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