Not Entirely Happy With How This One Turned Out But It's Still Pretty Cool

not entirely happy with how this one turned out but it's still pretty cool

little gideon gif I made while bored

I might try to add on to it later

these books were my everything in my preteens and now I am afraid to reread them because I have them on a pedestal in my mind and I don't want my opinion of them to change lol

Sometimes I randomly remember Maximum Ride exists and then recall some random thing from it that I had completely forgotten from previous rememberings and fully start to lose my shit about it again

There is a very specific and narrow window in a developing preteen/teens mind to read these books where you can revel in the full unhingedness of them, without being old enough to question what the fuck is going on

I recently found out that there is a physical copy of CDAD in the works and I am so excited-- I had the idea to redraw the cover for funsies. I can't wait to be able to put my favorite book on my bookshelf :) @zrreed

image one is my rendition of the cover, image two is the sketch for it, image three is the actual cover

Fun little Quirks for the Flock!

(AKA: I don’t believe in superpowers, but I do believe in uncanny valley)

Tapetum Lucidum/Eyeshine. The classic staple. The shorthand, if you will, of saying “this thing ain’t human”. Most birds have yellow or red eyeshine to further distance them from mammals.

On a related note, bird pupils can normally expand way more than a human’s, especially in dim light. Catch any of the flock around dusk and there’s hardly any Iris left, just these black voids in the middle of their face.

Bird noises, my beloved— the flock can have a wide range of very-not-human sounds that they use among each other, and there’s no reason for these isolated kids to ever realize that they maybe shouldn’t do that in front of other humans.

So owls are not the only bird with extended neck movements. A lot of birds have higher neck mobility. Which is to say that the flock should be able to turn their heads a good 120 degrees without much issue, and this is ANOTHER thing that they’d likely forget most people can’t do.

I know it was a funny moment when someone tried to give them bird seed, but it would be genuinely interesting for them to have diet changes. All of them have given into the urge to eat raw meat at least once. Some of them do it regularly, especially when they’re traveling.

Straight-up teeth gore. Birds are, at their core, reptiles, closely related to alligators and crocodiles. So it makes sense for the flock, since they have teeth instead of beaks, to have them fall out and regrow from time to time, especially if those teeth are damaged.

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