Ram the Blade Ship?

[paul1991]

I was reading through TAC and I came across a part that I never payed much attention to before.

Now I don't believe this has been covered before. Essentially it says that the people aboard the ship that rammed the Blade Ship and the people on the Blade Ship died, right?
I think it is saying that without a ship there to place the Blade Ship in a containment field, the parts would have drifted apart and the occupants would have suffocated.

It's not a cliffhanger. It's a straight-up murder-suicide.

The Blade ship's engines glowed bright and the
ship broke away from the StarSword.
<You think you've won, Andalite?> Visser Three
sneered. <You're still just one fighter. And your
Dome ship is crippled. I'll swing around, move off,
and finish you in my own good time.>
<I wouldn't swing around just yet, Visser. See,
you've cost me too much. And I am going to put an
end to you right now. Computer? Maximum Burn!>
FWOOOOOSH!
319
My engines lit up and I was blown back across
the fighter's cramped bridge.
BOOOOOOM!
My fighter hit the neck of the Blade ship, slicing
the diamond-shaped bridge away from the rest of
the ship.
But I didn't see that. The impact knocked me out
and tore both the fighters' engines and its shredder
completely off.
I should have died.
But I didn't.
Minutes after I crippled the Blade ship, the An-
dalite Dome ship TailStrike came out of Zero-space
less than a light year away. The Yeerks decided it
was time to leave. Their Pool ship put a
containment field around the parts of the broken
Blade ship and made for Zero-space.
When I woke up, back aboard the StarSword, I
was already a hero. The lost aristh who had
returned mysteriously, years after disappearing,
and had flown his fighter in a bold suicide mission.

[Chad32]

I feel that way too. In the end there's nothing around to save Jake and the others, unless some kelbrid ship comes by. This is what TV Tropes calls a bolivion army ending. It's an ending where you don't see the people on the losing side die, but there's no clear way for them to survive either.

I think KA may have wanted to let the fans decide in a fanfic or something, but personally if I was a fanfic writer, I would have rewritten the whole final arc. If not just try to do my version of the whole series where Visser Three didn't suffer villain decay, and David became a recurring villain. Among other things.


Jake and the other most likely die. Personally I just have in my mind that they do. The series took it in the rear, so they might as well have died. Plus Cassie gets killed when David's parents somehow find out about the way they handled their responsibility with their son.

[RYTX]

idk, I sight the biggest different between those two occurrences is that Elfangor rams the Bladeship, Jake says "Ram the Bladeship".
Did the pilot obey that order without question? Did someone (Marco) jump up and punch Jake in the head? The one seemed has fantastically powered as anything in the series, did it have a way to stop such action? We don't know.

I think both where drawn up as the bold murder-suicide run, but Elfangors obviously was not successful in that vain, and if Jake's was ever actually executed, or indeed some other force prevented it from being that, we don't know, which is why I think she can call it a cliff hanger.

I also don't know that it's true the occupants from Elfangors run would have suffocated: Ship like that has to have airlocks I'd assume, emergency doors or something, else they would have just been dragged out into the vacuum right?


and David's parent's killing Cassie? Wow. eeeh.

[The Spectre]

Honestly I like to think they die, because leaving a cliff hanger at the end of a 54 books series is IMHO a straight up "haha now figure this out s***theads!" by the author

[esplin]

There used to be a thread somewhere on the forum where KA and Grant actually did some Q&A with us.  I'm not sure if the ending was discussed there, but it had some interesting things in it.  If you read between the lines you'll see that they were not heavily invested in ANYTHING that happened 'off camera'.  We, as fans, thought of way more situations and explanations for things they did.  Personally I dislike their attitude towards what is arguably their most successful work.  Animorphs was not much more then a paycheck to them. 

So my opinion of them is low, and it annoys me when I see other forum users kiss their asses.  Animorphs was a hard series to end I'll concede that but they didn't try very hard to do it right.  The last chapter of Animorphs is a middle finger popping out of zero space and calling itself 'The One.'  I might be an opinionated jerk but I feel that a cliff hanger is lazy and just another way of saying you don't know what to do. 

I would have loved a murder-suicide ending simply because there would have been some closure.  A lot of bad things happened in the series and a sad/horrible ending would have been.. well... appropriate.  I guess a happy go lucky ending would have been a middle finger as well, just a much different one.  The only thing I wanted was anything that we got.  And in before 'youre not entitled to anything'.  The authors mentioned that they were raising Jake while animorphs was being published and this means that us, as purchasers of the series, helped KA and MG live their lives during a very special time.  I don't think its smart for an artist to do things that might potentially alienate life long fans.  It might be okay if the art you're producing is on high level of quality.  Maybe your fans just didn't get it.  I don't think this is case here though. 

[Chad32]

I think it's pretty obvious that some interest was lost for the Animorphs series when the back half was mostly done by ghostwriters. I wouldn't have wanted a happy go lucky springtime and flowers ending either, but some people seem to think you have to have one extreme or another.

I think as customers who paid for the books, we have some right to give our opinions. Sometimes an author is forced through contract to continue something they'd rather finish, and I don't know if that was the case here.

[AniDragon]

I never got the impression that AppleGrant didn't care about Animorphs, more that they didn't realise how much it meant to the readers until much later.

[Semeir-Cooraf-Armaheen]

Personally, I think they went out fighting like Elfangor did.

[Valennia]

I finally finished reading the Animorphs series! 
I kind of liked the ending, it sort of leaves the readers an opportunity to imagine what happens next, and I'm also glad that it didn't just end with Earth being finally at peace, Marco is rich, Jake is bored, Tobias lives out his life as a depressed hawk. I think Applegate honored the characters by them going out fighting, even after saving the world and the human species they're still just crazy teenagers with a death wish.

[NothingFromSomething]

Animorphs was not much more then a paycheck to them.

Why?  Because they didn't give you the ending you wanted?  Because they felt strongly about making a statement with the final story arc, and haven't wavered in defending it since?

Pretty sure if you take into account the amount of devotion and humoring of the fan's complaints over the years, you'll see how ridiculous it is to day the series was just about the benjamins.

[esplin]

They didn't feel strongly about Animorphs.  That is my whole point here.

I'm not sure what 'humoring of fan complaints' happened during the creation of the series.  I wasn't plugged into the internet at the time.  If that is true, it seems very weird that they would cater to that and then do a 180 at the end. 

Either way, the ending was poorly written.  I love how it was amazing up until the Kelbrid thing.  I also love how people defend crap based on nostalgia and some false sense of loyalty to something.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

I think it's safe to assume that two spacecraft hitting each other is a bit of a suicide. That's not the kind of thing anyone should expect to survive, and I don't think Jake was expecting to when he gave the order.

Yeah, I could go on my rant about the series again, but I'm not sure how often I can state my opinion. Once more can't hurt, yeah? I'm with you, Russ, in that they were pretty much over Animorphs by the time they wrote the ending-- I wholeheartedly agree with Chad's take on the final arc, actually, as I've found his opinion and mine dovetailing in many previous discussions. It felt cheap in more ways than just that ending scene to me.

See, to me, reading the series, I can really feel where Applegrant lost interest. The books up through the David trilogy felt like we were building something excellent, the war was on, things were getting rough, the characters were developing believably, the war was beginning to take its toll, stuff was getting darker, more mature, and I consider the best books of the series to be those from somewhere around 12 through book 22-- where the series really started to come into its own... but to me, it feels like, when they got to the end of the David trilogy, they basically lost interest. 23 feels to me like they wrote it because they had to, because Tobias had to find out that Elfangor was his father, and then after that, the series kind of goes off the rails and avoids the entire premise of the Yeerk war, when viewed from the authors' perspective. The only non-ghostwritten books between 23 and the final arc are 24 (Helmacrons), 26 (Iskoort/Howlers), and 32 (nice and mean Rachels, where it kind of feels like they went 'hey! I have another idea for that series that we still sort of own!').

I'm not knocking the ghostwriters. Most of them are wonderful-- I just don't like that Animorphs was written by so many different people, and that no two of them ever portrayed the characters and the storyline in quite the same way. Which is to be expected, as no two writers are the same, but still, the range of ways in which, for example, Rachel is portrayed, is almost painful. I can feel the changes when we move between writers. Similarly, I'm not bagging on Grant and Applegate-- they remain, to this day, two of my favorite authors, and they had an awful lot on their plates at the time. The issue, to me, comes from their being held strictly to the one-regular-book-a-month schedule, plus extras. I'm not surprised they lagged and burned out on the series.

And then, as time went by, the gap between Applegrant and the Animorphs grew, and I can feel that, too. They have said that they had to approve every book that went through, and I think, for a while at least, they still came up with the plots, but the absurd and non-Animorphs-y books get more frequent closer to the end. Then you get to the final arc-- and it starts to feel tighter again-- my theory is that they had a tighter influence over the books then. And I really do appreciate that they came back to write the final two books in the series. But to me, there's still a distinct disconnect between the Animorphs we see until the David trilogy (and I guess including those through book 26, since, even though there weren't many Yeerks, they were still the Animorphs), the Animorphs of the second half of the series (including 25, which just feels ghostwritten to me, to the point that it's actually what first inspired me to find out about the ghostwriters), and the Animorphs of the final arc, because yes, I don't think the authors cared in nearly the same way about book 53 as they did about 22. There's a good two years there without writing Animorphs while the characters developed through a dozen other authors without them.

[Azguard]

Yikes. I gotta reread the series now.

As for my opinion on the series from a hindsight perspective the ending of Animorphs burned me. Hated that we were left on a cliffhanger. Hated that we couldn't explore more the new elements introduced. I guess it sorta prepared me for Mass Effect 3 (but that's another story). Still, after awhile I felt like it was an appropriate way to go out. I didn't want a happy cookie cutter ending where everyone lived in a mansion. I guess it wouldn't have been that bad. But I liked that it felt real. War ends, another war begins. There's no time for rest. People die. Even heroes. No one is invincible. And the universe is a big place so new things were introduced.

In a traditional writing format and story arc it may have been in poor form. But I eventually came to like it.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

See, my issues with the final arc are a little bit difficult for me to put into words, so bear with me here. I don't mind the unhappy ending-- I, personally, have a very strong appreciation for a properly tragic ending. Certainly far better than any cookie-cutter happy ending would have been (although there are degrees in between-- a happy ending could also have been done quite well). Rachel's death, the dissolution of the team, it's all appropriate for a war story, and a very good way of delivering a message and impacting the reader. I don't mind the cliffhanger-- I think I actually agree with KA, in that the only good way for the Animorphs to go out is fighting until the last, and even though "ram the Blade Ship" is a suicide order, what happens afterwards is left to the imagination of the reader, and it was a very effective way to give the series continued life. I, personally, don't have any issues with the introduction of The One as a new and immediately intriguing challenge for them to overcome (though I do have a problem with the general fan consensus that it must be a creature of a level with the Ellimist-- seriously, if that were true, the Animorphs would already be dead or captured long before they ever saw it, and even if they weren't, there's no chance of their succeeding in hurting it anyway... that's another discussion). I feel that Grant and Applegate can absolutely write an ending to just about any series. They're a ridiculously talented pair.

The problem, though, is that I didn't want an ending to just any series. I wanted an ending to Animorphs. After all these kids have endured, everything they've been through, as well as we've come to know them, as good as they've gotten at fighting the Yeerks, a lot of what happens in the final arc, and especially in the final two books, feels so contrived. It's like it's taken my series, my beloved series, and forced it to be something it's not just to deliver the ending. When I read book 53, I can really feel the distance that's grown between Applegrant and the Animorphs, and it's almost like they're ghostwriters for their own series at that point, and like they've decided to make the ending what they're going to make it, regardless of how much sense it makes.

I feel that way about much of the final arc, but the easiest example for me to cite is the sequence surrounding Rachel's death. Keep in mind, the fact that she dies is, in itself, acceptable, in my mind. I could go on about events and whatnot, but basically, what that bit boils down to in my mind is that the Jake I know would have come up with a better plan than "Hey, Rachel, go hide out on the Blade Ship, alone for contrived reasons, while our now-unimportant auxiliaries are slaughtered on the ground!" I feel like Jake's personality and abilities, along with most of the circumstances surrounding the event, are twisted just so that we get that scene, and for that sequence, it just feels like I'm reading an entirely different series. A lot of the character actions and reactions throughout that particular book feel out-of-character to me. Those aren't the Animorphs. They're different people with their names and abilities.

*shrug* Like I said, tough for me to put into words, and nothing so obvious as "It was an unhappy ending waahhh!" I just see a huge difference between the way the Animorphs' characters developed through book 26 (excellent), the way they developed in books 25 through 52 (also good, but they took a slightly different direction), and the way they were portrayed in books 53 and 54 (which is also very good, but it's not the same). I'm not sure if that's where Applegrant thought they ended up as characters, or where they wanted them to end up, or something else entirely. It's just that how the authors apparently saw the characters at that point was very different from how I saw them.

[itw2009]

this topic. this tangent.

rather, was the op headed in that direction when discussing the logistics of surviving the order "ram the blade ship" in light of TAC (something i hadn't connected before)?

anyway. to the former, i doubt that katmike were thinking about TAC when they wrote 54, but i personally wouldn't mind the "less cliffhanger, more death" conclusion. in some ways and on some levels, that sort of closure doesn't seem inappropriate at all. (kindasorta but not contextually echoing lumy.)

as for the latter, the tangent, but easily the more fun bit to discuss:

i respect that katmike made a choice. not really knowing the context in which the choice to end the series this way came about, i don't judge them for it. i suspect (as i think i'm not alone in doing) that the series' popularity was waning after months of being ghostwritten by a half-dozen authors who couldn't (wouldn't or simply didn't) interpret the characters consistently. scholastic almost surely saw profit declines and came around and told katmike: "you've got 'x' number of books left. find a way to finish this by then." whatever else played into the final arc and 54... i don't know. i see a hyper-detailed spectrum of speculation from the RAF community- these things that might have affected the series' progression and end in one way or another: kids, time crunch, apathy, paychecks, other projects, audience age and/or devotion level, losing touch with the books, ghostwriters, 'well, from an interview, it seemed like' / 'looked like' / 'sounded like', etc...

no one's got the full picture except katmike (and at this point, i doubt that they'd remember how everything in their lives led up to "Ram the Blade Ship"), so i've pretty much decided to leave "why"s and motives out of my evaluation of the ending. i can't read minds and will only give them the benefit of the doubt, assuming that they chose what they thought would be best at the time. i don't believe that said choice was intentionally malicious or even merely apathetic towards the audience. even with numerous Q&A sessions (some long after the fact, some without the benefit of audio and/or visual of the person speaking), i think that the motive-related information gleaned therefrom isn't direct evidence of this "katmike don't care about us" complaint. anyone can misrepresent him/herself (repeatedly) to general media and anyone watching/reading the general media can misrepresent what is reported.

...that also doesn't mean that folks can't feel jipped. in the same way that there's no decisive evidence of "they hate us", there's also no decisive evidence of "they love us". there were assuredly elements of the series that were "sub-par" (my baseline is an average of the quality of the non-ghostwritten books). but again, if i don't have enough evidence to make a call about a person, i'm not going to hang my hat on the conclusion that makes the worse assumption about a person. people, in general, deserve better than that.


...i'm also not pointing fingers at anyone with the above and i'm not particularly judging anyone who does the above. i don't pay much attention to who says what and i don't solidify my opinions of people over a few internet forum posts- especially not when folks're hanging their opinions out on the line to be judged by strangers. opinions happen.



anyway. taking all of that out, that leaves me with the ending. just the ending. ...it's not something that i've ever addressed/formed a public opinion of, because i'm like that. xD

so... hmmmm. there was context. 53++ books worth. i tend to give those skimpy, limp, ghost-written drabbles less authority than the first 25 and last 5-10 or so. like i said, my quality baseline is the stuff katmike wrote.

i've read a lot of proposed alternative endings. they usually start with rachel's death (and i have nothing differing from popular opinion of how that played out) and then hone in on what must surely be the clusterf* in 54. well, i'll start with the "pet cassie" beef. do i want cassie to join the anis on their Final Mission and die in a blaze of glory? pretty much. but cassie being cassie (at age 20-ish), do i think that she'd agree to it? no. and would it be fair to force her to tag along? i don't think so. in this one way, i see cassie as existing to serve as a foil for everyone else. she shows that there's a choice. if she hadn't chosen differently, i might have taken the other anis' decisions for granted.

marco tagging along was another beef of mine. it might've been that final touch to his 20-ish personality: despite a rocky relationship with Ax, despite being the reluctant animorph, despite his cynicism, despite being somewhat satisfied with his post-war life, despite knowing intimately how hellish war is... he pretty much chooses to go back. is he being loyal? an adrenaline junkie? i don't know. i can't tell. but did i want him go with the anis and yadda yadda...? yes. (odd how dissatisfied i am when i get what i want. xD)

ax being kidnapped- at all. you know, if jake had been the one to disappear, i find it significantly more probable that the entire ani team would have gone after him. but in any case, since i rather want the anis to die in a blaze of glory, using ax' disappearance as the catalyst wasn't, imo, a terrible choice. could've been better. could've been worse. i mean, who likes mopey tobias, anyway? (jay-kay. i love you, tobias.)

cliffhanger. you know what? i'm ambivalent. "you may now demorph" hit harder than "ram the blade ship". the former signified an End, which was more bittersweet. the latter was something of a cop-out (but less negativity associated with the connotation): giving the readership room for speculation without committing to a final end. am i like this with all media? nope. my preference for cliffhangers just peeps out under circumstances that animorphs didn't meet. they'd done their duty. imo, all 'important' questions had been answered.

....uhm. general "feel" of the ending (53/54, pre-post-war). lumy, i don't think you're alone in finding voicing that to be difficult. for myself, i give the authors a lot of leeway. little plot choices, turns of phrase, actions chosen by the characters... idiosyncrasies that seem inconsistent are legit reasons for complaint. at the same time, characters changing over elapsed time in book-land seems, to me, to be more realistic. as my own devil's advocate, i think "but this is more/worse than that. there was no reason for so-and-so to do or say 'x'." to which i respond "just because the reason behind a change isn't spelled out doesn't mean that it isn't possible. the byproducts of 'i've been fighting this war for "y" years could be anything and can't be spoken for by someone who's never fought in one."

people are complex. they frequently do things that you don't expect. knowing that, i don't mind seeing book characters doing things that i don't expect. jake making a seriously bad decision to send rachel out. (was it the fact that this was tom, that the war had taken this dramatic turn, that he'd been fighting it for so long, that they were this close to an end affecting his decision? or had katmike needed a convenient reason to kill rachel off?) the auxiliary anis being put on the front lines to die. (did a snapshot of the situation at the time leave room for alternatives? or did katmike just need a convenient "war is bad" subplot end?)

again, i tend to give folks the benefit of the doubt. perhaps i should do so less often. i dunno. well, what else do people complain about? it all seems to be related to "i can think of a better ending". i don't see many specific "this is what went wrong"s that add up to some overarching "the whole thing sucks". i could be missing it, but that's where i am at this point in time. (moral of the story/my advice to katmike: stop doing animorphs Q&A sessions. this is clearly the source of your buttrape.)

my conclusion? i'm neutral. in fact, my hyper-analysis of the whole thing just seems to further detract from the story, so i think i'm done. and speaking of "distance", i haven't read the series in a few years, so who knows what the hell i'm talking about? i sure as shootin' don't.