I was once listening to one of the ten billion animorphs podcasts out there, with two hosts, one who'd read Animorphs as a kid and one who was reading it for the first time as an adult. For those who don't know, Animorphs is a war story in which a handful of children have to secretly hold off an alien invasion until the "good" aliens arrive to save Earth. It starts off with fairly clear-cut Bad Species of aliens and Good Species of aliens but as the series goes on it becomes clear that there is no such thing as a good, clean or glorious war, that a clean Good Side and a clean Bad Side is usually propoganda, that heroism is a matter of circumstance and that war will chew up and spit out even the victorious; there are no winners in war, just the side that lost less.
It's a lot, for books aimed at eleven year olds who want to read about kids turning into fun animals.
On the podcast, the two (American) hosts happened to get onto the topic of the post-9/11 Iraq War and their reactions to it. They were both children at the time and as such could not be expected to have particularly nuanced views of US military policy. The person who hadn't read Animorphs was unsurprised by the declaration of war; that's what you did. Someone attacks America, America goes to war. That's how a country protects itself, through military revenge. The Animorphs fan, about the same age, had been devastated and against the war from the start. War was a Big Deal and, while sometimes unavoidable, should be a last resort; a lot of people were going to die, and a lot more were going to get hurt, and no matter how the war shook out it was still going to be horrible. They attributed this perspective, of course, to the series that had taught them about the horrors endemic to war in an engaging way at such a young age -- to Animorphs.
That's what kid fiction is for.
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