Final Fantasy VII Is Possibly the Epic of Our Age

If you're even slightly aware of video games, you’ve probably at least brushed up against Final Fantasy VII again recently. Whether through Remake, Rebirth, or just the constant cultural presence it’s had for decades, it keeps resurfacing. And for my generation, a lot of people, it's nostalgia—we are revisiting something important from the past. 

For me, it’s honestly the only reason I wanted a PS5—well, beyond the kids. I’m enjoying it, moseying my way through the world and its story. Comparing it to the original as I go.

After some time playing, I don’t think nostalgia is all of what’s happening. I think Final Fantasy VII has quietly become something much bigger than that. I would even go as far as to call it the epic of our age. And that's what I want to take a moment to talk about.

When we talk about epics, we usually think of stories like The Iliad, The Odyssey, or Beowulf. The Divine Comedy. The most modern example thus far might be The Lord of the Rings. 

None of these are just popular stories. They define how people understand the world. They carry moral frameworks, archetypes, and warnings that outlive the generation that first encountered them.

Final Fantasy VII does the same thing—but it does it in a modern language.

Not through gods on mountaintops, but through corporations. Not through destiny handed down from above, but through systems built by humans. And not through mythic heroes, but through people whose identities are fractured, reconstructed, and uncertain.

At the heart of Final Fantasy VII are characters who have lost something fundamental. Cloud’s identity is fragmented—constructed out of memory, trauma, and expectation. Barret fights for a community that’s already been destroyed. Yuffie is trying to reclaim a culture that has already fallen. Red XIII has to relearn who his father was—and what that means for who he is.

These aren’t just heroes. They are people trying to understand who they are after the systems around them have broken. That’s a very modern problem.

But what elevates Final Fantasy VII beyond a story about broken people is how it treats power. It presents gods and devils—but not in the traditional sense.

The “gods” in Final Fantasy VII are not distant beings. They are everyday people who embody healing, connection, and care. Aerith isn’t powerful because she dominates the world. She doesn't. She isn't powerful simply because she's last of an Ancient species, even though she is. She’s powerful because she nurtures the world and it's people in small, everyday ways in spite of her background, because she remains aligned with something larger than manufactured systems and corporations.

The “devils” are also human. Shinra isn’t evil in a mythic sense—it’s worse. It’s efficient. It’s normalized. It’s a system that believes everything can be extracted, optimized, and controlled. It doesn’t see the planet as something sacred. It sees it as a resource. Even Sephiroth, who appears godlike, is the product of human experimentation. His transcendence isn’t divine—it’s engineered.

That’s the shift.

In older epics, gods shape humanity. In Final Fantasy VII, humanity creates gods—and devils—and then loses control of both. This is where we find the tragedy in Final Fantasy VII. It's where the meaning truly lives.

It’s not just that people die. It’s that the conditions that make those deaths inevitable were created by human ambition. The tragedy itself is derived from human action, but it's not purely human. It’s the tragedy of the gods—of things that should have been sacred, reduced to experiments, exploited, and destroyed.

And beneath that, the deeper tragedy is ours:

We built the systems that made it happen. That’s why the story still resonates. Because Shinra doesn’t feel abstract anymore. It feels familiar.

It represents a version of the world where success is measured by efficiency and growth, even when those things come at the cost of life itself. It’s not just a villain—it’s a warning about what happens when systems lose their connection to meaning.

And the answer the story gives isn’t to destroy systems entirely. It’s to refuse to become them.

If there is one core truth at the center of Final Fantasy VII, it’s this:

Don’t become the devil.

And while that sounds simple and easy, the story of Final Fantasy VII points out that it's really not always so clear. It takes an awareness of how to keep your humanity intact amidst modern developments. 

Don’t let ambition detach from consequence. Don’t let systems define what has value. Don’t let the pursuit of power sever your connection to people, to community, or to the world itself. Because once that connection is gone, everything else follows.

What makes Final Fantasy VII a true epic, though, isn’t just its themes. It’s its legacy.

Epics don’t just exist—they spread. They become part of how people think. They get retold, reinterpreted, and passed on. Final Fantasy VII has done exactly that.

It shaped a generation that grew up with it. It continues to shape new ones through its remakes and reinterpretations. Its characters, its imagery, its ideas—they persist. That’s a mimetic legacy. And it’s still growing.

There’s one more piece that matters. Every epic is tied to the medium that carries it. Ancient epics were oral traditions. Then came written works. Then came film. 

Final Fantasy VII exists in something newer—interactive media. And that changes everything. Because this isn’t just a story you watch or read. It’s a story you participate in. You move through it. You make choices within it. You inhabit its world. That makes its ideas more personal, more immediate, and more enduring.

That’s why I believe this story matters a lot.

Not because it’s nostalgic. Not because it’s popular. But because it is quietly doing what epics have always done:

It’s teaching us how to see the world. And more importantly, it’s warning us about what we might become if we’re not careful.

The Rat, the Unicorn, and the Mortals

I’ve been working on a new novel, and like many fantasy stories, it carries with it old legends—stories whispered long before the events of the main tale begin. This is one of them. It tells of a wish, a unicorn, and the moment the worlds were first divided.

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Long before the worlds were parted, when forests were older than the names of kings and rivers had not yet chosen their courses, there lived a woman who kept a small gray rat.

The rat’s name was Rick.

He was not remarkable among rats. He knew the scent of grain and the comfort of warm hands. He knew the quiet rustle of cloth and the shadowed spaces beneath cupboards where the world felt safe and still.

He knew the woman’s voice, and the kindness of being fed. But he did not know why any of these things mattered.

For a rat does not ask such questions.

As a rat, he knew no more of meaning than a chair or a table knows meaning. He lived by warmth and hunger and the smallest contentment of being alive, and that was enough.

The woman loved him gently, the way one loves a small creature that curls beside the hearth in the evenings. Yet sometimes she looked beyond her window and wondered if there might be something greater waiting for her in the world.

One night, beneath a pale and watchful moon, she wandered into a forest where the trees grew tall and quiet.

There she met a unicorn.

The unicorn regarded her with bright, untroubled eyes, for unicorns did not then hide themselves from the world, nor did they understand the fragile sorrows of mortal hearts.

“What do you wish?” asked the unicorn. For unicorns were generous with miracles, though they were not always careful with them.

The woman hesitated only a moment.

“I wish my rat could become a beautiful man,” she said softly, “so that I might love him as he loves me.”

The unicorn tilted her head. For unicorns understood beauty very well. And to a unicorn, beauty and eternity were the same thing.

So the unicorn granted the wish. Rick the rat became a handsome man.

He stood beneath the pale trees, tall and radiant in the moonlight, and the woman cried out with joy. She gave him a name worthy of the miracle she believed she had been given.

She called him Shadrick.

At first the world seemed a wonder to him.

He could speak. He could think. He could look upon the woman and understand the strange ache that lived in his chest when she smiled.

But with that understanding came something else.

Time.

He watched the woman grow older. The brightness of her laughter softened, the steadiness of her hands began to tremble like candlelight in a restless wind.

Shadrick, however, never changed.

The unicorn had made him beautiful. And beauty—so the unicorn believed—could never fade.

When the woman died, Shadrick stood beside her grave while the rain fell quietly through the grass. He wept the sorrowful tears that only meaning can bring. After his cries of longing had gone unanswered by the tomb and the larger world, he said nothing for a great while.

Then at last he spoke.

“What was the meaning of it?”

He remembered the life he had lived before. The life where nothing had meaning at all. The rat had known hunger and comfort and fear, but never the terrible knowledge that all things must end.

It was meaning that had given him that knowledge.

Meaning had given him love.

Meaning had given him grief.

And so the immortal Shadrick came to believe something no mortal man nor immortal unicorn would ever understand: that meaning itself was the cruelest magic in the world.

In the centuries that followed, he searched for a way to quiet that cruelty and unmake meaning.

From his sorrow he shaped a strange and subtle hunger—something that fed not upon flesh, but upon the desires born from the knowledge of mortality. It grew wherever a finite life claimed purpose, gathered love, or found longing.

The unicorns began to notice the thinning of mortal hearts. They did not understand grief the way mortals do, nor did they trouble themselves much with the quiet tragedies of human hearts. Unicorns loved beauty and innocence, and they tended their forests and the creatures within them as one keeps a garden.

They cared for their woods. They cared for the living things that wandered through them. And they wished men, women and all mortals to remain as beautiful and clean as their capacity allowed—indeed, as they ought to yearn to be.

But the dulling of their hearts was not beautiful.

Where Shadrick's devouring beast passed, the world seemed thinner. The songs of birds lost their brightness. The green of leaves grew dull. Creatures wandered without purpose, as though something quiet and important had been taken from them.

And the unicorns would not have their world made hollow, so they did what no creature had ever done before. They separated the realm of mortals from their own.

The lands of wonder and the lands of humankind were drawn apart like two pages of a book, slowly and carefully, so that neither would tear.

But the unicorns did not simply push the emptiness away.

Instead they gathered it.

They removed the hungry thing Shadrick had made from the roots of the world and the quiet corners of mortal longing, and with their ancient magic they extracted and shaped it. The emptiness that had once threatened to swallow meaning became the very thing that held the realms apart. They wove it into a boundary between worlds.

This boundary was called the Null.

On one side lay the lands of humankind, where time moved quickly and hearts were fragile. On the other side lay Luminwood. The deep forest where unicorns walked beneath leaves that never lost their brightness.

Yet even such a boundary could not stand alone.

A single set of beautiful, cloven hooves must continue to walk the mortal side, where wishes were still spoken and careless miracles might yet be born.

And so one unicorn stepped forward.

She left the forests of Luminwood and entered the world of humans, taking a shape that could walk quietly among them. She did not go because she understood sorrow better than the others.

Unicorns never forget.

They remember every flower that has ever bloomed in their woods, every stream that has ever run beneath their trees. And she remembered one small thing that had once grown in the world.

A wish.

A small gray rat.

And the man he had become.

And the ravenous spirit he unleashed.

So she crossed the barrier to tend the forest of that unforgotten thing, and to see that it never again grew wild enough to hollow the world.

Centuries passed.

Kingdoms rose and fell. Forests were cut and planted again. The old stories became little more than quiet legends whispered at the edges of memory.

But boundaries weaken. Old magic stirs.

And somewhere, in the silent places between worlds, something still listens for the moment when the barrier trembles.

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A Modern Footnote

Centuries later, when the barrier finally trembled again, no one in the human world noticed at first.

The news spoke only of an explosion in a research building and the strange garden that had appeared overnight where concrete and glass had once stood.

Most people watched the footage and forgot it before the evening ended.

But somewhere in an office break room, a woman stood very still as the broadcast played. She still had a child waiting for her at home when the workday ended.

For a moment—just a moment—the camera caught the trunk of a tree in the center of that impossible garden.

The bark was silver, and she longed for home.

Double Bind Binging Businesswomen

The double bind psychology generated in the workplace. Let’s talk about it.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, that’s OK. Neither was I.

Not until my typical mosey to the car after work, trying to make sense of the scatterplot of thoughts that undulates through my mind when I’m dealing with intense feelings or complicated issues. I grabbed a few words describing the disconnect I felt, plugged them into Google, and Gemini served a term I hadn’t heard before:

Illustration adapted from a concept by Dr. Doyenne.

“Double bind.”

A double bind happens when the range of acceptable behavior becomes extremely narrow — when you’re essentially damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Speak confidently, and you risk being perceived as aggressive.
Soften your language, and you risk being perceived as unsure.

Too direct → “difficult.”
Too collaborative → “not decisive.”

As a woman and as a mother, many of us learn to navigate this dynamic early, even if we don’t know the term.

One reason I notice it so clearly is that I’m also transgender. That has given me the unusual experience of moving through professional spaces while being perceived very differently at different points in my life.

At 18 years old — perceived as male — I worked as an electrician. I had about two years of informal on-the-job training and was still in the middle of a vocational program I was completing on my own.

Despite being early in my career, I was moved into a foreman role and regularly treated as an authority.

Eighteen. Year. Old. Boy.

Fast forward to today.

Thirteen years after transitioning. A 39-year-old woman.

I finished that vocational program years ago — six years before transitioning, at age 20. Since then I’ve earned an associate’s degree in accounting, pursued bachelor’s-level education in math and data analytics, completed Python automation coursework through Google and Coursera, and spent over a decade in auditing, accounting, and credit analysis.

Across that time I’ve studied systems — electrical systems, computer and data systems, financial systems, and the mathematical models behind them.

But recognizing expertise requires something simple organizations often fail to practice:

Listening beyond the level of stereotyping.

When we rely too heavily on assumptions about who “sounds authoritative,” we risk filtering out insight before we’ve even heard it.

Over time this has made me pay close attention to how organizations recognize expertise — and how easily ideas detach from the people who first surface them.

There’s another dimension to this that’s personal.

For the first 26 years of my life I avoided femininity. I was raised male in a very fundamentalist environment and learned early that femininity was something to suppress — at the risk of cruelty.

Ironically, that early conditioning benefited my career beyond reason.

Eighteen. Year. Old. Electrical. Foreman.

In many professional environments you must be competitive, assertive — even aggressive — to move forward. Assertiveness and femininity don’t have to collide, but in many people’s minds they still do.

After spending much of my life suppressing femininity, I’m not willing to abandon it now to fit a narrower idea of what authority should look like.

And the real question is:

Why should anyone have to?

Strong organizations evaluate ideas on their substance — not how closely the speaker fits a stereotype of authority.

Because sometimes the biggest constraint in a system isn’t capability.

It’s misperception.

Rebuilding the American Dream: Why We Need a Maximum Wage Ratio

How historical pay ratios shaped our culture of ambition, and how a 100:1 cap can restore it.

In America, we’ve spent decades arguing over the minimum wage. But the real imbalance isn’t at the bottom. It’s at the top.

Other nations have already tested this idea. In Switzerland, citizens voted on the 1:12 Initiative in 2013, which would have capped any CEO’s salary at twelve times that of their lowest-paid employee. It failed, but it reframed Europe’s debate on compensation. In Japan, corporate culture keeps executive pay naturally restrained—often around 30 - 50× an average worker’s pay—more by norm than by law. And in the United States, Portland, Oregon became the first city to tax pay inequality. Beginning in 2017, companies reporting CEO-to-median-worker pay ratios above 100:1 pay a 10% tax surcharge; above 250:1 pay 25%.

But 250:1 is still astronomical. It roughly matched national ratios from the mid-2010s; already deep into the inequality spiral. So while Portland made history, it didn’t make harmony. The gap here still feels like despair. Workers don’t sense civic pride; they feel underpaid and unseen. The moral gesture is there, but the ratio is too wide to heal the disconnect.

That’s why America needs to go further. Not a minimum wage debate. A maximum wage ratio: a simple rule tying the top to the bottom, so that success lifts everyone instead of leaving them behind. Not punishment, but proportion. Not equality of outcomes, but equality of belonging.

The right number isn’t 250:1, or even 150:1. It’s 100:1, which is the balance America had during its most ambitious, hopeful era, when work still meant possibility, and success still felt shared.

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A Short History of Pay Ratios and Pop Culture

The story of wealth in America is really a story of vibe. How people felt about success, work, and reward.

Era	Avg. CEO-to-Worker Ratio	Cultural Mood	Pop-Culture Snapshot
1970s	~30:1	Blue-collar pride and suburban stability	9 to 5, Rocky → Hard work = dignity
1980s	~50:1	Wall Street excess, deregulation, MTV materialism	“Greed is good” → Wealth = glamour
1990s	~100:1	Tech optimism, expanding opportunity	Hip-hop’s golden age, Office Space, Jerry Maguire → Hustle = hope
2000s	200:1+	Housing bubble, debt addiction	“Keeping up with the Joneses” → Hustle = stress
2010s	300:1+	Gig economy, burnout, inequality boom	“Grind culture,” irony → Work = survival

The ’90s: The Balance Between Dream and Delusion

The late ’90s were the last time the American Dream still felt plausible. The economy was expanding, tech was unlocking new paths to wealth, and culture celebrated work not as punishment but as self-expression.

Hip-hop and pop culture glorified success, but also the struggle to get there. Think “Mo Money Mo Problems,” “Can’t Knock the Hustle.” Even films like Office Space and Jerry Maguire wrestled with meaning, not just money. It was a strange equilibrium: ambition with empathy. You could believe in hard work and fairness at the same time.

The 2000s: When Hustle Turned Hollow

By the early 2000s, that equilibrium broke. Tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate excess pushed ratios past 200:1. The grind became an obligation instead of a dream. “Work hard, play hard” turned into “Work nonstop, maybe survive.”

The 2008 crash sealed it. The wealthy bounced back fast; everyone else was told to tighten their belts. That’s when hustle culture stopped feeling inspirational and started feeling like gaslighting.

Why 100:1 Is the Sweet Spot

• Rewards innovation and leadership.
• Demands shared prosperity.
• Keeps success aspirational without becoming absurd.

If your lowest-paid worker earns $40,000, your highest earner can make up to $4 million. Plenty of room for ambition, comfort, and creativity.

But once pay passes 200 - 300:1, something spiritual collapses. People stop believing they live in the same system as their bosses. When that faith goes, so do motivation, trust, and pride.

Making It Real

1. Corporate tax scaling. Lower rates for companies under 100:1; surcharges above it (tightening Portland’s model for real impact).
2. Public disclosure. Every company publishes its pay ratio. Let consumers and investors decide what feels fair.
3. Federal contracts. Only companies under 100:1 qualify for public funding or procurement.
4. Bonus reform. Shift stock-based compensation toward long-term value shared with workers (profit-sharing, employee ownership, and retention dividends).

If you want a raise at the top, raise the floor first.

The New American Dream

We can keep the hustle: The drive, the creativity, the love of success; but we have to re-anchor it in fairness.

A maximum wage ratio isn’t anti-wealth. It’s pro-trust, pro-dignity, and pro-sustainability. It says: you can climb as high as you want, but the ladder has to stay attached to the ground.

The 1990s gave us the last version of the Dream that still felt real. Maybe it’s time we take that ratio—and that optimism—and build forward from there.

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Note: Historical pay-ratio series from sources like EPI, AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch, and SEC pay-ratio disclosures. Portland’s surcharge effective 2017. Japanese ranges reflect widely reported corporate norms rather than statutory caps.

The Dialogue

In my last post, I wrote about Animorphs #31: The Conspiracy. Not just the family tension, but Jake’s opening description of the war with the Yeerks: a secret war that most people don’t see. I talked about how that framing becomes a roadmap, not only for the rest of Animorphs, but for how we recognize and resist cults; and, more broadly, modern fascism hiding in plain sight. 

And of course I also had mentioned how the series became a major literary fulcrum in my memoir. It is a major part of my childhood that affected my thinking regarding the fundamentalist cult I was raised in.

I hadn’t planned to keep writing about the series.
But as I've continued my reread, #33 The Illusion stopped me cold.

Most readers remember this book for its torture sequence. Team scout and loner, Tobias, is captured, restrained, enduring unbearable psychic pain as a terrible Yeerk leader and her machine twist his brain’s pain and pleasure centers. It’s one of the most excruciating scenes in the entire series. But what struck me most wasn’t the physical torment. It was what surfaced during it.

In the middle of the torture, Tobias’s mind slips—or maybe the machine drags him deeper—and suddenly he’s in a memory. A dim living room. The shades drawn. His uncle in front of the TV, a beer in his hand. Tobias speaks, tentative, trying to share something that matters.

He says his drawing has been chosen for an award. It’s an honor. He’s excited. He just wants someone to see him. His uncle doesn’t look up. Doesn’t pause the TV. He asks if there’s prize money, and when Tobias says no, the man mutters that he had a job at that age. The words land flat.

Tobias feels the beginnings of tears and chokes them down, before retreats to his room and gazing forlornly out the window.

Outside, a mother and daughter are getting out of their car, the daughter clumsily juggling a school project in hand: a finger painting that’s getting slightly crumpled in how she is managing it. The mother stops, rescues it, and holds it up "like it was the Mona Lisa" as she carries it into the house.

Tobias watches. Realizes he’s alone. The tears start to pour, but when he moves to wipe them away, he sees his hand is covered in feathers. It’s a wing. And that snaps him back to the present. Back to the pain, the restraint, the violation.

It’s such a quiet, devastating moment. The boundary between memory and reality dissolving in the very act of survival. And that’s the line that undid me. Because I think every former child of neglect, knows that window. And as a trans parent, I'm on alert for it.

The duality of the glass

I read that scene and felt two people inside me: the child looking out, and the parent looking in.
The part of me that still aches to be seen, and the part of me trying to teach my daughter that she already is.

The other night, she told me there’s no representation anywhere for kids with trans parents. Not in books. Not in movies. Not even online. She said it gently, but the loneliness behind it was heavy.

I said something small... something like, “Yeah, I know. There really isn’t much.”

Later, I realized I could’ve said more. I could’ve turned it into a moment—a Mona Lisa moment—where I stopped everything I was carrying and held her words carefully in my hands.

But then I remembered that she felt safe enough to tell me. And our conversation had closed with her remarking that her friend was making an animation, and she’d asked her to include a trans mom. And I told her how proud I was of her noticing things like that, and being so bold in trying to change narratives to show real lives that get overlooked.

So hopefully she did feel seen, after all. My daughter is an artist and animator herself, and we ended the night by sitting together and watching an anime we enjoy.

The hawk mind

When Tobias retreats into his hawk mind, it’s supposed to protect him. To dull the pain, to detach. But even inside that refuge, the human part of him bleeds through: the boy in the dark room, speaking into silence.

Reading that, I wondered what my own hawk mind has looked like over the years.

When you’re raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, you learn how to hover above your own feelings. You learn to perform bravery, to be “proud” of being different, even when it isolates you. You learn that openness is duty, not authenticity.

I carried that habit into adulthood... into parenthood, even. Generally, when I think about my daughter out in the world—talking about her family, trying to fit that story into other people’s narrow templates—I am looking for ways to make it easier for her. Little adjustments to language that might save her from having to explain too much. Even expressing little exceptions...  Just to let her know her needs are what come first.

But sometimes, the hawk instinct comes out louder than I mean it to. I tell my kids they should be proud of who they are, proud of their family, proud of having a trans parent. And I mean that. They should be. But I’ve realized that sometimes I’ve said it like a commandment—like it’s their job to feel that way. Like pride is a duty.

That’s not what I mean or want for them. I don’t want them to inherit pride as another duty. A mask like mine was, to wear in spite of people, or in front of me. I want it instead to be a well they can draw on when people don’t understand. I want them to arrive at it naturally, formed on its own from love, and in their own words. 

And I do feel we've accomplished that, even if situations are not always easy.

Because for most people, family still comes in tidy shapes: mom, dad, brother, sister. Ours doesn’t. She has two moms, and we’re separate, and she moves between our homes. It’s not something she should have to justify. So I tell her that however she needs to talk about it—whatever phrasing helps her move through those moments with dignity and calm—is okay with me.

It’s not that she needs to redefine who I am... she already knows. I'm the custodial parent. We are close and the relationship with the other is somewhat rocky. But it’s that my daughter deserves to feel at ease while navigating a world that still isn’t sure what to do with families like ours.

So maybe my hawk mind isn’t what protects me anymore. Maybe it’s what keeps me from swooping down to meet her where she is.

Default pride

That’s where I’m learning to draw the line. Between pride that’s assigned and pride that’s embodied.

When I was a Witness, pride was mandatory. Visibility was obedience. Now, as a trans woman and a mother, pride feels different. It’s not something I expect from my daughter; it’s something I want her to have room to define for herself.

If it’s easier for her to talk about us like we’re a single mom—one word, one presence, one safe explanation—she can. If it feels better to say “my moms,” or to call us separately “Mommy” and “Mama,” that’s hers to decide. She doesn’t owe anyone the logistics of her family.

All I want is for her to move through the world without shrinking. To know she can adjust her language without betraying who we are. That it’s okay to choose comfort over confrontation, and that doing so doesn’t make her less brave.

That’s what I mean by default pride: not a performance, not a duty, but the quiet knowing that your family is whole, even when you have to describe it in shorthand.

Because the words don’t make us real. The love does.

Through the window

Sometimes I think about Tobias at that window, and how many of us grow up staring through our own versions of that glass. Some of us never stop. We spend our lives trying to become the parent in the scene. The one who knows when to stop, take the weight, and carry the painting gently inside.

Maybe that’s the real miracle of stories like Animorphs: they hand us our old selves in ways we can finally understand. They remind us that the hawk and the child are still in dialogue, still teaching each other how to be whole.

And sometimes, the only thing between them is a window: one we’ve spent our whole lives learning to open.

Who's fighting? Where Are the Uniforms? Whereas The Conspiracy...

How an Unlikely 1990s Series Becomes a Map for Resisting in Today’s Invisible Wars...

We’re in a war, fighting for the survival of the human race. 

You’re thinking. Yeah right. That’s okay. I know... I probably would’ve said the same thing once. 

No way. Not a chance. If it’s true, where are the troops storming the beaches? Where are the bombs? Where’s the battlefield, the RPVs, and the cruise missiles? 

…But it’s true. Every now and then the crazy becomes real. 

And this is not a clean war, if there is such a thing. A war like World War II, where thousands saw the wrongs being committed and stood up to correct them. Where you attacked an enemy you could see, an enemy who wore a uniform and came right back at you, guns blazing. 

This isn’t that kind of war at all.
[It's]... more subtle than that...

When I first read these words, they kind of sounded like they could’ve been written for today. About creeping fascism. About MAGA, maybe. About another deceptive political or religious movement, perhaps. About the way cult‑like movements don’t march in uniforms, or bedsheets, anymore — they infiltrate, they whisper, they spread online.

But these words aren’t from a think piece on our current politics. They were written in the 1990s, for the 31st book in a children’s science‑fiction series called Animorphs. I've been rereading much of the series for nostalgia-sake, but this is the first time I've read this entry. If you’ve never heard of this series, or only vaguely remember the covers with kids turning into animals, then you’re not alone.

Here’s why it matters: Animorphs might just be the most relevant, overlooked survival guide for our current moment.

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What Animorphs Is About (and Why It Matters)

Animorphs was a 54‑book young adult series created by K.A. Applegate—the writing duo of Katherine Applegate and husband Michael Grant—published between 1996 and 2001. On the surface, it’s about five teenagers — later six — who gain the power to morph into any animal they touch. They use this ability to resist an alien invasion of Earth.

That might sound simple, even cheesy. But the genius of Animorphs is that the aliens — called Yeerks — don’t invade with spaceships and laser guns. They invade quietly, by slipping into people’s minds. A Yeerk is a slug‑like creature that crawls into a person’s ear canal and takes over their brain. From the outside, the person looks completely normal. On the inside, they are a prisoner. Their body and voice are being used by someone else.

The Yeerks set up a youth group called The Sharing, which looks like a community club. It’s fun, it’s safe, it’s welcoming. Kids sign up, families get involved — and slowly, piece by piece, more people fall under control.

The teenagers in the series — Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Tobias, and later Ax — discover the truth and are forced to resist. They can’t tell anyone. They can’t trust the police, or their teachers, or even their own families. The invasion is already happening, and no one believes them.

Sound familiar?

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Book 31: The Compass

By the time you get to Book 31, The Conspiracy, the war has dragged on for years. Jake, the team’s reluctant leader, opens the book with the passage quoted above. He’s trying to convince the reader that the war is real — even though there are no tanks in the street, no uniforms, no clear enemy you can point to.

This moment matters because it captures the feeling of fighting an invisible war. A war where the biggest obstacle isn’t the enemy itself — it’s convincing anyone else that the enemy exists.

That’s why Book 31 is somewhat of a compass for where the series is headed. It points us to the reality that this kind of war doesn’t look like the ones we grew up learning about in history class. It’s not Normandy or Pearl Harbor. It’s infiltration. It’s narrative control. It’s disinformation.

And that’s exactly what our politics feels like today.

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The Series as the Map

If Book 31 is the compass, the entire series becomes like a map. Because Animorphs doesn’t just identify the problem — it shows what resistance looks like. And it’s not clean. It’s not easy.

• Jake shows us how leadership is necessary, but corrodes when every choice is between bad and worse.
• Rachel shows us how the strongest and most dedicated can be the most energetic, inspired, and triumphant; but can so easily be consumed by violence and death.
• Marco teaches both strategy and cynicism as a survival tool, always asking: who benefits? 
• Cassie embodies empathy, along with the painful truth that it can be weaponized and that compassion has limits.
• Tobias shows how trauma reshapes identity — but also brings clarity or purpose.
• Ax represents loyalty fractured by conscience. He helps us recognize the value of found family, and the cost of blind obedience.

Together, their stories form a guide. Not to victory without cost — but to survival when the enemy is everywhere and nowhere.

Animorphs teaches that to resist systems like the Yeerks — or MAGA, or QAnon, or any movement that functions like a cult — you need more than good intentions. You need strategy. You need empathy sharpened into a something dangerous. You need the willingness to act ruthlessly but strategically when it matters, even at great personal cost.

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Why This Resonates Now

The Yeerks were never just aliens. They were metaphors for the systems that hollow people out: fascism, religious extremism, propaganda, authoritarian politics. Before we could put words to is, they were every movement that says “we’re here to help” while demanding absolute control.

The Sharing was never just a youth group. It was a stand‑in for how cults recruit, how authoritarianism spreads, how people are seduced by belonging.

Reading Animorphs today feels unsettling because it doesn’t read like the past. It reads like a warning we ignored.

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The Takeaway (and series spoilers... sorry)

In the end, the Yeerk War doesn’t end with one clean battle. It ends because each member of the team makes a choice — a choice so costly that without it, Earth would have been lost.

• Jake, the leader, chooses to sacrifice his own brother, who has been enslaved by a Yeerk. Destroying the enemy ship that Yeerks is on also means destroying part of his own family. His choice means the loss of both his brother and cousin, Rachel. It’s a ruthless calculation, and it breaks him. But without it, humanity would not have survived.
• Rachel, the warrior, chooses a mission of near-certain death. She accepts the one-way assignment to take down a powerful enemy, almost certain not to return. She becomes a blade the others cannot wield, and without her sacrifice, the war would have continued. But she loses her life in the process.
• Marco, the strategist, chooses pragmatism over innocence. He becomes the voice who justifies the impossible, who says aloud what the others won’t. Without him, hesitation would have paralyzed the team.
• Cassie, the healer, chooses compromise. She intervenes to stop one of Jake’s most devastating orders from being carried out, pushing for a surrender rather than total annihilation. Without her, the war might have ended in ashes.
• Ax, the alien teenager, chooses humanity over his own people. His defection proves decisive. Without him, victory might have belonged to his race — but not to Earth.
• Tobias, the team scout/surveillance.... and the outcast... carries the grief and embodies the cost of the war. He is traumatized, and he's broken by the unbearable loss of Rachel, the one he loved, and becomes the witness to everything the team sacrificed. Though he remained bitter, unable to forgive, carrying grief that never healed. Without him, there would be no memory, no reckoning.

Each choice is devastating. Each choice leaves scars that never heal. But together, those choices end the war. And that’s the point: if even one of them had refused, the Yeerks would have gained the upper hand and won.

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What That Means for Us

We are in our own invisible war now. Not with alien slugs — but with authoritarianism, disinformation, and movements that hollow people out while smiling to their faces.

The lesson is that survival doesn’t come from waiting for a clean, cinematic victory. It comes from choices:

• Choosing when to be ruthless.
• Choosing when to sacrifice.
• Choosing when to be pragmatic.
• Choosing when to compromise.
• Choosing when to resist.
• Choosing when to bear witness.

None of these choices are easy. None of them are pure. They all come with costs. But if we refuse to make them — if we sit back and hope it all resolves on its own — then the war will be decided for us. And not in our favor.

In my memoir, I use Animorphs and other books from my childhood to help chart my path out of the cult I grew up in. With Animorphs, I use it as a literary fulcrum to display my own developing callousness to the cult I grew up in and my family. To show how it felt to live under control, being told I must lead the congregation from an early age, and living with family that felt like sometimes they weren't speaking from their own, real thoughts.

Like they were under control of some parasite that found it's way into their ear.

Such things, like the fictional Yeerks, only gain the upper hand when no one is willing to confront. When no one is willing to make choices from their own gut and good sense, and instead of from social pressure and perhaps what appear to be social norms. 

The same is true now.

Atheism is True, Proof is False, and Assertions are Null

Having grown up as a fundamentalist Christian, I still really love symbolism. I think it's why I enjoy coding, encryption, and illustrative, allegorical writing so much. So if the title to this essay seems a bit presumptive, here's what "Atheism is True" means from an initial, strictly logical, mathematical perspective:

Atheism exists.

We’re often told life is about choosing a side. You either believe or you don’t. You either say yes or no, true or false, right or wrong. But what if that’s not the whole picture? Some people aren’t choosing a set of beliefs—because those answers, for them, just aren't there to choose from.

In the disciplines of Data Science and Discrete Mathematics, there’s a concept that explains this, if you aren't seeing the bigger picture.

When examining a data structure that contains a boolean—which is a simple True or False choice—there aren’t just two options. The structure can contain either that True or False value, or it can simply be empty. When that happens, we describe the emptiness as "Null." That doesn’t mean zero. It doesn’t mean false. It means undefined. It means no value has been provided. The field is blank.

And if a computer program looks for a True or False answer without recognizing that the structure might be Null—it might be empty—the program can literally fail. It won’t know what to do without the missing information—unless it’s been encoded to expect that possibility.

This is essentially what many atheists are trying to express in real life.

Atheism describes the consideration of God as a structure—as an entity or institution—and it isn’t necessarily claiming “False.” Instead—as you've probably heard but maybe had a hard time wrapping your head around—atheism is the absence of belief.

A-belief. A-theism.

Atheism, as a concept, isn’t saying “False.” It’s saying “Null.” It’s saying there is no real True or False information available. The structure is simply empty of data that can be evaluated. It’s not a denial. It’s not a rebellion. It’s a recognition: the field has not been filled.

The data structure for God, from this view, just doesn’t contain evidence that can be classified one way or the other.

And this isn’t just a technical point. It matters in real life—in families, in classrooms, in communities. When people are pressured to take a position they don’t actually hold—or to claim belief where none exists—it can create distance, even harm. Some of the deepest tensions in our culture come from that push to choose, when all someone really wants is to be honest: I don’t know. I don’t believe. I haven’t seen the data.

This doesn’t mean all atheists think alike. Some do actively claim that the God proposition is False. That’s often referred to as strong atheism. But what I'm describing here is the actual definition of atheism—the absence of belief. Sometimes called implicit or common atheism. Atheism in its clearest conceptual form.

And when you understand that, you see why the pressure to declare True or False can feel so off. For atheists like myself, the identity doesn't stem from refusing to believe, and it shouldn’t be framed as something negative. It’s a way of holding space for the unknown. Some people are just living with Null.

And there is meaning in recognizing Null. It's honest. It’s real. It's utility within the structure of our cultures—available to hold any True or False information the future. And it's just as valid if it never does, even if some refuse to see it that way.