All's Fair in Death and Taxes

AMY: You know, when I first met you, I thought you were the most annoying person I'd ever met, with your "moments of beauty," "seize the day" crap like you'd watched "Dead Poets Society" too many times. JONAH: Shows what you know. You can't watch "Dead Poets Society" too many times. AMY: I hated how cheesy you were. I hated how woke you were. I hated how often you used the word "artisan." But most of all, I hated how you believed that life could be better than it was. And yet here we are. And my life is so much better than it was... because of you.

like. this is love to me. this is something that i try to "replicate" a lot whenever I try to write about love, I guess, the dynamic between someone who has seen how the world is and doesn't really believe it can change and someone who does sincerely (want to) believe the world can be better than it is.

and it's not even that jonah (on his own) changed amy's life for the better. I mean, don't get me wrong, he did basically waltz into her life in a manic pixie dream girl-esque way. but (iirc since, again, it's been years since I watched this show) jonah actually just showed amy that life could be better than this, better than stuck in a shitty job and in a marriage she wasn't actually happy in, and thus made her want to change her own life. he made her want to change her own life for the better.

art block is your brain telling you to do studies.

draw a still life. practice some poses. sketch some naked people. do a color study. try out a different technique on a basic shape.

art block doesnt stop you from drawing, it stops you from making your drawings look the way you want them to. and thats because you need to push your skills to the next level so you can preform at that standard

Write a description of an object. write the weather today. Write a made up characterization of a random photo of an actor from the internet as to the character they are in that picture. Write a little story about your pet’s day. Write about spilling soup and make it super dramatic and tragic. Write about someone’s day being ruined and make it funny. Write a meetcute coffeeshop AU of two OCs you’d never put together- maybe from different stories. Write them breaking up.

A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.

A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.

That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.

This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writers’ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.

With all this in mind, let’s go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and don’t want to get it spoiled.

The list of things I'd change is maybe too big to even contemplate, so...

Things I'd Keep the Same, in an AniTV Remake:

Flashlight-shaped dracon beams! I don't even care if the AniTV props are a case of low budget of bowdlerizing to make it look less like a weapon. I love that design choice (left image). That dracon beam is innocuous, it looks un-gun-like, and you can imagine it fitting a hand as small as a taxxon's, as big as a hork-bajir's, as clumsy as a gedd's, or as weak as an andalite's. The design we get in the comics (right image) is a lot closer to the book description, but there's no way that could be tucked into Tom's jeans pocket (as in MM4) or passed off as anything but a ray gun, if a human-controller gets caught with one. Plus, that trigger guard is IMHO a little too ergonomic for specifically human hands.

Lean into the paranoia, away from the epic space battles. There's tremendous potential in the sequences where Marco is walking down the street and spending too long looking at every single person he passes (left image) because they're all potential controllers. It's so easy to create horror for an Animorphs adaptation: all you have to do is have a few extras wander by in the background of every single scene, and you've put maybe-enemies in the room. As Pop Arena points out, that girl in the white shirt (right image) who brushes past Marco in S1E3 later shows up in line to exit the yeerk pool; he had a whole conversation with a human-controller present and didn't even know it.

=> From IMDb, Joshua Peace (Tom) and Richard Sali (Chapman) were getting paid for every episode, so have them be constantly present. Rachel's grabbing Cassie by her locker to tell her they need to meet — put Chapman down the hall, turning to look at them. Tobias lands on a street sign — have Tom walk by underneath. Heck, put Jake in a horror movie 24/7: every single scene in his house, have Tom just there in the background, visible to the viewer even when Jake thinks he's alone in his kitchen or front yard. It's a low-budget high-effect way to get the scariness of the books across.

Go with more subtle morphs over big-and-bad ones. I get why the Animorphs' lineup looks like it does in the books, but I also get why AniTV can only do so much with lions and tigers and bears. This is sort of the same thing as using human-controllers to increase the Animorphs' paranoia, but the opposite: have a few bugs or mice or lizards in the background of every single scene between controllers. And do stuff like that moment where a controller casually smashes a fly mid-sentence, shortly after we saw Rachel morph a fly — that's a great moment of tension, even if again weird editing ruins the effect.

Large (if you're compensating for something)

Medium (intimidation purposes)

Small (to fit down host's pants)

Extra Small (to fit inside glasses)

#animorphs#tbh I think I want more of those high action battle scenes#not that i dont like the paranoia but i want to see good choreographed fights

I'm the opposite! Because I think to get to have those battles in a live-action show, you'd have to sacrifice basically everything else. Like, the amount of CGI it would take to create a scene where a grizzly bear, a tiger, and a gorilla burst out of an elevator and take on 12 giant bladed aliens in the hallways of a skyscraper, only to have one alien dragged out a window by the bear working with a hawk while a wolf and a different type of alien (who moves his tail too fast for human eyes to follow) provide backup... It could be done, certainly. And with 6 months, 10 million dollars, and 15-odd digital artists, it could be made to look damn good.

BUT if that's where you put your time and money, then other things are going to have to go. You won't be able to do it for every episode — even Game of Thrones itself couldn't — and you're going to have to build your production schedule and writing around those ~5 minutes of screentime. And other considerations, like set-building or re-shoots, will have to come second.

The only thing that comes to mind would be to go the direction of the show but more, having her just be in a small morph already but then willingly throwing herself at a much larger predator. These days with CGI you could get the idea across, but back then the only way to do that would've been to endanger animals, which no one wants.

And yes: Tobias going off on his own so much in the books makes way more sense than having Christopher Ralph wander around alone for no reason. Again, you can tell they were trying to capture Tobias, but if That Fucking Hawk can't act and you're stuck trying to convey it by having a regular human guy crouched behind a tree....

Please, for the love of cake, give us comments! Even “Good cake!” is better than silence! A thumbs up. Anything.

Does Animorphs have queer representation? As with a lot of 20th-century media, especially children's media, the short answer is "it's complicated."

What's canon:

In #40, two characters with male pronouns (Mertil and Gafinilan) are described as being devoted to each other to the point of death, and use a gesture when greeting each other that book #38 described as the andalite equivalent of kissing. The romantic nature of the relationship is — by the authors' own admission — as obvious as they could make it in a children's book written in 1999.

There are several instances of queering gender when morphing, most notably with Ax. When creating a human shape, Ax uses 50% girls' DNA and 50% boys' DNA to create a human body often described as "androgynous" or with similar terms. Ax states that he chooses to be male while in that morph because his identity is male (#4). The popular interpretation is thus that human-Ax is an intersex person with male gender.

There is plenty of other gender nonconformity. Tobias describes Rachel as "becoming... more herself" when turning into a male bald eagle (#13) and Rachel states that her male grizzly bear shape (which she chose to be male) is "letting out... a part of me that was always inside" (#7). Visser Three (who is male) stops to admire his own body while in the shape of a human female in a designer sundress (#23). Ax (#11), Tobias (#43), and Marco (#51) all take on the shapes of female primates and deliberately perform femininity at various points in the series. There are hundreds of other examples, but I want to mention Cassie's yeerk morph in #29 because we know that yeerks have at least three sexes and their genders have no human equivalent (#19), which is part of why they tend to use their hosts' pronouns and change pronouns when they change hosts (Visser).

What's Word of God or fanon:

[Quick clarification: "Word of God" are statements from the author(s) about authorial intent that do not appear in canon; "fanon" is a fan reading of canon so widespread that it's assumed as default.]

Marco is bisexual. This became fanon when readers pointed out he flirts heavily with Jake (calling him "hey, handsome" in #21, sending an email about his "big manly shoulders" and "piercing brown eyes" in #16, etc.) and to a lesser extent both Tobias and Ax. It became Word of God when co-ghost-writer Michael Grant tweeted that [sic] "Marco was bi <- Canon." Author K.A. Applegate has since confirmed on Reddit that she likes and supports bisexual Marco.

Tobias is trans, genderqueer, and/or gender dysphoric. This has been fanon since the series was first released. Many trans and enby fans see themselves in Tobias's struggle to find a body that fits who he is, while also being fed up with society's expectations about the type of body he "should" want. It's intensely wish-fulfilling to read about Tobias's ability simply to decide to be male in some situations (e.g. MM3), to decide it's easier to be female in others (e.g. #43), and to have the kind of body with no obvious gender that tends to get "it" pronouns (e.g. #3) the other 99% of the time. It's Word of God because K.A. Applegate has stated repeatedly that she's deeply honored by this fan response, that she wishes she could've made it canon, and that "as the proud mother of a trans daughter," she would love to write the books over with a canonically trans Tobias.

Mertil and Gafinilan are married. This one's a true fanon in that every fan work I've ever seen to contain either character treats them as a couple by default, to the point where any fan work that did interpret them as platonic would have to explain why that decision was made. It was always authorial intent (Applegate and Grant have both stated this) and it's as close to being canon as the authors could make it.

In conclusion? It's complicated.

The very idea of "your identity and your body are fluid" was always going to challenge gender determinism and heterosexism, and K.A. Applegate (and her ghosts) have always embraced that reality. The books are, by the authors' own admission, as queer as they could get away with being, and they do repeatedly raise challenges about the ideas of gender and sexuality being at all fixed. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean there is an explicit statement anywhere in the text that "Marco is bisexual" or "Ax is intersex" spelled out in so many words. I agree with Applegate that, by contemporary standards, the representation falls frustratingly short.

this is a great summation - what I love about the authors of the series is that they make it very clear not to retro fit their understanding of what fans have taken from their work in a way that unnecessarily gives them credit for things that they did not intend but instead embrace the fandom interpretation in a supportive way

What gets my notice now as an adult (and wiggled into my subconcious as a kid) is how in #3, there is a big kerfluffle about who gets to be a male wolf and who gets to be female. And after that? Literally not one of them cares. Like you said, they're popping in and out of all sorts of bodies all the time and being completely comfortable in most of them. Not a common message in the 90s.

They may not have been able to hit the level of queer acceptance back then, and they definitely make it clear now that they wish they'd done better, but compared to most 90s authors with a montly book to write... they did pretty good!

Yes! And you're right Animorphs successfully combats magic or sci-fi systems that sort of keep the gender binary by default. Like the trio in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets all trying to shape-shift into Slytherin kids of the same gender. Or the books (Wizard's Hall, Color of Magic) that actually build deterministic gender roles into their magic system.

And when Jake “wins” and gets to be the male wolf, the book shows that it’s actually a pain in the butt because he’s just peeing everywhere.  I bet that really reinforces with the kids that our human concept of gender and sex is meaningless when applied to animals (and I’m sure there’s bleed over into how they view human sex/gender).  So great!

Marco is less bothered about changing species than he is about changing gender. He is going to be biologically female for less than 2 hours. The fact that the kids make a reasoned biological assumption about how having two male wolves is a bad idea, but Marco - while conceding the logic - still gripes about it, is itself telling. He is a boy. And he doesn't want to be a girl. Never mind the fact that he's going to be a wolf.

Unpack the toxic masculinity to that. The only people that will ever, ever know he was a female wolf (for 2 hrs) are his other Animorphs. His wolf morph isn't going to try on dresses, talk about boys, want to go shopping, or any other [insert teen girl stereotype]. It's a wolf. Just because the wolf is female, that doesn't make it a girl. How insecure in his gender indentity does Marco have to be in that moment?

It's worth mentioning that Marco - like all of them- is about 13 at the time. They're adolescents in the early to mid stages of puberty. So at the age in which most people begin to define their gender identity and sexual orientation, these kids routinely change their species and sex.

An interesting - possibly ironic - element here is that biological sex doesn't specifically matter in any specific morph. To that matter, biological sex actually doesn't "matter" whatsoever unless you're either having sex or pregnant. Sitting in a chair doing nothing, you're using your lungs, brain, heart, kidneys, intestines, pancreas, etc. By contrast, for all the societal importance humans place culturally on the configuration of our 23rd chromosome, the reproductive organs go "unused" like 90% of the time. It's not like the female wolf Marco is going to morph is going to be doing something explicitly "female" like mate, lactate, or whelp.

It draws attention - either deliberately or tangentially - to how very little being biologically male or female explicitly matters. They're morphing wolf to cross terrain. Nothing more. In this case, the sex of the wolf is as relevant to what they're doing as the paint color of a car.

You mention Rachel morphing to a (male) eagle as becoming her true self, but that's less about the gender of the eagle and more about the predatory nature the raptor represents. In truth, for most egg-laying animals - which is to say, practically all things that aren't mammals - females tend to be larger than the males, which only a few exceptions among non-mammals. This means it matters more that Rachel's battle morphs are large and powerful; that they're male is a byproduct. Bull grizzlies and elephamts are just bigger. Rachel didn't pick her raptor morph to be an eagle because it was male, but rather because it was the largest, most powerful option presented to her. Had the eagle been female, Rachel still would have picked it. Had there been male and female eagles in Cassie's barn, Rachel would've picked the largest available.

There is a read to the series that the way the kids every now and again apply human gender norms to animals is pointing out or making fun of (American) gender roles and expectations.

Here’s an ANIMORPHS animation pitch I made last summer! Created it for a lot of different personal and professional reasons, but now I’m happy to share!

Please respect my boundaries and assume that I am Not mad.

I'm a UK-based creative who writes and designs TTRPGs. My games focus on niche topics such as running a train under a totalitarian regime or making a desperate trek towards salvation across an icy expanse.

If you're curious about my work, here are a few titles I am particularly proud of:

The Trains of the Glorious Republics of the People - Where you play as a train crew in a fictional 1930s totalitarian state.

Ice, Snow, and the Quest for Salvation - A solo TTRPG about a trek across frozen tundra during the golden age of polar exploration.

We Are The Land - Take on the role of folklore monsters attempting to drive off a group of mortals that have disturbed their slumber.

You can find the rest of my projects and additional material for the above on my itch.io page, and if you want other ways to watch what I am up to, visit my Carrd site.