Animorphs - The Entire Series

It's incredibly funny as an adult that the Yeerk that manages to get out of the boiling pool and infest Jake is also astoundingly incompetent at being stealthy

Jake is dumb to be surprised the Yeerk can morph. But all of the animorphs are dumb at one time or another.

The Yeerk showing Jake Tom's mind is the most disturbing thing in this series to me so far. He loved Tom and looked up to him so much. Also makes me rethink Tom throughout the entire series.

How so?

I actually did not remember the yeerk showing Tom's memories. To me, that's equally horrifying - that this parasite can retain your memories and thoughts then play them back to a different host later. It can really just show you a string of broken people to break you

There's a handful of times in the series where we get to see what it's like to be on the receiving end of the animorphs, and it's always terrifying

jesus christ that tom segment

This does sort of make me rethink Rachel killing Tom. I mean, obviously the ideal is to rescue long-term Controllers, but when you know your older brother has spent every day for over a year praying for death as things escalate around him, that might factor into making the call.

EDIT: Definitely feel less bad about boiling those defenseless yeerks now, though! It's really hard to be a 'noncombatant' when your participation at all involves doing that to people.

Just Tom is a whimpering mess, didn't want to go through spoilers but makes me feel a lot worse for him throughout the series as he is forced to do worse and worse stuff to other people, his brother and then he is eventually relieved and thankful for Rachel

Yeah I remembered the entire rest of this book except that Yeerks retained memories.

It shows the potential for Yeerk symbiosis though, in teaching and therapy and...

The most frustrating thing is Yeerks could do a lot of cool, consensual, beneficial things but instead they do this.

Like okay maybe it'd get boring for the Yeerks but then there's a lot of people that'd be willing to trade part time usage of their body, too, so...

As I mentioned earlier, a LOT of people have tweaked to ideas like this and there's a full spate of Symbiotic Yeerk and/or Good Yeerk fan fiction out there that tries to explore these concepts.

I bet it would be really fascinating to see the different ways different people absorb different concepts from the inside, on a neurological level, and how the framework of their perceptions colours the way the integrate they same information etc. But those aren't the kinds of interests you develop waiting in a mudhole for some thirsty monkeys to wander by.

Also Temrash being able to watch and comment on Jake's dreams seems to suggest that the Yeerks are a continuous consciousness, or don't seem to sleep or fall unconscious like other animals do. Meaning they're basically trapped in their immobilized host bodies with nothing to do or no way of exerting control over them for however long it takes for them to complete a sleep cycle.

That'd probably drive anyone nuts night after night. No wonder most Yeerks we meet are completely brainbroke.

Also can Yeerks communicate in the pool

I still want to know how a Yeerk in the pool knows which head being jammed into the pool is theirs

Also worth noting, I feel, is that the Animorphs are being genuinely smart and clever in this part of the book. Yes, they're teenagers and do a lot of dumb teenager things, but they are not stupid and this bit is a good example of it.

Sleeping next to a yeerk infested tiger is probably pretty dumb

The Capture-Chapter 19


Two new races here who have been taken over by the Yeerk....the Ssstram and Mak who we'll never hear about again. I think they were forgotten about.


It must be hard for the Yeerks, who, as I think was mentioned, come from a world with so much less genetic diversity, to deal with the sheer variety of life on the planet....a planet they don't really understand, with life they don't really understand


So that's a pretty big psychological difference between Yeerks and people there.

The Capture-Chapter 20


Tobias is cold.


So this is a little bit more about the Yeerk homeworld here, and their history pre-empire.


Honestly, bastard as he is, I can't help but feel sorry for the Yeerk these past two chapters. He's totally and completely outclassed, and just ultimately pitiful. He's desperately trying to avoid death, but is countered in everything he tries, and is ultimately doomed. Much as he deserves it, I feel bad.

Ax said Yeerks are blind. Maybe he was taking a dip in the Yeerk pool as a Gedd or something.

Also it's too late now but I think Fly would have been his best bet. 4 mph for 2 hours puts you 8 miles out in any direction, then go bird and fly home.

True, but Ax could be wrong or oversimplfying. Ax has never been a Yeerk. And they may have bad enough vision that they're functionally blind.

Yeah even as a kid I thought this was the obvious choice, to the point where Applegate should've had them stick with roaches and not have the fly morph available at all.

"I realized then that there is a very basic difference between Yeerks and humans. A human will fight even when he knows he can't win. Maybe our species is just a little crazy. But human history is full of cases where a handful of guys would fight an entire army. They'd get stomped, but they'd fight anyway. That's not the way it is for Yeerks. They are ruthless. They will do anything, absolutely anything to win. But when the situation is impossible, totally impossible, they stop fighting. They figure that other Yeerks will carry on the fight for them. Different ways of looking at your world."

Hunh. You know, I've read variations on this theme a lot over the years. Never realized that I would've first seen it in Animorphs of all places.

Again, god them if they ever encounter a Yeerk that's crazy or determined enough to not surrender...

My guess is that Yeerks have other senses don't correspond to any human or Andalite senses, and Jake's mind is filtering the Yeerk's memories of its native sensory apparatus as sight.

It's kind of a weird trope when you think about it, because while humans are capable of struggling against all odds, they're also capable of giving in to despair and giving up, which animals, I believe, generally never do. So the idea only makes sense in a fictional setting with intelligent nonhumans who are more prone to giving up than humans are. And yet the way the trope is used (maybe not so much in Animorphs, but in other stories, e.g., Fullmetal Alchemist) often implies that writers see it as a profound observation about real life, rather than something that happens to be true in the setting they've created.

Edit: It's something that occurred to me when reading Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, in which the whiskey priest, encountering a starving animal, reflects that "Unlike him, she retained a kind of hope. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair." And yet when the subjects of hope and the uniqueness of humans come up in genre fiction, it's usually framed the other way around!

100%. "Fuck yeah human determination" is a trope that feels good, but the reality on earth is that humans love to give up. We give up all the time. We give up by leading "lives of quiet desperation" instead of doing what we really truly desire, or we commit suicide, or we quietly withdraw from our own minds and bodies and leave a hollow shell behind: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/the-trauma-of-facing-deportation

I'm now approaching the end of the series as a first-time reader (thanks thread for the inspiration!), and while there are plenty of examples of human grit & nevergiveup-ness etc. in the text, there is also a really compelling & nuanced counter-example in Tobias. He maybe-probably trapped himself in hawk morph to escape his human life, he definitely tries to commit suicide to escape his hawk life, and in book 33 where Taylor tortures him for 50% of the pagecount, he tries to escape into the hawk brain to deal with the physical torture, because animals only focus on the immediate present, and even a shrieking, uncomprehending present of PAIN PAIN PAIN is preferable to seeing an eternity full of neverending PAIN PAIN PAIN stretching out before you. If you can't perceive the future, you can't fall into despair.

of course then she starts pushing the big button labeled "psychological torture" instead, so that strategy stops working for him, but I thought it was a cool reinforcement of your point about animals vs. humans and despair.

I remember book 6 being a big "damn these books don't pull their punches" moment for me as I was getting started with the series. now I'm on 50 and it's kind of sad how much younger and more free the kids seem here compared to their counterparts later on.

yeerk jacuuzi? w/e, flip that bad boy on and let's grab some mcdonalds on the way home

Yeah I re-read the series when I was like 19 or 20 I think, and definitely noticed a marked difference between the sort of optimistic cheerfulness and hope of the early books, then around the middle there's a tone of how wearying this constant guerilla war of attrition has become for them, and by the final third - even as it becomes clear they're probably going to win the war, they know that no matter what they're going to be personally traumatised by everything that happened, forever.

It's a shame that due to single view points per book we won't actually get to see Ax Jake doing his thing.

Having last read these at the age of eleven, I vaguely remembered Ax being kind of a wiener. Maybe I was hoping for another Elfangor?
But on the re-read... Ax is kind of awesome! He's doing great, especially for a more-or-less orphaned kid stranded among aliens in the middle of a warzone.

huh, my childhood memories only have Jake being infested and like nothing else from this book. like the capture/starving being pretty much the whole book, but its really just a small portion isn't it?

It's the last third of the book, but it does loom a lot larger in the mind. I think it's because it's the intense, unique part, while things like "Jake practicing morphing, the kids infiltrating a Sharing meeting/discussing how to stop a Yeerk plot" is sort of routine and not surprising at this point.

It's not every book where a group of teenagers not only consciously decides to imprison a sentient being until it starves to death, literally the only alternative would get them all killed or enslaved and with them probably doom humanity.

Probably would have been too on the nose for the Yeerk to ask them to give him a quick death and voluntarily leave Jake rather than die the slow, agonizing death of starvation.

If the yeerk accepts that it's going to die, why not morph into a fish and take Jake down with it? I guess maybe the fugue mind state means it's not thinking clearly, but the idea must have occurred to it at some point.

I got the feeling that Yeerk admired Jake to some degree. Yeah he would make him a host if he could, but if not I think he wouldn't want to destroy such a unique body for no reason. Like a naturalist wouldn't want to see an endangered lion put down even if it mauled him, or a jockey wouldn't want to see a good horse neglected even if he could never ride it.

Plus Jake did mention that he had fantasies of being rescued right up until the end, and he wouldn't want to be stuck as a roach if that happened.

It's just not a thing a Yeerk would do. Regardless of the accuracy of "humans don't give up ever," the books are pretty consistent that Yeerks do. If they can't win, they don't bother fighting until/unless that changes, even if they could get a taking-you-with-me out of it; they'll sit and wait for the ever-decreasing chance of rescue instead.

Personally, I wonder if that's due to how helpless Yeerks are in their native form. If a Yeerk is in trouble outside a host, it's screwed, end of story. There's no biological impetus to fight on even when survival is improbable because Yeerks are that helpless unless they're in a host.

I'm wondering how much it is that this world is just so much more dangerous than the Yeerk homeworld? Maybe earth life itself is just more competitive and more driven than Yeerk planet life.

I look at it as more of extreme selfishness, as befits a parasitic species.

Why would I care about killing an enemy if it means I die in the process? That doesn't benefit me at all. Way better to sit it out and hope that the situation changes.

While humans can definitely give in to mental despair and hopelessness, we're also the best endurance runners on Earth. Hunter-gatherers will chase antelopes until the latter literally collapse from exhaustion. Horses and some dogs come close, but we've selected them for those traits and have a deep kinship with both. It isn't that extreme to suggest that high endurance is a uniquely human trait. Better than making humans the average yardstick against which other species are balanced by having more strength but less dexterity and so forth.