I wrote previously about how I started reading The Animorphs in the year 2024, but that was over two months ago and we’re many books further into the series. I feel like we should be approaching the halfway point soon, but that’s still almost two full months away. Right now, even though I’m a week ahead (as of writing this, anyway–I’m on schedule as this gets posted since I’ll be taking a week away to focus on reading Dune for a different book club), I feel like we should be much further along considering all of the stuff that has already happened. The Animorphs have time travelled twice, we’ve gotten two (comparatively) massive stories about characters from the past, we’ve learned so much about the universe of this series, and our poor protagonists have been traumatized so many times that they’re turned into hardened veterans in a way that is equal parts fascinating and equal parts horrifying. In a Youth series! I genuinely don’t think I’ve seen a better portrayal of trauma and what it means to be a child soldier in any kind of fiction ever. Sure, I think the series would have benefited from some of the more modern knowledge about how trauma works and why it works that way, but I think this is still handling it all pretty well for a series largely created in the nineties.
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Reading The Animorphs For The First Time: Part 1
One day last December, while incredibly bored at work, I stirred up some drama in a discord server I’m in by admitting that I had no idea what a “warrior cat” was and, as that started to die down, that I’d never read any of the Animorphs books. Since most of us grew up in or after the 90s, I discovered that I was one of the few who had never been exposed to either sprawling franchise and, since I wanted something fun to do, I suggested we do a book club centered around reading all of the animorphs books in a single year. Someone drew up a schedule, another person shared a link to a freely available PDF of the books (which had been shared during the early days of the pandemic, when everyone desperately needed something to do and parents struggled to occupy their children), and I briefly tried to get everyone to figure out if we were going to do a proper full book club or just post our reactions to things. Since we landed on just posting reactions, as I was apparently the only person who explicitly said they wanted to discuss the books as we read them, I’ve felt a lot less motivated to keep up with this largely solo experience. Despite that, I’ve managed to mostly keep up with the schedule (we’re reading book 8 this week, after having read the first seven and then the first “Megamorphs” book) and I’ve had disappointingly few conversations about what we’ve read so far.
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