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"Just tell them we're Animorphs." "Tell them we're what?" "Idiot teenagers with a death wish."

THE ANIMORPHS30 ZINE IS HERE!!!

(And thanks to @gros-chat-fait for this beautiful cover art!!)

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series, creators of the fanbase have come together to bring you a zine of nearly 200+ pages (at which point I'm not even sure we can call it a zine anymore! The correct term at this point would be anthology!), filled with art and writing.

You can download it as a PDF here, or if you just want to view it without downloading, it's available on Canva here.

Currently I'm still working on options for getting a printed release, but self-printing is still an option! Stay tuned—there should be a self-print mirror available shortly (I'll just need to change some links to QR codes, among other things).

adding to the pile of little colorful dragons i've been drawing lately

(I gather it was for a show called Off Campus; raise your hand if you've heard of it)

anyway, poll time:

They explored the effects of PTSD that he would suffer and realistically dealt with how it would affect him mentally to be not allowed to make choices, to be mentally and psychologically abused to that extent and how he would struggle to adjust once he was safe. They even dug into the uglier realities of torture as it exists in real life, showing Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence

Also, lots of fanfics portrayed Bucky as being physically disabled after his time as the Winter Soldier. Like, there were multiple fics I read where he has a feeding tube that described that with realism, and several more where he has various GI tract difficulties after being tube-fed throughout his stint as a living weapon. Multiple fics that describe him having seizures, at least two fics where he is addicted to heroin and suffers withdrawals from that, also fics where the arm is removed and he has to adjust to life as an amputee

And then, when you return to canon, of course they're not interested in the long-term mental and physical effects of The Horrors at all, except for a little bit of Hollywood PTSD.

It's a lot, for books aimed at eleven year olds who want to read about kids turning into fun animals.

On the podcast, the two (American) hosts happened to get onto the topic of the post-9/11 Iraq War and their reactions to it. They were both children at the time and as such could not be expected to have particularly nuanced views of US military policy. The person who hadn't read Animorphs was unsurprised by the declaration of war; that's what you did. Someone attacks America, America goes to war. That's how a country protects itself, through military revenge. The Animorphs fan, about the same age, had been devastated and against the war from the start. War was a Big Deal and, while sometimes unavoidable, should be a last resort; a lot of people were going to die, and a lot more were going to get hurt, and no matter how the war shook out it was still going to be horrible. They attributed this perspective, of course, to the series that had taught them about the horrors endemic to war in an engaging way at such a young age -- to Animorphs.