The thing that bothers me is how did the Yeerks get the infrastructure so fast. Like how did they get that fleet so fast?

In Ax’s first book, he mentions the first species to fall to the Yeerks, the Nahara, a race is never mentioned again. And in the HBC, Aldrea mentions that after the Yeerks escape their home planet, they vanish. The Yeerks find a race with a decentralized nervous system (that they kill,) and then apparently steal an Ongachic ship, another race not described in detail. There’s a long calm before the storm, as it were, before Yeerks come to the Hork-Bajir planet. So I came to a few conclusions/assumptions.

This is my head canon, and it’s the history I’m using for my reboot.

The Andalites didn’t go to the Yeerk planet for research purposes. It’s mentioned that they were already on the planet for [reason] and then discovered the Yeerk-Geed symbiosis later. That implies to me the Andalites came to strip mine the planet. A galactic armada, even with z-space power cells, or whatever fuel it uses, has to be resource intensive. Iron and titanium and neodymium, plutonium and uranium.

We know the Yeerks absorb Kandrona rays, so that implies their planet is radioactive. So I’m thinking the Andalites came for heavy metals and valuable isotopes and stumbled on the Gedd-Yeerk symbiotes.

They then spent x amount of time on the Yeerk planet, educating slugs about everything.

This is a point of contention for me, though.

They imply Yeerks and Gedd were a pre-industrial society. I don’t think even with Andalite tutors, you could teach a caveman how to build a rocket ship. The sciences involved are too much. Physics, chemistry, metallurgy, et cetera.

I personally took it that they had to have a baseline society. Maybe a Gedd version of a Mayan society. Large scale, but comparatively primitive. They know how to make medicines, have wheels, cities, the Gedd are farmed the way ants farm aphids, and the Yeerks are way more symbiotic in nature than they are parasites.

They learn so much from the Andalites, and there has to be a period of peaceful cooperation (Seerow’s Kindness), but then the Andalites change that relationship somehow. That uprising couldn’t have come out of nowhere. It took too much planning and coordination, and it was risky as hell, so there had to be an impetus, and neither Aldrea or Esplin get into that.

Here’s where I go. If this planet is important to the Andalites, does it truly belong to the native species at that point? Like Columbus discovering the Taino population in the Caribbean, did the islands still “belong” to the natives once discovered by Europeans with the technological and military capacity to take what they wanted?

So, either the Yeerks figure out that they’re being annexed as an Andalite colonial mining outpost or they find out the Andalites have harvested all there is to harvest and they’re taking all their fancy toys with them. Either way, Andalites being there has already fundamentally altered their society, and the Yeerks rebel.

And the Andalites sell it as an unprovoked attack, rather than an insurrection. Being the arrogant superiorists that Andalites are, I’m not sure that they would ever actually see that they’re at fault. From their perspective, they were benevolent and shared tech and science and information. That they destabilized a society - or the argument that they didn’t have the right to mine a planet just because they found it - might honestly be lost on them.

Or it could be simple imperialism. Both options fit.

They write correctionist history, or at least a biased history that renders Andalites blameless. The idea permeates that Yeerks were primitive parasitic slugs rather than symbiotes, and that they lacked any society or culture.

This line of reasoning brought me to the almost inescapable conclusion that Andalites are not well liked by other highly-evolved species. The Andalites are arguably the most technologically advanced species, but the other races that have the technology to be more or less equal to the Andalites obviously don’t like them. Andalites meddle in everyone’s business, and just assume they have the right. The way most of the world sees the United States.

So if I assume the Andalites are the USA, and the Yeerks are say… I don’t know, like Vietnam or Iraq or something.The US is coming, so what do you do? You ask Russia and China for help, maybe Pakistan or Libya.

Hence in my thinking, the whole Andalite-Yeerk has to be a proxy war for some other race or races.

The Yeerks take a handful of Andalite ships and go somewhere they know the Andalites can’t follow. I’m inclined to believe the Kelbrid are the most likely candidates, maybe just because that’s where the series goes at the end, but the Kelbrid are described as warriors and they’re obviously militaristic enough for the Andalites to leave them alone, which seems no small feat.

Then the Kelbrid (or Nahara, or Ongachic) would be very interested in Andalite technology, and let’s be real, those stolen ships are the only currency the Yeerks had. They could help outfit the Yeerks with resources.

Of course what the Yeerks don’t realize (or maybe they do and it doesn’t matter) is that the Kelbrid are just using them to spread the Andalite armada thinner and thinner across the galaxy.

But wherever the Yeerks go after Seerow’s Kindness, by the time they arrive on the Hork-Bajir planet, they’re capable of building their own ships.

It would explain the never-elaborated Rakkam-Garoo conflict and the stuff with the Anati. And also like I said, the Nahara and the Ongachic are never addressed in detail either. The Animorphs never encounter a Nahara-Controller that I recall. This could mean any number of things. They could all be dead by the time the Yeerks get to Earth, or just that all Naraha-Controllers are in other parts of the galaxy. But it’s just as possible that the Nahara were allies to the Yeerks, not victims.

#Animorphs

Edited after re-checking HBC