Toothcup smut and personal shit.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

Oh yeah, that was a discarded plot point from Eleutherophobia back when I was writing a Kelbrid Invasion plotline that ultimately didn't make sense and got recycled for parts. In a version where Rachel was still dead, I had this vision of them scrambling to find more morphers and Jordan sheepishly coming out of the woodwork to mention, oh by the way, she's been able to morph since the last few months of the war but Rachel swore her to secrecy.

I am curious about how Tom would handle the idea of Jordan morphing? Like I feel like…if they had given Saddler the ability to morph to save his life and he found out it would be so early on to his own recovery that he would have just accepted it? But he is so protective of Jordan and Sara, and I just can’t see him handling it well. Morphing is cool and all, and he likes doing it. But outside of the fact that his family would already be high up on the list of potential targets for a Yeerk resurgence…. how do you think he would react? Finding something like that out after Rachel comes back?

Yeah, I do think he'd be very freaked out about it, and demand that she get extensive training from Jake or someone on how to use it safely, starting ASAP. Because, like, I'm always trying to write his relationship to morphing as different from the Animorphs'. In some ways he's far more casual about it — he thinks nothing of morphing in the middle of a crowded sidewalk or interstate, he rarely struggles with control. And in some ways he's less casual — he rarely stays in morph for more than a minute or two, he doesn't morph as often, he almost never loses himself in enjoying animal minds or senses.

Plus, once I let him be an estreen, I get to write tons of partial morphs. Which Cassie rarely uses and none of the other Animorphs can even attempt. So Tom's less likely to turn all the way into a snake to win a fight when he could instead Buffy-ify his face to intimidate his way out of one:

Ellen: How did you get better so fast?

Saddler: I could swear I felt someone touching a small flat object to my hand, something that gave me these tingles? And then I heard a voice telling me I needed to concentrate on becoming a mouse? And then I was really small, and really scared, but the same voice told me to focus on becoming a human. And then I was sitting in a hospital bed, not sure how I got here.

Rachel: Sounds like a hallucination. Right, Uncle Steve?

Steve: Um, I'm a pediatrician, not a neurologist, but... it could be that...