#esplin 9466 prime

[clitoris-maximus]

the visserrrrrrrrrr

save me cunty alien centaur save me

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How do you think the Earth invasion would be different if Esplin 9466 Lesser was in charge and not ol’ Visser 3?

I feel like they're both so driven by inferiority complexes that we might just see a similar world. Esplin the Lesser isn't nearly as much of an andalite weeabo as Esplin Prime, so he might not go through the trouble of acquiring and maintaining an andalite host, but he would be every bit as egotistical and bombastic as his twin. I mean, in canon he's basically the Elon Musk/Elizabeth Holmes/Adam Neumann of that universe, so I think it's safe to assume he's an egotistical serial liar.

The question is, would Esplin 9466 Prime be able to make it without Alloran? (Presumably if he's not a single-digit visser then he doesn't have the flagship host.) I don't know about that one. He doesn't seem smart enough to set up the web-based honeypot that his twin uses to get Soylent Green, and if the relationship between the twins is as fraught as it is in canon then he might just starve.

[lorenfangor]

Loving this theory. Who do you think are some of the most addicted hosts? How does that show?

I’m going to presume you meant “most addicted-to-hosts Yeerks”; the only host I can think of who’s genuinely inseparable from his Yeerk is Mr. Tidwell, but he and Ilim are heavily coded to be a couple so I don’t think that counts, lol

I think that any conversation about most-addicted Yeerks has to start with Esplin 9466-prime. From his earliest chronological appearance he’s obsessed with hosts, with having a host and specifically an Andalite host. He revels in the amount of control he has over Alloran, he loves using the morphing power and collecting exotic monsters, he’s got a frankly terrifying vore kink that he indulges in at every opportunity, and he doesn’t believe in self-restraint. To me his addiction is obvious, and it shows up in the sheer amount of things he does with his host body; he’s not interested in Alloran’s life he’s interested in the things he can experience through Alloran’s senses. (Or Aldrea’s, or potentially Elfangor’s, even)

Edriss 562 is the other obvious example, though for her the addiction seems to be to (as I’ve said before) LARPing humanity. She loves the experience of living a human life, having human children, being a human housewife. She loves existing as a human, but where Esplin is drunk on the things he can do or feel with Alloran as a proxy, she is much more interested in specific kinds of experiences that can only be achieved through particular hosts with specific lifestyles. Esplin does have a full-blown obsession with Andalites, but it’s not the way Edriss does - he doesn’t want to join Alloran’s herd and be Jahar’s husband and father two children, he doesn’t want an Andalite life.

Tom’s second Yeerk (I call him Feriss 512) is someone else I think probably qualifies - by series end, he’s morph-capable, he even morphs Tom. He doesn’t need a host to experience out-of-the-Pool life anymore but he’s choosing to do things that way out of the desire for… something, that I’d argue was the thrill of having a host.

(the problem with very few developed Yeerk characters is that it’s hard to cite specific examples of host addiction, lol)

I think for a lot of Yeerks the behavior manifests in more subtle ways - @nikosheba mentioned I think at one point that having an involuntary host is like going on a road trip with someone tied down in the passenger seat screaming at you to let them go and begging and pleading and crying for your mercy, and deciding that it’s worth it to go on the road trip anyway, and like… Yeerks are capable of affection, they’re capable of forming and forging bonds, but they’re encouraged to assert that their urges are more important than the rights and autonomy of another sapient being, they’re chasing one more fix, one more hit, and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt along the way.

I also think there’s a difference between “Yeerks who are hooked on just the experience of having a host” and “Yeerks who are hooked on that and on the neurotransmitters and hormones that their hosts involuntarily produce when they’re scared/hurt/traumatized/etc”, and Esplin and Tom’s second Yeerk seem to fall into that category where others like Edriss and Aftran and Iniss don’t. Like, some Yeerks really do seem to enjoy not just inhabiting a body but causing pain and trauma.

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

What if the Animorphs Did A Thing?

Apologies to @thejakeformerlyknownasprince for stealing their format for this idea.

It was Tobias who realized the possibilities first. Letting the Yeerks have the other Helmacron ship? No way. True, Tobias might have been the slightest bit angry because Visser Three held him hostage, but if the past few hours had taught him anything, it’s that shrink rays are more powerful than they seem.

“A Shrink Ray? Really?” Marco laughed. “Dude, this isn’t a cartoon.”

<No, but we’ve just spent all day at three millimeters tall, and we were helpless.> Tobias adjusted a feather. <I’m just saying that if Visser Three and the Hork-Bajir were three millimeters tall, they wouldn’t be a problem.>

It doesn’t take much more than that for everyone to agree that the shrink ray would be useful, or is at least too dangerous to let the Yeerks keep. They all start trying to figure out where it might have gone.

The last time anyone seen the Helmacron ship Galaxy Blaster, Chapman had been greedily shoving the thing into his suit pocket. That meant it could be at his house. Maybe it wasn’t, but maybe it was. It was worth a look.

Sneaking into Chapman’s house wasn’t as hard as it should have been. Many defenses had been put on the ground floor and in the basement since their visit many months ago, to be sure, but Melissa had left her bedroom window open that night. Maybe she was waiting for some unknown visitor, or maybe she was taking advantage of the cool breeze blowing into her room. Either way, an owl covered in fleas didn’t bother her as she slept. She never heard a thing.

While Ax led the others down, dodging Yeerk sensors as they went, Cassie and Rachel snuck into Chapman’s bedroom as a rat and a squirrel. Just in case. They were supposed to keep an eye on Chapman and his wife.

Rachel was the one who noticed it. Chapman had simply fallen onto his bed and fallen asleep. She’d seen this with her father Dan after a long day, and she’d done it herself after a couple of missions. The odds that Chapman had stopped to do anything before falling asleep were slim. Cassie and Rachel split up to look for his jacket.

Cassie found it in the clothes hamper. It took some digging, but a squirrel’s paws are quick. In no time she’d dug the Galaxy Blaster out, and the two girls headed to retrieve the guys from what sounded like a terrifying ordeal of evading automated Dracon fire and electrical traps.

Ax wasn’t sure if he could make the Galaxy Blaster able to fly again. That didn’t matter, according to Tobias. All they needed was the shrink ray. If Ax could somehow get that working again, they could shrink or grow things at will.

“Attack of the 40-Foot Hawk,” Marco chimed. “Like one of those Godzilla movies. Oh man. Could you imagine it? Visser Three turns into the Monster of the Week, then you just swoop down and grab him and-”

Ax interjected.<A bird that large would not have the correct proportions to sustain lift.> A collective groan of disappointment goes around the group.

The biggest problem with fixing the ship is the extremely tiny controls in the bridge. Ax’s fingers just weren’t nimble enough to manipulate them in the sequence Marco remembers, even with tweezers and the most absurd looking magnifying eyepiece anyone has ever seen. Ax assured the others it can provide magnifications far beyond what a normal Human magnifying glass provides. Tobias noted the eyepiece appeared to be a piece of a microscope that Ax ripped of and strapped a headband to. Ax didn’t confirm or deny this.

When Ax finally admitted defeat, the Chee were happy to help. The mechanical precision of their fingers, along with their vast knowledge, lets them get the Galaxy Blaster back to working condition in a few hours. Bonus, with some coaxing, Erek agreed to make it easy for the others to use as well. A shrink ray, it seems, just barely skirts the Chee non-violence directive.

So they put a handle on it. And a trigger. Really, they just strap the Galaxy Blaster to part of a broken watergun, giving them a proper shrink ray pistol that looks as silly as it is. Thanks to Erek’s work, it was simple to use. One button causes a 2x reduction in size with each trigger pull. The other button causes a 2x increase in size with each trigger pull. Erek made the Animorphs swear they would not use it for violence.

The next raid on the Yeerk Pool, the Animorphs all go in combat morphs. Ax wields the shrink ray.

The first wave of Controllers to run at them are reduced to 3 inches tall in a moment. They quickly scampered away to avoid being crushed by the Animorphs.

The second wave of Controllers didn’t fare any better.

The third wave decided that fighting at close range wasn’t a good idea when their enemy had a shrink ray. Unfortunately for them, Ax is exceptionally accurate, and he managed to hit them with ease even as he dodged Dracon fire. The third wave were shrunk down in no time at all.

The shrunken Controllers who have Dracon beams were horrified to find out their weapons are much less effective at this size. The Animorphs shrugged off numerous hits without issue.

Visser Three arrived, as he always does, in style. He dropped in from the ceiling in some horrific bat-monster morph. No one paid attention to the name of the planet he acquired it on. A shame, he was quite proud of that trip. He had been the only one to survive. Moments later, he was no larger than a little brown bat, and Tobias easily caught the Visser in his talons.

The Yeerks didn’t really seem to have an answer for what is happening. In all the chaos, they tried everything they could think of. None of it worked.

Someone manages to take off in a Bug Fighter, but before they can turn the weapons onto Ax, the Bug Fighter is reduced to the size of a toy car. Tobias knocked it out of the air with ease.

The Hork-Bajir tried again and again even after being Shrunk, but their tiny blades do nothing, and Jake is almost amused at how easily he batted them all away, like a cat with a favorite toy.

The Taxxons awere too distracted trying to catch all of the tiny Controllers to put up any meaningful resistance. But innocent people might get hurt by a hungry Taxxon chasing them down. At Cassie’s urging, they too were shrunk before they could eat too many people.

Maybe thirty minutes after the Animorphs arrived, the Yeerk Pool’s primary defenses had all been dealt with.

Visser Three refused to accept defeat initially. He demorphed and remorphed again and again, but at three inches tall, even his largest and most powerful morphs are useless.

Eventually, he realized the Animorphs have won. He began trying to negotiate, offering as little as he can at first. He knows where Elfangor’s human son was and could take the Animorphs to him.

This came as a shock to some of the Animorphs- They weren’t aware Elfangor had a Human son. However, they put two and two together about the Yeerk interest in Tobias a few days ago and promptly resolved that he has some explaining to do when this is all over.

The Animorphs decided that the small offers Visser Three made aren’t enough. They had, unexpectedly, won. The entire Yeerk Pool was theirs. Visser Three, now in a pickle jar with holes in the lid, was theirs. They decided to tell the world, to end the invasion once and for all.

The Chee arrived and helped with catching and sorting out the shrunken Controllers. And then, strangely, Mr. Tidwell- a late arrival to the battle- began to help too.

The Yeerk Peace Movement are bewildered by this turn of events, and the Animorphs are bewildered by the existence of the Yeerk Peace Movement. Aftran 942 is brought up from the depths of the Yeerk Pool to explain. Cassie began working on a plan for dealing with the Yeerks.

The Yeerks were returned to full size after they left their hosts, and then they were quickly moved into the pool before their now-free hosts could try to hurt them. Esplin 9466 remained in the pickle jar even after he was returned to normal size.

A bewildered Alloran took all of five minutes to recover before he began to demand to know where the Andalite fleet was and how many Andalites had arrived to help. When he was told the truth, he made several loud noises of shock and despair. Then he asked if he could see the shrink ray. Marco told him it would violate the Prime Directive to share such technology with a species as primitive as the Andalites. Ax ‘accidentally’ smacked Marco in the back of the head for calling Andalites primitive.

After some time, the Free Hork-Bajir were alerted by Tobias and arrived to take care of the now-free Hork-Bajir. The Taxxons- a wildcard even once they are free- surprisingly united around a strange Taxxon that goes by the name of Arbron.

The Chee covered for the Animorphs when the Animorphs decided to set up a temporary base of operations within the Yeerk Pool.

It became clear within an hour that the people who beat the Yeerks were mostly just Human teenagers. It didn’t matter. The Yeerks didn’t have anything that could stop or resist the shrink ray.

As more Controllers wandered in for their bi-weekly feedings, they were caught by the various forces that now control the place. The situation is explained to them, and they’re given a choice.

The few that resisted were tied up and left in the many sheds on the periphery to wait the few hours it will take for the Yeerks to starve. The Yeerks that surrender are thrown into the pool without ceremony and their hosts set free.

Once some of the Human-Controllers who serve in the police and military were free, they quickly went to get the proper authorities. Marco went up to meet the police as they arrive and escorted them down into the facility. Within a few hours of Visser Three’s surrender, the Media arrived. Within a day, the world knew all about the invasion. The remaining Controllers on the surface tried to stay away for as long as they can, but eventually, they too surrender.

Vissers in other Yeerk facilities on Earth quickly ordered the ships in orbit to open fire on the Yeerk Pool, to end this debacle before it could get any worse. The ships in orbit refused. Some landed and surrendered. Others fled to the safety of the Yeerk Empire.

The general surrender begins extending to the other Yeerk facilities as well. Law enforcement and military forces begin arriving and taking control. In some cases, the fights were bloody. In others, the Yeerks surrendered without firing a shot.

Jake didn’t feel any qualms about snatching the slug that slithered out of Tom’s ear and throwing it as hard as he could. He didn’t know if the slug made it into the Pool or splatted against the ground on the other side. He didn’t care.

Visser One arrived a few months later with a full war-fleet. Somehow Visser Three had screwed things up, but Earth was still vital to the Yeerk Empire. It didn’t matter if the Humans now had access to Yeerk technology. A full fleet, led by the fearsome Nova-class Empire Ship, could easily retake the planet.

A lone Blade Ship, since repainted in the style of a Human naval vessel, flew up to meet the Yeerk fleet. It transmitted a single message: Surrender immediately or be shrunk.

Visser One laughed. Shrunk? That’s ridiculous! There’s no way they could possibly be serious, the Humans didn’t have that kind of technology, and even if they did, it wouldn’t be useful- And then the Visser realized something was very, very wrong. A strange beam projected by the Blade Ship hit each ship in the Yeerk fleet, one after the other. One by one, each ship in the Yeerk fleet vanished from optical sensors. Communications with each ship indicated they were all alive, all intact, but surprisingly, unbelievably, they had all been shrunk. Visser One was left with a choice. Take her tiny, useless fleet back to the Yeerk Empire, or surrender.

With a pounding migraine reinforced by Eva’s cheers, Visser One surrendered.

[fandomisheart]

So, Esplin, named after Esplin 9466 Prime aka Visser Three/Visser One of the Yeerk military.

Does he pull off the name as a Togruta?

[clitoris-maximus]

tobias and HIS MOM!! VISSER THREE IS HIS MOM.

basically just a like what if visser actually did adopt tobias in that one book

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Imagine a peace movement yeerk accidentally ends up in the head of a Very Important controller

Okay. In this scenario, let's say Aftran cuts Visser Three in line as he's on his way back to Alloran, and gets into Alloran's head instead.

The question for me becomes: how long could she keep it up?

Optimistic answer: three days. And then once she's back in the yeerk pool, all her fellow yeerks will go "hey, you don't look* like Esplin 9466-prime" and she'll be killed on the spot. But you can do a hell of a lot in three days, if you're pretending to be the head of the invasion. Come up with excuses to get all V3's lieutenants killed. Open peace talks with the Animorphs. Promise all the yeerks voluntary hosts, or morphing power, or both. Just... open the cages, and mime shock that oopsie, the hosts escaped. Like, Aftran could totally win the war that way. Especially since she'd have Alloran on her side from the moment she revealed her mission, and Alloran's a one-man army.

Pessimistic answer: five minutes. And then the real Esplin 9466-prime, still in the yeerk pool, will go «HEY LOSERS. IT'S ME. SHOOT THE IMPOSTER.» and anyone with a modicum of self-preservation instinct will jump into the nearest host, grab a dracon beam, and start blasting.

*we don't actually know how unhosted yeerks recognize each other, but we know (from Visser) that they do

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I just realized I think Iniss and Temrash were originally *ranks* the same way as Visser is. Not names.

I agree. It seems like there was a soft shift around yeerk naming conventions somewhere between #2 (where Iniss 226 alludes to his name changing) and Hork-Bajir Chronicles (where Esplin 9466 goes through several titles but keeps his name). If I had to guess, Applegate was trying to make it easier to track one character through multiple job changes by having Esplin 9466 remain Esplin 9466 after becoming Sub-Visser Twelve and then Visser Three. Also makes it easier to keep track of how important any given yeerk is — it's pretty intuitive that Vissers outrank Sub-Vissers and Visser One outranks Visser Three. Iniss + Temrash = 0.5 Visser? doesn't have the same obviousness.

There's also reference in #2 to "an Iniss of the second century," which makes me think that yeerk names are supposed to mimic Roman lords' names with the first kid being named Primus, the fifth one Quintus, and so on. That would explain how Esplin 9466-prime and Esplin 9466-lesser got their designations. Esplin (or Iniss, or Akdor) would be a family name, and 9466 or 226 or 1154 would refer to the birth order. Potentially that also explains the seven-digit yeerk name (Essak 2041275) we see in #41, if that was just the child of an unusually large family.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Can we all just apriciate that visser three, with all his monster morphs, might be one of the few non monsterfuckers in the series?

I will accept that Alloran might be a non-monsterfucker, but Esplin “Visser Three” nine-four-six-six-prime has a CANONICAL andalite fetish that he talks up so much that he grosses out all his yeerk friends, and I will not see him besmirched in this way.  It’s apparently to the point where in Hork-Bajir Chronicles when the senior yeerks are like “we need somebody here to crawl into an andalite” we know four or five other yeerks immediately go “You’re gonna want that Esplin guy.  The one with the super-weird andalite thing he won’t shut up about?  Yeah, that Esplin.”  Being the only yeerk in existence with an awkwardly large andalite kink is, like, Esplin’s defining characteristic.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Oooh, that's interesting. I was thinking more about the contrast between Eva and Alloran, because the first time we meet Alloran, he's hurt, poisoned, terrorized, and begging for death. The first time we meet Eva, she's also hurt and terrorized, but she manages to hold herself together and walk right back into slavery for the sake of the planet. Alloran was a soldier and General Ripper. Eva? We don't really know, but definitely a suburban housewife who went through hell and came out stronger.

To follow up here, I do headcanon that Eva’s a full-time mom before the war.  Partially because there aren’t nearly enough stories about kickass empire-toppling full-time parents.  Partially because, as I said, motherhood is so freaking important to Eva in Visser.  Partially because we don’t hear about Eva having a job pre-invasion.  Given that Applegate manages to sneak in professions for even minor characters like Jake’s mom and Rachel’s dad even though neither one of them features in more than three scenes before being infested in #49, it’s probably safe to say that if she’d really wanted to establish Eva’s career then she would’ve found a way.

And if Tom has minimal identity when he’s infested, Alloran has a very disorganized and distorted identity when he’s taken.  We see in Hork-Bajir Chronicles that when it comes to andalite-superiority rhetoric, Alloran is the most dedicated zealot in the whole colonialism machine.  He believes in helping the Andalite Empire Electorate so hard that he’s willing to kill and die and fucking commit genocide for the betterment of his species.  But then Alloran does, in fact, commit genocide… and the very propaganda machine that he worships immediately turns against him.

In Andalite Chronicles, Alloran’s bitter raving about how he was the only one brave enough to make the sacrifice play with the quantum virus seems like, well, just a bunch of bitter raving.  However, with the context of HBC and also #38, we start to see that he has a point about being just the guy who pulled the trigger.  Over a dozen andalites help to engineer, package, ship, store, and prime a quantum virus that just happens to kill hork-bajir.  Every andalite on the hork-bajir homeworld except Aldrea knows about the virus before it’s released.  But Alloran is the only one who gets the credit and the blame.  Alloran deserves a lot of blame, to be sure — he had the authority to prevent the virus at like 15 places in the plan and never once tried to stop it — but the idea that he went rogue and acted alone is straight-up propaganda.  Real governments do this all the freaking time: they order state-sponsored atrocities and then blame alleged bad eggs within the organization.

Not only did Alloran have a lot of help in killing the hork-bajir, he also recognizes that the Electorate never actually stopped pulling this bullshit.  A good thirty years later, after having allegedly washed their hands of the “Butcher of Hork-Bajir” bad egg from last time, the Electorate’s War Council sends Alloran’s own brother to go be Alloran 2.0 in #38.  And it’s fascinating that they use eliminating the bad egg, i.e. Assassinate the Abomination, as their cover story while planning a second imperialistic genocide.  (To be clear, Arbat saw what happened to Big Bro after Alloran became the face of the last “protect them from Communism controllers by killing them” action.  He gets that the War Council gave him a ship and a quantum virus and a set of orders, but that the War Council will reward him by claiming he went rogue and became a monster just like his brother.)

However, unlike Arbat in #38, Alloran actually believes in HBC that he’s on the right side of history and that history will see it that way.  And then time passes, and history happens, and he’s not vindicated or rewarded.  In AC, he’s shunned by his own beloved culture, sent to die on some foreign planet under a fool’s errand.  No one comes along to say “it was hard but you did the right thing” or at the very least “it’s not like you deserve 100% of the blame;” they just keep right on pretending that Alloran got the quantum virus and the idea to use it out of nowhere.  And it’s under those circumstances that Alloran gets betrayed by his own aristh, outmaneuvered by an alien child that he considers no better than a dumb animal, and infested with a yeerk who (if possible) believes in the myth of andalite superiority even more than Alloran himself does.

So yeah.  Alloran has an identity in HBC, and it’s being The Best Andalite Prince There Ever Was, here to save all the lesser species from barbarism by way of might-makes-right.  He has a collection of delusions in AC, but I’m not sure he has a clearly formed identity anymore.  And then the twain converge: Alloran meets Esplin 9466, living proof of the extreme bullshit underpinning the idea of andalites as saviors.  What I wouldn’t give to see the interaction in which those two discover (to their mutual horror) just how much they have in common.

Alloran spends the next 15 - 20 years being used as a tool by the yeerks to hurt the andalites.  Small wonder that the only way out he can see in #8 is for Ax to kill him.  He does learn and grow.  He eventually becomes the kind of person who goes to bat against the Electorate out of loyalty to a human war-prince (#54).  But he goes through a very personal hell in the interim, and that’s a lot of what we see in #8.

I also think that that timing is no accident.  We see Chapman almost incapable of intentional movement in #2, Tom groveling to his captors in #6, a whole bunch of hosts rendered helpless with despair in #7, Unnamed Ex-Host Lady unable to function even after being freed in MM1, and then Alloran begging for death in #8.  All of these moments help to establish controllerdom as this horrific atrocity that must be stopped at all costs.  HOWEVER, we also see William Roger Tennant saving Marco’s life by fighting off a yeerk command in #35, various hosts risking death to shield the Animorphs with their bodies in #38, Eva kicking ass while still a controller in Visser, and Arbron and Toby leading a crapton of hosts in rebellion in #53.  By that point in the series, we get the point that being a controller is TERRIFYING AS FUCK.  Using characters like Eva and Arbron, Applegate shows us that hope and personal integrity and even abolitionist revolution are still possible even under those circumstances.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Yeerks and Pronouns

(Because Fanlore drew my attention to this.)

In canon, yeerks tend to adopt the pronouns of their hosts.  Visser Three uses Alloran’s pronouns, Visser One uses Eva’s, etc.  We can assume that this is a convenient shorthand, given that yeerks have six genders and don’t really use gendered pronouns in their native language (Andalite Chronicles).  Aftran doesn’t say exactly this to Cassie, but that’s approximately what her explanation in #19 translates to with a contemporary understanding of gender.

As far as we know, the only pronoun-like designation that yeerks tend to use is to distinguish single births from multiples.  Within that, they distinguish the size of multiples at birth.  Hence, Esplin 9466-prime and Esplin 9466-lesser (#16).

However, the Animorphs frequently use “it” pronouns to describe yeerks.  Two quick examples: in #16 Jake saying “The Yeerk found the answer that Tom would have made. It aimed Tom's eyes and made Tom's face smile sardonically. It opened Tom's mouth...” and in MM3 Cassie saying “[Marco] flipped the Yeerk almost casually through the air. Threw it into the flaming hulk of the tank” (emphasis mine).  My reading of the text is that these aren’t attempts to use the correct pronouns to describe individuals with six genders; these are dehumanization.

And in my fic, the yeerks’ ex-hosts tend to engage in a shitton of dehumanization toward the yeerks.  Chapman expresses amusement at the thought of yeerks dying horribly.  Eva offers to send flowers to anyone willing to kill yeerks’ allies.  Tom makes a semi-joking offer to go “hunting” for ex-yeerk nothlits.  Hopefully, these are behaviors for which I successfully convey disapproval in my fic, along with things like Tom (however briefly) buying into the myth that Jake Controls Everything and Therefore Everything is Jake’s Fault.

Anywhoo, the way that Tom’s narration in Eleutherophobia tends to use “it” pronouns for yeerks (except when he slips into using the pronouns of the host) isn’t meant to indicate that “it” pronouns are those yeerks’ preferred pronouns.  It’s meant to indicate that he’s got some Seriously Problematic views toward yeerks, for reasons that are understandable but ultimately not justifiable.

Tl;dr: Canon would suggest that most yeerks don’t have English-language pronoun preferences but use their hosts’ pronouns for convenience.  That doesn’t mean it’s correct or okay for characters, both in canon and in my fic, to use “it” pronouns for yeerks who haven’t expressed a preference.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I misread that ask and thought they were implying that esplin had twin sons joe and bob and I just went with it

Visser Three: Visser One has twin human children! I must one-up her by getting some of my own. We have no choice.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

It's fanon and can definitely be read as canon that Visser Three can exert psychic influence to give people the creepy-crawlies, because tons of characters mention having an awful feeling of intimidation any time he enters the vicinity, well before they can actually see or hear him. Add to that the fact that Elfangor can definitely transmit emotions with some kind of thought-speak-adjacent skill (although it seems Ax cannot, presumably because he is babey), and I think there's a good lot of evidence to back up the read that Esplin is using Alloran's abilities to do something to unnerve everyone around him at all times.

I’ve never read all the books but I’m pretty sure Elfangor was in human morph when Tobias was conceived and that’s why he was a normal kid before the morphing despite being half alien. Could you do an AU where being half alien actually had side effects?

Potentially-unpopular opinion: I already view Tobias as being affected by being half-andalite in canon?

Jake’s initial description of Tobias is of this dreamy, stargazing kid who is somewhat off-puttingly weird in a way that I’ve always read as being subtly inhuman.  Tobias in #1 gives off strong Luna Lovegood vibes to me.  He’s got that “I liked the [war] meetings; it was like having friends” energy, of course (Half-Blood Prince), and like Luna, he’s the kind of character that we can see why he’d attract bullies — he’s several steps off from the rhythm of most conversations he’s in.  Other fandalites have read him as autistic and/or trans, and I think the evidence is inarguable that he’s bad at conforming to societal expectations, however one chooses to interpret it.

Anyway, during that first Close Encounter Jake says “It was Tobias who saw [Elfangor’s ship] first. He had been walking along, gazing up at the sky… That’s the way Tobias is sometimes” (#1).  And then when everyone else is freaking out over the possibility that this is about to turn into War of the Worlds, it says “Tobias was actually grinning, but that’s Tobias for you. He’s never scared of weird stuff. It’s the normal stuff he can’t stand.” (#1).  Tobias has basically been waiting his whole life for his deadbeat dad to come back exactly this brand of weirdness.  He can’t stand normal life, and he’s not great at functioning there, because he’s never been normal.  And on some level he’s always known it.

Add to that Tobias’s general antipathy toward humanity, to the point where he gives up on being human when it’s too much effort during the first battle.  Add to that the fact that Tobias to a large extent drags the others into the war with his insistence that they can’t let Elfangor down.  Add to that Tobias’s near-instantaneous close connection with Ax, even before he knows that he and Ax are related.  Add to that Tobias’s frequently-unrealistic optimism, what he later describes as the most striking andalite instinct when he first uses the morph.  Add to that the fact that Ax describes the decision to bomb the Yeerk Pool as the most andalite thing he’s ever done, and compare it to Tobias’s decision to annihilate the mercora.  Add to that Tobias’s tendency to be the first and last one on the team to use the alien morphs, from hork-bajir and taxxon to andalite and nartec.

All in all, I actually view Tobias’s personality as already being half-human, half-andalite, and eventually half-hawk.  (Yes, as Tobias himself would say: that’s too many halves.)  He’s very Elfangor-like, and he’s already canonically got a lot of the andalites’ calculating nature but also their dreamy optimism.

[absynthe--minded]

Ancestor worship. Especially since their elders die to create them. I could easily see stories of previous generations getting mythologized into culture heroes, and certain yeerks getting turned into demigodlike figures. The first to infest a Gedd, the first to learn to use a computer, the first to look up at the stars and dream. Maybe in a few hundred thousand years Esplin 9466-prime and Esplin 9466-lesser become twin gods: one the vengeful lord of war and conquest with magic shapeshifting powers, the other a god of death who comes for the evil and the corrupt in the night.

Oral tradition rather than written records. Prior to Seerow and computers, stories and knowledge were probably passed down yeerk-to-yeerk-to-yeerk.

Communal instead of individualist thinking. They’d spend their whole lives in pools surrounded by their brethren, close enough to touch. They probably see themselves as part of a greater whole.

Ritual surrounding infestation. I could see it being a special, sacred thing to take a Gedd host. Something you had to earn, or reserved for special occasions with fanfare and ceremony. There were probably elder yeerks who were disgusted by the imperial bent their race took.

What IS Yerk Culture?

YES.  That IS the question.

Sorry for the facetious answer, but we really really don’t know.  As far as we can tell they wouldn’t have any kind of visual or audial arts, given that they don’t use sight or hearing for communication, and their senses of taste and smell also seem to be fairly limited by human standards beyond what it takes to interface with other creatures’ minds.  They also don’t apparently make noise, and navigate through tactile echolocation (#29). So that rules out music, visual art, and a lot of what we humans would consider “culture.”  Not only that, but we never really see yeerks who aren’t in the military, and we rarely ever see them outside of strategic-planning or combat situations.

We know that they have a language that can be at least kind of conveyed through human mouths (#17) and andalite thought-speak (MM1), even if Rachel estimates that the human-controllers are probably approximating a lot of words and sounds.  We know that yeerks have complex computer interfaces that allow them to digest large amounts of information (HBC) for all that they’re probably not “reading” in the sense we think of reading with words on a page or books on tape.  They could be using a Braille-like system, or taking advantage of their parasitic abilities to create artificial intelligences that they can then “infest” and take “memories” from.

There’s also the fascinating detail that they die in order to spawn.  Teeechnically, a species can’t have “culture” at all unless it transmits information from generation to generation within single groups.  So, it’s possible (and crazy to think about): yeerks could’ve had no culture at all before Seerow came along.  It’s a remote possibility, given how far they come in the next 40-odd years, but if all the yeerks in a naturally occurring yeerk pool were constantly smushing themselves into balls, dying, and producing new yeerks that had no way to communicate with the now-dead older generation…  Maybe yeerks need computers like the kind Seerow offered in order to exist as cultural beings.  If they do go from having zero culture and zero communication to being The Yeerk Empire in about 15 years, then boy howdy is Ax off-base when he says that humans advance faster than the universe average.

Assuming that the yeerks did have culture before Seerow (maybe they communicate through half-generations?) we can speculate about human-like forms of culture that might work with their lived experience.  A couple ideas:

Dance.  For yeerks this’d probably mostly take the form of synchronized swimming, but given that they swim in pretty tight clusters and there are usually hundreds of thousands of them in any given yeerk pool… might be pretty cool.

Competitive sports.  I’m thinking yeerks could have races, swimming obstacle courses, attempts to see who can control a gedd the fastest, and other demonstrations of physical skill.

Games.  If yeerks are anything like ketrans, then they might really enjoy MMORPG-like simulations using their computer-brains.  Plus, these could double as training tools, similar to the way the U.S. military uses video games right now.

Changing hosts over several yeerks.  This could be the form of a game or puzzle or training exercise, and to be clear it’s UNETHICAL AS FUCK, but Yeerk 1 could leave a skill or quirk or neurosis in a single host’s brain that Yeerk 2 finds and builds upon, and then maybe Yeerk 3 tries to force the response to go extinct while Yeerk 4 alters the host’s brain chemistry in order to create a conditionalized response for the training… So on and so forth.  They could build on each other’s work in order to pool their intelligence toward altering a single human or hork-bajir AND I DIDN’T SAY IT WAS MORAL JUST THAT IT WOULD BE FUN FOR EVIL YEERKS TO DO TO PASS THE TIME.

Competing with sensory intensity.  For yeerks new to humans’ music perception, andalites’ panoptic vision, hork-bajir’s trigonometric skill, or taxxons’ probably-out-of-this-world sense of taste, I could totally see bro-like contests with yeerks drinking hot sauce or blasting heavy metal or otherwise proving their toughness through masochism.

Sun worship.  This one is hinted at a teensy bit in the books, when controllers greet each other with “may the kandrona shine and enrich you” (#2, #41, #53) or variations on that phrase.  Since the yeerks take their energy directly from their sun, or else bottle up the energy of their sun in portable kandrona generators, it might make sense that they have a deeply spiritual connection to the sun and its rays.

Anyone else with ideas about yeerk culture, please add to this list.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

This is a really interesting perspective and I like it a lot! I honestly think that the whole numbering system has to be a bit of a continuity error, because both Temrash 114 and Iniss 226 (in #6 and #2, respectively) mention their number suffixes changing with rank or social order, but Esplin 9466-prime remains Esplin 9466-prime throughout like four different ranks. The "yeerk's name-number represents birth order" system seems to come up way more often than "yeerk's name-number represents rank", which is why I think it's fanon that the name-number doesn't change for most yeerks.

The other one I find interesting is that the yeerk ostensibly inside Jake in #41 is called Essak 241275 and has a whopping six-digit number when we otherwise only see three-digit and occasionally four-digit name-numbers. It could just be a continuity error in a book that frankly has a lot of other continuity errors... OR it could be a hint about the fact that he's on a version of Earth where 100% of sentient beings are controllers, suggesting that there are a ton more yeerks in dark!2009 than the version of 1999 he remembers. If we go with the name-number-as-rank idea then that suggests that yeerks have just made so many more yeerks that they need 10³ more ranks. If we go with the name-number-as-birth-order theory, that means that yeerks have managed to bring reproductive success waaaaay up; I'm thinking something like England going from a ~50% infant mortality rate to a ~0.03% rate in only about 100 years, only yeerks pulling off the same thing within 10 years thanks to sci-fi nonsense.

Anyway, it'd be nice if we got more answers in canon. But then I guess there'd be nothing for us to speculate wildly about.

What IS Yerk Culture?

YES.  That IS the question.

Sorry for the facetious answer, but we really really don’t know.  As far as we can tell they wouldn’t have any kind of visual or audial arts, given that they don’t use sight or hearing for communication, and their senses of taste and smell also seem to be fairly limited by human standards beyond what it takes to interface with other creatures’ minds.  They also don’t apparently make noise, and navigate through tactile echolocation (#29). So that rules out music, visual art, and a lot of what we humans would consider “culture.”  Not only that, but we never really see yeerks who aren’t in the military, and we rarely ever see them outside of strategic-planning or combat situations.

We know that they have a language that can be at least kind of conveyed through human mouths (#17) and andalite thought-speak (MM1), even if Rachel estimates that the human-controllers are probably approximating a lot of words and sounds.  We know that yeerks have complex computer interfaces that allow them to digest large amounts of information (HBC) for all that they’re probably not “reading” in the sense we think of reading with words on a page or books on tape.  They could be using a Braille-like system, or taking advantage of their parasitic abilities to create artificial intelligences that they can then “infest” and take “memories” from.

There’s also the fascinating detail that they die in order to spawn.  Teeechnically, a species can’t have “culture” at all unless it transmits information from generation to generation within single groups.  So, it’s possible (and crazy to think about): yeerks could’ve had no culture at all before Seerow came along.  It’s a remote possibility, given how far they come in the next 40-odd years, but if all the yeerks in a naturally occurring yeerk pool were constantly smushing themselves into balls, dying, and producing new yeerks that had no way to communicate with the now-dead older generation…  Maybe yeerks need computers like the kind Seerow offered in order to exist as cultural beings.  If they do go from having zero culture and zero communication to being The Yeerk Empire in about 15 years, then boy howdy is Ax off-base when he says that humans advance faster than the universe average.

Assuming that the yeerks did have culture before Seerow (maybe they communicate through half-generations?) we can speculate about human-like forms of culture that might work with their lived experience.  A couple ideas:

Dance.  For yeerks this’d probably mostly take the form of synchronized swimming, but given that they swim in pretty tight clusters and there are usually hundreds of thousands of them in any given yeerk pool… might be pretty cool.

Competitive sports.  I’m thinking yeerks could have races, swimming obstacle courses, attempts to see who can control a gedd the fastest, and other demonstrations of physical skill.

Games.  If yeerks are anything like ketrans, then they might really enjoy MMORPG-like simulations using their computer-brains.  Plus, these could double as training tools, similar to the way the U.S. military uses video games right now.

Changing hosts over several yeerks.  This could be the form of a game or puzzle or training exercise, and to be clear it’s UNETHICAL AS FUCK, but Yeerk 1 could leave a skill or quirk or neurosis in a single host’s brain that Yeerk 2 finds and builds upon, and then maybe Yeerk 3 tries to force the response to go extinct while Yeerk 4 alters the host’s brain chemistry in order to create a conditionalized response for the training… So on and so forth.  They could build on each other’s work in order to pool their intelligence toward altering a single human or hork-bajir AND I DIDN’T SAY IT WAS MORAL JUST THAT IT WOULD BE FUN FOR EVIL YEERKS TO DO TO PASS THE TIME.

Competing with sensory intensity.  For yeerks new to humans’ music perception, andalites’ panoptic vision, hork-bajir’s trigonometric skill, or taxxons’ probably-out-of-this-world sense of taste, I could totally see bro-like contests with yeerks drinking hot sauce or blasting heavy metal or otherwise proving their toughness through masochism.

Sun worship.  This one is hinted at a teensy bit in the books, when controllers greet each other with “may the kandrona shine and enrich you” (#2, #41, #53) or variations on that phrase.  Since the yeerks take their energy directly from their sun, or else bottle up the energy of their sun in portable kandrona generators, it might make sense that they have a deeply spiritual connection to the sun and its rays.

Anyone else with ideas about yeerk culture, please add to this list.