Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Acalio-Laron-Jaham on December 19, 2009, 02:52:19 PM
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So what happened to the Yeerk empire at the end of the series?? throughout the series, the yeerks have said they've already conquered quite a few races already (not gona list them, someone has already done that in another post). So at the end, is the war just only over for earth? thats the impression i got anyway, But then we get Ax's narrative like 2 years (a mere 2 years!) after the final battle and defeat of yeerk mothership on earth and he's a prince now and says the war is over and its peacetime but finds peacetime boring, finding excitment in hunting remnant yeerk ships blah blah blah, and i quote "<The destruction of the Yeerk Empire had spawned a lot of illegal arms trading>"
What the heck. :huh:
ooooook. So What happened?? how can just two years after losing a pool ship, one visser and the yeerk forces on earth result in the crumble of the entire yeerk empire??? did I miss somethin here? was there like a book 54.5 (before Ax's '2 years later' chapter 14) or something that tells what happened to the rest of the yeerks in the galaxy? (sory about this rant paragraph haha but had to vent it out)
What happened to the super yeerk stronghold that is the taxxon planet which we see in TAC? Abron is obviously not there leading any sort of rebellion anymore since he popped up on earth in like book 53. We were never told of what became of the taxxon homeworld i think after the events of TAC, but its clear in TAC that the taxxon homeworld was totally property of yeerk. There was the living hive rebellion which recruited Abron, but as we see in the book, his rebellion attempts were futile. So, I think its safe to assume that the taxxon rebellion on the taxxon planet was eventually unsuccessful, so Abron laid low and joined yeerk forces to earth to meet jake, and the taxxon planet is still under yeerk power. What happened to the yeerks there? Did the andalites show up there and liberate it?
What happened to the hork-bajir home planet? the first planet that the yeerks successfully took over it seemed - from what I've read in the Hork Bajir Chronicles. That planet is like a second yeerk home planet. I know the arn wanted to make a rebellion there from #34, was that even succesfull? what happened to the yeerks there? did the andalites show up there and liberate it?
What about all the other species mentioned throughout the series and in the visser chronicles (the mak and whatever) that the yeerks successfully conquered? surely the successful conquest of an entire species would constitute a resultant army force of a number in the billions provided that there was not an event like biological warfare as with the hork-bajir...
So what happened to the yeerks who controlled those bodies? and won't their planets be a massive yeerk stronghold - like a 3rd, 4th and 5th etc. yeerk homeworld like how the taxxon and hork-bajir planets became? what happened to the yeerks there? did the andalites show up there and liberate it?
What about all the Vissers and sub-vissers? didn't the 9 vissers all have like a huge army of their own?
And then the council of thirteen and the yeerk emperor - what happened to them? they seemed pretty damned powerful through the main series whenever mentioned, and particularly in the visser chronicles.
Unless the andalites developed some kinda super weapon that wasn't mentioned, its very hard to believe that just because the yeerks lost earth, it would cause their empire and war effort that has grown, advanced and expanded and even rivaled the andalites for the past 60 years or so (based on HBC, earth year 1966 when the Andalites on yeerk homeworld under prince seerow learnt of the yeerk uprising) would just suddenly get their butts whooped (after seemingly whooping the andalites for all that time - thats the impression i got throughout the series, yeerks spreading like some unstoppable plague throughout the galaxy, andalite forces always already stretched thin and desperate) just two years after losing earth. Especially if you read the visser chronicles and TAC, the yeerk empire seemed huuuuge.
All these yeerk controlled small planets and moon outposts throughout the galaxy, all these sub-vissers and vissers mentioned in different places etc.
All those things mentioned above of the yeerk empire, destroyed out in 2 years? was the andalites majorly winning the war in years leading up to the events of book 54 for them to be able to have the yeerk empires destruction come about just 2 years the events of animorphs victory in book 54? I certainly didn't get that impression. From the books which mentions the andalites and the war in the rest of the galaxy, it didn't seem like the andalites were doing so well at all. i got the impression that they weren't doing soo badly as to lose the entire war and their homeworld yet, but they certainly weren't capable of winning any time soon.
I thought the yeerk earth invasion force was only a fraction (even if that much) of the yeerk empire. Visser 3's personal force. It shouldn't have really affected the rest of the empire in the war against the andalites should it? I mean after all, they were already managing quite well against the andalites throughout the galaxy without visser 3's forces, because obviously his forces were already occupied on earth anyway, thus preventing them from being out there in the rest of the galaxy battling the andalites with other yeerk empire forces anyway.
I guess one could say that maybe the yeerk empire crumbled on itself? that after losing earth, civil war ensued between each council members and vissers, resulting in a free for all, which ended their empire?? I doubt that though. It is a good possible reason, but since K.A did not say that, it wasn't the case then, I guess.
K.A, if you are reading this, you should have tied up this major loose end of how the Yeerk empire came to end properly.
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god I love you for putting all of these posts together.
I think fanon (which really doesn't work for me on a multitude of levels) is that the Escafil Device that Cassie surrendered basically gave the entire Yeerk Empire the opportunity to have free, sensual life without having to enslave a host. So, theoretically, some Yeerk freedom force went to the Hork-Bajir homeworld, and the Taxxon homeworld, and every other Yeerk-occupied world that you mentioned and said "hey, guys! We can have bodies without our hosts screaming at us all day! Check this out!"
This causes a number of problems, in my mind:
1) First of all, the Yeerk population always seemed to be...rather large. Not Earth-large, because it seemed implied that they would continually need to send Yeerk replenishments, and even if open war ended up killing 9/10 of the population of Earth, there would still be more than enough hosts to go around. We know that in THBC, the Yeerks escaped their homeworld with 250,000 slugs.
There is some indication in THBC that the length of a Yeerk generation is a little more than two years:
Yeerk date: Generation 685, mid-cycle
Earth date: 1966
Yeerk date: Generation 686, early-cycle
Earth date: 1968
So, even if we're being generous, it takes 5 years to grow a batch of new Yeerks from their three parents. What we don't get is how many Yeerks come in a batch. We know twins are possible, and the way it was described was like "disintegrating into a bunch of little slugs," so just for argument's sake, on average, let's say that 10 Yeerks are born for every three that die in reproduction (I'm being really generous here, I always thought it was more like hundreds), and just to make the numbers easy, let's say 2 Yeerks out of each batch die before they can breed.
For every ten Yeerks that are born, five die. Every generation, the population would be doubled. That means, by the end of the war in 1999, there are roughly 16,000,000 Yeerks.
AND THAT DOESN'T INCLUDE THE HOWEVER MANY YEERKS STUCK ON THEIR HOME PLANET.
Best case scenario, if all of those Yeerks suddenly had physical, resource-consuming bodies, that seems like a rather large dent on ecosystems. The Anacondas in the Amazon was enough for me to go "...seriously? won't they eat all of the endangered prey and stuff?" But SIXTEEN MILLION NEW BODIES....
2) Am I really expected to believe that every single individual out of sixteen million Yeerks would be okay with this plan?
They're not--we get that in canon. Tom's Yeerk incites a revolt and steals Visser Three's Blade Ship to start a new Yeerk empire.
What we are expected to believe is that they were the only Yeerks who ever did so. Out of SIXTEEN MILLION YEERKS, who spent 30 years fighting a war for a very specific end goal, EVERY SINGLE PERSON is okay just creating a new body and essentially letting the Yeerk species die out.
Not happening, sorry, play again next time.
I have something more to add, that doesn't really have anything to do with your theory, but it's also an inconsistency that's bothered me: Does the war itself actually make any sense? (http://community.livejournal.com/animorphs/502194.html?thread=6368178#t6368178)
Basically I argue that with the resources the Yeerks made off with at the beginning of the war, there's no way they're a galactic superpower in thirty years, let alone five.
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wow.
You both appear to have well thought out and reasons arguments, my only in put is this
As sentient live forms go, at least in the Ani-universe, it seems humans are freaks
Physiology that makes them usable as host, physically capable, and most importantly, the ability to breed in good numbers almost anywhere which is what results in a lot of them
From what it sounds like, most suitable host didn't even number in the millions, and their own biological draw backs made them limiting: no matter how many slugs there are, only a fraction had a host
I've never considered a yeerk reproductive rate, but at the very least it sounds like they live a while, and obviously not all breed, so even if it doesn't sound like it, 6 billion is a lot to gain for them
This is where they put there resource, and everything else they have isn't in great condition so add in massive loses here, uprising on the HB world and other places, and the notion that the homeworld was always under quarinteen, domino effect. Empire loses the big peace and the everything starts to come to since they put to much into it. Maybe
P.S. : detest the every yeerk starts morphing idea: really, like no one suggested that until Cassie in 40 years of war? No
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I imagine that most Yeerks would be happy to be trapped as a nothlit because that way they have a permanent host body (without an innocent person screaming in your head 24/7) and never have to return to a blind, helpless state again.
Obviously not all Yeerks are going to feel the same way, but given the choice between becoming a nothlit and becoming DEAD I doubt many of them would refuse. The Yeerks knew full well what the Andalites would do to them if they refused the deal. They knew they were beaten and, as proven by Jake's narrative in #6, Yeerks tend to give up easier than we do when they know a situation is hopeless.
We don't know the true extent of the Yeerk empire, but we do know that a significant amount of it was stationed on (or in orbit above) Earth, particularly by the end of the war. The Yeerks put most of their eggs in one basket because they knew that even a fraction of Earth's population would be enough to completely overwhelm the Andalites. They never thought that losing Earth was an option, even with the Andalite Bandits causing so much trouble.
I admit it seems unlikely that the rest of the Yeerk empire (including their key strongholds such as the Taxxon homeworld) would have fallen to the Andalites so soon after the war. However, you're forgetting one important detail: the morphing technology. Obviously the Andalites and remaining Yeerks are going to spread the word about the morphing power being offered as an alternative to enslaving other races, and like I said earlier near enough all of them are probably going to accept it. Then the Andalites would only have to take care of a much smaller, crippled empire.
Cassie could easily have been the first person to think of giving the morphing technology to the Yeerks, because any Andalite who may have thought of it would probably have been charged with treason for suggesting it. Remember the law of Seerow's Kindness? Sharing technology with the Yeerks is what started this whole mess! The Andalites aren't going to make that same mistake twice. Morphing was practically brand new when the Yeerks first stole Andalite technology, so it was one of their only advantages over the Yeerks. Even if someone had thought it was a good idea, the Andalite military would NEVER have trusted the Yeerks to keep their word about becoming nothlits or not abusing the technology.
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Yeah i don't enjoy fanon either, and i don't bother with reading any of the fanfics out there lol. it jsut seems, i dunno, fake. Which of course, it is lol.
yeah, i agree with you that the yeerks, that all 16,000,000 of them would just accept what the peace movement offers - to morph a permanent body is a bit far fetched. there are good reasons for both sides on why some yeerks would and why some yeerks won't. for most of the series, we are made to view the yeerks as evil...so maybe some yeerks gain pleasure out of infestation, out of the fact that they are able to control a another being in their very literal way. I would see it as akin to greed or power trip or something - like how some bullies don't need to physically or verbally harm their victims in anyway, but they do it anyway cuz they enjoy the feeling of power it gives them. kings and emperors and empires in the past conquer not cuz they actually need more land or living space for their people, but cuz they enjoy doing so, the power, the rush, the pride etc. oh there's so many examples for this point that im lazy to list anymore further. but yeah, so this is a main reason i see for some yeerks to not want to accept the morphing tech to become a nothlit (or they may, but would still want war and to conquer anyway cuz they addicted to feeling of having power). I reckon this theme would have been a good one for K.A to elaborate on in the those few final books where the whole point of the war of yeerks needing host bodies and allowing them to morph was discussed alot amongst the characters.
anijen21
"I have something more to add, that doesn't really have anything to do with your theory, but it's also an inconsistency that's bothered me: Does the war itself actually make any sense?
Basically I argue that with the resources the Yeerks made off with at the beginning of the war, there's no way they're a galactic superpower in thirty years, let alone five."[/color]
haha sory but just had to quote u there cuz so happy about that point u made. Absolutely. I agree with you %100. Ever since i read THBC, esplins narrative from the beginning basically describes the rise of the yeerk empire. Ever since I've read THBC, I've found it difficult to believe how the yeerk empire had become what it was in the main series. I mean they escaped with a couple of andalite ships and some thousand yeerks. how was it that they know how to build ships and weapons and all? We were never told of how long a time it was that the andalites, mainly seerow, had spend with the yeerks and how much he actually taught them. I would imagine it would take a almost a lifetime, based on human standards, for yeerks to learn everything from scratch - basic sciences, chemistry, maths, physics, biology progress to more advanced engineering etc.
that is, unless the andalites had some sort of special instantaneous knowledge transfer techniques like we see in the matrix where knowledge can be instantly uploaded/downloaded into a persons brain - after all, the andalites there all thought based and stuff. but since this was never mentioned, its only speculation, making the Yeerks sudden advancement in knowledge and technology on the hork-bajir planet a few years after escaping from the andalites on the yeerk world all the more ....absurd.
And with how easily it was for the yeerks to take the hork-bajir - yeah, the horks were not bright. But, there were still sentient, still intelllgent enough to know about danger, to sense and feel danger and fear, like they know how to avoid going into the valleys of father deep. From this, i would assume that they know that in order to be safe from the danger, they would have to move to get away from the danger/threat. there was a esplin narrator chapter in THBC where he describes how easy ti was for them to capture hork-bajir hosts - thier Gedd controllers simply walked up to the hork-bajr and dragged them away, hork-bajir doing nothing at all back, complying like a rag doll. From what I've seen of Jara and Ket, they were no way that dumb, and they ain't no seers. even a grasshopper knows to resist and escape from danger. I think how easily it was for the yeerks to advance and how easily the Horks were taken was more of a KAGL (Katherine Applegate Got Lazy) then a KASU.
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god, you're totally right and I never even put pressure on that line that was like "We took a Hork-Bajir, I infested him, I went back to his friends and said 'I am back' and they said 'Yes, you are" because I just thought it was hilarious, but you're totally right. Self-preservation has nothing to do with intelligence. It's an instinct. And if Hork-Bajir have writing, society, and language, then they're WAY beyond self-preservation. And you're right, you could argue "oh but the Arn made them maybe they messed up" NO THE ARN DESIGNED THEM TO BE AFRAID OF THE DEEP, and I very much doubt they can program fear that laser-sighted.
ooh boy now I'm just getting mad, the whole backstory was my favorite part of the whole series but IT'S FULL OF HOLES! :( :( :(
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haha yeah that line was funny. But meh, people get lazy overtime i guess. Its a shame that K.A got lazy and didn't bother to put more effort, attention and detail into those bits of the stories. After all, she wrote the HBC herself, it wasn't done by ghostwriters. even though we see now that its full of plot holes, i still like em though nonetheless.
And its one thing to teach someone how to operate a machine, pilot a ship and shoot a weapon. its a whole different thing to actually be able to create these those machines and weapons from scratch. whats described in THBC the yeerks simply learnt how to pilot the andalite ships, squeeze the trigger of a shredder, and flew away with it. then all of a sudden they knew how to create thier own ships and a blade ship a dracon beam weapons.
Teach a person or a group how to drive a car and fire a gun. I don't think within two years time, they would know how to create one from scratch. But then again, that person isn't a yeerk, and he wasn't taught by andalites. xD
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The Yeerks managed to capture some Onganchics and maybe some other people and access their memories. That's how they learned so fast. Though it's true that the Horks should have been smart enough not to be pulled around by Gedds. Although I always pictures gedds as being small, and when you're a seven foot tall reptile with blades you don't feel threatened by some small mammals.
There are definitely plotholes in HBC, but I don't think their ability to create ships is one of them.
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They may have known how to build all of that stuff, but they had none of the resources. Imagine if planet Earth got wiped clean--all cities, factories, farms, etc, EVERYTHING just wiped clean. We still have our knowledge base, but none of the tools to do anything practical with it.
That's how a lot of post-apocalyptic dystopias start, and tbh I think that's where the Yeerks started. Yeah, they had a few Andalite ships and got a couple of Skrit Na and other ships, but I doubt that gave them the resources to become a superpower well-equipped enough to take on the Andalites.
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You're right. That is confusing. They would need a lot of resources besides just host bodies, and the Hork society couldn't provide it. They might have taken some stuff from the Arn, but it doesn't really fit well.
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The Yeerks learned fast by infesting other species, but also from the information taught to them by Seerow and provided by the Andalite computer database on the ships they stole.
If I recall correctly, over a quarter of a million escape the homeworld and it wasn't long before they started to make a significant stronghold on the Hork-Bajir planet. Based on what we are told, they had almost a year before the Andalites showed up. I'd say that's enough time to infest a large number of naive Hork-Bajir, interrogate the technologically superior Arn for information (as well as using them for slave labour) and start building ships and other defences.
Even when the Andalites FINALLY turned up to help, they only had a small force and hardly any ships. If they'd been smart and actually listened to Aldrea, they could have sent half their fleet and completely destroyed the Yeerks before they established a powerful base of operations.
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Yeah, I'd say two Years are fast enough. The Yeerks worked non-stop on advancing their race and building ships. They had tons of hosts, and not all of them went on raiding parties. Many of them studied the Andalite computers, reverse engineered the Andalite ships, merged them with the other alien tech they obtained through infestation, along with that race's knowledge of technology. Remember, they probably worked 24/7. They didn't have to worry about making dinner, or dropping the kids off at school, or soccer practice, or ballet recitals, or watching Letterman, or Survivor. They did nothing but work on expanding their race for two years straight.
I'd say that's plenty of time.
RE: Hork-Bajir infestation
The HB never used their blades as weapons. They had no knowledge of violence before the Yeerks and Andalites came. When they went into Father Deep, they were killed by the monsters. They had no concept of self-defense. The only reason Ket Helpak and Jara Hamee were no push-overs is because they were trained and grew up as fighters. The pre-infested HB had no idea about aggression or violence. How could they defend themselves if they didn't know how to? If the Arn's monsters could kill the HB for all the time before Aldrea taught them violence, then what would make you think that a single HB could defend himself against a bunch of Gedd?
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I'll give you that *the race that never knew violence* is a sci-fi trope.
I'm still not quite sure I buy the Yeerks dragging off Hork-Bajir in front of everybody and no one saying anything about it, but if that's the one thing I have to buy for the infestation to work, I guess I will.
But I still do NOT buy that the Yeerks had the resources to overwhelm the Andalites in five years.
All my support is up there so I won't repeat myself, but it don't make no sense. The Borg were in the Delta quadrant for years before they even came across the Federation, and then, they still lost. The Yeerks should not have been portrayed as the superpower they were.
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I think the only reason the Yeerks became a superpower was because the Andalites underestimated them. The Yeerks are resourceful and can gather important information from their hosts. Perhaps Hork-Bajir aren't the most enlightening species around, but we know nothing about some of the other races they infested.
The Andalites only sent a small force to the Hork-Bajir world because they didn't believe that the Yeerks were there in force. True, this was largely because it was Seerow's daughter reporting, but it was a HUGE mistake...because that gave over a year for the central Yeerk force to grow large enough to win. There may have been other Yeerks throughout the galaxy, but if so they weren't plentiful at that point. The future Visser's and future Council members were there, on the Hork-Bajir planet. By the time the Andalites arrived, and lost, the Yeerks were able to harvest hundreds more hosts. Maybe not enough to become super powers, but a great start.
Then you have the Taxxon world, which frankly I have to imagine was a cake-walk. A whole planet of voluntary hosts? And we don't know the intelligence level of Taxxons, not really. They were hive creatures, but they are also very dexterous. They provided an entire planet of hosts with virtually no struggle. The Andalites obviously did not put up much of a fight either because, let's face it, Taxxon's aren't exactly the most threatening species around.
I think that the Andalites ego and inability to accept a bunch of slugs as a threat led to the Yeerks becoming a superpower. In fact, I think the only one that grasped the magnitude of the situation was Alloran. He may have handled it the wrong way, but he understood the threat, at least.
As for the collapse of the Yeerk Empire, I agree that there is no way that it can collapse from the loss of one planet, not after their run. The only possible explanation is that they suffered too many losses at once. They lost Earth, Leera and that place Visser One went to redeem herself (I forget the name, sorry...). Still, it's a stretch. And I refuse to accept that the Yeerks would allow themselves to die out through nothlitism.
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I think it would have made more sense to say that the tide had turned, and the Andalites were definitely winning after they lost Earth. Instead of them somehow being defeated a mere two years afterwards. I mean they still had their two main worlds, and possibly some other places. It's said that the main forces were on Earth, but surely they did leave a good number on the other planets. What about the other 25+ Vissers, and who knows how many Sub-Vissers?
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Not to mention the thousands and thousands of underlings. I mean, the galaxy is a big place, there's lots of places to hide. Besides, in addition to their two main planets the Yeerks owned lots of little moons and whatnot (from VISSER) that they used as bases and bought from the Skrit Na.
Speaking of the Skrit Na, I think that may be where a lot of the technological know-how came from. They weren't brilliant, but they were smart enough to fill in any gaps in the Yeerk mindset. They weren't used as hosts, but that doesn't mean they were never infested. It was just an undesirable host because they needed to phase. I think it's safe to say that a few Yeerks infested Skrit Na to try them out as hosts, then decided they were better as mere business partners. They got a lot of technology, planets and I'm guessing knowledge from them.
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And I always assumed that the main force and the yeerks, the main grand army or whatever, was with the council of thirteen and the emperor, on whatever planet that they were staying.
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I think the sudden collapse of the yeerks is pretty dumb also. It said that the Andalites were out gunned and outnumbered, stretched to thin. How could a very powerful empire just collapse for no apparent reason?
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I feel like you guys are misinterpreting a lot of the information in the series. True, the Yeerks are always described as a plague on the galaxy or whatever, and in HBC Esplin specifically says that the Andalites are the dominant race in this arm of the galaxy- but look at that realistically. "This arm of the galaxy" contains tens of billions of stars (Joe Bob Fenestre couldn't buy all the stars in this galaxy for a quarter each), and even if you say only 1/10 of 1% of them has a potentially inhabitable planet, that's still tens of millions. I guess what I'm getting at is that the races of the Animorphs universe obviously have a major tendency to exaggerate... unless Esplin was speaking about the Andalites' technological dominance.
Anyway, the Yeerk Empire had obviously not spread to a million star systems, and they could not possibly have been raging across the entire galaxy, so why assume they were on any more planets than we heard about? Maybe a dozen planets/moons in my guestimation. It always seemed to me that the reason we only saw Taxxons and Hork-Bajir used as hosts in the main series was that they were the most readily available to the empire- other conquered planets seem to have yielded very low numbers of hosts. It always seems that humans vastly outnumber any other species in the Aniverse. 6 billion hosts would make the Yeerks unstoppable, even to the Andalites, and they know it. I got the impression while the Yeerks were scouting other planets and attempting to enslave the populations there, but that Earth was far and away the ultimate Yeerk prize. The majority of the Yeerk force would almost definitely have been concentrated here. By defeating the Yeerk force on Earth, humanity managed to essentially snap the backbone of the empire, and within 2 years you wouldn't have much to do besides hunt down renegade Yeerks. What baffles me is why the Andalites took so long in getting here; probably didn't see us as advanced enough to pose any sort of threat, but in my mind that makes the Andalites arrogant to the point of idiocy. Which actually fits their actions throughout the series, so...
Yeah, I know; there were 47 Vissers, so why weren't there more here? My thought process is: who's to say there weren't? Visser 3 obviously needed officers, so why can't 10 or 30 of them have been Vissers? Just because we didn't hear about them doesn't mean they weren't here. Visser 3 was just the highest ranking Yeerk on the planet, and the one assigned to head the invasion (and my guess is that Visser 1 was used for her strength in starting invasions, and Visser 2 was a douchebag who sat on the couch on the Taxxon planet watching Survivor reruns or something).
I never got the impression that the Andalites were a very imperialistic race- they seemed pretty content to stay on their own planet and explore the galaxy. Heck, judging by the fact that, before the war, they were only allowed to have one child per family (according to Elfangor in TAC) their population would actually have been decreasing (and Seerow got to have 2 kids because he was a high ranking prince? Who knows...) The Yeerks, on the other hand, spend every waking minute trying to figure out better ways to increase their hosted population, and have fully enslaved two races with populations large enough to be worth mentioning. Truthfully, you could skew the Yeerk population increase however you wanted by tweaking the percentage of Yeerks that breed, the frequency with which they do so, and especially the number of grubs that are produced in any Yeerk mating... incident. If forced to guess, I'd say they probably breed to fit the environment. In the full pools of the homeworld, Yeerks wouldn't breed often, but with plenty of space in artificial pools and plenty of hosts for the Yeerks to take, they breed far more frequently ("So you have to choose between life without sex and a hideous, gruesome death? Man, tough call"). In any case, my point is that I see no reason the incredibly ambitious, expansionist Yeerk empire couldn't become too much for the Andalites to handle within a few years. The only thing holding them back would be a lack of hosts. Which, conveniently, Earth remedies nicely.
As for their quick technological advancement- that makes sense too. You have 250,000 Yeerks just sitting in a pool with nothing to do but study Andalite technology based on the computers. Even a fraction of that number could make significant advances. On top of that, the Yeerks have an advantage that puts them light-years ahead of human beings when it comes to learning- they can take hosts. By the time the Yeerks were building ships on the Hork-Bajir homeworld, they had the technological knowledge of the Andalites and the Ongachic at their disposal, and maybe the Skrit Na as well if, as Terenia said, they infested a couple of them. They had the technology of all three races to reverse engineer and to assist them in construction (at the very least, construction of construction equipment).
And yeah, the Hork-Bajir know to fear danger, but nothing in their experience would suggest to them that the Yeerks would be dangerous. They take a Hork-Bajir, lead him away, and soon he's back, seemingly unharmed. There's absolutely no reason to fear them- a peaceful infestation out in the open seems not only plausible, but it appears to me to be the best way to go about capturing Hork-Bajir hosts.
Give our Lady Applegate some credit, guys. She might not have the memory for details that RAF has collectively, but she's still a pretty consistent sci-fi nerd. I don't see any inconsistencies in the way the war worked out.
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Yeah, I know; there were 47 Vissers, so why weren't there more here? My thought process is: who's to say there weren't? Visser 3 obviously needed officers, so why can't 10 or 30 of them have been Vissers? Just because we didn't hear about them doesn't mean they weren't here. Visser 3 was just the highest ranking Yeerk on the planet, and the one assigned to head the invasion (and my guess is that Visser 1 was used for her strength in starting invasions, and Visser 2 was a douchebag who sat on the couch on the Taxxon planet watching Survivor reruns or something).
Yeah, but Taylor, who was Sub-Visser 51, was Visser Three's second-in-command. That in itself implies the one-Visser-per-planet rule, that those 46 other Vissers were out, if not infesting other worlds, at least scouting for other infestable worlds.
I never got the impression that the Andalites were a very imperialistic race- they seemed pretty content to stay on their own planet and explore the galaxy. Heck, judging by the fact that, before the war, they were only allowed to have one child per family (according to Elfangor in TAC) their population would actually have been decreasing (and Seerow got to have 2 kids because he was a high ranking prince? Who knows...) The Yeerks, on the other hand, spend every waking minute trying to figure out better ways to increase their hosted population, and have fully enslaved two races with populations large enough to be worth mentioning. Truthfully, you could skew the Yeerk population increase however you wanted by tweaking the percentage of Yeerks that breed, the frequency with which they do so, and especially the number of grubs that are produced in any Yeerk mating... incident. If forced to guess, I'd say they probably breed to fit the environment. In the full pools of the homeworld, Yeerks wouldn't breed often, but with plenty of space in artificial pools and plenty of hosts for the Yeerks to take, they breed far more frequently ("So you have to choose between life without sex and a hideous, gruesome death? Man, tough call"). In any case, my point is that I see no reason the incredibly ambitious, expansionist Yeerk empire couldn't become too much for the Andalites to handle within a few years. The only thing holding them back would be a lack of hosts. Which, conveniently, Earth remedies nicely.
They may not be imperialist, but the Andalite Chronicles more than characterizes them as the self-appointed police force in the galaxy. So even if they're not out conquering other races, they do have the defensive capabilities to force them to obey...whatever laws there are out there.
And yeah, I pretty much fudged all those numbers about how many free-roaming Yeerks there are. And I think your point stands--with six billion potential hosts to infest, you think the Yeerks would be breeding like crazy to account for all of them. Why, then, were there only 17,000 Yeerks in the Pool Ship? And idk based on how the Yeerk Empire is characterized, I sincerely doubt the Yeerks had a *choice* in whether or not it was time for them to breed.
As for their quick technological advancement- that makes sense too. You have 250,000 Yeerks just sitting in a pool with nothing to do but study Andalite technology based on the computers. Even a fraction of that number could make significant advances. On top of that, the Yeerks have an advantage that puts them light-years ahead of human beings when it comes to learning- they can take hosts. By the time the Yeerks were building ships on the Hork-Bajir homeworld, they had the technological knowledge of the Andalites and the Ongachic at their disposal, and maybe the Skrit Na as well if, as Terenia said, they infested a couple of them. They had the technology of all three races to reverse engineer and to assist them in construction (at the very least, construction of construction equipment).
This I don't agree with. Yeah, they might have understood Zero-Space technology and ship-building and weaponry, but all of the knowledge in the universe is useless without the tools to apply it. Even Tobias says in #23 that the human brain is useless without the hand. My point was, they may have 250,000 Yeerk slugs but they only had a few ill-equipped ships. We're told they mined a lot in THBC--what did they mine with? Their intelligence? No, what this series completely forgot about, at least with self-sustaining societies, are fixed factors of production. Not the little inputs, like fuel and cotton and metal, not the things that the outputs are actually comprised of, but the TOOLS. The looms, the machinery, the factories that MAKE all of the little stuff. The Yeerks had NONE of this. How am I expected to believe they can set up a self-sustaining economy with no prior platform to build off of in FIVE YEARS? And if they did, then I have to believe the outputs they did produce were shoddy as hell, which they were never characterized as. One of the general rules in economics is fast, cheap, good, pick two, and the Yeerks, through some magic, seemed to get all three.
And yeah, the Hork-Bajir know to fear danger, but nothing in their experience would suggest to them that the Yeerks would be dangerous. They take a Hork-Bajir, lead him away, and soon he's back, seemingly unharmed. There's absolutely no reason to fear them- a peaceful infestation out in the open seems not only plausible, but it appears to me to be the best way to go about capturing Hork-Bajir hosts.
Someone drags you off screaming, you do something about it. I really don't think it takes a great deal of intelligence or prior experience to fear something.
Give our Lady Applegate some credit, guys. She might not have the memory for details that RAF has collectively, but she's still a pretty consistent sci-fi nerd. I don't see any inconsistencies in the way the war worked out.
Inconsistencies, no, but a lot of the details were shoe-horned rather forcefully into working. There aren't any direct contradictions (at least not with this), but it just doesn't feel plausible to me. Especially based on Yeerk and Andalite characterization later. The Yeerks, who are apparently SO GOOD AT TOOLS AND BUILDING, do stupid stuff like try to erase free will and manipulate shark brains to be intelligent? And the Andalites, who are apparently the smartest race in the galaxy, are so arrogant and self-serving that they'd rather let a potential threat die out than attack the REAL threat that is marauding across the galaxy? It may not be inconsistent, but it's forced, at the very least.
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Yeah, but Taylor, who was Sub-Visser 51, was Visser Three's second-in-command.
Ah. Haha. Forgot about that one. I'll be able to speak more knowledgeably once I finish my reread. In the meantime, I'm tempted to call the rank there a KASU to make it fit my theory ;D
And I think your point stands--with six billion potential hosts to infest, you think the Yeerks would be breeding like crazy to account for all of them. Why, then, were there only 17,000 Yeerks in the Pool Ship? And idk based on how the Yeerk Empire is characterized, I sincerely doubt the Yeerks had a *choice* in whether or not it was time for them to breed.
Maybe not a conscious choice, but biologically it makes sense (sorta) that they wouldn't breed until they were in an environment that could support the grubs. It's not necessarily how it really worked, but it's a system that allows the Yeerk population to be whatever you need it to be for story purposes. As for the 17,000 Yeerks on the ship... not sure I can defend KAA on that one That doesn't really make sense at all. Two Andalite freighters that were probably considerably smaller and were not designed specifically for Yeerk transportation were able to collectively carry a quarter million Yeerks. Maybe there are a couple of missing zeroes in there? :P Or maybe 250,000 was a super-high estimate?
One of the general rules in economics is fast, cheap, good, pick two, and the Yeerks, through some magic, seemed to get all three.
There are dozens of plot devices you could use to explain how the Yeerks were able to begin construction within a few years, but I'm going to go most prominently with the magic of "it worked for the story." Besides, those rules apply to human economies- doesn't it make the Yeerks a scarier foe if they're just that much better than us at these things?
Someone drags you off screaming, you do something about it.
I didn't get the impression that they were dragging the Hork-Bajir off screaming. Given the nature of the Hork-Bajir at that point and the nature of the Yeerk operation taking place, it seems to me like it would make the most sense to just talk a Hork-Bajir into coming to the Yeerk pool and lead them by the hand. Involuntarily voluntary infestation.
Haha... yeah, I agree with you that a lot of the details feel pretty forced, especially when you try to reconcile the last two books with the rest of the series, or the Chronicles with much of the main series, but I think KAA considered her specific situations pretty well.
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There are dozens of plot devices you could use to explain how the Yeerks were able to begin construction within a few years, but I'm going to go most prominently with the magic of "it worked for the story." Besides, those rules apply to human economies- doesn't it make the Yeerks a scarier foe if they're just that much better than us at these things?
YEAHHHHH I KNOW I just love being super hard on Animorphs. It's those kind of it-worked-for-the-story plot devices I love reading about. Even if there had just been a throwaway sentence in the HBC like "we commandeered a *random alien* mining freighter and thus had the resources to mine the Hork-Bajir world," I would have been like "okay, cool." Seeing how the Yeerks would have sought out and pinpointed specific resources at the beginning would have been a really cool development of their entire modus operandi, you know? And I really wish their design aesthetic would have jibed more with their scavenger tendencies, like their ships being an ugly hodge-podge of all the races they'd acquired, rather than just using the black-and-ominous-insect motif that every evil empire uses :/
I didn't get the impression that they were dragging the Hork-Bajir off screaming. Given the nature of the Hork-Bajir at that point and the nature of the Yeerk operation taking place, it seems to me like it would make the most sense to just talk a Hork-Bajir into coming to the Yeerk pool and lead them by the hand. Involuntarily voluntary infestation.
Okay, here's the quote I was referring to:
Fitting in with the Hork-Bajir had been pitifully easy. The host body I'd taken was named Fet Mashar. His friends had seen him taken away in a fighter. They had seen him being dragged away by Gedds.
And yet when I reappeared among them very few questions were asked. I simply said, "I am back." And the Hork-Bajir would say, "Yes, you are back."
Now I admit I didn't really have a problem with this line until recently because it exhibits a kind of rare dark humor that really only ever popped up in the Chronicles. So I was fine with it. But now that I read it again...I guess it's not totally clear what the Yeerks did. "Dragged away" could have been "oh there's this delicious bark over here let me guide you there," but I always just pictured they conked him over the head and dragged his unconscious body away while his friends watched like "hmm." But I think your assessment makes just as much sense.
Anyway, I know most of this is just nerd-quibbling but whatever it's one of my favorite things :(
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I got the impression when reading the Hork-Bajir Chronicles that Yeerks were continuing to scout for alien technology even as they invaded the Hork-Bajir homeworld... I'll see if I can find the quote later. But yeah, it would have been cool to see more of how the Yeerks got their operation off the ground rather than just hearing some offhand comment from Aldrea that they're building a war fleet on the far side of the planet.
Nerd-quibbling is awesome. I like having to put some thought into what I read, and your wonderful skepticism is forcing just that. I'm enjoying it ^_^
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Long story short: the Yeerks were having a MASSIVE shortage of host bodies, as stated in Visser, and the humans were their last chance. Without the humans, they had far too many hostless yeerks to compete against the Andalites.
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then why were the Andalites always described as "outnumbered" and "spread too thin"?
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Uhhmmm... mmm... muh muh muh... middle ground! Maybe it's balanced just perfectly that the Yeerks slightly outnumber the Andalites everywhere but Earth. Or maybe the Yeerks really do outnumber the Andalites everywhere else, but the Andalites are slowly gaining ground, and the Yeerks need a huge influx of hosts (say six or seven billion?) to be able to turn the tide of the war? That seems like it might fit what both of you are saying. It could also explain where most of the Vissers were, actually- while Visser 3 keeps the primary invasion going, the rest of them run around like crazy people on the front lines. Mmm... am I making any sense, or am I just grasping at straws here?
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a little bit of both
I'm honestly ready to just throw in the towel and say "IT DOESN'T WORK" so it's good that you're trying to make it work, because if it can work it should work
BUT I JUST DON'T THINK IT CAN
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So, I'm coming in late to this discussion, but I have always loved thinking about the practicalities of the war and whether claims made for the purpose of plot actually stand to logical scrutiny.
I think KA's problem was that she set up the ani-verse too ambitiously at the start. My impression at the start of the series was that the Yeerks were incredibly dominant, having infested countless planets and races before. As the series progressed, we learn that number-wise, Yeerks aren't really that dominant, and have only successfully taken a few useful species. Earth was the next big strategic planet (although possibly after Leera), and not just another planet added to a long list.
So the defeat at Earth = defeat of the empire. The tide of the war was already turning after Leera. 'Visser' halfway explains the Yeerk/host resources problem. Yeerks had only three primary species under control:
1) Gedds - Poor host bodies, weak, generally sucked
2) Taxxons - Crap for everything except flying ships/maybe engineering stuff
3) Hork Bajirs - Excellent hosts, but too many wiped out by the quantum virus
Thus, they really didn't have too many resources. My impression was that the hosts they did have were spread pretty thin across their 'empire'.
It doesn't really matter how many slug Yeerks there were since they are pretty much a non-resource toward the war effort against the Andalites. It just takes one non-Yeerk to push a button and kill thousands of Yeerks. I suppose what matters is the population of hosts V Andalites. After THBC, the number of hosts V Andalites was probably about equal.
I think it's plausible for all the Yeerks to either stay as slugs or become Nothlits after the war. In terms of destroying a planet's ecology - there are probably a whole lot of sparsely populated planets in the galaxy that we don't know about that could have easily supported a new intake of red tailed hawks or something.
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As far as the "supporting yeerk nothlits" thing, depending on how this was done, it might not be too much of an issue. If they turned into humans, Earth could absorb quite a few of them with little effect. I mean, we're already supporting about 7 billion humans, up from 6 billion just 10 years ago. By 2050, we're expected to be up to 9 billion. 16, 25 or even 50 million new humans would be a drop in the bucket. Yeah, we are running into problems with overpopulation, but the yeerk-humans would not add significantly to them. A bigger issue would be how to train, educate, and integrate all those new people.
You know, I've been thinking about the loose ends left by the end of the series, and it struck me how little information we got on how the war ended. In addition to the very inadequately explained fall of the yeerk empire, we know almost nothing about what happened to the yeerks on Earth. The Beginning goes into great detail on what happened to the hork-bajir, taxxons, and andalites, but it never mentions any yeerks besides Visser One and those that escaped on the Blade Ship. I mean, the whole nothlithood thing was supposed to be the solution to the central conflict of the series, and we don't even know what the yeerks turned into.
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My thoughts are based on the assumption that the Yeerk empire was not that powerful to begin with, or at least they were only powerful in our part of the galaxy (with the Andalites stretched thin in a bigger part of space).
Maybe the yeerks AREN'T the super power we thought they were. This might explain exactly why they fell in 2 years. maybe all we know is from a few andalites, humans, and our perceptions through theirs. What might fit also is that the Yeerks had allies (though never mentioned and this might just be due to their pride). This would make sense with their super ascension into empire, their ability to acquire and build technology, and the reason they lost so fast in the end (their allies deserted). Of course, some of our perceptions of the Yeerk Empire are from the Yeerks and they might have just exxagerated a bit of their power.
As for the technology gap, who's to say they had to make the tools? I mean, they could have just as easily bartered, or, more likely, stolen all their technology, maybe from some races that they couldn't enslave.
And for the empire expansion, and collapse, its possible the Yeerk Empire was built and survived on expansion like how some old human empires were (for example, the Mongols). If they don't expand, they die. And when the Andalites stopped the Yeerks at their biggest prize, Earth, they died. And they died quick. Rate of expansion could have come by other factors. Perhaps the reason the Andalites disregarded the Yeerks at first was because the Andalites were at war somewhere else with a more powerful immediate enemy, the Kelbrid perhaps? With no attention at first to the Yeerks, they could spread a lot more quickly. By the time the Andalites resolved their other conflicts and turned to face the Yeerks, they realized that the Yeerks had grown more powerful, that they were now stretched thin (trying to regather and reorganize their military), and that they had used up a lot of manpower and resources in fighting other wars. It would make sense then that maybe the Yeerk empire was not all that powerful, but just powerful enough in our part of the galaxy where the Andalites had not concentrated their forces.
We also know from human history that fast expanding empires tend to die fast deaths. So if the Yeerks really did expand at an incredible rate, it could make sense that they'd also fade quickly.