Series re-read Hork Bajir Chronicles
I'm way tired tonight and won't have a lot of coherentness lol, but I know y'all will like being turned loose on this one.
As you know, it's the prequel story of Aldrea, daughter of Seerow, and Dak Hamee, Hork-Bajir seer. The future Visser 3 is there too.
Any thoughts on the connection between this book and The Prophecy?
As you know, it's the prequel story of Aldrea, daughter of Seerow, and Dak Hamee, Hork-Bajir seer. The future Visser 3 is there too.
Any thoughts on the connection between this book and The Prophecy?
Chunk the first: Does the war actually make any sense?
Reading this series the first time, I always had the impression that the Yeerks were winning. Didn't you? I think we can blame this whole point, actually, on those irritating, redundant, and ultimately conflicting chapter-one recaps. The bane of any long-running book series, that horrible four or five pages that just screamed "SKIP ME," but you knew you couldn't, because there might be a paragraph or a line with new information and then you'd be missing out.
These chapter one recaps made it pretty consistently clear that the Andalites were outnumbered.
I'm not going to look for quotes because goddammit they were painful enough to read the first time, and I don't even know where to begin looking. But I KNOW the phrase "spread too thin" has been used at least once in this series, I KNOW "outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned" was probably used. The Andalites were supposed to be the underdogs. The Andalites were supposed to be honorable and chivalrous and desperate.
But let's actually take a look at how the war begins.
Prince Seerow, the only good Andalite according to Aftran, teaches the Yeerks. This is kept very vague, and I think that's a very good thing. What did he teach them? Math? Philosophy? Religion? None of those very practical or applied, nothing that could help the Yeerks greatly. Engineering? Design? Weapon-building? How to procure and process natural resources? Okay, a little better. Did he just download the entire Encyclopedia Galactica and let them have at it? This is what Aldrea says: 82
Just to reiterate--THEY ARE JUST LEARNING ABOUT WRITTEN LANGUAGE. This, for all intents and purposes, is the BEGINNING OF YEERK HISTORY.
We also know he gave them some stuff. In fact, we know exactly what they made off with at the beginning of the war.
>Four hundred Yeerk-infested Gedds with shredder-armed fighters> p. 6
Great, so, like, nothing. This is the entire Yeerk army...no, the entire Yeerk civilization at the beginning of the war. To me, at this point, it's like taking on the US Army with a couple of BB guns and a shortbus.
But let's just see how this bitch develops.
7
Bingo
All right, so 400 sort-of-able-bodied Yeerks and the potential for 250,000 more. This, at least, is like a short bus, 2 BB guns, and a shitload of high-caliber bullets. But no guns to fire them.
This seems like a joke. This doesn't seem like a huge threat. This seems like something the few career warriors in the military would be thrilled about. Finally, something to do other than patrolling the borders to Kelbrid space while playing Minesweeper all day during my duty shifts!
But, two years later, this is already a W-A-R war.
"Not in modern war, which is fought with shredders and ionic-dispersion explosives launched from our most advanced ships. The war against the Yeerks won't be about tail-fighting." 11
Anyway, let's see what everyone is up to during the interim.
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The Hork-Bajir war happened five years before the Andalite Chronicles. Well, at least the Andalite Chronicles started five years after the beginning of the war, so this is actually like six or seven years BAC. There were at least 2 Dome Ships in that book, so the Andalite ship-building industry has a pretty high turnover rate, from design to prototype to working craft in 5-7 years. As well they should; we're led to believe Andalites have been doing this for a while, they've had some PRACTICE.
"...Andalite fighters. We had four altogether. Plus the two transports. We had also seized a small Ongachic craft and three Skrit Na ships." 64
This is the entire Yeerk armada when they start the invasion of the Hork-Bajir homeworld. Their entire force. So now, let's call it all the shit we've said plus like a used Corolla and, I don't know, a couple of bicycles against the US Army.
Here's a little posturing from Visser Three (or whatever the fuck rank he is at this point): "We could build our own weapons. Our own ships! Vast, powerful ships that would make the galaxy tremble." 125
Okay, so this is pretty much where we're at when Aldrea contacts High Commands and tells them to get the fuck over here and help her out. We get some "in the meantime..."
"The Yeerks were mining. Iron, uranium, nickel, bauxite. Diamonds and rubies. They were building stronger bases. And from the far side of the planet, we heard stories of vast constructions...They were building more spacecraft...The Yeerks had learned very fast. They had Andalite, Skrit Na, Ongachic, and Hawjabran technology to dissect. And now they were no longer held back by a lack of hosts." 149
This is the only plausible explanation given to the Yeerks' rather meteoric rise as a superpower in the galaxy. And, to me, it's not enough. The Yeerks have no infrastructure. The Yeerks have no culture, no society. The Yeerks, before Prince Seerow met them, had no organization. They couldn't even be called a civilization.
How the fuck do you go from swimming blind and ignorant in pools to being a superpower in five fucking years?
I mean, in a way, it's a neat little thought experiment. What would humans be like if every social and cultural taboo and prejudice was wiped away? If we were blindly reintroduced to the entirety of our procured knowledge base with none of the pre-standing organizations and infrastructures to impede us? What kind of people would we be then? Would everything be about efficiency? Would everything be about our progression as a species? I mean the Yeerks are kind of like communist Russia--all labor for the motherland or whatever. No distractions, no history, nothing but their own weirdly tunnel-visioned and unobstructed obsession with conquest.
I mean, it could work. But this is only some theoretical humans we're talking about. Now, what if that happened, but there WAS a race of historically and culturally rich aliens out there who were just about as smart as we were but A LOT more experienced?
It's like some little leaguers with good equipment going up against the Yankees.
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"We suspect that they have built 14 fighter craft, based on a new design but similar in capabilities to your own Andalite fighters...The Yeerks are also constructing a new type of ship, quite large, very heavily armed...have taken to calling it a Blade ship." 158
159
It takes seven months for them to go from not having ANYTHING besides the aforementioned, to mining materials, designing ships, engineering them, and producing them. Maybe I am just way too cynical about industry, but this seems unrealistic at best. This seems like someone giving you a ton of unprocessed iron ore and you building a Ford truck out of it with nothing but an instruction manual. Not happening.
Onto the Andalites: 160
160
Two things:
1) Even if this desperate call Aldrea made is low-priority, because she's just the dumb bitch daughter of that bastard that got you into this mess in the first place, I can't buy that's all they send. If the Yeerks can build 14 ships in seven months, I have to assume the Andalites are AT LEAST that good at it, and would send more than what amounts to a Humvee and two privates to check out this rather big deal intelligence report.
2) WHAT THE FUCK MADE YOU THINK THE YEERKS WERE IN SECTOR TWO? ALL of the Yeerk resources are centered on the Hork-Bajir homeworld. You would have sent a scout to Sector Two, scanned, found nothing, and turned around and came home. Just like, technically, you should have done for this. And you would have seen the six ships they stole, knew they were ALL HERE AT THE SAME TIME AND WIPED THEIR FUCKING ASSES OUT!
All right, so I guess I made two points. 1) The Yeerks got way too good at the war way too fast. They made up Vissers and Sub-Vissers on the fly, they came into being as a civilization in less than a decade and though they were driven, they had no system in place to launch this kind of offensive. Some rich douche bag may want to start a professional baseball team or dig for diamonds in Somalia, but without the infrastructure and know-how in place, it's a futile venture.
2) The Andalites are the dumbest shit intelligence officers in the history of ever.
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Like a lot of things in Animorphs, the whole premise of the war is kind of shoe-horned into working. Like she covers the bases she needs to, she extrapolates where the mistakes were made and what assets and liabilities everyone had going for them at the time she needed to. All the same, it feels way, way too convenient. You can't portray the Andalites as the smartest (and yes, most racist and bigoted) race in the galaxy and then have them make such a monumental mistake (and I am NOT referring to Seerow's Kindness), and you can't portray the Yeerks as such an industrious, victory-obsessed race and then have THEM make the incompetent, Saturday-morning-cartoon-villain mistakes that they make on a perpetual basis in the regular series. It just doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, I think biologically the war with the Yeerks could have happened. I mean, shit, Arab terrorists have what amounts to a short bus, lots of high-caliber bullets, some BB guns, 2 bicycles and a used Corolla, and they're still a threatening enemy. But they're threatening because they could be anywhere. Because they're good at hiding. Because they infiltrate, sabotage, because they can sneak around unnoticed. And those are the exact things the Yeerks can do. If the Yeerks had been portrayed this way, as a subversive group that slowly infiltrates and leeches other species away, we might have had something. And, for a long time, that was how they were portrayed. Then Visser Three got trigger happy and Visser One was just holding out to protect her "kids" and there were Pool Ships and Blade Ships for every Yeerk lieutenant that wanted one and Bug Fighters were distributed like Halloween Candy and...FUCK, you know? It just got out of hand.
Bottom line: The Andalites should have been the American government. And the Yeerks should have been fighting like the Animorphs, all guerrilla-chic and courageous. The Yeerks should have been the rebel alliance and the Andalites should have been the Galactic Empire, and not the other way around. But then I guess, in all fairness, the Animorphs never would have been involved in the first place.
So there you go. A lot of illogical details at the war's inception to make the whole series work? I guess it's up to you if that's worth it.
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THEY ARE JUST LEARNING ABOUT WRITTEN LANGUAGE. This, for all intents and purposes, is the BEGINNING OF YEERK HISTORY… The Yeerks have no infrastructure. The Yeerks have no culture, no society. The Yeerks, before Prince Seerow met them, had no organization. They couldn't even be called a civilization.
Ah. *raises hand* Two words: oral history. Even on Earth, less-writing oriented cultures had skalds/bards/storytellers who were expected to memorise insane reams of verse, history, stories etc. And rote-perfectly, too. I tend to assume the Yeerks would have a similar tradition, to keep track of all their bright ideas, politics, crafts, laws, philosophical arguments… and yes, scientific discoveries. I’m sure pools of several million people all stuck talking to each other would spawn something like our own ‘natural philosophers’, if just to settle bets about whether sound really carried better at midnight than at midday. ;) Optics and quantum mechanics would be right out, obviously, but there’s no reason Yeerks couldn’t have had basic ideas about sonics, soil science, biology - hell, psychology. Things you can investigate in the pool, and that matter in the pool. Like how to maintain the pool structure against erosion from all that acid rain, or how to prevent the banks getting lined with vanarx nests.
In addition, they could have cribbed much of their military ideas off Andalite history and swiped the bits that worked for their existing social structure (Vissers didn’t exist, but the Council of Thirteen seems to be old). It was much more successful than it should have been, but... as you said, Andalite intelligence is seriously embarrassing.
All that said, I totally agree with most of your points, especially that the Yeerk forces to start with are not scary. It really makes me wonder about Alloran, at the start of this book, and wonder how much xenophobic crap he’s been spreading among the troops by this stage. (“The incompetent parasites have gone joyriding in our freighters! This can only mean… INVASION! THE GALAXY IS DOOMED, SEEROW WHAT HAVE YOU DOOOONE?” "Oh, man. Look, I'll call the Council of Thirteen, you apprehend these guys and we'll start figuring out how to untangle the diplomatic repercussions-" "It's TOO LATE. You've DOOOOMED US ALL." "..." "AND I'M TAKING OVER." "...Ohhhhh shit.")
<.< But that’s another rant. Just wanted to quibble the notion that the Yeerks had no prior civilisation, ‘cause that’s sort of my personal ‘squee-and-babble-button’ to the point where I’m writing a ridiculously long set of fics about it. (Certainly civilisation in the empire would be a very different and strange and probably messed-up beast compared to what came before, which is one of the things that fascinates me into a gleeful speculative stupor.) There’s a lot of things their culture wouldn’t have, (like a real history of war, or visual arts) and I’m sure Andalites would like to call it all ‘nothing’, but, well. Andalites.
Aaaand I’ve just realised you’re the same Anijen21 as on ff.net, so hi! *waves* ^_^
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and to be honest, you're right. There was some semblance of Yeerk culture before the Andalites got involved with them, the Council of Thirteen was described as "ancient," so they do have some sense of government, however disorganized and undescribed it may be.
All the same, two things--it was really ambiguous in the series whether Yeerks could communicate with each other in the pool or not. There were times it felt like they were all sitting together in there swapping stories around some imaginary campfire and other times it felt like they could barely see where they were going. So I guess I was reading this from the perspective like, without technological help the Yeerks are pretty much nothing when they're in the pools, but you're right, that's very probably not the case.
Second, even if it's not, I KNOW the Yeerks are just characterized by the few, if any, Gedd hosts they could nab on their own planet before the Andalites came, and the Gedds didn't exactly have a burgeoning culture and civilization. So really, that's the only exposure to intelligence the Yeerks have. And actually, I'm still kind of confused as to a very fundamental Yeerk question--are Yeerks capable of their own imagination, drive, and intelligence, or are they limited by the host they use? Like in Visser she says that languages get scrambled in the Hork-Bajir brain, so the Yeerk has to use the Hork-Bajir's language center to communicate, not his own. Maybe it's just like morphs, where the physical body influences you greatly but you can still overcome it.
Anyway I got off track lol. Best case scenario, the vast majority of Yeerks know nothing besides their pools, and I'm sorry, you can't create a rich culture by sitting inside of the same house all of your life. Each pool would be its own hermetic environment, except for the few infested Gedds that may or may not travel between pools. And even then, what stories would they tell? "There was lots of lightning, some weird trees, and I tripped a lot." Not exactly the means for a culture to flourish.
But you're right. It's not an absolute "THE YEERKS HAD NOTHING BEFORE THE ANDALITES." More of a "The Yeerks got 97% of what they had during the war from the Andalites."
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Plus, I got the impression that the Andalites were a pretty big power, and perhaps they simply had other bigger things to worry about than those Yeerks who are just spending their time on some insignificant backwater planet, which may justify the low priority that the Andalites placed on the Hork Bajir war.
On a side note, I don't wonder about Alloran at all. Perhaps I've been reading too much Warhammer 40K, but I honestly think Seerow's mission was doomed to failure. There's just too much potential for danger with the Yeerks to allow them off-planet.
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And regarding Alloran - you could say the same about any species, couldn't you? ;) The Andalites seem to like torching species, in particular. Humans have the slavery - mental and physical - down to varying degrees of insidiousness. Seems a bit odd to say the species with no stated history of conflict is the really dangerous one.
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Would Yeerks, if integrated into the wider galaxy, pose unique problems in terms of policing, law and abusive potential? Hell yes! (And so would telepathic Leerans, and indestructible Chee, and naturally-armed morphing Andalites, and presumably humans to everyone else.) Is that cause to say they'll all do that? No. Is it cause to say they're the biggest danger? Not until we can point at other species and say they don't permanently damage each others' minds, or force people into acting against their own will, or sacrifice others for their own gain. All of which humans do, all over the world, often to their own families. *shrug* We're not that bad, but we don't have to be for some of us to cause vast amounts of suffering. Same with the Yeerks.
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While controlling themselves from using their powers to not harm others is possible with the other races, it isn't with Yeerks. For any Yeerk to win, another sentient being must lose, barring the minority of Yeerks who will only take "willing" hosts.
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Yeah, the inconsistency of Yeerk abilities is a bugger. I just tend to go with the options that offer maximum communication because, well, Yeerks have that ultrasonic language and there’s no reason they couldn’t use it. Otherwise, what was Seerow teaching them to put into phonetic writing? (Also, I find it all more fun this way. *BIAS ALERT*)
I figure speech and language issues there are because Yeerks can’t be bothered with translator chips. It’s a shortcut they use, so they’re dependent on said shortcut working. Neurologically speaking, they wouldn’t have a Hork-Bajir’s speech areas, and language perception/production is a complex ability. Basically, they need to make the brain translate and interpret what filters in. (And yes, I figure that makes for some pretty grey areas about where one mind ends and the other begins, and fun psychological questions.) ‘Higher’ cognition, though - there’s no reason Yeerks wouldn’t have their own. If nothing else, Esplin in the HBC is thinking and wanting for himself pretty well before he ever gets near a host. And I think we can safely say our galaxy-conquering prodigies didn’t do all that with a(n average) Hork-Bajir’s level of intelligence.
Being stuck in a pool is a problem only if you assume a single environment = a single, unchanging set of stimuli, and a Yeerk pool is not that. Hell, virtually nowhere is. You can’t create culture by sitting in one house on your own but I think the pools as described are much more comparable to compact, building-less cities, at least in terms of population. And that’s about the most stimuli-rich environment a social creature can get. Visual input = nonexistent. Sonic input, tactile input, olfactory input, and again, social input - now we’re off the scale. I mean, remember in canon when the Animorphs described being a dog or a wolf? And the sheer intensity of the world as viewed through that sense? Put that in, as you said, an enclosed environment, so the smell doesn’t disperse as well. Now imagine the smell of several thousand people all stuck in there with you, moving and conversing and experiencing bursts of emotion. And they’re talking. And about five hundred of them are directly related to you enough that you care about what they think, and all moving different ways and…
Now you’ve got the kind of environment that might drive the evolution of a complex, adaptable nervous system.
What kind of stories would Yeerks tell? Good question. Stories about proper social behaviour or the consequences of flouting the Council’s decree, or the first Yeerk ever to take a host, or myth-based justifications for traditions, maybe. You might as well ask how humans can tell stories when they can’t even detect different sorts of silt. :P
What’s to talk about in a pool? Oh my. Gossip! Personal disputes, leadership issues, disease, cleaning and maintenance, death, care and feeding and assignment of Gedds, what the newest batch of grubs are like, would you believe Anfiss Eight-Five-Nine is trying to teach them a dialect he made up himself? Not all that different from the things humans are most obsessed with talking about. It might be a more abstract cultural environment than one might expect, and it mightn’t be as complex a society as some, but neither is a human family and some of us can’t shut up about what goes on in those.
So I think it comes down to shifting what you’re looking for. It’s easy to assume that the pool is a sterile environment because it’s described pretty much as that, but what usually happens when you look closely at ‘simple’ environments is they turn out to be pretty complex. And what interests a human might not be the same for Yeerks, just as some people find manor houses sterile and dull and the owners may think quite the opposite.
My extrapolations, let me show you them. @@
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Let me just give an example. Airplanes. How did we make airplanes? By observing birds. I don't know the whole damn history or anything, but both Da Vinci and Bernoulli recognized that birds don't always have to flap to fly, that some other principle was guiding their flight. Humans have had centuries of opportunities just to watch their world and figure out how it works. And we've projected our sights to places we can't normally see--outer space, under the ocean, beneath the Earth's crust. But we've always had hints. There were always meteors and volcanos and dead giant squids that float to the surface of the ocean. There have always been instigators to our curiosity and imagination.
Yeerks don't lack imagination, but before Seerow...I don't know, I feel like I'm losing a handle on my point. He gave them everything. They didn't have to earn it. Without having to go through that centuries- and millenia-long process of trial and error, without inherently understanding every aspect of every reason that something is done, I just don't think the Yeerks would be as good at everything they did that the series said they were. I feel like they would make shitty ships and have bad social organization.
But that's just me thinking about this series way too hard, like I always do.
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