Just got the "Hey, you made an account and never posted!" e mail and thought I would, finally, post. I'm introducing myself but I'm almost certainly not sticking around--I just want a place to talk about Animorphs and fandom and what it's meant to me.
The books gave me something to sink into when my childhood was really awful. Two parental figures, my father and my grandmother, died the same summer. My mother and sister and I were homeless, moving from fleabag motel to fleabag motel, poor as hell. I was as crazy as a child could be, then. I read to cope. I read so much I almost flunked several grades because I refused to do my homework. I was not stupid, I just had no interest in the misery of my real life. I wanted to a different skin, to take an animal's body and fight Yeerks. I had a sibling who felt like an alien and hard choices and too much growing up too fast of my own to do, so I felt I could relate to that group of kids. And I wanted to be best friends with Cassie and play video games with Marco and fall in unrequited love with Tobias (I was not as glamorous as Rachel).
I filled a dozen notebooks with Animorphs fanfiction. I read and reread the books I owned and bought and discussed them as they came to their end. I found the Morphz message board online and became a frequent poster; I used this name, initially, but I had others, too.
I made so many friends on that board. It became my world, and thank God, because my real world remained ****ty. Never really horrible but never good enough to give me reason to leave fantasy and fandom behind. And I met the man I would marry on that board, the man I'd eventually rearrange my life for and move five hundred miles to be with, when I was 13 years old.
I fell in love with him 13 years ago. I still love him, actually, even though he left me two years ago, but honestly this isn't about him. It's about what fond memories I have of the people who shared my world and who made it so much better when I felt alienated and broken and lost. I miss the person I was when I found Morphz. I miss how easy it was for me to connect with strangers, to fall in love, to make plans for my future and believe they would turn out for the best.
I guess that I'm here is a sign I haven't grown up because if I had I would have moved on, like my ex did, and left my childish things behind. This fandom is like the house I grew up in. My memories are so specific to who I was when I lived there, the height I was when I looked up at my mom making dinner at the stove, and when I go back it looks different than it does in my head, the angles not quite right, so I feel dissatisfied with the place but it's still so precious because it's fundamental to who I've become. And I'm still an escapist, still prone to falling hard and never giving up on people, still too honest in some ways and too held back in others.
But I was telling someone about my sad little love story and I realized I am not ashamed of the dorkiness and childishness of how I met him, of the silly kids' series that brought us together. I'm actually pretty proud of it (he wasn't)--It wasn't a mistake. I regret a lot about how I acted in our relationship and I'm heartbroken it ended, but I don't regret where we met. I don't regret that I threw it all in. I wasn't going to win; I gave orders to ram the ship anyway. It was the right thing to do.
I've lost touch with everyone I made friends with through Morphz. I'm sorry if any of you are those people. But I haven't forgotten. Not for a second. Every time I see a red-tailed hawk, and that's usually every day, I think of what those stories meant to me and the people they brought into my life. I'll give them to the kids I adopt as my own and maybe I'll tell them why, someday. Because I wanted to fly, because I wanted to fight, because I wanted to do the impossible. And I guess, because of Animorphs, I did.
