poop hits the fan after book 19

[bizarrocarlos]

notice how the animorphs lives didn't really suck until after book 19. the new guy tries to kill everybody,rachael starts to realize she's a sociopath, (which is proven in the separation),tobias loses more of his grip on humanity then gets tortured, marco comes to term that his mom may need to die (he almost pushes her off a cliff) then is held back and sees her be shot and fall, ax is torn when the new andalites arrive on earth and doesn't know what to do,and jake has to shoulder the crushing responsability after he lost his family.
before this it was mostly, the yeerks are trying to do something, we go in and stop it,visser three shows us a new morph,escape with minor injuries. next mission.

[Duff]

Yea thats a good point, there were definitely some serious and rough moments in the series but 19-22 was the real growing up period for them. It was a black and white war until Cassie found out that the yeerks are a species just like humans and they aren't all bad, some of them were just as caught up in it as they were. Then of course the david trilogy made them make the hardest decision they'd ever had to make and one of the hardest of the series.

The other things you mentioned didn't happen directly after that but that was a definite shift in the tone of the series that allowed them to tackle more adult and emotional trials.

The big personal trials for each animorph really occured at the start of the 30's, 30-33 really created personal trials and revelations for marco, jake, rachel and tobias respectively.

[goom]

i didn't think the david trilogy was that bad. rachel seemed out of character at times, but it was good none-the-less.
i do agree though that the series kind of slumped in the second half (ghostwriters esp.).

[Ghost Tiger]

Rachel was out of character in the David trilogy?   

I felt that was pretty much the most "classic Rachel" book in the series.  And the other two she didn't narrate seemed in-character too.

[Duff]

Yea goom that was rachel at her finest, and I don't think carlos was saying that the quality went down but that the maturity of the stories and the level of personal conflicts the animorphs went through went up.

[JFalcon]

Actually Marco's life sucked until book 5, then it got better 

But no I see what you're saying and it's an interesting point, things pretty much do change around that point; though on my next full series read-through-athon I plan to spot the exact moment when they stopped taking Visser Three as seriously as they did in the first books (I suspect it was book 9)

[Chad32]

I think it was book nine as well. That's the first time they pull one over on him and have a good laugh afterwards.

[Duff]

Yea once he is threatened by a skunk and defeated then its pretty much over for scare tactics. But they still fear him for awhile after that, not like the piercing crap my pants fear of the first books but like an oh **** visser three is here this is going to be a really tough really bad battle