One more question, actually. I see you've done these mulling over posts for the numbered books, but I don't see any for the mega morphs or chronicles. Do you mind I make posts for them? This community seems to be mainly just you, and I don't want to overstep if you're hoping to keep it that way. Haha

This is probably my favorite book in the series so far. Absolutely loved it.

Note on the following, as I wrote it, I realized it was coming across as complain-y, but it's not that. I just don't have anywhere else to voice these things, and I'm getting them out. Haha. Genuinely loved this book.

Additional edit, this one is getting long with a bunch of speculation at the end. Haha

The failed mission as eels was a great twist. Sometimes missions fail, sometimes they have to be aborted. We don't see that enough, I think. This made everything feel more realistic to me. Genuinely good dramatic build up here.

I fully did not expect Cassie to have to go through with the surgery. Like at all. I just assumed there was some deus ex machina coming. That was legitimately harrowing.

Something I don't understand, though. Eric (I'm doing audiobooks this time around, and I don't remember. Is it Eric or Erik?) says his "father" was a doctor centuries ago. Are the Chee capable of performing surgery on a human? Does slicing into someone violate the non violence clause in their programming? Because if so, that makes for an interesting case of a doctor, and if not, why did Eric not perform the surgery under Cassie's guidance? Surely it would have been safer, given that he is an android, and cannot sweat into Ax, or accidently get a tremor at the wrong time.

Another little plot hole that bugs me. Eric has a yeerk in his head. He has a tiny kandrona emitter that keeps the yeerk alive. Which means he knows how to make a kandrona emitter. Surely they could have found a home for Astrid. They could have converted a kiddie pool into a yeerk pool for her, they could have allowed her to live with one of the Chee. There were ways to keep her in the fight. She began the peace movement, she was a valuable soldier in the fight against the yeerks.

Which, on that note, a couple thoughts I've had since beginning this reread:

One of the reasons the yeerks are all so "fall in line"y behind Visser 3 isn't just that he's a tyranical dictator. Soldiers defect from those all the time. Being threatened with death is nothing new. But it's because he controls the food source. "Defect and I'll hunt you down" leaves room for hope, but "do as I say or I take away literally every milligram of food on the entire planet" is different. There is literally no hope at that point. Do what they say, or starve to death slowly, painfully. That's a helluva motivator. You may start believing the propaganda just to make yourself feel better about what you're doing at that point. And that's not even to mention the whole Cassie/Astrid conversation from 19 about blindness and deafness in their yeerk state. Visser 3 feels like a Saturday morning cartoon villain sometimes, but the yeerks as a whole, (and even Visser 3 in some of them) are really quite nuanced, layered characters that you just don't expect from a kids series about alien slugs and morphing into animals.

Another thought I'd had much earlier in the series, but that this one brought to mind was yeerks and morphing technology.

We know from the Hork Bajir Chronicles that the yeerks did not have an empire, or were even imperially minded, prior to Seerow's Kindness. They were at least partially symbiotic with the Gedd, the Gedd not being intelligent enough for it be this big moral question in their using their bodies. The Yeerks wanted to expand past their planet, and due to Andalite laws and customs, they weren't given the technology to do so. They had access to it, but it was a controlled access. Andalite soldiers blocked the machinery and so on. So the yeerks, being a species biologically adapted to just taking what they wanted, took what they wanted through violent means. But it occurs to me, had the morphing technology been available at the time, if the yeerks had had access to that instead, I don't think we would have seen a Yeerk empire grow in the same way.

The Yeerks are slavers by their biology, right? But look at human chattel slavery. I'm an American, so we'll use that as the example. Europeans enslaved Africans because they didn't want to do the work. They wanted someone else to plough the fields, someone else to clean the kitchens, someone else to raise their kids. It is slavery by the lazy and the entitled.

But the yeerks are different. Every Hork Bajir controller fighting battles has a yeerk in its head. Every human controller working construction likewise has a yeerk physically feeling the bodily exhaustion, thirst, hunger, et cetera. The Yeerks are doing the work themselves, just as much as the controller. This is not slavery by the lazy. They aren't trying to get out of work, they are trying to live a life that doesn't completely fucking suck. So if they could morph, why would they need to enslave? Sure, there's the whole moral dilemma about morphing a sapient creature (one I genuinely don't share, to be honest), but that's a helluva lot better than making mind-slaves of entire planetary populations.

If the iskoort offer an alternative in the form of custom designed, clones symbiotes, then I think the morphing technology offers a distinctive third way that's even better.

I have a suspicion that's going to be one of the solutions towards the end of the series, but since I never finished it as a kid, I don't know. No spoilers please. Haha

Okay, that's way too long. If you read all of that, I'm really sorry lol