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The ending works for me. Part of it is I easily see Jake ordering this blaze of glory to atone in some way for being a war criminal, and part of it is that the war that ended just sowed the seeds for the next war.
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Apr 6, 2023 15:35
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The ending works for me. Part of it is I easily see Jake ordering this blaze of glory to atone in some way for being a war criminal, and part of it is that the war that ended just sowed the seeds for the next war. I don't see Jake sacrificing other people to atone for what he sees as his sins. Himself, maybe, but not his crew. I read this as a suicide attack, but not because the goal was suicide so much as it was the only way to maybe take out the One, who seems very much like Crayak-lite. They are probably dead, but not definitely, and it does seem like a return to the status quo where they were also probably dead a lot of the time.
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Apr 6, 2023 15:46
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Fuuuuuuuuuuck Okay so who wrote good fanfiction following up on this?
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Apr 6, 2023 16:56
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   Not to distract from the ongoing discussion about the ending and the overall wrap up of the series in general but I've been granted permission by Epicurius to extend the Let's Read a tiny bit longer while he gets ready to move on to Everworld by covering both Alternamorphs COYA books in his stead. Now since these are Choose Your Own Adventure books we'll be treating this like a standard COYA experience in Let's Play, but we'll go over that more in depth at the appropriate time once we start this bullshit end note to the whole experience. We'll be starting with the first chapters up to the first decision point on Tuesday just to get over holiday weekend entirely and then go alternating days of voting/posting until we finally run completely out of Animorphs material once and for all. 
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Apr 6, 2023 17:29
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Elfangor survived ramming the blade ship so I don't think it's a suicide mission. Logically yeah they'd probably die, but narratively I don't think that's how we're supposed to take it. I'm not a huge fan of introducing a new villain on the last two pages of a fifty book series. The last book as a whole was strong though. And the series, with all of its flaws, really is fantastic.
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Apr 6, 2023 17:32
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Elfangor survived ramming the blade ship so I don't think it's a suicide mission. Logically yeah they'd probably die, but narratively I don't think that's how we're supposed to take it. Michael Grant later confirmed either in a tweet or a Reddit AMA post, I can't exactly remember which, but he said that they all survived.
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Apr 6, 2023 17:40
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nine-gear crow posted:
Finally we'll be covering the good stuff.
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Apr 6, 2023 17:45
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nine-gear crow posted:
We haven’t ran out of material until all the video games have been let played and we’ve done a let’s watch of the show. 
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Apr 6, 2023 18:00
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Was kind of reading this last book as a Lord of the Rings Scouring of the Shire ape, except I don't think Gandalf shows up with another dragon to rob just at the end.
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Apr 6, 2023 18:39
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nine-gear crow posted:
lol these are so bad let’s do it
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Apr 6, 2023 20:19
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the alternamorphs books were literally the first books I ever read that taught me you could feel disappointment from a book, lol
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Apr 6, 2023 20:27
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Thanks for taking us through this journey, Epicurius! Hope you have some more time to focus on your health now. The first Alternamorphs book was the first thing I actually ever read from the series, so I'm looking forward to reliving it now.
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Apr 6, 2023 22:06
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They’re not good by any stretch, but I’ll always respect the second one for its premise of “play as David”.
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Apr 6, 2023 23:45
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Star Man posted:I'll never feel quite right with the Chee or the Ellimist and Crayak. My feelings towards them are as an adult with better literacy. The Chee's holograms have always seemed like complete bullshit that bailed the kids out of unwinnable situations. Applegate did her best to not make the Ellimist and Crayak's game one about destiny and prophecy, so the characters had most of their agency. The Ellimist is a god drat liar and totally influenced the Animorphs where they could get away with it by showing them the Kandrona ray in book 7 and restoring Tobias's morphing ability. But then there's the time matrix, and I've grown to absolutely hate time travel in science fiction. I will concede that Elfangor became a nothlit as a human and is Tobias's father and the Ellimist pulled off some bullshit to thrust him back into the Andelite-Yeerk war as an Andelite and wiped out Loren's memory. All of that could have been done without the time matrix. I absolutely do not understand the point of all that. Even as a very dumb 10 year-old reading about those characters, I felt the same way. It felt like there was this nastier, leaner story that couldn't get out and so all this extra fluff was scooped on top to stretch things out. That would be too much to realistically expect, even if it wasn't a kid series, and I knew that even then... but those three are narrative devices only barely pay off and only with a lot of work to partition them off from the "real" story. I still like the Ellimist Chronicles though.
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Apr 6, 2023 23:56
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Oh and yes very interesting final chapters. Always thought it was interesting that they gave it to Marco, and he doesn't mention Jeanne at all considering how hard he tries to jump her prior, but yeah it's an appropriate ending. Also feels appropriate that religious zealotry is the "next phase" after the Yeerks given when the series was published.
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Apr 6, 2023 23:58
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mind the walrus posted:Oh and yes very interesting final chapters. Always thought it was interesting that they gave it to Marco, and he doesn't mention Jeanne at all considering how hard he tries to jump her prior, but yeah it's an appropriate ending. Also feels appropriate that religious zealotry is the "next phase" after the Yeerks given when the series was published. It really gives you the impression that the Sharing was created just as much for the Yeerks' own personal mental and spiritual benefit by Edriss as it was for the benefit of their invasion plan. The Yeerk Empire was already very structurally cult like, especially given how its rank and file were basically terminally programmed by the upper echelons to the point where flushing 17,000 of them out into space was viewed as the more acceptable alternative than trying to even bother to deprogram any of them once the cult leadership was busted with a sledgehammer. So a lot of them just falling right into the embrace of effectively yet another cult as a means to try and regain power and prestige under The One is incredibly fitting.
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Apr 7, 2023 00:07
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I think the big thing about the Yeerks is that until Seerow showed up, the Yeerks didn't know that the rest of the galaxy existed. The only other species they knew about were the Gedds, and they mainly used them to help them migrate. They were blind. Had no written language, and no real society. Then in less then a generation, they'll lea4n about the rest of the galaxy, steal Andalite ships, teach themselves modern archeology, ally with the Taxxons, and enslave the Hork-Bajir. How amazing and frightening that must be to the average Yeerk. Everything they knew was wrong, and now a race of parasites/symbiotes now find themselves in an existential war.
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Apr 7, 2023 00:57
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freebooter posted:This wistful line sums up all my feelings about the series as a whole. For all the body horror and PTSD and brutal experiences... it really was a grand, exciting adventure that's inextricably wrapped up with memories of my childhood. The days, man. I'm reminded of the very end of Ken Burns' Civil War, and Shelby Foote's quotation of the memoirs of Confederate Sergeant Barry Benson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mumPcoIZa_I “In time, even death itself might be abolished; who knows but it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarters, to play chess and draughts, to get up soon to answer the morning role call, to fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade, and again to hastily don our war gear while the monotonous patter of the long roll summons to battle. Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers, and all will say, Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?” I think one of the reasons why this series has endured is that it very much captured the sense of a group of friends together on a grand adventure. For all the terrors of combat, the horrors of war, the agony over the lives lost and decisions made... for these characters, there will never be anything else like the thrilling sensation of being shot at (and missed), of soaring above the city in formation, or of plotting a mission in Cassie's barn. And for those who read these books when we were the ages of these characters (Or slightly younger, in my case), it was all too easy to imagine yourself beside them. And then they released some books where you really were supposed to imagine yourself beside them, and they were hot garbage!  The Alternamorphs books are so, so obviously half-assed attempts to hop on the Choose-Your-Own Adventure craze of the late '90s/early 2000s (see also: the Give-Yourself-Goosebumps books), and I'm excited to relive just how bad they both were.Anyway, thanks again for posting these, Epicurius. I still have to jump back in the thread and catch up on a bunch of the ghostwritten books, but it's been really fun to reread and reexperience the series from the beginning to the end.
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Apr 7, 2023 01:53
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Also, going back a bit:WrightOfWay posted:Maybe she wanted it to be Yosemite and the publisher wanted it to be Yellowstone? Yeah, the choice of Yellowstone over Yosemite is so odd. Like, in addition to keeping the California connection with Yosemite, just imagine seeing a bunch of Hork-Bajir swinging through a grove of Sequoias. Hell, they could even help with wildfires! If this series ever gets a sequel or some other adaptation gets all the way to the end I demand this be retconned 
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Apr 7, 2023 01:57
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You don't want to talk about a sequel. You REALLY don't want to talk about a sequel. 
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Apr 7, 2023 01:59
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I also never read it as a suicide attack, I thought it was just a cliffhanger ending with the implicit agreement that the series is over and the cliffhanger will never be resolved except in our imagination. The series always had such a fun Star Trek influence that I feel happier leaving Jake, Marco and Tobias exploring the galaxy trying to rescue their friend, than just sitting back on Earth dealing with the fallout of war. (Not to say that this book doesn't do well addressing the messy, imperfect conclusion of a war they won.)Fuschia tude posted:Also glad you're going to post Applegate's letter. I've avoided it because I was sure it would be full of spoilers. Was it really added to later printings of this book? Not just this one? This was me who "remembered" this and it's probably 100% a false memory. They totally should have though. Acebuckeye13 posted:I think one of the reasons why this series has endured is that it very much captured the sense of a group of friends together on a grand adventure. For all the terrors of combat, the horrors of war, the agony over the lives lost and decisions made... for these characters, there will never be anything else like the thrilling sensation of being shot at (and missed), of soaring above the city in formation, or of plotting a mission in Cassie's barn. And for those who read these books when we were the ages of these characters (Or slightly younger, in my case), it was all too easy to imagine yourself beside them. Yeah, there's something very sort of soothingly Saturday morning cartoonish about the little '90s suburban California world it creates - the barn, the woods, the Gardens, the mall - and the formula of their missions and their lives: the infiltration morphs, the surveillance bird of prey morphs, the battle morphs, the aquatic morphs, the Morph of the Week to deal with whatever new situation they're in. And so putting the trauma and the horror of war aside, there's something sad about Marco sitting there - sort of as a reader surrogate - wistfully thinking about the old days, which are gone and never coming back. Thanks for taking us down memory lane for the past few years Epicurius, it's been great.
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Apr 7, 2023 02:12
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It reads like the war equivalent of 'last star on the left, and on till morning,' to me.
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Apr 7, 2023 02:15
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So, a lot of people had criticisms about the last book and the way it ended (some of which were repeated here). Applegate, who had always been good at communicating with her readers, decided to write a response....a final letter to the people who didn't like the way the book ended explaining why she ended it that way.quote:Dear Animorphs Readers: So that's the series. There are a few books I didn't cover.....the Alternomorph books, which are being covered by nine-gear crow, a book called "Meet the Animorphs, about the tv show and the actors in it, and the parody "Veggie Morphs", where the characters are cutting across a garden when they see a ship crash, piloted by the Prince of the Vegetable Kingdom, at war with the evil Jeerks. The Vegetable Kingdom does about as well in the war as the Andalites quote:"Don't despair. We of the Vegetable Kingdom have vowed to fight the Jerkks wherever Anyway, we're not reading that, although the cartoon Arthur did a similar parody. Well start the new series on Monday. Happy Easter to Christians, Chag Sameach for Jews, and Ramadan Mubarak for Muslims.
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Apr 7, 2023 02:39
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Kazzah posted:They’re not good by any stretch, but I’ll always respect the second one for its premise of “play as David”. I loved them as a child because I was the kind of person who liked to die/lose as many ways as possible and they gave so many options for that..
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Apr 7, 2023 04:55
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Epicurius posted:Well start the new series on Monday. Happy Easter to Christians, Chag Sameach for Jews, and Ramadan Mubarak for Muslims. Thanks, Epi. It's been a really weird three years, and this thread has been a great ride through it. I love this weird, dark, occasionally-stupid-and-often-brilliant book series, and it's been a real pleasure to get to read along with you and everyone else in the thread.
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Apr 7, 2023 05:51
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Epicurius posted:So, you don't like the way our little fictional war came out? You don't like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don't like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents. Again, still absolutely chilling to remember that within literal weeks of this letter being published, 9/11 happened and then there were US soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. It's gonna be one of those things that will always haunt me about this series. This paragraph, 9/11, and everything that came after it...
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Apr 7, 2023 09:33
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I have nothing but the utmost respect for an author who writes - even when writing children's fiction - a reflection of our own cruel and unfair world, and doesn't flinch away from explaining to the readers precisely why she did so. It's the difference between writing actual proper literature (again, even if it's a children's book about turning into animals) or writing Mary Sue fan-fic.
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Apr 7, 2023 10:02
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Avalerion posted:The cliffhanger non-ending is lame. All the other stuff with how and where everyone ended up after the invasion was very well done though. This is about how I feel. I think the "ram the ship!" ending shifts the focus too much onto this one-off cliffhanger of how the battle is going to turn out, which dilutes the message of how the Animorphs are adapating/failing to adapt to the world post-war. All the stuff leading up to that is fantastic and emotionally powerful, but I feel like the conversations in the playground the week after this came out were about if Jake and co survived the battle, not about if they survived the war.
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Apr 7, 2023 10:24
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freebooter posted:It's the difference between writing actual proper literature (again, even if it's a children's book about turning into animals) or writing Mary Sue fan-fic. I mean, yes, nakedly so. Hollywood and the visual media industry has always been a cadre of douchebags looking to use written media as a springboard to do whatever dumb bullshit they already wanted to do which is "keep the lights on long enough to still look pretty and keep having cheap plastic sex". Thanks to modern marketing algorithms scraping for keywords and the absolute dearth of taste that is the majority audience, I've had to watch nearly every single property I knew about 20-30 years ago get a sad, paunchy revival. In the last month I've seen a very sad revival for Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, a very sad revival for Clone High, and some weird card company releasing a crappy nerd movie all the while the algorithm barrages me with ads like "YOU KNOW THIS THEREFORE YOU LOVE IT" and seriously it all needs to gently caress off. It's a testament to Animorphs' enduring lack of marketability that the only thing the visual media industry can think to do when reading about the premise is to try and spin it for comedy, and lord oh lord are they going to have a hard time doing that.
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Apr 7, 2023 13:21
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Epicurius posted:So, a lot of people had criticisms about the last book and the way it ended (some of which were repeated here). Applegate, who had always been good at communicating with her readers, decided to write a response....a final letter to the people who didn't like the way the book ended explaining why she ended it that way. This is such a true and powerful message that speaks a lot to why I've grown so dissatisfied and contemptuous of stories in video games and books that don't treat war with this gravity. War is the ruiner of things. It destroys places, ends lives, corrodes the souls of those who survive, and leaves little but physical and psychological devastation in its wake, even the wars that you can make an argument were righteous and justified.
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Apr 7, 2023 14:00
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This reminds me that Robot Chicken has done some Animorphs skits in their recent seasons. There's no mention of any aliens which aligns with what most people think of the series as about teens with powers getting into hijinks. They definitely know though and are playing that perception up for the gag.
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Apr 7, 2023 16:39
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mind the walrus posted:... a very sad revival for Clone High Oh what? Ew nooo 
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Apr 7, 2023 17:23
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cptn_dr posted:Thanks, Epi. It's been a really weird three years, and this thread has been a great ride through it. I love this weird, dark, occasionally-stupid-and-often-brilliant book series, and it's been a real pleasure to get to read along with you and everyone else in the thread. I've been re-watching Battlestar Galactica over the last few months (and season 4 for the first time) and that's pretty much how I feel there, too. This series has possibly aged better than that one, though.
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Apr 7, 2023 20:40
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Fuschia tude posted:I've been re-watching Battlestar Galactica over the last few months (and season 4 for the first time) and that's pretty much how I feel there, too. I've rewatched BSG pretty recently. Yes, it has. BSG's ending still makes me mad with how slapped together it is. It's frustrating because when the show was good it was SO GOOD. It peaked at the end of the second season with the whole Pegasus arc, and then the writers' strike happened. It was clear though that the showrunners had no clear idea how the series would wrap up and that's what ultimately hurt it, not the strike. Animorphs OTOH, valid criticisms about pacing in the ending arc aside, at least ends in a way that is thematically coherent with the rest of the series imo. Regarding Animorphs, I'd mostly spoiled myself on the larger plot points of the ending, but I was still pleasantly surprised with how well it came together. There's definitely a lack of catharsis but that was ultimately what Applegrant wanted, and while I definitely understand why people dislike it even now, it mostly works for me. I'm glad we're doing Everworld next! I've only read the second book and that was like back in 2002, so I'm looking forward to experiencing it (mostly) fresh.
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Apr 7, 2023 21:24
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Traxus IV posted:Oh what? Ew nooo Happy as poo poo for Wil Forte and Nicole Sullivan though. Get paid y'all. Will probably watch an Abraham Lincoln highlight reel at some point because Forte as Abe is the funniest poo poo in the world to me. dungeon cousin posted:This reminds me that Robot Chicken has done some Animorphs skits in their recent seasons. There's no mention of any aliens which aligns with what most people think of the series as about teens with powers getting into hijinks. They definitely know though and are playing that perception up for the gag. Cythereal posted:This is such a true and powerful message that speaks a lot to why I've grown so dissatisfied and contemptuous of stories in video games and books that don't treat war with this gravity. War is the ruiner of things. It destroys places, ends lives, corrodes the souls of those who survive, and leaves little but physical and psychological devastation in its wake, even the wars that you can make an argument were righteous and justified. That's why if I do play ludicrously violent games it's usually something like '93 DOOM or modern stuff like DUSK where it's all abstracted to hell. Even Fortnite is clearly a field where the arms and logistics are a means to goof around. Apex Legends isn't the worst I've ever seen, but it gets more at what you're talking about where it's this weird half-cartoon/half-realistic world where fighting is this almost aristocratic whimsy space for heroes, but even then it's also clearly just Virtual "Tag" and the aesthetic trappings are just the path of least resistance. But it'd be nice to see games that manage to
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Apr 7, 2023 21:38
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah I love me some Lord and Miller but they aren't saving this one. I understand that they can't recapture the magic and want to do their own thing, but what they've shown so far has all the same marks as Velma where someone watched a few Adult Swim blocks, read a bunch of reddit posts, and said "yeah, yeah I think I get this" and they clearly do not really "get it." Spec Ops: The Line. It even has basically the same "who said I survived?" Ending.
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Apr 7, 2023 21:44
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Yeah Spec Ops was exactly what I was thinking of where it's just a moral atrocity simulator followed by the game bludgeoning you around the head with it as though it's a deep or meaningful insight. "You could have stopped playing!" is not a deep metatextual gotcha, it's exploiting the goodwill of the player because they trusted that you had more to show them than a mirror and a sneer. Meaningful for the absolute dullest meatheads who play any military shooter game because "ooh-rah" or whatever goes on in their brains, but there's a reason that game is a curiosity rather than a landmark.
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Apr 7, 2023 21:49
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Uhhhh..... OK.
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Apr 7, 2023 22:00
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Soonmot posted:Fuuuuuuuuuuck As someone who's really not into infection at all, I really liked this author: https://archiveofourown.org/series/151619. It's a series of stories that take place after the war, from the perspective of a surviving Tom. Normally I'd consider keeping him around a big narrative cheat, but I think it works here as a way of showing the characters from an outside but still familiar perspective. The stories are interconnected, but can be read in any order, and mostly focus on what it's like for former hosts to try and live their life, and integrate back into normalcy after everything that's happened. Like I said, normally not my thing, but I liked them.
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Apr 7, 2023 22:13
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mind the walrus posted:Yeah Spec Ops was exactly what I was thinking of where it's just a moral atrocity simulator followed by the game bludgeoning you around the head with it as though it's a deep or meaningful insight. "You could have stopped playing!" is not a deep metatextual gotcha, it's exploiting the goodwill of the player because they trusted that you had more to show them than a mirror and a sneer. That reminds me of the people who start playing a PC game and say "wow this game lets you save and load at any time and you can adjust the game speed on the fly? And you're expected to play like that?! They should reference this in the narrative like Prince of Persia does!!!!" Yeah way to go presenting the shallowest observation about the most fundamental game mechanics as some sort of metatextual insight. Fuschia tude fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 7, 2023 |
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Apr 7, 2023 22:21
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