#overzelos

You are my best rec for fics that can include both sex and well-done aspec characters. I would be all over this if I knew the first thing about this fandom. xD

oh man, well, it’s not hard to get into if you’re a fan of VIDEO GAMES? they’re usually stupidly cheap on steam if you’re a pc player/used at gamestop if you’re a console player. if you prefer to watch games, though, there’s always playthroughs on youtube, with or without commentary as you like

You've captured another unsuspecting victim? XD

Honestly? There’s no real knife when it comes to Nora Robinette. I honestly think she’s good for Peter, and I believe they eventually find each other again. Peter is a hot mess engineer who not only accepts the existence of aliens and cyborgs without much blinking at all, he starts BONDING with one. You know he and Ax are chill. Nora is a math teacher with a poodle named Euclid. Match made in fucking heaven. If anyone out there is a You’re The Worst fan, Peter is Paul, Nora is Amy, and Eva is Lindsay. I have a very bleak view on nearly all of the canon relationships in Animorphs, but I LOVE Peter and Nora. I haven’t really worked out all the details between what happens with Peter, Eva, and Nora after the war. I’m still kind of piecing it out, and the detailed headcanons will probably appear in The Rachel at some point. But I think Peter and Eva try, really TRY, for a long time, because their story is all sweeping violins and layered harmonies. Everyone assumes they’re this beautiful romance that comes out of the war, a bright spot and a piece of hope that people need, and they TRY.But at the end of the day, both of them are too different. Peter has grown in confidence between raising Marco alone and the support of Nora. He doesn’t quite melt into Eva in the way he used to, and he resents that she resents that. Eva’s feelings for Peter completely died because of how positively Peter reacted to Edriss’s manipulations of him. She doesn’t want to admit it, she doesn’t want to admit Edriss ruined her marriage. She wants it back, she wants all of it back, she wants to undo everything Edriss touched. But she can’t. She can only deal with what’s in front of them.

Okay strap-in because you asked me a Star Wars question so…rambling ahoy!

I’m probably (okay definitely) biased, because I’ve spent several decades reading about Han Solo and his piloting and my exposure to Poe’s consists of all of one movie plus a few comics – but I would say Han, personally, just because he flies so much outside the box. And I don’t just mean he’s an idiosyncratic pilot who comes up with unorthodox techniques; I mean he literally flies ships in ways they are not meant to be flown. Regularly.

There’s a quote that comes to mind (and I may be paraphrasing slightly because I’m pulling it from memory, but): “That has to be Solo. No one else thinks a stock-freighter is a snubfighter.” And that’s why I’m putting him over Poe.

Because as good as Poe is as a pilot, Han regularly takes ships miles beyond their specs – and does it well. He’s not just good, he’s insane. Stock light freighters are not snubfighters; they don’t have the maneuverability or the weapons for close-combat engagements. Even when they’re tricked-out with extra armaments, it’s so they can defend themselves from pirates and flee – not so they can cruise into snubfighter engagements and shoot TIEs out of the sky. But Han does this so regularly that people start to expect it. Like “oh that’s the Millennium Falcon, they’ll come help us out in this fight!” or even “oh that’s the Millennium Falcon, we’ll take that with us when we go up against the Second Death Star in a massive space battle!” That’s not the type of ship that should be going into combat…but Han does it so often that people just nod and accept it as an okay thing to do. By the way it is not an okay thing that people should do.

(And yeah, he caught Vader by surprise…but there still aren’t a lot of people who can say they’ve shot down Darth Vader. Heck, there aren’t a lot of people who can say they’ve caught Vader by surprise, but Han and Chewie did it!)

As for direct battles to refer to, I’m not going to be much help because all of the battles that I know about exist in a canon where Poe doesn’t exist. Because they’re from the old Legends EU, which is defunct now. (Sadness.) However, you can always bring up the shooting-down-Darth-Vader-thing as that’s from the movies so it counts…and of course, the Kessel Run thing is a big deal, much as it gets played for jokes: he managed to fly so close to the event horizon of a bunch of black holes that he actually shaved distance off his flight path (without getting consumed by said black holes) which is…pretty impressive. And crazy. (And also perhaps no longer canon ummm maybe check on that.) But hey, you can definitely bring up the 3720-to-one odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field, because not a lot of people could survive flying that and that was in the movies as well, so it’s definitely canon!

(He did once outfly Boba Fett in the Dark Empire comic too…which again my bias is showing, but that’s pretty damn impressive in my book!)

So I would focus the conversation on the madness that is Han Solo’s piloting, for sure; because while flying a snubfighter well is impressive, flying a ship in ways that the ship wasn’t even designed to do is just nuts, especially when you do it over and over again instead of just when under duress and don’t have a choice. Because it’s one thing to shoot down TIEs when they’re swarming at you, and something else altogether to go chase those TIEs down willingly when you’re in a ship that has no business going up against fighters like that.

Especially because his ship is usually falling apart at the time, too. People tend to be pretty impressed that he can even manage to keep the Falcon in the air, honestly…let alone fly it well enough to shoot down crack Imperial snubfighters.

The fact that Han (again, in Legends chronology) also figures out how to fly and manage capital ships is a big mark in his favor too, because they operate very differently from snubs (or light freighters pretending to be snubs lol) and as far as I know, Poe has only ever done snubfighters. As far as I know, mind you!

Vaguely Relevant Story Time: at one point (in defunct Legends chronology) a Rebel base was evacuating too slowly and a star destroyer was going to pound them, so a few X-Wing and A-Wing pilots fake-up a weird shield/energy signature and broadcast some staticky communications to make it sound like they’re an escort of fighters trying to sneak a breaking-down Millennium Falcon with Princess Leia onboard out of the area before the Imps can detect them, and the Imperial captain’s reaction is basically “this makes no sense – but that sounds legit because nothing Solo does makes sense, quick break off the attack on the base and go after that ship!” At one point he asks his sensor-techs if the specs they’re reading match the Falcon’s sensor profile and the response is basically “umm…we have at least four different sensor profiles on record for this ship over the last three years alone, sooo…no?”

At another point, in order to infuriating an egotistical post-Imperial Warlord, some of those same pilots – with Han’s blessing and Chewie’s help – mock-up a different YT-1300 freighter to look like the Falcon and fly it around to annoy this dude (they call it the Millennium Falsehood) and just the nonsense that goes on with this escapade is…pretty damn epic. And at one point involves a protocol droid wearing a Han Solo-facemask and impersonating his voice. This has actually very little relevance to Han’s piloting abilities…but is one of my favorite tricks ever pulled by any of the Rebel pilots, so I’m sharing it anyway because it’s a good story and does at least support the idea that people think of Han as a good and utterly unpredictable pilot, because the Imps at no point suspected that it wasn’t actually Han flying around on these ridiculous missions despite the fact that he was supposed to be managing an entire fnarling taskforce at the time and had no business taking his ship out on risky solo (ha) jaunts like these wtf dude.

Also Han (in Legends; I have no idea if this part of his backstory remains canon now) attended the Imperial Academy, which means he once flew TIE fighters when he was younger, and anyone who can survive flying those tincans…well! Let’s just say that attrition among TIE pilots is hella high and leave it at that. (They have no shields; that’s why they’re faster than X-Wings. No hyperdrives or ejection life support either, so not only will you go up in a ball of flaming gas if you get shot, you can’t eject and you can’t escape. Talk about a deathtrap…)

At any rate, the fact that people like Wedge Antilles (arguably the greatest snubfighter pilot in the Rebellion, at least in my opinion!) respected Han’s piloting to the degree that he did means that his reputation was not unearned.

tl;dr in technical terms, Poe is probably the “better” pilot. In terms of what the fuck just happened was that even a ship??? however Han Solo wins hands-down because while Poe might be able to outfly him in a straightforward one-on-one simulator match…Han Solo doesn’t fly straightforward ever. He’s a maverick pilot who makes his ships do things that they should not be able to do. So no matter how good of a stick-jockey Poe is (and I do believe he’s a good one), Han ranks as a better pilot in my book due to his audacity and unorthodox tactics because he flies ships in ways that other people cannot. In ways that, in fact, those ships cannot. But in Han’s hands, they do. Somehow.

…erm so I hope that lengthy ramble helped? I will be glad to answer follow-ups or tangents if you have more questions! And I apologize for the verbosity lol.

I THINK ABOUT POST WAR BERENSONS MORE THAN MOST PEOPLE.—Naomi Berenson had a begrudging affection for the Hork-Bajir, but Toby she would never be truly at ease with Toby. She was too dangerous. It was one thing to be eternally armed with sharp blades, but ultimately be too stupid to really know what to do with them. It was another to be a seven foot alien and also understand California zoning laws You couldn’t really tell the Hork-Bajir apart, not without really knowing them and picking out some inane detail, but you always knew which one was Toby. She walked with a heaviness and a purpose that the others just didn’t have.Naomi knew it was Toby walking toward her, and she tensed.Toby handed her four envelopes, all pink, all smelling of Rachel’s favorite perfume. Naomi recognized the scent. It was what she used to wear, before Rachel made it her signature.Naomi was too empty inside to cry. The loss of a child was a pain far beyond anything with which the body could react.“She gave this to me,” said Toby gently, “To give to you if she died.”Naomi took the envelops, her heart fluttering sickly against her numb emotions. “Thank you,” she said.Toby nodded, then left.There were four letters. Mom, dad, Jordan, Sara.Naomi put them in her purse, then into a suitcase, then into a dresser drawer in her new house. It took her ten months to open them. She read hers in a bathtub, soaked both in sweet smelling oils and Belvedere, and she cried in a screaming way while feeling entirely distant. It was a step toward healing, which was a scarred thing for a mother, but a possible thing.Rachel’s letter said many things. Big things, small things. Least of all, it said to not to hold it against Jake.She hadn’t spoken to her nephew since that day. There had been no time. Jake had ceased to be the too serious child her in-laws were in the process of spoiling, and had become a symbol and a legend far out her reach. It was all for the best. If she had seen Jake the day she finally understood what had happened above Earth that day, she would currently be in jail.When she did finally contact him, she thanked him, because without his guidance of her sadistic daughter, worse consequences than the loss of her life would have befell them all. Then, she requested that they never, ever speak again. Jake understood entirely.

—

Naomi sends Rachel’s letter to Dan in the mail. He receives it, reads it, and cries for the first time since he was a boy. The sensation was disturbing. He was disturbed to find he felt sick afterwards, almost hungover. There’s a reason he left tears up to the women.

Rachel’s letter specifically told him to never forget about Jordan and Sara. It was the last request she ever made of him, his poor daughter who had gone through so much while he slept with P.A.’s in Connecticut. That night, he promised himself and her memory that he would never forget about his other two daughters, no matter how busy his life got. Even if he was never quite sure what to do with Jordan and Sara. Even if the longer he spent away from his daughters, the less connected he felt to them.

He never kept his promise.

—

Jake had to wait a while to talk to George and Ellen.

Life was a dizzy affair after the war. There was this event and that medal, this conversation and that handshake. The Animorphs were much too busy learning how to find the right camera and how to attach a lav mic to tie up loose ends. There came a time, finally, after the three sent Ax back to his homeworld (an event that was shown on all networks simultaneously) that they finally had time to talk.

Marco pulled Jake from his hotel room. They went into Cassie’s. Cassie sat on her bed, Jake at the desk, and Marco remained standing. This elevated him, made him larger. In these matters, he was the new general.

He looked at the two of them. “David,” he said.

David’s parents were a liability. They Animorphs had a certain image to uphold, an image that was very important. Jake had to kiss babies, Cassie had to wear skirts, and Marco had to always smile. This was their life now. They couldn’t have a story leak about about the Andalite bandits clearly abducting, then losing, a child. Too many Yeerks knew it had happened, least of all the ones in David’s family.

It was decided, by Cassie, that they would tell David’s parents that he had been a hero. That he had tried to fight, and had failed. That he died in battle, wrapped in the body of a golden lion.

It was decided, by Marco, that he was the one who would track down the family and speak to them. Marco was the only one who could swallow it all down, and truly stomach the lie.

Marco told them it went well. He said the story he made up held weight. Surpisingly-unsurprisingly, David’s parents wrote a book about him. It was called The Seventh Animorph. People spoke of his heroics more than they did of Tobias. 

After the book’s release, Jake drove to his aunt and uncle’s. They hadn’t been in much contact. Ellen and George had isolated themselves and their family over the years. It wasn’t a sudden shut down, or a finality of events, but a slow freeze that crept through the family like lips turning blue. There was Ellen and George, with wet faces and red eyes, mourning their son and their sanity. Then, there was less of them. Then, there was nothing.

They let Jake in with solemn faces. They offered him dry scones and weak tea. Jake waved it all away. He was in no position to accept even the humblest of offerings.

He explained what truly happened with David, leaving out David’s unsavory ending. He told them that it was David’s morphing Saddler that created the miracle, and that David’s murder of the half-dead shell-boy solved the mystery of the elevator.

Ellen stood up, pushed her shoulders back, and spat on him.

Jake didn’t know what to do. He had rehearsed every angle of this conversation, but had never anticipated that particular reaction. It was animal, uncouth and undignified, and on some level, Jake knew he deserved it.

“I know it’s hard to understand,” Jake said calmly, using his firmest tone, “But it is the truth.”

That’s when the screaming began. Jake said nothing. This outcome, he had expected. He bore it as best he could and, an hour later, when it hadn’t subsided, he quietly excused himself, and left.

He never saw Ellen and George again, and he never would.

—-

There should be a word for the friends of a sibling, Jordan thought. It’s not that they’re important to you, not really, but they’re consistent and comforting. Cassie had slept over at Rachel’s house so many times that she had her own toothbrush in the bathroom. Every summer, Naomi organized a late-July visit to The Gardens, and while Jordan and Sara had a rotating cast of friends, Rachel always brought Cassie. Cassie was a sort of family member, in her own little way. Berenson-adjunct.

Jordan never knew Cassie that well, but she knew enough to see the changes in her. She wore make-up, now, and pantyhose. She had to, to get people to listen. Jordan was eighteen, and she had already learned that lesson.

Cassie was on the TV, rambling about this, that, or the other. Yellowstone, Hork-Bajir, Brazil, who cared. Jordan didn’t. She turned off the TV, relishing in her ability to do so.

Jordan had been living on her own for six months. She’d moved out while her mom was at work. She lived alone in a nice, new apartment, one that was just a few blocks from the Santa Barbara Andalite tourist center. This suited Jordan. She worked at the Cinnabon. She liked Andalites a lot, and was always especially patient with them, even when they were arrogant and frustrating. She made the staff keep it a secret that she was Rachel Berenson’s sister. She missed her big sister terribly, but she’d been young and malleable when it happened, and she survived, and she didn’t want the shadow to hang over her any more.

That’s why she left her mother’s house as soon as she could. She needed to be in complete control of her life. She needed to decide what to watch, when she wanted to watch it, even if that meant Cassie was on the screen.She couldn’t have done it without Jake. He’d helped her load everything into a truck, and went shopping with her to buy the sort of things a freshly eighteen-year-old didn’t have. He paid for the apartment, actually. She never could afford to live here, not on a Cinnabon salary.

Jordan stretched out on her brand new couch, very specifically not caring that she was still wearing shoes. She turned the TV back on, just to see Cassie’s face.

—

Sara never moves out. Sara lives with her mother for so long that, eventually, her mother lives with her. Sara marries half-heartedly, and he moves into the house that Rachel’s reward money built. He’s a nice boy, attractive and simple, and he doesn’t mind the attachment Sara and her mom have for one another. Sara likes to be needed, and her mother needs to have Sara. It it up to eldest daughters to challenge their mothers, while the youngest daughters provide stability and comfort. Sara does her job well.

— 

Jean and Steve Berenson felt sick with how much had slipped past them. But who could blame them?

The Sharing was a healthy, helpful organization, they thought, and they were proud that Tom had taken such a strong interest. Jake spent entirely too much time with Marco, but little Marco clearly needed Jake’s influence. Their boy was good, and Marco was without a mother and had much too much freedom. Their boys were both so, so good.

A childless house meant they could discuss what needed to be discussed. They discussed Jean not bringing in any more money, relying on Steve to take on clients he had no time for. They discussed Steve using his long office hours as an excuse to just not come home. They discussed Steve’s shirts smelling like his secretary’s perfume, and his secretary avoiding Jean’s eyes whenever she visited. “You’re doing exactly what Naomi did to Dan,” Jean would say, tear choked and desperate, and Steve would scream, “You’re not! Fucking! Listening!”

It was hard to notice that they were fighting in a war when Jean and Steve were locked in one themselves.

It was a well known fact that a child’s death often dissolves a marriage, but Steve and Jean survived against all odds. There was no such blueprint for couples that lost one child, who was an imposter the entire time, because their other child sent their niece to kill him in a kamikaze mission. Steve and Jean had been through more than they could sort through, and the only people they had were each other.

When the war ended, Jean and Steve renewed their vows. They invited Jake, but he was not in the ceremony.

They were as relieved as they were horrified that he had left Earth in a rogue Yeerk vehicle. They never spoke of it, but all three knew that a love without like was all the family had these days. They loved Jake, really and truly, but it so hard to look at him and not see their eldest. Jake would never say it, but it was just as hard for him to see the two people who had been so close, and had noticed nothing.

This is an amazing idea and if you don't feel like writing it I will totally write it for you once I am capable of typing again.

Oh my god yes. And season one James.

Well, most of the characters in the story are very highly placed people in the various governmental / societal structures at play, so most of the scenes cover decision making discussions rather than implementation.  This is a function of leadership, but not one that takes place where the hierarchy would be immediately obvious (especially if the narrator is Link, who isn’t someone who pays a whole lot of attention to hierarchy as a rule, existing, as he does by nature and also by definition, outside of most of them).  

(Hunter has some thoughts on the other hand.)

(He’s drawn org charts trying to explain it all back home.)

Except for Nabooru over the Elite, for the most part nobody in that room has the authority to order anybody else in that room to do anything, it’s all discussion and negotiation.  After it’s done, the Elite all split up and go to boss around their respective subordinates and actually make the plans happen.

The personal guard thing definitely isn’t all they do.  It’s just the most obvious function when they’re away from home with Link.  The Son is the second most important job the Gerudo have (the first being the defence of Hyrule from hostile interlopers), so when he’s away from the Fortress, the Elite - as the best of the best - are charged with protecting him.  To be fair to the Elite, other Sons have not travelled anywhere near the extent that Link does.  Some of them didn’t really travel at all.  Even Ganondorf travelled less, and he started a whole ass war.  But Link has, like, forty-five different magical means of instantaneous travel and distance means less than nothing to him and he didn’t grow up in the Fortress and he’s used to a world that is much bigger than the desert.  So this generation of Elite finds themselves away from their main duties at the Fortress more often than past generations have.  (They’re working on this.  Compromises like allowing Neesha to count for the purposes of protecting him when he’s away, even though she’s so young and also not an Elite, is one of them.  Reassigning workloads and taking more flexible approaches to organizing themselves is another.  They’ve done things a certain way for a very long time - most of those habits and processes are getting looked at and revisited now.)

Also, because they’ve been at war for so long, a LOT of the current Elite came up from the Red, rather than the Green, and a LOT of the current activity is based around military action/responses, so there’s a lot of combat discussion (and of course because of the nature of Plot, the combat is where the narrative is focused), and less of the other stuff featured in the story (I’ve got half thoughts for another in-between story that might feature more of the latter, but I have so many projects already I can’t see myself taking that on any time soon).  But, like, right now, with the Gerudo heading out across Hyrule Field to go shut down the moblin portal before trying to take Castletown - the scenes focus on the Elite, because they’re the named, established characters whose personal storylines are part of the plot.  But their force is larger than that.  They’ve got reds and purples with them too (probably no greens - they didn’t take a big enough force to merit that level of coordination (the greens would be less happy about being left behind on THIS one except there is a LOT of clean up to do at the Fortress right now and they don’t really have the time or capacity to be properly put out over it)).  The Elite will call the shots when combat starts and the reds and purples will deploy accordingly.  (There are, perhaps, more Elite than there need to be on this trip, BUT this is a very exciting trip, and it’s very hard to stop an Elite from doing a thing if she wants to and they ALL want to, and also it can be justified because the Hylians sold out their King, so this is a little bit of an Achieving Restitution and A Little Bit of Revenge trip as well, and all things involving the Son involve the Elite.  Also, they aren’t 100% sure how complicated taking over the city will be administratively yet, so more is probably safer until they’re established and can send for whatever greens they might need).

In terms of specific non-combat roles for the currently named Elite, Indiga, for example, is in charge of the Gerudo network of diplomats/spies.  They don’t have a LOT of spies since the war ended - a lot of the women who were spies under Ganondorf were very uninterested in continuing to be so after he was gone for various reasons - but they have a handful.  Diplomats are more common, particularly bearing in mind that the Gerudo have dealings with non-Gerudo communities deeper in the desert and beyond Hyrule’s borders.  Indiga manages this network as one of her primary functions.

Aliza oversaw a lot of the work where the Gerudo laws and religion intersected, which included sitting in judgement on trials for serious accusations (but not so serious they required the Son to weigh in), hearing appeals of decisions made by the greens on lower-level accusations, and - post-Link - overseeing extensive and spirited discussions about the meaning of his existence, how to properly interpret all the many aspects of it, and what changes those might required to the existing laws (and also what laws needed revision now that Ganondorf wasn’t there to insist they work a certain way).  She was very active in the aforementioned revisions to King Defence Protocols, from the perspective of determining what would and wouldn’t fulfill their oaths to the Wind in relation to her Son.  She also oversaw the organization of the oath swearing ceremonies for girls passing their rite of passage mission and etc.