Animorphs.
Cool friends fighting aliens...more accurately, the pariah of a fascist civilization, minutes before being eaten alive in front of said "ccol friends" persuades and then bioengineers human child soldiers to facilitate an end to an ill-conceived and failing war now reduced to unilaterally exterminating a parasitic, physically disabled species, itself undergoing a violent civil rights movement on their own planet based on their self-recognized flaws, struggling to realize its place in a universe where godlike beings exist and decide not to offer remedy(rules of the god game) and spectate while the parasites overwhelm all vulnerable species in the known universe.
The child soldiers agree to resist the parasites, but at least a minority of them believe genocide is the wrong answer. After being physically and emotionally tortured, shot, repeatedly disemboweled and having their limbs hacked or bitten off by hosts of the parasitic species, however, all of the child soldiers begin taking violent, morally devastating actions that end their lives as they know them.
Use spoiler tags as necessary! There are always new readers discovering this series.
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I found this two days ago and have been binge listening. I crave Animorphs stuff sometimes, and this hit the spot for sure. They have only done through book 15 so far, but the Andelite Chronicles has been done too.
This is a person doing a complete blind read (as in they have never read the series before), and it has been a lot of fun listening to them guessing what is going to happen in the upcoming books in the series that they haven’t gotten to yet.
good find! i listened to a lot of morph club cast but it was a reread for thr hosts, and although they were often surprised, I'd like to hear from someone with fresh eyes on the series.