Sorry, bro. No offence, but I'm going to call BS on this one.
While Grace simply saw the ending as bad writing, I saw it as something more.
Post-Modernism.
She purposefully made the series the way it is. Making Jake the boringly nondescript leader, yet focusing on him far too much. Making Rachel, the "Rebellious princess"(groan, another one?) She's the girl the author wishes she was. smart, pretty, perfect in every way. Even Marco, AKA captain sarcasm, spontaneously fails at humour whenever trying to make a comeback to her hurtful insults!
She wanted us to hate these characters.
She wanted us to want them to die.
It makes it that much worse than they do.
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Right off the bat, I get the impression that Jake, Rachel and Marco are your least favourite characters. Calling Jake a boring leader is rather extreme and undeserved. The kid had to grow up at thirteen! He made choices--yea, a lot of them were bad ones, too-- that men much older than him never had to make: life or death. He had to live with the knowledge that ANY ONE of his friends could die the next day, and it would be all his fault. I don't hate Jake for that. Hell, I respect him.
"Rachel's a mary sue and must die!" shouted the reader. She does.
I'm sorry, do you know what a Mary-Sue is? Yea, I get it, it's unrealistic for a girl to be pretty, smart and independant. But you're forgetting about her darker nature. I don't recall a single instance where Rachel had intercourse with every and all characters. Her only relationship in terms of romance was with Tobias, through and through. So what if K.A wishes she could be like Rachel. She also admitted that Marco was written similarly to her own husband, and said she had more in common with Cassie. Applegate isn't the first, nor the last, author to create characters from past/personal experiences. Don't chastise her for that.
His perfect life crumbles around him, he makes failure after failure, and slowly loses his mind.
Calling Jake a boring leader is rather extreme and undeserved. The kid had to grow up at thirteen! He made choices--yea, a lot of them were bad ones, too-- that men much older than him never had to make: life or death. He had to live with the knowledge that ANY ONE of his friends could die the next day, and it would be all his fault. I don't hate Jake for that. Hell, I respect him. Could YOU ask your cousin to kill your brother for you? Could YOU condemn a whole bunch of disabled children to death? Could you subject your most loyal and tormented friends [Tobias] to torture, knowing it would kill him?
"It would be illogical for Marco to be harmfully affected by the events of this series." said a more rational fan.
Marco ends up a life that is bittersweetly shallow.
I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that. If you read number 54, you'd know that Marco was just as willing to go on the Blade Ship Fiasco as Jake was. Why? Because he REALIZED that his shallow and materialistic life wasn't going to heal all the pain of war. In the Andalite Chronicles, there's a bit where Alloran's speaking with Elfangor, Chapman, and Loren about war. He says that few soldiers really ever come home from war. THAT, in my opinion, is what K.A. had in store for Marco. She starts out by giving him a tough life (which you seemed to forget in your convuluted spiel), rewarding him with a life of luxury, and having him come to a realization (personal growth, perhaps?) that stuff won't fill the large void in his life.
"Cassie is another mary sue, this one focusing on purity rather than perfection. She's boringly static, never grows out of her treehugger phase, and just gets in the way of the other characters. Unlike the others, We'd actually be okay if she died. Possibly by jumping under a bulldozer to save rat."
Sadly, she doesn't die. she leaves jake for a hotter guy, and quits the animorphs, despite initially joining it to save the world.
Um...Did you read the Departure? Or the Ultimate? Or the David Trilogy? In which she makes decisions that are very "un-Cassie like?" Cassie's aware that her morals get in the way of the war--in fact, that's all we ever get in her narrations. And, yea, she is EXTREMELY annoying. I'll admit, her books (with the exception of a few) are my least favourites. But I doubt she deserves to die. Of all the characters in the book, Cassie had no business being in the war. THAT was her purpose. Showing us what it was like for a kind person to be thrown into a war. Many of these soldiers were seen in WW1 and WWII: patriotic, kind boys playing hero. Boys who eventually just wanted to go home.
"Ax is funny." said a large group of kids who like ax.
Ax lives. Well, nobody wanted HIM to die, did they?
"Tobias is my favourite character. even with his life sucking so much, he still helps the people who almost got him killed many times.
With Rachel dead, he loses his mind, despite having a mother, friends, and starting to get a decent life.
What would he talk about with this mother? How they went flying that one time? How she kinda/sorta saved his life? How she bailed on him (though, for good enough reasons, I'll admit) and seemed to care more for her own dog? As nice as Loren is. And as much as Tobias would have liked to have a family, everyone got to the point where it was just plain fact that Tobias wasn't going to live out his childhood fantasy of being reunited with his parents. His mother has NO memory of him or his father. The most they could ever be, as Tobias stated, was friends.
"ZOMFG david iz so meen! 
" Shouted the worst kind of fan. the kind of fan that ignores plotlines, and just fantasises about the hero and the rival in bed. the kind that somehow doesn't understand the tragic story his life took when he met the animorphs
.
...................
...................
........Huh?
He gets trapped in rat form by Cassie. All part of a "master plan" that was absolutely God-Awful. the plan goes "get your best friend that you love like a sister, force her to trick someone she may like, sacrifice her last shred of sanity hearing the tortured anguished screams of a kid in a rat, and rather than have tobias eat him, leave it on an island where he will life out the rest of his life in misery."
"Wait, he'll be killed anyway. Countless animals eat rats." said the rational fan who also sees the problem with this plan. "Besides, this is too dark a plan for queen treehugger. Even if it wasn't too dark, and you are finally getting some much-needed character development, the plan is still fundamentally absurd! why not just kill him?"
"Eeek! I can't kill him! that would be mean!" shouted cassie.
"And yet damning him to eternal misery and fear somehow isn't?!"
"uh... look behind you! A pretty tree!"
She runs off, leaving the rational fan even more confused than he was before.
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This can be discussed and refuted in the many David threads on RAF.
Something tells me that Applegate spent more time laughing at the readers than she did telling a story.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
One last note: Some of you have called her nonsense at the book store an overeaction. I've known her for three and a half years, and that would barely score a 4 on a 1-10 scale of her overreactions.
Listen, man. I give you kudos for your take on post-modernism, and I respect your opinion and views. I apologize if this post appeared hostile--it wasn't my intention.
Unfortunately, I disagree with you. Animorphs, in my opinion, was a serious war story that tried to convey a serious message to kids; with the added twist of making soldiers out of children.
Honestly, I think this thread was made just because you happened to be friends with Grace.
