Take a look through my eyes.

the ending of Animorphs v. the ending of Harry Potter

[It ought to be obvious and there ought to be a statute of limitations on this, but here there be spoilers]

First, I love both series but neither of them are perfect.

I read the last Animorphs book not too long ago and it made it clear why the ending of Harry Potter has always bothered me.

There was some controversy over the ending of Animorphs when #54 was first released. The fans didn’t love it. K.A. Applegate addressed that. Anticipated it, even, and wrote us a letter about it in the back of the book!

Forget the “ram the blade ship” mystery ending for a second, I understand the beef with that, she basically refused to write an ending and let us wonder about it for the rest of our lives.

The rest, though: Rachel dies. Even if she had survived, she was starting to legit lose it. Tobias can’t forgive Jake for it and gives up on all life as a human being in order to live as a hawk and a hermit. Jake falls into a depression. Cassie and Marco seem untouched at first glance, but Cassie is so bothered by some of the decisions Jake made toward the end of the war that she seems uncomfortable even being in his presence. Marco seems to be enjoying a life of wealth and stardom, but the fact that he morphs a lobster just to retrieve something at the bottom of his pool makes us wonder if he’s not dissatisfied with his cushy life. Ax, well we don’t know about Ax, but we can assume he fared at least okay, propelled along the fast-track of rank in the Andalite military but probably feeling a like a bit of a foreigner in his own land after his years on Earth.

The point is, the heroes suffered. Some of them died and some of them were fucked up beyond repair. All of them were changed. Their relationships with each other were shattered. There were consequences, not just for everyone around the heroes but for the heroes themselves.

Harry Potter tries to be realistic and gritty insofar as how awful war is and how random and fickle death is in a war, but it ultimately fails. Characters die, characters who didn’t have to, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione are more or less untouched and undamaged. They came out of the series the same way they came into it, older and wiser, but basically the same people. Everyone marries their high school sweetheart. They live happily ever after, all of them. The ending just doesn’t jive with everything that came before it. It seems unreal and dishonest. It makes Fred’s and Lupin’s and Tonks’ and definitely Dobby and Hedwig’s deaths seem cruel and pointless. If the ending was going to be pure fantasy, couldn’t everything else have been too? Rowling was merciless, but not as merciless as she needed to be to make her point.

As much as I love HP, this is true.

36 notes | Reblog | 8 months ago

Posted on September 19th at 1:09 AM
Reblogged from: strayaesthetic
Originally posted by: strayaesthetic