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.
----
"Rachel's a mary sue and must die!" shouted the reader.
She does.
"Jake is just some boring leader guy. Lame!" shouted another one.
His perfect life crumbles around him, he makes failure after failure, and slowly loses his mind.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
----
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.