After all these years...

[Kitulean]

Still, referring to your previous post where you said ThinkAgain gave away the ending, when he really didn't. If you can pick out what he meant by that game of sentence hang man, then you should be on Wheel of Fortune.

My point is, on a board dedicated to a series THIS old, you kinda have to figure people will give away plot points without thinking. If you really don't want to be spoiled before you read the book, then read the book. It really can't take very long.

BACK TO THE TOPIC - Getting into this series got me through a really hard period when I was moving away from my friends and to a new state where I didn't know anyone. It will always be one of my favorite series, if only for that alone, but also because it's just damn good.

[Terenia]

Funny, Cerulean, Animorphs was kind of my helper too, but not because I moved away from friends...b/c I didn't have any.

It's always fun to be able to imagine that you can just morph a bird and fly away. Or that some sort of alien species would come and snatch you up and enter you into an intergalactic war.


Hell, I would have been happy to join the Sharing and become a voluntary, if it meant being a part of something. I'm the type of person that would have bought into their bullcr*p...

[goom]

I guess I'm going to have to come down and say that all spoiler tags in this forum are a coddling, obstructive.

i wouldn't say obstructive, since they actually make posts seem shorter.
but yeah, i think we can at least not purposely to spoil it to newbies, but we shouldn't go out of our way.

and what about the sled? (i haven't seen the movie)

[anijen21]

lol I really picked a bad movie to make that point with

what's a spoiler that everyone knows? The Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde thing?

[Darth Revan]

Hell, I would have been happy to join the Sharing and become a voluntary, if it meant being a part of something. I'm the type of person that would have bought into their bullcr*p...

Gah, not me. I wouldn't go to there. I'd prefer stay home.

[Kitulean]

Aww, Terenia. I kinda know what you mean, since I didn't get any real close friends through most of the first couple years after moving. Reading Animorphs, it was like they were enough to be friends. As sappy as that sounds now.

As for movie spoilers

[spoiler]OH EM GEE, VADER IS LUKE'S DAD.  [/SPOILER]

And goom:

[spoiler] In the movie, his last words are 'Rosebud' and they spend all this time trying to figure out who Rosebud is. It turns out that was the name of his sled and that for all his riches and power, when he was dying he was reaching out and longing for his childhood toy. [/spoiler]

[Shenmue654]

Hey, it's Shen. I'm gonna give my two cents, given that I'm exploring the site out of boredom.

I agree with what everyone says about the ghostwritten books being bad. In fact, they were actually so bad that my twelve-year old self could never finish the series. K.A's writing was engaging and beautiful, and when I re-read the earliest books as an adult I find myself just as entranced as I had been then. Because I heard through word-of-mouth how badly the ending came out, I just abjectly refuse to finish on "moral grounds." XDD I want to preserve my memory of what I loved about the series, and simply will know how The End came through the usual sources. ; )

I personally still think Animorphs is good. Re-reading it, I was shocked to find that it was perhaps even better than I'd expected. KA always threw in political nuances and themes on the nature of freedom, the pain of war, and the gray shades between good and evil. Few book series that are written for pre-teens/children have ever done anything like this, and I'm frustrated that the political climate has created a saccharine sweet politically correct media climate. You can't blame the kids today for being so distanced from reality. Animorphs, while grounded thoroughly in science fiction, wasn't afraid to describe the way that the world could be harsh.

In particular upon re-reading some of the books, I almost laughed at how uncensored it all was. I was eight years old when I began this series, and I was reading about pain and suffering and screaming and death? XD It made me wonder just what kind of kid I was. ; ) The series is also part of what has formed my worldview, which includes the belief that people are rarely what they are for no reason at all.

I still think the characters are fairly impressive for a book series like that, despite KA Appelgate's memory lapses. X3

[Aluminator (Kit)]

Not all the ghostwritten books were bad, but certainly none of them were KAA's old Animorphs. And yeah, the series definitely got harder to stay loyal to without her writing- they just weren't as gripping and engaging in my mind. To me, my impression of the series is that the first half was spent building believable, three-dimensional characters with loads of humanity and thrusting them into a world that was unapologetic, grisly, and realistic, and yet at the same time, more fun than I'd ever had reading a book. Am I over-idolizing Lady Applegate? Maybe. I still enjoy them quite a bit today, though. The second half of the series feels like it was spent slowly crushing those characters back down to one-dimensional shells of what they'd become and making the world less entertaining, if still quite dark. Granted, I'm going mostly from memory- I'm still not to the ghostwritten books in my reread, so I'll see if I feel any different when I get there. I'm sure it's not nearly as extreme as I'm making it out to be.

[ThinkAgain]

Funny, Cerulean, Animorphs was kind of my helper too, but not because I moved away from friends...b/c I didn't have any.

It's always fun to be able to imagine that you can just morph a bird and fly away. Or that some sort of alien species would come and snatch you up and enter you into an intergalactic war.

The same for me as well. I was basically (am...) a loner, and these books pretty much made a good portion of my childhood. Then, and even to this day I look out the window and wish I could just jump out and fly away. Anything for escape, really.

Hell, I would have been happy to join the Sharing and become a voluntary, if it meant being a part of something. I'm the type of person that would have bought into their bullcr*p...

Eh, not so much. I never was a fan of group "fun" sessions. From how it was described early in the series, I would have interpreted it as cool kids making a club to pretend to be nice to uncool kids to look like nice people. I would have never believed that the people who made fun of me and isolated me would ever randomly accept me into a club, even if it did have other lonely people in it.

[Darth Revan]

Yeah a bunch of preppies having pity parties and such.

[donmoosavi]

IMO the Ghostwritten books as a whole aren't bad; there are some simply awful ones, and some that are exceptionally well done; I think of rthe most part the rest are decent with some shades of greatness in them. KA is obviously best when she is in complete control of the book, and she wrote a few extra ones in between the ghostwritten ones, as well as the megamorphs and you can see the difference.

[Serraph105]

no the series is great. It has characters that are full of depth and are often times conflicted about what they have to do. Also it doesn't hesitate to talk about what war can do to you and just how unclear the choices you have to make can be and it didn't bother trying to dumb down the violence in it either granted it was protected by the magic of demorphing, but still.

I do however think that people start giving K.A. Applegate far too much credit  when people start comparing her to the ghost writers. I'm not saying they were just as good, but I am saying they were not really the huge step down from K.A. that people like to say they were. This is especially true when you consider how many people will tell you of their dislike of the way the series ended keeping in mind that that was when the author finally picked up her pen again.

[AmberKatira]

I disagree about the characters having depth.  Maybe they had a bit more substance to them before the ghostwriters, maybe not.  I think you'd have to be looking pretty hard to notice the difference though.  Mostly, I feel like the characters are animated tropes: warrior, conflicted leader, voice of peace, comic relief, emo introspection.  Marco was the only one who really ever felt like much of a real character to me.  That's not to say that this kind of thing didn't work within the series.  I feel that it gave the authors ways to voice various philosophies and arguments of logic and morality.  For the age group the books are mostly written for, and for the age I was when I read them, those thoughts are pretty deep.  I read them for that sort of mental stretching and pondering feeling as much as for the exciting story.  And of course, being that young, flat characters bothered me not at all.  I fell in love with the destructive, attractive, burning girl-power that is pretty much Rachel's character.

The books don't stand up quite as well for the re-read because now I really do expect strong and developing characters, and the points of deep thought no longer seem quite so deep.

[esplin]

:] awesome post Amber

[AnyaSciarra]

I'm always confused at how Animorphs was targeted at preteens.

There's a lot of gore, discussion of suicide, the value of freedom, depression, sacrificing things for the greater good, and seeing things in more than black and white.

I certainly wouldn't give this series to a preteen if I was a parent.

If I ever had children, they'd be introduced to Animorphs early on, along with Doctor Zhivago and To Kill a Mockingbird. But you are right, it is pretty surprising, the subjects they deal with.

I have to say that Animorphs is an impressive series. I don't want to go fan-girling, but the topics dealt with really hit home- I up until recently was a near- absolute loner. I like books where I can imagine myself a part of the story, like I have done with everything from Sherlock Holmes to Shakespeare to Animorphs. I am glad that KAA did not skim over harder subjects like most authors would, all because "it's for children." The world does not spare the details.

Another series that is in the children's section at the library at which I volunteer is The Five Ancestors, which I love. It's about Kung Fu, kids, betrayal, and a lot of the stuff the Anis deal with. It's really violent, and in some places very dark. Both Animoprhs and TFA have it right- the world is tough.

Okay, but this is from the girl who read Crime and Punishment at thirteen...