telling the full story of the war years while editing the Chee's contribution out, though... Probably steps up the Yeerk Peace Movement a lot.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 13:56 |
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"Oh, that week we were all in the Arctic? Actually Ax was at home for that one, he spent the whole time swapping between morphs and running all our lives. Real classic sitcom two-dates-at-once type stuff."
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 14:00 |
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Kazzah posted:"Oh, that week we were all in the Arctic? Actually Ax was at home for that one, he spent the whole time swapping between morphs and running all our lives. Real classic sitcom two-dates-at-once type stuff." Lol, that's true.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 14:06 |
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freebooter posted:And what does Erek imagine that Blade Ship is going to do next? quote:edit - probably not a spoiler to say that this is the last appearance of Erek or the Chee, which always annoyed me a little but I didn't recall that it's prefaced here by the Animorphs explicitly saying that they'll want to keep their society a secret. It does make it an interesting thought experiment to wonder how they go about telling the full story of the war years while editing the Chee's contribution out, though...
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 17:02 |
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A little late on this, but I think what was most striking to me personally about Rachel's end here is that it wasn't Tom that ultimately killed her, or Chapman, or Visser Three/One, or even Crayak/Drode. It wasn't one of any number of big, noteworthy villain names throughout the series that finally brought down the toughest, most brutal and ruthless fighter on the team. It was just some random, unknown, no-name Yeerk, with no presence in the story before or since. One quick smack of a polar bar paw and it's over. For all the times they squeezed through and survived, that was all it took. That kinda really sucks. In a thematically appropriate way.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 18:24 |
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mind the walrus posted:Way too many of the aliens are used as cheats to get the kids out of situations with relatively little blood on their hands. The Chee make more sense on paper than most, but I'm not surprised the end for them is basically a "Well you see we---murmur murmur murmur---and that's the story of how we all got out of Space Tijuana!" handwave. Speaking of that, it does make me wonder why Jake didn't have Erek use holograms for the fake attack rather than getting every non-main-Animorph ally killed, there's precedent for it from when he did that fake colony and so on. I mean I know the answer was "He didn't think of it and Erek wasn't exactly in the mood to help him out with ideas" but it is something rather odd.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 18:40 |
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Chucat posted:Speaking of that, it does make me wonder why Jake didn't have Erek use holograms for the fake attack rather than getting every non-main-Animorph ally killed, there's precedent for it from when he did that fake colony and so on. I mean I know the answer was "He didn't think of it and Erek wasn't exactly in the mood to help him out with ideas" but it is something rather odd. I think Erek is pretty strong but maybe not "take direct hit from shipboard laser cannon" strong. IIRC he and his dad got a little injured from the handheld Dracons. It's also probably exponentially more difficult to produce a massive hologram like that instead of a couple people, his graphics card would be slowing down to like 8 FPS. The final scene with Toby really makes me wish she had been a more major figure in the series. The Cassie book where she was a main character was great, as well.
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# ? Mar 26, 2023 20:21 |
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Also, even if he didn't kill anyone, Eric would be acting to enable a military operation as a direct participant, which probably violates his programming.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 02:08 |
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Chapter 7-Marcoquote:Ax and I watched fascinated, repulsed, maybe a little triumphant, as the Yeerk crawled slowly from the Andalite ear. Jake isn't president, but he's proven himself a diplomat Chapter 8-Jake quote:We flew the Pool ship to a rendezvous point just beyond the moon’s orbit. As we’d promised, we deployed the Bug fighters by remote control and blew them up. We detached the ship’s engines and waited. Waited for hours. i guess suffering has made Alloran humble, i'll say that even though not a lot of attention is paid to Ax over the course of the series beyond him being the butt of jokes, this is a very different Ax than the one we first met.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 03:37 |
Alloran continues to be right
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 03:48 |
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Marco finding a random briefcase of cookies both owns and provides a nice bit of much needed levity
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 03:57 |
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Epicurius posted:slightly goofy-looking Andalite fighters Vindication! e: I forget how Andalite names work. Would Asculan-Semitur-Langor be related to Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, or the same rank, or is Semitur just the blue alien deer scorpion version of "Smith"? Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Mar 27, 2023 |
# ? Mar 27, 2023 04:07 |
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Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil have no component of their names in common while being brothers.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 04:59 |
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Okay, so that probably rules out theory one. And it sounds like theory two is unlikely, given Asculan is big-league. Alloran-Wang-Jones it is, then.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 05:03 |
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Mazerunner posted:Marco finding a random briefcase of cookies both owns and provides a nice bit of much needed levity I choose to believe they're Famous Amos. I also have to admit that it's believably frustrating that these Guerilla Fighters are about to get run over by the "good" Colonial dickheads before enough of their safeguards-- Ax ensuring communicaes are broadcast to the homeworld, Alloran's freedom ensuring he'd have the ability to stand up for them, the pragmatic logic of the morph cube being able to neutralize the Yeerk/Taxxon threats-- help bail them out, and the book is still wise enough to make you realize it's essentially dumb luck that their proposals met with people who had sense.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 08:29 |
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Tunzie posted:Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil have no component of their names in common while being brothers. Sirinial and Esgarrouth are their parents middle-names, so there might be some patronym/matronym thing going on. Or it could just be a naming quirk of their family. The only other Andalite family we see are Aldrea's, and we dont see Seerow or her brother's full names. quote:The speech was delivered in a low thought-speak tone, all emotion severely controlled. But then Alloran whipped his tail blade over his head, so fast it cracked like a whip. He smiled the subtle Andalite smile and yelled, <Do you know who did that? Do you know who moved my tail? I did. I did. I did it.> Rather dusty in here.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 08:56 |
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I have a distinct memory of reading this part of the book when I was 13, and picturing the briefcase full of loose cookies, and how Visser One's sticky slug body was probably covered in crumbs while he was in there. Also, late to the party but reading that last Rachel chapter made me tear up, especially the end, about wanting to stay and not go. So devastating and tragic at the end to be reminded how much all of them are still kids, despite it all.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 11:32 |
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I always imagined it as a transparent plastic jar, despite being clearly described as a briefcase. I stand by my canon.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 11:52 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 22:09 |
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The Andalites being so consistently lovely is incredibly believable and yet seems like such a bold choice for a "YA" book. I love it.
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# ? Mar 27, 2023 12:41 |