The Part Where the Yeerk Empire is Just Wuxia Baddies in Space
As soon as you realize this, they become stupid easy to write.
(ft. A Rant On How TEQ Feels About How Yeerk OCs Should Always be Written)
Re-reading Animorphs as an adult is cray.
If you're widely read at all you have probably encountered translated wuxia and xianxia novels (or at the very least you have spent some time reading cultivator-adjacent shit for free on Royal Road.) And once you do this, you can't unsee the fact that Animorphs borrowed from and then hybridized wuxia villainy and made it into the series' own wholesale western interpretation with aliens.
I say "hybridized" because the yeerks are a mashup of any or all the following: wuxia baddie, western comic book villain, shounen bad guy.
Once you realize this, it's cannot unsee information. It's like having a free skeleton key for how to make yeerks act, because as long as you are pulling from those above three parameters you basically cannot fuck up a yeerk's characterization. The rest of the work is already done for you by the plot and setting and themes, which then shape which expression of these three parameters that your character is going to have to take for the property to feel like the original books.
This includes, IMO, yeerk characters who are "good."
Now, I could go on a whole other rant about "good yeerks" in a lot of fanfic and fandom material I've read. So many times when I see it, it's basically a standard fandom hurt / comfort trope plastered on to go "look, the bad evil slug heel turned! Everything is comfort and snuggles and understanding now!" And every time I'm like... Yes, I will take 'things that definitely would not have happened in the bodywork of the original canon series' for $1200, Alex.
This is largely because to write a plausible yeerk character you have to think about the society they come from. Which is basically the pure unfiltered emotional and sociocultural expression of 'lol get fucked n00b u fukin deserve it!' Basically, power is all that matters and it is better to be the shitter and not the shittee. But also, be aware of how high you climb in your quest for power, because the higher you climb, the more likely it is that you become a target to get popped off so someone else can climb in your place.
The yeerk empire is a ruthlessly authoritarian colonialist slaver dominance hierarchy. It produces leaders, followers, occasional traitors, quite a few smugglers (and those skimming off the top,) and a force of urgency for everyone because you have to climb high enough to not get constantly shit on, but if you climb too high your chances of dying exponentially increase.
My own headcannon here is that there is a decent chunk of them that min-max the exact way that gets mentioned in #19, which is basically "rise high enough that you are no longer doing shitty gruntwork that will certainly get you killed, and as soon as you get to a place where it's safe, stop rising and coast... because if you keep going up, you're just going to raise your chances of getting killed again." This tracks and makes a lot of internal sense with the many glimpses of the yeerk empire that we got in canon, because as it turns out the writers of the series knew what the hell they were doing (for the books they actually wrote, anyway.)
So I personally feel that even if you're writing the nicest yeerk who ever lived, they are still fundamentally going to be a questionably-moral alien space slug that is way too comfortable with subjugation, force, and control to get what the fuck they want when they want it.
Now, given that you're writing a "nice" character, the expressions of this are probably going to be muted. It should still be coming through in their personality in small ways, though. Preferably in ways that they themselves are doing on autopilot, without ever really bothering to interrogate what they're doing, because it's so second nature to them.
This is important, I think, because in canon we see time and time again that human morality doesn't really matter to yeerks much. They have to be pretty thoroughly convinced and cajoled to take up a human viewpoint before any of them even consider forced hosting and slavery to be wrong in any sense.
My personal headcanon is that they see it as some sort of divine biological right. Something that breaks down to essentially "If I can catch you / outsmart you and infest you, then you deserve it for getting caught and for having biology that allows it." I'm betting many of them would be seriously insulted at the idea that they're even doing something wrong. I'm further betting that a lot of them don't want to deal with involuntary hosts not because it's wrong but because it's less irritating and miserable. That's a different (and in my opinion more terrible) thing.
I'll stop this post here for now, though, because this is getting into a lot of the background worldbuilding logic that I have running for Fatality. I'm going to have quite a few yeerk OCs that are going to range the gamut of personalities and culture, and I've thought a lot about how to characterize each of them both to make the points that I'm making in the narrative and to give some texture and feel of expansiveness to what's supposed to be an empire with hundreds of thousands of members.
Ax held his head high and for a moment I thought he might refuse to answer Tobias's question. Then, <You must understand that the Andalite high command is not the entire Andalite electorate. This long war has made them a greater part of our civilization than they should rightly be, The Andalite electorate, the people, do not know what is planned.>
More of the general "the people are not their commanders" theme of Animorphs that's pivotal to keeping the Andalites from frying Earth and being done with us, but also...
I wonder if this is where the Andalite traitor plot really ended up. I know, Doylist answer is that the Andalite traitor plot was just forgotten about and all, but Watsonian-wise I could see the traitors being Andalites that want to prolong the war to keep the power they tasted during it. To them it's not enabling the yeerks to any sort of victory, it's maintaining a stalemate for their own ends.
Fun fact¡!: I can't stand Cassie as a canon character. I hate every fucking decision she makes.
I'm writing this on my tablet while chilling in a mostly empty apartment. As of yesterday my computer and most of my non-negotiable belongings are wrapped, packed, and in a crate in a warehouse somewhere in the industrial part of town. This is part of the reason I haven't updated the fic since October: the logistics of this move have been a nightmare to plan and coordinate.
This particular post about a very silly animorphs fanfic is brought to you by Güd Gardens cannabis prerolls, which I am currently burning through like they are going out of style. If I start rambling incoherently you can make an educated guess as to why.
So, Cassie.
As I mentioned on another post, the Animorphs fandom loves to flatten Cassie into either "Punching Bag Who Is Wrong" or "Magical Plot Device Nature Goddess Negro." She is either held up as an example of how stupid her moral objections were (and how much those morals hamstrung the effectiveness of the team) or she is deified as a perfect character who knew more than anyone else and exists on some kind of higher goodness plane of moral fidelity.
Neither of these are canon Cassie: Cassie is a teen black girl whose pacifistic & diplomacy-minded wealthy equestrian landowner parents have significantly sheltered her and tried to give her as many opportunities as possible. She is slightly naive and very concerned with her own self-identity as a nice, good, moral person. She wants to be a vet and help animals because she has been taught that this is the good moral position to have. She is environmentalist and concerned with ethics because she has been taught that this is a good moral position to have. Having these moral positions makes her a good person.
Now, those last bits are important: Cassie is not an especially nice or a good person. She isn't any better than any of those other kids. Cassie regularly kills in the name of freedom fighting in a highly specist manner. Cassie is completely fine with doing something horribly morally reprehensible if she can convince herself it is necessary and also the lesser of several moral evils. It's only after she does the thing that the weight of what she has done sets in and she has to live with the moral damage, but that doesn't change that she did it.
The reason it's so easy for fanon writers to write Cassie as simply being morally correct is because it's an easier and simpler position to take. It doesn't require nearly as much mental exploration of her as a character and it still works as a slightly saccharine shorthand for who she was in canon 80% of the time. The problem is that Cassie's struggle for moral clarity and whether or not she's actually doing the right thing while her morals are increasingly becoming clouded by her own slow overton window shift is her character journey. If you take that away from her, you get a stagnant static character who can't meaningfully arc into change or growth.
I actually had to go back and change the final couple chapters of A19D because a vocal reader or two got very upset at Cassie having a moment of exhausted furious humanity. I got scolded basically as a fic author for her being "OOC" which is fucking hilarious because I damn near plagiarized her furious meltdown from a very similar canon meltdown she has at the end of #16. It even had the same roots (an innocent child being harmed / killed to advance a yeerk's goals) and the same moral outrage (not being nearly concerned enough about how reprehensible that is.)
Despite that this was the beginning of a subplot that was going to resolve in early-mid Fatality and give Cassie some character growth and introspection, I ended up editing the next chapter and giving her a realization she should have had about 3 months later in-story time because it was clear to me that these readers couldn't deal with their main character having canon-shaped flaws for the next little bit. It was irritating as hell too, because the story is weaker this way with handing Cassie growth that she hasn't actually worked for and doesn't deserve. But it gets irritated readers out of my way who can't reading comprehension or canon character fidelity, so that's what we're doing now I guess.
I kind of wish I had stuck to my guns and either ignored these readers and basically told them to fuck off or taken the time to reply to comments and been like "here are the exact page numbers in #16 where she has basically this exact same reaction, have fun fam." But I'm aware that the fandom is basically fucking dead for readership and I worried that this lack of reading or character comprehension was a common fan reader issue among the small group of people who still read Animorphs fanfic.
At least it's a minor thing in the larger scope of the story.
I also kind of got the sense that people assumed A19D was a standalone work, which is kind of an interesting thing to think. It's very much written to signal to a savvy readership that it is only the beginning divergence that launches a different timeline. A couple people picked this up, but by and large the consensus was that this was the only story despite not nearly enough being explained to justify that.
This is actually another reason that I've had trouble continuing the fic series. I've been doubting a lot of craft choices lately because now I'm worried that I'm going to get more accusations of making Cassie "OOC" by... preserving her canon character fidelity in a way that sometimes feels uncomfortable.
I realize that the answer here is to not give a shit because this is free fucking fanfiction and also fuck all the way off. But I do want people to enjoy the narrative, so these reader concerns and reactions have made it more difficult to continue writing.
As I said above, I am not a fan of canon Cassie. She is preachy, heavy-handed, a downer, a wet blanket, and "moral" in a loudly performative way. There is no circumstance under which I would ever write a character like this in any original work of my own. Her self-sacrificing tendencies and self-effacing to be "good" for others sets my teeth on edge.
That's part of the reason that she is the "main character" as it were of this fic series. It's easy to correctly write a character you like. It's much more difficult to correctly write a character you can't stand and wish you could change to not be such an insufferable extra little holier-than-thou twat.
The thing is, Cassie is also funny. She's quick-witted, intelligent, hardworking, honest, skilled, kind, and naively sheltered in a way that makes her very endearing. Part of keeping her character intact is not letting these negative and positive traits cancel each other out. She can be both kind and preachy. She can be both funny and heavy-handed. Her character works best when these things show up together without one emotional reading being able to take over what's going on with her.
Cassie is at her best when her decisions or opinions are morally correct and strategically catastrophic. Part of her arc should always be how choosing the path of less harm still inflicts wounds that are harder to immediately see.
Idk, or something like that. I got two joints left and I plan to go smoke them both on a nice little late night walk. More fic and fandom chatter later.
Oh no. You Tumblr people interacted with my first post about this Animorphs fanfic I'm writing. God help me.
Because much like a toddler I cannot turn away from even the simplest forms of validation and praise, have moar post!
(My monstrous behemoth of an outline, let me show you it:)
When a psychologist diagnoses as obsessive-compulsive, this is what they mean
That's 14.5k words of planning document. The side-by-side table there is how I'm timeline tracking A19D and Scramble so that they line up and make sense, since they're occupying the same timeline space in-story. Fatality, the sequel, is still not fully fleshed out at this point and especially arcs two and three still need some scaffolding and a couple themically aligned character and situational (so, character) b plots.
Of the ~120k of extra prose backlog written, I currently have about 55k of the epilogue, Building Bridges. This is important because this entire project is actually about the epilogue.
One of my biggest pet peeves in this fandom is how a fic story will often "make peace" and then... things are over. Plot done. All atrocities large and small papered over and morally collapsed into neat win/loss categories that magically make everything better. So, you know, nothing like the original series itself.
This fic project is a series of pushbacks against a fandom that likes to take the lazy way out and wave a magic author fiat wand to cast wave of greater feels nostalgia instead of doing the actual craftwork that the writing requires to maintain world fidelity and hold nuance and morally corrupted positions that don't collapse into simple categorical points. It's a combination of my annoyance at this fandom's fucking inability to characterize Cassie correctly (no, Cassie is not the Punching Bag Who is Wrong. No, Cassie is not a Magical Plot Device Nature Goddess Negro,) and its rampant desire to turn Animorphs into something closer to Care Bears.
Expressions of this show up in Cassie's fan characterization (hell, they show up in everyone's fan characterization) but it's worst with Aftran. Oh, the bones I have to pick with her fan characterization. My God.
We see Aftran twice in the original canon series. During those appearances she consistently presents as manipulative, overbearing, silver-tongued, morally-flexible, selfish, paternalistic, rage-filled and quick to anger, sadistic, malicious, and capable of collaboration even with beings she hates if it furthers her goals. We also see glimmers that she does understand right and wrong at a basal level, but that her societal authoritarian dominance hierarchy culture upbringing has all but wiped that instinct out.
That's canon. Even when Cassie rescues her in canon the second time we see her, the first thing Aftran does is manipulate Cassie's empathy, care, and goodwill to pressure her into assisted suicide. This is after manipulating Cassie into a highly risky mission to rescue her, because and I fucking quote:
Animorphs #29
This is the first thing she says. Not 'thank you.' Not 'sorry for infesting you to talk to you.' Not 'the situation I just finished putting you as a fourteen/fifteen year old child in was awful and unsafe and should not have happened.' No. The very first line she gets is 'I knew you would come for me, Cassie,' and it's really really important. This is the foundational way that canon Aftran interacts with the world: entitled assumption. This is who she themically is at base as a character.
AKA, a scheming little shit who can have genuine affection for Cassie and still plan to use her as a rescue vector because that's the option she has available.
This is consistent in tone and theme for her from the first to the last time we see her in canon. She almost always maintains that air of entitled command, operational value, and goal-oriented thinking. It's only when she's in serious emotional distress and feels situationally screwed over and out of options that her composed presumptive register breaks down and she gets desperate and angry, and then she lashes out.
But this is not anything like the Aftran of fanon. In fic, she's kind, apologetic, and justifying of human-centered morals. She's an apologist for the sins of her own species and not for any strategic gain or operational or tactical value, but because it's wrong and that's bad in a more simplistic and childishly pure ethical sense. It's a simplification of her canon character into 'morally redeemed' without doing any work to get there or respecting what and who her canon character is at all.
This is "OOC:" essentially a fan creation fleshwalking in the character's skin. It comes from laziness, refusal to engage with what type of character a favorite character actually is, or a misunderstanding of the character as a whole.
This is a large part of the reason the Fatality fic series exists, because I'm frustrated by fandom and fanfic silliness. Writers taking the time to respect characterization and world constraints produce work that is by nature much closer to the original IP because it closes off most author fiat nonsense immediately. The very first shit-test becomes "would this actually happen in canon? Would the kids or more tertiary characters actually react or think or speak this way?" If the answer is no to either, rework until it's yes to both or discard the idea.
The second shit-test is "is this aligned to the themes and overall thrust of canon? Is it also aligned to the overall themes and thrust of what I as fic author want to say or make a point about?" If the answer is no to either, rework until it's yes to both or discard the idea.
The third shit-test is "does this idea slap? Does it keep me glued to the page because it's compelling?" If the answer is no to either, rework until it's yes to both or discard the idea.
You get the concept.
If you can get something to pass all 3 of those tests and you have built the technical skill to write in a similar prose style and tone as canon, you can pretty quickly build something that bypasses 95% of usual fanfic pitfalls and feels like the original property. This is because not only are you mimicking the original pacing, prose style, and tone, but you also have the themes and thrust and message aligned. If the deeper mechanisms driving the story are also on-point and match canon, the story feels like canon in a textural and semi-indefinable sense of nostalgic je ne sais quoi.
This is also why I have the entire story outlined, the ending planned, and the epilogue reasonably fleshed out and actively being written as a guidepost. The epilogue's actual prose is pretty meaningless and discardable (though damn is it good. I think it's the best writing I've ever produced and fam it cheeses me off to no end that it's fucking fanfiction) and the reason I'm writing it is so I have the general events, the tone, and the emotional stakes and worldbuilding already set up for the end and post-end conditions. I want the ending in sight the entire time I'm writing earlier prose so i know exactly where the story is headed.
To circle around to my earlier point (like the world's slowest oil-tanker of a multi-concussed MMA fighter laboriously trying to form a cogent thought) the fandom likes to go "we have peace now! Good wins! Screw moral ambiguity or previous sins or whatever, all is forgiven and that's a wrap! Cozy bullshit now!"
And it's like, if you wanna go write that, sure. Have fun. Just don't expect me to read it (because I'd rather chew arsenic pills for a medical study where when you cash the check they send you after 5 weeks and 2 hospital stays, it bounces... and then you're pulling NSF fees)
What I like is fanfic that takes the bones of the original series and treats them like legos. I like retreads that do something materially interesting with the points they're making. Most importantly, I like fics where consequences matter.
This is why I originally got into Animorphs as a kid. The consequences mattered. This is why I got so mad at the Deus Ex Bullshit in book 19, because the consequences ceased to matter.
So watching the fandom mostly go "peace happened and everything is fine now!!!" grinds my gears to no end. Because... yeah, I'm sorry, in Animorphs? No, Fam. Fam, no. No one would be fucking going "we have peace now yaaaay! Flowers and roses for everyone!" because that entire situation would be a complete and total ugly, messy, complicated shitshow.
More specifically I take issue with the "yeerks are good now and they're gonna be good allies who are good and recognize how bad they were" because. Lol. Lol. Lolololololololololololol. Reading comprehension is fucking dead, I guess.
And look, like, if that's what you want to write, I mean, sure I guess. But in the same way that I take offense to character OOC I also take offense to IP universe and world OOC. That is a fan creation fleshwalking the IP in its skin. Fuck all the way off.
Fatality (the fic series project) is a reaction to this fandom and fic nonsense. As a fic series it exists to set up "peace" and then explore what that would actually cost everyone to achieve. The epilogue is the most important story in the entire fic series of work because it's the story that goes "oh, did you think the story was done now because 'peace' was made? Motherfucker, we are barely getting started. Making peace and keeping peace are two totally different things, and this part of the universe is a political powder keg rigged to blow at a wrong glance."
This is why Scramble is taking so long, because a lot of the points that fully mature and turn horrendously ugly in Building Bridges are first planted in the next 7-ish chapters of Scramble so that they sprout strange and terrible fruit throughout all three arcs of Fatality and poison most of its actually positive turning points.
Fatality as a series is about making something that truly is better out of violation and domination and coercion without ever justifying those things, and how that does and does not taint and destroy what's been built. So all that stuff needs to slowly grow throughout the story and feel naturally seeded at the start. It has to arise situationally and organically or the whole story's message gets destroyed.
I had more points here but I've been smoking on some great 30% weed for the last couple hours while writing this and now brain not work so good.
More rambling later.
So a couple years ago I decided it was time to put effort into a very silly Animorphs fanfiction. I now have 60k of it up on A03.
I also, for some godawful reason, have another 120k written but not yet posted (because it's all in disconnected and isolated pieces that don't have the in-between connective tissue yet set up properly.)
And it's all because of this little shit:
'Let's put the twist reveal right on the cover! I mean, those idiot tween readers don't know anything, the clueless little shits. It's not like they can read, they're dumber than rocks! Stupid rocks! We can totally get away with it!' - Scholastic, probably
It is far too much work for a free fucking project. The outline is seventeen goddamned pages and has the kind of effort put into it that a smarter person would reserve for paid structual and copy work:
This is 15% of the outline. Proof that writers of fanfiction should be treated with first-line atypical antipsychotics before being given access to any writing implements.
Now this fanfic project started because my dumb ass went and re-read the Animorphs series in my mid-30's. I got to book 19: The Departure and threw a tantrum at the end the same way I did when I re-read the series in my early 20's and the same way I did when I originally read it at like... idk, 12?
My basic issue with the end of this book is that its stupid Deus Ex Caterpillar ending is a cop-out and pretty much a total themic betrayal of everything that the series had been building up to at this point. I do understand what the authorial intention was: Cassie is a special little snowflake who uses the awesome power of too much empathy or whatever to make love and understanding shoehorn their way into the narrative in the most eye-rollingly inauthentic and inorganic way possible.
And I do get why no one gave a fuck: I mean, what were you gonna do as a reader, go cry about it? Your next best possible option for tween reading at this time was Goosebumps. Motherfucker, shut the fuck up and consume your deux ex total bullshit ending Animorphs book. It's not like you had a ton of age-targeted media options anyway.
So. Be me, a couple years ago: exhausted, burnt out, crotchety, sick of everyone's shit, and so full of piss and vinegar it's probably an undiagnosed medical condition (call your doctor if you experience symptoms of priapism for more than four---) and sort of desperately hoping that I can emotion-mine some remembered childhood nostalgia out of that old kids-turn-into-aliens-to-fight-animals (or was it the other way around?) children's book series.
I sat down to read it, and ---holy shit!--- I knew in theory that the series holds up for the books that were written by the original authors, but this shit slaps!
And then I got to Book 19, and I got to the end, and fury filled me, because this quite emphatically did not slap. This was unslappage of the highest order. If this ending was any less of a banger it would read like a moldy sheet flapping on a slackened clothesline.
Assuming this feeling would pass, I let my rage consume me. But that was not the end, no: that was only stage the first of my grief process at how shitty that book's ending is. Next, after rage, came that terrible sense of purpose where I abruptly realized that oh no, I probably care about this enough to write content about it!
I went to my computer.
I sat down.
I opened google docs.
I turned on music.
I started typing.
In one night I somehow wordvomited almost 9k of fic fever dream onto the screen.
Now, that's not really impressive. A drooling toddler can bang her little dumb fists against a keyboard all day and put out an awful lot of text, none of which I would read at anything less than loaded-with-safety-off gunpoint. But in this case I produced serviceable prose that didn't immediately make me want to commit ritual suicide by way of self-immolation. I decided that was a plus.
In a fit of temporary mental illness I put that shit up online. I guess I forgot the whole maxim where no one will ever love your dumb bullshit as much as you will. But, surprisingly, people did not call for my immediate lynching and/or placing into the stocks in town square. Horribly (for me) they did something worse: I was given encouragement.
Because mommy and daddy never loved little baby TEQ enough, this was basically the equivalent of inhaling salvia-laced catnip mixed with the choicest smokeable rock crack-cocaine. What started as a silly little anger-fueled nonsense alternate divergence quickly became something that I went "well, fuck. I bet I can make this all internally coherent and slap."
And things went well! I banged out story 1 in three months or so and patted myself on the back!
And two weeks after I finished story 1, while on a walk only two blocks away from my house, I saw something fucked up that ended with the city coroner and a body bag. I didn't write for four months.
When I did start writing again it was difficult to get back into it. To encourage myself I started picking outline scenes and creating them with no regard for anything like sequence or in-story timeline. The result of this is that I have the entirety of the story and epilogue mapped out, and over half of it written, but I can't actually publish any of it because I still have some early foundational sections unwritten.
These early sections are taking sixever because SO FUCKING MUCH depends on them. I'm trying to thread multiple concepts and layers into prose that can't go on too long or expand too much without it losing the feel of the original series. This is fine for Cassie POV, because [SPOILER REDACTED], but the other kids (for reasons that include tone and major takeaways and themes) need to feel solidly like they have been ripped from a version of canon that got published in an alternate mirror reality. It needs to feel like Animorphs or it won't make the points I'm driving at.
So now I have another 120k of writing across almost 3 years in-story time and I can't actually use any of it until i get my shit together and write a cogent, coherent plan for the next like 7 chapters of Scramble, because if I fuck that portion up I might as well just delete the whole damn story project, and that's intimidating.
I finally got the first couple chapters of Scramble out in June or so of 2025, almost a year after A19D started publishing. In October I came back and updated it so that at least 14 chapters are out. We're now right at the point there where the story turns away from infighting / straight recap with natural team exposition and goes into rewarding the reader for sticking with it with lots of crucial information and de-escalating panic stakes. Interspersed with the knowledge dumps will be some great low-pressure bittersweet team bonding moments.
The information given will also retroactively turn the end third of A19D and the beginning third of Fatality into a tragedy, as the audience (and the rest of the group) will know more than Cassie does.
I've decided to start ranting and rambling about the project here, because goddamn if I can't go off on main (I say, while on a fandom-and-fic-specific alt) about this stuff my head will explode. I have other people to talk to about my original projects (which also slap btw), and I feel it's ethically about the same as waterboarding to inflict my fic divergence shit upon people already patient enough to listen to my nonsense about my originals.
But I'll end this here for now because it's getting less funny and more winding and introspective as I run out of steam.
