A Rebuttal to K.A.'s final letter

[animefanboy]

Honestly, I wasn't expecting a perfect victory, but something that provided closure to the series. As far as real life wars, look at the famous picture of a US Sailor kissing a woman, the celebration after World War II was enourmous. I wasn't expecting a party, but at least something that made it feel like the journey was over.

[Alex Oiknine]

Chad your comment made me sad! But yes, eventually their story, however insignificant to the rest of the cosmos, will end... Though slower than probably most of our own stories, since we're not famous or anything.

Is it funny fictional characters in some ways get longer lifespans than we do? I guess I must think so.

Anyway, I like to think they're on a new journey. If Applegate/Grant are interested in rebooting Animorphs, they must have thought a continuing Animorphs story (regardless of whether or not it involved the originals) was possible!

[Chad32]

I'm sorry it made you sad. I didn't really mean it like that, but stories really do end. Even this planet is not eternal. The universe...I don't know. I heard once that it's ever expanding, and I don't know if it's possible for it to hit an end.

[Alex Oiknine]

I wasn't being that serious about my sadness, lol, but thanks.

Life's characters are always changing but the plots are always the same.

[AmberKatira]

I, for one, liked the "cliffhanger" ending.  After getting through the 53 other books in the series plus all the megamorphs and chronicles and such, we all had this feeling that we knew not just the animorphs' world, but their larger universe pretty well.  That cosmos was huge.  And yet those six kids were somehow always the center of it: the source of hope, future peace, long-lasting galaxy-wide change.  Our view was just so narrow in that way.  I'm glad that there was something in that universe to sneak up and surprise us at the end, to let us know that while the animorphs will always be badass, it will not always be their fight and their story.  They deserved an ending, not an eternity as warriors.  And I felt that that kind of message is much better than the one we would have gotten if, say, they had tried to find and kill Visser One/Three instead.  That would just be like getting stuck in an endless loop.

Also, I approved of Jake's decision to leave Cassie behind for their final mission.  He was right when he said they needed someone to protect the gains and victories they had won.  Abandoning that kind of responsibility would be paramount to saying that all that really matters is the fight, rather than what they were fighting for.

[CCVandi]

As much research as it is clear you did, and as well as you made your point, I would have to disagree with the idea that her ending to the story was not in the spirit of the story.  Animorphs IS a war story (and by the way, so is Star Wars.  <-- See that word there? It's war.)  WAR is not a genre of story, it's a setting or a type of story.  Sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction are genres and all can be about war.  Lord of the Rings is a war story.  And K. A. was right about it being up to the children to save the world.  The Heroes of WWII were the young men, late teens and early 20's, who went and fought, and came back wounded, broken, or crazy.  That's what happens in war.  Everyone involved is a causality in some way.  Every soldier loses something, and she communicated that message very well.  It made the whole series more powerful, especially to those of us who are rereading it now with a greater understanding of life than when we first read them.  It makes them less of a hokey sci-fi story for kids, and more of a legend about heroes, who were willing to lose any and every part of themselves for the rest of humanity.  It made Animorphs an epic, and it would not have been as good if she'd done it any other way.

[Red]

I just read that letter for the first time and well, whatever your opinions on how it ended, props to K.A for defending her choices so bluntly.

[Allie DeLarge]

First, a disclaimer: I love Animorphs.  I love this series - so much.  Some of them are in the top 10 books I have ever read - and I'm truly grateful to Katherine and Michael for bringing them into the world.

Now, however, with the discussion about Animorphs 2.0, I thought it might be a good idea to revisit K.A.'s famous post-series letter (written around 2001) to the fans.  Unfortunately, I had a very negative reaction to this letter. Why?  Because it contains what is (arguably) a huge lie.  At the very least, it is a huge contradiction (close to the same thing).

I will prove it.  This will (obviously) be marked as a spoiler:

[spoiler]

This is from K.A.'s letter (source: http://hirac-delest.issamshahid.com/database/articles/kaa_response_54.htm)

Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don't end happily. Not ever...Here's what doesn't happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt.

This claim is simply untrue - a lie.  I'll give four crushing responses to this statement, from the general to the specific:

1.  Animorphs is a sci-fi/fantasy story, which is a completely different genre than "war story."  Animorphs is much closer to Star Wars (a sci-fi/fantasy) than Saving Private Ryan (a war story).  Animorphs was never realistic, and it is not about a realistic war. 
2.  Around 1998, K.A. says (in response to question asking "Do you have any words of wisdom for Animorphs readers?"):

Two things: I hope my books help give you respect and awe for the natural world. Animals are at least as incredible and amazing as any alien species. The other thing is that in the books, it's up to kids to save the world. In life, that's true as well. 

  (source: http://www.kidsreads.com/authors/au-applegate-ka.asp)
Think - very carefully - about what this quote means, combined with the context of the ending (#54).  This 1998 quote says it's up to kids to save the world.  And yet, your reward as a kid for deciding to save the world is being killed (Rachel) or screwed up (Tobias, Jake)?  What a great message to send to kids!  Clearly, K.A. changed her mind about Animorphs somewhere between this 1998 interview and her 2001 letter.  Animorphs was NOT always a war story (as K.A. defines it).  Instead...
3.  Animorphs used to be a story about hope.  Think about The Invasion, or the Andalite Chronicles, or Megamorphs #1.  In MM #1, the last word is literally "hope"!!  Now, by "hope" I do NOT mean simplistic/cartoonish good-vs-evil fights.  I mean something much deeper.  The characters in the three books that I mention go through hellish nightmares (Tobias is trapped as a hawk, Elfangor actually DIES, Jake thinks that he let Marco die).  And amazingly, against impossible odds, they emerge determined to keep fighting.  First question - Is that realistic?  Not really... but when was the last time you turned into a tiger to fight aliens?  That's right.  Second question - Is that stupid?  NO.  If you think inspiration and hope are stupid, I feel really sorry for you.
4. Another line from the 2001 letter:

But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end...And to tell you the truth I'm a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I'd wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping.

  Oh please.  This is what you call a "straw man" argument.  No one was hoping for a comic book victory.  What a lot of us WERE hoping for was something actually in the spirit of the series - like Megamorphs #1 (see the previous point), or #26 The Attack, or #4, or #13, or #6, or #7.  Why were we hoping for that?  Because that's what the series used to be about!  It used to be about hard questions, the need to keep fighting, trust and friendship, where to draw the line, and hope in the face of darkness (and yes - sometimes, a hard-won triumph).

Let me be very clear again - I was not looking for a cartoon victory.  I WOULD HAVE BEEN HAPPY WITH A DEFEAT - as long as it stayed true to the spirit of Animorphs that we all loved (again, #1 and Andalite Chronicles are perfect examples of this).

I know K.A. and Michael always cite Lord of the Rings (and how they wanted Animorphs to be more LOTR and less Star Wars), but here's the fatal flaw with that argument: unlike #54, no one finishes Return of the King feeling depressed.  This is how they feel: "Wow."  Lord of the Rings is not a slam-dunk victory, but it is awe-inspiring.  Frodo is scarred forever - like the Animorphs, he sacrificed any chance at a normal life - but you also appreciate the world that he has saved, you appreciate Sam's ability to return to the Shire, you appreciate Aragorn's coronation as the rightful king.  In Animorphs, there's none of that, even from the "successful" characters (Marco / Cassie / Ax).  In LOTR, the victory is complex and comes at a great cost - but it is clearly a victory.  In #54, all of that is brushed off-screen (we get one sentence of Ax being promoted), so from a reader's perspective it might as well not happen.

We care about Animorphs because we cared about the characters.  So what once was a series about hard choices, the shedding of innocence, and hope amidst adversity ends with (1) an exercise in cynicism, (2) a non-ending, and (3) a note from the author to "morph out" - which I translated as "grow up."

If K.A. wrote the ending to simply "make us" realize that war is terrible - mission accomplished, I guess.  But I think we already knew that starting from The Invasion.  Sorry, but I have WAY too much respect for Animorphs to take the narrow message of #54 over the higher message of #1:

Until then, we fight.

[/spoiler]

So, agree?  Disagree?

You lost me when you said Animorphs is not a war story, but a sci-fi/fantasy story.
For one, those are not mutually exclusive, mainly because 'war story' is not, as you're treating it, a genre.
It's a type of story, that's all. Any story of any genre can be a 'war story' - sci-fi, horror (how fitting would THAT be), fantasy, what have you. As long as the thematic content is ABOUT war, it's a war story. Animorphs is very DEFINITELY about war - it is literally about the effects of it on children and others forced to fight, and it is figuratively about the effect on humanity as a whole. On ALL sentient beings. It's a deconstruction of all our glorious notions of war. That's Rachel's entire reason for existing! (Well, almost.)
And Star Wars, if you're concerned with things like genre, isn't even a sci-fi series.
It is what you call 'space opera'. Essentially, fantasy tropes, sciencey setting. It is INFINITELY more similar to Lord of the Rings (if Tolkien had bashed himself over the head with a steel-toed clog before sitting down at his typewriter) than it is to, say, 2001: A Space Oddity. ODYSSEY. Haha! Wow. David Bowie on the mind.

Examine the events of the Animorphs series.
The 'heroes' are, by definition, guerrilla fighters, caught up in what is called an asymmetrical war. Very different from Star Wars, which is much more of a traditional 'journey' story - even if the destination is more metaphysical than corporeal (i.e. enlightenment in the light side of the Force).




And, for the record (directed at everyone now), I believe what she meant by it being 'up to children to save the world' was something along the lines of "it's up to the young to put a stop to the cycle of war, where their parents had failed".
If you see war as cyclical and self-propagating, in that sort of light, the ending makes perfect sense.
They are consumed by the next revolution of the cycle. Crayak and the Ellimist, Good and Evil, duel within us endlessly. Because we are sentient.
It is our beauty and our bane.

To me, the ending is wonderful.
I LOVE how broken they all were, after the war ended. Except maybe Cassie. Been a while since I read The Beginning, and I never have paid much attention to Cassie...
But that's what war DOES, what war IS.
It is pain and horror and it breaks people, inside.

[songofsuzanna]

I think that Animorphs is supposed to be a war story.  And war changes people.  My dad was a Vietnam vet, so I have a firsthand look at the sort of trauma war inflicts.  I didn't have a problem with that.

Jake and Cassie not staying together did not surprise me at all.  However, because I had missed part of the series, Rachel's death seemed senseless and pointless.  And I couldn't understand why Jake never tried to save Tom.  He shared a house with the guy.  You can't tell me that there wasn't a point where Jake couldn't have ambushed him, tied him up, and starved the Yeerk out of him.  There was even that family trip to a cabin (can't remember which book that was) where Jake was going to kill Tom.  What kind of a brother thinks about killing first instead of saving?  But I'm sure someone can give me a reasonable explanation for this.

But what upset me the very most was that ending.  I can understand Jake, Marco, and Tobias going after Ax.  But it felt too sudden and too abrupt.  That last monster was quite literally out of nowhere.  Though I'm not a majorly published author yet (only in small magazines), I've gone through enough classes (and I mean professional classes and workshops) and done enough writing on my own to see a cop-out when it's on the page.  She just wanted to end the series.

Applegate did not have to end it like she did and the whole "I wanted them to go down fighting" is utter bull.  None of us wanted them to go down fighting.  Why would you go on and on about hope only to kill off most of the characters?  We wanted them to live.  Where was the living in that last book?  Where was the hope?  It was so depressing, I cried for like five minutes after reading that thing.

And you don't take your readership through such an emotional journey and then leave them on a low.  An author's first responsibility is to her readers.  Applegate was just thinking about herself at the end and not about what was best for her readers, emotionally, and what ultimately made sense.

[LisaCharly]

I know I'm one of the few who really loves the ending, but I remember it ending and running crying to my mother about how unfair it was (she also read the series and was all weepy over Rachel at the time). She told me that I probably hated it then, but would come to love it as an adult - and she was right. As she told me, it wasn't about the Yeerks and it wasn't about the One and it wasn't ever about the enemies. It was about the Anis. At the end of the series, they all knew who they were - Jake, Rachel and Tobias defined by war, Marco still feared death but would lay down his life for Jake, Cassie knew that she was only a soldier because of circumstance, and Ax had blended his time on Earth with the culture he'd wanted to return to, but now felt able to criticize (though I do wish he'd gotten more pagetime at the end). I don't feel like it was a cop-out. I feel like it felt conclusive, it ended with a bang, and the Anis had all reached the apex of their maturity as characters in realistic ways. She could have ended the series in a variety of ways that would have alienated fewer readers, even ones that weren't happy endings, but I feel like the dark-yet-gutsy ending it got really served the series well.

And it wasn't about the readers, because the readers were a bunch of grade schoolers at the time and you can't always try to please your audience. Because then you get Megamorphs 2.

*prints Ram the Blade Ship t-shirts*

[Terenia]

I find the ending...difficult.

Like Lisa implied, the older I get the more it grows on me, and in the end I respect AppleGrant's license as the creator of the series to end it however they darned well please. I do feel like the time of the Animorphs had reached it's conclusion, and that was displayed nicely in the way she ended it.

I guess the reason it rubs me the wrong way, personally, is because for me it was not about the Ani's. Yes, they were the focal point and the vessel through which the story was told, but as a reader I was always much more interested by the alien races and the war on a grander scale. I didn't like the implication that because Earth was won the Yeerks were never a problem again - so let's move on to the next threat. I imagine the reality of the situation would have been a very Firefly-esque universe, with the Yeerks standing in for the browncoats as outcasts who still hold strong to certain beliefs. That was the conclusion I was interested in, and we heard so little regarding that it made me sad.

[kcool12]

I think that while none of us were expecting a total happy ending, with everyone alive and together and happy, we did expect there to be some closure. I was okay when Rachael died, you knew that one of them had to at some point in the series and Rachael was the pick. But ending 54 with Jake saying "Ram the Blade Ship" its leaving everyone with hopes or dreams that will never be answered. What happened to them? Who is the One? Is Cassie the only animorphs left? WHO, WHAT WHEN WHERE AND WHY? And i agree, animorphs was more of a standing up story than a war one, but around 50 that all changed, the end was near anyone could see that; but a that point it became a full out war. Not just a few battles here and there with school the next day. Armies attacking and casualties on both sides. So we saw that coming, okay. But 54's end? I think Applegate owes it to the fans to write just one more and answer the questions. If she did that and everyone died, i would still be fine because it gave some closure.

[Semeir-Cooraf-Armaheen]

The story could have ended with Jake and them firing all weapons at the other ship. Which would imply THEY KEEP FIGHTING rather than they all die.

Tobias especially should have survived. He is Elfangor's son. He fought and died so that Tobias and all children like him could LIVE. In a way, I feel like Elfangor's memory was spit on with that ending.