It's sort of one of those... I guess you'd call it "Show don't show" issues?

Like they've obviously got something going for them since they managed to move into and take hold of some major political powers—and in a very strict sense they do achieve all of their objectives—but it's hard to rationalize how they got there. To the best of my memory the invasion is already well-established at series start, and I think the original villain gets killed off early, or something?

It's possible the skillset is just different. The Yeerks being what they are, actual warfare tactics, even guerrilla war, are pretty sub-optimal for them. Their leaders would have better luck being skilled in organization and advertising than anything, really. Visser 3 may be less a general and more an executive.

It's like putting a changeling in a fistfight. Yeah they can do it, but it isn't playing to their strengths, so they're obviously gonna be on the backfoot.

PS if you're interested in a competent villain who works through disguise and manipulation and remains in control and competent for the majority of the time you might be interested in my web novel Birthright; the main villain enters the story by pulling off the masterstroke of a several-years-long-plan and the protagonist is almost helpless to move against her directly and instead is forced to focus on winning over the villain's supporters. Also a significant portion of the plot focuses on the protagonist's personal relationship with the villain.

Yeah, some of those book series are LONG runners alright.

Animorphs actually wasn't a particularly long runner despite the number of books thanks to how frequently they were released. IIRC, she churned them out at a rate of once a month.

Pretty much the entire span between issues 45-54 are my favorite part of the franchise, with the David Trilogy a close runner-up.

I liked most of them, but there are definitely flaws too. For example, the whole Auxiliary Animorphs thing, which they make a big deal of, only to be ignored and then killed offscreen for no reason. I would call that the influence of ghostwritters with competing ideas, but they say Applegate wrote all the plot outlines beforehand.

It seems like from everything I've heard Visser 3 is an idiot, and Visser 2 is kind of a loser who gets played a lot and needs to be bailed out by luck despite supposedly being the smart one.

You're probably thinking of Visser 1, not Visser 2. Visser 2 only appeared in a single book. As far as I know, Visser 1 was never portrayed as a loser though. She just isn't in charge during the time of the main series so the yeerks can't benefit from her competence.

but it's hard to rationalize how they got there. To the best of my memory the invasion is already well-established at series start, and I think the original villain gets killed off early, or something?

The invasion was started by the much more competent Visser 1. However, she got kicked out in favor of Visser 3, who is a complete idiot. It is strongly implied that Visser 3 is the main reason why the yeerks never found and defeated the animorphs. Visser 1 does show up at several points in the books trying to regain her position, occasionally ending up Enemy Mine with the Animorphs.

Edited by storyyeller on Feb 6th 2019 at 8:09:56 AM

Visser three is vicious, unhinged, crude, and, above all, a little dim, yes.

But he managed to be the first Yeerk to get control of an Andalite, the mortal enemy of the Yeerks, and a high-ranking one to boot, so he's got plenty of powerful forms- including the Andalite form that's plenty powerful on it's own- to transform into to still be a threat if the Animorphs ever directly confront him and he's got plenty of buggers under him that are less incapable, though nobody really wants to contradict him for fear of getting eaten alive by ravenous bug-monsters or speared on his tail. So, there's the Watsonian reason for him being in charge of the Earth invasion.

Heck, at one point, the Animorphs want to keep Visser three here because he's utterly blind to the idea that the Animorphs are children and not "Andalite bandits" and a smarter Visser, such as Visser One, the Yeerk possessing Marco's mother, would cotton on to the idea of the Animorphs being humans and human children to boot.

Yep, he's physically very threatening, but ultimately harmful to the larger Yeerk invasion. It'd be like if Donald Trump could turn 20 feet tall and shoot fireballs whenever someone disagreed with him.

Also, IIRC, Visser 3 getting the Andalite host was pretty much pure luck.

Edited by storyyeller on Feb 6th 2019 at 10:43:35 AM

That's kinda my problem though. It seems like such a long long LONG series to have an incompetent, debilitatingly unhinged character as the main villain.

It's like if the only villain for all of One Piece was Buggy the Clown.

Like, the idea of intentionally keeping someone like him in charge is obviously a logical one and something the main cast SHOULD do. But surely for the sake of stakes or moving things along they can't SUCCEED at this in perpetuity?

Edited by GNinja on Feb 6th 2019 at 3:45:49 PM

The thing is that the Yeerks still have a huge advantage despite the incompetent leadership. It's 6 teens against a massive government conspiracy with scifi tech.

Surely that makes them look even worse though? That 6 kids can just run circles around and dismantle a massive alien conspiracy, only suffering set backs due to mistakes THEY'VE made or pure bad luck?

Sorry, I'm slipping back into my mania about incompetent villains again. I've been a bit stressed lately.

But the kids don't "run circles" around them. For the most part they barely survive while waging guerrilla warfare. There are even a couple times when they were only saved by literal divine intervention.

Edited by storyyeller on Feb 6th 2019 at 11:29:28 AM

Oh really? What big awesome moments would you say the Yeerk have throughout the series?

Ginger, remember what happened last time. Calm down.

... sorry. My depression's hitting me really bad today for some reason.

I know that they get a Yeerk into the president of the United States. Effectively conquering one of the most well-connected and influential states on the planet gives them a huge springboard into the rest of it—assuming they haven't already established bases elsewhere. Setting aside Creator Provincialism it makes the most sense for them to try to establish themselves in a location that has a decent amount of influence and reach, but ALSO the largest, densest, most community-oriented population possible, in order to make it easy to take as many hosts in as short a time as possible. Realistically their main base of operations would probably be somewhere like India or China.

Regardless, the point remains: Effectively conquering the United States with little-to-no resistance is nothing to sneeze at. Their entire modus operandi is subtle so they're never going to get grand sweeping victories or huge shows of force, but they're good at what they do. That the Yeerks have all the chips is one of the driving factors behind the series.

But seriously give Birthright a shot; I'm genuinely curious how you feel about Ko-Kraham as a villain, but if nothing else I feel like I've written her as fairly competent

Ah, the Ellimist...

Ah, and yes, the Animorphs are nothing but a bunch of teenagers with special powers, meaning that if Visser three ever gets a hint that the "Andalite bandits" are not "Andalite bandits", they're buggered, so they have to leap through a plethora of hoops to keep this fiction going and even then, they still get hurt and hampered. Even their leader, Jake, gets possessed by a Yeerk for one novel!

Oh, and the Yeerk thing doesn't actually get dismantled by only those kids. Our plucky band of traumatized teenagers (and one Andalite) only manage to stop the Yeerk invasion with the help of the extraterrestrial forces waged against the Yeerks including the Andalites, the rogue Hork-Bajir, and whatever forces on Earth they can get and even that is after Visser three becomes Visser One, finds that the Animorphs are children, and goes with "Operation 9466": the full-on invasion of Earth and I do mean invasion.

It ain't my opinion but here's one from the Crowning Moment of Awesome page for Animorphs for said Visser:

I think I just got really annoyed and overly wound up reading about how the kids develop into these ultra cunning, ruthless, manipulative bastard types, but there's no Yeerk like that to counter them. That and reading about how the kids have an invincible alien cyborg as an ally who refuses to just end the plot instantly because of some brand of pacifism broke my brain.

It's one of my wonks when it comes to villains that I dislike it when a villain gets by solely through superior resources or numbers, not through anything they legitimately do well.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 6th 2019 at 5:32:51 PM

Eh, the Animorphs had to become cunning and ruthless because they don't have any real numbers or resources. Guerrilla warfare was the only way for them to fight back until the Yeerks give away the whole thing.

As for those robots...wow. Now, I do not recollect what they were or even what they were called but I do recollect that one of the things they did was generate holograms or copies so that the Animorphs aren't really hampered by having to stay in school for eight hours and balance that with attacks on the Yeerks. So, uh, I guess that was their purpose.

As for the Yeerks having a cunning and manipulative villain, her name is Visser One and she actually does cotton on to the idea that the "Andalite bandits" are not Andalites but humans by noting that she can't even begin to recollect when the "Andalite bandits" offed a human.

It's why Marco had to try to off her while she was controlling Marco's mother. She started the shebang and if she was in charge of the whole thing from the start, the already steep battle of the Animorphs would have become near-impossible, if not actually impossible.

I'm willing to turn this thread into the Animorphs thread, if everybody wants.

Animorphs? My Little Pony? Same thing, right!?

I heard of Visser 1. I incorrectly thought she was Visser 2.

From what I've read she kinda gets screwed over a lot in the series though.

Because if Visser 1 ever got in charge of the yeerks, it would be a Curb-Stomp Battle.

Anyway, the robots mostly just serve as duplicates of the Animorphs while they're away on missions, lessening the whole strain of Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World, but there are a couple times when they do other stuff as well. They provide holograms and forcefields a couple times, including IIRC in book 30. And they provide intelligence on the yeerks which leads to a mission or two. (The Chee pretend to be controllers and have thus infiltrated the Sharing).

As far as Birthright goes, I read the first chapter back when it first started. How is it coming along now?

Fairly well actually, I recently chapter 12 and it'll be going up this afternoon, in fact. On the whole I've probably been at it longer than I would like, but as of this chapter I've entered the endgame, and I've got about 3-4 chapters left, plus an epilogue, of the first draft.

It's not generally received much attention so once I've completed the first draft I'm probably going to pull it down from most of its hosts and spend a little time tweaking it (I need to strengthen the plotline around the middle in order to keep the reader invested and also tweak a couple of elements to work better with the overall theme), then try sending it off to a few publishers.

Basically, what it boils down to is that the primary threat in Animorphs isn't any individual villain. It's the insurmountable wall of force that is a vast alien empire with seemingly infinite resources, more than enough forces to literally just chuck them in your face and drown you in a sea of corpses, and the ability to infest anyone in your life.

The Animorphs are six kids looking out at the world and knowing that literally anyone they have ever met might be an alien body-snatcher trying to identify and murder them, and no actual scenario for victory. How do you defeat the Yeerks? Punch every single member of their millions/billions-strong empire?

The Animorphs blow up a truck ship used to bring water to the mother "Pool" ship in orbit. COOL. They have minorly irritated the Yeerks. Within a couple weeks, there's a new ship to do the job.

The Animorphs destroy the Kandrona, which provides the radiation Yeerks need to feed on to survive. COOL. They spend a few weeks prioritizing who on Earth gets to go up to the Pool Ship to feed and who gets f*cked, then they replace the Kandrona and bring in more Yeerks from other parts of the Empire to replace any numerical losses.

The Animorphs stop the Yeerks from using Lawyer-Friendly Jonathan Taylor Thomas as a spokesperson for their secret invasion YMCA center. COOL. The center remains open and continues to recruit with its normal spokespeople.

There is no victory condition here. As long as the secret invasion continues, the amount of damage that six kids with morphing powers can do to it is very limited. For most of the series, the end-goal is not to defeat the Yeerks; the Yeerk victory over the planet Earth is framed as an inevitability. The Animorphs' goal is just to stall for time by harassing the Yeerks until the Andalites can show up with their massive space army and drive away the Yeerks' massive space army. If they ever come.

It's like if the Star Wars Rebel Alliance consisted entirely of Luke, Leia, and Han. No bases, no fleets, no Red Shirts, and no ships outside of the Millennium Falcon and Luke's X-Wing.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 7th 2019 at 7:31:12 AM

Post of the Day #2419

Posted by Rich Reeders on Sat, 3rd Mar '12 8:25:30 PM - Post #114346 in the old thread

Cold pizza is delicious and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. My hierarchy of pizza goes

• Fresh and hot
• Cold
• Ewwww, microwaved

The microwave ruins the taste of most foods, really.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 7th 2019 at 8:09:02 AM

I much prefer microwaved pizza to cold pizza! Any type of warmth will do!

Come hither, brethren!

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 7th 2019 at 1:14:05 AM

Depending on the kind of pizza, microwaving it will just dry it out.

My grandfather puts a moist paper towel in the microwave, which he says works.

I just make sure to eat the whole pizza fresh. And then my family's like "Why didn't you buy a bigger pizza for a better price?" Because I can't eat an entire bigger pizza and I don't like cold pizza.

I used to have that dilemma with mac 'n cheese. One box is a little much to eat in a single sitting, but I also don't like leftovers.