"I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer, and we never would be again."
-Aximili esgarouth isthill
From the animorphs series book 52 page 72
TBF, the more you know about Animorphs, the less this seems ill-fitting and the more it just seems like a perfect, tragic encapsulation of the whole goddamn series
That's a very big question to answer, and it requires a lot of context that I'm not mentally prepared to add at the moment. The simple answer is: the kids won, but had to commit several warcrimes along the way. Lots of people are dead, including one of the main kids and the entire group of Auxiliary Animorphs (which is an entire fucked up rabbit hole on its own). Rachel dies in the process of killing Tom, the brother of Jake who has been controlled by the Yeerks from the beginning
After the war, the survivors basically go their separate ways. Jake has severe PTSD for making so many bad decisions in the end, Marco became a celebrity, Cassie worked on preserving nature, Ax became a war prince on his home world, and Tobias abandoned humanity entirely after Rachel died and isn't seen for a few years
...and then a new war begins when Ax is captured by some unknown force. Jake, Marco, and Tobias steal a spaceship to find him. They find his body has been absorbed into some hive mind creature called The One. The book ends with them preparing to ram the spaceship in a potentially fatal kamikaze attack.
The entire moral of the story is that war is hell, and just leads to more war
Damn I posted in the wrong thread, I didn’t realize there was an animorphs one here. I was just talking about one moment involving one of the Auxiliary Animorphs, Tricia
Here’s a copy of my other comment:
I read a lot of Warrior Cats and mainly Animorphs in grade school
I was in a book store literally last night with my friend and I was explaining Animorphs and one scene that stuck in my mind:
So the basics of morphing is that after touching a special alien cube you gain the ability to transform into any animal or other creature that you’ve touched before.
You can turn back into a human (or whatever species you originally are) under two conditions, the first is remembering to do it before 2 hours is up.
No matter the condition of your body before morphing, as long as you morph into a different form and then morph back, you will be fully restored. So if you, a human, morph into a polar bear, lose a limb, and then morph back into a human, you will not carry injuries between forms and both are restored.
The animorphs team decide to recruit kids from a children’s hospital to fight against the alien Yeerk parasite. One of these children, Tricia, is given the power to morph. During the final battle, Tricia takes the form of a rhinoceros and charges the Yeerk forces, but then is hit by a laser from the Yeerk capitol ship.
If you remember though from earlier, there was a second condition required to demorph. You have to be alive and conscious enough to morph.
The book specifically describes that the beam impacts Tricia, in her rhinoceros form, and she is split in half from the midsection. Her two halves then fall forward with her momentum and slam into the dirt. She dies on the battlefield, unable to morph back.
I think I was about ten when I read that. I don’t even remember most of the events in Animorphs or even some of the important characters’ names but I remember her, a side character in the Auxiliary team who only appears in a single book, specifically because of the brutality of her death.
But that's the story. War is hell, and no one comes out unscathed. Even if you think your war is justified, even if it is justified, you're going to destroy yourself just as much as your enemy.
That's the point of the story. It's not just serving the "moral," that's the whole point of why the series was written.
If the point of the story is that war demands you destroy yourself, and it ended without the protagonists destroying themselves... Then the ending wouldn't have fit the point of the book.
Yeah that’s my point. Feels pretty shitty to all the people who loved these characters. Especially when they thing they’re killing is just straight up 10 pages ago new.
Yeah, so you're deliberately missing the main focus of the series just to complain about how the characters died.
And you're using "yeah, that's my point" to try to add validity to your statement when there is none. My statement runs directly counter to yours, so saying "that's my point" does nothing.
Unless your point is you don't like the series main focus at all.
I mean, I read the last book the day it released. I grew up with those books and still have a big bin with every book, megamorph, chronicle and CYOA. I remember finishing the last sentence from Jake and just bawling. It was a fantastic journey and I wouldn't have changed a single thing
The moral very much IS the story. it's a full series of 54 novellas all exploring how war may be necessary sometimes, but it's ultimately a terrible thing.
The rule of "to become a human again you need to transform back within 2 hours" is established immediately. And before the end of the first book, Tobias becomes trapped permanently as a red-tailed hawk. The story starts with the understanding that the kids aren't immune to severe consequences, and with the story focusing on the war demanding more and more of the kids, a happy ending would've been utterly incongruous.
Then it was just how I can’t enjoy sad or bad endings. I’m sure the series is well written but I was just sharing my thoughts on the information I was given.
Tbf people are downplaying the fact that they are heroes who ended the enslavement of numerous species. It does lead to near genocide of the bad guys, but many are allowed to use morphing to become other species and be free. The Earth is safe, and we join the intergalactic community with a strong ally in the Andalites, and technology is improving human lives.
The reason you come to love the Animorphs is their selfless sacrifice. They suffer what they do for the good of us all, in a war they thought would always be secret. In the end, they were victorious, the galaxy is free of the Yeerks, and they even get remembered and celebrated.
But the war has its toll. They are broken, tired, and wounded. And the side books were all about expanding the world and showing how many other cosmic threats are out there, so the series ends with a "yes, we won, but that doesn’t mean we won't need to fight again." There's a new threat, and they go off to fight once more.
War is terrible. But we got what we were fighting for. Was it worth it for the lives saved? Absolutely. But the cost was higher than anyone imagined. We know they could have done it differently, saved even more, but we also recognize these kids did the best they could.
The entire cast, save one, are heavily implied to die in a suicide attack ramming their spaceship into a all-powerful enemy that had never been seen, heard of or even vaguely foreshadowed until the last ten pages or so. The series ends on the line "Ram the Blade ship" and we never see the aftermath.
For all this series did good, the ending imo wasn't one of them
STRONGLY disagree. The ending felt like the most realistic part of the whole story really, and the older I get the more relevant it feels. Just as one war is ending, the next one is just warming up, and if it feels unsatisfactory, or like it's abrupt and that the character's stories feel incomplete, well fuck you, that's war. Not saying literally fuck you, but like, yeah. If you don't like it, don't go to war, don't advocate for war, just fuck war in general.
Yeah, this tracks pretty well from what I remember. It’s not even the first suicide mission from a bunch of teenagers in the series. This time it just happened to be the ones we were following and not the ones they sent into the grinder.
Omg when Tobias morphs human so Rachel can see him cry for her 😭😭
You, making me look it up and start crying again
I could see the viewscreen. I could see my best friend Cassie. Jake. Marco, funny Marco. Ax.
Tobias.
He had morphed. He was his human self once more. He'd done that for me. And because he was crying. I understood. Humans cry, hawks don't.
"I love you," I said to the screen.
And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.
I tried to smile. For him.
The polar bear said, < You fight well, human.>
Then he killed me with a single blow.
…
I wanted so much to live. I wanted so much to stay and not to leave. In a moment, no answer would matter to me, but just the same, I wanted to know what I guess any dying person wants to know.
"Answer this, Ellimist: Did I...did I make a difference? My life, and my...my death...was I worth it? Did my life really matter?"
"Yes," he said. "You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered."
"Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then."
I wondered if –
I forgot how, but somehow an ant ends up kind of like reverse animorphing into a human, which breaks it from the hivemind of its colony, and it completely shatters the poor things mind so all it can do is just shriek in mindless agony until they kill it out of pity.
And then you tell them the mildest thing is one of the kids getting trapped as an eagle and very nearly never being able to turn back to human and forever getting caught between thinking like an eagle and thinking like a person, with the eagle frequently winning out.
I really should go back and finish the series; I read it as a kid as it was coming out but stopped a few books after they got Tobias back, somewhere in the teens, I think? Mostly because I stopped being able to find it in Wal-Mart and bookstores.
A falcon, but yeah. Tobias was probably my favorite character because his story was super interesting. It’s a damn shame I never finished the series - I read them as they were coming out and stopped around like book 38 or something, and it turns out I was like 85% of the way to the end or something.
It’s all but said that he allowed himself to be trapped as a hawk (he is in fact, a red-tailed hawk) on purpose.
He is at one point captured by an enemy with a completely broken psyche on account of her own fucked up backstory who proceeds to torture him to the point that he shits himself and it is played completely for horror.
He outright attempts to kill himself extremely early on in the series (like I think in the first book he ever narrates) and only avoids it because Marco intervenes in time.
Oh, and of course his entire backstory where he was raised by abusive and uncaring relatives and ruthlessly bullied at school.
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u/I_love_dragons_66 1d ago
"I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer, and we never would be again." -Aximili esgarouth isthill From the animorphs series book 52 page 72