For My Obssessions

[For those of you just tuning in: A-Town is the shitty postwar sitcom inspired by the life of Jake Berenson, to the eternal annoyance of Jake Berenson.]

Oh my god, like when Megamorphs 4 was inspired by a crappy AniTV episode to do the same premise better? I love this, not in the least because Rachel would find it infuriating.

Interviewer: So. A-Town. How do you feel about that cutie Trina?

Rachel: Oh yeah. That episode where she gave birth to a pterodactyl has always been a favorite of mine.

-- six weeks later --

Trina [bursting onto the set of the A family home]: Liam, oh Liam! I've had the most terrible morphing accident!

Liam [also in Brandon's house for some reason]: What is it, Trin? What happened?

Trina: M... morphing allergies!

Man in Pterodactyl Costume: [Enters]

Liam: Oh no!

Man in Pterodactyl Costume: EEeeeeeeEEEeeeEeeeek!

Liam: Oh NO! I'm not the father, am I?

Trina: Focus, Liam! What do we do? It's coming right at us!

Liam: I... I, uh... [calls upstairs] Daisy! There's a pterodactyl in the living room!

"Daisy" (Zeptron 420) [rushing down the stairs]: Andalite!

Man in Pterodactyl Costume: EEeeeeeeEEEeeeEeeeek!

"Daisy" [draws a knife]: ANDALITE! [runs at the pterodactyl]

[Zeptron 420 dive-tackles the pterodactyl; they fall off-set and out the As' front door. There are sounds of a scuffle, human and pterodactyl screeches, and then the sound of a human scream rising up into the sky as it gets further away.]

Liam [peering out the window]: Fiddlesticks! I didn't mean for it to carry her away! Oh well, one less controller to worry about.

Trina: My hero! [kisses him]

-- one week later--

Rachel's thought that she'd be willing to kill Saddler because "no one should have to be so... helpless" (p. 128). Yeeeeeesh. Like, I've mentioned before that Saddler foreshadows Tom — Rachel's cousin who's ~2 years older, "stupid enough" to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but still clearly not deserving that, not likely to get a happy ending no matter what his family tells each other, and Rachel's willing to kill him if that's the only thing left she can do to prevent him being "so helpless." But also: Saddler foreshadowing David? Almost worse. Because it's a whole other type of "helpless." Because Rachel doesn't kill him, and we don't know if that's better or not. Because yeah, maybe Saddler shouldn't have cut into traffic on a bike with no helmet on, but that doesn't stop his fate from being wildly unfair.

Jake asks Rachel if she has ideas for how to handle Saddler — and Rachel takes that to mean he's asking her how far she's willing to go to stop him. But we know, because we've been in Jake's head, that he's really just hoping someone will come up with a plan he can implement, because that's what he's always doing. Rachel is so so hard on herself in this book, but her perception that Jake sees her as a weapon is clearly off-base from the reality that he "worries about [her] more than anyone but Tobias" because he's scared the war is hurting her almost as badly as it is Tobias (p. 106). Not because he thinks she's a "violent nut" like Rachel is afraid she's becoming.

Also, that scene in the hallway is so heartbreaking because Jake and Rachel realize that the violence being against a fellow kid — a fellow Animorph — really does mean it's different this time. And they're so clear-eyed about the fact that they can see a future for Cassie after the war, a future for Marco, hopefully a future for Ax. But for themselves, and Tobias? They already know how this war is going to end, and that the possibility of any kind of normal life is off the table. And they accept that fact, and they hug, and they vow to keep right on protecting their team. No matter what it takes. No matter how little of either of them is left, when this all is done.

Jake and Rachel have always been a source of comfort for me. I've always been thrown into leadership positions and the one to do the hard things so the people I love can live with themselves. So this book, one of the few that has those two front and center, has always stuck with me.

Jake, hating himself and secretly resenting his team for putting him in this spot. Forever willing to do it because responsibility and duty will always overwrite what he wants to do. And eternally loving each and every one of them, even when each and every one of them hates him at one point or another. Who seperates himself from everything because someone has to. Who knows without them he is absolutely nothing. And who regrets every choice he ever made because he wasn't perfect.

Please stop buying Harry Potter, a free zine. Printed January 2026. Feel free to copy and distribute in book stores, libraries, neighborhood little libraries, and at conventions and conferences. No credit required. See this guide for how to cut and fold this single-page, one-sided zine.

Transcript of the zine:

Page 1: Please stop buying Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a worldwide phenomenon. Unfortunately, J.K. Rowling is using the popularity of the series to attack transgender people’s human rights.

Page 2: Recently, there has been a moral panic about trans people. A lot of it is recycled from anti-gay rights campaigns in the past.

Image descriptions: The first image features a man holding a protest sign that reads, "NO Men in Women's Bathrooms." The second image shows a Daily Mail article headline that reads, "Children 'Put At Risk' By Gender Ideology In Schools." The third image shows a newspaper article about Anita Bryant that reads, "Popular singer became known for opposition to gay rights." The picture of Anita Bryant shows a protest sign that reads, "Sign petition here to repeal Metro's 'gay' blunder! Save our children from homosexuals!"

Page 3: To be clear: Trans people have existed throughout human history and across cultures. Suggested reading for trans history: Transgender History (Stryker), Trans History (Combs & Eakett), Before Gender (Erlick).

Page 4–5: J.K. Rowling is not just "being mean" on Twitter.

Yes, she bullies trans people and cis women she thinks are trans. She also funds hate groups and spreads dangerous misinformation to her millions of followers. In 2024, she donated 70,000 British pounds to an anti-trans organization’s effort to petition the U.K. Supreme Court to take away trans rights. They won.

Image descriptions: Five newspaper headlines. Headline one reads, "JK Rowling accused of 'Holocaust Denial' over posts about transgender persecution in Nazi Germany." Headline two reads, "JK Rowling and Elon Musk named in Imane Khelif's lawsuit over Olympics gender row. Rowling referred to the boxer as a ‘male’ and accused her of ‘enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.’" Headline three reads, "JK Rowling donates £70k for legal challenge on defining a woman." Headline four reads, "How JK Rowling funded a legal battle that curtailed trans rights in the UK." Headline five reads, "Harry Potter and the Supreme Court Ruling - are the new cast tainted by association?"

A screenshot of a Twitter post by JK Rowling dated April 16, 2025 shows Rowling sitting on her yacht while smoking a cigar. She wrote, "I love it when a plan comes together. #Supreme Court #Women's Rights."

Page 6: J.K. Rowling has said that any support for Harry Potter tells her that she is right and that people support her anti-trans actions. She is using her immense wealth, fame, and social power to violate human rights. Any attention or money that the Harry Potter franchise gets goes directly to harming trans people.

Page 7: "But what if my child asks for Harry Potter?" We often underestimate children's intelligence. Tell them what I’m telling you: Harry Potter’s creator is using her fame and money to attack a vulnerable group of people. As long as she is doing this, we cannot support her by giving her money and attention.

Page 8: No one is perfect. But consider giving these authors and their works a try instead:

Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston

Animorphs by K.A. Applegate

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

Percy Jackson and The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Oh man, how could I ever begin to answer? This is the best part of the series, and in some ways it's in every book! But I'll do my best.

David Trilogy:

In #22, Rachel characterizes Jake asking Ax to "get" her as Jake knowing what a violent monster she is, and using that monstrousness against a kid their own age. She obsesses over the idea that she's a terrible person who is barely worthy of being on this team, and the idea that Jake is basically puppeting her into atrocities.

But in #21, Jake asks Ax to get Rachel because he's scared. And because he wants the biggest baddest person he knows to protect him, if he's about to go into a battle he doesn't think he can win. Jake sees Rachel as his protector — in #11 he says that he never gets really scared until he sees Rachel get scared, and in #26 he trusts her to draw lines he can't. (Between this dynamic and how much Rachel dismisses Jake as a leader at first, I do headcanon Rachel being a few months older than him.)

One of my favorite-ever uses of rotating narration in the series involves that moment when the veleek corners Cassie and Rachel midway through Jake and Marco's attempted game of keep-away, while Ax is forced to watch the whole thing on livestream. Specifically, the gap between Cassie and Marco.

What actually happens: the veleek is hovering over three Animorphs, hesitating. Cassie and Marco are both mid-morph; Rachel is fully elephant. Marco continues morphing, Cassie stops morphing, so the veleek goes for the "movement" and takes Marco.

The way Cassie tells it, she makes this unforgivable decision out of cowardice, deliberately choosing to sacrifice a friend to the tornado beast because she's too much of a self-centered wimp to make the hard call. Her narration says that she might have even had better odds of survival than Marco, since she's the better morpher and she was mostly in a very small morph (squirrel) sitting on the neck of a morph (elephant) they knew the veleek couldn't lift. And Marco apparently dies as a result.

It is, literally, her worst nightmare come true. In #4 and again in #9, Cassie expresses a visceral horror at being asked to choose who lives and who dies, and Marco even taunts her for it in #4 because he sees her as naive. That moment goes on to haunt Cassie, in some ways, for the rest of the series. The following day she explains to Jake that she has to be the one to nearly get killed baiting the veleek, because she can't live with herself if she doesn't. In #19 she cites it as a reason she can't be an Animorph anymore. When she dumps Jake in #53, she cites his willingness to trade lives without guilt as the reason.

Obviously Jake has imposter syndrome throughout the series, but the last two books are some of the most interesting examples of the gap between his perspective and everyone else's. Jake characterizes his own lack of caring as he flushes the Pool ship as a sign of his moral bankruptcy, and he tells Cassie outright in #54 that he's less bothered by his own decision to kill 17,000 noncombatants than he is by his own lack of caring in that moment. Jake takes this emotional numbing as proof that he has lost all ability to care about other people, and become only a war machine.

For a lighter example, I love all the comedy around Ax confidently assuring the reader in his own books that he can flawlessly pass as human... interspersed with all the others going "look, if you just follow Ax around every millisecond he spends in human morph, and you have a friend on standby to create a diversion, then the odds of someone calling a 5150 drop way down." Part of what makes all those sequences so funny is Ax's condescending attitude toward the human species — he is so certain that his superior intelligence is the source of all misunderstandings, and meanwhile the other kids are like "you couldn't watch someone else discard a coffee cup first, then decide whether to throw it across the room when you're done?"

Loads of aspects of #8 follow the same pattern. Ax is certain that the other Animorphs recognize his superior intellect and treat him as an authority, and that he has a duty to serve that role faithfully. Meanwhile Tobias and Jake and Cassie are all like "that poor kid? Not only is he exactly as lost as the rest of us, he's also stranded on an alien planet without his mom and dad just after losing his brother." When Ax finally decides to break the rules and let the others in, he's expecting a bunch of questions about how to use andalite weapons technology to win the war, and what he actually gets is "how do you eat?" In #8 Ax thinks of himself as an ambassador between species — and the humans all think of him as their weird friend who they want to help feel less out-of-place while he's stuck here.

Last big one that comes to mind for me is the gap in how Tobias sees Jake's family, vs. how Jake sees Jake's family. From Tobias's point of view, Jake's living in a 1950s sitcom: he has two parents, one sibling, one dog, and they all get along! They live in a McMansion, off two white-collar salaries — one a doctor's salary! — and they go on vacations together every year. They eat fresh salmon, and spinach, and homemade tiramisu (#16), as they sit around their kitchen table every night and talk about their feelings.

Which is all literally true. But the other thing that's literally true: Jake is the only Animorph with no safe place to retreat to in between battles, because he's the only one cohabiting with a known controller. Part of the reason Tobias can be under the impression that Jake's home life is picture-perfect is that the Animorphs spend the least time at Jake's house: most meetings are at Cassie's, Tobias and Ax's scoop is their go-to backup location, and occasionally they spill into Marco's or Rachel's bedrooms. Because Jake's home is fundamentally unsafe in a way none of the others' are. When Rachel has a nightmare, she gets Jordan's incompetent but well-meaning comfort (#2); when Marco or Cassie does, their dads come to offer hugs (#10, #19); Tobias and Ax are alone, but at least it's private (#33). Jake describes jamming his face into his pillow so he can cry himself to sleep as silently as possible in #1, #6, #26; he also has raging insomnia by #26 that is still an issue as of #47.

And Jake's family being so enmeshed makes the controller thing so much worse, because he can't get away from it. In #31 Tom's yeerk almost has to resort to murdering their dad to get out of attending a family event to support their mom. In #21 the ongoing emergency forces Tom and Jake to spend more time around each other. In #37 Jake can't get out of traveling with his family for over a week (I assume for the High Holy Days?) because Tom's yeerk has refused outright and so Jake is completely unable to refuse as well. Meanwhile, Tobias's perspective on all this is semi-amused bafflement that "Tom" (or Jake) can't just go "screw this!" and walk out of the house, expecting their parents to take that as a valid answer.

In many ways, both Jake and Tobias assume that Jake has no problems and Tobias has all the problems. The other four Animorphs are way more balanced in their perspective. Marco especially feels for Jake because he knows how hard it is having yeerks corrupt your family. Ax understands Jake's complicated grief over losing Tom (years before Tom actually dies), and Ax understands that Tobias is the way he is partially by choice. Cassie and Rachel both see how Jake is being worn down to nothing by sheer exhaustion, and are also both copacetic about how eating roadkill isn't the worst lifestyle choice.