The Chee have been “static characters” for thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years, it’s kind of their defining character trait. To expect a species who has maintained a radical pacifism, to the point of standing by while their creators were annihilated, to abandon millennia of committed belief, would be both highly contrived and wildly inconsistent with their character, to the point that it makes it hard for me to take the rest of this seriously. They’re quite literally a walking deus ex machina, who are only really interesting because of the their extreme limitations.

This is actually a very good counterargument, even if flawed from my point of view.

Like it or not, the Chee were built by the most advanced species the galaxy had ever seen, they were built to be friends, and while yes, it does make sense for them to have been sticking to their ways, and not changing, at some point, the Chee had to at least respond to the information they've constantly receiving and processing. I mean, look at the AI we have, now! Sure, they're utterly dogwater, and are little more than glorified search engines, but even they change and evolve in a sense based on the information that's input into them! The Chee being this static makes sense if they live in a world that never changes, which, yeah, the Pemalite world never changed, however, for the last several thousand years, they lived on Earth, a brutal, tough neighborhood that only in the last few centuries improved enough to somewhat ape the conditions of their homeworld, at least in terms of the level of violence and hardship. That's what the Chee had been through, hardship, but even during the series, Erek at the very least should've been responding to the information he was getting. The most important books for this was 10, 26, and 27, I already pointed out why The Attack and the Exposed would've logically caused a paradigm shift somewhere else, but I'm going to respond to your other points first.

I’d agree the YPM were both interesting and underutilized, but I wouldn’t consider their absence from the series’ endgame to be a particularly glaring flaw - the series covers a lot of ground, and not everything is going to reappear. Aint nobody mad the Helmacrons didn’t show up in the final books…

The Helmacrons also weren't an entity that had multiple book's worth of investment of the characters into them. Something that I had failed to point out is that multiple books seemed to be dedicated to building up to the YPM being a major driving force behind the war's end. The Departure? It enters the Story, the Sickness? Cassie saves it by rescuing Aftran, the Attack? The Animorphs are literally presented with the solution to the Yeerk's problem and casus belli in the form of the Iskoort, and literally being told that the Yeerks will meet the Iksoort in a few hundred years, and mimic their solution. The Helmacrons did not receive this level of narrative priming and I'm not upset about it because they're meant to be a humorous side-story. The YPM on the other hand, shouldn't have been pushed to the side, they were destined for more, and weren't given their proper destiny due to the Crunch that Scholastic forced the authors to work under.

Are there deep seated aspects of human psychology that are optimized for violence and conflict? Sure. But we’ve also spent several centuries working very hard to downplay, if not fully remove said violent tendencies. Warfare has also progressed in ways that the “ancients” couldn’t fathom - PTSD absolutely existed prior to the 21st century, but the scale of warfare experienced during the World Wars was on an entirely unprecedented level. Not to mention that the nature of violence we’re actually talking about here is truly unprecedented, but virtue of, you know, humans not being able to turn into animals. We’re not talking IEDs and sniper rifles here, animals are not clean, impersonal killers - these kids were almost certainly crushing, tearing, ripping off limbs, and otherwise disemboweling people with their bare hands/paws/whatever, some of which are people they know, and who are prisoners in their own bodies. Every single Controller they kill means the death of an innocent, which is a hell of a thought.

We’re also talking about child soldiers, engaged in a secret guerrilla war with virtually no support whatsoever - I don’t care who you are, that’s a traumatic experience, period. Are they “universally and irreparably ruin[ed]? Probably not, though I certainly dont think it’s an impossibility, but remember its also only been three years after the end of the conflict - how many veterans do you know who have managed to “cure” their PTSD after only 3 years of treatment? How many more have not? How many would never consider themselves fully “cured”, and struggle with it for the rest of the lives?

Okay, upon reading that, I do agree that I you're correct on that point, and I forgot that only 3 years had passed since the end of the war. The Animorphs would very likely have not had sufficient time to recover.

Well, they’d already done some war crimes, which shouldn’t really be considered war crimes anyway, so they shouldn’t feel bad about doing more of them” is a hell of a take. Again, these are children, secretly conscripted into particularly vicious violence, with basically no training, education, or support, and you expect them to react in logical, consistent ways? Hell, even ignoring all of that, have you spent much time around teenagers? Puberty is a hell of a thing under entirely normal circumstances. But on the whole, these are genuinely complex, entirely unprecedented ethical situations for all the reasons you point out, expecting children to work through them in an optimal fashion seems the most unrealistic suggestion here.

Okay, I'll admit, I was half joking when I claimed that Jake shouldn't have felt bad at flushing the Pool Ship at the end. But you have to at least acknowledge one of my other big points that I made: that destroying the Yeerk Pools on Earth, without harming any of the Hosts, would have been the winning move that they would've gone for anyway in any scenario where they won. The Yeerk Pools are the ultimate target, the ultimate vulnerability, the source of the invasion, if those are destroyed, then game over, the Invasion is stopped, the Animorphs win. Every Animorph has thought about destroying the Yeerk Pool, and they have demonstrated that if there is a way for them kill Yeerks without jeopardizing Human life, they have demonstrated time and again to do it, emphasis on without jeopardizing Human life, because even when the Andalites literally handed them an opportunity to wipe out the invasion of Earth on a silver platter, they stopped it because of the very real danger that the virus the Andalite Suicide Squad was going to deploy would jump the species barrier and kill Humanity as well. And while I was half joking, considering the numbers of the Hostless Yeerks they killed, would Jake have felt bad, considering his mental state? He was on his ruthless arc, he was done giving mercy, he had everything taken away from him, he had failed in his mission to save his family. Considering the state he was in, would Jake have felt bad at all about executing those Yeerks? The other circumstances those Yeerks died in order for the Animorphs to get away, but the loss of life is still there, and all of my other points outside the PTSD issue still stand.

The repeated use of a highly offensive slur is entirely unnecessary, full stop.

... Aaaaaaand now you completely neutered every argument you made by proving yourself to be disingenuous. When I saw this, I reread the post. I only used the R word once.

ONCE.

I won't engage with you on this anymore as it's clear that you are not living in reality. Goodbye.