andalitebonsai

[andalitebonsai]

how do you think a david redemption arc would go down?

Man, I got nothing — he's too effectively evil. Other people have thoughts?

[andalitebonsai]

Do you think Jake killing those 17000 unhosted yeerks was a war crime? Was it necessary? What do you think would have happened if he hadn't given that order?

Was it a war crime? Yes, absolutely — they're noncombatants. Was it necessary? Depends on how you define necessary, and whether you're talking to Eva or to Erek at the time.

What would have happened if they hadn't?

It's hard to say, because that final plan is so convoluted. But my read is that Jake flushes the Pool ship, as much as anything, in a last-ditch effort to save Rachel's life. He knows their timing is super-delicate, that Visser Three firing on the Blade ship is a bad-but-acceptable outcome because it'll wipe out the morph-controllers and Rachel, but that Tom's yeerk firing on the Pool ship is a catastrophic outcome because it'll wipe out five Animorphs and the leadership that humanity needs surrender from if they're going to prevent the andalites from wiping out planet Earth. He has to stop either ship from taking out the other by creating a diversion, and finds a diversion that also becomes a show of power.

What does happen as a result of killing those 17,000 yeerks:

Visser formerly-Three gets the abundantly clear message that he has lost control of his empire, and surrenders as a result

On board the Blade ship, the morph-controllers are distracted long enough for Rachel to get in position and kill Tom

Nonetheless, Rachel dies and the Blade ship gets away with at least a few living morph-controllers still on board

The andalite Dome ship also gets the abundantly clear message that Jake, not Visser Three, is in control of Earth — that's part of why they're willing to negotiate with him

So if the Pool ship isn't flushed, how much of that changes? Hard to say. Maybe Visser Three annihilates the Blade ship, which is sad but a better outcome than we get in canon. Maybe humanity loses Earth to the yeerks, or the andalites, or both. But there are so many moving pieces to that final battle — Jake, James et al., Arbron et al., Marco and Ax, Tom's yeerk, Visser Three, the other morph-controllers, Toby et al., General Doubledday et al., Rachel, Cassie and Tobias, the Dome ship Elfangor, the Andalite Electorate, Visser Three's troops, Eva et al., freakin Alloran out of left field — that it's really hard to say what the final result would be. Humanity does successfully fight off the yeerks and form an alliance with the andalites in the version we get, but at a steep cost.

[andalitebonsai]

King David and the Birds of Prey

[andalitebonsai]

While I was away this summer I tackled reading the whole Animorphs series. I'd heard it was good, but I wasn't expecting it to be that good. The turmoil, the increasingly grey morality...

[andalitebonsai]

Colored my Leerans! Look at these frog squid friends. They absolutely make suction cup popping noises when walking around on a ship.

I’m gonna say that when the Yeerks were driven from Leera they still had dozens of Leeran-Controllers offworld, though this number dropped as Leerans are rather sensitive to cold and exposure to various compounds. Even the water of the Yeerk pool causes adverse reactions.

Theoretically Leerans can reproduce in huge numbers and more than make up for this decline. There is a scarce sex which lays clutches of hundreds of eggs at a time and a more common sex which takes two eggs into a throat-pouch to fertilize and brood, and while all captive Leerans held by the Yeerk Empire were brooders, Leerans on their homeworld are able to change sex and often do. Apparently they need to want to do so, and due to the characteristic Leeran distributed brain allowing partial resistance to Yeerk control, no Yeerk was able to induce the change in a Leeran-Controller. Captive numbers remained very low.

Ultimately this was spun as being for the best, as between their psychic abilities further enabling Visser-Visser infighting and Leerans physically being a huge pain to infest they were probably never going to be common hosts. Leeran-Controllers were stationed as security, monitoring for disguised Andalites and treacherous Yeerks in sensitive locations such as the environs of the Council of Thirteen.

Three Leerans were posted on the Pool ship over Earth. Two died to ‘accidents’ later proven intentional and one was traded by Visser Three to Skrit Na in exchange for the chance to acquire a Bievilerd.

[andalitebonsai]

Colored my Gedd design. They’re more monochromatic than I’m leaning for other aliens because Gedd had no evolutionary pressure to have great color vision. Their eyes are adapted to their lifestyles and to the stresses and demands of their homeworld, such as acid rain, constant Kandrona exposure, and regular submersion in sediment-heavy pools. If they don’t have the wide-band color spectrum and high fidelity of Andalite eyes, well, Andalites stationed on that planet needed eye protection and regular flushing with saline solution to prevent damage just from being outside.

The patterns on the flat, scaly undersides of their tails are unique to each individual, like a fingerprint. Historically Yeerks on the homeworld tended to great fondness for and fascination with these patterns, though Imperial Yeerks are generally instructed that overt admiration for the features of any individual host is the first step towards host sympathy and must be curbed. 

It is sometimes policy in the Yeerk Empire to amputate Gedd tails in addition to shaving their manes and any body hair that could be unhygenic, the better to anonymize hosts and reduce the likelihood of Yeerk-host collaboration. It does significantly detract from a Gedd’s ability to swim and means they can’t clean the walls and floors of filled Pools effectively, but that’s what Pool draining protocols are for.

[andalitebonsai]

My interpretation of a Gedd. They’re not well described! We get “like monkeys”, “mouthparts”, three fingers, webbed feet, small eyes by Andalite standards, a Taxxon can bite off one’s head, and uneven legs meaning they’re often on three limbs. The wiki says they’re blue, but I’m not sure where!

so my thought was they’re symmetrical when young, and as they start using one hand more than the other that one grows more slowly while the other becomes heavier and stronger. They’re variably bipedal and tripedal. Each hand has three fingers and a “panda’s thumb” that the fingers can pinch against to strongly grasp things like this foraging tool.

They take to the water to escape bad weather and predators, and to find food. While swimming they propel themselves with their tails and snorkel with their nasal trunks, both of which have roles in expressive communication out on dry land. Free Gedd wishing to avoid Yeerk entanglement will often braid reed fibers into their manes and wrap the braids to cover their ears, which deters all but the most determined Yeerk and at least slows that one down.

In Pools where Yeerks have a coercive relationship with Gedd, they often force their hosts to cut their manes short. Gedd taken offworld by the Yeerk Empire are generally shorn altogether.

Here’s also a previous version from when I was snowballing designs.

[andalitebonsai]

Yeerkpilled miserymaxxer

[andalitebonsai]

There was talk of creating new ranks. Everyone said that if we were going to become a conquering army, we would need a hierarchy. The ancient Council of Thirteen would remain all-important. But beneath that would come something called "vissers" and "sub-vissers."

Yeerks on the homeworld, isolated from the "conquering army," have never even heard of a visser.

The inherent competition and infighting of the Empire was manufactured around the time our current Visser Three was maybe one year old.

[andalitebonsai]

Do you think that when you morph a person you get some of their personality traits? Cassie mentioned wanting to make bad decisions as Rachel, but I'm pretty sure she was kidding. Tobias mentioned Taylor being gentle, but idk if that was a Taylor trait or a human thing, like Andalites being optimistic.

I think the long answer to this has comprised literally millions of volumes of text over the entirety of human history, all debating how much we’re who we are due to genes and how much due to our personal histories.  And of course the answer is not additive but multiplicative: a genetic tendency to find it easy to learn grammar times early access to a computer equals a very skilled coder, genes that make you tall times encouragement to be athletic means NBA, etc.

But the short answer from Animorphs seems to be that the personality of the morph makes suggestions, that the morpher’s own mind can then listen to or set aside as the morpher wants.  So Cassie in Rachel-morph feels flashes of anger, but doesn’t act on those feelings that we see, and Tobias in Taylor-morph feels a desire to be gentle but spends most of that scene acting about as cruel as we ever see him be.  My read: the morph’s personality determines your impulses and automatic responses, but the morpher’s original personality determines your slower controlled thoughts and self-reflection.

So it’s like the classic saying “it’s healthy to be angry sometimes; it’s not healthy to act on anger right away.”  IMHO a morph’s mind determines how much anger you have, whereas the morpher’s original mind determines what the person does with that anger.  Or fear, or sadness, or joy, or empathy.  Obviously the morpher’s actions will be informed by that first emotional response, but they won’t be dictated by that response.

[andalitebonsai]

1 hour speedpaint 🖌️

[andalitebonsai]

Arguably, Edriss 562 and Esplin 9466 are both transgender. Yeerks don't inherently have a gender, and they are not supposed to overly sympathize or identify with their hosts. Yet both exhibit clear preferences for one gender of host / host morph.

[andalitebonsai]

i hadn’t drawn erek from animorphs yet, but i listened to the android audiobook today and got the urge

commissions | twitter | shop

[andalitebonsai]

The Kafit-bird is well-known to estreens and arisths alike as one of the first morphs that one may acquire. These twelve-winged birds of prey are maneuverable, stubborn, and can burst the eardrums of those nearby with prolonged exposure.

Kafit females are typically larger than their male counterparts. Their colors may look dazzling to those living on Earth, but on Andal, the coral and yellow of their underbellies blend in with the sky and their blue and purple feathers help camouflage them among the azure Andalite grass.

Dr. Virtihl is seen here wrangling a particularly ornery female Kafit bird who regularly gives both the xeno-ornithology lab and Oregon zookeepers trouble. It is something of a 'pet' of hers, being a problematic specimen brought from Andal on the Domeship Skytree.

She calls it 'Tegayaffit', a nickname roughly meaning 'bites fingers from within the grass'.

[andalitebonsai]

My name is Jake —

Just kidding! It’s Marco! Got you with another one of my trademark ‘complete lies’. Anyway, here’s a completely true and accurate story involving aliens, my family, and my feelings about things.

[andalitebonsai]

i love animorphs!

[andalitebonsai]

Wallkett, pulling a cart of gooba fruits.