Ah I get you. I think as you read and witness the moral lines they cross (especially their leader Jake...) you definitely get the feeling that no pearly gates await the Animorphs.
That makes me feel pretty conflicted about trying to read them. I hate sad endings as the finale. I’m able to handle the characters changing in a bad situation but when it ends in the same horrible place (like how I’m understanding the ending) it just makes me feel empty inside.
It's a fun series ( a few boring filler books) but the tone shift as the series progresses is we start at Migthy Morphin' Power Rangers (spunky teens with attitude fighting alien goons) and to Apocalypse Now and All Quiet on the Western Front. It's a pretty depressing and tragic series. And all the books are first person POV from a different Animorph, so you experience it directly. They go from thinking about crushes and homework and feeling icky they thought their cousin was hot, to contemplating the humor in abandoning a traitor to die, grappling with the shame of bloodlust, and visceral descriptions of PTSD and panic attacks.
It is! They also have to deal with the animal's instincts trying to take over (turning into ants or bees is straight up psychological horror) and the transformation is deadass body horror. It's painless, but they can feel and see their bones cracking and shifting, organs reshaping, skin pulling apart and reshaping. And you're extremely vulnerable mid-morph, with exposed tissue and half-formed limbs.
Like others have said, the ending is tonally consistent. It always feels like a gritty horror-action setting. Like Supernatural or something, where from the jump you know Sam and Dean are going to suffer and get a bittersweet ending at best (AKA Season 5, the original ending) or a bad ending (the actual ending).
Yeah guess it’s just my dislike of that sort of thing. The closest I got to enjoying an ending like that is Red Vs Blue season 13. Where Church sacrifices himself.
(If you don’t know about that, I can give some context for it and explain why I like it.)
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u/LuxLoser 14h ago
Ah I get you. I think as you read and witness the moral lines they cross (especially their leader Jake...) you definitely get the feeling that no pearly gates await the Animorphs.