Erek

[MikeR]

I'm about halfway through the series, and I'm having trouble understand the Chee. I know they can't be violent, and that they can do surveillance for the Animorphs. But Erek takes pretty direct action sometimes. For example, he blocks a door and prevents Howlers from coming in to kill his friends.

So what about other non-directly-violent actions? Can he dig a nice tunnel for them down to the Yeerk pool, so they could drop in some more maple cereal? Could he destroy those awful bio-whatever security devices that make it so hard for the Animorphs to get it? Could he paint all Controllers bright red with indelible paint? And so forth. Seems like he could be a lot of help.

[Gumby]

Doing those things would be for the purpose of allowing the Ani's to kill or hurt Yeerks, which would violate his programming. But just protecting them by placing himself in harms way is just letting them escape from a bad situation, they might use their survival to cause suffering, but he can't be sure. He can't assist in violence, just prevent it. And standing by while the ani's got shredded would be a bigger violation then protecting them.

[MikeR]

Not sure I see the difference between that and giving the Animorphs intelligence information, which they generally use to go kill Yeerks. And if Erek can give protection, by getting in the way, I think there were a few other missions where they could have used some of his protection.

How about if we humans promise never to hurt the Yeerks, and then the Chee can gently collect them all and build them a nice Yeerk pool on Mars, where they can infest non-sentient Martian animals?

[Darth Zakryn]

I think there's all sorts of safeguards and failsafes on Erek that the Pemalites programmed into him. We don't know what those limits are except that he cannot directly allow or kill a sentient being or any other form of life. Perhaps Erek has learned how to find little loopholes in his programming, like VIKI from I, Robot.

[MoppingBear]

could he do some of the things you mentioned? possibly.  would he? no.

[Tim Bruening]

Not sure I see the difference between that and giving the Animorphs intelligence information, which they generally use to go kill Yeerks. And if Erek can give protection, by getting in the way, I think there were a few other missions where they could have used some of his protection.

How about if we humans promise never to hurt the Yeerks, and then the Chee can gently collect them all and build them a nice Yeerk pool on Mars, where they can infest non-sentient Martian animals?

But Mars doesn't have any infestable life forms!

[Chad32]

The deal with the Chee is the same deal with the Free Hork-Bajir and Yeerk Peace Movement. The series was so centered on the protagonists that these other interesting groups were marginalized. They definitely could have been used more, but the authors decided it would be better to see what would happen if a Buffalo got morphing powers, or if Rachel was cut in half as a starfish, or if they found mutated Humans in an underwater catacomb.