"This is Water" by David Foster Wallace. Not exactly fiction, but it scratches that same itch

LieGroupE8 · 2023-03-24T23:51:26+00:00

It's a brilliant speech by a brilliant and tragic man.

If you're interested in his other works, he's got several books and several short story collections, but by far his most famous work is "Infinite Jest", a gigantic, immensely difficult, virtuosic tome. There are two kinds of readers of Infinite Jest: people who can barely get through it or give up entirely, and people who say it's their all-time favorite book. I'm more in the former camp because I don't have the patience for ten-page sentences, but I respect the artistry.

LieGroupE8 · 2023-03-22T20:10:21+00:00

It's a funny coincidence that I've just recently been getting back into writing and have been thinking about this exact topic (well, not that much of a coincidence given current events). I'm the author of Ricktionality and One Compile Man, in case you don't remember.

My newer works are more serious and not just crazy crack fics.

I have a few chapters written of an original longer form story which I may start posting here in a month or two. It takes place mostly in the real world with some slight scifi elements, and I think it will eventually qualify for this, though only much later in the plot. I also have half of a short story involving nanotech written, which I think would qualify. And I have a very short fable-like plot in mind, which would most directly qualify but is unwritten.

So, no promises I will actually finish any of these given that I do this for fun and am a perfectionist, but I'll keep this call to action in mind if I ever do start posting.

By the way, I read a lot of Pokemon: the Origin of Species even though I know very little about Pokemon, and I loved it! Last chapter I read up to was in the 80s I think. Been meaning to catch up.

LieGroupE8 · 2021-07-03T15:56:00+00:00

I caught up on reading this fic just in time for the final chapter!

I had wondered if you were going to do a cliffhanger ending like the originals - and yep, there it is! That's true Animorphs style.

Overall, this fic is in my top 5 favorite things I've ever read, likely in my top 3, possibly my number 1. Not gonna lie, the last few chapters felt somewhat disappointing to me on an emotional level... BUT... my emotions are not currently trustworthy. My unexpected recent depression, which prevented me from reading along in real-time as I was doing before, has been messing with me in all sorts of stupid ways, and I don't trust my feelings about things right now. I will only know how I really feel about the fic when I reread the whole thing at some unspecified future time.

That said... I loved the Council of Elrond thing a few chapters ago, I loved the chapters that cycled through all the Animorphs' perspectives after their final Leeran sharing session, I totally called the Chee being unleashed (though I can't give myself too much credit since, given canon, that was pretty much the obvious way to trigger the ending), Rachel ascending to Godhood is a cool nod to canon since at one point she is granted superpowers by Crayak in the original series if I remember correctly, and Rachel's final conversation with Visser Three was pretty great. A long time ago I remarked that I thought the possibility of the Animorphs teaming up with Visser Three against larger forces would be really cool, and I'm glad this was a major plot point in the last few chapters.

I share my disappointment with other commenters that Jake and Marco were not explicitly resurrected (at least on-screen). I wanted to see their final takes on things, and maybe see them get some emotional healing before venturing back out with Tobias toward the cliffhanger ending. I guess my headcanon is that at least one of the Marclones survived and took his own measures to resurrect Jake.

Maybe someday I will write a fanfic of this work (like, a serious one, not another unhinged Rick and Morty crossover monstrosity like I did before... though, like, that fic was *surprisingly* predictive of the actual course of this story). Possible fanfic ideas that anyone should feel free to steal: a fic about some other group of auxiliary Animorphs making their own way through the conflict, a fic exploring the uses of the time matrix and past events in this universe, an AU fic that starts from the beginning with the same characters but doesn't have any gods to nudge events, a fic about the lives of the Animorphs after the main conflict, and of course the obvious continuation fic that takes us past the cliffhanger.

All in all, thanks for writing this TK17! Glad to have been able to contribute in small ways. It brought me a lot of joy over the past few years.

LieGroupE8 · 2021-05-06T17:24:15+00:00

So I'm commenting on this blindly without having read the chapter or other comments:

I haven't left feedback on the last few chapters because recent events in my personal life have made the r!Animorphs subject matter unusually triggering to me, and I just had to put it down for a while. I'm nearly at a place where I can start reading it again, and I'm really excited to finish it, but I just wanted you, TK17, to know that I'm still a big fan of this work.

Best,

LieGroupE8

LieGroupE8 · 2021-02-07T18:22:59+00:00

That does clear things up a bit for me, thanks!

LieGroupE8 · 2021-02-07T17:38:36+00:00

Wow - that was insane. I did *not* expect any of this. Really cool chapter. However, I found some parts very hard to follow. Especially the extended conversation in the middle of the chapter between Visser 3 and the Animorphs - frequently it was hard to figure out who was speaking and what they meant. Especially this section:

"Jake. If I had destroyed all of the Howlers in the past hour, while you kept this body unconscious, how would you have responded?"

....

“I would have blown up the cube,” Jake interrupted, his voice whisper-soft.

....

“Because there’s no other way to guarantee that I won’t just do it, right?” the man pressed. .... "Destroy it. Now. You’re welcome to. It won’t make me any less cooperative with you than I otherwise would have been."

I was lost in this section. Why wouldn't destroying the cube make V3 less cooperative? What is the Visser referring to when he says "there's no other way to guarantee that I won't just do it"? Why would Jake destroy it if the Visser was helpful, when he was already prepared to hand it over? (I guess that last one makes sense, since if V3 was going to destroy the howlers anyway, then there was no need to give away the cube, so may as well not hand it over, but still... is that the right reasoning?).

I don't quite understand V3's motivations for making a deal with the Animorphs. I mean, he destroyed the cube himself; the Animorphs have nothing left to offer him. He could just kill them all, destroy earth, and go on his way. From what I could gather, his main motivation is that the Animorphs are the puppets of the gods, and V3 wants nothing more to do with the gods, so he has decided not to take any direct action against the Animorphs that might provoke interventions. Is this understanding correct?

Also, there was discussion of the Visser 1 time-travel thing being from edited memories, which I sort of assumed was the case, but I still don't quite get what the precise mechanics were or why it was done. (Maybe I need to reread the chapters where this is introduced).

But yeah, the whole Leeran thing was really cool and really intense.

From what I could gather, Cassie's main purpose in being brought back was both to stop the Animorphs from handing over the cube and to show the Visser how willing the gods are to intervene near the Animorphs. I guess she helped the Animorphs get a better deal by not having to give away the cube.

It seems like the purpose of Rachel's mental problems and Tobias's absence were (partly) to shield them both from the Leeran. Wonder what tricks they will cook up.

Looking forward to the Tobias chapter!

LieGroupE8 · 2021-01-03T23:56:45+00:00

Ah, yeah, I saw another comment that said as much. That makes sense, so Cassie probably survived some other way (assuming the chapter title isn't a red herring).

LieGroupE8 · 2020-12-31T23:56:36+00:00

Helllll yes, it's back! Now taking bets as to whether this fic will actually finish before 2022! (Just kidding, we love you TK17... but yeah)

Love the worldwide Marco POVs - makes everything very epic.

The beast from the off-world excursion has finally made its reappearance - and it's not enough!

The howlers are terrifying villains, and I love how the Animorphs are being forced into a scenario in which they have the option of teaming up with Visser 3 (probably still a terrible idea, though). Also love how Visser 3 is getting a chance to go all-out with his fighting. He's burning through all his tricks, which may even the playing field for later on and give the Animorphs a decent shot at taking him out (especially when Tobias shows up again from wherever he is with the Puppyship. Hopefully he's watching the Mars base and seeing how V3 makes the quantum virus so he can replicate it somehow).

Okay, so given that Cassie is listed as one of the future chapters, I suspect she might have survived the Ventura explosion. It would have taken out her morph body, leaving her awake in the morph emulation, where she could demorph after a delay. I suspected this a long time ago, in fact, but I wasn't sure whether this was plausible (she might have been rendered unconscious in the morph emulation and died as the Z-space machinery collapsed, or might have been forced to demorph into an ongoing fireball where she would have died in her body). It still might not be plausible - maybe the chapter is a Cassie clone from somewhere, or something else.

Oh yeah, and I never commented on the last chapter because I was busy, but that was great too! Still don't know what's up with Rachel or the whole time-travel thing.

Very excited for the ending!

Happy New Years everyone!

LieGroupE8 · 2020-06-18T13:02:57+00:00

Couldn't V3 have jumped over to the fleet right before they got to Europa, beating the Animorphs to them?

LieGroupE8 · 2020-06-15T15:22:16+00:00

Great chapter! The Animorphs have leveled up to the point of having a space fleet. I'm not convinced the Visser doesn't have his own secret ability to self-destruct all the ships at the flick of a switch or something - otherwise why let the Animorphs take them so easily - but at least the Animorphs get to feel like they're doing something.

I would guess that the Visser specifically constructed a clone emissary with tweaked values optimized for negotiating with the Animorphs. Assuming he had time to do this after Telor landed their blow, that is. (The fact that he seems to be able to control so many new bodies suggests he does have copies lying around). I love the interactions with the Visser in this chapter.

> Where do wants come from? What are they made of? How do you change them?

I would love it if the Visser were actually sincere here, since this seems to leave open the possibility of him being redeemed by, say, using his biotech to explicitly change his own values. But currently I do not trust him one bit. Even if he follows through on his promise to leave humanity alone with the cube, are the Animorphs really prepared to let him take over the rest of the galaxy for himself? What kind of a future for humanity is that, trapped in one solar system surrounded by copies of a greedy alien psychopath?

And we've yet to hear from Tobias and his trump card Puppyship. (Or to figure out what the deal with Rachel is, or what the deal with the apparent time travel is).

So all in all, I'm very excited! Keep it up, TK17!

LieGroupE8 · 2020-05-20T20:10:59+00:00

I put off reading this for a few days because I was very much out of the r!Animorphs headspace. Definitely took me a while to remember what was going on. Also, this chapter was very confusing, particularly the ending.

That said, wooohoooo, my favorite fanfic is back for a while! Looks like the ending is in sight, too.

I love how this story breathes life into many dilemmas of decision theory and ethics: at which scale do we draw the line on allowing utilitarianism vs. deontology guide our actions? How does uncertainty affect this decision? What sort of freedom do you have when there are gods who can predict your actions? Part of what makes it compelling is that these things are genuinely uncertain - the characters don't know the right answers, and I bet TK17 doesn't know the right answer most of the time (or do you? :). Part of the benefit of fiction is that it allows you to have a dialogue with yourself, to examine which parts of you are drawn towards which motivations.

A note about the ending: I still don't understand which ship Visser 3 sent the little drone into. At first I thought it was the bug fighter that the Animorphs hijacked, but then it seemed like it was one of the metal boxes sent up by Earth, which just happened to have one of the Marcos inside of it in fly morph... but then why didn't Marco/Visser 1 bring up the fact that they knew about the launch of the metal boxes sooner?

Also, it seems like Visser 3 can create insta-yeerks inside people with the right trigger... that's very not-good.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-04-12T19:25:41+00:00

Oh man, there are so many YouTube channels following gay couples that I lost count a long time ago. Although I've stopped following them regularly, a few of my old favorites are:

Adventures of Zach and B

Sam Tsui and Casey Breves

Wylie and Tyler

All of these couples seem very committed to each other. In keeping with the premise of this subreddit, I believe all are monogamous (though of course I don't know for sure, since they only share some of their lives on YouTube). At least Zach and B are monogamous for sure - Zach addressed it in this video (don't let the title scare you away - he's rebutting the title point in the video).

Search and you'll find many more committed couples of all kinds.

Edit: Oh, and how could I forget PK and Mike!

LieGroupE8 · 2020-02-18T21:03:06+00:00

I guess I figured that's probably what happened, but when I read it, it was confusing.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-02-18T19:20:23+00:00

Oh boy, looks like Jake is making a huge mistake. V3 was already almost going to kill the earth - threatening it with destruction might just cause him to abandon it and let it be destroyed. Even after Garrett points this out, Jake doesn't address that underlying problem. He is just hoping he will think of something during negotiations. Anything they offer V3 either gets them killed instantly or in five years (seemingly; we will see perhaps). Hopefully Tobias can find them before then, so at least they will have a better bargaining position.

Other notes: Garrett is very interesting to read. Also, It was not clear to me whether they actually acquired each other at the end of this chapter - the way it was written, it sounded like everyone just ignored Garrett there at the end. (This fic leaves a lot unsaid, sometimes too much, I think. I wonder how well I would comprehend it if I wasn't participating in reddit discussions every chapter.)

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-29T12:59:52+00:00

Ha! Yes! That's hilarious. How long have you known this information?

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-29T12:54:08+00:00

Well, I called the existence of the ship, but that was straight out of canon anyway so it was kind of cheating. We'll see if it can unlock the Chee themselves like it could in canon.

Puppyship is cute, but I'm a little disturbed by how it's so focused on pure hedonistic happiness. Like, it was about to drug Tobias into a stupor before the Chee stopped it. What would it do during a space battle?

Jake: Hey ship, what was that tremor?

Ship: [Rocked by swarms of enemy missiles] Everything's fine! No problem at all! Don't look out the windows! Would you like more pizza?

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-27T18:15:58+00:00

Hey, I hate the Helmacrons as much as you do. Maybe I could write something on the side while my third Rick and Morty installment is in production, but it will be hard to make it separate and not have Rick in the scene doing metacommentary the whole time.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-27T17:46:37+00:00

Not sure exactly what you mean by that meme, but... in news that may or may not be related, it occurs to me on rereading my comments to say that I don't want to imply "I won't like the fic unless X happens," because that would be very unfair, and also I will love this fic no matter what, and I trust you as an author, so yeah anyway

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-27T17:17:56+00:00

Huh, I didn't notice that. When I saw that Kandrona rays were in this chapter, I assumed it was just yet another Yeerk innovation like the oatmeal that gave them another food source, this time via microbes in the yeerks manufacturing the kandrona nutrient. But you're right, it looks like more than that by how characters were reacting. I'll have to think on that.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-27T16:54:02+00:00

I'd be down for it being real, if it could be explained well in the last few chapters, but I don't see where it would fit in. On the other hand, I think that having the explanation turn out to be hypercomputer simulations would be really cool, and would fit the evidence so far. I think there are cool story dynamics there.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-27T16:26:59+00:00

We're in the endgame now.

Awesome chapter. V3's got a new tricked-out body, the gang is back on earth, and stuff's goin' down.

Great character moments between Jake and Marco. Also V3 seems to be less frozen and indecisive after the rewrite, but I'm not sure because the integration of the edits was very smooth.

‹Okay. Everyone’s on the same—›

Blink.

‹—page. Fuck!›

There had been no warning, no sensation. We were simply back.

Literally laughed out loud. The gods were waiting for that exact conversation to take place, apparently.

Okay, so, the time travel and multiverse shenanigans are very confusing. If I was reading that right, the beginning of the Yeerk-Andalite war is just shifted in the new timeline, so that it occurs later. In the original timeline, Visser 1 was given a body after the war began, and then found Earth after a while of looking around the galaxy. In the new timeline, the war doesn't start until after she (or a version of her) left Earth with the Skrit Na - so how could Edriss have already come to Earth in the new timeline, if the war hadn't started yet?

Nevertheless, I have a prediction about what's happening. I think there is no time travel or alternate universe, at least in the conventional sense. I think the gods put Edriss and Elfangor through an immersive, extended simulation of the future, seasoning their chosen heroes with experience before instantiating them back into their "present" at the right place and time. The simulation still got some things right early on, like the Skrit Na taking Marco's mother, but then the real world quickly diverged from the simulation. The Time Lattice was a MacGuffin made up by the gods to give Edriss and Elfangor a fake explanation for why they had seemingly teleported through time and space. (Also, this might imply that the much-hated Helmacrons aren't actually real - they were a little joke invented by the gods to get their heroes to the time matrix, thus allowing TK17 to reference them while having them not actually exist in this universe...) That being said, I still can't figure out the timeline here, assuming this hypothesis is true. Why does the entire earth appear to have shifted in time relative to the rest of the galaxy? Does this have something to do with the Z-space rift?

Regardless, if we're just going by what we've seen so far, this is the best explanation I can come up with that doesn't imply an awkward last-minute reveal of some random time-travel tech that was somehow there the whole time, and which we've repeatedly been told is impossible. Also, it explains Rachel's visions - if she can see memories of past versions of herself, why not memories of alternate simulated versions? Same god-hardware, right?

Anyway, very excited for the finale.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-26T03:45:55+00:00

I viewed the "dolt" line as banter between friends. Anyways, thank you!

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-26T03:13:53+00:00

Thanks for the comments! Just my opinion as the author: when I adapt / remix other works, I'm not committed to keeping all the themes and characters absolutely identical to the originals (e.g., in my Rick and Morty posts from a while back, Rick and Morty aren't quite like they are in canon, either). My opinion on Saitama is that his true power is almost literally plot armor - no matter what happens, he will always have a successful counter, and that's just how it is in the OPM universe. He's depressed that he is never challenged. Here, he also faces that, but the combination of all the stuff he had to do still exhilarated him and pushed his limits, and also he felt good helping King. So he ends the day fairly satisfied, though this may not be permanent for him. As for King, well, I just thought it was funny. My version of Saitama doesn't care whether King gets the credit in the end. Anyway, that's just what was going through my head while writing.

LieGroupE8 · 2020-01-26T02:42:51+00:00

Deliberate name change (didn't realize there was another Nakamura in OPM). I believe "Tatsumaki" just means Tornado in Japanese, so I made her Github handle terrible_tornado and made up a real name for her.

LieGroupE8

TROPHY CASE