Book Reviews: Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, books 51-54

I did finish the series back in May, defying my tendency to just ... not finish the things I love & don't want to see end (see: my first watch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I even wrote review notes! But I did not type them up, fulfilling my tendency to avoid talking about things I love A Lot. But I just filled up my Moleskine, so I'm forcing myself to finish these reviews before I fulfill my very worst tendency: caring about the thing so much that I never talk about it, and my feels end up buried in review notes in a filled Moleskine from three years ago (see: Fate/Zero LN, prior to my recent reread.) So enjoy 3k words about Animorphs!


( The Absolute (Animorphs Book 51) )

( The Sacrifice (Animorphs Book 52) )

Title: The Answer (Animorphs Book 53)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 2001
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 155
Total Page Count: 308,250
Text Number: 1043
Read Because: reading the series
Review: It's only right that Jake gets the final single-narrator book, and it's a good one. Reveals like his full name, age, height, and the series's timescale are devastating in that they ground everything that's come before, making it feel more real—despite, of course, various narrative inconsistencies. The reveal of the cast's ages also prompts a formal aging up, moving the series from MG to YA. The more nuanced characterizations of—and interactions between—the Taxxons, Visser, and Chee further this—and the realer things get, the more harrowing they become, which suits the end of the series. It's hard to judge relative quality through my anticipation/dread of that ending, but I love the balance of small to large, of intimate, broken personal moments and big-picture plot developments, of character breakdowns and Animorphs hypercompetence; it's fitting for a penultimate book and a strong parallel to Jake's late-game character development.

Accompanying the hard-facts infodump re: the Animorphs, this also answers some long-lingered worldbuilding/alien questions:

1) "That Visser One was dead and his human host now worked with us"—Edriss 562's gender has been assumed-female throughout the series, but this implies otherwise, hugely complicating (and queering) previous conversations about Yeerk gender identity/reproductive role, for Edriss 562 in particular but also generally speaking. The assumed-heteronormativity is safe but, between triad-reproduction and the way that hosts are simultaneously reviled and necessary re: fulfilling social/romantic/sexual urges, Yeerk sex & gender has actually always been weird as hell and this doubles down on that. ...I acknowledge that it could be a typo/inconsistency on account of ghost authors—and I don't care!

2) It also answers "how often do Yeerks actually take Taxxon hosts?" and "are Taxxons themselves as disgusted by their cannibalism as morphed Taxxons or Yeerks with Taxxon hosts?

( Quote. )

(Also let us take a moment to appreciate Arbron and some A+ tying back in the spin-off books.) The above information conflicts somewhat with the Taxxon-controller on the Council of Thirteen, but I'm content with reality conflicting and complicating hierarchy/taboos we've seen elsewhere, because that's how societies function.

( Also two Jake and Cassie quotes. )

Title: The Beginning (Animorphs Book 54)
Author: K.A. Applegate
Published: Scholastic, 2001
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 160
Total Page Count: 308,410
Text Number: 1044
Read Because: reading the series
Review: It's amazing how little of this resolves events in the previous book and main storyline; much of it is an epilogue, and while combining that into one volume is a good call (stand-alone epilogues are disjointed and easy to dismiss) it still makes for a weird final book: it's a betrayal of expectation, and it's hard to acclimate to the the aging up and the broader, more summarized narrative. But this series is persistently imperfect—imperfect in tone and quality, sure, but further it insists on its characters's flaws and on the profound brokenness of its world, and it's only right to make those the defining aspects of the epilogue.

Insofar as a review of a finale is a review of the series entire: Animorphs has been a hell of a ride. It buys in on the wish-fulfillment of morphing and it uses body horror to subvert its tone into something darker, but what ultimately makes the series successful is the implications of the worldbuilding and the effect this has the characters. They grow, they change, but mostly they suffer, in thematically-relevant and meaningful ways; they're indelibly marked by the awfulness of war. And so the epilogue refuses the lingering temptation of wish-fulfillment and holds true to its character arcs and themes. It's a disappointing book, in part because of inherent structural flaws, in part because it's sad to see the series end, but mostly on purpose—and to great effect.


Some notes:

• I am of conflicted feelings about how things shake out for the Taxxons et al. ( Source quote. )
  
  
  1) All the concrete Taxxon worldbuilding developments re: how they feel about their compulsion towards cannibalism are a great way to end the series—they're substantial, meaningful, etc. 2) This is the death of a species! insofar as I presume that the snake-nothlit Taxxons could only reproduce non-sapient snakes. That's a big deal! which connects to: 3) The series has a mixed track record with ableism, depicting but condemning it, but using cultural taboos surrounding it as fridge horror, and uncritically depicting sanism. "Better dead than cursed with this Taxxon body" and "better ending the species than remaining Taxxons" are functionally similar and uhhhhh icky—icky is my big takeaway here. Depicting states of being/disability which remain awful regardless of accommodation is valid; depicting autonomy in functionally-disabled people is important; there isn't an obvious positive outcome for the Taxxons; "better dead than..." is still a problem. I don't mean to imply that the series treats it as an un-problematic solution, but it falls I think within the purview of its uncritiqued ableism.



• At one point Cassie outright says, "Jake, you can't equate the victim and the perpetrator," and I feel like this messy MG cult series gets this concept better than one thousand Deep Takes about how oppressed people can be dangerous, too!! in The Witcher/Bioshock Infinite/Dragon Age/edgy grown-up narratives that I've bitched about at length in the past.



• Jake's breakdown in the series's endgame is so good. I mentioned when reviewing The Revelation (Animorphs Book 45) that for the bulk of the series, these books retain a measure of status quo—there's continuity, there's character arcs, but the general premise of the cast and conflict remain consistent. It's part of what makes the series readable, rendering it episodic-friendly but also rendering it friendly—there's an implicit promise that no one will die in this book, because the series needs to keep going. Deviating from these implicit promises is what makes game-changers like bringing the parents into the fold so memorable. But Jake's troubles are a less exciting, more frustrating alteration of the status quo and, as with the series finale, these apparent weaknesses are productive: his breakdown—and thus the impact of the war—have meaning because they lack the resolution promised by the episodic format and expectation of a happy ending.
  
  
• To wit:
  
  

  Part of me wanted what we'd had in the old days, Cassie and me. But that wasn't possible. I knew that. I had come to accept that all of that, all of what I'd had with Cassie, Tobias, Ax, even Marco, all of it was "in the war." And the things that were "in the war" didn't seem to translate into real life. Like they were written in incompatible computer languages or something.
  
  I still cared for Cassie, for all of them. I always would. My life was divided into three parts: before, during, and after the war. And that middle section was so overwhelming, so big, so intense, it made the other two portions seem dim and dark and dull.




• The way the romantic relationships resolve an antidote to every insipid Harry Potter-style epilogue. The "meet your hetero true love before you turn 16" archetype of MG/YA is limiting and discouraging, and I was already feeling that when I was in the MG/YA reading age—because that archetype insists that who I was as a depressed kid, and my goals and relationships, is who I would be forever.
  
  (fun fact, I met Devon when I was 17; but I am an outlier and as a trope it's still a gross trope!)
  
  
• These things—the validation of Jake never getting a happy, normal ending and the insistence that we are not limited to the romances we have as teenagers, or: nothing changes, except for the good things—are not for me conflicting. They're honest to the experience of the characters and the themes of the series, and they're a productive antidote to our impulses re: what a successful, completed narrative should look like.



• I'm in no ways married to the ongoing plot as sketched in the epilogue. The details I think are forgettable and the structure and tone of the final book are a bit of a mess. But the major character beats and the general thrust of the ending are, I think, essential. I couldn't imagine the series ending any other way.
  
  I wish that kid-me had finished reading it at the time! I would have appreciated and benefited from it.