#k a applegate said fuck me specifically that day

[bayofwolves]

whoever said cassierachel is doomed yuri was right i can't take this anymore

#when rachel dies and cassie is in pure shock and disbelief #and says she feels as though there's a hole inside her that nothing will ever be able to fill... #BAWLING #k a applegate said fuck me specifically that day #callie talk #animorphs #cassel

[sourbat]

top 6 writing influences?

This is a long one, so here's the short answer (in no particular order):

1. Exploitation Films

2. Reoccurring trauma

3. Literature by POC

4. Socialism

5. The Beats

6. Traditional Horror

And if you want the longer version, read more underneath.

Exploitations Films- So before I went and majored in literature, I wanted to direct film. More specifically, I wanted to direct exploitation films that centered on extreme violence and government oppression. I was majorly influenced by the “Torture Porn” era of exploitation films (early-mid 2000s- early 2010s), but since delving into the world of SAW I’ve taken the plunge into other works such as Pasolini’s Salo, or Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and looked at the hidden meaning behind these messages. I quickly learned that these obscene and extreme films all had some underlying message: that violence is justifiable in certain circumstances (ex: if you’re wealthy). I wanted to make films that discussed these “justifiable” excuses, reasons that we as a society make up. I used to write more of these satires, but since then have taken the next step to theorizing solutions, or means to subvert our oppressors.

Reoccurring Violence/Trauma- I mean this was my whole MA career right here. I studies films, games, and other media centered on violence and past traumas. This is sorta where I gained a real appreciation for intergenerational trauma, and when I started to discuss and explore my own. Again, much of my older works discuss the trauma to an extreme extent, whereas these days it’s less about the suffering, and more about finding the root cause and beginning to heal. I wanna give a shout out to my girl Slyvia Plath, whose works still haunt me to this day. You were done dirty, girl, and you deserve to be taught in public school to help those who need it. (and before you ask; yes, my own trauma does fall under this category. but that's a more private conversation)

Literature written by non-white, POC writers, scholars, etc.-It was my second year of college when I was finally met with such narratives as “white people did not colonize the Americas and Hawaii. They invaded these lands, and still are to this day.” I finally had names of well established writers who LOOKED like me. Who grew up Catholic like me, and felt lied and betrayed like me. You never realize how bad you needed to read a book where the only people who are described are white (making them the outlier), and all the defaults are brown, like me. Like anyone whose read some of my wordier stories seem to presume I got my influences from writers like Shelley, Dickens and or King (and to some extent, they’re right), but it’s actually Viramontes, Diaz and Alexie that inspired me to keep on trucking with my writing.

Socialism/Socialist Theorists -I’m not gonna delve to deep into this one since I’d rather not raise a discussion on politics on this website. If you’re curious to know more, you can ask me personally how this affected my writing/viewpoints. I can say that many early modern writers (especially black) were socialists… you just don’t get the pleasure of learning about it until much, much later….

The Beat movement- The best way to describe this movement is “transcendentalism+ modernism and naturalism, mixed with all the worst drugs). This does partially tie with the socialist portion (though more communist if we look at our writers). Admittedly, I got into these guys thanks to Naked Lunch, a text I would only recommend to hardcore enthusiast, and the Beat movement is heavily saturated with mentally ill, drug addicted white men. There are some lesser known female writers, but I can’t name any off the top of my head. That said, a lot of the works are incredibly sardonic, sarcastic and designed to enact discomfort (gee, sound familiar). If you are curious to know and learn more, hit me up. I can recommend some of the less controversial writers of that time (or the big baddies if you wanna explore assholery at its worse).

Horror Stories-It all started with me picking up Goosebumps, and went from there. After that, came Scary Stories, spooky 80s choose your own adventures, King, Poe, Radcliffe and more. Gothic Literature gave me a window into women writers, early themes regarding body autonomy, feminisms, exploitation, etc. More importantly, it gave me a real good outlet to explore the women’s voice in literature. But really, let’s all take a moment to thank R. L. Stine for getting kids like me to read in the first place. Also, K. A. Applegate, because although Animorphs was technically Sci-fi, that shit fucked me up as a kid.

#sorry this is late #and a mess #but if you want more you can alsways hmu #but this was fun #also romanticism #and gothic lit #are inspired me #feeshies #thank you

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

ratinthewall replied to your post: Hi! So your reread is both hilarious and I love...

so… this does mean you have to dish on your horoscope headcanons for the rest of the kids too :)

i mean this from the bottom of my heart: SO glad you asked. honestly the animorphs, except (appropriately) for ax, are like, so easy to identify with astrological archetypes when i went through it i almost thought these were all too obvious? like, oh, pegging the leader as a capricorn, real thoughtful. but just as jake is a capricorn not just because he’s the leader but because he is a million-year-old disciplinarian who hates himself and will throw down at the drop of a hat, the more i thought about all of these the more convinced i became.

cassie is a pisces. the elemental rules of thumb lead us straight to water for someone as ruled by her emotions, and as full of real respect for the power of emotion, as cassie; cassie herself, of course, has a number of meaningful interactions with water and water animals herself, from suggesting their trout morph to making friends with a psychic whale to channeling the whale to drown the veleek to the spiritual regard she has for dolphins to bidding aftran farewell in water form. pisces is associated with dreams and sleep, which also are recurring cassie motifs, from her reception of ax’s distress call to her interpretation of her own nightmares about choosing someone’s death in MM1 to the dreams that hint at the unraveling of the alternate timeline in MM4. when i think of pisces i think of a certain porousness, the end of the zodiac meaning, kind of, the aspect of human existence nearest and most prone to drifting into the broader fabric of the cosmos, which is cassie all over; jake calls her mystical in the very first book, she’s sub-temporally grounded (whatever that means), she’s kind of the only one of the animorphs that gives a shit about what happens to the non-human parts of earth in the events that the yeerks when for real, she has a talent for beautiful morphing (pisces is also a mutable sign). empathetic to a fault, alternately wise beyond her years and blinded by the immediate overwhelm of her own emotion, trusting her gut more than anything else. pisces. keywords: intuitive, dreamy, artistic, humane, sympathetic, sensitive, compassionate, perceptive, tender, impressionable

tobias is a libra. libra is the only inanimate sign of the twelve, which feels appropriate for someone whose sense of self as an actual person is as weak as tobias’s. libra is the scales, which is to say justice but also a balancing act, and, like, is that not tobias’s entire life? hawk/boy, predator/prey, kill/save. he’s looking, always, for the true balance of the components of himself, and in true libra fashion is never fully satisfied. he’s also the most consistent swing vote on the team, specifically because he’s the only animorph who consistently sees both sides of a story, who can hold the micro and the macro in his mind simultaneously, who can really look simultaneously at benefits and costs—and he often expresses himself carefully, waiting to speak until he can articulate himself, not getting caught up in the back-and-forth of marco/rachel on one hand and cassie on the other. my favorite passage in the entire series is his interior monologue in 23 about how every single human lives on that edge between savage and saint—about how for everyone, doing the right thing is a balancing act, doing the right thing in fact requires a balancing act because there’s never going to be just one right answer that gets you through everything. he can be judgmental, but he is also willing to cut people slack—he tells rachel, gently, to back off a teammate more than once. IMO tobias is the character through which the true moral message of the books—which (again IMO) largely hinges on exactly that idea that there are no shortcuts, no easy answers, that you are constantly figuring out what is needed today and you don’t always get to be sure it was right—gets most clearly expressed, which i mention mostly because, and i did not know this when i first pinned tobias as a libra, K. A. applegate is a libra too. keywords: just, sociable, refined, accommodating, kind, fair, diplomatic, likable, indecisive, respectful, artistic

rachel as an aries, again, like, it feels almost too obvious? is it jake that literally calls her the goddess of war? but, well: rachel’s comfort zone is the fight. she’s a creature of action, someone who likes doing better than she likes thinking, and who is not great at sitting still. she is quick to anger, she does have the temper of someone ruled by mars, and she will fuck your shit up if she decides you deserve it. she’s got that aries impulsivity, too—how many times does she do something only to think immediately afterward, or even as she’s initiating the movement, “so, this is stupid of me”? she’s not one for planning ahead, and although she’s aware of the biggest picture she doesn’t intuitively take into account the consequences of whatever they’re considering. she’s restless, driven by an internal battery. but she’s thrilling to be around, she lights people up, she radiates strength that others can use. jake calls the shots, but rachel is the one metaphorically waving the flag. keywords: active, initiating, leading, independent, aggressive, impatient, combative, energetic, pioneering, naive, assertive. plus, rachel as aries gives some fun things with both pisces-cassie and libra-tobias. rachel and cassie very much are poles on the animorphs spectrum, which is captured by placing rachel as aries (the baby of the zodiac, holding only itself) and cassie as pisces (the eldest sign, containing all of them); the two of them are simultaneously nestled next to each other and a universe apart. meanwhile aries and libra are sister signs, which: Aries is drawn into the Libran mystery and benefits from diplomacy when they become confrontational. In comparison, Aries can teach Libra the skill of quick decision making; which although impulsive provides the spontaneity they need. Libra can be indecisive to a fault, they can benefit from any help in this department! sound like anyone we know? i also (1) as a capricorn who has only dated arieses and libras like the idea of them as a cardinal sign power couple and (2) love and find very fitting with them and the series as a whole the idea that rachel is ruled by the god of war while tobias is ruled by the goddess of love.

marco is a gemini. motormouth whose speed of talk is outpaced only by the speed of his brain. big on intellect, low on internal emotionality. a joker, vibrating a little higher, a little faster than everyone around him. difficult for other people to get a handle on, comes across as more glib, more callous than he is (i, a gemini rising.... Can Relate). a people person, interested in others—he is the only animorph we see trying to strike up new connections well into the war, and like yeah it’s mostly because he’s the thirstiest animorph by virtue of being the only human without a counterpart on the team onto whom he can focus and have reciprocated all that desperate energy but still—but also good with others, charming and likable and the best liar on the team by far, the quickest on his feet. containing a central duality, not the way tobias does, where there’s a constant tension and ongoing recalibration between hawk and human, but completely, even comfortably: the lightest animorph and the darkest, the most chipper and the most terrified, the most normal and the most ruthless, and, crucially, given to switching from one to the other on a dime. thinking in multiple dimensions. keywords: talkative, mental, adaptable, flexible, changeable, responsive, sociable, superficial, versatile, inquisitive, witty. (also, interesting to think of marco & cassie as the two mutable signs to whose openness, changeability, etc. cardinal jake is drawn to.)

ax... you know, it really is fitting that he’s the most difficult one. does astrology even apply if you weren’t born on this planet? is his astrological birthday the day of his first human morph? do andalites have their own zodiac, their own archetypes, their own beliefs about how the constellations shape their lives? (i bet they do. military andalites are probably too rational for it, but i bet everyday andaites do have their own set of astrological concepts). at first i thought aquarius, because of the easy Out There/weirdo/alien connection, and his technological prowess connoting a certain intellect, but the thing is, although ax is well ahead of humans scientifically because of the advanced position of andalites as a whole, we don’t know that he’s particularly impressive by andalite standards, and in fact the series strongly suggests he is... not. (falling asleep in xenobiology, anyone?) now i think—and again, i’m less convinced of this than of the others, but the more time i spend with it the more right it feels—i like him as a taurus. the food thing is obvious, yes, tauruses like to eat, like sensual pleasures, and we know that ax finds human senses just absolutely mindblowing all the time and has NO shame about sharing this fact. but ax is also determined (to kick visser three’s ass, as a mere aristh!), and yes, can be stubborn (”yes, prince jake” / “twenty-five of your minutes”). think of how he builds a scoop for himself, fills it up with concrete physical things to make it a home—that’s very taurean, to me. (the tauruses i know fucking love nesting.) i also like the idea of ax as a taurus to jake’s capricorn, because (as a capricorn) i always think of taurus as like, capricorn’s less deranged little sibling, and i think there’s something to be said for the fact that ax and jake are similar people—unimpressive students who deeply want to Do Right—who have a similar outlook on the war (which is to say that they’re the two who think of it most fully as a war instead of a series of battles, ax because he brings in the bigger picture of the yeerks and jake because he has to take a broader perspective in order to make the calls and lead the team), but ax is 6000% less tormented and fucked up about it than jake is. keywords: persevering, down-to-earth, stable, stubborn, possessive, prosperous, dependable, physical, sensual. in my reckoning, the only fixed sign of the bunch, which feels true. yeah, i’ll take it.

#animorphs