also about that comment on yeerks smothering each other: i’m pretty sure one of the really big social problems yeerks faced was that yeerks in their natural state cannot individually murder each other. they’re softbodied aquatic invertebrates. they have nothing to murder each other with.
killing a yeerk would be a group effort: they would either have to bury a yeerk in the silt of the bottom of the pool and guard him for days, or slowly push a rock on top of that yeerk until he’s crushed, or by group effort isolate and then shove the yeerk out of the pool on to dry land and keep him there until he dries out. these group efforts would be exhaustive and require extensive, determined coordination. basically, yeerks have only ever executed each other.
unfortunately, yeerks gain the capacity to murder people in the space of… a day. a week at the outside. monday: no yeerks had ever murdered anyone. friday: they’d shot like three andalites and were starting in on shooting each other.
yeerks are not emotionally equipped to understand murder. they understand death, and predators, and maybe even socially-mandated execution. but a species with no real form of organized warfare or interpersonal violence gets its hands on guns and spaceships and goes basically fucking nuts. think about it: humans know we can fuck each other up. all our cultures acknowledge and regulate our capacity— and our desire— to kill people we hate.
yeerks don’t have that. yeerks have never had that. they suddenly get that and they go fucking nuts. roughly fifty years later they are still fucking nuts, only even more so because they’ve locked themselves into this completely unnatural, artificial social situation— a highly regimented life of total war— and any yeerk with a host now has the capacity to kill. and they kill each other a lot. their whole ranking system boils down to ‘who is allowed to kill who’. esplin 9466 gets an andalite body but still has a yeerk’s mind, a yeerk’s total lack of… control, awareness, something, and he just fucking starts chopping heads off and never slows down.
the ultimate fridge horror of the animorphs, i think, is that the yeerks themselves are child soldiers: terribly young people in a terrible situation, born into a war they didn’t start, forced to use alien technologies that mutiliate their sense of self, their capacity for pain, their ability to relate to noncombatants, even their fellow combatants. the first victim of the yeerk empire was the yeerks themselves.
(via featherquillpen)
