This is your daily reminder to not be ashamed of making your life easy for yourself.
Cut your food into small pieces, make the font size 30 on your e book, use straws to drink, get a pen that’s comfortable to hold, take more naps, walk slowly, eat another cookie, buy velcro shoes, re-watch the part you couldn’t understand the first time, write things on your hands so you don’t forget it… whatever you want and/or need
Don’t let anyone tell you how you should be doing things. We don’t need to prove each other anything
we need a fictional wheelchair user who does all the unrealistic bullshit cars and motorcycles do in fiction. i wanna see a wheelchair do the akira slide. i need a high speed chase with a nitro-fuelled wheelchair where the character out-maneuvers cop cars. does anyone understand me
it literally would’ve made more sense if Leia as a jedi was the one to, in a moment of fear and weakness, raise her lightsaber against ben.
Leia is the one who never forgave Vader, who never had the same level of sympathy towards him that her brother had. Any fond word about him sends a wave of nauseousness through her. Even hearing words of kindness towards him felt like she was committing a betrayal. How could she? Her home and her parents were obliterated because of men in whom darkness resided. If she saw darkness within her own son, it would make the most sense that she would be the one to think that she might have to take responsibility, as a general, as a jedi, as a daughter of a man who slaughtered millions, to stop this darkness before it hurt anyone the way Vader did.
but in the same moment she ignited her lightsaber, she would immediately come to reckon with exactly how Luke became so horrified at the prospect of slaughtering his own blood family. Why he could never bring himself to kill Vader even for the sake of the galaxy. How could she ever even fathom to consider doing this to her own baby? But it’s too late. your son is looking up at you with your sword raised over his head and it’s too late.
Btw this is not my original idea, I’m just going bonkers in my corner about it. This concept belongs to @jaigeye and their awesome web weaving post you should look at here
while muskrat is takin out the tweetapp behind the shed and shooting it in the head (while making sure to stream the act live frm every angle) …… have u seen this????
GRITTY WEARING THE BARBIE CLOTHES TO THE MOVIES
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Um, I saw an argument about this and.... is Animorphs a kids or young adult series? It's really got me confused
These are all very good points, and given the age of the kids when the war ends, the fact that they’re still fundamentally children is really sad. They never got to grow up! They were too busy fighting a war! I’m just gonna go cry now.
Just to super underline it - though the above post does so brilliantly - but the plot of Animorphs deals a lot with facing a threat that if discussed with any adults will be - at best - dismissed or ridiculed, and at worst, lethal and destrutive, because trusted adults may not in fact be trustworthy.
That’s a hugely childist plotline in how it deals with the treatment of children in society, particularly with the intersection of childhood, abuse and trauma. It’s also resonant with children facing their own ‘secret wars’, who very much need and rely on these narratives; I know I did.
Animorphs is a children’s series, and it is brilliant.
Animorphs is I believe what current publishing calls “middle grade”, and it is very much a thing. For context, when I was 10-12 and reading Animorphs in my spare time, our school assigned reading was getting into the Social Issues And Death genre of kids’ books. They just didn’t have aliens.
Oh, yeah, I’ve been lurking r/Animorphs since starting the series and I could see the bros there getting incensed at reminders that the grimdark edgy sci-fi series they like is also a goofy romp for ten-year-olds. It’s large; it contains multitudes!
Animorphs is a children’s book series. It’s written for children, marketed to children, adopts a childist perspective, and primarily discusses the concerns of children. It is not a young adult series, nor is it even a marginal case like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter.
Why is my stance on this so firm?
First of all, Young Adult as a marketing category (for fiction aimed at teens) didn’t even exist in the mid-1990s when Animorphs first came out. It wasn’t developed until the mid-2000s with works such as Twilight, Hunger Games, and Mortal Instruments. But even if we’re willing to go back and classify pre-YA works as being precursors (e.g. Eragon, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), then Animorphs still doesn’t fit the bill, because Animorphs too clearly is about childhood rather than adolescence.
The protagonists of Animorphs have non-alien goals that revolve around getting their homework done, living up to their families’ expectations, avoiding bullies, and figuring out their own genders and orientations. They’re scared of being separated from their parents (#7), of losing their sense of fun (#19), and of never being able to have lives outside of the war (MM1). These aren’t the hopes and fears of mid-adolescence; they’re the hopes and fears of late childhood. They’re not motivated by adolescent concerns like sex, rebellion, drugs like alcohol, independence from authority, or personal privacy. They don’t have adolescent worries about crossing the thresholds of adulthood, maintaining their ability to travel, choosing colleges or career paths, or being respected as independent adults. They’re child characters.
The Animorphs are children, and thus also don’t have the rights and freedoms of adolescents. They don’t drive, they don’t go on unsupervised dates, they don’t hold jobs, they have chores but don’t maintain households, they don’t plan their own futures more than a few weeks in advance, and they don’t have money beyond a few dollars here and there. Marco is a partial exception to all of those, but he’s the first one to admit that he lacks the skills to shop for food more filling than Peanut M&Ms (#5), to drive more than a mile without crashing (#28), or to manage money long-term (#14). Marco is cooking and shopping for his household out of necessity, and he’s doing it as an untrained child would rather than as an emerging adult would. Because he, like all the other Animorphs, has the knowledge and abilities of a child rather than a young adult.
The Animorphs come off like kids, with kids’ level of experience. None of them have heard of the Battle of Agincourt or the Battle of Trafalgar (MM3), all of them are more inclined to go “eew” than “ooh” on the rare occasions when talk turns to sex (#13, #43), and most of them are pretty terrible at electronics operations (#16, #20). Most of their battle strategies come from cartoons and video games, not formal martial theory. Nevertheless, the kids are treated as complex and valid individuals capable of both great good and great evil. That’s my oversimplified understanding of the childist perspective: that it focuses on the ways that society restricts and dismisses children, and takes the radical stance that children can be fully human members of society while still being fundamentally children at heart, without having them be mini-adults in all but name. Animorphs has a firmly childist perspective toward its own protagonists, and emphasizes that with the minor characters.
Because most adults treat the Animorphs like kids, refusing to respect their superior experience even when confronted with overwhelming evidence that these kids know what they’re doing. The Animorphs, by contrast, never stop respecting adults and adult authority. Most notably, the protagonists never ever stop referring to adults as “Mr. Tidwell,” “General Doubedday, sir,” “Aunt Naomi,” etc., even on occasions when they’re telling those adults what to do. The kids operate outside traditional power structures sometimes, but still view themselves as being subject to those power structures.
As a quick point of contrast, think about an in-between series like Harry Potter. The protagonists don’t just date but make out and have intense sexuality crises. They travel long distances without adults and are trusted to provide for themselves, especially in Deathly Hallows. They pivot away from “Professor Lupin” toward “Remus” in later books, and they tell off headmasters and Ministers for Magic alike. They make career choices, and lead social justice movements. They’re arguably more child than young adult when the series starts, but they’re also pretty clearly more young adult than child when the series ends.
One last point of order:
[Image description: the spine and part of both covers of Animorphs #9. The Scholastic logo, a white book on a red background, is visible on the spine and front cover. The name “Scholastic” is visible on the front and back covers.]
The Scholastic name or logo appears — by my count — no less than eight times on a standard Animorphs book, including twice on the spine alone. That’s not just a marketing tactic. It’s a signal to librarians, teachers, and other children’s book curators that these books being listed under the “ages 8 to 12″ label isn’t arbitrary or accidental. These books have been evaluated by experts in the field, and deemed not only appropriate but engaging and also educational for children in that age bracket. These books use simple language, except when they occasionally use and then immediately define more complex terms like “thermal” or “singularity.” Their educational content focuses primarily on animal facts, with a moderate dash of history and good ol’ fashioned ethics, and that content is present in every book. A young adult series would be under no obligation to explain how gravity affects whales’ organ structure in the middle of an adventure (#27). I’m no expert, but I wholeheartedly agree: these books are appropriate, enjoyable, educational, and meaningful for kids to read.
These books have a lot of extreme content, which is probably the source of the confusion about the target audience. Because we live in a culture that simultaneously holds up the myth of children as innocent beings unaffected by violence, and devalues children’s culture through suggesting that any serious or impactful work MUST be meant for adults like us. But Animorphs is so good because it’s a series for kids, never in spite of that.
I think the fact that it is dark or has complex
themes doesn’t really have anything to do with the target audience, but
sometimes there are concepts and references that I wouldn’t have
understood when I was younger than middle school, which surprises me..
but then, a grown author is naturally gonna put in some stuff that is
cool or funny to them, not just to children
Basically though the target audience of a book is
not defined by the subject matter but by the actual ease or difficulty
of reading it. The words and sentences in animorphs are pretty simple
even if the themes are not
In
contrast something like shakespeare often has pretty simple themes but
difficult to parse text, which is why you wouldn’t have a child read it
This was my experience too — as a secure 7-year-old, I noticed the characters were sad and had bad dreams sometimes, but I didn’t really connect that to the battles or the inability to trust anyone. As an adult with more experience with stress/loss/loneliness, let alone some training in psychology, I find Animorphs a lot scarier to read than I did at that age.
What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:
Tech that can regenerate my old meat legs.
Robot legs that work just like meat legs and are functionally just meat legs but robot
Literally anything that would mean I don’t have to use a wheelchair.
If I do need to use a wheelchair, make it fly or able to “walk me” upstairs
What I actually want:
Prosthetic covers that can change colour because I’m too indecisive to pick one colour/pattern for the next 5+ years.
A leg that I can turn off (seriously, my above knee prosthetic has no off switch… just… why?)
A leg that won’t have to get refitted every time I gain or loose weight.
A wheelchair that I can teleport to me and legs I can teleport away when I’m too tierd to keep walking. And vice versa.
In that same vein, legs I can teleport on instead of having to fiddle around with the sockets for half an hour.
Prosthetic feet that don’t require me to wear shoes. F*ck shoes.
Actually accessible architecture, which means when I do want to use my wheelchair, it’s not an issue.
Prosthetic legs with dragon-claw feet instead of boring human feet or just digigrade prosthetics that are just as functional as normal human-shaped ones.
A manual wheelchair with the option to lift my seat up like those scissor-lift things so I’m not eye-level with everyone’s butt on public transport/so I can reach the top shelf by myself.
A prosthetic foot that lights up when it hits the ground like those children’s shoes.
My EXTREMELY LATE Halloween Comic - inspired by the Vampire of Lugnano. Feels good to work on some personal stuff, and it’s been ages since I’ve drawn a horror comic.
Person who has spent all their cash on rent and food still has a place to get out of the house and do something interesting.
Cool community classes and community art shows.
ESL tutoring.
Tax prep and forms.
tbh fuck anyone who says a single bad thing about libraries
Not content I normally reblog but libraries are super important and our world would be diminished without them.
The library was how I was able to read so many books as a kid that my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford.
Libraries are one of the only places on Earth that treats people the same no matter how much money you have. We can’t lose that.
And nowadays many libraries also rent ebooks, movies, and some even have tools. Many libraries have computer basics classes (I knew someone who taught those to older adults and every class, she would sit on a keyboard at one point, just to remove some of the fear of ‘messing up’ from her students).
There’s a library near me that uses their old card catalog for a seed library (you don’t literally return the seed that you borrow, you collect seeds from your plant and return those).
Some have rooms available to non-profits for meetings. Does your philatelist club need a place to meet? What about your caps for preemies group?
Some sponsor lectures, on information like local history. There’s a couple near me that have ‘meet the artist’ days where an artist sets up shop to show how they do their art. A crocheter friend of mine takes hooks and yarn to show kids how to do a chain.
Remember: WE PAY TAXES to support them. Use them.
I was a poor kid. Did not have access to much. But my parents got me a library card early and I spent my whole childhood there. Every dino book, every science book, heck - even VHS tapes on dinosaurs and science. I devoured them.
Libraries are gateways. I would not be a scientist without them. And the better they are - the more we fund and support them - the more doorways open up for everyone.
Protect libraries. Fund libraries. Knowledge is power, and libraries make knowledge available to ALL.
Renee / mid-20s / USA / Here you'll find fandoms, social issues, and things that make me happy / Check out my (mostly Star Wars) side blog Holocron in the Restricted Section , and my creative blog ReneeoftheStars
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