#loriache

Jesus christ but I guess also not surprising for a society that decides to send people they've deemed criminal into deathtraps

unit-1312 even elf criminals subscribe to the honor system

Here it is, a whole bunch of questionably-organized thoughts off the top of my head (because if I wrote it out properly it’d be an entire dissertation): 

Animorphs as Graphic Novels

Superhero team-up plot

Need for secrecy and “dual identities”, including through hiding abilities from loved ones and civilians

Kids’ powers given by science which no other human possesses — they are extraordinary, “unique to the universe” (MM3)

Small team of fighters with variations on similar powers (strength, speed, stealth, etc. divided among morphs)

Inability to trust authority, forcing them to take fight into own (amateur) hands

Secret Invasion: the aliens are in disguise, characters take on others’ appearances and identities

Use of exposition conceits and contrivances

Notably eschews Magic Tree House convention of putting all exposition into prologue

Also does not follow Babysitters’ Club convention of info-dump (thank Jeebus)

Follows in convention of using various devices (memory recordings, personal introductions, dialogue) to introduce the reader to the plot

When these occur, deliberately written w/ character voices

Stylistic descriptions

Heavy use of onomatopoeia

Short sentences, short paragraphs, short words

Thought-speak

Written with hypertext symbols/pointed brackets

In comics, used to denote a translation from a foreign language (possibly b/c guillemets popular in French and Italian texts?)

In Animorphs, used to denote not-quite-real and non-audible nature of this type of speech

Simultaneous condemnation and celebration of need for lawbreaking and violence

Explorations of impermanent death

Rachel and Tobias in MM2; Jake in MM3 and #11; all of them in MM4; David (maybe) in #48, David definitely in #22; Cassie, Tobias, Rachel, maybe Ax in #41

Impact of death is NOT on dead character, but on surviving teammates left behind (Alaniz)

Explorations of impermanent disability

Loren in #49; James, Erica, etc. in #50; Tobias in #13 and MM2

THIS IS PROBLEMATIC AS FUCK and doesn’t age well, but it is still a convention of the genre

Vivid, lurid, unreal cover scenes, including stylized depictions of battles

Discomfort with public personas, including identity fragmentation

Jake being disturbed/horrified by own postwar lionizing (military awards, Mount Rushmore, etc.)

Cassie noting how much Rachel’s funeral would have discomfited Rachel herself, and the lack of accuracy in statements made about her postmortem

All Animorphs, especially Jake and Tobias, responding to praise with shame

Writing structure

Short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters, short books

Heavy use of imagery, with emphasis on worldbuilding through unreal imagery

Dialogue does not let up throughout story — not during dreams, not during battles, not during self-reflection

During rare moments when no one is talking, everyone is doing something, w/ very little room for long reflection

Emphasis on concrete, physical sensations and images over wishy-washy abstraction

Catchphrases!!!!

“Let’s do it”

“This is insane”

Arguably: “Good grief”; “Don’t call me prince”/”Yes, Prince Jake”

Superman as someone with “a body that retains no marks, on which history cannot be inscribed” (Bukatman)

Heroes getting “spear deaths” while villains and the pathetic get “straw deaths” (X)

Rachel’s death as heroic sacrifice

Jara Hamee, James et al, Rachel, Ax (?), Elfangor, Jake et al (?): dying in battle while bravely facing down hopeless odds

Visser One: stepped on almost accidentally after being stripped down to nothing by execution process

Visser Three: denied death in battle; must die after lifetime spent in prison

David: made helpless and pitiful before begging for death rather than continuing to exist in this state

Tom: “‘This pitiful, broken thing?’ He [the yeerk] gestured to his own body.” just before death (#53, emphasis mine)

Saddler: vilified and (guiltily) victim-blamed before dying in bed

Even “mock deaths” in Megamorphs books follow this pattern

Animorphs as SUBVERSIVE Graphic Novels

Ultrarealistic (humorous) embodiment of experience of fighting battles in multicolored spandex

Condemnation of violence

Emphasis on consequences beyond the physical

Physical violence is gross, disturbing, horrifyingly realistic (contrast: comics are often bloodless, or have unrealistically pretty violence) (Pizarro & Baumeister)

Unhappy endings

Superhero stories: “happy ending” = wife, kids, picket fence, heteronormativity

Animorphs: happy ending would be the chance to rest/recover and stop having to make moral decisions (#31); happy ending moves out of reach over course of story

Almost outsized emphasis on impact of secrecy, lies, violence, and injury on protagonists

Superhero comics (and later superhero movies): strangely bloodless stabbings, often played for humor or pathos but no gore

Animorphs: Marco’s entire jaw being ripped off as his tongue lolls loose from the hole in his face (#49), Jake tripping over his own entrails where they trail on the floor following disembowelment (MM4), Rachel being blinded by amount of blood gushing from a head wound (#41), etc.

Tobias

Descended from an ancient line of alien warriors, abandoned unwillingly by his parents at birth with unworthy guardians, grows up with no advantages, goes on to become a messiah-figure to the hork-bajir… and after all that, he’s just some guy on the team

It's not the story of Tobias and the Superfriends (or of Jake and the Superfriends) b/c he’s a part of the team

Characters like Cassie, who has ordinary (and therefore unconventional for superhero) backstory, actually get just as much development and even more narrative time than Tobias does

Showing impact: he has chronically, almost pathologically low self-esteem as a result of how he was raised, he experiences a lot of anger with both his parents for abandoning him, he gets continuously bullied in school for markers of poverty (wrong clothes, overweight, need to change school districts)

Jake

Another common superhero narrative: ordinary kid with group of friends accidentally stumbles into alien secret, ends up in charge of a group of superbeings almost overnight, all the while maintaining a secret identity as an ordinary (mediocre) boy non-hero to his normative suburban parents, aware all the while of villainous figure lurking in their midst…

But he remains, at the end of the day, not that special: the only “secret ability” he has to conceal is the ability to morph, not super-smarts or super-strength or any quality that makes him a brilliant rather than a merely decent leader

Again, impact: his family gets torn apart by weight of his and Tom’s yeerk’s secrets, something Aunt May (for instance) is much less likely to have to contend with

Rachel’s death as planned sacrifice play: Jake makes no attempt to die in her place

Contrast graphic novel trope (Superman and Jason Todd, Captain America and Bucky, Black Widow and Hawkeye, Hulk and Iron Man) of superheroes going to almost-ridiculous lengths to die in each other’s place, and superheroes almost never dying outside of concerted effort to prevent/undo friends’ deaths

Hi there!  Let me go ahead and put out the call to others on this, actually - I was mostly referring to browsing for graphics/gifsets/fanart etc, only because I am a bit weird and don’t typically read canon-era fic while I’m currently writing for a fandom…I get too worried about having my own ideas dry up or be swayed by other people’s.  I’ve done a bit of basic tag browsing on AO3 to see what the fandom distribution looks like (as if I couldn’t guess, heh), but as far as actual reading goes, I work better when I’m in my own little world.  X)  

(In this fandom’s case, though, I suppose I should consider looking at Modern AU’s??  Just because they feel so completely separate from the universe I’m working in; I don’t think it would bother me.)

Yes!!! With the infix “or” which in that series means “the younger”! Because the woman weaving the story of history on her loom is the Best mythological archetype; fight me, and I am a writer myself.

what makes the sky blue was an event held for the third granblue anniversary and instantly became a smash hit with the players because it featured a much heavier story than ever before and basically marked the shift of granblue to being A Game With Lore. the villain of that event was sandalphon, an angel created to be lucifer (the head angel)’s backup in case something happened to him but deemed useless because of lucifer’s perfection. distraught with the knowledge that he’s nothing but a useless spare he instigated a rebellion and got locked up in super hell jail, but two thousand years later the protagonists’ chance meeting caused a shift in the world that allowed him to wiggle his way out. once escaped he attacked the angels that presided over the four elements and stole their powers in order to make the floating islands of the world crash to the bottom of the sky, all in hopes of forcing lucifer to acknowledge his existence by becoming a threat too big to ignore. he was bitter and vicious and really desperate and essentially set a new standard for granblue villains at the time

the fanbase fucking loved him. so much in fact that they demanded he become playable, and cygames was kind of left with no idea what to do because they didn’t intend for him to be anything but a villain. the fourth anniversary they released a part two of the what makes the sky blue saga and it was… not great. it was notably shorter than part 1 and basically didn’t resolve anything. lucifer (also a wildly popular character) was killed off, sandalphon’s past crimes were mostly glossed over with a bigger bad you had to team up against and his character felt like it got reduced to “likes coffee and is sad about lucifer”, and the new characters that got introduced were all 1.5 note at best. it’s the middle part so I feel it’ll hold up better if you play the whole set back to back because it is the fate of the middle installment to set up the later events without being able to resolve much but at the time, to be left at this middle point for a whole year was deeply unsatisfying. people who liked sandalphon were given a defanged flanderised version and people who didn’t like him weren’t given any reason to change that opinion. on top of that, all the other events that year had been rather lackluster too or even just blatant meaningless filler fanservice, so that didn’t leave us with very high hopes for the grand finale on the fifth anniversary

FORTUNATELY!! the finale FUCKS!!!! i think its the longest event story in the game now. belial went from having only horny and evil as his personalty traits to being the most complex villain in the game, we got to bully sandalphon for throwing us off a fucking cliff in part 1 and they PARALLELED that multiple times, they went over how sandal’s ‘redemption’ in part 2 was only a temporary fix and finally got him to decide his own wishes rather than be dragged along by his (lack of) purpose, every damn character mirrored each other in some way and they all draw from the overlying theme of personality vs purpose so everything actually feels like it fits together, they put the story arc to a satisfying close while leaving enough loose ends to create more content with in the future, one of the biggest mysteries in the game got resolved, they confirmed TWO!!! m/m couples, we got not one but TWO fucking BANGERS as raid themes. cygames said this year they’re breaking away from previous traditions so this event was essentially going to set the standard for all granblue writing the coming year and after the mediocrity of the year before we were all pretty nervous about it but they fucking delivered. the future is looking as bright as sandalphons smile. he worked for that happiness