so, i just read through this whole series with the ebooks (w/ the uncorrected ones for 6-12, which btw in book 11 I cracked up when it said "WTF" instead of "WTE"-it totally fit). i had only vaguely remembered book1 from my childhood.
anyway, it was a good series... the ending made me so grateful for the animorphs ending, I mean, yeah animorphs made a cliffhanger but it was a cliffhanger with a plot/enemy that no one really got to care too much about. in a lot of animorphs fans minds, the whole "the one" thing almost didn't even happen. at least they resolved the yeerk plot for God's sake.
did anyone else think she went out of her way to avoid any "my name is..." moments in the narration? lol, like she refused to have the narrator introduce themselves so it didn't look like animorphs.
I also felt she kind of started with similar character templates but made sure to radically tweak them-- jake/david, marco/christopher, cassie/april, tobias or ax/jalil, rachel/senna. ok so some are more of a stretch than others, but it seems applegate starts out like "what if a leader, a comedian, a peacenik vegetarian who loves to moralize, a strong scary female, and someone who's in some way different and never had a previous strong connection to the others all had to either use animals to fight aliens or use gods to fight alien gods?"
