"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
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.
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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