NO Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known!

the most harrowing animorphs book is the one where the animorphs, who are already child soldiers, are unknowingly forced to fight and kill alien children

yes, this happens

The “good” godlike figure tricks them into it and, the series representation of true pacifism chooses not to tell them what’s going on so he can use them as the tool of vengeance that his pacifism prevents him from becoming himself

#every time I learn something new about animorphs I regret ignoring the bin full of them in primary school#seriously I should have read them but I thought they were lighthearted based on the wackass starfish cover#very embarrassing but yes it was a classic judging a book entirely by its cover sitch#welp better late than never 

From memory I think that starfish one is the one where a teenage girl beats someone up with her own severed arm and also pins a random teenager to the wall in the mall (by her clothes) using steak knives, but more importantly, they are all available online for free with the writers’ blessing.

every

#I’m sorry Animorphs had a WHAT#A WAR?#I never got to read it but I always thought it was a fun and lighthearted story or something#I need to read it 

It’s um

I hate to be the one to break this to you but Animorphs is in fact a war story. The story does not exist without the war. It is specifically a story abut child soldiers being enlisted to fight bodysnatching brain slugs, meaning that almost every time the kids kill a ‘nasty invading alien’ they are also killing an innocent slave. Concepts of the morality of child soldiers, offense vs. defense, what counts as acceptable losses/acceptable collateral damage and whether it’s acceptable to slaughter enemies while they’re helpless, things like chemical warfare and the rights and protections that should be offered to displaced war refugees, as well as war not having ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and most actors being victims of their circumstances and societies, are heavily explored. (As well as trauma – these kids have SO MUCH PTSD. The first suicide attempt takes place in book 3 and things don’t really improve, especially after the torture book.)

I once did a quick tally and found that of all the “main” species in the book (humans plus any alien species that appears in three or more books), only three species do not explicitly attempt on-page genocide in the series. They’re the three species who we are introduced to in the first book as the antagonists.

I’ve done this rant before but animorphs radicalized me farther than anything else. I remember setting the last book down at the age of maybe 12 or 13, the book ending with a member of the main cast dead, warcrimes committed in the name of freedom, every character covered in scars both physical and mental, and I thought to myself “I don’t want to join the army anymore” Those books hit their target audience in me and they changed me forever. If not for them, I probably would have joined the army at 18 and royally fucked up my life

you know how sometimes a character will mention a food they like and then the fandom will turn that into like 60% of their personality?

ax animorphs is the best character because he genuinely is just Like That in canon. he has repeatedly called the cinnamon bun one of humanity's greatest inventions. he gave a cinnamon bun to a girl he liked as a present. he keeps a framed picture of a cinnamon bun in his otherwise sparsely-decorated room. one time he ate an entire tray of cinnamon buns so quickly that he horrified bystanders and had to have the paramedics called. he later admitted to practicing eating cinnamon buns to prevent himself from going ballistic again. he begins promoting cinnabon as an andalite tourist destination after the war. literally all of these sound like silly headcanons you would read in a tumblr post but they're all real. the cinnamon bun lover of all time.

Didn't the room only come after he had lived in the woods like a cryptid, but he already had the cinnamon bun picture even then? Wasn't it just a magazine ad he had cut out and hung on like a tree or in a shanty he made

He actually spends the entire series living in the woods like a cryptid, in a little dugout shelter he’s just put some furniture and a TV inside. Before he builds that, he is apparently just living in the woods without any shelter at all, just a feral alien teenager running around eating grass and the occasional snail. And yeah, I believe the cinnamon bun picture is explicitly called out as being cut from a magazine. Aximili Esgarrouth Isthill, character of all time.

How could I forget they never actually upgrade him from the dirt hole

i mean the Animorphs didn’t get rid of the pain of being a man. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like I understand where you’re coming from here but they very much did not get rid of the pain of being a man.

fuzzy space elf

also available with fabulous wintercoat

ahhhh this is great

SCREECH