#yeerk politics

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

One thing I’ve never exactly understood. Why did the victory on Earth in books 53/54 correspond to a total victory over the Yeerk Empire? Most clearly, we never see the Council of 13 get defeated.

Short answer: Eva.

Long answer:

This is all kind of background to the main plots of the books, but. What we know happens is something like this.

The yeerks try to take Leera, under Visser One's leadership. They meet andalite resistance, leeran resistance, and Animorph resistance — ultimately they fail (#15 - #18).

V1 gets reassigned to Sleegab Five. Not many details, but it doesn't go well. Doesn't help that Marco has been actively discrediting her within the Empire (#30).

V1 gets rereassigned to Anati (#30).

Toby et al. launch a resistance on the Hork-Bajir Homeworld (#34).

V1 gets tried as a traitor (thanks, Marco) and slated for execution (Visser). V3 becomes V1. This corresponds with the Empire withdrawing from some failed attempts to take other planets.

Eva (after being rescued; thanks Marco) points out that the Yeerk Empire has few territories outside of Earth that aren't being occupied by andalite counter-invasions (#45).

Andalites have occupied Yeerk Homeworld, Taxxon Homeworld, and Sleegab Five, taking them back from Yeerk Empire (#46). Eva knows that the yeerks are trying to convince the andalites that their focus is on Anati, and that their actual focus is on Earth.

Ax persuades Andalite War Council that yeerks are concentrating on Earth, which is a mixed blessing — it gets the andalites to head for Earth, but they plan to annihilate it when they arrive (#46).

Yeerk forces further concentrate on Earth (#51). Eva speculates that they now have 0 other planets, if they've lost Anati.

Jake, Toby, and Eva plan to blow the biggest yeerk pool on Earth to convince the yeerks "Earth isn't worth their time". They know they're making the yeerks some other planet's problem, but need to prevent the andalites from wiping out humanity (#52).

The yeerks are so overcommitted to Earth that blowing the yeerk pool has the opposite effect. New!V1 instead lands the Pool Ship on Earth and throws everything at an open Earth invasion (#53).

Eva, Jake, Arbron, and V17* conspire to both draw andalite forces to Earth and conceal that fact from new!V1. Now all the andalites' and all the yeerks' eggs are in the Earth basket (#53).

Jake corners V1 and forces him to surrender. V17 reveals to the Empire that the andalites are here, and plans to use that chaos to escape with a splinter group. The andalites accept Jake's handing over the Yeerk Empire (#54).

Rachel kills Tom, preventing V17's escape.

Ax and Alloran manage to negotiate Earth remaining independent, even as the andalites take control of the Yeerk Empire.

[domesticadventures]

animorphs #05 ie the first book narrated by marco in which they all get partially dismembered while in ant morphs and barely escape with their lives and marco is understandably like ok. well. that's it for me folks, this is the last mission i'm doing.

but that is NOT enough for one book, oh no. they continue the mission and wind up getting captured by visser three, who thus far has been their biggest, most terrifying enemy, only to meet visser one. and visser one is in the body of marco's mother, who until now he believed died almost two years ago.

and after this, marco questions everything about his mom before her disappearance. he wonders, was that real? was that her? or was that just the yeerk in her head playacting for as long as it had to until it could get away from me?

they finish the mission and then marco, knowing his mom is alive, knowing she's being controlled by a yeerk, knowing he absolutely can't say anything about this to anyone, and in fact hiding it from everyone but jake, who he swears to absolute secrecy - after all that, marco goes with his dad to his mom's grave to commemorate the second anniversary of her supposed death. and while there, something in his dad changes. marco sees the light come back into his eyes. he sees him come back to life. he sees him working towards becoming the dad he was before his wife died.

and then the book ends but you know. you have to wonder how long it took before marco started questioning that, too. is his dad really stepping up, moving forward, for marco's sake? is he really doing it because it's what his not-actually-dead wife would want? or is this just something else marco can't trust. is this, too, just a yeerk playing at being his parent. is it only a matter of time before his dad is gone, too. in the space of one scene, marco gets his dad back in one way and loses him irrevocably in another.

but his mom is alive. and there's a chance he could one day get her back for real. so he'll keep fighting. it's so awful! i'm obsessed

[lakesbian]

v much respect your decision to enjoy animorphs in your own time. hope you're having a good time with it <3

if you have time, i'd love to hear any thoughts you have on aftran and the yeerk peace movement. *The Departure* and *The Sickness* are two of my personal favourites, and I love that rude slug

yeah it's fun :) the more complicated and nuanced politics and the "no species is a monolith" thing is goes w/o saying one of the main reasons why it's endured and why it was so popular. i love the bit in the aftran book where cassie is just literally gaslighting her and she doubts herself for a second. extremely funny how it's continuously a Thing with cassie where being the niceyest sweetest most perceptive special girl also means she's good at manipulating people. coyly and everything. (on a tangentially related note it's also very funny when she shows up to marco's house uninvited to Emotionally Support Him and she insists on him utilizing Proper Host Etiquette by offering her cookies and then when he takes the cookies back from her as a way of insinuating the conversation is over she just grabs the milk he was drinking and keeps talking.) aftran was well written and so were the actual causes 4 the yeerks doing all that beyond cartoony 'they're evil.'

the sickness is also cute it was adorable that ax learned how to play rock paper scissors while he was sick. and cassie petted his head and told him even brave warriors get sick sometimes :). also extremely endeared to cassie (like 4'3 tops) and marco (five foot nothing and his bills all paid) carrying jake (Normal Height, Described As "Big") home in what had to be the world's most lopsided and miserable chair-carry. the animorphs is closed forever because the world's smallest bravest warriors frewed up

[ghostofbriggiesmalls]

<If we use the Time Matrix to win this war we will no longer be Andelites. Not what I think of as Andalites, anyway. We have to win this war by being ourselves. By living up to our own standards, not by becoming as brutal and ruthless as the Yeerks are.> “You mean what’s the point of winning, if by winning you lose what you were fighting for.”

thank god the Animorphs never got political.

[generallemarc]

Animorphs fans, should I get into it as an adult?

I know how long it is, but I saw a post about how Yeerk politics was a Jenga tower and it was incredibly intricate, scarily close to how actual evil empires like the USSR or Nazi Germany worked, and did actually seem to reflect things I saw on tvtropes and the few times i tried to read the books as a kid. It sounds like a treasure-trove of lore with ATLA-levels of kids being written well. Is that accurate? Because if it is, l I know what I'm asking my sister for for Christmas.

[tomberensonsghost]

Yeerks out there inventing new medical therapies to catch an Important Political Figure when all they had to do was have a little kid with a conch shell run up to him at a photo op and be like ‘does this sound wike the ocean, mister?’

[tunashei]

First impressions of Animorphs!

I'm listening to the Animorphs series while I work, through Animorphs Aloud - a fan made reading of the series. Here are my first impressions/random thoughts about them! Spoilers below if you haven't read them.

Book 5: The Predator

Alright we've got Marco POV. I was dreading this one cause I find him a bit whiny and annoying, but I'm actually quite into it! I think seeing his internal thoughts and worries really helps deepen the character.

My suspension of belief is being tested by the idea of punks dumb enough to try and fight a gorilla.

Ok so if you get hurt and then morph, you lose the damage. But what if you have something stuck in you? Like a bullet.

<I am well. And each of you?> Idk why but I love this line. Polite boy. <3

Ax u fucking numpty where the hell are you going. I was not expecting him to be this...air-headed. And of all the foods for him to try first he got COFFEE?! Not gonna end well. Though is an interesting thought, if you could introduce food to someone who'd never eaten before, what would you pick?

---------

“Must I carry this?” he asked, indicating his empty coffee cup.

“No, you can just throw it away.”

Bad choice of words. Ax threw the coffee cup. He threw it hard.

---------

^ This made me laugh out loud at work

Ok so I guess staying undercover is just straight out of the equation now. How are you going to cover up Ax morphing from human to Andalite when he did it in a crowded mall? And then this poor lady watching her lobsters turn into humans/ an alien.

Confirmed can't morph from one animal to another. I thought Jake had done it in book 2 from flea to tiger but turns out I misheard and he did go back to human in between..

The ants lacking the idea of self leading to the group forgetting themselves is legitimately creepy. Imagine if they hadn't regained control, and Tobias watches his friends turn into ants and walk off and they're gone forever...

Put being ripped apart by ants on my list of ways I do not wanna die

Being that this is book 5/54 somehow I doubt this will be Marco's last mission, but considering how against it he's been and the recent traumatising I'm curious what will pull him back. Hoping it will be something that puts the 'should we/shouldn't we' plot point to bed.

You know I really want to know HOW Visser Three got the Andalite body, hope we get to learn that backstory sometime.

AAAAAAAAAAAA Visser One reveal holy shiiit. I KNEW Marco's mom would come back up, but I didn't put the pieces together with Visser One. Haha. Brilliant. I guess this is how we'll be keeping Marco on board.

Oh man the thoughtspeak between Marco and Jake, the only other one to realise. It makes Marcos comments on Tom being a controller in the first books so much juicer. Now you guys have this in common.

Not really sure why Visser Three didn't just kill them then and there

They're in a hurry so can't really blame em but man it would have been good if they could have acquired a Hork-Bajir from the unconscious ones

One thing I appreciate in animorphs is how so far, most of their missions have been failures. This book is probably the biggest failure, they potentially blew their cover with Ax in the mall, got almost killed twice, failed to capture a spaceship and got saved by a Yeerk. I really enjoyed it though, I like Marco a lot more now, I think the big reveal is gonna be great for his character.

[denzartriste]

how would quackity or techno fit into animorphs?

OKay okay. As of my animorph au, which i am putting all these guys in, Techno is stuck between a pig and human because he past the two hour time limit of how long he can be in a morph without being trapped in it, and decided to try and change back at the last minute. Stuck in a weird in between now, which sucks because he basicly can't live his normal life at all anymore - what with the entire "Can't let the yeerks know who the animorphs are". Obviously i AM deviating from the original story a teeny bit, but the yeerks and all that are pretty much the same i think.

I dont super know What would cause Techno to be stuck/not leave a morph for two hours - him forgetting until the last second is a bit silly but also it's the best i have right now. Maybe a dramatic situation where, at the last minute when he realises that it's between revealing himself or being stuck a pig, he'd rather reveal himself and risk the death that comes with it, but it's already to late.

Quackity is a bit trickier - i actually was thinking about him when i posted for characters because i knew there was a chance you'd ask about him (i was correct i was correct) and so i think he would have both a zoo and a casino. And i do think it would be like, either very close together or in the same area. He's a weird man he is Odd he has a zoo next to a casino. Half his staff are bizarre/abnormal. One of them really likes stating he's a human and can list off any biological fact but tends to end it off with some note about how it is Very normal for a human to just have 2 bones. Quackity doesn't question it, because he's being polite and also that sounds like more work than he's willing to do for a man who does his job fine. One of his other employees keeps staring at people and also always wears a hat with moving antenas poking out of it. Q thinks it's some new trend- mechanical hats or something. His skin is also purple but Quackity thinks it a medical condition so he doesn't ask. Another guy has asthma, and quackity didnt know asthma made you cough smoke and also have a phobia of cats and ALSO look a bit green but, again, medical condition. It's rude to ask. Ect ect - It's important to note that Quackity is a fully normal guy without any animorphing powers - And the fact he attracts so many Not Human People to work for him is a shit coincidence. The reason he attracts so many animorphs is because of the zoo, and the fact that animorph need to touch animals to aquire dna to morph into that animal.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Just wondering...do you think David thought-spoke privately with Visser Three in #48 and told him the Andalite Bandits were human and that's why he starts looking in #49? Because that's my headcanon

Oh man, I do NOT know what to make of #48, but I do like this take. If David dropped V3 that hint, and if V3 saw mecha-Rachel as a distorted but still human-looking morpher, I could get behind this.

And you're right that Visser Three is the barrier to figuring out the andalite bandits are human. As early as #4 the kids overhear Temrash 114 and Iniss 226 debating: "is Visser Three wrong? What if they're not Andalites at all?"/ ... "Visser Three wrong? Maybe. But I'm not the fool who's going to try and tell him." Heck, as early as #1 the yeerks are looking for "some kids who were shooting off fireworks in the construction site", and presumably they don't mean andalite kids. So like, clearly some of the controllers are at least open to the possibility of human morphers. The only thing stopping a full-scale human morpher search is Visser Three a) having TWO of the galaxy's biggest andalite supremacists in his brain, and b) having absolute power over the Earth invasion.

So I've always headcanoned that some technician controllers start looking for irrefutable proof of human morphers as early as Elfangor's death, and that it just takes them ~2.5 years to come up with something ironclad. Ax's presence may have slowed the process — he's obviously an andalite and not just someone in morph as Elfangor — and Tobias's ability to stay "in morph" for 2+ hours and to go directly from being "in morph" to a different morph almost certainly muddied the waters. But yeah, maybe it's not that the technicians finally persuaded Visser Three; maybe Crayak engineered it that way.

[fanonical]

rachel: the yeerks are going to replace the mayor!

marco: oh shit!

marco: ...who is that again?

rachel: seriously

marco: i'm twelve, i don't follow politics!

[demenior]

📓 anything Animorphs?

To this day, I still think about writing a really good Animorphs/Avengers story

The ultimate barebones would be:

It's set relatively real-time, meaning that the Ani kids were ~16 in 1999

By 2010 (~Avengers time), the living humans wouldn't even be 30 yet

The Yeerk War went off in secret/was covered up by Shield

Jake never went on his suicide mission/no dealing with The One (yet)

Instead, Jake is employed by Shield for a variety of very secret roles

This changes a lot for me as to whether he was coerced into signing up as a minor and so is stuck in a very tight contract where Fury basically owns hm and Jake is resentful of that (with the trade-off being, so long as Jake is held by Shield, the rest of the gang can live their lives in peace)

Or did he join Shield for the same reason he goes off on the One Last Mission- because he can't leave the war behind

In some versions in my head, no one knows about Jake's powers and he reveals them at a cool moment but ultimately I don't think that's a great idea

The bottom line is always that Jake is devoted to keeping the Yeerk War a secret because that was what he believed was the right choice at the end of the war, but maybe these days he's regretting that decision and unfortunately has to live with his mistakes

Anyways, the story goes: the Avengers are assembled and are the big top dogs because not only did they save the world, they saved the world from alien invasion! They're so cool!

There's also this Jake guy who acts as a bit of a secretary/coffee guy/makes them sign forms etc etc. Obviously Fury wants him to be their new Coulson but like, the kid is a baby compared to the rest of the Avengers

While everyone is polite, no one takes much stock of Jake because he's just a kid! And a little dorky, a bit of a pushover, etc etc

And so from there it would be a series of scenes in which the cast of the Avengers all have moments where they have to do a double take at Jake to try and figure out why their intuition is telling them "something is up here" on the little moments where Jake lets his mask slip

These events could even include dramatics such as:

A mission gone bad and Jake lost a limb or was seriously injured in an explosion, only to show up with no injuries

Jake knowing to much about aliens that visit earth and him (badly) lying that he was going off intuition

Jake always exists as a bit of a morally gray character, who's focus is always on The Greater Good (more like Fury), than the morals of a situation, which can put him at odds with a lot of the Avengers. He's a very 'the ends justify the means' kind of guy.

There was a story where, with the events of The Winter Soldier, Hydra = Yeerk takeover, and so I was going to give Jake a very dramatic and public "Shield (hydra) is declaring this one dude enemy of the state and blaming him for Nick Fury's murder" to which everyone goes "Jake??? But he gets nauseous killing flies??"

And so along this route is how Steve and co would reunite with Jake somewhere and find out about the Yeerk War

There was also a thought about the events of Infnity War, with the Bg Last Stand in Wakanda, where Jake rolls in with his Howler morph and a bunch of the Hork-Bajir colony and remaining Animorphs to fight to defend earth

And so during the big fight Jake would be trying to draw Thanos out, because Thanos would definitely know about Howlers, and Jake would be projecting his Greatest Hits (read: war crimes and victories) through thought-speach to goad Thanos into engaging him, leading to the final showdown in that movie of the team trying to stop Thanos and failing

[nonsensical-shitposting]

oh no i made a new au

Since he’s been a fan of Bug Fables for much longer than me, I decided to run the initial premise for it past my brother to see what he thought. It went something like this.

Me: So I’m calling it the Team Snakereverse AU as a placeholder name for now. The basic idea’s that Vi, Kabbu, and Leif all start off the story in roughly the opposite position from canon. Here, I’ll send you what I’ve written down for them so far.

Him, reading it over: Alright, so to summarize, Vi accidentally became a communist revolutionary, Kabbu got a soul-crushing desk job, and Leif ripped off the Yeerks from Animorphs?

Me: ...that’s grossly oversimplifying it, but I know you’re just trying to be funny, so whatever. Anyway, now I just gotta turn it into a fic...

Him: Okay, but don’t go overcomplicating it. The base concept you’ve got there is good enough on its own. You don’t need to go changing anything else about the canon situation and making more work for yourself-

Me, already having several tabs open in Firefox to research oligarchic thalassocracies in the Middle Ages Mediterranean, the phonology of Panamanian Spanish, tire manufacturing, mercenary organizations throughout history, Jungian analysis, whether there’s any historical precedent for militarist-theocratic diarchy as a system of government, bombardier beetles, and the sociocultural effects of rapid industrialization: -okay, setting aside the issue of reversing Astotheles’ ideological underpinnings while keeping his personality as similar as possible, what if I swap the bandit hideout with Metal Island so the former gets reworked as a kind of underground Las Vegas and the bandits are based out of the latter? That actually works pretty well in conjunction with both the Snakemouth Den-Rubber Prison swap and flipping the Termite Kingdom’s canon isolationism so it’s an imperialist surveillance state- hm, but if I’m gonna go with the idea of the termites seizing a cultural hegemony, I can’t half-ass it, I need to figure out all the ramifications...

Him: WHY DO YOU DO THESE THINGS TO YOURSELF JORDAN

Me, in the process of sketching out a termite anatomy-based political compass equivalent: I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is child’s play compared to the convolution of The Strings We Pull. Ooh, hang on, what if the termites set up a system of submarine-based public transport that takes the place of the ant tunnels in canon? I gotta map this out-

[sarifel-corrisafid-ilxhel]

Visser Three celebrates the Earth holiday known as St. Valentine's Day with Capone-style massacres of his political enemies. Visser One celebrates it with wine, cocaine, and adoption certificates gifted to herself.

Napkin 433 celebrates it the normal way, with festive bits of flotsam, a large cake hidden somewhere in the Yeerk Pool, and a betting pool on how long it will take the Taxxons to find said large cake.

[pretty-rage-machine]

fic author self recs

incredibly touched by @meikuree tagging me! I'm struggling to think of mutuals that I know write fic, haha. I'm a tumblr hermit. Uhh... tagging @misfitmccoward​, @applesofthemoon​, @yeoldesouthpole​, @lostboywriting​, @kitkat-bar​, @transversely, and @mme-yersinia​!

Five of my own fics I’d rec.

🐻🌠👋🗻FRIENDS🍦💎🔪🏄LEND💞🦆🕵️😲A👊👌🤟🙌HAND🤝🧙🔎💖- Gravity Falls, Mabel & Multi-Bear & Hand Witch and a smidgen of Ducktective... sorta.

This fic was a stretch for me but to this day I’m pretty proud of it!  There’s a few rough spots I might massage out if I went back to it, but this story marked the first thing I’ve ever written for Gravity Falls.  It’s a comedy story and the jokes seem to have landed well with people.  It’s also a casefic!  It does a lot of things!  I feel like this story has good energy.  Gravity Falls compels me as a canon because even when it gets dark, there’s always a joke around the corner, and I was trying to go for those vibes here (though this is not what I’d call a dark fic).  I think it holds together and I’m still just really proud of it.

Chimera - Gemini (archive-locked), Heather/Sierra.

As always, on the reread I can see spots I’d smooth out or adjust.  Still, I think this does what I set it out to do: it’s a creepy sexy horror story, written for an exchange and on a deadline, for a fandom I’d never touched before (kudos to the requestee for their incredible prompts tho).  I had a lot of fun writing this story where the MC having killed her stalker only compounds her problems... readers seemed to really get what I was going for with the ending of this too.  How else can you really know your thing has landed?

Incidental Violations of Kel Fraternization Code - Machineries of Empire (archive-locked), Cheris/Jedao.

Someone in the reviews described this fic as ruthless.  Someone else said service top Jedao was living rent-free in their bread after reading this.  Someone else on another website wanted to discuss the fic!  I’m always the moon when someone likes a thing I wrote, but someone wanting to discuss what I wrote?  My heart...!  There is meat on those bones, there is.  There is some staying power in there.

Anyway it’s a Cheris/Jedao missing scene set during the siege in Ninefox Gambit, and it felt like a risk to write and still retrospectively does tbh.  My favorite smut fics also function as character studies, and character relationship studies, and by that benchmark this one feels successful.  I think I wrote this over the period of a few days?  As someone whose writing pace has slowed to a crawl in the past few years, I long to return to the groove.

A Season Under the Kandrona - Animorphs, Aldrea & Alloran & Seerow & Garoff. 

This is set while Andalites were living on the Yeerk homeworld, a really underexplored time period in canon... I’m kind of obsessed with Seerow now tbh?  I love him.  He’s my almost complete nonentity background character blorbo.  I also love Aldrea, with all her vicious, terrible flaws... the Animorphs holiday exchange landed me with a challenge to write a story solely focusing on the aliens.  Yeerk/Andalite politics have always fascinated me.  Aldrea is really young in this story, but I’ve always loved a tale where you know more than the narrator does, and can connect the dots independent of what they think or feel.  Youth and naivete makes for its own type of unreliable narrator.  It was a pleasure to dig back in a canon time period that remains mostly unwritten.

long still sea - Blade of the Immortal, Rin & Anotsu & Hyakurin & Magatsu & Manji, but mostly about Rin and Anotsu.

Written for Yuletide in the space of an afternoon.  How DID I do it?  This was written at a time when I was maximally embittered at the BotI ending, and this is my fix-it, which I still think is a pretty interesting story and an ending I wouldn’t have minded seeing - “more adventures await” is always an implication that, when it appears at the end of a beloved story, heartens me... These days I feel a bit differently about Rin’s final choice in the manga, but at this time I wanted to explore alternative options, and how whatever choices she made, she was going to lose something.  Making the merciful choice - if it even was merciful - was never going to be easy, or unpainful.  I still regard this as a really cohesive piece.

[dionitro]

Ok but you can't tell me that so much of today's politics CANT be explained by Yeerks

[acavatica]

If theres an andalite social hierarchy, then is there an intelligent species social hierarchy? hmmm

Not entirely sure what you mean, but I'd argue there's a social hierarchy any time at least one species can recognize the personhood of the other.

If you mean "do the Andalites have a hierarchy for the other species they know," then yes, absolutely. It's probably based on how much like Andalites the other species are perceived to be. I'd argue that without Seerow, the Andalites would never have accepted the sapience of the Yeerks, and even beyond that, that the Yeerks had to show they were a military threat to gain that recognition and the potential to improve their status. After all, if two countries are at war, they're more equal than if one is subjugating the other.

We don't know enough about the other species to know how the Andalites relate to them. I would imagine the Leerans would have fairly high standing, but the Andalites would keep them at a distance. A chilly, but respectful political relationship. They didn't value the Hork-Bajir based on their perceived intellect. They are openly disgusted by the Taxxons. They're still on the fence about humans, but at least they do look like half an Andalite.