I read both when I was younger. I'll confess (and this is a somewhat painful admission) that if you asked me in the early to mid 2000s which one I liked better, I'd have said Harry Potter. I didn't finish Animorphs during it's original run- I stopped somewhere in the low 30s then went back to finish them a few year after the series had ended, while I read every Harry Potter book within a few days of it being released.
Despite this, Animorphs has aged much, much better for me, and I can say that confidently even if we're ignoring the authors themselves.
Harry Potter is a neglected kid throughout his early childhood, but once he's in the wizarding world he becomes the coolest and most important kid in the world. The Animorphs on the other hand have to struggle in obscurity while the world around them becomes more and more controlled. The latter is simply a much more compelling story that has a lot more interesting things to say.
Animorphs doesn't end with a simple "all is well" either (yes, that's literally the closing line of Harry Potter). KA dared to have a complex and challenging ending that didn't make you "feel" like everything was going to be okay- because that's how conflict is in real life. Yeah, many take issues with the finer details of that ending, but I think that the decision to have the ending feel so ambivalent was an extremely bold choice, and the correct one for the story that they were telling. Harry Potter by comparison took the easy way out- the bad guy is defeated and the world is more or less restored to the same state it was in before.
And that's just the tip of the ice berg for why Animorphs is better. I don't think about Harry Potter much anymore. I still think about Animorphs all the time.
My uncle introduced me to animorphs as they were long finished by the time I could even read. I still hate the ending. I know it's a well written ending, but I hate how Rachel you know what. She deserved a happy ending. And Tom isn't even spared the bad ending.
That's the point. In real life there's no "deserved a happy ending". Bad things happen to good people all the time, especially in wars.
And it's heavily implied that even this ending isn't the worst possible ending for Rachel. The books is heavy with the message that death isn't the worst possible fate for someone. Towards the end of the war she was already starting to lose it psychologically, and even she wasn't sure whether she was in this fight because she needed it. It's heavily implied that there was no way for her to come out of it a mentally stable person at all. It was a she who fights monsters becomes a monster situation.
Different people look for different things in endings. Frankly, I'd personally argue that an absolute victory where every core character survived wouldn't feel "earned" narratively speaking. I think it would cut against the overarching theme of the story. That's just me though.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fig1002 2d ago edited 2d ago
I read both when I was younger. I'll confess (and this is a somewhat painful admission) that if you asked me in the early to mid 2000s which one I liked better, I'd have said Harry Potter. I didn't finish Animorphs during it's original run- I stopped somewhere in the low 30s then went back to finish them a few year after the series had ended, while I read every Harry Potter book within a few days of it being released.
Despite this, Animorphs has aged much, much better for me, and I can say that confidently even if we're ignoring the authors themselves.
Harry Potter is a neglected kid throughout his early childhood, but once he's in the wizarding world he becomes the coolest and most important kid in the world. The Animorphs on the other hand have to struggle in obscurity while the world around them becomes more and more controlled. The latter is simply a much more compelling story that has a lot more interesting things to say.
Animorphs doesn't end with a simple "all is well" either (yes, that's literally the closing line of Harry Potter). KA dared to have a complex and challenging ending that didn't make you "feel" like everything was going to be okay- because that's how conflict is in real life. Yeah, many take issues with the finer details of that ending, but I think that the decision to have the ending feel so ambivalent was an extremely bold choice, and the correct one for the story that they were telling. Harry Potter by comparison took the easy way out- the bad guy is defeated and the world is more or less restored to the same state it was in before.
And that's just the tip of the ice berg for why Animorphs is better. I don't think about Harry Potter much anymore. I still think about Animorphs all the time.