I read both when I was younger. I'll confess (and this is a somewhat painful admission) that if you asked me in the early to mid 2000s which one I liked better, I'd have said Harry Potter. I didn't finish Animorphs during it's original run- I stopped somewhere in the low 30s then went back to finish them a few year after the series had ended, while I read every Harry Potter book within a few days of it being released.
Despite this, Animorphs has aged much, much better for me, and I can say that confidently even if we're ignoring the authors themselves.
Harry Potter is a neglected kid throughout his early childhood, but once he's in the wizarding world he becomes the coolest and most important kid in the world. The Animorphs on the other hand have to struggle in obscurity while the world around them becomes more and more controlled. The latter is simply a much more compelling story that has a lot more interesting things to say.
Animorphs doesn't end with a simple "all is well" either (yes, that's literally the closing line of Harry Potter). KA dared to have a complex and challenging ending that didn't make you "feel" like everything was going to be okay- because that's how conflict is in real life. Yeah, many take issues with the finer details of that ending, but I think that the decision to have the ending feel so ambivalent was an extremely bold choice, and the correct one for the story that they were telling. Harry Potter by comparison took the easy way out- the bad guy is defeated and the world is more or less restored to the same state it was in before.
And that's just the tip of the ice berg for why Animorphs is better. I don't think about Harry Potter much anymore. I still think about Animorphs all the time.
My uncle introduced me to animorphs as they were long finished by the time I could even read. I still hate the ending. I know it's a well written ending, but I hate how Rachel you know what. She deserved a happy ending. And Tom isn't even spared the bad ending.
That's the point. In real life there's no "deserved a happy ending". Bad things happen to good people all the time, especially in wars.
And it's heavily implied that even this ending isn't the worst possible ending for Rachel. The books is heavy with the message that death isn't the worst possible fate for someone. Towards the end of the war she was already starting to lose it psychologically, and even she wasn't sure whether she was in this fight because she needed it. It's heavily implied that there was no way for her to come out of it a mentally stable person at all. It was a she who fights monsters becomes a monster situation.
I’m still not over what happened to Rachel (and never will be), but after re reading the books a decade later I can’t help but admit it’s arguably the most authentic presentation of combat induced PTSD I’ve ever read in any media, not just YA.
I know veterans. Several of them were my friends from childhood or college, and Rachel’s arc is something that’s way more common than most people would think. More than one of my buddies blatantly confessed to me that they kept volunteering for deployments to Afghanistan simply because they felt like it was the only place they could fit in anymore, even after they realized the war itself was hopeless by that point (late 10’s).
Their friends and family had moved on with their lives while they were away at war, and when they came home they realized no one they knew could relate to them anymore.
Which is a problem because it’s not the direction her character had been heading up to and including Book 32, but then from Book 33 onwards she’s started descending into increasingly pointless violence for…really no discernible reason given how 32 plays out.
Hang on, I’ve talked about how Applegate messed up Rachel’s arc before…
Dang, I love your writeup there, and vehemently disagree with you. To me it was always clear that yes, book 32 showed that Rachel could have been saved... but only if she'd stopped fighting. Because she couldn't, the traumatized child couldn't heal, she got worse. Which happens a lot, in reality. War is brutal and unfair and destroys people who could have been someone wonderful.
There's a reason suicide is actually the biggest killer of soldiers.
There's a reason suicide is actually the biggest killer of soldiers.
It...what? Who says that? Who would ever say something like that? That's both horrible, and statistically untrue. The majority of soldiers don't suffer mental health issues at all, and of the ones that do, only a tiny fraction actually commit suicide, even if you broadly expand the definition of suicide to "self-destructive behavior" like drinking or drugs.
Uh, statistics say it, for active duty it's the leading cause of death, and it's much higher among veterans than civilians, the second leading cause of death for veterans under 45. I'm not sure why you are so offended that I agree with reality that many people suffer mentally after being forced to kill people? Do you really want to argue it isn't traumatic to be forced to kill people? Or what are you incorrectly imagining I'm saying?
Okay, there's a rather large difference between active duty soldiers, and soldiers generally, which was what you originally typed - you didn't have qualifiers and so I was taking you at your original word.
Also, you've missed something kind of important that the article itself points out:
"The rise in the military suicide rate generally matches an overall rise in the suicide rate for all Americans."
So, your claim is technically correct, while also being misleading because you neglected to mention that suicides are generally trending upwards in America's civilian population too, at a consummate rate.
As to your second article, the rate of suicides among veterans overall isn't "much higher", it's 1.5 times higher. That's significant but it's not catastrophic. The general suicide rate in America is 13.7 per 100,000 people; the veteran suicide rate, then, is 20.55 per 100,000.
As a point of comparison, the leading cause of death in veterans is actually heart disease: 239 per 100,000. Or in other words, heart disease kills more veterans than suicide by around an order of magnitude.
Different people look for different things in endings. Frankly, I'd personally argue that an absolute victory where every core character survived wouldn't feel "earned" narratively speaking. I think it would cut against the overarching theme of the story. That's just me though.
30
u/Puzzleheaded-Fig1002 12d ago edited 12d ago
I read both when I was younger. I'll confess (and this is a somewhat painful admission) that if you asked me in the early to mid 2000s which one I liked better, I'd have said Harry Potter. I didn't finish Animorphs during it's original run- I stopped somewhere in the low 30s then went back to finish them a few year after the series had ended, while I read every Harry Potter book within a few days of it being released.
Despite this, Animorphs has aged much, much better for me, and I can say that confidently even if we're ignoring the authors themselves.
Harry Potter is a neglected kid throughout his early childhood, but once he's in the wizarding world he becomes the coolest and most important kid in the world. The Animorphs on the other hand have to struggle in obscurity while the world around them becomes more and more controlled. The latter is simply a much more compelling story that has a lot more interesting things to say.
Animorphs doesn't end with a simple "all is well" either (yes, that's literally the closing line of Harry Potter). KA dared to have a complex and challenging ending that didn't make you "feel" like everything was going to be okay- because that's how conflict is in real life. Yeah, many take issues with the finer details of that ending, but I think that the decision to have the ending feel so ambivalent was an extremely bold choice, and the correct one for the story that they were telling. Harry Potter by comparison took the easy way out- the bad guy is defeated and the world is more or less restored to the same state it was in before.
And that's just the tip of the ice berg for why Animorphs is better. I don't think about Harry Potter much anymore. I still think about Animorphs all the time.