Animorphs.
Cool friends fighting aliens...more accurately, the pariah of a fascist civilization, minutes before being eaten alive in front of said "ccol friends" persuades and then bioengineers human child soldiers to facilitate an end to an ill-conceived and failing war now reduced to unilaterally exterminating a parasitic, physically disabled species, itself undergoing a violent civil rights movement on their own planet based on their self-recognized flaws, struggling to realize its place in a universe where godlike beings exist and decide not to offer remedy(rules of the god game) and spectate while the parasites overwhelm all vulnerable species in the known universe.
The child soldiers agree to resist the parasites, but at least a minority of them believe genocide is the wrong answer. After being physically and emotionally tortured, shot, repeatedly disemboweled and having their limbs hacked or bitten off by hosts of the parasitic species, however, all of the child soldiers begin taking violent, morally devastating actions that end their lives as they know them.
Use spoiler tags as necessary! There are always new readers discovering this series.
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Like this!
Is this one a "yikes" for everybody?
Maybe they just needed a break from a book every month for five years.
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Marco's heart exploding, or being exploded, is pretty harrowing, but the helmacrons combined with the trope theme is impossible not to roll my eyes at.
I still like the animorphs themselves within the story and I like Marco's initiative, but this book is odd and somewhat unsatisfying.
Maybe they needed some breathing room to get ready for the final run.
