For as much as I love Animorphs, I’ve never actually read it in order all the way through. It was always scattered entries, whatever I could find at the library or buy at garage sales. There’s even a small handful I haven’t read at all. That’s why, for my New Year’s resolution, I plan to reread the series in its entirety. However, I know how my brain works, and I’m afraid I might lose motivation and quit too soon. That’s why, after each book, I will add to this post with, in my opinion, the most fucked-up part of the book, as well as the silliest part (because anyone who’s read these books knows that those are the two main tenets of the series). That way, I’ll have a publicly available record to hold myself accountable to if I start slacking, plus a nice thread of propaganda to hopefully suck more people in. I plan to read one mainline book a week, starting with:
#1: The Invasion
Most Fucked-Up Part: Lots of strong contenders to start us off with, but I think the first scene in the Yeerk Pool takes the cake. A city-sized cavern beneath the actual city filled with cages of slaves begging for their freedom in the few moments they actually can.
Silliest Part: The fact that Marco legitimately names them “Animorphs” and nobody objects to it. You’d think Rachel would at least have a remark about a name that cheesy.
#2: The Visitor
Most Fucked-Up Part: Melissa Chapman lives her life believing that her parents don’t love her when, in reality, they sacrificed their own freedom to keep her safe and constantly fight to ensure that this bargain is upheld.
Silliest Part: Visser Three, the comically evil leader of the Yeerk invasion, repeatedly expresses admiration for a housecat named “Fluffer McKitty.”
#3: The Encounter:
Most Fucked-Up Part: The gang hits the two-hour time limit while in wolf morph and nearly get stuck as half-human, half-wolf abominations as they try to demorph. Tobias (who is fully trapped in the body of a hawk) witnesses this, semi-directly leading to him finally having a mental breakdown and attempting suicide in a fit of panic.
Silliest Part: One of the biggest obstacles they face is the fact they they need to catch a fish to morph into, and almost none of them have the patience required for fishing.
#4: The Message:
Most Fucked-Up Part: While in dolphin morph, Marco has his tail bitten off during a shark attack and nearly bleeds to death. His immediate thought is the fact that his mother died by drowning, and he doesn’t want to meet the same fate.
Silliest Part: A whale talks to Cassie and gives her directions to Ax’s crashed ship.
#5: The Predator:
Most Fucked-Up Part: I mentioned Marco’s mom in the last book so I could segue into this book’s reveal that she’s alive and the host body of the mastermind behind the Yeerk invasion, but I completely forgot that this was also the ant book, which definitely eclipses that. Upon morphing ants, everyone becomes so engulfed by the insects’ mindless devotion to their colony that they entirely lose their sense of individuality. Shortly thereafter, they become engaged in combat underground with another ant colony, describing it as their most brutal fight thus far. These combined events traumatize them so thoroughly that they will spend the entire rest of the series talking about how terrifying ants are and adamantly refusing to morph them ever again - the only animal to receive such harsh treatment, to my recollection.
Silliest Part: Marco, Jake, and Ax morph into grocery store lobsters to hide from Yeerks, and accidentally terrify the poor lady who buys them for dinner.
#6: The Capture
Most Fucked-Up Part: Jake is infested by a Yeerk, becoming a prisoner in his own body. The Yeerk, who had previously infested Jake’s brother, Tom, spends its time tormenting Jake before ultimately starving to death, a tortuous process for both of them.
Silliest Part: Everyone morphs into flies for the first time and are surprised to find it one of the most fun morphs so far.
#7: The Stranger
Most Fucked-Up Part: Everyone gets eaten alive by a Taxxon while in cockroach morph. They escape by demorphing, blowing it up from the inside.
Silliest Part: Rachel gets mad at a circus performer using cattle prods on his elephants, so she morphs into an elephant, tells the performer she’s from the “International Elephant Police,” and throws him across the big top.
Megamorphs #1: The Andalite’s Gift
Most Fucked-Up Part: Rachel, having lost all her memories from a bad head injury, unconsciously morphs into a bear and then gets both of her front legs completely eaten off by an alien monster.
Silliest Part: There are a solid two or three chapters dedicated to Marco’s horrible driving skills. Another driver on the road says he drives like he’s from Jersey. This series takes place in California.
#8: The Alien
Most Fucked-Up Part: Ax, desperately homesick, manages to contact his homeworld. Instead of providing reassurance, his people order him to take the fall for his brother’s crimes and then declare it his duty to kill the single most dangerous individual alive.
Silliest Part: Ax has to be literally dragged out of a movie theater by Jake and Marco after he starts eating popcorn boxes off the floor and tries to steal Raisinets from a child.
#9: The Secret
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs morph termites, hoping they won’t be as bad as the ants. They find that they are entirely unable to control their own bodies, subject only to the instructions of the queen. The nature-loving Cassie is forced to kill the queen to free everyone, and is subsequently left shattered by the fact that she destroyed an entire colony that was only trying to survive.
Silliest Part: Cassie forces Visser Three to surrender by morphing into a skunk and spraying him, then lies that grape juice gets rid of the smell.
#10: The Android
Most Fucked-Up Part: Erek, an android programmed for strict nonviolence, rewrites his programming to remove that limitation and subsequently destroys an entire building’s worth of Controllers in less than ten seconds. Unlike our human protagonists, who are offered some relief by their imperfect memories, Erek’s robot brain will forever preserve this moment in perfect detail, torturing him for hundreds of millennia.
Silliest Part: Dogs were not originally domesticated by humans, but rather by a race of androids called the Chee, who implanted wolves with the literal essence of their extinct creators. The Chee now secretly live on Earth in a giant underground dog park.
#11: The Forgotten
Most Fucked-Up Part: A bloody and unconscious Rachel is nearly eaten alive by a colony of ants. This isn’t even the worst ant-related trauma in the series (tune in for book 39!).
Silliest Part: The Animorphs are sent back in time by a few hours. Luckily, they apparently teach this stuff in Andalite school. Unluckily, Ax wasn’t paying attention in class that day because he was distracted by a cute girl. This isn’t even the stupidest time travel plot point in the series (tune in for… actually there are too many to choose from).
#12: The Reaction
Most Fucked-Up Part: Rachel begins to lose control of her morphing. Highlights include morphing into an elephant and destroying her house, morphing elephant in the middle of the ocean and nearly drowning, morphing into an ant afterwards and getting trapped inside an air bubble, and having a fully formed crocodile crawl out of her body on a TV set.
Silliest Part: The Yeerks’ new plan is to get a popular teenage heartthrob to become the new spokesman of The Sharing, their front organization. After being saved by the Animorphs, he quits acting and moves to Uzbekistan instead.
#13: The Change
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs encounter a pair of Hork-Bajir who have managed to escape the Yeerks. To prove they’re not under Yeerk control, one of them slices his own head open to show his brain.
Silliest Part: Hork-Bajir eat tree bark. They don’t seem to like Earth bark that much, but are afraid to admit it because they don’t want to hurt Tobias’s feelings.
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles
Most Fucked-Up Part: God, where to start with this one? The Hork-Bajir are a simple race with no concept of violence, who are then invaded by the Yeerks and forced to learn how to fight. They’re used as pawns by the Yeerks, the Andalites, and the Arn, and once it becomes clear that they’re fighting a losing battle, Alloran releases a virus intended to wipe out the Hork-Bajir so the Yeerks can’t get their hands on them.
Silliest Part: I got nothing. This might be the most humorless book in the whole series. Esplin gets thrown around by a big monster called a “Jubba-Jubba” and that’s kind of a fun image, I guess.
#14: The Unknown
Most Fucked-Up Part: Prepare for some tonal whiplash, because this book is possibly the silliest entry in the series. There’s nothing to put in this section.
Silliest Part: If you’re an Animorphs fan, you already know this book’s punchline, and if you’re not, I’m not gonna be the one to spoil it for you. Luckily, there are plenty other ridiculous moments I can share, like Cassie winning the Kentucky Derby or Visser Three decapitating Daffy Duck.
#15: The Escape
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs get microchips implanted in their heads. Because the chips don’t change size when they morph, their heads nearly explode when they try to morph flies.
Silliest Part: Tobias, now with his morphing ability restored, has to make physical contact with a dolphin so he can morph it. Given that he’s still a hawk, this goes about as well as you’d expect.
#16: The Warning
Most Fucked-Up Part: Jake gets swatted while in fly morph and the others have to drag his mangled body to a safe location before he dies.
Silliest Part: To provide a distraction so Ax and Marco can break into AOL’s head office, Rachel morphs a bear and begins mopping the (carpeted) floor.
#17: The Underground
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs consider the ethics of weaponizing drugs after discovering an addictive substance that can physically and psychologically destroy Yeerks, but permanently leaves the hosts as raving lunatics in the process.
Silliest Part: Said drug is instant ginger and maple oatmeal.
#18: The Decision
Most Fucked-Up Part: In a freak accident, the Animorphs are suddenly transported to an extradimensional plane where they nearly asphyxiate to death.
Silliest Part: Ax has a dramatic showdown with Visser Three on top of McDonald’s. Visser Three runs away and jumps into a dumpster.
Megamorphs 2: In the Time of Dinosaurs
Most Fucked-Up Part: Tobias betrays a group of peaceful aliens, knowingly sentencing the last remaining members of their race to death.
Silliest Part: I mean. Come on. Just read the title of this one.
#19: The Departure
Most Fucked-Up Part: Cassie willingly allows herself to be infested by a Yeerk in an insane attempt to broker peace. Upon learning of this, Jake gives Marco the order to kill Cassie if she’s still a Controller by the time they find her.
Silliest Part: Fuck, this is another pretty heavy book and the next three are probably gonna be just as bad. Uuh Marco pretends to be a smoker to get out of class. That’s about the only non-serious thing in this one.
#20: The Discovery
Most Fucked-Up Part: A new kid at school stumbles upon the morphing device, leading to the Yeerks destroying his house and infesting his parents trying to get it for themselves. Faced with no other choice, the Animorphs induct him in as a new member. They will definitely not come to regret this decision.
Silliest Part: I’m not even gonna try. See ya in three books.
#21: The Threat
Most Fucked-Up Part: David turns on the other Animorphs. The book ends with him seemingly killing Tobias and leaving Jake critically wounded.
Second Most Fucked-Up Part (This book gets two): Cassie (in flea morph) is biting Jake (in dragonfly morph) as he starts demorphing. The sudden change in pressure as his vascular system changes back to human causes her internal organs to explode.
Third Most Fucked-Up Part (One more for the road): Everyone hits the two-hour time limit again, this time as fleas. Marco is nearly stuck half-morphed as a human-sized flea.
Tune in next time as things somehow get even worse.
#22: The Solution
jesus fucking christ. okay
Most Fucked-Up Part: As the threat of David grows too large to handle, the Animorphs take him off the table by devising a plan to permanently trap him in morph as a rat and abandon him on an island. Rachel has spent the entire book terrified that she’s become a killer and forces herself to believe that this is a better option to that somehow.
Second Most Fucked-Up Part: In the last book, Jake and Rachel’s cousin Saddler was hit by a car and left in critical condition. In this book, David pushes the near-death Saddler down an elevator shaft and plans to use his morphing powers to steal his identity and regain a normal family.
The Andalite Chronicles
Most Fucked-Up Part: Elfangor’s friend Arbron is trapped in morph as a Taxxon, an alien species burdened with an insatiable, overpowering hunger. He tries to trick Elfangor into killing him rather than live with the hunger.
Silliest Part: Elfangor drives a Ford Mustang into battle on the Taxxon homeworld while playing Hank Williams on the radio. This happens directly after the aforementioned Arbron scene.
#23: The Pretender
Most Fucked-Up Part: Tobias decides to become fully human again upon learning he has a cousin who wants to take him in. The cousin turns out to actually be Visser Three in morph, and Tobias is left shattered by having the promise of a real family yanked away from him.
Silliest Part: It’s been so long since Tobias has had a human beverage that he completely freezes up when someone asks him what he’d like to drink and is nearly overwhelmed by the taste of Coke.
#24: The Suspicion
Most Fucked-Up Part: Cassie and Marco are shrunk down to a sixteenth of an inch by alien technology. The others try to rescue them in insect morph, leading to the horrifying comparison of a cockroach “the size of a Wal-Mart” and a spider “with legs the size of the St. Louis arch.”
Silliest Part: Meet the Helmacrons, a race of aliens the size of a grain of sand, yet with the largest egos imaginable. They spend the book flying around in three-inch long spaceships, declaring how they will conquer the planet and all will grovel before them.
#25: The Extreme
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs are trapped in the Arctic, freezing and starving to death and kept alive purely by the morphing technology, when they witness a polar bear brutally eviscerate a seal. After the bear leaves, they feast on what remains of the seal’s carcass. The seal’s pups arrive as they eat, looking for their mother, and Marco is reminded of when he believed his own mother to be dead.
Silliest Part: The gang is temporarily helped by an Inuit teenager named Derek, who takes the situation in stride surprisingly well.
#26: The Attack
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Howlers are a species of ruthless killers that have annihilated countless species over thousands of years. When Jake morphs one, he discovers that they never mentally develop past infancy and view their actions as nothing but a big game.
Silliest Part: This book takes place on the planet of the Iskoort, a species with the architecture sensibilities of Dr. Seuss and a culture entirely built around bartering organs and memories.
#27: The Exposed
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs get caught in the crossfire of a drug bust and it turns out that normal human guns are still plenty dangerous. Rachel’s shot in the head, Marco’s shot in the neck, and Cassie’s paralyzed by a shot to her back.
Silliest Part: When Erek malfunctions at the mall, Marco carries him out in gorilla morph, pretending to be promotion for an upcoming King Kong movie.
#28: The Experiment
Most Fucked-Up Part: They morph cows to infiltrate a slaughterhouse. Use your imagination on what happens from there.
Silliest Part: Ax has a TV now, and spends the entire book making references to various sitcoms and soap operas, much to the confusion and slight horror of everyone else.
#29: The Sickness
Most Fucked-Up Part: Cassie is forced to perform brain surgery on Ax to remove one of his glands before it explodes, killing him.
Silliest Part: They try to infiltrate the Yeerk pool by morphing eels and swimming through the city’s plumbing system.
Megamorphs 3: Elfangor’s Secret
Most Fucked-Up Part: This one’s a time travel book. The climax sees them brought to Normandy on D-Day and you can probably imagine how that goes.
Silliest Part: In medieval times, Tobias morphs into a Hork-Bajir to pretend to be the devil. He coincidentally grabs a pitchfork from a farmer before unknowingly running into a church, scaring the hell out of the priest (no pun intended).
#30: The Reunion
Most Fucked-Up Part: Remember that plot point about Marco’s mom being the host body to Visser One? Well, this book is about Marco formulating a plan to kill Visser One and desperately trying to convince himself that his mom is acceptable collateral.
Silliest Part: In a dramatic confrontation at the end of the book, Visser One deduces Marco’s true identity and Marco tells his mom that he loves her before she falls off a cliff to her presumed death. This entire super-emotional scene takes place while Marco is a goat.
#31: The Conspiracy
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs kidnap Chapman out of his own home while his daughter watches. They keep him tied up in a basement somewhere and threaten to starve him to death if he doesn’t comply with their demands.
Silliest Part: Tobias attacks someone that they believe to be a Controller trying to infest Jake’s dad. Turns out he’s just a normal dude who’s upset that he stole his parking spot.
#32: The Separation
Most Fucked-Up Part: Rachel exercises her right to bear arms. By which I mean that she has her arm chopped off in bear morph and subsequently picks it back up and clubs her enemy to death with it.
Silliest Part: Okay. This book. Due to some starfish-related shenanigans, Rachel is split in half. We alternate between reading about Mean Rachel, an unhinged maniac who uses the word “kill” in every single sentence, and Nice Rachel, a timid Valley Girl who spends the whole book alternating between shopping and crying.
#33: The Illusion
Most Fucked-Up Part: This is the “Tobias gets tortured” book. Tobias spend half the book in a near-death state, trapped in a box and forced to relive all his worst memories on repeat.
Silliest Part: Marco gets trapped in a chocolate fondue fountain as a fly and has to be saved by Ax.
#34: The Prophecy
Most Fucked-Up Part: Aldrea (the main character from back in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles) is temporarily brought back to life and returned to the Hork-Bajir homeworld, where she sees her home and everything she ever held dear destroyed and replaced by Yeerk occupation.
Silliest Part: Aldrea is basically a ghost possessing Cassie’s body in this one, and “alien ghost possession” is a pretty crazy pivot, even by the standards of this series.
#35: The Proposal
Most Fucked-Up Part: Marco’s morphing powers go haywire, causing him to turn into horrific amalgamates like a half-trout/half-gorilla or a half-skunk/half-spider.
Silliest Part: The villain of this book gives an extended maniacal villain monologue to what he believes is a completely normal cockatiel. He doesn’t even know it’s actually Marco. He just starts yelling at this bird about how much he hates it.
Visser
Most Fucked-Up Part: A man is left with a dead Yeerk in his brain, leaving him as a ranting street crazy in the years afterward. If you’re surprised I’m not putting something Edriss-related in this section, that’s because holy shit where the fuck would i even begin. I beg you, if you haven’t read Animorphs before and any of this sounds even the slightest bit interesting to you, at the very least, read this one. You will not regret it.
Silliest Part: When the Yeerks first arrive on Earth, they sift through television broadcasts to learn about humans and mistakenly believe Star Trek to be an intimidation tactic against alien invasions.
#36: The Mutation
Most Fucked-Up Part: Jara Hamee (one of the free Hork-Bajir) watches an old friend of his slowly asphyxiate to death after Visser Three haphazardly tries to turn Hork-Bajir amphibious.
Silliest Part: Atlantis exists.
#37: The Weakness
Most Fucked-Up Part: Rachel flies a plane into a skyscraper. Luckily, this book was published in 2000.
Silliest Part: A child bystander calls a gorilla-morphed Marco “Curious George,” and starts crying when Marco lectures him on the difference between gorillas and monkeys.
#38: The Arrival
Most Fucked-Up Part: Hey, remember that time Alloran tried to commit genocide? Well, the Andalites’ latest strategy is to send a secret suicide mission to Earth and give it another shot.
Silliest Part: Tobias destroys an entire McDonald’s from low orbit.
#39: The Hidden
Most Fucked-Up Part: Hey look, we’re finally at that ant trauma I mentioned a while back. In what is now the third? fourth? ant-related entry on this list, an ant obtains the morphing power and morphs into an ant/Cassie hybrid. Cassie watches in horror as this mindless facsimile of herself screams in agony over the overwhelmingly alien concept of free will. It tries to attack her, but gets gored by a buffalo (don’t worry about it) and Cassie watches herself bleed to death.
Silliest Part: The aforementioned buffalo is the first character in the series to unequivocally defeat Visser Three in a one-to-one battle (again, don’t worry about it).
#40: The Other
Most Fucked-Up Part: Ax is incredibly ableist in this book. Like, it is seriously uncomfortable listening to one of our main characters repeatedly suggesting they leave a crippled warrior to die and ardently refusing to do any self-reflection about it.
Silliest Part: A pair of disabled gay Andalites live in a normal human house in the middle of suburbia.
Megamorphs 4: Back to Before
Most Fucked-Up Part: In an alternate timeline where the Animorphs never became the Animorphs, we finally get to see Tobias’s abusive uncle firsthand and watch as his shitty home life leads him to falling into the Yeerks’ traps and willingly becoming a Controller. Also all the main characters die in this book but that’s just par for the course in time travel stories at this point.
Silliest Part: Cassie is apparently a time anomaly. This has never come up in any of the previous time travel stories, nor will it ever be relevant again.
#41: The Familiar
Most Fucked-Up Part: In a different alternate timeline from the last book, we see a world where the Yeerks won. They force their human hosts to procreate and then raise the children in warehouses, devoid of joy or education, feeding them only vitamins and forcing them to work out until they are deemed fit for infestation.
Silliest Part: Jake attends a Yeerk HR meeting.
#42: The Journey
Most Fucked-Up and Silliest Part: You know that one episode of The Magic School Bus where they shrink down and go inside Arnold? Well, instead of a magical educational adventure through the digestive system, the Animorphs are thrown into a horror show with such attractions as Rachel getting blinded by swimming in stomach acid and Marco’s heart being blown up from the inside.
#43: The Test
Most Fucked-Up Part: Tobias and Ax have to morph Taxxons and neither of them are able to control the morph. Tobias nearly eats the rest of the Animorphs, and Ax gorges himself and nearly dies from overeating.
Silliest Part: I get the impression that this section is going to get much harder to fill as I approach the final stages of the series. Uuuh Ax gives Tobias a haircut.
#44: The Unexpected
Most Fucked-Up Part: Cassie has to do surgery again. This time, she amputates an old man’s leg after it gets badly infected with an alien pathogen or something.
Silliest Part: Cassie gets knocked out on a plane and winds up stranded in the Australian outback. The final battle has her in kangaroo morph while people throw boomerangs at the Yeerks.
#45: The Revelation
Most Fucked-Up Part: Marco’s dad gets forcibly pulled into the plot and finds out everything. Marco selfishly doesn’t go back to save his stepmom once she has a target on her back, and then lies to his dad that she was probably a Controller the whole time anyway.
Silliest Part: The Animorphs steal a spaceship only for it to turn out to be a custom-made special needs ship they can’t actually operate.
#46: The Deception
Most Fucked-Up Part: Ax steals a nuke and threatens to blow up the Yeerk Pool (along with the metropolitan area on top of it).
Silliest Part: Ax hacks into the NSA with an iMac.
#47: The Resistance
Most Fucked-Up Part: This book swaps narratives between Jake and a Civil War soldier. In Lieutenant Fitzhenry’s story, we watch his command slowly dwindle and die of fever as they try in vain to stop the Confederate’s advance.
Silliest Part: The Animorphs enlist Trekkies into battle.
The Ellimist Chronicles
Most Fucked-Up Part: Toomin, the last of his species, is captured by an immense being known as Father, where he spends decades - or perhaps even centuries - trapped in a simulation, forced to play games against Father while surrounded by the never-decaying corpses of his people.
Silliest Part: The Ellimist, a god-like cosmic being that has continuously made cryptic appearances throughout the series, repeatedly refers to himself as a gamer. “Ellimist” is literally just his gamertag. I’m not even joking.
#48: The Return
Most Fucked-Up Part: David comes back, nearly asphyxiates Cassie, and tries to trap Rachel in rat morph as revenge. The book ends with a helpless David begging Rachel to kill him so he won’t have to continue his miserable existence as a rat, and we never learn what decision she makes.
Silliest Part: David tries to threatens Rachel by claiming to have an army of “loyal rat lieutenants” at his disposal.
#49: The Diversion
Most Fucked-Up Part: Marco has his face ripped off in battle and nearly bleeds to death.
Silliest Part: The main villain of this book is a little old granny with a gun. She also flies a helicopter.
#50: The Ultimate
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs sneak into a children’s hospital and enlist disabled children to fight alongside them.
Silliest Part: They get into the hospital by pretending to be child entertainers. Throughout the entire time they’re asking these children to risk their lives, Cassie is dressed as a fortune teller and Jake is wearing a fake goatee.
#51: The Absolute
Most Fucked-Up Part: Relatively light book this time. Going to war against the National Guard, kidnapping government officials, Tobias nearly getting run over by a roller coaster, the usual.
Silliest Part: Marco steals a tank and drives it down the interstate. He reassures Tobias he knows how to drive it from his experience with video games and the History Channel.
#52: The Sacrifice
Most Fucked-Up Part: The Animorphs make good on Ax’s threat from a couple books back and blow up the Yeerk Pool with a payload compared to that of “a small nuclear blast,” destroying most of the city’s downtown area and killing an unknown number of bystanders.
Silliest Part: lmao. nope.
#53: The Answer
Most Fucked-Up Part: Jake knowingly dooms the entire platoon of disabled children by sending them on a suicide diversion mission. Every single one of them is killed. He decides to follow this up by giving the order to kill 17,000 unarmed enemy combatants.
Silliest Part: Jake rides a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle to a war meeting.
#54: The Beginning
Most Fucked-Up Part: As is the true nature of war, nothing ever ends cleanly. Not all the good guys make it out alive, and not all of the bad guys face punishment. The final battles of the series take place not on the battlefield, but in courtrooms and negotiation tables. Some of the survivors are able to move forward with their lives, while others are left as nothing but broken shells. But in the end, whatever peace they manage to find for themselves can never truly last - there will always be a new threat to face, another war to fight. You wanted a happy ending? Too bad. This was a war story. And wars don’t get happy endings.
Silliest Part: The Andalite homeworld gets its own Krispy Kreme franchise :)
And with that, one year and 62 books later, my Animorphs reread has come to a close. In case it wasn’t blatantly obvious already, this series holds an incredibly special place in my heart. To simply call it my favorite book series would be a disservice. It is my favorite piece of media, period. Animorphs has genuinely shaped who I am as a person - my love of nature, my sense of humor, my passion for reading, my respect for children’s media and those who create it, my distaste for violence yet also my understanding of the occasional necessity of it, my perspective on humanity, and my hope for a better tomorrow - all of that can be traced back to the day that my older cousin gave little seven-year-old me a box of his old books and introduced me to the series that would change my life. Please, please, I beg you, if you actually read through this entire post and haven’t read Animorphs before, do yourself a favor and go fix that. The entire series can be found online very easily (with the author’s blessing, no less!). And if nothing else, at the very least read this: the final letter to the fans K.A. Applegate wrote following the release of the final book. This letter is the entire underlying ethos of Animorphs, laid bare in a few simple paragraphs. I think about it so often I can practically recite it by memory.
Thanks for sticking around and, uh, sorry for such a long post. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go get myself a cinnamon bun.