Aww, Dave. I’ve missed you ;u;

homoerotics:

Series: Shingeki no Kyojin
Pairing: Eren/Armin
Rating: G

original by シロクマ | translation by homoerotics

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cheftier:

metallikato:

nuggles:

when you find a shirt you really like and wear it a couple times and it starts doing

the thing

These are called pills. You can remove them with a shaving razor. Be gentle with delicate fabrics!

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS A++ INFORMATION TUMBLR USER METALLIKATO

akatriel-rowanborn:

language-escapes:

akatriel-rowanborn:

language-escapes:

I feel like thinking about Animorphs might as well be my job now, given that’s all I do at work these days.

Anyway!

So, I recognize that book 37 (The… Weakness, maybe?  I know the numbers, not the titles) has Rachel saying right out that she’s never seen her parents read the Bible and they aren’t really religious, and I know that she says in Megamorphs 3 that her dad is Jewish, rather than her parents are Jewish, but you know what?  Fuck that noise.

Because Rachel’s family is Daniel, Naomi, Rachel, Jordan, and Sarah; and while obviously names don’t HAVE to derive from ones religious background… yeah, no.  And I’m saying screw it, Naomi is Jewish (Naoooomi!!!!).  And maybe Jean, Jake’s mum, isn’t Jewish, but Steve is.  And either George or Ellen, whichever one is related to Steve and Dan, are Jewish.

And I want this because I want ALL THE STORIES about, like, Passover in the Berenson family.  About how Jake and Rachel were super relieved when either Jordan or Brooke or Justin was born (whichever child came directly after Jake and Rachel) because it meant they no longer had to be the Youngest.  If Rachel is younger than Jake, then she was clearly relieved because she hated being pointed out as the youngest, and Jake was relieved because Rachel bitched up a fucking STORM and seder is long enough already without food, does she have to make it longer by pitching a fit?  And if Jake is younger than Rachel, then he’s relieved because maybe Rachel will stop teasing him about being the baby (hint: she doesn’t) and Rachel is relieved because Tom and Saddler point out every year she’s only a few months older than him, which really, makes her a baby too.

[snip]

I want the story of Rachel and Jake, during the Animorph years, accidentally meeting up on the beach during Rosh Hashanah, each with their pockets full of bread.  And neither of them say anything, but both of them feel like there isn’t enough bread in the world to represent their sins.

THIS. ALL OF THIS BUT SO MUCH THIS ESPECIALLY. Tashlikh, oh my God. I am crying just imagining that. And Naomi secretly mourning the fact that she never got to see her daughter under the hoopah…

And can you imagine if Jake was an Animorph during his Bar Mitzvah? Rachel would just be smirking as he practiced reading his Torah portion, and if Marco asked, she’d say she had her Bat Mitzvah at twelve, because girls obviously grow up faster than boys, who stay kids an extra year, and then she’d just be the loudest one cheering him on when he chanted the tropes… and oh God, what if his portion was Blessing and Curses?! “I set before you this day, blessings and curses, life and death. Choose life.” or worse, he gets the part where his haftorah ends up being part of Lamentations?! Just… so much tears. Jaaaaaaaakeeeee.

And I can see Jake looking up Bar Kochba, and maybe even reading Eli Wiesel’s Night and just feeling like he couldn’t decide if the sure knowledge of oncoming death and destruction would make him keep his faith, or lose it. Where is God? Why won’t He save them from the yeerks? What sort of universe allows for this to happen???

JEWS REALLY ASK THESE QUESTIONS A LOT, OKAY.

I have been wanting this for YEARS, and even wrote a Passover and Hannukah story for Rachel, but never posted it because I thought no one would be interested.

And everyone just makes them secular or Christian anyway…

OMFG YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THE BAR AND BAT MITVAH TOOOOOOO!  I literally just buried my face in a pillow and screamed at the idea of Jake having the Blessing and Curses as his portion.  “Choose life” OMFG I CAN’T HANDLE IT.

If you have the Passover and Hannukah stories for Rachel, I, at least, would love to see them.  I am deeply, deeply invested in a Rachel and Jake who are actually Jewish, rather than just having it be Informed Judaism.

Ugh, seriously, though.  “Choose life.”  I’m just gonna- go cry for a while.

I think we actually found a way to make Animorphs MORE painful, guys.

He blushed as he made yet another mistake, warping the hard ‘kh’ of “v’hayah khi yavo’oo,” and Rachel, sitting next to Cassie in the closest row of benches to the bimah, started laughing into her shoulder. Cassie elbowed her. “What? He sounded like Melissa’s cat, with a hairball!”

“Or like you when you sing, Xena,” Marco smirked, leaning over the bench between the two girls. Rachel shoved him back into the seats behind without answering.

Jake only sighed, then tried to start again. Dude, he was only on the first line, and he already was messing up? He’d been practicing this for over two months now, one with trope, the other without vowels to get used to reading from the Torah.

Well, at least he’d tried to practice. It was hard when he could barely sleep, for all the nightmares of being stalked by a huge maned cat…

His eyes trailed over the reserved seating for family, at the one chair that would remain empty during his ceremony, because the boy that would have sat there had first been replaced by a murderous traitor, then that traitor locked in the form of a rat not more than three weeks ago.

David. David the sixth Animorph. He’d tried to kill them all, and almost had, and had left their team with more than just physical scars. The sound of his thoughtspeak screams still haunted him, and Rachel, though she wouldn’t admit it when he asked, had stared at Sadler’s empty reserved seat for over five minutes before Ax distracted her with a query on if he was allowed to eat the Torah crowns, as they had pomegranates on them.

Thankfully she managed to keep him from damaging synagogue property.

He tried again, his voice breaking halfway through the beginning. Another blush, and this time Cassie was hiding her mouth behind a hand, cheeks darkening slightly.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Jake forced himself to start over, wanting to get this down before the entire shul got there.

In Hebrew, he began again: “And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee…”

…

“…And this portion has gone down in history as one of the most powerful of the Torah. Why? It seems straight-forward. There are plenty of parts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy that demand you to love the Lord your God, follow His commandments, etc. If anything, this seems to be a repeat of many passages in Exodus, explaining that if you do what God asks, He’ll give rain, and care for you, your land, your life and children, while if you do not, He will turn away and ‘be wrathful unto even the thousandth generation of those that despise Him’.”

Jake took a shaky breath, looking out over the crowd. The Rabbi smiled at him, nodding for him to go on with his speech.

He swallowed, continuing. “But this portion also brings up hope. It says that no matter what, God will remember His children, and deliver them from wherever they have been scattered, bring them back from the farthest reaches of the heavens, from captivity and disgrace. God says He will bring them back to their home, disperse their enemies…”

The image of two pairs of furious green eyes flashed before his mind’s eye, and Jake shivered, trying to force away the image of Visser Three with the last parts of the speech.

“During the time of the Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbis were forced to turn the Torah in their synagogues into clothing. It was to shame them and their holy words. Force the delicate scroll to touch human skin oils, thus slowly ruining them. They had no other choice. They were forced to do this, told that their families would be killed if they did not. ‘And thou shalt bethink thyself among all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee…’

All of his friends were looking at him now. Even Eric the Chee. Jake could only imagine what he thought of the speech he’d cobbled together. Or how many times he’d heard someone make a Bar and later on Bat Mitzvah speech. Who knew? He’d been alive so long, he had to have remembered parts of the Third Reich, even if he wasn’t directly amongst any conflict.

He didn’t fight. Couldn’t, Jake had to remind himself. But the words felt hollow. How long had these Chee lived, and not done anything to stop mass murder? All their strength, all their power…

He felt his fingers go numb around the yad, the small metal rod often used to keep your place when reading the Torah, just to avoid getting skin oils on the sheep skin. He hadn’t let it go, even to read his speech, he realized. So delicate, and yet it had remained around for thousands of years. People hundreds of years before he was born knew these passages, these words, these symbols from an ancient world, where God promised to deliver a people from oppression.

“They sewed the scrolls into vests. The ‘blessings side’ rested above the heart, and the ‘curses side’ alternate. Always reminding them of God’s promise to help them. To save them from those that would kill or enslave them all. But no help came for them. No hope for they, who though their vests survive, displayed at Yad VaShem Israel, their bones were burnt to ash, their bodies melted into fat.”

He swallowed hard. So did Sadler’s parents. “Why would God let these things happen? Why would God let good people die? They chose life! They chose to follow Him. Why did they get nothing in return but the death that should rightfully only be given as a curse?!”

He had to calm his voice. Had to keep from screaming, from crying out at the injustice of the world and the God that said He would be there to protect them, yet allowed families to be torn apart by brain-infesting slugs, let entire planets of harmless creatures become slaves in a war they never should have been forced to enter, made KIDS have to make choices about how to stop another kid just like them, from killing them all by trapping him as a rat?

His voice was cracking like a little kid’s. “But that’s just it. This portion points out why bad things happen: because humans choose to let them. ‘I set before you this day, blessings and curses, life and death… choose life.’ God gave all mankind free will, to do what we wanted. He made the world, then said “this is for you. I made it, but you need to finish it. make it better, or worse. It’s your choice, not Mine.’” He paused, eyes on Tom’s face now. There was no sign of the yeerk behind his eyes, of course, just boredom with a hint of a brotherly smirk. Jake was thinking of that yeerk as he said his next words, nearing the end of his speech, “There will be people that choose to be evil, because they want to, because they have the free will to do it. But there will also be those people that stand up to them and break them down, reuniting families, hopefully healing what has been destroyed.”

Jake closed his eyes, then said softly, “And I like to think that God would rather his children not hate each other, that they would ‘choose life’…”

…Six Years Later…

“Ram the Blade Ship…”

There was the scream of metal, the soundless flash of fire in space as it quickly ate up the little oxygen it could find in life support, before it too died. Then, silence, and drifting bodies, the reverberations of emptyness all around.

And at the last, a memory. We chose life for them.

Today I successfully got my 8-year-old cousin to start reading Animorphs

My life’s purpose is fulfilled