Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Bootlebat on August 07, 2014, 10:18:48 PM
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Ok something that always bothered me. In #4 when they first meet Ax he says there are only three races that still fight the yeerks. Now obviously the andalites are one but what are the other two. I guess one of them MIGHT be leerians because we later learn the yeerks are trying to conquer them but I'm not sure Ax knew this at the time so?? And what about the third race?
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Just like with the Straam and the Mak, this is something that's mentioned early in the books that KAA doesn't really do anything with. As well as Alloran mentioning Yeerks being on the homeworld in book 8, and one Andalite saying he fought alongside Hork-Bajir in the war. Maybe the third race is the Onganchics. They have no homeworld, and one of their ships were taken by the Yeerks before they found the Hork-Bajir. That could be the third race. Still, it's not much.
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It could also be the Hawjabrans, speaking of races that were mentioned only briefly in the series. I can't imagine that their race as a whole were too happy with the Yeerks, who, keep in mind, turned off life-support on one of their transports and left a bunch of them to die just out of spite because they couldn't be infested. :P
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I just remembered, Visser One/Eva gets sent off to the Anati planet to deal with some issues there after Visser. Apparently, they managed to make a whole Yeerk fleet just disappear without a trace. She ultimately fails to resolve the situation, so they obviously put up quite a fight there, either with or without Andalite support (can't remember details). That failure is what led to Visser One's execution by Kandarona deprivation in #45.
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It could also be the Hawjabrans, speaking of races that were mentioned only briefly in the series. I can't imagine that their race as a whole were too happy with the Yeerks, who, keep in mind, turned off life-support on one of their transports and left a bunch of them to die just out of spite because they couldn't be infested. :P
I forgot about the Hawjabrans. Not being infestable would give them an edge over the Yeerks.
I'm not sure we really got any details about thae Anati area, besides the yeerks planning on making a trap within an asteroid belt when the Andalites showed up. That feels like kind of a new development, though, unlike with the earlier species.
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On a related note I got the impression from the early books that the Yeerk Empire was going to be a lot bigger originally, like Ax says only three races left in the galaxy which implies the Yeerks already got all the other races. Also seems like the Empire was around for a long time rather than just 30 years as we later find out.
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Yeah, I was a little surprised at first to hear that the war has only been going on for about 30 years when the series started. When I think wars in space, I think a lot of time passing because habitable worlds are few and far between.
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Hmmm. Never really could narrow this down in my head. Andalites are obvious. Leerans and Hawjabrans are both good candidates, like Dino said. Well we can't forget good old Homo Sapiens, but i'm pretty sure Ax wasn't talking about them.
Could it be the Hork Bajir? Were Aldrea's Hor Bajir resistance fighters still active at this point? I really don't remember Book 34 that well. Would they even count since the entire race had been enslaved?
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I don't think Hork-Bajir would count. I really don't think the idea of a Hork-Bajir resistance was in KAA's mind at that point. Maybe not even Hawjabrans and Leerans.
Was it ever stated why Hawjabrans couldn't be infested?
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Yeah. The Hawjabrans brain were spread out in nodes throughout their bodies. They didn't have one big brain that the Yeerks could wrap around so they couldn't be infested.
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Ok, that explains it.
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You're probably right. Applegate probably just had Ax say that without having any definite plans on how to expand on it. Or maybe she never planned to expand on it at all.
Besides, Ax could be completely wrong anyways. We know he wasn't the best listener when it came to school.
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Besides, Ax could be completely wrong anyways. We know he wasn't the best listener when it came to school.
This is a good point. Remember him saying that the Hork-bajir had a biological clock that set them warring every few hundred years or whatever it was? That bit of trivia ended up being utterly false.
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I think my favorite was when he told the Animorphs that Andalites had never heard of Helmacrons. Your brother Elfangor made JOKES about them in TAC Ax!
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On a related note I got the impression from the early books that the Yeerk Empire was going to be a lot bigger originally, like Ax says only three races left in the galaxy which implies the Yeerks already got all the other races. Also seems like the Empire was around for a long time rather than just 30 years as we later find out.
The funny thing is, it IS big by Animorphs standards. We find out in Visser that our population is HUGE compared to most in the verse. Like, when Visser 1 was reporting to her at the time superior that she had found a species with a population of 6 billion, he misheard her as it being 6 million and was still really excited.
Besides, Ax could be completely wrong anyways. We know he wasn't the best listener when it came to school.
This is a good point. Remember him saying that the Hork-bajir had a biological clock that set them warring every few hundred years or whatever it was? That bit of trivia ended up being utterly false.
Given what the Andalites did to them, that could very easily have been propaganda to quell the population. It was 70 years IIRC.
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I don't know if they made any propaganda or not. They threw Alloran under the buss for it, though if it had actually been successful I'm sure they would have made him a hero.
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Maybe not propoganda. I don't think they wanted to advertise anything about the Hork Bajir in case anyone investigated too closely. Not to mention it was a pretty shameful defeat for the Andalites.
But I can totally see the Andalite High command telling other races (Or inquisitive Andalites) that as an excuse if they asked why there were so few Hork Bajir. Maybe some Andalite kid asked that in class when they were learning about the Hork Bajir and that's just the response the teacher was supposed to give, whether the teacher believed it was true or not.
Wow. New Headcanon. :o
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I sort of loved that angle in the books that the Yeerks weren't exactly experienced at warfare and had only been doing it since around Vietnam. Made it all a little more plausible, that humans have sort of evolved as fighters, and by this point it was all sort of picked up by osmosis, even 13-14 year old kids grasped the basics of guerrilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics. Where the Yeerks (aside from the original Visser 1) were more about clumsy brute shows of force, just through inexperience.
And how the Andalites had been warriors for some time, but also had that prideful thing going on, they weren't really down-and-dirty do-whatever-you-have-to, Alloran aside, they sort of took the high road in the early books, until it all hit the fan and they got corrupted and desperate too.
A cool way to go with it, like humans might be technologically inferior, but we're basically really scary when backed into a corner and forced into fighting.
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We are a warrior race. Given the right tools for the job, we can kick anybody's ass. I was in a previous discussion about why the Chee didn't just sabotage the kandrona generators, but given the Yeerks information on us they'd never just leave us alone. They needed to conquer us, or wipe us out, because if we were given ships to fight them, we'd have ended the war ourselves.
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A cool way to go with it, like humans might be technologically inferior, but we're basically really scary when backed into a corner and forced into fighting.
Like pretty much any animal, when you think about it. Anyone can shoot a lion from a distance, but being up close with a pissed off cornered lion is always a bad thing. Suddenly, the whole series being about morphed animals makes sense.
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Eh, really the morphing's the least awesomely-plausible thing about the books. Yeah, a grizzly bear or a tiger are scary, but any goon with a big enough gun is in a position to not really be scared by one. The morphing's awesome in terms of "getting into the heads of an animal and exploring that notion with the kid readers", but as an actual weapon the whole thing's pretty flawed.
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I think that's why Hork-Bajir are rarely armed, and when they are there isn't a big fight scene involved.
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I think my favorite was when he told the Animorphs that Andalites had never heard of Helmacrons. Your brother Elfangor made JOKES about them in TAC Ax!
When are the helmacrons mentioned in TAC I really don't remember that.
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Just like with the Straam and the Mak, this is something that's mentioned early in the books that KAA doesn't really do anything with. As well as Alloran mentioning Yeerks being on the homeworld in book 8, and one Andalite saying he fought alongside Hork-Bajir in the war. Maybe the third race is the Onganchics. They have no homeworld, and one of their ships were taken by the Yeerks before they found the Hork-Bajir. That could be the third race. Still, it's not much.
He said Yeerks had infiltrated the Andalite Homeworld.
I took that to be a forshadowing of what we learn in Book 18 when we learn that there are Andalites who betrayed their race and were working with the Yeerks.