Animorphs/WMG

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Animorphs

This page contains SPOILERS for the whole series.

All the contradictions within the series are due to Loren using the Time Matrix

When Loren used the Time Matrix to return Elfangor and herself to their own universe, she specified that everyone would remember her being older. Because of this, instead of returning them to their original universe, it created a copy and sent them there. Since it isn't the "true" universe, Cassie's existence causes "glitches". Since no one notices these glitches In-Universe, we must assume that Loren is better at creating universes then Crayak.

  • Doubtful. The reason being that Cassie was grounded to what SHE thought was the correct timeline. Loren's meddling came years before Cassie was born, so Cassie would have no connection to it. It may be the technically true timeline, but Cassie wouldn't see it that way.
    • All they say in the book is that Cassie is "temporally grounded." They don't specify that it has anything to do with when she was born.
    • They say that Cassie was in one timeline but of another and that she had sensed that things weren't right and where she belonged even without her fully realizing it. If all these changes were made before her birth, however, she never would have been a part of the 'true' timeline and thus wouldn't have been even remotely aware of a shift that happened before her time or that she wasn't in a timeline she had no experience with.

KA Applegate is a genius.

Is deconstructing about five-hundred billion idealist tropes in a way that does not make us hate her not genius?

At least some, and possibly all of the characters are Unreliable Narrators

This explains every contradiction in the series.

  • I think it's because some of the ghost writers didn't bother reading any of the books. And there's also KASU's

Tobias became a Nothlit on purpose.

His home life sucked, he had no friends, literally no one cared about the guy, and compared to going back to all of that, the idea of flying all day was just too magical to give up. The merciless reality of the wild didn't set in till he actually had to face it firsthand. Corroborated by the way he spends every single moment he can as a hawk all throughout The Invasion, deliberately using the form as an escape, and in a later book, he refers to the moment he was trapped as a "choice."

  • Cassie hangs a tragic lampshade on this in her first book as narrator. "And Tobias is never happy, period. He thinks if he's ever happy, someone will come along and take his happiness away." Hint: She's right. It's the author.

The Yeerks were forced off Earth after #1 The Invasion, explaining every contradiction

The invasion of the Yeerk Pool was actually a resounding success, and they destroyed the Kandrona then and there. Afterwards the Yeerks left, and were killed by the Andalites, who were not the jackasses the series makes them out to be. Jake decides to write a book about his experiences. However, the other Animorphs found it, made some changes to it, and wrote sequels. THIS explains all the inconsistencies and extreme coincidences. It is simply a work of fiction for the most part.

  • That is an incredibly cynical Literary Agent Hypothesis. Also, poor Tobias.
  • The ending was changed so that, in the book, they didn't destroy the Yeerk Pool. Perhaps Tobias requested that he be allowed to keep his privacy and not have to deal with the fame, and so he became 'trapped.' No one would realize that the still-human Tobias helped save the world and should be famous; whatever other similarities they have, he's not a bird.

The Helmacrons are related to the Generations

Corporate and fungible sound like different terms for the same thing.

Helmacrons are Generations.

The Ellimist never mentions how big Generations are. The Helmacron's "take over the universe" personality could be the result of a charismatic Generation/Helmacron convincing several others that they were destined to rule the universe and then their "infecting" the entire species when they died.

The Skrit Na have the most advanced technology in the universe.

They simply use weaker technology when they visit other planets so that the other people in the universe won't try to steal their technology. Furthermore, they've implemented technology to ensure that the Time Matrix can't be used against them; hence, they took it to the Taxxon world rather then back to their home planet.

  • This makes sense. They were said to be an advanced, space-faring race since before the Ellimist even attained some semblance of godhood.

The unknown ship from the last book was a Space Hulk from Warhammer 40,000. Furthermore, the One is a daemon.

The beings that caused Jake's dream in #41 The Familiar played a large role in the series.

Some of their other actions:

  • Making it so none of the Yeerks would notice that they never encountered Erek's Yeerk in the Yeerk Pool.
    • Why would they notice? It's a big pool with thousands of Yeerks in it. The fact that an individual Yeerk never encountered Erek's wouldn't be surprising and they would have no reason to poll people on whether they've ever encountered that particular Yeerk since it infested Erek.
  • Putting the Animorphs' excess mass in a location where it would be hit by the Ascalin.
  • Preventing Tobias's injuries from healing during In the Time of the Dinosaurs.
    • If you read behind the scenes stuff, that was because KAA forgot about it
  • "Hiding" the Morphing Cube where David would find it.
  • "Telling" the former Visser Four where the Time Matrix was hidden.

Erek and the Chee brought the Time Matrix to Earth.

The Ellimist created both the Time Matrix and the Pemalites. The Pemalites created the Chee. The Skrit Na finding the Time Matrix is the catalyst to Elfangor and Loren's adventure, which is the catalyst to Visser Three and Elfangor's rivalry, which ends in Elfangor creating the Animorphs. Obviously, the Ellimist wanted all of this to happen. He had his "grand-creations" bring the all-important Time Matrix to Earth and set the whole mess in motion. The clincher? The Time Matrix was found beneath a pyramid, and Erek mentions helping build them soon after arriving on Earth.

  • Elfangor brought the Time Matrix to Earth when he came with Loren during The Andalite Chronicles.
    • Yes, but they only got their hands on the Time Matrix AFTER the Skrit Na took it out from under the pyramid. The whole reason Elfangor, Arbron and Alloran went chasing after the Yeerks and Skrit Na was to get the Time Matrix back. Their original mission was just to drop Loren and Chapman off on Earth and erase their memories.

Elfangor and Aldrea (and, by extension, Tobias and Toby) are descended from the Ellimist.

The Ellimist spent time as an Andalite and had Andalite children. Somewhere waaaaaay back in Elfangor and Aldrea's family histories are one of those kids. This is why the Ellimist is so interested in Elfangor and Tobias, and why he brought Toby into his master plans.

  • Although, since it was literally millions of years in the past, this would probably hold true for a huge chunk of the Andalite population. Hm, that's probably how they developed thought-speak.
    • It was mentioned that they had thoughtspeak before he got there, but thoughtspeak was rudimentary in much the same way as the speech of early humans likely was. The Ellimist breeding with the Andalites gave their offspring a boost in inteligence. All living Andalites are his descendants.

Rachel doesn't die; she is saved by Crayak, who erases her memories and uses her as a minion, sort of like the Drode.

Crayak and the Drode were showing way too much interest in her potential to let her disappear.

This might be part of an agreement with the Ellimist - conveniently, Rachel only dies once the war is won. Crayak and the Ellimist had struck a deal where the Ellimist could keep her as one of his pawns for the duration of the war against the Yeerks, and then Crayak could get her. (Her choice in #7 should have removed her from the front lines of the war.)

  • As an extension, the Ellimist told her his backstory because he knew he'd be sending pawns against her. He was hoping that she'd remember at some level and switch sides back to him several millennia into the future.

Rachel becomes a servant of the Ellimist.

She's already openly rejected Crayak's offers; it was a moot point by #48 when she realized that no power he could give her was worth the price of her soul. But notice how she only dies when the war is over. She was an important servant of the Ellimist during the war. Once she died, he was able to bring her in on the game. Crayak has the Drode, so we know they can have direct servants. And Ellimist made a point of comforting her and explaining to her why things are the way they are, explaining the secrets to her at last.

It's likely that, when she died, Ellimist would take her into their higher dimension and make her one of his ambassadors. This would mean that she still exists. Therefore, since the war is threatening to erupt anew, she may have reason to assist the remaining Animorphs.

  • Agreed. As much as Crayak wanted her, he probably made an agreement with The Ellimist about who would get her if she died. It went along the lines of Crayak getting her if she died in battle or in a moment of anger (in his opinion, the most likely scenario), and The Ellimist getting her if she died at peace or in a moment of clarity. During her Heroic Sacrifice, one of her last words was "I love you" -- a moment of clarity! The Ellimist then swoops in and brings her up to speed so she can understand what she's going to do from now on.
  • Related: Starfish!Rachel is how he can pull this off. She's dead, but as long as she's serving the Ellimist, it can be arranged that only half of her persona is dead.
    • But which half? The Ax Crazy half or the Shrinking Violet half? Neither seem very useful.
    • Wimpy Rachel. Confidence and directness can be taught, and the Ellimist has all the time in the world (and then some) to do it in.
  • Or maybe the Ellimist just assimilated her consciousness.

All the extremely unlikely events that worked in the Animorphs' favor were moves made by the Ellimist in his game against Crayak

This includes the Time Travel incident that warned Jake against stealing the bug fighter, the morphing cube surviving the destruction of Elfangor's ship, and their mass in z-space being snagged by an Andalite ship.

  • Sounds logical. It's a convenient Hand Wave because they are a pair of "gods" in this universe playing galactic chess with the space-time continuum. In fact, there are quite a few moments like that, where it seemed someone was intervening. Good theory.
  • Visser Three is incompetent because the Ellimist put a stupid, murder-happy Yeerk who fights with a sledgehammer and kills anyone with the brains and gut to make useful suggestions like how the 'Andalite bandits' may be human in charge of the important invasion of Earth. Seriously, Chapman and co. mentioned the possibility in #4 The Message but nooo the Visser will eat them for breakfast. In the Andalite Chronicles the Ellimist put Elfangor back to 'fix' the timeline but left things that would benefit him, like Tobias' existence, as they were. Visser Three's promotion from the capture of Alloran, "the greatest intelligence victory in Yeerk history," could have been one of them. That's how that idiot of a Yeerk ended up in charge of Earth.
    • He seems smart enough in the Hork-Bajir and Andalite Chronicles but I guess on the other hand, he did completely forget about his original host when trying to infest Aldrea and completely forgets how useful he finds the idea of a stealthy infestation by the time the main series comes around. He did also manage to infest Alloran but his plan for that seemed mostly to rely on other people being stupid and/or unobservant. If Elfangor hadn't seen Chapman capture Loren there would have been no reason to think the Yeerks ever got ahold of them but he didn't seem to have a real plan for capturing Alloran. Had Elfangor not refused once again to kill those Yeerks and Alloran not refused to let it go and had Elfangor not panicked and knocked Alloran out and then immediately left the humans alone with him, it wouldn't have happened so it might very well have been more blind luck than skill.
    • He seems to have risen to power mostly by being the first, and probably for a long while the only, Yeerk to study the Andalites. He was the only person to know the best way to defeat Andalites, so he won more and got promoted. It was mentioned in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles that he was obsessed with powerful Andalites. When he infested Aldrea, he couldn't wait to open her memories and feel what it was to be an Andalite. Having an Andalite host became his ultimate goal; once he got what he wanted, he became giddy and a little unmotivated.

The Ellimist put the morphing cube in Elfangor's ship

Why would he be carrying the Escafil device around in his personal fighter? The Ellimist simply popped one into being after Elfangor staggered out of his ship, having already cleared the Animorphs' creation with Crayak (as implied in Back to Before).

Elfangor suddenly realized that he could give morphing to the humans because the Ellimist just zapped his head with that knowledge, in the same way Tobias suddenly knew about the would-be Hork-Bajir valley in The Change. Let's face it, the guy usually operates via Dei Ex Machina.

  • That leaves the question of how he even knew it was there. Did the Ellimist inform Elfangor of this fact after he crashed, did he just spot it in the ship, what?

The Gardens is Six Flags Marine World in Vallejo, California

(Now known as "Six Flags Discovery Kingdom".)

Think about it: It's been revealed that the series takes place in California somewhere. Both The Gardens and Marine World combine elements of a theme park, a water park, a zoo, and an oceanarium. No other park in California (or the West Coast) is like that.

  • Jossed by reality, as Marine World didn't become a part-theme park until 1997, when the series (which launched in 1996) implied the Gardens had been that way at least since the Animorphs were young children.

A morpher's mind goes to Z-space with his or her original body and controls the morphed body remotely.

It's like Neon Genesis Evangelion's EVAs. At one hour, there is 100% synchronization, and the mind is equally split between the original, grounding body and the morphed, controlled body. At two hours, when synchronization hits 200%, the mind is more used to the morphed form than the original form, and it can't go back and switch the bodies at the same time. A nothlit cannot regain the morphing power because the natural link to his or her own body has been severed; the artificial link to the morphed body is not strong enough to handle the morphing process.

That time the animorphs got stuck in z-space had nothing to do with the size they tried morphing. It was because of the lack of a proper mental link.

Time spent in morph counts toward how hungry the original body is, but not vice versa, because the original body is kept intact while the morphs are made from and returned to the nothing in z-space.

  • Makes sense. There aren't enough neurons in some of the smaller morphs' brains (such as the insect morphs) to support the mental processes of a fully functional human mind.

The One was the being that caused Jake's hallucination in The Familiar, hoping to study humans before he had to fight them directly.

Furthermore, The One is also the being that forced Crayak out of his own galaxy before he met the Ellimist.

The Yeerks are the victims in the series, the Andalites are the bad guys, and the Animorphs (for the most part) are pawns who do what Andalites tell them.

It is incredibly important to note that a Yeerk taking a host is a natural function. Humans kill animals to eat; the human thrives at the expense of the animal. This is not good, but it is natural. Similarly, Yeerks take hosts - they benefit at the expense of the host body. This is not good, but it is natural. To expect Yeerks to not take bodies is akin to expecting humans to not eat meat -- it can be arranged, but it will cause discomfort and difficulties, especially if they are breaking an established habit.

One must note that while Yeerks themselves are good usually no more bastardly than the average human, there can be genuinely evil Yeerks.

Now, let's review the evidence:

  • Initially, Yeerks are in a pitiful position - they are blind, they are deaf, and their existence essentially is swimming around a pool until they die. But they can live and learn if they take the bodies of other creatures. They initially do this with Gedds, who form a symbiotic relationship with them.
    • A symbiotic relationship with the Gedds? This troper seems to recall that the Gedds were enslaved just as surely as the Hork-Bajir or Humans or Leerans or any of the other species that the Yeerks infested. Just because they lived on the same planet and are apparently fairly stupid doesn't mean that they are not aware enough not to have a sense of what is happening to them, etc.
  • The Andalites arrive and share technology with them but do not permit them to leave their home planet, thereby making the technology useless. Andalites also are the first to introduce the concept of parasitism to Yeerks. Until then, they did not know that what they were doing was parasitism (Dumb Is Good) -- and as long as the host was willing, it really wasn't. There is a difference between being a symbiote and being a parasite. Furthermore, Andalites degrade Yeerks whenever the opportunity arises:
    • "Orders are to prevent incidents. Don't you know these parasites are our brothers?"
    • "I'm not letting these filthy slugs touch my ship."
  • The Andalites essentially subjugated the Yeerks, making them second-class citizens on their own planet just because they followed their natural function back when that was simply symbiosis.
  • Also note that the Andalites freely walk around and form complex societies while prohibiting Yeerks to do the same, just because Yeerks need hosts to have a society.
  • The Yeerks rebel and take an Andalite ship, which causes the war. Andalites now freely kill Yeerks for things that they themselves do, which is why Yeerks often call Andalites hypocrites.
    • Informing the Yeerks about space travel without sharing it was very much a jerkass move on the part of the Andalites, but it’s a stretch to call it subjugation. They had Gedd hosts. There was nothing stopping them forming complex societies and living fulfilling lives on their home world. Humans have managed alright without faster than light travel so far. Refusing to share space technology with the Yeerks certainly isn’t equivalent to enslaving them. Especially not to the absolute And I Must Scream slavery that unwilling hosts are subjected to.
  • The Yeerks now need hosts and are now willing to resort to true parasitism. They successfully take Hork-Bajir hosts and beat back the Andalites, who try to stop them.
    • The entire war could have been averted if the Andalites had offered to allow the Yeerks to morph and become nothlits in a body of their choice. Hell if the Andalites hadn't been such collosal assholes, they could have offered themselves up for aquiring on the yeerk homeworld and suddenly, instead of a planet full of yeerks, you have a planet full of nothlit andalites.
      • No, the war could have possibly be ENDED by doing this but we don't know if the technology even existed at the time that the Yeerks escaped their planet and it was really new when Aldrea got ahold of it because her friend's mother worked on it. Morphing was still so new when the Hork-Bajir fell that Aldrea was able to walzt right in as Alloran when the Andalites actually recognized Dak standing next to her.
  • When the Yeerks arrive on Earth, they attempt to mix with human society, albeit with a goal in mind. The Animorphs start a violent guerilla war, attacking Yeerks wherever they're discovered. They are joined by a ruthless Andalite soldier-in-the-making. Over the course of the series, the Animorphs kill hundreds of Yeerks in surprise attacks, rarely giving the Yeerks a chance to defend themselves.
  • Note Jake's extreme ruthlessness in the final battle, where he slaughters seventeen thousand defenseless Yeerks. When he hears this news, Visser One suffers psychological defeat. He seems genuinely hurt by what Jake has done:
    • said Visser One dryly. <And all our brothers in the pool murdered by these humans...>
  • This entire war starts with the Yeerks doing what they have to do to survive as a sentient race. It's akin to someone murdering you and calling you evil because you need protein to live.
  • Several quotes, such as Cassie's conversations with Karen, hint that the Yeerks may be victims in all of this. Brought home when the kids discuss bombing the Yeerk pool, which is dangerously similar to a terrorist attack:

"They can't help being what they are!"

  • Also, several hints are dropped that Andalites in general are bad guys (though Ax probably isn't). Andalites only look out for number one. They fuck around for the entire series instead of saving Earth; when they do arrive, they're more than willing to blow up the entire planet to stop the Yeerks, despite the millions of innocent humans that would have died. Also, Andalites hate the disabled because they are "incomplete" and therefore useless. A quote from Dak Hamee sums it up:

"We have fought side by side with your people and you Andalites still treat us like inferiors! Like errand-runners or servants or like idiot clowns to amuse you! ... You Andalites have more respect for the vicious Yeerks or the cowardly Am than you have for the Hork-Bajir who fight and die at your sides. All that matters to your people is intelligence. Well, I've learned enough about Yeerk and Andalite and Arn intelligence to make me sick ... Let me tell you something: We may be simple people. But we don't use biology to invent monsters. And we don't unleash a plague of parasites on the galaxy, endangering every other free species, and then go swaggering around like the lords of the universe. No, we're too simple for all that. We're too stupid to lie and manipulate. We're too stupid to be ruthless. We're too stupid to know how to build powerful weapons designed to annihilate our enemies. Until you came, Andalite, we were too stupid to know how to kill..

      • Granted, he was talking about Hork-Bajir, not Yeerks; but every attack he makes on Andalite character is dead on the mark.
  • In conclusion, Yeerks are victims who take hosts because there is no better alternative for them. Andalites are hypocritical, arrogant, irresponsible douchebags.
  • So, is it okay for humanity to fight back against the Yeerk invaders like the Yeerks fight against the Andalites, or are the Animorphs somehow guilty for doing what the Yeerks do?
  • The Yeerks got a REALLY unfair lot. They're a sentient organism trapped in And I Must Scream body, and the only way to end that is to inflict it on something else. Even if they didn't target sentients, the mere threat of such is enough to make any sentient race hostile to them out of fear of being made pod-people, which will force the Yeerks to fight back and do just that, which is indeed EXACTLY what happened.
  • Yes, but Elfangor wasn't lying when he said the Yeerks were trying to turn humans into slaves, and the Yeerks we meet tend to agree with Elfangor. So, either it is morally wrong to impress your will on another species, like the Andalites did to the Yeerks and the Yeerks are doing to us, and the proper response is to fight back. Or there are no moral considerations, and every species should, first and foremost, do what they can to ensure their own survival. In this case, the Andalites are not wrong for fighting the body-stealing Yeerks, Yeerks are not wrong for enslaving various species like the Taxxons and Humans for their own benefit, and Humans are not wrong for accepting Andalite help in dealing with alien slavers.
  • The entire notion that the Yeerks are living in these sad, deprived bodies in their natural state (as explained primarily by Aftran) never made much sense to me. Living as a slug would seem that way to humans because we are used to our senses, but why would you crave sensations that are not inherent to your species? Do humans feel deprived and incomplete that they can't use echolocation as the Yeerks can? Do Andalites become nothlits with mouths in order to experience taste? Well, Ax might disprove that last one...
    • Point being, this troper has a hard time believing that the Yeerks were SO hard up before infestation because they wouldn't have known any different. If a Gedd on the Yeerk home world hadn't fallen face first into the pool and one of the Yeerks hadn't decided to burrow into its ear canal (erm... however it happened...) they would probably have been content in their natural state. And anyway, they are not really true parasites because they use their hosts for recreation, essentially, not survival. In fact, to get the one thing that is imperative for their biological survival, Kandrona rays, they have to abandon their "parasitic" role.
      • It's mentioned in the books that living without, say, eyes isn't too bad until you actually get eyes - then you want them all the time. Visser Three was happy enough swimming around in the pool, but when he infests a Gedd for the first time he reflects on how dreary and limited his life actually was.
      • Parasitism is defined as "a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host." It says nothing about whether the parasite needs its host to survive. Also, that was one of the points Aftran made. Before the Yeerks infested someone, they were perfectly content. We know from the Hork-Bajir chronicles that all Yeerks infest at least a Gedd for a short period in order to figure out how to control a host. Once this is done, those that liked the experience and had their previous existence ruined by the new sensations they could have if they infested someone are the ones that go around infesting people. Since the flight from the Yeerk homeworld, ALL Yeerks understand what else is out there so it doesn't matter that theoretically they could live their lives never knowing the difference if they hadn't infested anyone.
  • One of the main themes of the series is that there is no black and white that you can apply to such a complex situation. Yeerks are not all evil and Andalites are not all good, but the reverse isn't true either. One more thing that needs to be remembered when making comparisons of the Andalites is that we see a very limited number of them in the series, and those we do see are almost completely exclusively military. IIRC, Book 54 says that civilian Andalites are somewhat different.
  • Dude, humans ARE horrible to eat meat. We don't have to. We have the technology not to.We're barely missing out on anything, but hey, we're taking lives in gruesome fashion because it tastes good! Trust me, if I had the power or technology to forcefully stop humans from eating meat, I would. On the other hand, Yeerks are deprived of much more than humans are without their hosts. But say a tiger hunts its prey. Does the prey go: "Oh, well, I understand your position and deem you morally correct in your actions," and go ahead and let itself get eaten? No! Of course not. The tiger does what is most beneficial to it. The prey to it. Or, at least beneficial in a way that doesn't leave room for it to think about universal happiness. Unlike people.

There is no Crayak.

The Ellimist's experiences with Father are enough to drive anyone off the deep end. After he defeats Father, he absorbed dozens, if not hundreds, of minds. He had more knowledge than anyone was ever meant to have, and he explicitly mentioned the sensory overload and impulses to move body parts he didn't have.

All of this, combined with the millenia he spent wandering alone, drove him crazy. And then the Crayak shows up, an opponent who is always strong enough to challenge him and to drive him to greater achievements, but never quite good enough to defeat him.

The Crayak is a split personality the Ellimist unknowingly created to give himself purpose in what would otherwise have been a long, lonely life.

  • So then, the Ellimist and Crayak are the Sentry and the Void respectably?
  • "Never quite good enough to defeat him"? When he first showed up, it was the other way around. They played games across the galaxy and Crayak always won (or won disproportionately often). Sure, he didn't kill Ellimist outright, but that's because he was toying with him and probably appreciated having a near equal as much as Ellimist did. It was only after Ellimist ran away and Took a Level in Badass that they actually turned their considerable power against each other.
    • That wouldn't invalidate the theory. So the Ellimist's crazy side was stronger than him. It's happened before.
      • Which logically leads to…

Crayak is Tyler Durden.

See above.

K.A. Applegate is a Controller.

The Yeerks do exist, and she wrote the books to ensure that no one would believe anyone who told them that the world was being invaded by alien slugs.

    • Whoever wrote this theory is also a Controller, taking advantage of the fact that TV Tropes generally dismisses every WMG concerning reality as "not real, just for a laugh/making some odd sense." Therefore, you, writer, are trying to make us think your theory is too wacky to be true. And it almost worked...Tom.

Everybody on TV Tropes is a controller.

Tropes Will Ruin Your Life, after all. Glory to the Empire.

Marco has an Oedipus complex.

Which explains why he describes his mom the way that he does.

  • For which one?

Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas is the theme song of Tobias

Just listen to it. I am convinced this song had something to do with his character development somewhere along the line.

  • If Book 23, The Pretender, is ever (seriously) adapted into something, this song should play over the credits.

Visser Four from #18 The Decision and Megamorphs #3 is Visser Two from #46 The Deception

Ok, bear with me for a moment. First of all, Visser Two is unlikely to be the "missing" visser from the earlier books because he's fiercely loyal to Visser One (that is, Esplin 9466, formerly Visser Three) and it would be extremely out of character for a Yeerk Visser to show so much loyalty to someone promoted ahead of them like that. So it stands to reason that Visser Two was a lower ranking visser who got promoted at the same time as Visser Three. In #18 a Leeran controller mentions that Vissers Three and Four are very good friends. Visser Two doesn't remember the events of Megamorphs #3 because that timeline was erased, and the Animorphs don't recognise him because he has a different rank and host.

  • Then what happened to Visser Two? Err, pre-Big Promotion Visser Two? Well, he or she could've been offed by the Council, either for supporting Visser One somehow or for unrelated incompetence (perhaps Two finally cost the Yeerks the Anati system somehow?). But, since this is Wild Mass Guessing, maybe Two got promoted - to the Council. After all, even Yeerks die of old age eventually.
    • Promoted to the Council? Oh my god, Visser Two is Garoff (the Council spokesman in Visser)
    • The Council is elected, not appointed.
      • Says who? That doesn't sound very Yeerkish, and it doesn't mesh with the Council's stated purpose in Visser (to basically be twelve decoys in case anyone tries to assassinate the Emperor).
        • But the reason that the former Visser Four infested John Barryman in the first place was because he was demoted following the loss on Leera. Why would the Animorphs making it so the former Visser Four had to infest somebody else get him promoted back up to Visser Two so quickly? He was hardly going to be in a position to do anything spectacular to regain his rank after Leera.
        • He called in a favour from his "very good friend" Visser Three. Probably the same way he might have ended up on Earth to find the Time Matrix in another reality, come to think of it. If that's what happened, it would further explain his unflinching loyalty to Visser One (formerly Three) once he becomes Visser Two.
        • That does make sense. Had Visser Four not discovered the Time Matrix when he was controlling Barryman, he would have still ended up being Visser Two because Visser One wanted to have someone powerful on his side for once.

Everything in the book, from Yeerks to Andalites, are real. The world is currently being controlled by Yeerks

K.A. Applegate is warning us.

  • But Yeerks are smarter than most of the people leading our world, and they would need the environment to stay decent so they can keep their hosts alive and actually enjoy having good host bodies.
  • Ax states outright that they'll wipe out whatever they don't see as strictly necessary for producing and making hosts. Most of Earth's biodiversity can go fuck itself as far as they're concerned. Just look at what they did to the Hork-Bajir homeworld.
    • Yeah, but Ax was spoonfed Andalite propaganda. He's not exactly a reliable source on Yeerk plans.
      • Define "decent." Hosts can live in much less than ideal conditions. And even if the Andalites are completely lying about what the Yeerks do to planets, we saw the Hork-Bajir Home World and the Taxxon Home World as well as two nightmare futures of Earth where it indicated that Ax was totally right. And Temrash seemed convinced thath if nothing else the Yeerks would go about wiping out thousands of species just for convenience.

World leaders who don't appear to care about the environment are trying to make things worse for the Yeerks.

If the environment is hostile to us, then it'll be even more hostile to the Yeerks when they take over.

Then again, if the world leaders cared, then they would just start a nuclear war.

The Ellimist is the G-Man, or vice-versa

The Ellimist's ability to stop time - and his use of it to deliver exposition and orders to the heroes - is suspiciously similar to everybody's favorite briefcase-carrying Chessmaster. Even their MOs are the same, using carefully-placed pawns to fight "evil". Both of them appear as ordinary humans, but there is almost always something not quite right with them. Sure, the Ellimist is, on the surface, kinder, but he doesn't have the strictly-professional Doctor Freeman to work with, he has a bunch of teenagers. Brings up the question of what Crayak is doing, though...

Someone (Crayak? The One?) created the Yeerks.

Think about it: how the hell could they have evolved naturally? Did the local animals fall head-first into a pool every ten minutes? Even if they did, what advantage would there have been to traveling that way before they evolved their control abilities? The abilities couldn't have come first, there would be no point.

  • Entirely possible and likely, though given the Elimist and the Rules, its more likely that if Crayak made them simply engineered them from something already existing. Elimist created the Pemalites and Chee, and by The Rules, this allowed Crayak to make the Howlers, who were set against and defeated the Pemalites. Elimist modified the Andalites by giving them Thought-Speak and Uplifting them a bit, so its only fitting that in response, Crayak gave the Yeerks the ability to pull a Grand Theft Me and set things up to set his engineered creatures against the Elimist's, just like he did their wholly original creations.
    • The Pemalites (and possibly the Howlers) were created before The Rules. If Crayak did create the Yeerks, he would probably have done so around the same time (I say probably. The timeline's a little hazy for The Ellimist Chronicles, what with all the dinosaurs and proto-Andalites). The Yeerks would have had to have been around for some time, assuming the Iskoort really are related (which really must be the case, considering)

Crayak is the good guy and the Ellimist is the bad guy

The Crayak wanted the Iskoort destroyed so the Yeerks (his chosen race) would never submit to the tyranny of the Andalites (the Ellimist's chosen race). The andalites have proven ruthless and manipulative, and the Crayak wanted to prevent the militial destruction of Earth, under the guise of "defending the universe's sentient races." The yeerks couldn't try to find a paceful alternative, because the moment they did, the andalites would decimate them in order to rule the cosmos. Which is also why the andalites get involved in conflicts: to get rid of any race that may interfere with their universal monopoly. All along, the Crakay has been trying to destroy races with potential for aggression. Since the Ellimist engineered the andalites, the crayak couldn't touch them, so instead made the yeerks develop into what would eventually threaten the andalites' control. The ellimist used time-shifting and elfangor to construct a team of wildcards to ensure the andalite race's dominance in the universe. Also, the Kelbrid are fairy tales imposed by the high command to make them seem to be peacemakers.

Some selfish-gene speculations about Yeerk evolution

The first datum to explain is that the Yeerks obviously have a very strong drive for individual status. The second point is that they have a very un-individualistic means of reproduction: the individual Yeerks who reproduce die in the process, and produce hundreds of offspring at a time. The third point to remember is that Visser Three and the other high-status Yeerks live a long time without ever reproducing: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles implies that Visser Three is one of the oldest Yeerks alive today, and he is about forty years old. Which may not sound that old, but remember that most animals on Earth have a far shorter life expectancy than that--especially animals with the size and fecundity of the Yeerks.

Anytime the species produces hundreds of offspring for every three parents, it has to be the case that only a few individuals are the lucky ones who get to have distant descendants. It's also the case that only a small minority of Yeerks get to control a host species, and most of them don't.

Now, the thing to keep clear is that the drive to infest a host and climb the status hierarchy wouldn't be there if it weren't helpful in a strategy to be one of the Yeerks who does reproduce (possibly an unconscious strategy rather than one deliberately pursued). The desire to have a powerful position and a strong host seems obvious to humans and also to Yeerks, but the Yeerks would only evolve to be motivated this way if it helps them reproduce. If the best way to reproduce were to just be hanging around the Yeerk pool at the right time, then evolution would favor the Yeerks who spent all their time in the Yeerk pool, and not exploring the world in a Gedd body. And this is so even though it's presumably beneficial to the group to have plenty of Yeerks with host bodies, who can do far more things in the world than a mere unhosted Yeerk.

From here it's obvious that the Yeerks in hosts must be the same ones who reproduce. It's most likely that the actual process of reproduction uses nutrients that are only available to the Yeerks who have a Gedd host. And in fact, if the Yeerks with hosts have these fierce competitions with each other, it's likely that it even matters which Gedd they live in, that a Yeerk may need to be living in one of the best Gedds before it has a chance of reproducing properly.

So that's the ancestral environment that Yeerks evolved for: a world with Gedd hosts that are needed for reproduction, and apparently no other useful hosts. On the other hand, things are different today, with all the other host species. And it certainly doesn't seem that the highest-status Yeerks today, the Council of Thirteen and the Vissers, are the ones who reproduce. They also have their choice of host bodies, and they choose to inhabit one of their strong host races rather than a Gedd. Just as some men would rather pursue status and become Pope, even though they will have no descendants that way; so most Yeerks would rather pursue status and become a Visser, live in a powerful Hork-Bajir (or human, or Andalite) host body, and still leave no descendants. Their status-seeking instincts tell them that the stronger host bodies are the best ones to live in, and the Gedds are much weaker than most other host bodies. But in terms of reproductive activity, the Yeerks who live in an actual Gedd are the ones who reproduce, and so in the Yeerk Empire today, there is no longer a correlation between very high status and reproductive success. (But the Yeerks who live in a Gedd are still higher-status than the unhosted Yeerks, and probably higher than certain other low-status species in the Empire. Also, it's likely that high respect is attached to reproduction itself even though it obliterates the individual identity of the Yeerks who participate in it.)

So that's the situation with the Yeerks: The life story of an evolutionarily successful Yeerk would be to infest a Gedd, reproduce, and probably take only five or six years at most to do so. But the successful Yeerks today, like all of the Yeerks who the Animorphs meet, are the ones who win the competition for a powerful host like a Hork-Bajir or human; and their life doesn't end after five or six years since they're not reproducing, it's the Yeerks who were inhabiting a Gedd. It kind of explains a lot about the perverse cultural values we see in Visser, where the Yeerk Empire is fanatically focused on power and Visser One is on a trial in which her worst offense was being a loving mother. This is also why Aftran explains the Yeerk reproductive cycle as if even she finds it paradoxical and embarrassing, and she didn't address the question of which Yeerks it is who reproduce--although from an evolutionary standpoint, this is a very important question. It's also rather surprising that the Yeerks the Animorphs never actually meet any Gedds and hardly ever even have to think about them, until you consider how the Gedds must occupy an unusual position in any species that naturally evolved to have a close relationship with the Gedds, but is exploring the artificial possibilities of infesting all kinds of other species.

  • Just a minor point to start with, where is it implied that Esplin 9466 is one of the oldest Yeerks alive, because it seems to me that The Hork-Bajir Chronicles implies just the opposite! To be specific, it (and subsequent books) implies that the Andalites blockaded the the Yeerk homeworld and never left (The Andalite Chronicles be damned) so all the Yeerks on Earth are descended from those who left in that original group. But most Yeerks featured in the series give their home pool as part of their name, the most common of which is Sulp Niar which we know from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles is on the Yeerk homeworld! This seems to me fair, if circumstantial evidence that Esplin is in fact one of the youngest Yeerks featured, and where exactly is this contradicted?
  • While we're on genetics, Yeerk chromosomes are in triads, not pairs. Why else would three individuals be needed for mating?
  • There doesn't necessarily have to be a direct link between taking hosts and reproducing in order for the Yeerks' evolution to make sense. Yeerks are social animals. So even individuals who don't reproduce themselves can indirectly pass on their genes by helping their relatives. A few Yeerks with hosts to guard against predators would greatly contribute to the survival of their entire pool. If those controllers have plenty of siblings in the pool, then they’re increasing the chances of DNA very similar to their own getting passed on, regardless of if they reproduce themselves are not.
  • A simpler explanation for requiring host bodies is that inbreeding is genetically disadvantageous, so it would be advantageous for Yeerks to travel beyond their own pools when searching for the two other Yeerks with whom they would mate (combined with the "protect the pool" school of thought above). Furthermore, there are parasites on Earth that invade their hosts' brains and control them, so it's not hard to imagine that Yeerks could evolve a more advanced form of that. This especially could hold true if Gedds needed to drink from the pools in which the Yeerks live; if Gedds have orifices that would grant Yeerks access to their brains on the parts of their bodies they use to drink from the pools, then it would be a simple matter for Yeerks to evolve to invade said orifice (imagine if we had our ears on our cheeks). No regular-falling-head-first-into-pools issue there.

Crayak or the Ellimist created the taxxons as a joke

It would be an understatement to say that the taxxons kinda suck. While they are immensely intelligent and evidently very good pilots, the simple fact is, they're giant fluid-filled condoms that will break into a feeding frenzy at the sight of blood. In other words, you have a creature whose fragility is virtually a running gag, and who'll completely wig out and cannibalize one another, or even themselves given the slightest suggestion of a chance. At a lesser scale, this wouldn't be so bad. We're physically unimpressive, but good with technology, even though our brains can make us do silly things. But consider a human controller, like Tom. He sees his family constantly, knowing the yeerks are going to get them, but his yeerk maintains perfect control of him at all times. A taxxon controller, aboard the Blade Ship with Visser Three no less, sees the animorphs and gets cut in half for his trouble. Rather than say something, it immediately sees its blood-soaked ass sitting in front of it, and starts chowing down.

So we have a species of bulbous, fluid-filled condoms that could probably be busted open by harsh language, who have a feeding instinct apparently greater than self preservation, or the preservation of one's loved ones, and is triggered by blood. Imagine what taxxon controllers go through. Imagine one of their coworkers getting a papercut. For the love of Crayak, they're water balloons perched atop dozens of little needles!

I cannot see natural selection favoring these guys under any circumstances. And we've already established that the Ellimist and Crayak have both created life forms that they like(Ellimist has the pemalites, Crayak has the Howlers). Is it a stretch to say that Crayak created the taxxons for the sheer audacity of it?

  • Humans may be a similar-but-upgraded version, where either the taxxons' creator or the taxxons' creator's opponent took the original build, but took points from Metabolism, # of Legs, and Multitasking Dexterity, and put them in Endurance, # of Digits, and Creativity. While the taxxons are a poorly-balanced Navigator Munchkin species of gluttonous goo wrapped in an overfull water-balloon, humans are a slightly-better balanced Gadgeteer Genius Plus Infantry Munchkin species of gluttonous goo wrapped in a t-shirt (with the Horror Hunger, the taxxons couldn't effectively act as tech-savvy zerglings until the yeerks started simply using them as biomech). ...which makes sense, considering Crayak and the Ellimist are basically playing do-it-yourself
  • It would have to be Crayak considering that they are in constant pain from hunger. We know the Ellimist tries to be nice to his team and Crayok...

StarCraft with a slightly different series of objectives.

The One is the monster of the same name from "Ultraman: The Next"

Both are aliens, both are shapeshifters, both assimilate other organisms in order to alter their form, both are, you know, called "The One".

Naturally, we can also conclude that the series ends with Ultraman swooping in to save the day.

Stephenie Meyer's Novel 'The Host' takes place in an alternate universe of Animorphs.

Bear with me here for a minute. The very first moment I started reading The Host, the description of the aliens that control your body made my mind jump to Yeerks. It's an alternate universe where the Yeerks took over Earth so quickly that the Animorphs never had a chance, and were either killed or turned into Hosts themselves.

  • This troper came to a similar conclusion when a friend explained the plot of The Host to her.
  • This troper read The Host specifically because of this similarity.
  • Shit! It just occurred to me that the Yeerks, the Souls, and the Goa'uld are all one and the same!
    • Actually, those three races have absolutely nothing in common beyond being Puppeteer Parasites. They'll probably just wipe themselves out fighting over the human hosts. The Goa'uld and the Yeerks will first destroy the peace-loving Souls and then the Yeerks will be destroyed by the Goa'uld, who actually are Exclusively Evil. Except by then, the Goa'uld will have been greatly weakened after taking on such a powerful enemy as the Yeerks and SG-1 will have teamed up with the Animorphs and Epic Awesomeness will ensue.
  • There MUST be fanfiction for this.

'The Host' by Stephenie Meyer is actually a piece of Yeerk fanfiction.

A lonely Yeerk that infested a human teenager learned about the concept of fanfiction, and subsequently used the host body to write a story where the Yeerk invasion went much more smoothly - no pesky Andalite bandits - and where the Yeerks themselves weren't ugly slugs, but beautiful, feathery creatures called Souls. When the Yeerks surrendered, the human host found the story on her computer and decided to publish it as a piece of "original" fiction. This human was....Stephenie Meyer.

No ideas about the sparkly vampires, though.

Just an observation...

The Fictional Counterpart for America Online (AOL) is Web Access Amercia. Is it any wonder that its initials are WAA?

Rachel becomes The One becomes Crayak

I don't know why I decided this but it actually fits in some ways. We never actually see what happens to her. Her death is kind of implied but... and she was on the Bladeship which Ax was after when he got taken over. It shows an assimilation simuler to the type the Ellimist went through in his book. Kay maby other characters would work better. Crayak has an interest in Rachel out of all the Animorphs.

    • Jossed by Word of God. KAA herself said The One was a future villain-type thing unrelated to anything else in the series. And Crayak existed long before the Animorphs' time, as explained in The Ellimist Chronicles. Rachel might've been assimilated by The One, but it doesn't show them her face, only Ax's. And there's no evidence that she turns into The One, especially considering her last words to Tobias are "I love you": hardly evil.
      • "Kind of implied"? Rachel says "Then he killed me with a single blow." And Cassie, who was right there watching it, said "Rachel dead? How could that be? How could that be real?" They all watched her die. Even if she became something else post-death, she still died first.

The alternate future in #7 is caused by Jake's infestation in an altered timeline

The future shown in The Stranger happens because in an alternate timeline, the Animorphs did not rescue Ax, but Jake was still infested at the hospital in #6. If Ax had not been with them at the hospital, nobody would have noticed Jake was a Controller and he could have easily turned them over to Visser Three. This also explains why future-Rachel was confused by Ax's presence.

How Aftran 942 got back into the Yeerk Pool at the end of #19

You might wonder how Karen got out of the Yeerk Pool complex/cave without Aftran. Here's how I think they did it: Aftran/Karen runs of away from the Animorphs after they let her go. (This is after Cassie has been "trapped" as a caterpillar.) She runs off to the State police-Controllers, and says she lost track of the Andalite Bandits, but she's safe now. Aftran doesn't tell Yaheen 747 and the others what she knows, as part of Cassie's peace treaty. The next time Aftran and Karen go to the Yeerk Pool, Aftran gives her instructions. At the unloading pier, she tells the Hork-Bajir-Controller guard there that Karen is a voluntary host (now?) and has permission to go to the cafeteria (or wherever). Aftran instructs Karen to wait in the café for a few minutes, and then walk out as if she's a Controller. This is how Karen gets away free while Aftran stays in the pool as per her promise to Cassie.

Father and the Yeerks are somehow related evolutionarily.

The Ellimist Uplifted the Andalites.

Upon reading The Ellimist Chronicles, I wasn't under the impression that the Ellimist actually gave the Andalites any technology. He instead just planted the seeds of intelligence in them. With their physically capable bodies, there would have been no reason to for Andalites to evolve intelligence, unlike humans with our physically weak bodies compared to other Earth animals.

The Pemalites are the race that uplifted humans in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tobias is a comment on the Otherkin subculture from before most people knew Otherkin were a thing!

We are not suggesting that Applegate was psychic or anything but consider. A whiny Emo teen with an awful home life and no real friends inside the body of a beautiful predatory creature with wings and shapeshifting powers? Yeah.

The Ellimist sympathizes with humanity.

Visser One described the human mind as constantly in conflict with itself, arguing, doubting. Sounds a bit like the Society of Mind hypothesis. And we know that the Ellimist is a Mind Hive so we're like him/them, except without the god-like powers. Certainly explains why he gives the Animorphs such special treatment.

  • Definite possibility. More likely, what he said was true (about him being unable to at the time until... people cleared out, I think?) however he DIDN'T CARE one way or another. His attitude towards it was likely 'If it happens, it happens. I won't complain. Not like I have anything to lose.'

David is a sociopath, Visser Three has Intermittent Explosive Personality Disorder.

There's enough evidence in the trilogy to show that David only thinks about himself and violates the rights of others, refuses to take responsibility for his actions and rationalizes them ("Murder is one animal killing another", "I'm going to kill you before you can kill me"), is incapable of maintaining serious relationships, is extremely easy to frustrate and anger, has problems with impulse control, does not conform to societal moral norms (such as laws against stealing), is consistently deceitful, does not express guilt, is egomaniacal and takes what is described as a "sick pleasure" in manipulating others. His animal abuse is further proof. All this remains true even in his return in #48, wherein his actions are mostly an act to gain Rachel's sympathy in order to manipulate her for his own benefit
"Intermittent Explosive Disorder (abbreviated IED) is a behavioral disorder characterized by extreme expressions of anger, often to the point of uncontrollable rage, that are disproportionate to the situation at hand." Nuff said.
I'm also fairly sure Rachel has some sort of psychiatric issue but I don't know of a medical term for a disorder characterized by a psychological addiction to stress and adrenaline.

  • It would be remiss not to note that antisocial personality disorder (better known as sociopathy) cannot be diagnosed in an individual until they are eighteen years of age. David is around the same age as the Animorphs are (so, around fourteen or fifteen) so it is impossible for him to be a sociopath. He might be a budding sociopath (which would probably merit a conduct disorder or oppositional-defiant disorder diagnosis), but his circumstances should also be taken into account. Labeling him a sociopath is jumping to conclusions.
  • I'd also debate the validity of diagnosing an alien with a human personality disorder. Yeerks have drastically different psychology than humans do, as we see in Visser. Both of these 'theories' should be taken with a grain of salt (or perhaps the whole shaker).
  • Finally, Rachel is also too young to be diagnosed with a personality disorder more severe than conduct disorder with violent features, but the books sum it better than the DSM ever could - she's a violence junkie.
  • I thought it was pretty clear that David was supposed to be Not Right somehow. Sure, a lot of horrible stuff happened to him, but that doesn't excuse the sadistic tendencies, the weird rationalizations for what he thought was murder, the seeming lack of morals or guilt, the ego, or owning a cobra and naming his cat "Megadeth". While he might not be textbook ASPD, he probably would've ended up as a juvenile delinquent, had things gone differently (or possibly already was).
    • There's a huge gap between a juvenile delinquent and a sociopath, and even comparing the two is baffling. It's been scientifically proven that teenagers tend towards a distinct lack of empathy - Jake and the team are the exception, not the rule. In many ways, the David arc was about showing what would happen if an ordinary kid were recruited to the war, and clearly the results aren't pretty.

The Andalite-Yeerk War was a long bet by the Ellimist, who was attempting to create an Andalite-Yeerk-Human military alliance to prepare for the upcoming Kelbrid war, which is the next phase in his game against Crayak.

The common humanity, so to speak, shared between Yeerks, Andalites and humans is repeatedly emphasized (Hork-Bajir, less so), as is the possibility of artificial, non-living host bodies. The massive faction of Yeerks left on Earth after the war, combined with the new treaty, implies an eventual assimilation of all three cultures. The uprising against the Andalites on the Yeerk homeworld shown in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles was simply, in the end, a way for the Ellimist to get all three species together and hash out their differences in time to confront a new and (if The One is any indication) massively more inhuman and dangerous threat.

    • The Yeerks, Humans, and Andalites are unique in their intelligence and humanity then? Because it really seems like things would have gone a lot smoother if one of the three species involved hadn't had the ability to steal the brains of the others because that's just asking for trouble. Not to mention that no Yeerk is supposed to meet an Iskoort for centuries and the Yeerks seem to be going the nothlit route or the 'stuck on the Yeerk homeworld never to be allowed out of their Pools' route. After what happened last time they had a chance, it would take a lot for anyone to give them a chance, particularly given how complicated and ethically tricky creating a whole new species for Yeerks to infest is. I mean, the Hork-Bajir are an artificially-created race and that didn't make what the Yeerks did to them okay.
      • Non-living host bodies. And hey, maybe Yeerks are Crayak's brainchild and Ellimist just figured he could use them. Forgot that the Yeerks on Earth are going nothlit though
        • Is that possible? They have to be living because otherwise the Yeerks wouldn't die when their hosts do and it's canon that they do. I think it's strongly implied that the hosts have to be sentient as we have no evidence of non-sentient beings being able to be used as hosts. When the Yeerks want to take sharks, they have to artificially make them sentient as shown in #15 before they can control them. If the Yeerks made a non-sentient race artificially sentient that wouldn't make enslaving them okay and if they did what the Yoort did and made it so that they would die without the other that would be even worse because if it hadn't been for the Yeerks' meddling then the new hosts could live out their lives non-enslaved and the Yeerks don't really lose anything since they wanted hosts all along.
          • Horses. As I recall, the sharks had something about their brains which meant they had to be fiddled with, not their level of sentience. Unless you're saying the horses were sentient... which is a point you could debate, I guess, but there really isn't any evidence on that front.
            • We don't know if those were regular horses are specially engineered sentient horses. The Yeerks probably made non-sentient species sentient before the shark program since they seemed so sure that it would work (and it was working). And if they were just regular horses then why did the horse-controller who got bitten by a snake need to be destroyed? That destruction was a lot more public and suspicious than just finding a dying horse and a small slug that wouldn't have been around for very long anyway so it only makes sense to do if they were trying to hide something...such as the horse being altered to be fit for infestation.
          • In #41 The Familiar, Cassie/Niss says that one of the goals of the Evolutionist Front is the use of nonliving, artificial host bodies instead of living ones. This, however, is at least ten years in the future, so who knows where Yeerk technology is at that point.
          • It may be a goal of theirs do to that but have they actually made any progress on that or is that just the 'you know, this would solve all our problems' solution? Plus, you have to consider that that wasn't actually real so the things that happened and are mentioned in it may not necessarily be true either.
            • Guess this is why it's wild mass guessing.
              • That doesn't mean you can't debate a guess.

After the war, the Hork-Bajir become a Proud Warrior Race Guy culture.

In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Hork-Bajir culture is so pacifistic that the idea of violence hasn't even occurred to them yet. Over the course of the book much is made of how Dak Hamee's birth - the coming of a "seer" - heralds the rejection of old Hork-Bajir values, in this case, for the purposes of survival against the Yeerks. Ultimately, as we all know, the Hork-Bajir homeworld was sterilized by the Andalites and the majority of the Hork-Bajir species were killed by a virus. So after the war on Earth, you either have a) Hork-Bajir who have been born and raised as guerrilla soldiers, living in hiding or b) Hork-Bajir who have been born and raised by Yeerks for the sole purpose of combat. The end result is a Hork-Bajir population that doesn't really know much about anything except for fighting. I imagine a "you-looking-at-me" attitude similar to Israel, where the ability to fight is promoted for the purposes of avoiding another Hork-Bajir tragedy in the future. Doubly possible considering the Hork-Bajir refugees on Earth are regularly targeted by terrorists.

  • The Hork-Bajir would have followed Toby Hamee's example, and Toby herself showed pretty solid leanings towards being a Proud Warrior Race Girl. I'd say this one is pretty likely.

Tobias didn't actually change anything by disabling the Mercora bomb, apart from the impact location

If the mercora had successfully deflected the comet, it would move into an orbit that would intercept Earth again in a few months, a few years, or so. By that time, the Mercora would have been so busy with something (Nesk perhaps), and would not be able to deflect the comet a second time. Any butterfly effects end up suppressed, with nothing different about human origins, earth history ,etc. However, the Mercora's unsuccessful deflection changes the impact site of the comet, moving it to a harder to discover spot on the planet, leaving scientists much more confused about dinosaur extinction in modern times without an obvious potential impact site.

Tobias and Ax genocided the Mercora based on faulty logic.

They based their decision on the lack of fossil evidence of the Mercora, but by inference they lived on what is now the Yucatan peninsula, which due to its geology and climate is very unfriendly to fossils and their recovery. A promise to limit themselves to their colony and leave when they were back on their feet may well have done the trick anyway.

  • But then how would the Animorphs have gotten home in order to save the planet (and possibly the universe if #41 is to be believed) from the Yeerks?

The city the series takes place in is Bahia Bay

It fits. Located in California, contains a convenient mall, beach, amusement park, is within driving distance of mountains/desert, etc.

  • Jossed by Book 37, The Weakness. The tv station has the call letters WTVK. The fact that the first letter is W means that the Animorphs live east of the Mississippi River, since all tv stations have W at the first call letter east of the Mississippi, and all tv stations west of the Mississippi have K as the first call letter.
    • The station must have been a mistake (or, as the books were apparently written down during the war, a deliberate lie to throw people off). It outright says that they live in California in one of the later books.

The events of Book 48 led to the Yeerks figuring out the Animorphs were human in Book 49.

It didn't seem like there was ever any explanation as to how the Yeerks suddenly knew, other than some speculation about them always leaving blood behind at battles. When Rachel scares off the two thugs working for David, she's concerned that they'll tell their story where a Controller will hear, and the Yeerks will find David and get information from him. This is why she decides that she has to do something about David (what this something is, of course, is left ambiguous). However, she doesn't seem to do anything about, or even mention, the fact that their story also includes a girl who can turn into a rat and a bear, with nary a mention of freaky blue centaurs. Also, while she says there's no threat of Visser One recognizing Super-Rachel as one of the Andalite bandits, it's possible that his encounter with her could make him more open to the possibility that the bandits are human, at least subconsciously.

  • It's been suggested that the Hork-Bajir captured by the Yeerks in #47 also led to the big revelation of #49, which is perhaps plausible, but two direct eyewitnesses would hammer it home even further. I like this one.

The alternate dimension in #41 was the Crayak/Ellimist

I personally don't see why the Crayak or Ellimist can't disguise their voices, and pretend that they're some other god-like being.

  • Highly unlikely, for this simple reason: what motive would either of them have to do that? The Ellimist has already shown the Animorphs a Bad Future once and subtlety just isn't Crayak's style. Applegate Jossed the theory about this entity being The One, leading to two conclusions: either it's the 'greater power' the Ellimist referenced in The Attack or it's an entirely new being.
    • Or it was simply a dream with no being behind it.
      • Given that Crayak himself was introduced via a dream and dreams usually have deeper meaning in the Animorphs verse (see #06, #48 and Megamorphs 04, among others), this is fairly unlikely.

"The One" was actually Satan himself.

Not only would it be an awesome moment of Faux Symbolism, it would also explain his ability to "assimilate" others and transform their bodies.

  • I'm afraid I don't follow this one. What does Borg-style assimilation have to do with Satan? Part of what makes Animorphs great is that it avoids getting bogged down in issues of religion, so it'd be a huge step backwards, for this troper at least, if the series ended with the introduction of a disguised Judeo-Christian villain (though this would enable crossovers with Supernatural, which is perhaps the theory's sole redeeming point).

The events of Book 8 led to the events of Book 9.

In Book 9, the Yeerks start searching the woods behind Cassie's farm, thinking they'll find the Andalite bandits' feeding ground (which is partly right, since that's where Ax and Tobias live). They really have every reason to do this at pretty much any point in the series, but at the end of Book 8, Ax finds the meadow Visser Three feeds in and nearly succeeds in assassinating him. Visser Three's definitely arrogant and paranoid enough to feel the need to immediately retaliate, and that's what they're doing in Book 9.

Varnax feed on Yeerks for (more or less) the same reason Esplin 9466 Lesser does.

Esplin resorted to cannibalism because he didn't have access to a Kandrona. Varnax eat Yeerks because they need Kandrona rays to survive, but can't absorb them directly.


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