> The food horror’s getting a bit much as well. The Animorphs are constantly either getting devoured by alien monsters and ants (the ants are scarier) or losing control of their morphs and eating prey animals alive.
The best part is the end, when they link up with the national guard and eventually Jake straight up dumps a a bunch of them into the cold embrace of space under logic that boiled down to "they could have stayed on their planet".
It's sad that nowadays the strategy of "repeatedly bust out of military prison and demonstrate increasingly scary powers until troops accept you as their new leader” doesn't give you control of the local guard base like it used to in the 2000s. (Or so I heard, I never had to go full Mr Robot back before there was a hit USA television show about black clad crypto anarchists skullfucking the system once and for all.)
My pet fan theory is that the entire "Marco discovers conspiracy theories about aliens on the internet that aren't actually wrong" is a metaphor for shit like how some members of GCHQ or whatever would straight up hint how much they want to have sex with children. (Look into the Peter Bright (sp?) case? I had one coworker I suggested shared those urges who would also occasionally make his twitter avatar a kid — rude little brony.
Anyways, IIRC one of the minor plot points was one of the school vice principals was a controller? If you replace "Yeerk" with "Serial rapist" you can keep a lot of the same text in the books, complete with completely justifiably taking someone out into the woods and torturing them as they starve to death, then having what adults find out just kind of shrug and go "Well kid, that guy was literally an alien bent on destroying our way of life”.
(Only, a realistic plot would be that the “alien” is a Russian illegal and total sociopath instead of a straight up alien from another planet if we were to actually take the above and try to turn it into a creative nonfiction ish script pitch... but sadly COVID hit as I was about to finally take the screenwriting course I'd intended to since undergrad, so I fear I'll never be able to turn one of my movie plot threats into an actual movie.)
Anyways, thanks for bringing back fond memories OP. Animorphs, Goosebumps, and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich were some of my favorite books before the world went to hell.
The fetish subtext in these books is strong