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.
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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.
Thanks so much! I just realized I can copy your comment, quote it and add the tags myself, which i was going to do and then saw your amended comment.
Much appreciated.
What a great series. I recommend pretty much everything else they worked on together and apart. Their other series are considered less complete in terms of world-building, but Remnants and Everworld both have some very interesting ideas and characters and more than a few holy shit moments.
Gone is a Grant-only venture, and pretty great as well, a whole lot of well-written dark and crazy.
Animorphs is such a rich text despite being an easy enough read that I've gone back for a reread occasionally and invariably been shocked by plot points I'd forgotten, grown closer to certain characters or just enjoyed vicarious Cinnabons depending on how I'd developed since the last go-through that it's worth a second look in the future at some point.