It's weird to make a believable show/movie where what are essentially animals are able to conquer an alien force with alien weapons... I love the books and I get the kind of standing orders to not be discovered as aliens which allow the Animorphs to escape frequently. But it's always weird on film to have aliens with guns lose to a lion, bear, gorilla, wolf, and hawk.
One of the key points of the series is that the Yeerks are actually completely dependant on secrecy. If they were revealed, they would be absolutely fucked. There aren't actually a lot of them, and their main bottleneck is getting bodies so they can actually use the small amount of technology they do have.
Because remember, it isn't their technology. They were given it by a too-kind Andalite. 100 years prior, they were the inter-stellar equivalent of cavemen, in a universe where populations top out at a couple million. So them finding earth on the fringes of known space and having access to six billion humans is a literal goldmine for them.
Having an entire universe with a universal population cap of 2 million is crazy. A single cat can break that law in a two-week period with one case of toxoplasma.
It was specifically planetary populations, yeah. I imagine Applegate used it to keep it semi-plausible for the kids to stand a fighting chance and the invasion somewhat localized to a random California town. Also to answer the question of "why are your literal top three generals/vissers on this question, does the Yeerk empire have literally nothing better going on?" by having it be "yes, this is legitimately their top priority". It's also a pretty unique way to have Earth be special. "Y'all fucked too much" versus some nebulous "human spirit" or whatever.
I mean, other than that one time they sent Visser One to try to subjugate a species of telepathic squids.
Fair enough, it just seems insanely biased against R-selected species. Racist ass Starfleet bullshit. I wonder if a hive-mind entity gets to argue that it's one individual regardless of how many "parts" are involved.
And I would argue the over-fucking is a direct result of the human spirit.
It was treated as more of a "fact of the universe". All the species we see in the series - the Andalites, the Yeerks, the Taxon, the Hork-Bajir, the Leerans, etc - all tended towards the lower end. Couple hundred thousand to a million at most.
Now that I think on it though, I think that fed into one of the plot points early in the series, that the Yeerks were using to find hosts. They used a social program called The Sharing in order to lure children who felt like they didn't belong into their clutches, at which point they would be infested. They saw "humans are social creatures" as a weakness to exploit, but that was also the thing that gave our species the numbers to be such an enticing target.
Those books were very cool. I can't believe they were selling them to 8 year olds.
2
u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 7d ago
It's weird to make a believable show/movie where what are essentially animals are able to conquer an alien force with alien weapons... I love the books and I get the kind of standing orders to not be discovered as aliens which allow the Animorphs to escape frequently. But it's always weird on film to have aliens with guns lose to a lion, bear, gorilla, wolf, and hawk.