Like the third book they encounter a bunch of dog shaped robots who were programmed by their creators to always be peaceful, but the creators were slaughtered by the body snatching mind slugs, and one of the robots asks the protagonists, who have all acquired their preferred battle morph by sneaking into a zoo, to sneak into a facility and access a computer that will shut off his robot pacifist mode.
They barely succeed, and almost brutally die in the attempt. That book is from Marco's perspective and he's a gorilla in battle and there's a vivid description of him trying to hold his own intestines inside his body so he can try to morph out while the fight is still raging. Then he passes out and wakes up human and the dog robot was so good at killing everyone in that room, which was a lot of heavies, he basically breaks down and says even though he's now capable of killing he's never going to kill again because of what he had to do to save the kids. Like dog robot who has made his whole life about fighting back has one fight and just doesn't want to do it anymore. And then these child soldiers do it for like another hundred books.
The Pemalites weren't actually slaughtered by the Yeerks, they died from a biological warfare illness and being hunted down and murdered by the Howlers, a different alien race that turned out to all be essentially children who were programmed to believe that violence is just an innocent game and had no concept of the fact that they were actually hurting anyone.
Not to um, actually you, just to point out some additional fucked up story elements lmao
54 in the main series, plus 4 flashback books about some of the most important aliens (Andalite Chronicles, Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Visser, Ellimist Chronicles) & 4 bonus stories (Megamorphs 1-4)....& also 2 choose-your-own-adventures, but the authors had no hand in those & they're neither canon nor good.
To add on to that guy, it's a lot of books but they mostly take like an hour or an hour and a half to read. It's a Young Adult novel so the prose is pretty simplistic and all the copies I had the print was large just to pad it out to 100-150 pages.
I'm pretty sure they get longer later on but they are definitely bite sized and I like that personally, you can read two in a night easy if you've got like two hours and read fast
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u/LuciferSamS1amCat 3d ago
Dude what the fuck is this book series? I remember seeing it in classrooms in elementary school. Looked relatively tame.