Andalite culture isn’t very defined, but we do get some odd little hints here and there.



There seems to be a gender-based segregation. Males in the military, likely not optional, and females in seemingly every other major field.

For as oddly chauvinistic as Andalites appear throughout the series, what I find interesting is that it’s heavily implied (in my reading, at least), that the homeworld is female-dominated. I have to stress this point because it consistently gets buried in the sexist exclusion of girls on the spaceships: Andalite society assumes girls are much smarter than the males.

Okay, granted, we only have a data set of two here: Aldrea and Estrid.



Aldrea mentions specifically that she wasn’t interested in science or the arts… because those are Andalite female gender expectations. Estrid was a math prodigy. In the US today, we are still trying to get more women into STEM careers, but it seems that for Andalites, nearly all of their architects, engineers, mathematicians, doctors, biologists, physicists, are all very likely to be female. And not just the scientific careers. Every estreen in the series was female, and it’s just casually mentioned that morph-dancing is a form of performance art on the homeworld. Aldrea mentions cloud artists as being a viable career choice.



In fact, outside Seerow, we don’t really ever see any other male Andalite scientists, not really. Okay, sure, Gafinilan had a knack for botany and horticulture, but that was his hobby. His day job was a fighter pilot. And Seerow seemed to actually be bullied by his subordinates. Seerow was technically Alloran’s superior officer and yet Alloran had no respect for him whatsoever. That’s probably more because Seerow was a compassionate idealist and Alloran was just a tad unhinged (and racist against Yeerks even before the uprising). But I think part of it had to do with Alloran conforming to their cultural expectation of a “soldier” while Seerow was a “scientist.”

Also, it doesn’t make it any less sexist, of course, but literally the only reason females aren’t in the military is simple sexual dimorphism: females have significantly smaller tail blades. Aldrea was aware even decades ago that shredders don’t have anything to do with tail blades, but the military had long been a boys’ club, and tail blades have obvious cultural importance. Female exclusion from the military has a cultural bias, yes, but at no point does Ax ever imply Estrid is somehow inferior because she’s female. He comments that she has very poor discipline for an aristh, but he holds her to the same standard his superiors held him. Don’t talk out of turn, stuff like that. The second Ax finds out she was a math prodigy, he defers to her expertise. He doesn’t try to mansplain anything, he fully accepts her as his intellectual better. The only time he ever has a gender-based issue with Estrid is during their tail-fighting match, and again, that’s the only cultural gender conditioning we see.

Anyway, we know the Andalite fleet 1) spread thin across the galaxy and 2) with the exception of Estrid (who wasn’t actually in the military, iirc), entirely male. That means the sex ratio on the homeworld is probably astronomically skewed to females. Of course there has to be at least some males on the planet (for the obvious reasons), but given that Ax was, as mentioned, a war child, I think military service for males is probably compulsory. A large percentage of all the male Andalites are off-world at any given time.

That means the males left on the planet are probably some sort of special. We don’t get much information on shore leave or whatever, but it was mentioned Alloran was married and had children, all while actively serving off-world for years. He either had to rotate back to the homeworld to see his wife, or like Seerow, maybe higher officers get to take their families with them. Who knows?

What we do know is that the military council is made up of senior military officers and apparently is on-planet. So I’m assuming that military service is likely done in tours like it is the US military. Most males probably put in their required years of service and then retire to other industries. And of course, a military is not just its armed forces. There’s also support positions, contractors, pilots, welders, etc. Obviously those dome ships come from somewhere. I don’t think it would be a stretch that most of the male population on the homeworld are likely still employed in support positions in the military, just with jobs that don’t require going off-planet. Or they’re retired or otherwise between deployments.

This would still create a society where the only males that have access to the female population have already achieved some sort of male status.



This brings me to another slightly less safe-for-work topic.



Andalites are also a herd species, or at least evolved from one. In herd dynamics, females are more social, whereas males compete against each other. Rams and bucks specifically evolved to spar, and stallions might not have horns or antlers, but they also fight over breeding rights. As a general rule, herd species favor female-skewed sex ratios for a reason: they tend to be harem breeders. It’s hard to say if this may or may not be true for Andalites. They’re not mammals, of course, but they’re written with a lot of mammalian traits, and with the tail blades being sexually dimorphic, that implies they’re used for a gender-specific role, like horns or antlers. And harem breeding isn’t limited to ungulates. It’s true lions, gorillas, elephant seals, and so on. It’s more prevalent in mammals, but harem breeding occurs in some species of birds, fish, and insects.

For animals that breed via harem, the mortality rate for males is insane. Breeding is always a numbers game, but every strategy makes trade offs. From a zoology perspective, there’s a not-insubstantial degree of expendability and acceptable loss in regards to males that reproduce this way. A female lion cub stays with the pride. When she’s mature, she becomes breeding stock. A male lion cub is kicked out violently to fend for himself. When he’s mature, he becomes competition. Males have to tough it out and hopefully seize control of a harem by force, then spend every breeding cycle defending their breeding rights. This is a layer of stress females don’t have to put up with. They breed every cycle without competing. At the evolutionary genetic level, males just don’t matter much. Sure, if he breeds, he spreads his genes, but if he’s killed by a rival male or starves to death because he’s pushed to the fringe of the group, it’s still cool because his genes are also invariably represented by any of his sisters, who are almost guaranteed to breed.



The only thing against this theory is that Applegate and Grant seemed to write what little we see of Andalite relationships as being monogamous. That could have evolved culturally, independently of biology, though. They also breed way less frequently than herd mammals. A doe has fawns almost every year she’s capable of doing so. Then again, it’s not like human females aren’t capable of having a child every year either, we just culturally choose not to breed that fast. Worth mentioning though that infant mortality was sky high before germ theory, so we used to crank out more kids.

Any way, I kinda envisioned Andalite pregnancy as being something of a process, so that on its own would slow down the birth rate. Plus, the series does allude to state population controls. They’re grazers, so population density would be a valid concern.

Still, none of that solves for a planet dominated by females with few males… that’s going to be a weird impetus for the evolution of social mores. Interestingly enough, this system forces the females to compete over who gets to breed, rather than the males competing. (All who think the military councils could somehow do this on accident and not deliberately isn’t paying attention.)

This rant already went way further than I expected, but I’ll add one last thing.



Something I did pick up on even as a child reading #8 when Ax is forced to accept blame to spare his brother’s reputation, the military is sneaky as hell. And based on the fact that Elfangor had no idea what happened to defame Alloran’s career (he knew something bad happened, but not what), there is a huge push for the military to cover up… [indiscretions]. This is partly where I get the head-canon that the Andalites came to the Yeerk planet with less-noble goals in mind.



We see the Andalites from a military perspective and aren’t really privy to the civilian perspective of their society, but even stranger is that Ax doesn’t inquire about it. Okay, so #18 isn’t a great opportunity to ask about who won the SuperBowl while he was stuck on Earth, but he doesn’t ask Estrid about his own planet at all. There aren’t any sports (aside from apparently a tail-fighting circuit), he doesn’t ask about current events. Anything interesting happen while I was away? He doesn’t ask if she has any new music she brought from the homeworld, if she has any new movies, any games, any books, any… well anything. He asks her about her mission. That’s… well, it’s kinda scary, actually. His whole life was military academy, military service.

At the end of the series, the deal with the Andalites only comes up because Marco had the bright idea to livestream the end of the war. Up to the point that Marco blurts this out loud, Asculan had no intention of pulling back the fleet. He was about to commit essentially a war crime and they only thing that stopped him was that the public would find out.

Later in that same part, it does imply that Andalites do have their laws, legal systems, and some form of democracy, but all the same, I ultimately come to the conclusion that the Andalite homeworld is run as a dark state, or at the very least, the military is run as a dark state separate from the rest of the government. I doubt the average Andalite off the street knows about the quantum virus on the Hork-Bajir planet if an aristh in the very military that did it was oblivious. Andalite history is likely very, very self-aggrandizing.