Recap / Animorphs: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles

Narrator: Tobias, Aldrea, Dak Hamee, Esplin 9466

Tobias learns the backstory of how the Yeerks conquered the Hork-Bajir.

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Tropes:

• Always a Bigger Fish: The monsters in Father Deep are terrifying to Hork-Bajir, but can be killed by Andalite tail blades, or Yeerks with stolen shredders.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: In a choice between jumping into Father Deep and being killed by the monsters who live in it, or being caught and enslaved by the Yeerks, Dak chooses Father Deep.
• Big "NO!": Aldrea lets out several after she sees her parents and brother killed by a Bug Fighter.
• Bioweapon Beast: The depths of the Hork-Bajir homeworld are filled with monsters that kill any who wander into it. It turns out that when the Arn created the Hork-Bajir to rebuild their planet's ecosystem, they created these monsters to prevent the Hork-Bajir from discovering their underground cities.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Esplin 9466 casually describes how Yeerks reproduce: Three Yeerks fuse together and then explode into hundreds of grubs.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Dak still loves Aldrea, but he's disappointed when he realizes his Andalite friend wants him to be a killer.
  • Aldrea realizes too late that the Andalites don't have the Hork-Bajir's best interests in mind. She's upset enough to forsake her own species and trap herself in Hork-Bajir morph.
• Bystander Syndrome: The Arn modify themselves to have a fatal brain aneurysm if they ever get infested by Yeerks, making sure there can never be an Arn-Controller. They're content to stay out of the war after that, assuming the Yeerks will leave them alone if they have no use for them. Dak correctly guesses that the Yeerks would rather destroy what they have no use for.
• Cavalry Betrayal: Aldrea calls the Andalite fleet, begging them to kill the Yeerk forces on the Hork-Bajir planet. The Andalites respond with a quantum virus that wipes out most of the Hork-Bajir and only slows down the Yeerk advance.
• Child Prodigy:
  • Dak is the Hork-Bajir equivalent of a teenager when the reader first meets him, and he's already been marked as a seer by the elders.
  • Toby Hamee turns out to have inherited Dak's mutation, revealing her to be able to talk to Tobias as an equal despite being a few months old.
• Cultural Posturing: An interesting case in which the posturing is done by a member of another culture. Esplin is obsessed with Andalite superiority over the all the other species that the Yeerks consider good enough, and constantly talks them up, much to his fellow Yeerk's annoyance.
• Dead Guy Junior: Aldrea named her and Dak's son Seerow, after her father, who was killed by the Yeerks early in the book.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Alloran and the other Andalites are stumped when they realize Dak is as smart as they are.
  • Esplin manages to partially infest Aldrea, only for his partially abandoned Hork-Bajir host to rip him out of her ear.
• Dumb Is Good: Deconstructed. The Hork-Bajir are the only good faction in the story because they're ignorant of conflict and violence. They end up used as tools by the Arn, Andalites, and Yeerks, all of whom take advantage of how dumb the Hork-Bajir are. Dak is the only one to recognize this.
  Dak: You Andalites have more respect for the vicious Yeerks or the cowardly Arn than you have for the Hork-Bajir who fight and die at your sides. All that matters to your people is intelligence. Well, I’ve learned enough about Yeerk and Andalite and Arn intelligence to make me sick.
• Eaten Alive: A Hork-Bajir Controller and a Gedd-Controller get eaten by a Jubba-Jubba, one of the predators of Father Deep. The Hork-Bajir Controller is bitten in half, while the Gedd-Controller was small enough to be eaten whole.
• Eldritch Location: To the Hork-Bajir, Father Deep is this. Father Deep is the bottom of the valley that rings around the equator of the Hork-Bajir planet, and it's filled with a blue mist that can't be seen though, and large predators that Hork-Bajir are helpless against. In reality, the mist and the monsters are how the Arn prevent the Hork-Bajir from discovering them.
• The Farmer and the Viper: As he taught them about the universe, the Council of Thirteen assured Prince Seerow that they wanted peace as much as he did. He's shocked and in denial when several Andalite ships are stolen and their crews slaughtered by Gedd-Controllers armed with Andalite shredders.
• Final Solution: The Andalite High Council makes the decision to exterminate the Hork-Bajir with a quantum virus to prevent the Yeerks from using them as hosts.
• Foregone Conclusion: As a backstory for Animorphs, it was never going to end well for this book's protagonists. In the current era, Aldrea and Dak are dead, Alloran is disgraced several times over, Esplin 9466 has the Andalite host he desperately wanted, and the Yeerks enslaved all the Hork-Bajir in existence.
• Framing Device: Tobias going to check on the free Hork-Bajir and sits with Jara Hamee as he tells the story of his grandparents, Dak Hamee and Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Dak knows nothing of violence, and his only experience with death is when an old Hork-Bajir died of an accidental cut from another Hork-Bajir. He's bewildered when a Hork-Bajir Controller attacks him. It only occurs to him that Hork-Bajir blades can be used to kill when he sees two Hork-Bajir Controllers cornering and cutting at Aldrea.
• He Who Fights Monsters: This is how Dak feels after winning his first battle. He notes that the Hork-Bajir no longer need the monsters from Father Deep, because they are the monsters now.
• I Reject Your Reality: Seerow is so broken up by the Yeerks betraying him that he chooses to believe that the Yeerks who are causing trouble are renegades not associated with the Yeerk government. He's wrong.
• Idiot Hero: The Hork-Bajir have a level of intelligence close to a human toddler, or possibly slightly less than that. Early in his life, Dak takes a stick out of a fire and draws a stick figure of his friend, Jagil Hullan, on the side of the tree. Dak tried to explain that it represented his friend, but Jagil Hullan couldn't wrap his head around it, insisting that he was Jagil Hullan and Dak just scratched on the wall. Jagil Hullan failed the equivalent of the Mirror Test.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: Dak feels this way after learning the truth about Andalites and Yeerks, and the Arn's creation of the Hork-Bajir.
• Impersonation Gambit: Aldrea acquires and morphs into Alloran so she and Dak can finally find out what the Andalite High Council's plan to win the war is.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Hork-Bajir have intelligence equal to that of a human toddler, except the seers, who have a genetic mutation that nullifies the intelligence dampening installed into them by the Arn. Dak is one such seer, and he's frustrated by how removed from his own race he is by virtue of being smarter than everyone around him. Aldrea is the first being he can talk to as an equal.
• Internal Reveal: Aldrea kept her morphing power a secret from everyone, even her family. Dak is the first person to learn about it when she asks him to bring her a chadoo to acquire.
• Interspecies Romance: Dak, a Hork-Bajir, and Aldrea, an Andalite, fall in love as they spend time together. It's simple for Dak, but Aldrea tries rationalizing it as having no unrelated Andalite males around her to be more interesting than Dak. Eventually, Aldrea gets trapped in a female Hork-Bajir morph and the interspecies part is no longer an issue.
• Madness Mantra: The Hork-Bajir can't understand why their fellow Hork-Bajir are attacking them, nor can they understand why their seer returned with an Andalite and an army of predators from Father Deep. They only understand a simple command: "Do as he does." The he in question being Dak. They chant this as Dak leads them into battle over the new Yeerk pool made from the Speaking Tree.
• Order Versus Chaos: The Arn are obsessed with order, and find Dak and Aldrea's presence in their part of the planet to be against the order they've built. This is mainly because the Hork-Bajir planet's ecosystem is in a delicate balance after an asteroid impact, and the balance would come crashing down if it was upset.
• Person as Verb: In her narration, Aldrea darkly notes that the Andalites use her name interchangeably with Category Traitor for daring to be trapped in the morph of another species and accepting it.
• The Plague: The quantum virus attacks the programmed target at the subatomic level, preventing their immune system from being able to save them. The Andalites program it to target the Hork-Bajir to prevent the Yeerks from having them as hosts. Dak and Aldrea steal the canister, but fail to stop it from being opened.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Dak gives a calm, but epic one to Aldrea about how the Andalites, her included, have no respect for the Hork-Bajir they're trying to save.
  Dak: Have you fought in many battles, Aldrea?
  Aldrea: <No. Of course not. But I have studied—>
  Dak: Have you ever killed a fellow Andalite?
  Aldrea: <No! Why would you—>
  Dak: You ask me to kill my own people today and to lead my people in killing their brothers. You say they are not Hork-Bajir, but Yeerks. But when the dead have given up their souls to Mother Sky, there will be Hork-Bajir bodies lying dead.
  Aldrea: <Dak, we’ve been over this and over this! It’s too late to be worrying about all that. This is a war! If you want your people to survive, you will—>
  Dak: Be quiet, Aldrea. These are my people who will die today. Be quiet, Andalite. Be quiet.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Seerow is fired from his position as Prince by Alloran and sent to the Hork-Bajir homeworld to study an "irrelevant" species.
• Realpolitik: Aldrea decides to work with the Arn, even though they created the Hork-Bajir as a Slave Race, and keep them in line using a bunch of giant monsters the created, as she knows letting the Yeerks win would be even worse, and the Arn's monsters are rather useful to have on their side. She even says at one point that twisting life to create monsters is evil, and in a just world the Arn would be punished, but that, now at least, their evil serves her and Daks purpose.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: Dak didn't believe Aldrea when she said she'd side against the Andalites to save him. He's pleased to find that he was wrong, and regains his trust in her.
• Screw You, Elves!: Dak calls out the Andalites and their arrogant attitudes to the Hork-Bajir every chance he gets.
• Sensory Overload: Some Yeerks find the extra senses they gain when they infest a host to be overwhelming.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Aldrea is knocked unconscious while in Hork-Bajir morph and wakes up past the time limit. She's not broken up about it, as she had previously intended to die as a Hork-Bajir.
• Shattered World: A meteor hit the Hork-Bajir planet in the past, destroying the atmosphere and turning most of it into a barren wasteland. The only habitable zone is the valley around the planet's equator, where there's enough air to support life.
• Sins of the Father: Aldrea and her brother Barafin are ostracized by their fellow Andalites because their father, Prince Seerow, was the one who gave the Yeerks the information and means to steal Andalite ships and escape their planet to enslave new races.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Andalite society is rather sexist, putting females in non-warrior positions like scientists and arts. Aldrea wants to be a warrior, but isn't taken seriously by all the male Andalites around her, even though she has more know-how and morphing skills than they do. The excuse they give is that female tail blades are smaller and blunter than male tail blades, but Aldrea points out that modern wars are fought with ships and shredders, not tail fighting. She does bitterly note, however, that the three tail strikes it took her to cut off a Jubba-Jubba's arm could have been done once if she were male.
• Start of Darkness: It's interesting to note that in the first half of the book, Esplin was much more charismatic and friendly with his brothers then we see him in the present. It's easy to say he changed after being left for dead when his Hork-Bajir's spine was severed, unable to move or block out the pain, staring at the sky as starvation started tickling his mind before he was found and rescued.
  • At the same time, Dak was as pacifistic as any other Hork-Bajir, getting stunned when Esplin attacked him unprovoked. As he processed what happened, he notices Aldrea being attacked by the Controllers, and feels the strength in his muscles for the first time. He promptly leaps onto Esplin's back and slams his fist into him, severing his spinal cord.
  • It gets worse later, when Dak and Aldrea gather an army from Father Deep, attacking a troop of Controllers while terrified and confused Hork-Bajir watch from above. Aldrea rallies them to join the fight, demanding they do as their Seer does. Fifty Hork-bajir leap down from the trees, and the slaughter begins.
• Together in Death: Aldrea morphs to Hork-Bajir partially to die along with Dak if the quantum virus is released before they can destroy it. They end up surviving, but the intention was there.
• The Unsmile: Tobias describes the Hork-Bajir equivalent of a smile as an expression that would send humans running in the opposite directions.
• Villain Protagonist: There are four point of view characters in this book. The fourth one is Esplin 9466 Prime, the future Visser Three.