Series re-read Hork Bajir Chronicles

[buffyangellvr23]

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?

Comments

[anijen21]

I have such a huge thing to bitch about with this book that I am so unprepared to do.

But I will organize my thoughts in a few minutes and...yeah idk lol

[anijen21]

All right since this is a Chronicles book I'm just going to do this in chunks so let me stumble belly-first into my most important point for this book:

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

[anijen21]

"I knew that they were building a new generation of spacecraft that would be called 'Dome Ships.' These Dome ships would actually have huge, artificial parks." 63

[anijen21]

Of course, it becomes a fair contest. Here, at the *true start of the war*, when everyone is in full gear and ready to go, are our stats:

"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

[anijen21]

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

[mattiris]

And it's posts like these from you that are exactly the reason I tune in each week. Bravo, madam.

[anijen21]

lol ty. My computer crashed just as I was about to post it and I damn near lost the whole thing but firefox or windows 7 saved it somehow, so thank bill gates I guess

[pivot89]

*spontaneously delurks because oh hai, did someone mention Yeerk culture? :DDD*

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

[anijen21]

lol don't apologize for your counter-rant, this is the reason I keep writing 2000 word essays for this community lol

[roflmaozedong]

Perhaps we can assume that Yeerks are just really good at learning stuff? Like, to use a D&D analogy, Str and Dex were dump stats in favor of Int and Wis? Which may perhaps justify how they were able to expand so fast?

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.

[pivot89]

That sort of ties in with a notion I have that Yeerk nervous systems are insanely flexible - which is how they can magically rewrite themselves to tap an individual alien's brain. So yeah, very quick learners in the right subjects.

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.

[roflmaozedong]

Re Alloran: not really. I think determining the danger posed by any given species depends at least as much on their future potential as their past actions. We have had slavery - but we got rid of it, and the last century demonstrates an ability to progress. Whereas the same argument is hard to make for the Yeerks. Plus, humans would have no stated history of conflict either if we were all blind and have no limbs.

[pivot89]

Aaactually. <.< Uh, human slavery is still prevalent in many places. And different varieties of it have been normal in many, many societies. We've certainly gotten better, but the Yeerks had their Peace Movement too. It's hard to say they have no capacity to progress when we've only got, what, thirty years of their history to go on? It took much longer than that for human ethics and ideas of social justice even to get to where we are now

[roflmaozedong]

However, if you were to fix the matter of human slavery, it would be done by stopping the humans who still own slaves. Whereas that option just isn't available with the Yeerks.

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.

[pivot89]

XD Awesome, then. I'm just not usually good at jumping into conversations

[anijen21]

You're definitely right about the social aspect (I kind of prefer assuming maximum communication too...does that contradict what I said above? Eh whatever), and your comparison to giant, buildingless cities is really apt. However, I still think the Yeerks would have more of a problem adjusting to corporeal, intergalactic life than the series let on. I guess I'm thinking about this all from like an allegory of the cave angle--humans live chained in a cave and only ever see the shadows of puppets projected on the wall by a small fire. And that sucks. But Yeerks are even more limited than that, just by their physical setup. Yeah, a pool might be a vibrant, social place, but very few Yeerks know anything other than that environment. And there might be gossip and hearsay about the few Gedd hosts ambling around, but even that environment is extremely limiting as far as spawning imagination, industry, and culture