Animorphs
Animorphs.
Cool friends fighting aliens...more accurately, the pariah of a fascist civilization, minutes before being eaten alive in front of said "ccol friends" persuades and then bioengineers human child soldiers to facilitate an end to an ill-conceived and failing war now reduced to unilaterally exterminating a parasitic, physically disabled species, itself undergoing a violent civil rights movement on their own planet based on their self-recognized flaws, struggling to realize its place in a universe where godlike beings exist and decide not to offer remedy(rules of the god game) and spectate while the parasites overwhelm all vulnerable species in the known universe.
The child soldiers agree to resist the parasites, but at least a minority of them believe genocide is the wrong answer. After being physically and emotionally tortured, shot, repeatedly disemboweled and having their limbs hacked or bitten off by hosts of the parasitic species, however, all of the child soldiers begin taking violent, morally devastating actions that end their lives as they know them.
Use spoiler tags as necessary! There are always new readers discovering this series.
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Finally finished the series last week for the first time and my god.
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I feel like from the moment I knew for certain someone was going to die in The Ellimists Chronicles I knew it would be Rachel, she just seemed least likely to be able to handle a post-war life.
That said I love how they managed to wrap everything up and still deliver on who dies in this book early enough to really show us the fallout after the war. I think the my favorite sequence in the whole series is definitely the tense negotiations between the animorphs and andalite high command when Marco points out that if they back down on those negotiations then the andalites will own them, because he is completely correct.
All in all a fantastic conclusion to a great series and I haven't even touched on the final fates of the yeerk pool, the animorphs reserves, or the yeerks aboard the pool ship. But I can't appreciate enough how much screentime they gave to the weight and truth of Jake's actions as a war criminal during the fighting and how that affects him.
Only fitting that the antagonist right at the end is just a bigger and more advanced version of the same existential threat the yeerks pose: being swallowed up and assimilated by an entity that doesn't want to kill you, just take away all free will and use you and your knowledge/memories to expand its reach.
I agree with everything you said, every concluding element combines into a truly fantastic ending for the series.
I'd appreciate it if you can throw a spoiler tag around your first and second paragraphs in case anybody else stumbles across the series and these posts for the first time.
thanks.
Can do, how do I format spoiler tags on lemmy?
I appreciate it.
example:
heading
contentshould look like this when you type it out:
put your heading where it says heading and the content where it says content and you're good to go!
most clients have a button with a little diamond with an exclamation point above the text box, and that'll insert the spoiler formatting into your comment for you.
full markdown explanations: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html
Sweet, I appreciate the help. I don't remember exactly what I wrote and the comment is currently removed, but if you can restore it I'll add in the spoiler tags
sure thing, it's restored.