#6 - Reveling in a fantasy of promotions and power (#6 The Capture)
It's February 1997. Toni Braxton sat on top of the charts until the last week of February, giving way to... well, we'll talk about them next time. Daft Punk releases their debut album "Homework" while Ben and Jerry's releases a new flavor of ice cream named after the band Phish. February kicks off the Star Wars rereleases with an updated version of Episode IV: A New Hope, complete with Han Solo talking to a really ****ty CGI Jabba the Hutt. Television adopts a rating system, just in time for the premiere of "King of the Hill." "Final Fantasy VII" is released for the Playstation, the first in the popular RPG video game series to use 3D graphics.
In real news, Gene McKinney, the only African-American to reach the rank of Sergeant Major of the Army, resigns after nearly 60,000 calls to a Army hotline accused him of sexual misconduct. NASA sends astronauts up to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Divorce becomes legal in the Republic of Ireland. In North Hollywood, two bank robbers wearing kevlar body armor and armed with AKMs are killed in a shootout that resulted in seventeen injured police officers. This eventually results in select police officers being armed with semi-automatic weapons.
The big event, however, was the inauguration and the beginning of the second term of President Bill Clinton. Then came the sixth book in the Animorphs series, the first to focus on the Yeerks trying to acquire a person of high political standings, in this case a governer who is running in a Presidental election. While I won't pretend to know all the behind-the-scenes details, to me this makes it seem like Animorphs was meant to be a monthly series from the start, not the "every other month" thing they did for the first seven books. Had it been a monthly series, this book would have fallen on November 1996, at the time of the election, giving this book a more "ripped from the headlines" feel, intergrating it to real-life events. One could imagine the advice children who would have read the book would have given their parents: "Be sure to vote Clinton, Mommy. Bob Dole has an alien in his head."
What's funny is, had the Yeerks been succesful in infesting the nameless govener, they would have still lost the election. It would seem that the Yeerks have a problem dealing with American politics (and to a lesser extent, world politics) throughout the series, every attempt to invade that system ending in failure, and not always because of the Animorphs. They hit Hewlett Aldershot the Third with a car and he slips into a coma. They attempt to invade a micro-United Nations peace conferance, only to get shut down by random elephants and rhinos. They try to start a war between the United States and China, and lay the success of that plan on one Controller who bends under threat.
The Yeerks have already successfully invaded Earth culture, have already intergrated themselves in education and entertainment, and seem to pervert even basic laws of nature, such as death. And yet somehow, they can't seem to figure out government. Why is that? Let's consider the Yeerk's own governing system. Their highest governing body is the Council of Thirteen, a group of mysterious robe-wearing Yeerks who keep a level of control by keeping everyone in constant mystery. Not all the members are identified, and no one outside of the council know who among the thirteen is the true Yeerk Emperor. The center of Yeerk government is essentially a cult, an Illuminati-style body of influental people, the only difference being that the Council makes no secret of their presence, opting instead to just cloud the details.
Then there's the Visser and Sub-Visser system, which we see created in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles by one Yeerk simply proclaiming himself into a position of power, and everything kind of falling into place haphazardly. The Yeerk military body is in many ways a parody of the Andalite military body and their system of "Princes." Their military forces have a similiar immature quality to them. Their ships have almost toy-like designs, based off of bugs and manta rays and spiders and battle axes, and they all have similiar toy-like names. Bug Fighter. Blade Ship. The only Visser we ever really meet with any kind of professional attitude is Visser One. Visser Three acts like an immature child, throwing lethal fits when he doesn't get exactly what he wants.
This seems to give way to the core of the Yeerk's nature: Yeerks are inherently conceptual creatures instead of structural ones. In their natural state, they are balls of ideas bouncing around in large pools, like neurons clicking against and triggering each other. They are full of ideas but, as blind, deaf and weak, they are at the mercy of external forces, the lapping of the pools, natural predators, the weather, and so on. Structured thought would have been difficult in such an environment, and the forming of organizations beyond the most simple of tribal would have been unlikely. Before they began their invasion of space, the only Yeerk form of government was drenched in old mystic symbolism, a hold over of ancient rituals. The Council of Thirteen might even have theological origins and never had any real political power.
Therefor, as conceptual creatures, Yeerks have no problem understanding human ideals and culture, but they lack the maturity of thought to easily infiltrate a structured system like a world government. Prior to their invasion of Earth, the Yeerks had never tried to take over a statist society. The Gedds were monkeys, the Hork-Bajir were barely tribal and the Taxxons were intelligent but prone to anarchy. Humans, on the other hand, define themselves with structure, from government to family units (and when you think about it, the Yeerks seem to have a problem invading families as well. I don't recall the Yeerks ever managing to take control of an entire family). We are naturally drawn to patterns and systems, and are more willing to submit to structured government than fend for ourselves. Structure like this is a shell that the Yeerks simply have a hard time cracking.
(There's also a matter of time. Yeerks have had centuries to develop ideas, but only thirty years to develop governing systems.)
Yeerks essentially remain in a constant conceptual state, they are almost literally an invasion of ideas. How fitting that their physical form should be small bits of grey matter. Yeerks are ideas given organic bodies, ever-changing, merging and multiplying, seeking vessels from which they can properly express those ideas. It harkens back to a bit of classic science fiction filmmaking, the kind of thing Michael Grant would be in to: 1958's Fiend Without a Face, a story where experiments in telekinesis result in the creation of living monsters made of pure thought. Monsters who first attack with an invisible invasion before finally taking on a physical appearance, that of living brain matter. It eventually turns out, much as it does for the Yeerks, that once these thought monsters contest humans, specially an American airbase, in the physical realm, they get their asses handed to them. They are out of their depth.
While the Animorphs did what they could, perhaps an even bigger reason the Yeerk invasion of Earth was slowed down was because the Yeerks simply bit off a little more than they could chew.
