Huzzah!

:D

Awesome!

It was fun!

15 days until the 30th anniversary!

ooooooh!

I will have to listen.

The last book...I hold the minority opinion on the ending.

I hated it in summer 2001. It felt like a letdown. Even saw KAA's (prescient) letter about the intentions she was going for.

I will grant that the book after the cremation felt somewhat 'in search of an ending'. Like "We missed our exit on the highway, we have to go 7 more miles down to get to an exit to turn around." Though they do find one.

These days, I agree with Applegate that, as the entire series is very much a decontstruction of the whole Power Rangers "Go to school, save the world, be awesome, come home, do homework, repeat" trope, to end the core war and plot with a picture perfect ending where the villains lose the heroes win and then they all have cake would've been literary malpractice.

I didn't get the ending I wanted, no, but I got the ending I needed.

That said, some of the other books were...a mess. Particularly in mind is #38 where Cassie argues against supporting the Andalite black squad in assassinating Visser 3 because "It's just murder" and serves "no strategic or military advantage", which...Cassie at this point has already taken place in TWO attempted assassinations of Visser 3 (#8 and #36, THE PRIOR BOOK), and killing a high ranking enemy officer as a disruption is a time-honored tactic in war. It's why modern militaries try to develop independence and test for competence, but Visser 3 clearly does not operate on a "Underlings might have viewpoints I haven't considered" basis.

Just killing Visser 3's host body (and incidentally, Alloran has asked to be killed before!) and its infinity Monsters Of The Week would substantially reduce the risk of ANY operation the Animorphs take. If Visser 3 himself was removed, his removal would create a power vaccuum. His immediate subordinate is Sub-Visser Fifty One and she is...'unstable' is the most generous definition. She's not up to the job of running the invasion; she's been promoted because she's more psychotic than Esplin. It would likely take months for someone with an official rank exceeding hers to get on site to take command, during which the Animorphs could run rampant. (The Council could obviously give her orders in the interim, but given the distance, she'd have a great deal of say in how to operate in the immediate term, and she's too messed up for that to go well).

I'd link you to Adam and Ifi read Animorphs but they took it down. :(

(PS: In Youtube links, you should remove the "si" and anything after it; that's a tracking tag so that when people who click the link you provided, Google can see that they have some sort of connection to you. The video works fine without it.)

I think I love Animorphs, messiness and all. I'm probably most bitter about the Auxillaries, but there's enough wiggle room in the text, that I like to think several survived.
I just love how it explored the messiness of war and morals so much. Including when the characters contradict themselves, because they're kids! Of course they do!
Thank you!

That's what I mean about the deconstruction! The actual consequences of this stuff unlike the Power Rangers style.

And yeah, they made mistakes. Just some of them felt completely out of character.

And yeah, the auxiliaries got a raw deal. But whether we want to admit it or not, that is actually part of the job of a military leader. I spent years as a tour guide on a WWII submarine and dove into the details of the conflict. And being able to tell other people to go do things, full well in the knowledge that they might (or even will!) die, is part of being a General or Admiral. Killing others as part of a greater strategy, and having to bear that crime on your soul and still continue to work. (At least until after; Jake's PTSD worked rather well!)

This was part of Applegate's warning letter. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.
That said I missed originally this was book 15. Derp.

I love her warning letter. It's so potent now.

And yeah haha, I've been doing the book club on Tumblr, so we just finished the series this week. It was funny to go back and try to be careful of spoilers XD

The timing was alarmingly prescient. Summer of '01. :(

That was a great listen. What a mention for pools- they sure did feel over-chlorinated. Now if only the Animorphs graphic novel wasn't just a yearly make... heck. Glad it even exists as a new way to get folks to the series.

Ah yay! I'm glad you enjoyed! And you're so right about the pools. My eyes used to BURN after swimming XD