question about the fall of yeerk empire...

[Terenia]

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.

[Acalio-Laron-Jaham]

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.

[Gumby]

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?

[Aluminator (Kit)]

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.

[anijen21]

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.

[Aluminator (Kit)]

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 

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?  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.

[anijen21]

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

[Aluminator (Kit)]

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 ^_^

[Fwahm]

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.

[anijen21]

then why were the Andalites always described as "outnumbered" and "spread too thin"?

[Aluminator (Kit)]

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?

[anijen21]

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

[Axeme]

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.

[INH]

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.

[Azguard]

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.