child soldiers v. bodysnatching aliens: ANIMORPHS

I do seem to recall that one of the problems with Andalite cities was food production - they were simply too crowded and didn't have enough space for grass enough to feed everyone. Since Andalites eat fresh off the growing plants rather than from picked things like humans do, I imagine that bringing in food from elsewhere is much more a problem for them - they'd basically be having to transport live sod for agriculture rather than the way we do it. So that probably contributed.

 

ok i dont know what to say just know im a huge animorphs nerd and im glad i found this forum, dak hamee is pure

 

i return with a cracky new andalite theory!

okay so andalites have big ruminant barrel guts, for some reason. but they don't need that space to break down cellulose like terrestrial ruminants. they don't even eat cellulose, or the andalite equivalent. they crush vegetation with the impact of their hooves, then suck up 'nutrients'. but other terrestrial animals on liquid diets mostly suck up sap and nectar. the composition of andalite grass can't be too significantly different from terrestrial, because axe lives three years of his adolescence on earth and no mention is made of malnutrition, which he would certainly exhibit if andalites needed high quantities of sugar.

my guess: they have a tank full of some kind of microorganism like yeast. a very, very efficient yeast, plus god knows what other kinds of alien gut flora. water plus trace amounts acids, proteins, sugars and minerals go in... ethanol comes out. andalites are powered by biodiesel.

i'm pretty sure my chemistry's off, here, but it's funny to think about. alternately, andalites do suck up lignin and cellulose, and run off methane.

 

also i bet all the animorphs censored their experiences with most of ax's biological functions, out of respect for the more sensible bits of seerow's law. there's 'okay help us with radio stuff' and then there's 'we're going to record that time we caught you pooping.'

 

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Daemorphing brought up how, there's so many things the Chee could have done. Spying on the Yeerks. Making a rogue Yeerk pool to provide an alternative to Empire life. Helping to smuggle hosts out, like an underground railroad sort of thing. Therapy sessions for the Animorphs. Helping the Animorphs with their schoolwork. Possibly, even, helping the Animorphs kidnap known Controllers.

Hell, they could've theoretically made nonsapient androids with senses, to give to Yeerks as hosts. Hosts with no sapience to shove aside. They could've entirely removed the reason the Empire was using to excuse its invasion and they did nothing most of the time

 

Stuff like this is why I like thinking the series is just a big allegory for Current Events and politics at the time

 

also chromatographic pointed out that the pemalites not only forced the Chee to be complete pacifists but also deliberately build them so they were specifically designed to not be able to withstand violence


and they threw away the thing that could give them a choice

 

i have no coherent animorphs thoughts right now but i am overjoyed that an animorphs thread exists and god, i really wanna reread the books at some point

 

the animorphs could've freed tom by just kidnapping him for 3 days

if they're freed only tom it would've been suspicious but if they'd grabbed some other human-controllers too then it wouldn't have been nearly as suspicious, just another andalite bandit raid

they could've started an underground railroad themselves before even meeting the chee

 

hell if they'd gone "do you think there's anything left in the construction site? could we use it as a hideout or meeting place?" and gone to investigate they could've theoretically found the morphing cube before david did

 

also the andalites knew where ax was why did they not send a stealth rescue mission
why was a known war criminal not only still in the army but in charge of cadets

why are the andalites so...like that

 

i mean i think the andalites just straight up did not care about Ax enough to mount a rescue mission for him.

Also the - the guys that made the Hork-Bajir? They could have ended the entire plot just by making the Yeerks a bunch of nonsentient hosts with like 30 different senses. but they didn't because they're assholes.

 

"they didn't cause they are assholes or actual Tweens" is a good summary

 

i saw a headcanon that ax is the andalite equivalent of autistic

and with that headcanon either: a. the andalites have a very different opinion on autism/their equivalent of it than humans do, or b. ax is, by his own standards, a vecol

 

Huh, that's an interesting headcanon. Considering that the Andalites all communicate via telepathy, I'd find it plausible that they would have a different opinion on aneurotypicality in general. A lot of the communication issues between autistic people and neurotypical people happen because 1) the neurotypical person is expecting body language or facial expressions that matches the script they're running (and may be expecting the kind of subconcious mirroring that a lot of autistic people just can't do), and 2) the neurotypical person may be leaving a lot of what they're actually trying to say in the subtext, under the assumption that it'll just get picked up on, and 3) Ask culture vs Guess culture is a thing, and autistic people (afaik) tend to struggle with Guess culture a lot..

Whereas Andalites don't have verbal communication at all - their communication channels are body language and telepathy. And from what I recall of canon, it's a lot harder for there to be a communication disconnect with telepathy. So Ax being Andalite!autistic might well get a shrug from other Andalites, who grew up being told that it's better to be very clear about what you're saying so that no one's misunderstanding you.

(Admittedly, I don't remember what a vecol is or how it's defined; it's been a very long time since I read the books, and I was usually borrowing them from my friend or from the library so I didn't exactly manage to read in order.)

 

Well, thoughtspeak isn't the same as pure thought - I do think characters can lie, or choose their phrasing, or so on, through it.


A vecol is basically a rude term for a disabled person.

 

disabled, a cripple. first mention is in book 40. i absolutely do not have a document of all the alien words in these books for referencing what are you talking about.

(eta: that's how it was defined in-story)

 

another thing daemorphing brought up: cassie using a wolf morph and trying to just incapacitate hork-bajir, so they live but can't fight until they heal

poetry (the author of daemorphing) pointed out that for at least some of those hork-bajir, the resulting injuries would just result in the yeerks killing them
all she was doing was making them suffer more before dying

(daemorphing cassie responds to that revelation by acquiring a bull moose)

 

I mean Cassie probably kills a guy during book 1.