Peter: The best morpher. He understands how the technology works, better even than Ax does, and he can follow orders like a champ. Though he's no andalite when it comes to tracking time, he seems to have better numerical estimation abilities than the others and that'd serve him well. On the parents' auxiliary team, I could see him in a role similar to Cassie's (being able to do partial morphs) or Tobias's (the first one to try the weird alien morphs).
Naomi: The diversion expert. She's good at getting and keeping attention, and pretty dang fearless. So she'd take on a role like Tobias does sometimes where he flies around drawing fire from the others by keeping just out of range. If she could find a bird of paradise morph that might suit her, but I could also see frilled lizard or blue-spotted monitor working well in that role since reptiles can be a little hardier than birds and survive a hit or two.
Michelle: The one evacuating civilians. She abhors violence, but she's also hard to scare. So I could see her morphing elephant, or another people-mover giant herbivore, and rushing in to grab bystanders out of the line of fire and carry them away. If she grabs a few human-controllers in the process, that's fine; once word gets around that she is actually willing to return any surrendered yeerk to the pool in exchange for keeping the host, lots of yeerks would be willing to work with her after being accidentally captured.
Eva: The leader. She'd acquire the biggest baddest hork-bajir whose permission she could get, and she'd put herself at the vanguard of the team. She'd also default to leading the auxiliary family team due to wealth of relevant knowledge and tactical experience. This would naturally lead to a lot of clashes with Michelle, but I think they'd be able to find common ground on wanting to save humanity more than any other priority. Plus...
Walter: The peacekeeper. His role would be sort of like Jake takes on during the downtime, working to smooth over conflicts between teammates and make sure they all keep their eyes on the ball. If Eva's the tactician then he's the strategist, thinking long-term about what kind of Earth they want to have left when all the dust clears. In terms of fighting style he'd be the versatile support person, maybe elephant morph as well since it can serve as a diversion or a people-mover or a tank depending on who must needs backup at any moment.
Loren: The tank. She's got that "throw rocks first, ask questions later" attitude that helps her charge into battle against pants-wetting odds, and she's proven to be suicidally brave (or just suicidal) under fire. Depending on what the Gardens has, I could see her getting cassowary, gharial, orangutan, something else that gets a what the fuck reaction from Californians in the second between seeing it and it fucking you up. She's also known to have really good aim, so post-re-ensightening I could see her literally just picking up a dracon beam and blasting away at her enemies.
What do the country of Portugal, the city of Seoul, and the Archive of Our Own (AO3) have in common? They are all home to more than 10 million people! That's right: AO3 has surpassed 10 million registered users this month! We at the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW) are delighted to share this incredible milestone with you.
Even as the community is growing year by year, the active exchange of creations and ideas between fans remains as a cornerstone of fan culture. Whether it's gifting each other fanfic, recording a podfic of your favorite story, or putting together a reclist of fics—no fandom thrives without the myriad ways fans share their passion with one another. In today's world, where ideas are just one more commodity, and content is curated for maximum revenue, it's more important than ever to appreciate and celebrate these aspects of fan spaces.
One way to let other fans know you appreciate the love and hard work they pour into their creations is commenting on their work. In celebration of this milestone, we have prepared a Bingo all about comments! Below you can find the bingo cards in both a square and vertical format.
You can fill out as many bingo squares as you want—the more comments, the merrier! Let us know on this post or on social media which Bingos you scored.
Happy commenting, and a huge thank you to everyone who helped us reach this milestone!
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
I'm reminded of that quote about how you don't have to be a psycho to kill someone; you just have to think you're right.
Visser Marco: Easily the scariest of the bunch. He not only has the strategic thinking to get the job done, but he has the charisma to sell his transformational leadership style. Might still do the thing that Visser Three does with protecting a small inner circle at the expense of the greater Empire, but Marco has the right mix of ruthlessness and charm to make it work. TBH I headcanon that a big part of the reason the yeerks won in #41 is because some visser got their hands on Marco, and he's just that good.
Visser Rachel: Although she wouldn't share Visser Three's viciousness toward his underlings — she never fights anyone who she doesn't think is stronger than her — I could see her going all in on the monster morphs. Given her impatience with the nuances of leadership in #37, I could also see her getting too into the side project of finding All The Monsters to fight into submission for acquisition purposes, and quickly becoming bored with the task of hunting down half a dozen andalites.
Visser Cassie: If you've ever read The Host, I picture her like Wanda. She cares deeply about humans, she wants to save them, she's sad for them, and she views resistant hosts as being raccoons with a leg in a trap who bite the ecologist trying to free them. But also like Wanda, I think that very concern would be the seed of dissidence, because she'd listen to humans more than her fellow yeerks. If all of her human bodies are farm-raised not to resist, then she might go about her merry way through the galaxy finding and breaking in new host species for her people (again, like Wanda). But if she meets a human who has love and connections they're willing to fight for, she'd probably end up rebelling.
Visser Ax: Yeesh. Edriss 562 alert. I think if anyone would become the most like Visser One — brilliant, cold, elaborately convinced of the rightness of the mission, willing to view humans as pets — it'd be him. He doesn't like leadership, but if you convinced him it was the right thing to do, then he'd go to just about any ends to do what he sees as the right thing. And then he'll retire, with his 3-5 pet humans in tow, to a nice preserve upstate.
Visser Tobias: The clear loser. He's so dour, so willing to question everything, so unwilling to give orders, that he'd end up fired within a month. Whether the charge would be insubordination, dereliction of duty, or refusing to interact with his fellow yeerks, it'd be bad.
Visser Jake: He would be dangerous for a completely different reason than Marco. He's no strategist, but he is excellent at winning the loyalty of talented people and then delegating them well. If the Yeerk Empire is closer to an authoritarian military (you go where you're put, and you do that job until you can't) then Jake might not do well because he needs to be able to build a talented team for his own strengths to come out. But if it's closer to a ruthless American business (Meta will recruit talent from anywhere, and they don't care who they have to kill to do it) then Jake will have built and mentored himself a planet-killing machine of talented yeerks within a year. Heck, if he gets promoted to the Council of Thirteen, it'd be only a matter of time before he won over 10+ of his fellow counselors and became Emperor in all but name.
I’d only attended two meetings. The first time I just kind of wandered around lost, feeling like a dork. I filled out some form with my name and address and social security number and all. The form asked me some personal questions, too. Nothing too personal, but enough to make me uneasy.
The Sharing straight up asks for your SSN?
It’s a good test of whether someone is easily manipulated. Someone who balks and walks away isn’t someone who will willingly sit through one of Mr. Visser’s speeches later.
(Also, the idea of Visser Three posing as a motivational speaker/cult leader is super amusing to me. No wonder he’s angry all the time.)
I finished books 1-7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl in two weeks, and more importantly I managed to drag both my gf and DD into it too - I think that's one of my strengths :) I had a great time. ( spoilers )
Slight downside, DD and I haven't started our Hades 2 1.0 playthroughs yet, since we planned to start at the same time and she just got to book 6 of DCC ^^ Hopefully soon though.
Instead I played a few runs of Vampire Survivors again. Good for occasional short play sessions that don't require much brainpower (though it is easy to forget to look at the time...) I don't unlock something every run but almost, which feels very cool and like I'm getting somewhere even though I have no idea what to do/where to go for actual game "progression." I might look it up at some point, idk.
(I also considered exploring the new Minecraft updates - I want to find a happy ghast! And ride a nautilus!, among other things - but I lost one set of good armor/tools in the End and another in the Nether a few months ago, and both are very possible to retrieve but I haven't found the motivation yet to either get one of them or make myself new gear. Possibly keepInventory would have been a good idea after all.)
Speaking of games, specifically board games: in early January with L and two of her friends we played Wingspan, which was a lot of fun, and then we tried out Earth, which we also enjoyed a lot. That one we tried first in single player, and then we decided to try the version where you play in teams but quickly switched back because it gets a lot more tactical quickly. The third long game the three of them played was Forest Shuffle - I detect a theme ^^ We also played a quick game of Pandemic. And this reminds me that L and I didn't get a chance to play Hanabi yet, hopefully soon.
It's also been ages since I gave an update on my group's TTRPG games and our current Stars Without Number campaign! We got to level six, which means I can now do "normal" teleports without Committing Effort and it feels fantastic. And I got some other cool abilities too, like imprinting on a party member to teleport back to their side even when they are out of sight. ( Recent adventures )
2025 was a busy year for AO3! The site continued to see rising traffic, with Communicationspublishing an update on AO3 statistics from 2020-2025. In December, Support received 3,589 tickets, totaling to over 40,000 tickets received in 2025, an all-time high. Meanwhile, Policy & Abuse (PAC) received 6,357 tickets in December, totaling approximately 47,500 tickets in 2025. Check out PAC's pie chart for more details.
Pie chart of the approximately 47,500 Policy & Abuse tickets submitted in 2025, divided by type of complaint. These categories reflect the subject of the complaint, and (with the exception of Offensive Content), do not indicate whether the report was upheld or rejected.
In the first half of January, User Response Translation translated or betaed 32 ticket requests from Support and PAC.
In December, Tag Wrangling wrangled approximately 598,000 tags, or around 1,300 tags per volunteer. In total, they wrangled approximately 4,944,000 tags in 2025. They also continued work on handling "No Fandom" additional tags, publishing December and January news posts detailing recent changes. In total, Tag Wrangling published nine "No Fandom"-related news posts in 2025 covering around 399 new canonical "No Fandom" additional tags.
In January, Tag Wrangling updated their Fandom Tag Metatag guidelines, including clarifying when a fandom metatag should be made and when to merge closely related fandoms into one fandom tag. Check out the news post detailing the new policy.
As part of International Volunteers Day (IVD) 2025, Communications collected and batched answers to the IVD Q&A by committee, resulting in five committee-specific news posts highlighting Communications, Support, Tag Wrangling, Translation, and Volunteers & Recruiting. Answers across committees, along with additional responses not featured in the news posts, have been compiled in a separate AO3 work.
III. ELSEWHERE AT THE OTW
Fanlore ran an editing chat to close out 2025, and it was a lot of fun! They also began preparing for their annual IFD Fanlore Challenge and Femslash February event! Keep an eye on their Bluesky, Twitter/X, and Tumblr for announcements.
Legal answered many internal and external questions this month.
In January, Communications' Fanhackers wrote about the Transformative Approaches to Fan Identity, and they began a multi-post survey of acafannish research and publishing resources.
IV. GOVERNANCE
In December, Board announced the resignations of two directors: Kathryn Solderholm and Erica Frank. We would like to thank Erica and Kathryn for their service as members of the Board, and wish them all the best in their future endeavours with the OTW.
In January, Board finalized and approved the OTW Procurement & Purchasing Policy. They and the Board Assistants Team (BAT) organised the first quarter of 2026 public Board meeting on January 18 which had 54 attendees. Minutes of this meeting will be available soon on the OTW website. Elsewhere, Board and BAT continued work on document review and archiving board statements, Code of Conduct tasks in conjunction with Organizational Culture Roadmap, and ongoing projects for mental health resources for volunteers, scheduling tools, public meeting best practices and volunteer retention in BAT. BAT also updated their OTW website committee page.
Organizational Culture Roadmap finalized a confidentiality policy in preparation for upcoming external recruitment.
V. OUR VOLUNTEERS
In December, Volunteers & Recruiting thanked all OTW volunteers on International Volunteer Day with their organization-wide email and graphics campaign. In January, they ran recruitment for Open Doors.
From November 22 to January 23, Volunteers & Recruiting received 355 new requests, and completed 378, leaving them with 52 open requests (including induction and removal tasks listed below). As of January 23, 2025, the OTW has 1,013 volunteers. \o/ Recent personnel movements are listed below.
New Subcommittee Leads/Workgroup Heads: Eevee (Internal Complaint and Conflict Resolution Lead) and megidola (Organizational Culture Roadmap Workgroup Head) New AO3 Documentation Volunteers: Lulu S (Chair Trainee) New Fanlore Volunteers: Elfie, Konsta Morales, Watts, and 1 other Graphic Designer New Open Doors Volunteers: Addiebees, AviLine, feelyx, LeighR, Marie K, meservey66, MetaKass, miffmiff, Mort, pinkconstellations, SleepyJane, Spit, StormySea, Truendz, Vail, and 11 other Import Assistants New Policy & Abuse Volunteers: megidola (Supervisor) and 1 Chair Track Volunteer New Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Chelsea Cheyanne, inspiredstork, Sanity, will, and Yrindor (Supervisors) New Translation Volunteers: Rhine and 1 other Chair Trainee; Arushi, athursdayschild, Eirinar, Linarii, Mira8, Niki K, Phoebe B, Pi, Rita P, and 12 other Translators New TWC Volunteers: Fiona M, Yumi, and 3 other Layout Editors; and 2 Outreach and Communications Editors New User Response Translation Volunteers: Eki, f0f8ff, HARRitte, Jules R, Laus, PanPan, rosings, zoy zauce, and 3 other Translators
Departing Directors: Erica Frank and Kathryn Soderholm Departing Committee Chairs: 1 Communications Chair and 1 Elections Chair Departing BAT Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Departing Communications Volunteers: KW Ukuku (TikTok Moderator), Lori P (Graphics Volunteer), 1 Fanhacker Volunteer, and 1 Social Media Moderator Departing Communications News Post Moderation Volunteers: 1 News Post Moderator Departing Development & Membership Volunteers: 1 Graphic Designer, 2 Membership Data Specialists, and 2 Volunteers Departing Fanlore Volunteers: 1 Discord Moderator, 1 Outreach Analyst, and 1 Policy & Admin Departing Open Doors Volunteers: Pelagia and 1 other Administrative Volunteer, Wynne (Import Assistant), and 1 FCPP Intern Departing Policy & Abuse Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Departing Strategic Planning Volunteers: 1 Volunteer Departing Support Volunteers: Nary and 22 other Volunteers Departing Tag Wrangling Volunteers: Nary and 1 other Supervisor; Asas Carmesins, Bruno, Eevee, lianneder, Lily_Haydee_Lohdisse, McBangle, Sayornis, Tea Huimyni, and 10 other Wranglers Departing Translation Volunteers: Teelee (Task Assistant); Illiterations and 4 Translators Departing TWC Volunteers: Melanie Kohnen (Review Editor); Courtney Lazore and 1 other Proofreader; and 1 Symposium Editor Departing User Response Translation Volunteers: 1 Translator Departing Volunteers & Recruiting Volunteers: 1 Senior Volunteer and 2 Volunteers
For more information about our committees and their regular activities, you can refer to the committee pages on our website.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.
This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)
(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)
So what cool fancrafts/fanvids/other kinds of fanworks/fics/fanart/podfics have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.
BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.
At the risk of sounding silly: that issue is the biggest reason that I tend to prefer books over movies. Books are always going to be more adventurous, more experimental, more diverse, and more internally coherent. Because they're written 80% to 90% by one person, rather than by committee and funding collective. Sometimes that experimental nature means the end result is Not Good, but experimenting with absolutely everything until we hit on the good stuff is how we got sci fi (Mary Shelley) and free indirect discourse (Jane Austen) and semi-episodic fiction (Charles Dickens) and series fiction (Daniel Defoe) and verse novels (Alice Duer Miller) and novels themselves (Miguel Cervantes).
So like, there are some damn good shows out there. And there are some extremely silly fan takes about secret hidden episodes, and there are some real cases of the lowest common denominator of comprehension of the material being the take that makes it onscreen. But books tend to innovate faster and more, in more directions, by simple virtue of being low-budget.
Yessssss I love all of these ideas. I think it just fits for The One to be a kelbrid deity, and then for The One to be a local term for Crayak himself. And I love the orff connecting back to the kelbrid, which then explains what the heck was going on in #41.
Hopefully somebody writes this someday, because it so nicely ties together several of the places Animorphs is uncharacteristically inconsistent. That, or I'll just accept it as my new headcanon forever because it explains so much.
I 100% agree that it feels exactly like the weird comic aesthetic to have random gods show up to the kids' space adventure and kick off time travel nonsense. Like, Animorphs hits on all the classic sci fi tropes — other planets, nanotechnology, eldritch moral dilemmas, shapeshifting, body swapping, mind control, alternate histories, robots, you name it. And the Ellimist (and to a lesser extent Crayak) are excellent fuel for all of that to go down without simply handing the protagonists a plot-breaking time machine.
And in-story there is reasonable justification for their being there. Turns out the fate of the human species really does hinge on the protagonists' actions. So does the fate of the Yeerk Empire, and maybe the entire universe. Between that and the rules of the game — minimal intervention, Toomin tries to preserve diversity as Crayak tries to destroy it — the level of involvement does feel more or less consistent.
Like, the Ellimist doesn't make total sense if you follow his power set and motivations to the extreme, but he makes more sense than the Watchers or the Endless do.
fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.
This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!
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