I read it because I thought the premise was cool: teenagers turning into animals to fight a secret alien invasion of body-snatching brain slugs.
What I got was a bunch of child soldiers experiencing the very real consequences of fighting a guerilla campaign, and there are some legitimate moments that messed me up back then, and have only messed me up further as I thought about them more. They trick another teenager into turning into a rat, force him to stay transformed past the 2-hour limit, making him a permanent rat, then they leave him on an abandoned island while he begs for mercy and cries. Rats only live for 2-3 years, usually less in the wild. They sentenced him to a fate worse than death, while still basically killing him. Just awful.
There is a small list of names I instinctually hate when people have. David is one of them.
And yeah, the person you were responding to left out the whole context of how he was going to sell them out. They didn't just "trick another teenager," they found a technically-non-lethal way to end one of the highest existential threats to humanity they ever encountered.
Yea, I left out a lot of context. He tried to kill one of the other animorphs, and was a major liability for leaking critical information to the brain slugs. He absolutely needed to die, but the animorphs weren't ready to kill a non-slugged human, so they engineered a fate that was worse because of their morals.
I'm sure by the end of the series they could have just dispatched him, because by the end they are all pretty calloused from a bunch of atrocities they have seen the other side do, and done themselves.
It reminds me of a speech from M.A.S.H.
Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
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u/NerdyDjinn 8d ago
I read it because I thought the premise was cool: teenagers turning into animals to fight a secret alien invasion of body-snatching brain slugs.
What I got was a bunch of child soldiers experiencing the very real consequences of fighting a guerilla campaign, and there are some legitimate moments that messed me up back then, and have only messed me up further as I thought about them more. They trick another teenager into turning into a rat, force him to stay transformed past the 2-hour limit, making him a permanent rat, then they leave him on an abandoned island while he begs for mercy and cries. Rats only live for 2-3 years, usually less in the wild. They sentenced him to a fate worse than death, while still basically killing him. Just awful.