spacewalker:

morilore:

You know, I really appreciate that despite how hard Animorphs went in on so moral ambiguity and “war is hell,” it never for one instant let that moral ambiguity affect the issue of ultimate responsibility: the colonizing aggressor is wrong, all casualties on both sides are the fault of the colonizing aggressor, the struggle against the colonizing aggressor is good and just and not some “over-simplistic” “narrative” that needs to be overcome with nonviolent peace and love or whatever.

YEAH LIKE. Honestly, that’s why for all that the Animorph’s actions in the later books are objectively horrifying, and the orders Jake gives are awful, I never bought into the “Jake became just like the Yeerks/Visser Three” viewpoint that many people seem to hold. 

Because nah, he didn’t. Regardless of what he did do, he didn’t ask for the war. He didn’t start it. He might be “General Berenson” after the war, might be a war-prince, but those titles didn’t come with resources or training or any kind of capital that would have let him negotiate a bloodless end to the war. He was the child leader of a guerrilla force whose numbers were in the single digits, and for whom surrender would lead to the enslavement of an entire planet. 

The shit he does and orders others to do is objectively awful by all moral standards, but in context? They’re still absolutely the lesser evil, and necessary, and no less horrible for it. Which is the entire point of the series, and reducing it to “Jake and Visser Three are exactly the same because they both kill loads of people” is ignoring the far more nuanced message of the books.