Alternate #19 ending
I haven't posted to this community before, but like many of you, I loved Animorphs while growing up and still love the books, reread them, etc. Lately my boyfriend has been reading them for the first time, at my urging, and we sometimes read them out loud together. My boyfriend knows other series quite well (Buffy, Harry Potter, comic books, and some others) and he writes and draws comic books, so he tends to look at things from the standpoint of what does and does not make a good story. Anyway, we just finished 19 today, which he said was creatively the best Animorphs book he's read yet. But he also suggested something interesting which I'd never thought of before. He thought that the loophole which allowed Cassie to demorph was pretty contrived, which I guess it is. But he also said that he thought the book would have been ever greater and more powerful had she stayed in the butterfly form. He said that given her character arc, it would have been a fitting (if highly disturbing) conclusion for her, and a truly beautiful sacrifice. He even suggested that the last chapter could have just been Rachel meeting Karen at the mall. Of course those of us who've read the entire series know how much that would have changed things, and he did say he knows why no one would actually do that in a "YA" series. But I thought that was a really interesting idea. I know I would have been very unsettled by one of the main characters living out her life as a butterfly, but at the same time it would have been really powerful. Any thoughts on this idea?