Y'know, as a general rule I liked the series more the further into it we get... but I really liked the first two Megamorphs more than the last two. *shrugs* I feel like this one was just... too jumbled and confusing. Our heroes had no real idea what was happening... So it felt kind of difficult to keep up. ^^()
I liked it fine, just not as much.
1) Y'know, I don't really understand the fascination with making Melissa into an Animorph. ^^() She really gets no character development in the series itself; we know nothing about her except that she's not as fierce as Rachel (since she still gets to exist in the AU), she's good at gymnastics and she talks to her cat. And yet she's one of the most talked-about NPC's in the series, as far as I've seen. I guess she's a female human character considered to be reasonably attractive who is about the age of the Animorphs, which means she gets shipped with poor single Marco, but... it just seems kind of out-of-the-blue. ^^()
Anywho, I thought the AU was fairly compelling. What kind of amuses me is that... well, Visser Four had to think he'd get something, personally, for doing this, right? But once the world was the way he wanted to make the world... what difference would it make, as far as his personal accomplishments go? Once he changed the timeline, the AU would have become reality, right? Why not just take the Time Matrix to Visser Three and say, "Hey, humans
used to be super-powerful, highly technological super-beings that had nearly destroyed us when I used
this to make them into technologically backwards primate-creatures. You're welcome! =3" and reap the same rewards with a sliver of the effort?
2) Sans Einstein, were nukes/nuclear reactors ever invented? That alone would change a lot about more current history... Starting with Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the Cold War, on up to a boatload of present-day headaches.
3-5) The harshness of this book was really what drew me, despite the fact that I didn't find the storyline as compelling as some. I liked that she didn't pull any punches with it. War is nasty, and in this one it wasn't animals or aliens getting ripped apart- Jake the human gets the back half of his head blown out, and that's vivid and violent and disturbing in the way all first-hand accounts of warfare are gonna end up. I love how sudden that was, and I love how he wasn't in morph at the time. I kind of like how they go through all that effort to not kill too many humans in their war, and then they realize that humans kill each other in inventive and nasty ways all the time. That's pretty deep.
6) =)
Although... KAA kind of has the habit of presenting racism as something dead and gone. It's never mentioned in the main series, except as something completely irrelevent- I believe Rachel narrates something along the lines of, "Jake is white and Cassie is black, but no one but an idiot cares about that," which is true. But... there's something of a flippancy there; it feels like she avoids talking too much about racial issues even as she takes all these other conflicts head-on. She can talk about genocide and WMDs all day long, but she says the word "hispanic" in relationship to Marco/Eva all of... what, once or twice? And her talking about racism in a book about the follies and foibles of mankind's past mistakes and then ignoring it again once we're back in the current timeline feels, again, like she's dodging the issue of racism in the present.
Does that make any sense at all?
I'm thinking no. ^^()
7) Very creative, extremely anticlimactic. xD
[off topic] Speaking of book two, I read somewhere that one of the points of that book was to give Rachel a reason to fight. Everyone else found a personal reason, while hers became protecting families.[/off topic]
*nods* I've ranted about that personal thought; each of the first five books- and book eight- was centered around giving every Animorph a reason to fight. ^^
