Liylac-Pantherra-Untsya

Now this fanfic project started because my dumb ass went and re-read the Animorphs series in my mid-30's. I got to book 19: The Departure and threw a tantrum at the end the same way I did when I re-read the series in my early 20's and the same way I did when I originally read it at like... idk, 12?

My basic issue with the end of this book is that its stupid Deus Ex Caterpillar ending is a cop-out and pretty much a total themic betrayal of everything that the series had been building up to at this point. I do understand what the authorial intention was: Cassie is a special little snowflake who uses the awesome power of too much empathy or whatever to make love and understanding shoehorn their way into the narrative in the most eye-rollingly inauthentic and inorganic way possible.

And I do get why no one gave a fuck: I mean, what were you gonna do as a reader, go cry about it? Your next best possible option for tween reading at this time was Goosebumps. Motherfucker, shut the fuck up and consume your deux ex total bullshit ending Animorphs book. It's not like you had a ton of age-targeted media options anyway.

So. Be me, a couple years ago: exhausted, burnt out, crotchety, sick of everyone's shit, and so full of piss and vinegar it's probably an undiagnosed medical condition (call your doctor if you experience symptoms of priapism for more than four---) and sort of desperately hoping that I can emotion-mine some remembered childhood nostalgia out of that old kids-turn-into-aliens-to-fight-animals (or was it the other way around?) children's book series.

I sat down to read it, and ---holy shit!--- I knew in theory that the series holds up for the books that were written by the original authors, but this shit slaps!

And then I got to Book 19, and I got to the end, and fury filled me, because this quite emphatically did not slap. This was unslappage of the highest order. If this ending was any less of a banger it would read like a moldy sheet flapping on a slackened clothesline.

Assuming this feeling would pass, I let my rage consume me. But that was not the end, no: that was only stage the first of my grief process at how shitty that book's ending is. Next, after rage, came that terrible sense of purpose where I abruptly realized that oh no, I probably care about this enough to write content about it!

I went to my computer. I sat down. I opened google docs. I turned on music. I started typing.

In one night I somehow wordvomited almost 9k of fic fever dream onto the screen.

Now, that's not really impressive. A drooling toddler can bang her little dumb fists against a keyboard all day and put out an awful lot of text, none of which I would read at anything less than loaded-with-safety-off gunpoint. But in this case I produced serviceable prose that didn't immediately make me want to commit ritual suicide by way of self-immolation. I decided that was a plus.

In a fit of temporary mental illness I put that shit up online. I guess I forgot the whole maxim where no one will ever love your dumb bullshit as much as you will. But, surprisingly, people did not call for my immediate lynching and/or placing into the stocks in town square. Horribly (for me) they did something worse: I was given encouragement.

Because mommy and daddy never loved little baby TEQ enough, this was basically the equivalent of inhaling salvia-laced catnip mixed with the choicest smokeable rock crack-cocaine. What started as a silly little anger-fueled nonsense alternate divergence quickly became something that I went "well, fuck. I bet I can make this all internally coherent and slap."

And things went well! I banged out story 1 in three months or so and patted myself on the back!

And two weeks after I finished story 1, while on a walk only two blocks away from my house, I saw something fucked up that ended with the city coroner and a body bag. I didn't write for four months.

When I did start writing again it was difficult to get back into it. To encourage myself I started picking outline scenes and creating them with no regard for anything like sequence or in-story timeline. The result of this is that I have the entirety of the story and epilogue mapped out, and over half of it written, but I can't actually publish any of it because I still have some early foundational sections unwritten. These early sections are taking sixever because SO FUCKING MUCH depends on them. I'm trying to thread multiple concepts and layers into prose that can't go on too long or expand too much without it losing the feel of the original series. This is fine for Cassie POV, because [SPOILER REDACTED], but the other kids (for reasons that include tone and major takeaways and themes) need to feel solidly like they have been ripped from a version of canon that got published in an alternate mirror reality. It needs to feel like Animorphs or it won't make the points I'm driving at. So now I have another 120k of writing across almost 3 years in-story time and I can't actually use any of it until i get my shit together and write a cogent, coherent plan for the next like 7 chapters of Scramble, because if I fuck that portion up I might as well just delete the whole damn story project, and that's intimidating. I finally got the first couple chapters of Scramble out in June or so of 2025, almost a year after A19D started publishing. In October I came back and updated it so that at least 14 chapters are out. We're now right at the point there where the story turns away from infighting / straight recap with natural team exposition and goes into rewarding the reader for sticking with it with lots of crucial information and de-escalating panic stakes. Interspersed with the knowledge dumps will be some great low-pressure bittersweet team bonding moments.

The information given will also retroactively turn the end third of A19D and the beginning third of Fatality into a tragedy, as the audience (and the rest of the group) will know more than Cassie does. I've decided to start ranting and rambling about the project here, because goddamn if I can't go off on main (I say, while on a fandom-and-fic-specific alt) about this stuff my head will explode. I have other people to talk to about my original projects (which also slap btw), and I feel it's ethically about the same as waterboarding to inflict my fic divergence shit upon people already patient enough to listen to my nonsense about my originals.