I was just wondering whether the characters in animorphs or a mixture of them reminded you of someone in real life. And how realistic animorphs was.
For the realism part, I think realistically the Animorphs would be suffering from
way more post-traumatic stress disorder. They're essentially child soldiers, and you can look up any of the literature on real-life child soldiers, from Uganda or anywhere else, to see how psychologically damaged they are.
The Animorphs had it better in some ways, because most RL child soldiers are isolated from family and friends, and their entire life is war. The Animorphs spent the majority of their time in normal society, and still had their families (well, most of them did), so it was easier for them to keep a grip on their sanity. The books only dealt with exciting missions of course, but in-between the missions (the stuff that never gets written about) I guess they had a lot of down time to be (or try to be) normal.
Still, modern warfare takes place mostly from a distance, and yet it can still have serious mental health effects on people. The Animorphs specialized in close combat, and spent who knows how many total hours chomping into other living creatures, feeling bones crunch beneath their teeth, feeling flesh tear beneath their claws, their faces coated with fresh blood, while the screams of their victims sounded in their ears.
I know they had nightmares once in a while, but it's a miracle that bad dreams were the extent of it. No significant psychotic tendencies, no inability to function in normal society, no panic or anxiety attacks, no serious depression or suicidal thoughts.
Kind of unrealistic in my opinion, but then again, I suspect that having such a mentally resilient and incorruptible bunch as the defenders of humanity wasn't entirely a matter of luck *cough*Ellimist*cough*.
