Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: ANIMORPHS: The Monster and the Child at War

INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is all about Animorphs. If you have only a passing familiarity with this series, you may be thinking, oh, how fun! If you know this series well, then you probably know that things in this video are going to get pretty dark.

            Before we dive into that, though, I have a little housekeeping business to address over here on The Monster & The Child. We’re nearing the end of the year, so I am going to be taking a tiny little winter break, but there will still be videos coming up. So this is the last proper video essay of 2025, but in two weeks, I’d like to put out an Ask Me Anything. In order to do that, I’ll need some questions, so if you are wondering anything about monster studies, childhood studies, the research and teaching that I do or have done, or anything even semi-related to any of that, then please ask those in the comments of this video! I only started this channel in July, and it’s absolutely wild to me that I have (as of this recording) close to nineteen hundred subscribers. That’s by far the broadest audience I’ve ever had the privilege of addressing, so I’d love the chance to get to know you guys a bit better, answer your questions, and talk more directly to you about your interests.

            For my first video back in January, I plan on discussing my upcoming plans for book clubs and mentorship services, especially those that I want to make available for teenagers. I hope to start up some book clubs for adults, too, so if you’re not a teen but you’re interested in getting more of the topics I discuss into your everyday life, then fear not. In that video, I’ll also talk in more detail about my experience running a Monster Book Club for my doctoral dissertation and why I am hoping to basically make that experience essentially the cornerstone of my career going forward.

            After that, we will be right back into the video essays. I was very pleased to find out, when I first started this channel, that I really love this form of writing! It’s many of the best parts of teaching a class and writing a conference paper put together. I have, however, been churning out 20-plus page scripts every two weeks since July, so I do just need just the slightest bit of breaks. Also, I need to read and watch a bunch of stories to prepare for the videos that I have planned in the new year. But I am very excited for the videos that are coming up. Monstrosity and childhood are pretty inexhaustible topics, and I hope that you will continue joining me on this journey into their depths.

            Now, without any further ado, let’s talk about Animorphs. Animorphs is a sprawling middle-grade science fiction series that was published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001. In those five years, 54 books in the main series came out, accompanied by ten companion books. Most people I know who encountered Animorphs in their childhood read them as I did: out of order from the library, based on whatever was in stock. I read them mostly from around third to fifth grade, as far as I remember. I know that I’d fallen off of the series by the time it was concluded, which for me was the summer between sixth and seventh grade, but I retained enough good memories that when I heard it had ended, I made sure to borrow the last four-ish books from my Animorphs completionist friend so I could know how the series ended. So shout out to Babette. For this video, I revisited about 15 titles, some from the beginning, then the David trilogy in the middle, and then the final arc.

All of the books are published under the name K.A. Applegate. However, she is not the sole writer; from the beginning, the series was co-created and co-written with her husband, Michael Grant. Applegate has said that she likes writing about animals – which is evident in some of her post-Animorphs output, such as The One and Only Ivan, which is from the perspective of a gorilla. Meanwhile, her husband likes writing sci-fi. Therefore, Animorphs was the perfect combination of their interests. The two of them wrote all the books for around the first half-ish of the series, but over 60 books came out in five years, so obviously that’s a really intense work schedule. Applegate and Grant also had a child in 1997, so obviously caring for her took up a lot of their time. So most of the books from the midpoint on are ghost-written, with outlines provided by Applegate and Grant. There’s a link to a list of the ghost writers in the works cited. Is the quality consistent the whole way through? No, and pretty much all Animorphs fans acknowledge this. But it was still an impressive undertaking from everyone involved. It’s impressive for fans to keep up with all of it, as well, so special thanks to Seerowpedia for the images for this video, as well as reminding me for some of the important details.

            Above all, Animorphs is a war story. This series, intended for and marketed to late-elementary to early-middle-school readers, is, at its heart, about the struggle to maintain ethics and morality in violent combat, and the ways in which people – especially kids – are changed when they have to engage in violence and make violent decisions. It raises questions of what makes a human a human, a child a child, and a monster a monster.

FROM MALL RATS TO SOLDIERS

            Animorphs begins with Jake. In the first book, The Invasion, he immediately introduces himself to the reader, but then lets us know that he can’t tell us his last name or where he lives, lest the information fall into the hands of his enemies. But not too long ago, Jake didn’t have any enemies. He was just a middle-schooler hanging out with his best friend, Marco, at the mall, trying to get over the disappointment of not making the basketball team. Despite Jake’s reticence to share identifying details, we pretty immediately know several important things about him. He is white, male, suburban, and American. Not all of the kids who will soon be the Animorphs are white and male, but they are all suburban and American, and they repeatedly use markers of those identities to express how “normal” are – or how normal they used to be. They drop name brands and pop culture references that situate them as middle-to-upper-middle class, and they list their pre-war preoccupations as things like sports, grades, and parents. It’s important to recognize that a particular construction of young adolescent is being established here to serve as a sharp contrast to the soldier identities that these kids are soon to take on. As I so often wind up talking about in these videos – and as I allude to in the title of my channel, The Monster & The Child – we’re using “childhood” to make ideological claims in storytelling by juxtaposing it with a culturally incompatible category, in this case “war.”

            So, as I already mentioned, Jake’s best friend is Marco. He is sarcastic, often cynical, and quick with a one-liner. Next, as we are leaving the mall, we meet up with Rachel and Cassie. Rachel is Jake’s cousin, Cassie is her best friend, and they’re established as a classic opposites-attract pair. Rachel does gymnastics, is a strong student with a confident personality, and loves shopping and fashion, while Cassie is quieter, more tomboy-ish, and loves animals by virtue of living on her parents’ wildlife rehabilitation farm. Last, and seemingly least, we meet Tobias. He’s a bullied kid who Jake rescued from a swirlie once, and he has subsequently become a bit of a hanger-on to Jake. In classic 90s ensemble of kids fashion, they are majority white but with some multi-cultural representation. Marco is Latino and Cassie is Black. Rachel has divorced parents, while Jake and Cassie have seemingly model home lives, but Marco and Tobias have more troubled family situations. Marco’s mother drowned a couple of years ago – as far as he currently knows, anyway – and his father has been in a deep depression ever since, leaving only child Marco to take care of both himself and his dad. Tobias, meanwhile, is shunted between his aunt and his uncle’s custody; both of them view Tobias as a burden to be foisted off on the other. So from the jump, we have an acknowledgment that some kids – even suburban American kids – are already dealing with heavy stuff, and that not all childhood experiences are created equal.

The five middle-schoolers set off to walk home from the mall, and they collectively decide to cut through the construction site across the street. It is there that their war begins.

A small UFO crash lands right in front of them, to the understandable amazement of all. A voice reaches out to them from within the wreckage – but not a voice that they hear with their ears. Instead, it speaks directly into their minds, and when they answer its call, we meet our first alien of the series, an Andalite named Elfangor.

For a series that is all about metamorphosis and hybridity, it makes sense that Andalites are a mishmash of animal parts. They’re blue-and-tan deer centaurs with extra fingers and a scorpion tail, no mouth, slit noses, and an extra pair of eyes on swiveling stalks atop their heads. They eat through their hooves and communicate via telepathic thought-speak. The kids are astounded but then immediately heartbroken when Elfangor reveals that he is dying.

Unfortunately, that is not the most important of Elfangor’s revelations. He tells the kids that Earth is in the midst of an alien invasion by the Yeerks, slug-like parasites that can completely highjack the brains of their hosts. They already have thousands of humans under their sway as Controllers, the name for Yeerk host bodies, and they have their sights on the entire planet. All Elfangor can offer is a chance to fight back by giving the kids access to the morphing cube. This is a piece of Andalite technology that allows a person to acquire the DNA of another living creature and morph into it. If the kids acquire powerful animals, then they can sabotage the Yeerks while keeping their identities secret.

If this sounds like a pretty slim advantage, the kids would agree, but Cassie is the first to say that she will do what she can. All five of them place their hands on the cube, but as soon as the tech is acquired, Elfangor tells them to beat it out of there: the enemy is on its way.

From a distance, the kids get their first glimpse of what they are up against. This series, in hindsight, was foundational to my tastes and interests in fiction, because there are so many monsters here, guys. The kids watch as two of our main antagonist species arrive: the Hork-Bajir and the Taxxons. The Hork-Bajir are tall, powerful aliens with organic blades on their arms and heads. They are actually peaceful herbivores – the blades are for stripping trees of the bark that they eat – but their formidable forms made them prime targets for the Yeerks, who have enslaved nearly the entire species. The Taxxons, meanwhile, are giant centipede situations with a bunch of little lobster claws, four jelly-like red eyes, and lamprey mouths. So: ew! We later find out that Taxxons drew the evolutionary short straw of the galaxy, as they are plagued with an insatiable, all-consuming hunger. They serve the Yeerks in exchange for a steady supply of fresh meat.

The menace of these creatures, however, pales in comparison to Visser Three. Visser Three is the Yeerk commanding much of the Earth’s invasion, and he is the only Yeerk to have managed to take an Andalite host. This means that, on top of being an imperial maniac who thinks that his people should stop with this “slow infiltration” business and just wage all-out war against the Earth, Visser Three can also morph. And he does, throughout the series, into as many giant alien monsters as he has managed to acquire through his galactic conquests. But this first time, he does so to eat Elfangor alive.

From a distance, experiencing this first of so many traumas, the kids are already being changed. Jake is in awe of Rachel’s courage as she reaches out to comfort both Tobias and Cassie: “I guess you never really know someone till you see them scared. And even scared to death, with tears running down her face, Rachel had strength to spare.” The next person to surprise Jake is Jake himself. As Visser Three transforms and hoists the mortally wounded Elfangor above his newly-extant gaping alien mouth, Jake leaps up and grabs a length of pipe from the ground, ready to rush in and attack. Luckily, his friends hold him back, because he would definitely die in this situation, but Jake discovers in this moment that he is the kind of person who fights. But since he cannot fight now, all he can do is witness Elfangor’s death: “At the very end, he cried out. His cry of despair was in our heads. His cry will always be in our heads.”

This tense switch at the end is a sophisticated little bit of narrative business. These books are written as the kids’ war chronicle, essentially. They talk directly to the reader as an implied fellow human who hadn’t previously been unaware of the Yeerk invasion. This framing doesn’t always hold up logically – for one thing, when the hell are they writing these documents? – but it can be effective in moments like this where we feel the narrative distance between the character telling their story and the version of them that existed in even the near past. We see that earlier in the scene, as well, when Jake comments, “Sometimes I think about that one, last moment when we were still just normal kids.” This is a fairly advanced approach to narration for a series aimed at such a young audience.

And make no mistake, I was not some sort of outlier reading these in elementary school. Though the characters are a bit older – we learn their exact ages much later in the series, but they’re 13 when it starts and 16 when the war ends – the books themselves are written explicitly for kids starting around nine. And in the opening chapters, a kind alien is eaten alive while his dying telepathic cry forms a lasting traumatic memory in the minds of five young people whose lives are now irrevocably changed. Because of this, when you see people reminiscing about Animorphs online, you’ll see a lot of how is this for kids, both as a kind of statement of incredulity that something so intense would be made available to the children it was marketed to, but also sometimes from fans as a bit of an implication that it’s too good almost to be really for just little kids, who won’t actually understand its handling of such dark subject matter. I would like to emphatically reject both implications. I strongly believe that not only can elementary-school-aged kids contend with this thematic material, but they deserve to have literature written specifically for them that deals with it. Children’s media doesn’t stop being children’s media just because it’s dark, complex, and/or high quality.

To my mind, the greatest strength of Animorphs is how grounded it is in its treatment of its characters. When I introduced them to you a few minutes ago, you probably heard that they can fit into pretty broad character types, but the series takes these archetypes – the funny one, the confident girl, the tree hugger – and then shows how these identities become roles that the kids struggle to maintain but also often chafe against as they deal with their new identities as soldiers. Jake in particular is reluctant to take on his designated role at first, when the gang pretty much immediately identifies him as their leader. Jake, understandably, at first is like, pass, but he eventually agrees to be the one to hear out all sides of an argument, and, if a tie-breaking call needs to be made, to make it. That’s all he’s willing to do as a “leader” at first, but as the series wears on, he takes more and more of an active role as essentially their general. Jake is willing to fight, but he quickly figures out how to stay level in a crisis. He is fair and diplomatic, able to mediate some of the clashes between the more opposed personalities of the group. These are traits that would make him a good basketball captain (if only he were actually any good at basketball). They’re admirable but ultimately unremarkable traits for a “normal” kid to have. And they also make Jake really well-suited for war.

Of course, there is an elephant in the room – and it’s not Rachel’s first battle morph. No, it’s the fact that Jake is the white boy with the typical nuclear family of the group. (Tobias is the other white boy, but we’ll get to him in a minute.) In “Billions of Lives Weighed Against the Ethics of Six ‘Kids…’”: The Moral Universe of the Animorphs, Elaine Ostry acknowledges, that, again, in typical 90s multi-culti fashion, there is some essentializing of race and gender roles here. The close-to-nature empath is Cassie, the girl of color, while the natural born leader is Jake. This is one of those assumptions baked into the text that we can read alongside its naturalization of suburban American “normality” with what it means to be “just a kid.” We can assume that the imagined audience  was also suburban American kids, majority white like Jake (and like me when I was reading these). For all the challenging of identity that this series does, we should, as readers or watchers of scholarly analysis YouTube channels, always take care to note that any given work will likely push against some social constructs while also unthinkingly upholding others.

The kid who grows into the chief strategist of the group is Marco. His cynical nature comes in handy when he uses it to figure out the enemy’s plans; he has no trouble imagining the worst. Marco is the most reluctant of the Animorphs at first, because he fears that if anything happens to him, his already grieving father will never recover. But early on, the crew makes a horrible discovery. From the very beginning, they know that Controllers can be anyone – and they get awful proof of that when they realize that Jake’s older brother Tom is one. But Marco could never have expected that his mother not only didn’t drown, but is actually inhabited by Visser One, the head-Yeerk-in-charge. Once the war becomes personal for him, he’s in, though at first he still hopes that maybe after rescuing his mom, things will get easier and he can lay down some of his outsized responsibility. (Spoilers: he cannot.)

If Marco is the most reluctant, then Rachel is the least. Her “strength to spare” translates into a soldier who is always ready for a fight. By book 4, she’s got quotes from The Art of War on her bulletin board. She likes fighting in a way that none of the other kids do. She is not as horrified by all the horror. We’re going to talk a lot more about Rachel in the next section of this video, but know that this aspect of her character is introduced early on. She spends ages thirteen through sixteen as a warrior and, in many ways, loving it.

Cassie, despite being the first one to accept Elfangor’s challenge, is the character most preoccupied with maintaining the group’s morals and ethics. She hates the idea of violence but recognizes that the Yeerks must be stopped, so she tries to draw as many lines as she can to avoid hurting or exploiting non-combatants. This is difficult because Yeerks infect unwilling hosts, so Cassie’s morals are consistently tested. Cassie is willing to understand and give the benefit of the doubt to people that her comrades in arms often don’t. In this series, there is no species that is entirely united in their ethics and outlooks – including Yeerks – and what may at first seem like a simple good vs. evil situation rarely actually is. Cassie is also devoted to wildlife, which is another main motivation for her in the war: Yeerk leadership plans on “simplifying” the planet’s ecosystems to maintain only what is useful for their dominance over the globe. All the Animorphs are horrified by that, but Cassie is the one who gives voice to the series’ environmentalist themes most frequently.

Finally, there’s Tobias. Like any self-respecting weird girl, Tobias was my fave as a kid. So morphing technology comes with one major caveat: you can only stay in a morph for two hours, or else you get stuck in it for good. By the end of, and I cannot stress this enough, the first book, this has already happened: Tobias becomes a red-tailed hawk. Because of his highly messed up home life, none of the other Animorphs are entirely sure that this was an accident on his part. This thirteen-year-old kid may have decided that being a hawk was the best outcome for him. So there’s that!

That’s as good a segue as any to the way this series uses morphing – which is just another way of saying shapeshifting, my favorite monstrous ability – to explore identity. When you morph, you experience the specific senses and instincts of the animal you become. You do keep your conscious human mind, but at first, the animal mind can be hard to resist, and it can sweep you away if you’re not ready for it. Sometimes, this is really fun. Jake’s first morph is his pet golden retriever, and he is immediately consumed by pure, overwhelming happiness. And also smells! Being a dog is great! So is being a dolphin! Even the battle morphs – tiger, grizzly bear, gorilla, and wolf – have their embodied pleasures of power, speed, and strength.

Other morphs, however, are considerably less fun. Obviously, very small morphs for infiltrating Yeerk bases are necessary, so the Animorphs quickly acquire an array of bugs. One of the early attempts at a small incognito morph is ants. This goes incredibly wrong. The ants have such a hive mind that the kids nearly lose themselves in the militaristic crush of colony-vs.-enemy. Marco narrates this book, and he describes the overwhelming understanding of “kill or be killed” crowding out any other knowledge in his brain. Also, he gets one of his legs ripped off, but luckily morphing heals your wounds. Since it’s based on DNA, you reset to your factory default, as it were. When Marco showers that night, he finds an ant head embedded in his skin, its mandibles still clamped down in death.

Ostry writes about how the series portrays every living being – animal, human, and alien – as having a particular way of knowing. Every creature’s senses, instincts, and priorities are unique, and Animorphs challenges the implicit hierarchy that humans tend to assume, where human knowledge is the best knowledge. Ostry acknowledges that this series does not constitute a comprehensive ecofeminist or posthumanist worldview, and that in many ways humanity remains centered. (She also acknowledges that this is a really long sci-fi series, not a philosophical treatise, so, like, expecting it to be an internally consistent work of theory would be weird for us to do.) But Ostry brings up ecofeminism and posthumanism as theoretical lenses that are relevant to the series because “Like metamorphosis, both theories challenge the borders of bodies and emphasize our connection to the natural world” (413). Ecofeminist theorists bring together histories of gendered oppression and the legacy of colonialist extraction of the natural world and show how these are not different systems, but rather functions of the same workings of power. Posthumanism, as the name implies, moves to decenter human perspectives and priorities from definitions of knowledge and truth, and to demonstrate the ways in which humans are just one of many interdependent living species and systems, not the top of any hierarchy. The morphing sequences frequently demonstrate these ideas in a particularly tangible way, as the kids acknowledge not only when the animals have better senses than they do, but a greater understanding of certain phenomena. One great example is Tobias’s delight in riding the thermals, the warm air currents that allow birds like him to glide. These currents are invisible to and therefore disregarded by most humans, and you can only understand them if you proactively seek out knowledge of weather and physics. But Tobias as a hawk has an embodied knowledge of the thermals in a way that no human ever could.

On the flip side, we also get an outside-in look at humanity, courtesy of our last member of the team, Ax, or Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil. He is a marooned young Andalite – the younger brother of Elfangor, in fact – who joins up with our squad. Ax combines DNA from Jake, Marco, Rachel, and Cassie – Tobias is already a hawk at this point, so he’s out – to create his human morph form. I wish this were a little more gender fun than it is, but Andalites have the same gender binary as our current culture and Ax chooses to present as male in his hybrid human morph because that’s how he identifies back home. Still, if you wanted to do a queerer reading of this for yourself, the components are certainly there. Ax allows the reader to consider aspects of humanity that most people take for granted: the precarious balance of tail-less bipedalism, for instance, as well as the many wonders of having a mouth. Audible (as opposed to telepathic) speech delights Ax, and he often repeats words or syllables that he finds especially pleasurable to produce. But even that sensory experience pales in comparison to taste. If you have literally any memories of this series at all, it’s probably of Ax losing his damn mind for Cinnabon.

The wonders of sugar are not the only things that Ax learns to appreciate – or struggle with – when it comes to humanity. I’m jumping way ahead here to a quote from near the end of the series, but in Ax’s last point of view book, he is greatly challenged by the decisions that some of the Animorphs have made. But Ax concludes that humans are: “Violent but peace-loving. Passionate but cerebral. Humane but cruel. Impulsive but calculating. Generous but selfish. Humans. Altogether a contradictory and deeply flawed species.” This is perhaps what Ostry means when she argues that the series does ultimately center and uphold humanity as uniquely special, but I do like that we get this assessment from an alien point of view, just as we get the Animorphs’ assessments of the wonders and challenges of the creatures that they morph. Humans have their own, highly complicated, “contradictory and deeply flawed” ways of knowing; they can be monstrous sometimes, but in some ways, that just connects them with all of the other deeply weird forms of life that the universe holds.

And Animorphs never shies away from that weirdness. If this series is “the horrors of war – for kids!” it’s also very much “baby’s first body horror.” From the outset, morphing is a horrifying process – albeit mostly just visually, since it doesn’t actually hurt. But despite the straightforward (if still weird) progression that the iconic covers imply, with morphing, you never actually know what parts of you are going to change first. That’s how you get sequences like Jake morphing a dragonfly for the first time, and remaining a full human at first except for the giant insect eyes that wrap around his head. (“‘Aaaaah!’ I commented calmly,” reports Jake.) In that same book, you have Marco nearly getting stuck halfway morphed out of a flea, which is to say, as a dog-sized flea. But it’s not just bugs that are horrifying to morph. With birds, feathers imprint and then erupt out of the skin; with snakes, limbs wither and shrivel into nothingness. Bones stretch like putty and skin thickens, scales, or sprouts fur all at once. Other forms of body horror include the kids getting eaten in cockroach morph by a Taxxon and demorphing to explode it from the inside out. It’s all gross as hell, but in a fascinating, scientific kind of way that clearly greatly appeals to young readers. The horror and the wonder of nature are not separate things.

As you will have noticed in some of the examples and quotes I have included, Animorphs also has plenty of humor. I expected some of the humor to be maybe a little groan-worthy when I revisited it for this video, but I was surprised by how much of it still really works for me, because it is so grounded in the characters. They all have such distinct voices, so even when they make a dumb joke (Marco, frequently), it doesn’t come off as pandering for kids; it reads as these specific characters having these specific senses of humor. Humor allows the characters to feel real, and therefore it raises the stakes when they’re in danger, because the reader has come to feel like they’re our friends.

So what happens to these characters in the years after that fateful trip home from the mall? Well, from our dark beginnings, things only get darker. The kids are soon to learn that the clear and clean systems of morals they were raised with as children are not so easy to maintain in wartime.

“THERE’S SOMETHING PRETTY DARK DOWN INSIDE YOU”

            In book 20, The Discovery, a new kid, David, arrives in town. The Animorphs try to stay more or less engaged with their “normal kid” lives at school and at home so as not to raise suspicions. They run their big missions on weekends so no one notices them all absent at the same time, and they keep up with their homework and grades to the best of their ability. This is another aspect of how the series juxtaposes constructions of “normal childhood” – again, read modern suburban American – with the actions of war, in a way that renders both of them strange and absurd. But typically, the Animorphs would clock a new student, be friendly with him, but keep him at a distance. This time, however, they can’t do that, because David has found the morphing cube.

            The kids all thought that the morphing cube had been destroyed, but nope, here it is, clear as day, causing Marco to make a very weird first impression on David as he offers to buy it for his pocket change. He continues to oh-so-casually inquire about this weird cube you found, whatever, just curious, and then David drops a bomb: he is planning on selling it to a mysterious bidder. So: Visser Three. This is bad, and though the Animorphs attempt to intervene, they are not able to keep David’s parents from being captured by the Yeerks. They do, however, rescue David and the cube, and since David has now witnessed alien horrors and is also an extremely marked man, they fill him in on the situation. They also realize that they now have the ability to recruit more Animorphs, though they’re not sure if that’s a good idea. But David seems like the obvious test case, since it’s not like he can appear in public ever again. He moves into the loft in Cassie’s barn, and they help him start acquiring animals.

This all goes pretty immediately wrong. The first warning sign is when David, in his first time out as a bird of prey, kills a random crow. He says that the bird mind took over, but Marco is pretty sure that he’s lying: “David had killed that crow. Deliberately. In cold blood. For absolutely no reason.” The unsettling moments start to add up, but the Animorphs are aware that this kid did just lose his home and his parents, who, even if they aren’t dead, are definitely Controllers. So some disturbing behavior kind of makes sense, under the circumstances.

Besides, the Animorphs have been growing increasingly disturbed by their own behavior. For instance, Marco observes how Cassie corrals David into doing what they need him to do by exploiting the tension that has grown up between David and Marco: “She’s always good at understanding people. It hadn’t occurred to me she’d be good at manipulating people if she had to.” Marco realizes that even Cassie, the most peaceable among them, can be “ruthless in a way, too.” In the next book of this sequence, The Threat, Jake tries to handle the increasingly out-of-control David situation by stepping further into his role as a leader. When David uses his morphing to steal a room at the Holiday Inn – not just breaking the kids’ self-imposed rule against theft (which they’ll also later break, too) but also putting both himself and the others in danger – Jake tells him, “You want to go around using your powers in selfish ways, then we can’t have you around. You’re just a danger to us. And you’re against what we stand for.” When David asks just what exactly Jake is implying with all of that, Jake responds, “We’re the only family you have now, David. The only people you can trust. The only people who can help you. We’re all you have. Deal with it.” Jake does not lie to himself about what he’s doing: “I sounded like I was threatening him. I was.” Jake later crosses yet another of his personal lines when he delivers orders to the others during a tense standoff with Visser Three: “I never do that. I never hand out orders. I mean, I am supposed to be the leader, but I don’t give orders. I just don’t feel like I have the right. But this time I had no choice.” It’s pretty amazing how often, if you skim even a handful of the books, you’ll find passages like this: I never do this. This isn’t me. But what else could I do?

David eventually has to be stopped from demorphing and surrendering to Visser Three in exchange for his parents (a promise that the other Animorphs know that Visser Three would never honor). If he were to do so, he would jeopardize all of the Animorphs – and in turn, the entire world. David tries to play it off like he was bluffing, but at the next opportunity, he attempts to escape – and seems to kill Tobias in the process. David sneers that the Animorphs don’t own him, and he’s going to use his powers to live on the lam, morphing other people as he goes. If they try to come after him – well, he’s already shown that he’s fine with killing them in a morph form. He says it’s not murder if it’s just a bird. When Jake is confronted with the dead red-tailed hawk, he realizes for the first time in the war, he actually wants to kill: “I wanted to destroy David. I wanted revenge.” David escapes and Jake reports the situation to Ax, who has an especially close relationship with Tobias. Ax responds to Tobias’s possible death with what can either be read as Andalite stoicism or shock, or both: “That would be a terrible thing.” Jake’s response? “Get Rachel. If David’s killed Tobias, we may have to do a terrible thing, too. Get Rachel.”

Naturally, the last book in this sequence, The Solution, is from Rachel’s point of view. Rachel and Tobias are in love – blood knight and bird boy – so Rachel goes cold at the news, and she also knows exactly why Jake sent for her. Just like Jake, she thinks, “I was going to hunt him down and destroy him,” but then she immediately amends her statement: “No, not destroy. That was a weasel word. It was vague, meaningless. I was going to kill him.” Luckily, we find out that Tobias is alive; David accidentally killed a random innocent hawk. Though Rachel is relieved, her rage is not tempered, especially when David lets them know that if he can’t exchange the cube for his parents, then he’ll exchange the Animorphs’ identities instead. This takes place in school, so the kids can’t morph in response, but Jake once again dispatches Rachel to chase David down. She grabs him by the collar, presses a fork to his ear, and whispers her threat: if David betrays them, then before Rachel is caught, she will hunt down his Controller parents, and, well …. She leaves the rest unsaid, but not to be vague; mostly just to let David’s imagination fill in the rest.

Leaving this confrontation, Rachel is rattled by how much she isn’t rattled. She narrates, “I was high on adrenaline. High on the rush of power and violence. What had I just done? In all the time we’d been fighting the Yeerks, I’d never made a threat like that. What was the matter with me? I felt … not exactly ashamed. But I knew I never wanted to talk to Cassie about what I’d just told David. Or Tobias. Or even Marco.” She realizes that she also in this moment feels hatred towards Jake for knowing what she’d do and using her to do it: “I couldn’t face what he knew about me.” She tries to remember if she’d always been this ready for violence, but “it wasn’t like I was thinking about myself.”

David once again escapes the group’s clutches by morphing into Rachel and Jake’s dying cousin – he’d been in a bad car accident – and taking his place with his family. Also one of the darker moments of the series, I would say! Now removing David as a threat would also mean revealing to family members that their son has died. David also insinuates that, in bug morph, he could be anywhere – even spying on Rachel in the shower, in one of the series’ few implicitly sexualized moments of violence.

Rachel, understandably, is in kind of the worst headspace of her life, and she lashes out at Jake for using her to do his dirty work: “You know something, Jake, you are becoming a real leader. You even have the whole hypocrisy thing down.” Jake tries to dodge her accusations, but finally, he comes out with one of the most powerful and infamous paragraphs of the series: “Okay, fine, Rachel. You want to do this, fine. I think you’re the bravest member of the group. I think in a bad fight I’d rather have you with me than anyone else. But yeah, Rachel, I think there’s something pretty dark down inside you. I think you’re the only one of us who would be disappointed if all this ended tomorrow. Cassie hates all this, Marco has personal reasons for being in this war, Ax just wants to go home and fight Yeerks with his own people, Tobias … who knows what Tobias wants anymore? But you, Rachel, you love it. It’s what makes you so brave. It’s what makes you so dangerous to the Yeerks.”

Jake follows this “yes-there-is-something-wrong-with-you” speech by telling Rachel that he worries about her, not because she’s at war, but because he doesn’t know what on earth she can do afterwards: “What are you going to do? Go back to being the world’s best shopper? Go back to gymnastics and getting good grades?” These attributes that early in the series had been used to establish Rachel as a “normal” adolescent now seem cheap and meaningless. Rachel, of course, can give as good as she gets, and asks Jake if he thinks he could ever “go back to being a mediocre basketball player and a decent student?” Which: damn, that’s cold. They both acknowledge the truth in what the other is saying: they have been irrevocably changed at this point, and not for the better. Normal adolescence is no longer remotely in reach for either of them. It has not survived contact with the incompatible category of war.

This darker-than-dark mid-series trilogy has one final twist. The person who hatches the plan to trap David is not Rachel, not Jake, but Cassie. That line from Marco about manipulating people? She puts that talent to good use, playing on David’s ego to trick him into thinking that he was trapping Rachel – when in fact, Rachel and the others trap him in a box in rat morph. Then all that’s left to do is wait. It only takes two hours, after all.

Rachel and Ax stick around for the agonizing last minutes of David’s human life. He will keep his mind in his forever-morph, but he probably won’t want to. They leave him on an island – there are other rats there, so there’s some food chain to support him. All the while, David is howling his protests in thought-speak, and he continues to do so, even when they’re gone. Later on, Rachel hears a classmate swear that that island is haunted; when he and his family were on a boat nearby, they “heard” a distant No!

There is a coda to the David saga near the end of the series. David is given assistance by a chaotic alien entity – I’m not going into that one, because this script is already really long – to psychologically torment Rachel. Long story short, she breaks free of their illusions and traps, but not before David twists the knife of her protest that she is “one of the good guys.” Rachel believes that her cause is good – and it is, honestly, she’s fighting for the freedom of all humanity and the continued existence of Earth’s ecosystems – but does she even believe that she herself is a “good guy” anymore? She tries to push away her rage, but “the truth was I didn’t want it to go away. I wanted my anger. I wanted my hate.” With David once again at the Animorphs’ mercy by the end of the book, Rachel points out her Cassie’s hypocrisy at expressing worry that Rachel will have to do the hard and dirty job of leaving him on the island again. She challenges Cassie: could you do it instead? No, Cassie can’t. Not without breaking so much that she would become no longer capable of fighting. And Rachel, however broken she becomes, is never incapable of fighting.

So what happens next? We don’t know, because Rachel never tells us. David begs her to kill him instead of leaving him on the island again. At this point, the Animorphs have caused the deaths of many human Controllers as collateral damage, something they swore they would avoid at the beginning of the series. But they’ve still avoided this: killing a member of their own species for the purpose specifically of ending that human life. Rachel weeps as David begs for death, and she narrates: “I felt sorry for David and sorry for me. Sorry for what the war had done to us both. … He was what we had made him.” She wants anyone else to make this decision for her, and she tells herself again “I’m one of the good guys,” but she doesn’t know what a good guy would do here. She does something. David does not reappear. But the books leave us to imagine what choice Rachel might have made … and what choice we would make in her place.

This approach of challenging readers with the characters’ choices continues throughout the end of the series. The kids consider again the question of recruiting new Animorphs in book 50, The Ultimate. At this point, they really need the numbers, but the question of who to trust remains, since anyone could be a Controller. Except, not quite anyone, as Cassie realizes. Yeerks avoid infecting disabled humans, under the assumption that these bodies will not be useful for them. Now, if I wanted to make a whole other video about Animorphs and disability, I totally could, because the Yeerks themselves are mostly blind and extremely limited in their mobility and communication in their slug form. Their first hosts, from their home planet, were also physically very limited. When the Andalite Seerow gave them the gift of space travel out of pity for their limitations on their sad little swamp planet, the Yeerks then immediately set off as conquerors, claiming hosts that empowered them to experience physical sensations and might that had previously been denied to them. So as I was writing this, I realized I definitely need to do an Animorphs and disability video at some point, but I am already over 20 pages into this script, so it’s not going to be this one!

This is all to say that the Animorphs realize the best recruits would be disabled kids from a local long-term medical residence. But as soon as Cassie comes up with this idea, she second-guesses it. She fears that they’d be taking advantage of people who would be particularly enamored of the idea of morphing their bodies, perhaps to the detriment of understanding the extreme dangers of this proposition. Plus, there would be additional risks of demorphing – sometimes necessary during battle – if, for instance, a wheelchair user had to demorph and then was without means of mobility. She asks, “We’re going to use kids less fortunate than us to keep us alive? Why are we so important? Why are we more important than everyone else?” Jake says that they aren’t, and that’s the point: it’s these kids’ planet, too. They decide to bring the cube to the medical residence and give the kids a choice – except is it a choice? When the new character James expresses resistance to the idea of recruiting him and all of his friends to war, Cassie explicitly tells him it’s not: “You don’t really have a choice here. This is duty time. You’ve been tapped.” Once again, Cassie the manipulator comes out, to her own disgust.

The new recruits’ tour of duty does not last long; in the penultimate book, all of them are killed by Yeerk arial strikes. Jake, having infiltrated Visser Three’s ship, stays in morph and doesn’t stop them. Demorphing would lose the whole battle. In other words, the auxiliary Animorphs are a necessary sacrifice; watching their deaths, a tactical choice. Now, introducing a bunch of disabled characters to kill literally all of them three books later is also a choice on the writers’ part, and one that I think definitely could have been done better. Not that I think all of them had to survive – war stories need deaths, and we’re going to get into more of that in just a minute – but this set of characters does wind up feeling like a philosophical consideration of disability instead of actual people. They’re more important for their impact on the main characters than as characters in their own right, and that is frustrating and disappointing, to say the very least.

This treatment of these characters does fit in with the thematic thrust of the final sequence, though, which is all about making choices when no good outcomes are available. Cassie, for instance, allows the Yeerk controlling Jake’s brother Tom to get away with the morphing cube. Partially, she does this to stop Jake from killing Tom’s Yeerk via killing Tom, since she does not believe that Jake could come back from killing his own brother. However, Jake points out she could have attacked Tom herself instead of preventing Jake from acting, and Cassie is forced to admit that she thinks maybe the Yeerks having the ability to morph could be good? She knows that they’re going to use this power to very dangerous effect against her and her comrades, but she reasons if the Yeerks can morph, do they need to infect people as parasites? Cassie is the closest contact we have to the Yeerk resistance – because not all Yeerks actually want to live their lives constantly engaged in wars of conquest. They are sentient creatures capable of systems of morality that allow them to see that taking over other people’s minds by force is, in fact, wrong. Cassie wants to give this contingent of Yeerk society a chance to come out on top, but by letting the morphing technology fall into Yeerk hands (or the slug equivalent thereof), she’s gambling her whole planet on the outcome. Understandably, the other Animorphs see this as a betrayal, though they ultimately forgive Cassie, even if they still believe that she made the wrong call.

Contrast this with the choice that Jake makes in the penultimate book, in the midst of the final battle. As the war finally moves from covert to overt, Jake takes it upon himself to fully harden into a ruthless general. Gone is the democratic leader moderating team votes. He hands out orders to kill, and he orders to Ax to lie to his own people about their plans: “I’m your prince, Ax: Do it.” He tells his troops, “Before this night is over the casualties will be piled high and some of you standing here right now will be dead and I don’t care because we are going to win.” Once the ship has been infiltrated and Jake is able to take control, Ax informs him that he also now has control of a Yeerk pool ship in orbit. The gang had previously destroyed the biggest Earth-bound Yeerk pool, which is a resource that Yeerks need to survive, and therefore much of the invading force – 17,372 of them – have been temporarily relocated to the pool ship. These Yeerks are overwhelmingly enemy combatants, but in the pool, they are literally defenseless – and offenseless, since there’s no means of them fighting back. They are unaware of the battle taking place on the Visser’s ship. This is by far the largest target that the Animorphs have ever had in their sights, and the gravity of it is not lost on Jake: “Seventeen thousand. Living creatures. Thinking creatures. How could I give this order? Even for victory. Even to save Rachel. How could I give this kind of order? They could have stayed home, I thought. No one had asked them to come to Earth. Not my fault. Not my fault, theirs. No more than they deserved. Aliens. Parasites. Subhuman. <Flush them> I said.”

Elaine Ostry writes, “The Animorphs is perhaps the only children’s series in which one of the heroes is called a war criminal – and questions his own innocence” (412). If this were a human war, then what Jake does is pretty unambiguously a war crime. Now, if humans ever actually wind up fighting against actual aliens, who knows what the rules of engagement would legally be, but Jake, by his own accounting of his thought process, knows that these are sentient creatures, and that he has to dehumanize them – de-soul them, de-mind them, de-individuate them – in order to commit this mass slaying that releases their helpless bodies to the vacuum of space.

But this is not the only choice that Jake makes. The Animorphs have struck a deal with Tom’s Yeerk to go up against Visser Three together, but Jake fully knows that that Yeerk will double-cross them as soon as the opportunity arises. He therefore orders Rachel to infiltrate his ship and to try to stop him from leaving to become a new conqueror to plague the galaxy. Jake and Rachel both know exactly what this means, and Rachel accepts her mission. Rachel, in the opening chapters of the final book, narrates, “I was Jake’s insurance policy. He thought maybe he wouldn’t have to use me. He hoped, anyway. But down deep he knew, and I knew, and we both hid the truth from the others because Cassie couldn’t let Jake make that decision, and Tobias couldn’t let me, and those two, by loving us, would have screwed everything up. It was a war, after all. A war we had to win.”  On the visual feed from the other ship, the rest of the Animorphs watch as she assumes her battle morph – grizzly bear – to attack Tom’s Yeerk in Tom’s body. Rachel says, “I felt … I felt exalted. It was my moment. This was my place and my time and my own perfection.”

But Tom’s Yeerk, via Tom, can morph now, too, and he becomes a cobra and bites Rachel. Guided by Tobias over the feed, even as her senses fade from the venom, she bites Tom back, killing him. At this point, she either stays in bear morph and dies of the venom, or demorphs and exposes her helpless human body to the remaining enemies. She chooses the latter so that she can speak her love aloud to the Animorphs watching from the other ship. A Yeerk in polar bear morph says, “You fight well, human.” Then, Rachel tells us, “he killed me with a single blow.” I had forgotten a lot of details of Animorphs since middle school, but never that line.

Time stops, and the Elimist appears to Rachel. The Elimist is a nearly omnipotent but nominally non-interfering alien entity that I haven’t gotten into because this episode is already, again, really long. But the Elimist wishes to honor Rachel at the moment of her death. Rachel narrates, “I wanted so much to live. I wanted so much to stay and not to leave.” Applegate et al. could have presented the consummate warrior Rachel as accepting her fate, ready for death in battle, but they haven’t pulled any punches so far, so why start here? Of course she doesn’t want to die. The authors do allow us and her some comfort, though, as the Elimist confirms to Rachel that her life was cosmically worthwhile: “You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered.” Rachel says, “Yeah. Okay then. Okay then.” The last words of her narration are “I wondered if –”, but she doesn’t get to complete that thought, or if she does, we don’t get to know it. Death, which war always, always means, has cut short her wondering, her curiosity, the value that this whole series so clearly upholds over all, in its delight in the strange and horrifying and beautiful world, in life in its countless forms. War is the antithesis of life. War does not answer questions, does not satisfy curiosity. War is just endings.

Anyway, the Animorphs win.

Tobias, mourning Rachel, takes off in hawk form to just live in the wild for the next several years. Cassie works on the relocation and protection of the Hork-Bajir and the Taxxons, wrapping those projects up with environmental protections for Earth’s ecosystems, as well. She starts a new relationship and builds a new life. Marco becomes the very wealthy spokesperson of the Animorphs, which he enjoys, though somewhat hollowly. Ax, once Visser Three is tried at the Hague (this is where the war crime allegations against Jake also come up), returns to his own people. Jake, meanwhile, feels slow and dull and adrift. He narrates, “I had come to accept that all of that, all of what I’d had with Cassie, Tobias, Ax, even Marco, all of it was ‘in the war.’ And the things that were ‘in the war’ didn’t seem to translate into real life.” Marco at least stages a bit of an intervention to force Jake to morph again and to talk to the others – both of which Jake had been avoiding – which allows Jake to move forward in some capacity, as he starts to train U.S. military forces in the use of morphing. But Jake doesn’t really come to life again until he receives word of Ax’s ship in distress after investigating what appeared to be the remnants of Tom’s Yeerk’s ship floating dead in space. Jake, Marco, and Tobias set off, but only after Marco tells Jake that he has to be willing to make the same kind of hard decisions that have him so “messed up” now. Jake says, “This time, maybe I’ll do it differently. Some things at least.” Marco grimly narrates that Jake wants to be “the warrior who never sinned,” and he reminds Jake that that’s not what war requires. Jake seems to take this to heart, because when they arrive at the dead ship, a new alien enemy reveals itself: The One, a creature that absorbs other life forces and bodies – including Ax’s. The One’s ship can outshoot Jake’s – but it’s much slower. So, Marco narrates, “There was a dangerous smile on Jake’s face. Rachel’s smile. ‘Full emergency power to the engines,’ Jake said. ‘Ram the Blade ship.’”

And that’s how the series ends.

CONCLUSION

In an AMA with Michael Grant, a reader with a particularly good memory asked if Jake’s decision to ram the ship was a callback to a choice that, at some point in the sprawling series, we learned that Elfangor the Andalite made long ago and survived. The reader asked if this maybe means that Jake, Marco, and Tobias survive as well, as opposed to going out in a blaze of glory to destroy one last enemy? Grant responded, “I love it when the penny drops.”

I was so relieved by this response. I found it by googling “do the Animorphs survive,” because after revisiting this series, I was so damn distraught about the possibility that maybe only Cassie actually finds life after war. Now, obviously, statements made by authors outside of the books don’t count as the text, so the ambiguity of the ending stands. But emotionally, I needed that little shred of hope. I had been in such a genuine funk all day. I, as a 36-year-old adult, needed this children’s series that never pulled any punches to maybe just pull one.

I don’t think K.A. Applegate would be very impressed with me in that regard. After the series wrapped up, she wrote a letter to fans in response to the inundation of upset responses she’d received, about Jake and Cassie’s relationship, about Rachel’s death, and especially about the ending cliffhanger. She wrote, “Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don’t end happily. Not ever.” She expressed surprise that anyone would have wanted her to write an unambiguous victory, because “Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with a conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating.” She also pointed out that she had most of our fighters transition to a new war at the end because that’s what so often happens in real life. Applegate concluded, “So you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents. If you’re mad at me because that’s what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn’t have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.”

This letter was published just a couple of months before September 11th. While Applegate clearly couldn’t have known the exact kind of prescient she was being, she obviously understood that her message was unfortunately evergreen. And she directed this message at precisely the kinds of children – suburban, middle-to-upper-middle-class Americans, like her characters – that she knew are so often excluded from considerations of war, because that cultural category of childhood is defined by innocence, ignorance, and domestic safety, three things that war absolutely demolishes.

In real life, war affects millions upon millions of children. Livia Hazer and Gustaf Gredeback explain, “Children are heavily over-represented among the world’s refugees (1/3 of global population, 1/2 of all refugees; UNICEF, 2022) and one in six children in the world live in conflict zones (452 million; Save the Children, 2021).” No one even remotely informed in the 2020s can deny the fact that, as much as Western ideologies would seek to separate the categories of childhood and warfare, that is simply not the reality. We have all seen the incredible suffering of civilian children in Gaza, in Ukraine, and in Sudan. Meanwhile, the use of child soldiers is often invoked to condemn the regimes and military forces that would use them, despite the fact that, as David M. Rosen points out, what counts as a “child soldier” is not a stable category across cultures or certainly across history. In Child Soldiers in the Western Imagination: From Patriots to Victims, Rosen explains how the historic child soldiers of the West – so think adolescents fighting in the American Revolution – are upheld as precocious heroes, while their modern counterparts in the Global South are often used as justification for writing off their areas of the world as uncivilized. Note: I hope you can tell that I am not saying that child soldiers are fine, actually – I’m very much not – but, like Rosen, I think it’s super important to recognize that the real kids who fight in wars are not only being used by their armies. Their symbolic rhetorical power is also invoked outside of the warzones to foster senses of cultural superiority. Rosen writes, “the concept of the child soldier fuses two very contradictory and powerful ideas, namely the ‘innocence’ of childhood and the ‘evil’ of warfare” (175). But war, though inherently ideological, is also embodied, and that powerful idea of childhood often is used in ways that obscure the embodied experiences of children at war. Lots of people talk about them, but not a lot of people listen to them.

Now, Applegate et al. were not writing about these actual child soldiers. Like I have said, they were deliberately using the notion of “normality” to build the contrast that Rosen is talking about. “Normal” childhood is peaceful childhood, in the very American point of view of this series. But in Applegate’s letter, she makes it clear that she knows not all of her intended readership may remain in peaceful lives as they get older. She and her co-writers wanted kids who live outside of war to see what it actually means before they might be involved with it. Applegate refers to her respect for her readers, and that is really the thing that I respect most about her and everyone involved in the creation of Animorphs.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that these books were an absolute juggernaut for Scholastic, very little scholarship has been published about this series. Its intensity and complexity have, in the nearly thirty years since the beginning of its run, seemingly gone unnoticed by most adults. I honestly wonder if that first book would get published today, because – and this is just my personal observation here, and not anything supported by full research or data – I feel like a lot of not only mainstream middle-grade but also mainstream YA genre fiction has been trending a little bit downward in moral complexity. Disclaimers, disclaimers, disclaimers: not all of them. There still plenty of people exploring big thorny ethical issues in science fiction and fantasy for young people. But is it the stuff that has the big publishing support and library ubiquity of Animorphs? If I’m wrong, and you know something that popular for this young an audience with the moral stakes of Animorphs being put out today, please tell me about it, because I want to know. But I just feel like the amount of trust that the writers of Animorphs put in their young audience is something we don’t see enough of. Though the writers reproduced many mainstream and problematic social constructions in their work – about childhood, about disability, about race and gender – they also deliberately challenged some of the most ingrained constructions that organize children’s lives, including that construction of innocence. They not only show what happens when young adolescents are removed from the social protections that prevent them from making consequential moral and ethical decisions, but they also do not allow the assumed innocence of their even younger audience to prevent them from having this conversation with their readers. I think that’s one of the main reasons so many millennials like myself remember this series so fondly. It leveled with us when we were kids. It didn’t let our age prevent it from telling stories that mattered.

Thank you for listening to me talk for a long time about Animorphs. I would love to keep doing so, so drop a comment talking about your own experience with this series, other stories about childhood and war that you’ve encountered, or just what animal you would most like to morph. Remember to also ask any questions you’d like to see me answer in my next video: you can mark those with “AMA” so I don’t miss them. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a like and subscribe to the channel. Like I said at the beginning, I have a lot of exciting plans for the new year. If you really want to make sure to be included in those plans, especially first dibs for participation in upcoming book clubs, check out my Patreon link in the description. Any support you give me over there or with super thanks on here will also help me to develop book clubs and academic/creative/activist mentorship services for teens.

I will be back here in two weeks with my Ask Me Anything, and then after that in the new year with plenty more conversations about childhood, monstrosity, and all the ways they overlap. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

References:

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