citizenpublius:

chuplayswithfire:

I’ve been re-reading the Animorphs books for the last month or so and I’m up to 20 now, but after reading #19 The Departure I’ve been struck once more by the whole idea that I’ve seen while lurking in the fandom tags – that, especially because of Aftran, people seem to have a ton of sympathy for the Yeerks, or at least more interested in giving them positive species headcanons in comparison to the Andalites, who seem to be loathed a lot more in comparison, and I’m pretty curious. Anybody got ideas or feelings about the topic?

Personally I love examining both groups, but I think it’s rooted in the fact that the Yeerks wouldn’t have been in the position of being violent colonizers if the Andalites hadn’t colonized them first. They were just chilling on the Yeerk Homeworld, just being an alien race that co-evolved to be parasites to the Gedds (and the ratio of Yeerk-to-host was so low that most Yeerks never took one), and then came these Andalites telling them they were an uncivilized species. Before the Andalites showed up, they didn’t care about militarism or imperialist expansion. Judging from Esplin’s interactions with his brothers and sisters in “The Hork-Bajir Chronicles,” it seemed most of them at one point even found the idea of a complex host species to be a frightening thing, and that had they not had enough hosts to go around, they would have lived contented lives in their pools (“But there were no host bodies available, not on this spacecraft. So we lived in our pool. As
simple Yeerks must. And I would have lived happily enough.
But then came the day when it was my turn to take ‘training.’”). They were content on being what they were, until the Andalites showed them what they were missing. 

The Yeerks were a naturally-curious and quickly adaptive species. They took everything Seerow taught them and learned very fast. And we have reason to suspect the Andalites weren’t being entirely truthful when they said the Yeerks betrayed them; we see that the Andalites called them “filthy slugs” and the like before they rebelled. We know that while the Andalites love lording around the galaxy, they don’t like sharing their toys. They told the Yeerks everything they were missing, told them they were a disgusting sub-species for having the audacity of evolving as parasites, and then told them they couldn’t have spaceships to try and make their lives better. Had the Andalites – an imperialistic, xenophobic, militaristic nation – not been the first alien species that the Yeerks came into contact with, things might have gone very differently. Or if the Andalites had just shared with them the morphing technology – so that the Yeerks could get their senses without taking an involuntary host – things might have again gone very differently. 

It might also tie into how we the audience are first introduced to each species. Thanks to Our Lord and Savior Elfangor, we’re first taught that the Andalites are going to be the allies of humans in this war, and that the Yeerks are a Pure Evil species. Then we learn that, no, most of the Yeerks are in a diaspora and can’t go back home (thanks to the Andalite barricade), and have been brainwashed by their Council of Thirteen into emulating the Andalites and trying to build an Empire as quickly as possible so they aren’t killed off by their enemy; and yet it took only 30-40 years of running a Yeerk Empire for them to start questioning the morality of taking involuntary hosts. 

We learn gradually that the Andalites’ idea of “cleaning up” their messes involves a lot of attempted genocide. They’re embarrassed over what happened with the Yeerks? Wipe out the Yeerks. They can’t keep the Yeerks from enslaving the Hork-Bajir (who the Andalites also treated as a sub-species)? Wipe out the Hork-Bajir. Earth’s massive human population would serve as the most perfect hosts for the Yeerks? Wipe out the humans. 

So while the Yeerks’ actions are not condonable, we the readers learn the root cause of their problems, of the entire war, goes back to the Andalites.