Characters / Animorphs

This is the character sheet for the Animorphs series. The Animorphs themselves can be found here.

Yeerk Empire

In General

Your average Yeerk outside their host

• Alien Catnip: Instant maple-and-ginger oatmeal, oddly enough. If a Yeerk consumes it, they get a pleasant high and want more, and it even satisfies nutritional needs normally sated through soaking in Kandrona rays. It's very much like a drug to Yeerks. Unfortunately, taking in too much results in complete insanity, and taking in any means the Yeerk wants more, eventually leading to a Yeerk losing its ability to separate from its human host. In the most extreme cases, the host is trapped in a living hell with an insane Yeerk permanently fused to their brain stem.
• Aliens Steal Cable: When the Yeerks (aka Edriss and Essam) first visit Earth, they park in orbit and attempt to learn what they can from television and radio transmissions. Amusingly, this leads to Edriss deciding to land in Hollywood, since it comes up the most in the transmissions and therefore must be the most important city on the planet.
• Always Chaotic Evil: A series-long examination and ultimate aversion. Yes, most of the Yeerks the characters meet throughout the series are authoritarian, militaristic, racist assholes. But they are products of an authoritarian, militaristic, racist culture, and it is unsubtly suggested that humans who grew up in their shoes would be a lot like them, especially when open nonconformity to the values of their race is considered a crime punishable by slow death. And while their nature as Puppeteer Parasites does somewhat pigeonhole them as villains, some sympathy is still granted to them because, despite being as smart and emotionally developed as any human, a Yeerk is stuck in the body of a blind slug that's only a few inches long if it doesn't infest another creature, making the temptation to violate others' rights just to have full sensory input and locomotion, even setting aside having spent its whole life being brainwashed into thinking of host bodies as cattle. (It's even implied that the relationship can be more symbiotic than parasitic if the Yeerk in question chooses to build a friendly relationship with their host rather than assert a master/slave dynamic, and from the start it's established they prefer "voluntary" hosts.) By the end of the series, the Yeerk Peace Movement and the end of the war give Yeerks a chance to get out from under the thumb of their dark masters and they prove decent enough people.
• And I Must Scream:
  • When a host, or Controller, is infested by a Yeerk, their memory and body is completely at the Yeerk's command, but the host's mind and intelligence are left intact. They're fully aware of what's going on, but can do nothing but watch as their "guests" use their bodies to do all sorts of horrible things; they're essentially trapped in their own heads.
  • Yeerks themselves suffer this in their natural state, being blind, mostly deaf slugs who also happen to be sentient.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Yeerks reproduce by three of them performing a Fusion Dance and then exploding into hundreds of newborn Yeerks. Naturally, the desire to sire children is not one that is very common to their species.
• Crippling Overspecialization: A major pitfall a lot of them seem to run into. The two most obvious examples are Visser One and Visser Three, but half the characters on this list fall into this for reasons described in more detail in their entries. In general, Yeerks seem naturally inclined to focus narrowly on a particular field or discipline, and flounder when put in a situation outside of their expertise.
• The Empire: They develop pretty quickly into a galaxy-spanning civilization, and are eager to assimilate more species into their fold so they can use them as hosts.
• Fantastic Diet Requirement: Their main weakness is that they need to exit the host and absorb Kandrona rays in a pool every three days, with the host left caged by other Controllers or enjoying themselves in the case of voluntary Controllers. If the Yeerk isn't fed in time, it dies slowly and horribly, mentally torturing its host all the while.
• The Farmer and the Viper: This is what gave rise to the Yeerk Empire in the first place. On an expedition to the Yeerk homeworld, the Andalite Prince Seerow felt sorry for the Yeerks, who were fully sapient but limited by the need for their hosts and Kandrona rays. Thus, he gave them access to Andalite technology and taught them writing, science, astronomy, and even how to build their own portable Kandrona generators. The Yeerks thanked Seerow by betraying him, escaping into space, murdering Seerow along with most of his family, and enslaving multiple races and civilizations to use as host bodies. It's because of this that the Andalites created a law, aptly titled "Seerow's Kindness," that expressly forbade any Andalite from sharing their technology and secrets with non-Andalites.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: The Yeerk Empire maintains an iron-fisted control over its people (who are effectively all conscripted from birth to serve as soldiers) and they not only have no concept of recreation to speak of, recreation is effectively a crime by their draconian laws. This is lampshaded in VISSER when Allison Kim remarks that the Yeerks are "all work and no play" and confidently predicts that will be their downfall. And indeed, the fascist Yeerk Empire proves incapable of maintaining its control once the Yeerk population is exposed to humanity. Between all the host sympathizing, oatmeal-snorting, and Peace Movement joining, the occupation of Earth probably would have failed eventually even if the Animorphs had never been formed to fight the invasion.
• Galactic Conqueror: They've already taken over several planets by the time they invade Earth.
• Going Native: Like Crippling Overspecialization, this is another pitfall Yeerks seem naturally prone to, particularly with intelligent hosts. This isn't a problem for them until they get to Earth, as their top three hosts up to that time are all handicapped in one way or another (Gedds are naturally dim and not very dangerous, Hork-Bajir are physically very threatening but not very smart and Taxxons, while intelligent, have most of their mentality tied up in their Horror Hunger). Humans, being a sapient species of high intelligence and superb senses (relative to a Yeerk's experience) are like catnip to them. It's hardly a surprise, then, when organizations like the Yeerk Peace Movement rise up and various Yeerks throughout the series get wrapped up in the psychology of their human hosts.
• Graceful Loser: An interesting aspect of Yeerk psychology. Being a race more given to pragmatism than humans, they see no point in fighting battles when the odds are against them, and consider humans mad for their Determinator tendencies. This is first revealed by Edriss in VISSER, and becomes something of a Chekhov's Gun gun late in the series when Visser Three surrenders to the kids in the final battle without a fight, subverting the expectations of many readers expecting a climatic battle but rewarding anyone who remembered Edriss's dialogue some 15-books back.
• Mechanical Insects: The Bug Fighter is the standard Yeerk combat ship, resembling a headless cockroach with two spear-like protusions for energy weapons.
• More than Mind Control: There are voluntary Controllers, people who willingly let a Yeerk infest them. Many of them are simply so alone, so desperate to be part of something, that they're willing to give up their free will. The Sharing's main purpose is to find these sort of people and indoctrinate them.
• No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture: As strict as the Andalites are, the Yeerks make them look like a bunch of laid-black slackers. The Yeerk extent of pop culture can basically be summed up as "No Fun Allowed", and in fact if a Yeerk fraternizes with its human host too much, it risks being charged with treason by sympathy with a subject species, a crime which carries an automatic sentence of death by Kandrona starvation.
• Orifice Invasion: They infest other beings by forcing their way through the ear canal and wrapping themselves around the brain.
• Parasites Are Evil: Yeerk infestation is often portrayed as a terrifying, dehumanizing experience, and the Yeerks themselves are encouraged to treat their hosts as little more than cattle — to the point of psychologically torturing them in order to force them to submit. However, the portrayal becomes much more complex as the series continues, especially once it becomes clear that the Yeerk Empire is harbouring a freedom movement that wants to shift the species away from parasitism and into symbiosis; these rebel Yeerks are regarded as sympathetic and even serve as tentative allies of the Animorphs on occasion.
• Puppeteer Parasite: They don't kill the host, have full access to the host's memories, and usually do a pretty good job of pretending to be the host, but they have to leave the host every three days to feed (the temporarily-free hosts are generally locked up in the meantime, but more than once the heroes take advantage of this — as if the Yeerk does not feed within those three days, it automatically leaves the host as it dies). They're also a bit more sympathetic, due to not being evolved on a Planet of Hats — as it turns out, most of them simply have no opportunity or capacity to do anything else. They are also stuck in a blind slug-type body unless they take over the body of another (both described by a friendly Yeerk and experienced by Cassie when she morphs into one).
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Of the Aliens as Conquistadors variety. The Yeerks move from planet to planet on a mission to infect and take over as many lifeforms as possible, while destroying any species they have no use for. That said, the series ultimately adds some complexity to the Yeerks, making the species as a whole somewhat more sympathetic, particularly in their war with the Andalites, who turn out to be less righteous than they first appear.
• Sensory Overload: Not quite, but close — being very naturally limited in terms of senses in their natural states, Yeerks are shown to get quite giddy with the senses humans take for granted, particularly sight. In some cases, Yeerks taking their first host do get overloaded from their first sensory experiences. In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, some Yeerks even reject the experience as frightening, though Esplin disagrees.
• Technology Uplift: The Andalites (more specifically Prince Seerow) elevated them from a primitive, barely-tool using (through the Gedds) race into one with tech surpassing mankind's by sharing their technology (which the Andalites quickly came to regret).
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: The Yeerks have full access to their host's memories and can mimic their behavior and personalities perfectly; the Animorphs are fully aware that anyone they know could be a Controller. To really drive the paranoia home, it's not at all uncommon for the Animorphs to cause a public spectacle... and start getting attacked by random members of the crowd.
• Trapped in the Host: The fate of any Yeerk who tries to a possess a Chee, who are lifelike robots that disguise themselves as human. A Yeerk trying to possess one finds out too late that they're not possessing a human at all, and the Chee don't have a brain that the parasitic Yeerks can mold themselves around in order to control.
• Villainous Underdog: Though it's not very evident to the main characters, the Yeerks are easily this in relation to the Andalites. They're a relatively young power, having only obtained significant technology thirty years ago, they lost their original homeworld relatively early, meaning that most of the race is now confined to spaceships, their technology is mostly knockoffs of Andalite tech, and they do not have enough hosts to win a war of attrition. Earth is so important to them because being able to convert most of Earth's population into Controllers is the only way they'll have even a chance of winning. Of course, this doesn't make much difference to the Animorphs themselves, as a relatively weak Galactic Conqueror is still a massive threat to Earth as a whole.

Visser Three (Esplin Nine-Four-Six-Six)

Visser Three (Esplin 9466 the primary)

Debut: Animorphs #1: The Invasion (1996)

He looked so much like Ax. So much like Prince Elfangor. And yet, so totally different. The difference wasn't something you saw. It was something you felt. A shadow on your soul. A darkness that blotted out the light of the sun. Evil. Destruction. His body was an Andalite. He was the only Andalite-Controller in existence. The only Yeerk ever to infest an Andalite body. The only Yeerk with the Andalite power to morph. Visser Three.

The only Yeerk to ever infest an Andalite, Esplin 9466 Primary, in his time as Visser Three, was put in charge of operations on Earth. Though he carried out the orders of his superiors and employed the strategy of infiltration and subversion suggested by his rival Visser One, his violent and impulsive personality lent itself more brutal tactics. A long-time proponent of a strategy of open war, his efforts to be promoted to Visser One were stymied by his inability to capture or kill what he believed to be "Andalite bandits", and his growing obsession with the Animorphs paved the way for his descent into insanity and paranoia.

---

• 0% Approval Rating: He's an Ax-Crazy Evil Overlord who executes his subordinates at the drop of a hat and makes a hobby out of collecting torture devices and morphing giant alien monsters. Consequently, he's almost universally hated and feared among his fellow Yeerks, with only a few die-hard fanatics expressing loyalty towards him. This actually becomes a plot point several times. Early in the series many Yeerks suspect some of the "Andalite bandits" are humans, but they don't talk about it openly because he hates that idea. Later, as the Animorphs are threatened with the prospect of Visser One taking over the invasion, they decide it's more to their advantage that Visser Three remain in charge, as his leadership makes the Yeerks less effective.
• Acid Attack: Two of his morphs have been known to use it: the Kaftid he morphs in The Pretender and an unnamed morph from The Return that's described as a giant alien alligator gorilla.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed, but in the tv show he's nowhere near as much of an Ax-Crazy Bad Boss as in the books, and the only person he actually kills (that we see) is Elfangor.
• Aliens Are Bastards: An Ax-Crazy Jerkass who kills whoever and whenever he wants.
• And I Must Scream: His final fate is imprisonment forever in his natural Yeerk form. Cut off from any sense he once enjoyed, powerless and alone for the rest of his miserable life.
• Animorphism: Mostly using scary giant alien monsters.
• Antagonist Abilities: Played with as to make him a Foil to the Animorphs. While they technically have the same powers, the heroes are mostly limited to Earth animals in their choice of forms, and each of them has a favorite 'combat morph'. Visser Three is a galactic conqueror who has the access to a set of terrifying forms mimicking abominations from distant planets, making the most ferocious Earth predators look like fluffy kittens in comparison. He has so many of them that he rarely reuses a shape. Due to this, the heroes stand not a shadow of a chance against him in a straight fight, except the rare times when they make a serendipitous discovery of a particular morph's weakness.
  • He also possesses an Andalite body and sometimes fights like an Andalite, with his tail blade, but he doesn't have Ax's tailfighting skill and usually has to put some distance between them and morph to get out of those confrontations.
• Arch-Enemy: Outside of his general enmity with the Animorphs, he's involved in a set of two one-directional arch enemy relationships; Ax considers him to be his because Visser Three killed his brother and Ax is expected to kill his brother's killer, and Visser Three considers Jake to be his even when all he knew about him was his status as the leader of the "Andalite Bandits" and his preferred battle morph.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: One of the main reasons, if not the main reason, why he's still in power. Getting Alloran's body boosted him in a few years from Sub-Visser Seven to Visser Thirty-two to Visser Three... and then he stalls out at Visser Three for something like twenty years.
• Ax-Crazy: Viciously insane, with a Hair-Trigger Temper, and executes his subordinates at the drop of a hat.
• Badass Arm-Fold: He apparently favors this pose, as seen on the cover of VISSER on the right.
• Bad Boss: He could well be the Trope Namer. Not only does he sarcastically mock his subordinates, but he kills them for little-to-no reason, ranging from such things as general failure to simply questioning his orders. Many Yeerks actually go so far as to pass up promotions to avoid working with him; those who do work alongside him live in constant fear of his wrath and do everything they can to avoid pissing him off.
  • One of the worst moments of this was when the Animorphs, needing to get the Visser out of the room they were in, imitated his voice, prompting a guard to walk into his room. Visser Three chases him out, screaming that he's going to execute him for his crime of entering without being summoned.
• Big Bad: There's two Vissers and the Council of Thirteen above him in the Yeerk hierarchy, but Visser Three is the leader of the Earth invasion, the Arch-Enemy of the Animorphs and the primary antagonist of the series. Further solidified when he is ultimately promoted to Visser One and becomes commander-in-chief of the entire Yeerk forces. And in one Bad Future, he works his way up to The Emperor.
• Big Eater: As a Yeerk with an Andalite host he seems to add the Yeerk delight in a host's senses to the general Andalite reaction to taste to an even more extreme extent than Ax or Estrid. Unfortunately for just about everyone, his Nightmare Fetishist tendencies lead to him choosing predatory creatures for the express purpose of eating his victims alive.
• Bigger Is Better: A philosophy he subscribes to wholeheartedly. Subverted in The Arrival, when he finally realizes bigger is not always better and morphs a small creature to avoid being assassinated. Ax's narration sardonically treats this like the Visser has learned some astonishing new trick.
• Blob Monster: One of his morphs in The Return. Rachel aptly describes it as 'Killer Jell-O'.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: Tom sells him out to the Animorphs in the hopes of seizing his Blade ship and escaping before the Andalites move in.
• Bond One-Liner: After eating Elfangor, he makes a really bad one about using the morph to "take a bite out of [his] enemies." He's also deployed equally bad one-liners when he feels like he has the upper hand, as seen in The Threat and The Mutation.
• Breath Weapon: His most powerful and only recurring combat morph, the eight-everythinged creature seen in The Invasion and The Resistance, breathes fireballs from each of its eight heads.
• The Brute: While he's the Big Bad to the Animorphs, this is his overall position in the Yeerk hierarchy. The main reason he became a Visser in the first place was just because he captured the first Andalite host and delivered a bunch of valuable enemy intelligence with it, but otherwise he's a General Failure prone to Cartoonish Supervillainy who is useful primarily because he is personally extremely powerful and dangerous. He's otherwise a terrible general and tactician with no sense of political savviness and is so arrogant and proud that it's crippling. It says something that Visser One, his primary rival in the Yeerk hierarchy, is a normal human he could kill with ease, but she's able to outplay him through intelligence and cunning because she's fully aware he has neither.
• The Caligula: Violent, sadistic, and murderously insane, he fits every bullet on the list.
• Cartoonish Supervillainy: At his lowest points.
• Chameleon Camouflage: The chameleon crab morph he uses in The Reunion has this as its gimmick.
• Combat Tentacles: More than a few of his morphs feature them, most notably the Lerdethak from The Forgotten and the unnamed monster he morphs in The Ultimate.
• Crippling Overspecialization: As a battle commander Visser Three is unrivaled by any other character in the story. As anything else, particularly as the stealthy invasion commander that he's been tasked to be by his masters in the Council, he fails in epic fashion.
• Cruel Mercy: After he's finally beaten, he's robbed of his prized Andalite body and forced to live out the rest of his natural life in his original Yeerk state, blind and helpless. For Visser Three, who was in love with the sense of sight, this is very fitting.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: He's had plenty of time on both ends on this trope. Even though he's a bloodthirsty brute with a bottomless grab bag of powerful alien morphs, he's also very stupid and willfully ignorant of indirect tactics and the Earth morphs that the kids use against him — so on one hand, you have the Visser using his eight-everythinged morph in The Invasion to immediately force the Animorphs to retreat, and on the other, you have the Visser laughing his ass off at Cassie's skunk morph in The Secret and leaving himself wide open to a good spraying.
• Cyclops: In The Sickness he morphs a creature that's basically a giant, tentacled eyeball.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Evil Overlord — he is a terrifying and intimidating presence, a brutal and violent conqueror, and commands an army of replaceable minions from whom he tolerates no failure. However, these traits that would make him a great warlord make him terrible at leading a covert infiltration force, which is what Visser One wants the Earth invasion to be. His Bad Boss tendencies result in him being surrounded by sycophants who can't do their jobs properly because they're terrified he'll kill them on a whim if they displease him, and others are willing to betray him because they hate him; he has no ability to formulate effective long-term strategies or plans, and the few times he tries his schemes are either impractical or easily foiled; he's easily tricked because he isn't terribly clever and underestimates his enemies and overestimates his own abilities; and any time he gets into a fight he causes lots of collateral damage uncaring about being noticed, which risks breaking The Masquerade. The result of his Cartoonish Supervillainy is years of wasted time and resources that see the Yeerks barely make any progress in their takeover of Earth, and he repeatedly failures to capture a group of six "Andalite bandits" despite all he could ask for to track them down. It says something that when he becomes Visser One and finally has the authority to dispense with stealth and lead a frontal assault and invasion of Earth, he becomes much more effective and dangerous.
• Dishing Out Dirt: In The Visitor he morphs a three-legged, twenty-foot tall creature that's strong enough to rip up chunks of cement from the ground and throw them.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Any subordinate who even mildly displeases him runs the risk of being hit with brutal retaliation. He once responded to a guard entering his quarters without being summoned by threatening to have him executed.
• Dragon Ascendant: By the series' end, he rises to become Visser One and leads the invasion.
• Dragon-in-Chief: He's subservient to the Council of Thirteen, but because they're basically a non-entity in the story being the ones he and Visser One report to, and because he's handily the strongest Yeerk thanks to his Andalite host, he is thus much more threatening as the leader of the Earth invasion and primary opponent of the Animorphs. Ultimately, it's his defeat and capture that puts an end to the war, all while the Council of Thirteen remain in the background.
• The Dreaded: Feared by Andalite and Animorph both. The Visser may be a General Failure, but in a fight he defeats the kids nearly every time, due to his greater experience and arsenal of alien morphs.
  • This is subverted when forced into single combat. On multiple occasions — including one time in an Alternate Universe where he fights a very green, untested Ax — the Visser fights one-on-one with the Animorphs and loses, often decisively. For all his talk, he relies on his terrifying and overpowering morphs to back it up.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the second book Rachel describes him as "not a creature that makes impetuous decisions". Given the Visser's later behavior, this assessment of him is nothing short of laughable.
• Enemy Mine: Teams up with the Animorphs to escape the Helmacrons in The Suspicion and the Nartec in The Mutation, as well as with Elfangor and Loren in The Andalite Chronicles.
• Enfant Terrible: He was 'born' in the two-year period between the Yeerks stealing ships and leaving their homeworld and finding the Hork-Bajir, at which point he was instrumental in enslaving them. He's five or so during The Andalite Chronicles and in his mid to late twenties in the main series. Maybe Yeerks just have brief childhoods.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing he does when the kids see him the first time is morphs into a giant monster and eats Elfangor alive, both showing how evil he is and showcasing his ability to morph into alien monsters (which would result in him becoming a one person Monster of the Week throughout the series).
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Part of the reason he assumes that the Animorphs are "Andalite bandits" rather than human teenagers with morphing abilities: it genuinely doesn't occur to him that anyone (much less a proud Andalite War Prince) would take pity on a group of "lowly" humans enough to bequeath the morphing ability to them—rather than conquering them or leaving them to their fate.
• Evil Gloating: He's a master of this, and he uses public thought-speak to ensure everyone can hear him.
• Evil Is Bigger: All of his morphs are ridiculously large.
• Evil Overlord: In charge of the infiltration of efforts of Earth, alongside Visser One. Eventually, he takes full control, turning the invasion from a quiet takeover to a full-blown war.
• Exotic Entree: He has two morphs, the Antarean Bogg and Vanarx, specifically devoted to being bad enough to do this to other species. In the first book, he devours Elfangor.
• Fatal Flaw: For him, it's a lack of restraint. His chronic inability to use force and violence pragmatically prevents his subordinates from doing their jobs properly, which proves a major handicap to the campaign to conquer Earth.
• Fate Worse than Death: His fate is being contained in a custom-made prison without a body for the rest of his life, helpless and only able to see through the box's sensors. For a power hungry monster like Visser Three who was in love with the sense of sight, this is most certainly one of these.
• Faux Affably Evil: He often speaks politely, but doesn't even try to hide his Ax-Crazy nature.
• Feathered Fiend: In The Decision he attacks Ax as a kafit bird, which comes from the Andalite home world. As revealed in The Andalite Chronicles, it's one of the first morphs that most Andalites learn, and a standard morph that nearly all of them know.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The name "Esplin" isn't terribly intimidating, though, thankfully, he's almost always referred to by his title. He also morphs into a creature called a "dule fansa" in one book, and even points out how silly its name is.
• Giant Enemy Crab: In The Reunion he morphs an alien chameleon crab.
• Giant Flyer: He's got two known morphs that fall under this banner: the Bievilerd from The Revelation and an unnamed monster described as something like a giant winged porcupine pterodactyl in The Underground.
• Giant Squid: The last morph he ever uses is one of these, seen in The Sacrifice. He may have used it before in The Mutation.
• General Failure: He embodies this trope. That's what you get for having a society basically built on Asskicking Leads to Leadership — The Peter Principle kicks in and your stealth invasion ends up being run by a guy who kills his own troops at the slightest provocation. The heroes occasionally work to keep him in charge, but are hamstrung by the 'stealth' aspect. What really drives the point home is that Visser Three's entire species is built around, and understands the importance of a stealthy approach^note The main resource Yeerks want from invaded planets is living host bodies, so open warfare is incredibly costly for them.. Even the superiors nearly as ruthless as he is manage to understand this. Visser Three was a nobody whose violent obvious tactics mostly worked on the Hork-Bajir homeworld because the hosts there were plentiful and didn't know to fight back until relatively late. This got him some rank, but it skyrocketed when he became the only Yeerk to possess a morph-capable Andalite (out of sheer luck as much as anything else), and his ego ballooned from there.
  Visser One: I understand you perfectly, Esplin 9466. You have the necessary brutality without the necessary subtlety. You are crude and emotional. You've made no progress with Earth. None. For all your grandiose schemes, you are no further toward your goal than when you took over.
• Graceful Loser: Very surprisingly done at the end. He surrenders to the Animorphs without a fight and leaves his host willingly. In previous encounters where he'd come off the worse and had to retreat he was angry and petulant. The difference is probably the scope of his defeats — failing at one plan or another left room to come back, but the loss of his entire army and capture due to betrayal at a critical moment left him completely without wiggle room.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: It doesn't take a lot to make him lose control and lash out violently at whatever's annoying him.
• Hate Sink: He's a sadistic, murderous tyrant, and colossal asshole as well. He's clearly not intended to be liked.
• The Heavy: Visser One and the Council of Thirteen are above him, but he's in charge of the invasion of Earth, so he is the main enemy.
• Hero Killer: Probably the most dangerous combatant in the series, and more than lives up to this reputation.
• Humiliation Conga: He goes through one at the end of the series. The Animorphs tricked him into believing that they were dying on the ground, Tom stole the Blade ship from him and got away with it, and he's forced to release his Andalite host and spend the rest of his life in a box, without the ability to see except through its sensors.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles he has a fixation on Andalites that borders on the sexual and is wildly delighted when he captures Aldrea and starts to infest her.
  "Hello, Andalite! You are mine! My host! My slave! Do you see who I am? Do you see that I am your master?"
• Insane Admiral: This is the default mindset for Yeerk Vissers, most of whom are shown to be motivated more by their personal agendas rather than military objectives. Visser Three is the standout, a dim-witted egomaniac with an unquenchable thirst for violence and a questionable grip on reality. He finds every excuse he can to butcher his own subordinates, spends the rest of his time playing politics with his superiors, and reacts to defeat like an angry child. His fanatical subordinate, Visser Two, is even more crazed, if that's possible to imagine. He also gets bonus points for taking an actual admiral as his host. Interestingly, Visser Three actually shows far more effectiveness, restraint, and... well, sanity, in the prequel Chronicles books. He gets a narrating role in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles in which he's downright the Only Sane Man among the Yeerks invading the Hork-Bajir homeworld.
• The Juggernaut: In The Message he chases the kids as a giant, untiring Sea Monster called a Mardrut. They're only saved by the fortuitous arrival of magic talking whales.
  • Most of the Visser's morphs trend towards this, due to their size, overwhelming power, and general unstoppability.
• Kill It with Fire: He's fond of this. In the first book he morphs a monstrous, unnamed eight-headed creature and in The Mutation he morphs the Luminar, a blazing creature that can flash-fry its enemies by pointing a finger. Hasbro must have caught on to it, because the first Visser Three toy transformed into a form never seen in the books dubbed the Inferno Beast.
• Klingon Promotion: An indirect example: In book 45, we learn that Visser One failed at the Anati invasion, and is sentenced to die. Visser Three presides over her execution, and gets promoted to Visser One a few months later.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When he's finally cornered by the team he surrenders without a fight.
• Large Ham/ Evil Is Hammy: Something of a Running Gag; every time it is explained that thought-speak can be sent to one person or a few, that's when the Visser ANNOUNCES HIS PRESENCE TO EVERY PERSON IN RANGE!
• The Leader: He's the very definition of an evil Headstrong type leader.
• Lesser of Two Evils:
  • The entire reason he willingly surrenders to the Animorphs at the end of the series; as he himself states, no punishment he might receive from the Animorphs could possibly be worse than what he would receive from the Council of Thirteen.
  • Also, the main characters see him as this compared to the much more competent Visser One (see below).
• Manipulative Bastard: Largely averted, but he runs a pretty good plot to smoke out Elfangor's son in The Pretender. He's smart when he wants to be. Usually, he doesn't want to be.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: He is not afraid to eat other Yeerks — host and all — who fail him. His brother, who figured out a means to survive without recharging in a Kandrona pool by consuming other Yeerks, implies that if Visser Three figured out that trick he wouldn't hesitate to use it.
• Monster of the Week: He's basically a one person example as he has a vast array of alien monsters acquired (most of which are powerful enough to be a match for the whole Animorphs team), and uses a new one practically every other book (indeed, he only re-uses one once in the series.)
• Muck Monster: He's got two known morphs like this, one seen in The Weakness and the other in The Hidden.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The unnamed creature he morphs in The Threat. All we know about it is that it is 'dark and large and has more arms than it should'.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Among Andalites, he is known as 'The Abomination'.
• Nightmare Fetishist: His private room on the Blade Ship is decorated with torture devices from around the galaxy, including an iron maiden.
• No One Could Survive That!: The actual Yeerk Esplin 9466 has made a shtick out of surviving against impossible odds. See The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, and The Alien. He also survives the war, which is no mean feat when you consider how many people want him dead.
• Off with His Head!: His preferred method of execution. The fact that his underlings can escape the host before dying as well makes this a somewhat less destructive punishment than normal, but it's still a demotion.
• One-Winged Angel: He has a menagerie of monstrous morphs he's acquired from across the galaxy.
• Perpetual Frowner: Downplayed, since he doesn't have a mouth, but the graphic novels show him giving an angry, disapproving look in all his appearances.
• The Peter Principle: He was quite a competent villain in the Chronicles prequels, but it's pretty clear that trying to run a stealthy infiltration campaign really doesn't fit his skillset, making him a General Failure in the main series.
• Pet the Dog: A possible example: In one book, he has to go to a makeshift circus, and complains about the bad treatment of animals there. He is in a morph at the time and trying to fool Tobias, so it's also possible he's just acting nice to fool him better.
• Plant Aliens: His Lerdethak morph from The Forgotten.
• Prehensile Hair: In The Suspicion he morphs a Medusa-like creature with scythe-tentacles for hair.
• Powerful, but Incompetent: He can morph into things that it would take an entire army to stop, but mentally he's the equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon villain and so has been handed multiple embarrassing defeats in spite of his vast power.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: His troops wear red and black.
• Sadist: Esplin loves torturing others and causing pain to his enemies. Or anyone really.
• Sanity Has Advantages: The main reason the Animorphs manage to survive the entire war against the Yeerks without a single casualty until the last book in the series is because Visser Three is an Ax-Crazy, supremely arrogant, ignorant, megalomaniac psychopath who makes Bond villains look intelligent and rational by comparison and is such a Bad Boss that his soldiers are too terrified of him to do anything without his express orders. More than once, the Animorphs conspire to keep Visser Three in power specifically because the Visser's insanity causes more damage to the efforts of the Yeerks to take over Earth than the Animorphs could ever do.
• Sanity Slippage: Not that he's particularly sane even to start with, but what little stability Visser Three does have steadily erodes over his three years of fighting the Animorphs. By the end he's clearly suffering the evil equivalent of Heroic Fatigue, being increasingly apathetic and delegating more and more of his authority to his treacherous lieutenant Tom.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: In the final book, he is removed from his host and sentenced to life imprisonment in a metal container.
• Sea Monster: In The Escape he morphs a bright yellow alien sea serpent. His Lebtin Javelin Fish from The Reaction and Mardrut from The Message also count.
• Sense Freak: In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles prequel, we see a young Esplin experience sight through his very first host, and he falls utterly in love with it, even with his host species' bad eyesight. In the present day, he loves his Andalite 360-degree vision. Ironically, Ax notes that he's not good at using his stalk eyes to continually scan for threats, which regular Andalites learn to do as a matter of course.
• Shoot the Messenger: All the goddamn time.
• Signature Move: Averted, since he has a penchant for hauling out a new alien monster morph every book. In a way, you could say his Signature Move is being a permanent one-man Monster of the Week.
• Smug Snake: A big part of his characterization: as terrifyingly intimidating as the Visser can be, his rampant ego and sociopathy also make him horribly ill-suited to his task of orchestrating a strategic covert takeover of Earth from within, and his compulsive sadism (contrasted with Visser One's Pragmatic Villainy) proves to be his undoing more often than not. He can't even work out the fact that his most persistent enemies are a motley crew of human teenagers instead of a squad of "Andalite bandits".
• The Sociopath: An incredibly low-functioning example of one, due to his Lack of Empathy, volatile temper, and proclivity towards committing Stupid Evil acts. He may have been different in his youth, as in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles he mentions joking with his twin and having friends, but by the main series it's different.
• Spike Shooter: In The Reaction he morphs a Lebtin Javelin Fish, a kind of manta ray that fires spears from its mouth. His Dule Fansa also shoots spikes from its four arms.
• The Starscream: To Visser One. He succeeds eventually. However, their hatred of each other is mutual.
• Start of Darkness: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles probably counts, since aside from Dak and Alrea's story, about a third of the novel is spent exploring his own backstory.
• Stronger Sibling: Labeled as such at birth, hence his 'primary' designation.
• Stupid Evil: It's only most of the way through the series when he even begins to suspect that the Animorphs are human. Possibly influenced by his Andalite host; Alloran is smarter than Esplin seems to be, but might be slow to believe that Andalites broke the law and gave the morphing power to humans who prove very effective guerrillas.
  • Book 28 has him react so badly to researchers claiming there's no way to add something to food that removes free will that the survivors entirely fake the results of their research and claim complete effectiveness. The last one is so beaten down by this that he just cooperates with the Animorphs when they show up, saying he'd rather die of Kandrona starvation than be there when Visser Three realizes what happened.
• Torture Technician: In The Extreme, it's revealed that he collects torture devices from around the universe.
• Tragic Villain: The closest he ever comes to sympathy is his opening chapter in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles prequel. He gets to infest a host for the very first time (for only a few minutes) and falls so in love with its ability to see that he knows he'll do ANYTHING to experience it again.
• Ultimate Job Security: To a truly breathtaking degree, as he remains commander of the Earth invasion for the entire series despite making zero progress at all, and indeed remaining confined to only a single metropolitan area (all his attempts to expand Yeerk influence are met with failure). Several Yeerks, including Visser One, are executed for failures far less egregious than Visser Three's, and yet not only is he not executed, he's even promoted! The Animorphs wonder more than once if he isn't just a Lucky Bastard, and with his track record readers will wonder that too.
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: Not in his Andalite form, but some of his battle morphs are really gross. The worst is probably a Muck Monster he turns into in book #37 that emits a horrific stench which Rachel says is like a combination of open sewers and rotting corpses. It's so foul that the Animorphs can barely breath and thus lose the fight.
• Uniqueness Value: Being the only Andalite-Controller, and the only morph-capable one, makes him one of the most powerful Yeerks, and it sometimes seems that he wants to keep it that way, sabotaging any chances that other Yeerks would get hosts that could do the same as his.
• Unskilled, but Strong: On multiple occasions — including one time in an Alternate Universe where he fights a very green, untested Ax — the Visser fights one-on-one with the Animorphs and loses, often decisively. That being said, he has a vast arsenal of powerful morphs, with which he has defeated the Animorphs in a straight fight and even forced them into a complete retreat more than once.
• Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: In The Discovery, he morphs a purple four-armed beast called a Dule Fansa, variously described as an 'evil Barney' and 'Hitmonchan with traffic-cone arms'.
• Villain Decay: Suffers from it, due to being the main villain for the entire series. Even more extreme if you read the Hork-Bajir or Andalite Chronicles, in which we see his beginnings as a very capable Manipulative Bastard, and long before his degeneration into the General Failure he is now. Despite this, fighting him head-on is still not a good idea.
• Villainous Breakdown: His repeated defeats and humiliations at the hands of the Animorphs take their toll.
• Villainous Rescue: In The Mutation. Without him, those kids would have been screwed by the Nartec.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Just as surprisingly as his Graceful Loser moment above, he brutally mocks Jake for trying to take the high ground right afterward:
  "He's a prisoner of war. We don't kill prisoners."
  "No, of course not. You merely destroy the ground-based Yeerk pool and kill thousands. And you add another seventeen thousand here on this ship. All defenseless, unhosted Yeerks. But you don't kill prisoners."
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: A curious character trait to be sure, and one that definitely contributes to his at-times cartoonish nature, but several times over the series (The Suspicion, The Mutation) he finds himself in Enemy Mine situations that force him to team up with the Animorphs, and in spite of his otherwise malicious personality, fully (and sometimes even enthusiastically) commits to the team-up, only to find himself surprised when the Animorphs turn the tables on him. In some books, like The Secret, this aspect of him is even made outrightly cartoonish.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: His victories in rising within the Yeerk hierarchy are typically the result of this. For example, in The Weakness he beat his rival the Inspector simply by standing back and letting him and the Animorphs fight to the death (he even allows the Animorphs to escape unimpeded!). He also achieves his ultimate triumph over his hated rival Edriss simply by not failing as badly on Earth as she fails in Anati.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: It's theorized by fans that this is the direct cause behind Visser Three's incompetence in the main series — in the Chronicles books he has a tendency to grandstand and rant and gloat but can be patient, thoughtful and manipulative, unlike the General Failure seen in the main series. Then he gets himself an Andalite host, becomes the most physically powerful Controller in the Empire, and it's all downhill from there.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • It says something about his character that probably the closest thing to a sympathetic moment that he ever had in the series to round him out was in The Pretender, when he mused to a seemingly-oblivious Tobias that Elfangor was a great man, and that he should be proud to be his son.
  • Later, Visser Three comes to regard team leader Jake as such too, repeatedly complimenting his tiger morph. Near the very end of the series, a former hostage of the enemy says they should listen to Jake — a sixteen year old boy — because he's the only person Visser Three is afraid of.
• The Xenophile: His whole rise to power began because he was fascinated by Andalites and believed that by becoming the nascent Empire's expert on Andalites he could make himself indispensable. Briefly infesting Aldrea turned this fascination to an obsession.
• You Have Failed Me: A lot. Visser One notes that he's executed subordinates "by the poolful," which basically means thousands or more. He does this so reliably that Marco's able to bluff his way out of a situation where three flunkies were expected by saying, "I think Visser Three killed them for doing something wrong". He chastises himself for this, calling it the worst lie he's ever told, only for it to be believed.
• Younger Than They Look: Yeerks grow up quickly. He was born in the two years between the Yeerks leaving their homeworld and finding the Hork-Bajir and started to gain in authority almost instantly. At the start of the main series he's only in his midtwenties.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: He has a form devoted to this, a Vanarx, which can suck the Yeerk out of its host and eat it.

Visser One (Edriss-Five-Six-Two)

Visser One (Edriss-Five-Six-Two)

Debut: Animorphs #5: The Predator (1996)

I took a human host and learned about the planet and humans, and because of that I was able to begin the invasion that you have now endangered with your criminal incompetence! ...You want to be Visser One? You want to take my title? We shall see.

Cold and calculating, it was Edriss 562 who suggested the strategy of infiltration that defined the war for the majority of the series, after years of living amongst her enemies. Though she punished failure harshly, she also rewarded well for success, and her calm and collected tactical abilities made her a star in the eyes of the Council.

---

• Arch-Enemy: To Marco, whose life's goal quickly becomes killing Visser One.
• Becoming the Mask: Subverted in VISSER. However, the ending suggests that despite her best efforts, she had became the mask ever so slightly — just not enough to overtake her ambition.
• Body Surf: In a sense during VISSER. Over the course of the narrative she moves through seven different hosts.
• Crippling Overspecialization: She's the exact inversion of her rival Visser Three's overspecialization. Put her in charge of a stealthy invasion, as she initially was with Earth, and Edriss will deliver results every time. But put her in charge of a military campaign, as the Council of Thirteen idiotically decided to do twice, and all the cunning wit in the world won't save her. Ironically, this serves to heighten her role as an evil Foil to Marco, who gladly serves as The Lancer of the Animorphs because he knows himself well enough to know he doesn't have the chops to lead the team.
• Daydream Believer: When she first arrived on Earth, she and Essam picked up broadcasts of Star Trek, which they believed were real footage, and that humans were capable of Faster-Than-Light Travel.
• Deliver Us from Evil: Ultimately subverted. Having children through Allison certainly had an effect on her but ultimately she prioritized the Yeerk Empire. She cared about those children, she liked being a mother enough to choose another one as her host, but had no concern about the rest of the human species.
• Disc-One Final Boss: She's set up as the Big Bad above Visser Three for the first half, only to be displaced from her position after too many failures, and for Esplin to eventually be elevated to Visser One in her place.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: She hides the truth about her past from her host because she'd rather have Eva's hate than her pity.
• Drives Like Crazy: While controlling Eva she drives like Eva — that is, aggressively and way too fast. Where do you think Marco learned to drive so bad?
• Enemy Mine: She aids the Animorphs for her own ends in The Predator, reluctantly works with them in The Reunion, and allies with them against Visser Three in Visser.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Her human children. Though her understanding of "love" is more about control and the appearance of love.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Seen at the end of VISSER. She muses about finding Madra and how she'll love her when she does — and if Madra doesn't, she'll just infest her with a Yeerk and then she'll have to love her. The monologue proves that, in spite of everything she's seen and learned, Edriss doesn't understand the concept of love any more than she did before she experienced humanity.
• Evil Genius: Her plans for the invasion are much more strategic and pragmatic than Visser Three's, and her distaste for him is built on how his lack of subtlety poses a threat to the invasion on its own.
• Evil Matriarch: Has Marco's mother's body as her host.
• Evil Overlord: Definitely gives off this vibe, especially in The Predator and The Escape.
• Evil Versus Evil: She is a heated rival of Visser Three.
• Faking the Dead: Faked Eva's death in order to get off the planet.
• Finger Gun: During The Reunion she tells the Animorphs she knows something is up with their group and she'll find out what it is. Then she makes a "gun hand", points it at Marco, and grinning, says "and then... TSEEEEW!"
• Friendly Enemy: With Allison Kim, one of her earlier hosts. Edriss and Allison respected each other as fellow scientists, and Edriss notes in her narration that Allison was willing to be pleasant to her if it meant learning more about the Yeerks' more advanced science. For her part, Edriss respected Allison's intelligence so much that she would occasionally relinquish control of some part of her body, just to see how long it took Allison to a) realize it, and b) use it against her.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Like Visser Three, she was a nobody who through a combination of skill and luck made it to the top in record time.
• General Failure: An interesting example. She's a good administrator, very clever, and knows stealth and infiltration like the back of her hand. But she's not much for military tactics, and her approach is slow and steady. When she's put into actual warfare scenarios like Leera or Anati, she tends to bungle them pretty hard. (Ironically, it seems like Visser Three would have handled them with aplomb.)
• Going Native: Played with, but ultimately subverted.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: Her troops wear gold and black.
• Graceful Loser: Discussed during VISSER. After infesting her first human host, an Iraqi soldier in the Gulf War, Edriss is shocked to learn that humans will keep fighting even when victory seems impossible. She contrasts this with the Yeerk philosophy of surrendering once defeat is imminent, which ends up foreshadowing Visser Three's anticlimactic surrender in the series finale.
• Humanity Is Infectious: She and her assistant Essam were the first long-term Human-Controllers, and found the experience much more addicting than any other Yeerk host species. When sharing memories of her first infestation of a human with the Council of Thirteen she fully expects that some of them will go on to take human hosts.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: We learn early on that she's the one pushing for the steady infiltration strategy of the invasion, but we never really learn why until VISSER.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: In VISSER, where she narrates.
• Ignored Epiphany: She experiences humanity but turns her back on it.
• Intrigued by Humanity: Edriss initially approaches humanity in a curious but clinically detached manner. Infesting the human scientist Allison Kim is what causes her studies to become more intimate.
• It Doesn't Mean Anything: In VISSER, between her and Essam.
• The Leader: For most of the series, anyway.
• Love Is a Weakness: She comes to feel this way.
• Mama Bear: She gives her children up for adoption but continues watching them from afar.
• Morality Pet: Darwin and Madra, her children through a previous host. She made the decision to conceive them, so she considers them hers.
• Mouth of Sauron: She serves as the main representative for the Council of Thirteen in the series.
• Never Found the Body: Three times: in the backstory, The Escape and The Reunion.
• Path of Inspiration: She uses a charismatic host, Lore David Altman, to create this ideology in the form of The Sharing.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Unlike Visser Three, Visser One only attempts to achieve realistic goals, and refrains from being a sadistic madwoman since it doesn't do anything for her, but make her underlings hate her.
• Psychotic Smirk: Her usual facial expression.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: She presents herself as this to her underlings. She harshly punishes failure, but she also rewards well underlings who fulfill her expectations. In VISSER, before going in search of Earth she punishes a subordinate who questions whether Class Five hosts even exist by killing his host but pulling him out of said host's brain and taking him to the nearest Pool, declaring in narration that he'll learn. This is... not the usual definition of reasonable, but compared to Visser Three it sort of is.
• Secret-Keeper: She eventually figures out the Animorphs are human (including figuring out the specific identify of one of them — Marco, to be precise), but keeps the secret out of spite for Visser Three.
• Social Darwinist: Believes the strong have an inherent right to prey on the weak.
• Superior Species: Sees the Yeerks as one.
• Take a Third Option: In VISSER she's presented with a Sadistic Choice by Visser Three. She finds a way out.
• Unexpected Successor: Before VISSER, Edriss held the lowly rank of Sub-Visser Four-hundred-nine.
• Villain Episode: She (and Visser Three) have a starring role in VISSER.
• Walking Spoiler: Visser One is this because she inhabited Marco's supposedly dead mother.
• Weak, but Skilled: A master of stealth, manipulation, and espionage it is no wonder she got the position of head of the Yeerk military. Although, while she is an excellent commander, she is a poor combatant, as virtually every physical encounter she has with the Animorphs ends with her at their mercy. It's only because she inhabits Marco's mother that she has survived as long as she did.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: With the odd exception of Eva, Edriss treats her hosts like paper cups — use them, then throw them away. Ironically, she becomes a victim of this by both Yeerks and the Animorphs. The Yeerks condemn her to death for failing to stall the Andalite fleet in the Anati system. Meanwhile, the Animorphs left her alone in VISSER because she was the sole power capable of stopping the Yeerks from forcefully invading and killing millions. When Edriss lost her credibility among the Yeerks, the Animorphs saw no point in keeping her alive and nobody stops Eva from personally killing her.

Hedrick Chapman (Iniss-Two-Two-Six)

Hedrick Chapman (Iniss-Two-Two-Six)

Debut: Animorphs #1: The Invasion (1996)

Sorry I skipped class, Mr. Chapman, but I've been in this lizard body, watching you because I know you're a Controller and part of a giant alien conspiracy to take over the Earth.

Assistant principal at the school attended by the Animorphs and a prominent Human-Controller, he and his wife became Controllers to protect his daughter Melissa from infestation. One of the more frequently-recurring antagonists, he also has a prominent role in The Andalite Chronicles as a truly despicable teen boy, contradicting everything about him learned up to that point.

---

• Asshole Victim: If you take The Andalite Chronicles as fact, it's really hard to feel sorry for Chapman in the main series.
• Butt-Monkey: His later appearances in the series tended to consist of this.
• Children Raise You: If his appearance in The Andalite Chronicles is the same guy, it's clear that getting married and having a daughter made the human Chapman much less of an asshole.
• Dirty Coward: This is Ax's assessment of his character in The Deception.
• Evil Principal: He is secretly a Controller with a Yeerk in his brain, helping them take over more people including the students in his school. Upon finding out Chapman is a Controller, Marco jokes this is why he's so strict.
• Fighting from the Inside: He and his wife in The Visitor. It's notable as the greatest act of resistance an infested human in the series ever puts up - while normally a Yeerk can easily override the will of its host, with a great effort Chapman can collapse in a shaking fit and threatens to do this regularly.
• Groin Attack: The victim of one, thanks to Loren (who does so in defense of Elfangor, who he was about to shoot).
• Hostage Situation: Twice the Animorphs make him victim of it, in The Conspiracy and The Answer.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: In The Andalite Chronicles Elfangor meets him on Earth and he remembers nothing of their encounters in space. This is revealed to be the Ellimist's doing.
• Last-Name Basis: Even before he became a Controller, he preferred that people call him Chapman.
• Middle-Management Mook: As the vice principal and key leader of the Sharing, he oversees a lot of the day-to-day infiltration of the Yeerks.
• Mook Lieutenant: His position is important enough that Visser Three can't risk the real Chapman rebel against his host, as it might cause parents to think Chapman is mentally ill, and thus get fired.
• No One Could Survive That!: Midway through The Andalite Chronicles he falls into a frigging black hole, something neither the Ellimist or Crayak could handle. He shows up in the third arc none the worse for wear.
• Non-Action Guy: Since he occupies the body of a middle aged principal, he's not really anywhere near the league of the Animorphs or Visser Three.
• Off with His Head!: His introduction to the series has him ordering a Hork-Bajir to decapitate the kids and bring their heads back for identification.
  • Though it may or may have been intentional, this becomes a nice touch when later books reveal how Chapman's boss Visser Three prefers to deal with those who've earned his ire.
• Out-of-Character Moment: The entirety of his role in The Andalite Chronicles. It's so extreme that fans have suggested the Chapman seen there is actually a different guy with the same name. Granted, the Chapman there is a teenager prior to a mind-wipe, so it's not out of the question he developed very differently later in life.
• Papa Wolf: "If you harm my daughter I will fight you. I will fight you forever."
• Recurring Character: For the first third of the series, and makes a cameo in the penultimate book.
• The Quisling: In The Andalite Chronicles.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: When he tries to cut a deal with the Yeerks in The Andalite Chronicles.
• Same Character, But Different: Inverted, time-wise; fans are generally confused by how differently he's portrayed in the prequel book compared to the main series.
• Screw the Rules, They Broke Them First!: He and his wife made an agreement with Visser Three to cooperate with the invasion as long as their daughter Melissa was left alone. Once the Yeerks start talking about possibly having Melissa infested, the two immediately begin Fighting from the Inside.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Chapman is a relatively minor villain, and his host body is an even more minor character, but in the Andalite Chronicles? He's the one who first informed the future Visser Three of the existence of humanity.
• Starter Villain: For the first several books the Animorphs encountered him pretty regularly and then he faded into the background as more formidable threats began to make themselves known, though he does still show up now and again.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: In the second book, he implicity threatens to kill himself to deprive the Yeerks of an invaluable asset unless they agree to leave his daughter alone.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: His and his wife's final fates are both left unknown.

Joe Bob Fenestre (Esplin Nine-Four-Six-Six the lesser)

Joe Bob Fenestre (Esplin 9466 the lesser)

Debut: Animorphs #16: The Warning (1998)

My brother, my twin, is the prime. To him go the best assignments, the best hosts, the rank, the power, the glory. And to me, only what I can take. Well, that wasn't good enough. I wanted more. And if I couldn't have it as a Yeerk, I'd have it as a human.

The billionaire owner of Web Access America and mastermind behind a web site devoted to exposing Yeerks, the Animorphs seek him out to learn if he is friend or foe. It turns out he's a Controller, but no ordinary Controller- he is in fact the twin brother of Visser Three, a lowly Yeerk who amassed a personal empire by allying with his host.

---

• Big Fancy House: And it's virtually impregnable to boot! The keyword here is 'virtually'.
• Cain and Abel: He and his twin hate each other.
• Cannibalism Superpower: He can live without the life-giving Kandrona rays Yeerks need to survive, but only by consuming another Yeerk once every three days.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He's the CEO of Web Access America and, as the spoilered examples here demonstrate, is richly corrupt.
• Crazy-Prepared: His house is filled with tons of traps, fences, and guards trained to kill any animal, from predator to bug. Is the animal part coincidence? It isn't since it's to defend against his morph-capable brother. It doesn't stop one of the Animorphs from razing the place to the ground.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Averted, and that fact makes perhaps the strongest case for him being the single most intelligent Yeerk seen in the series, surpassing even Visser One. Like Edriss, he's a Yeerk who demonstrates aptitude in multiple disciplines (technology via his reverse engineering and downgrading of Yeerk tech to build his empire, biology via his figuring out how to stay alive without the Kandrona, psychology via his scheme to isolate and capture Yeerks, etc), but unlike Edriss he's smart enough to recognize his limitations and never tries to fight either the Animorphs or Visser Three directly. He also recognizes that he'll never achieve his ambitions by working within the rigid confines of the Yeerk Empire, and so acts outside of the Empire's purview to get what he wants.
• Deal with the Devil: The real Fenestre made one with his Yeerk to get rich.
• Diabolical Mastermind: Fits most of the items on the checklist.
• Eccentric Millionaire: He's got extraordinary defenses around his mansion to keep any animal out and his guards see him as a paranoid eccentric in the vein of Howard Hughes. It turns out he's just making sure his brother doesn't come pay him a house call.
• ET Gave Us Wifi: His tech empire is built on reverse-engineered Yeerk tech.
• Evil Genius: In contrast to his more brutish twin.
• Evil Versus Evil: He's wiping out a hundred or so Yeerks a year, but he's doing it to survive, not out of any heroic leanings. He's also killing the hosts.
• Expy: His company, Web Access America, is a thinly-veiled take on America Online.
• Faux Affably Evil: He takes a page out of Visser One's book. Surprising, considering who he's related to.
• Fiction 500: He's identified as the second wealthiest man in the world. Net worth? 24.9 billion dollars.
• Fictional Counterpart: Of Bill Gates. Interestingly, The Andalite Chronicles hints at the real Bill Gates being around in the Animorphs verse. He's also got shades of Hannibal Lecter to him.
• Friend or Foe?: The kids spend most of the book trying to figure out which side he is on.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: Cannibalises fellow Yeerks in order to live without Kandrona rays.
• Last-Name Basis: Always addressed as Fenestre.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Dresses according to his station.
• Meaningful Name: 'Fenestre' is the Latin word for 'window'.
• Non-Idle Rich: He secretly runs a website that gathers humans who suspect the truth about the Yeerk invasion.
• Nouveau Riche: Joe Bob Fenestre was a lowly programmer working in the bowels of a telephone company before building Web Access America.
• Rags to Riches: Fenestre's backstory, which his company plays up for the public.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: He's able to circumvent a death sentence from the Yeerk Empire using his vast fortune.
• Self-Made Man: Subverted — Fenestre allied with his Yeerk to transcend poverty and become what he is today.
• Serial Killer: Kills Controllers so he can eat their Yeerks.
• The Sociopath: Esplin the Lesser is every bit as bad in this regard as his brother.
• Villain of the Week: In The Warning. He's never seen or even mentioned again afterward outside of an extremely small cameo in the prequel book The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.
• We Can Rule Together: Worked with his human host to achieve the power and wealth neither could have achieved alone among their respective species.

Karen (Aftran-Nine-Four-Two)

Karen (Aftran-Nine-Four-Two)

Debut: Animorphs #19: The Departure (1998)

You tell me what you think I should do. Andalites, humans, there's no difference: You're both smug, moralizing, superior races. You both live in beautiful worlds. You have hands and eyes and the freedom to move about wherever you like. And you hate us for wanting all those same things.

A low-ranking Yeerk assigned to the daughter of a billionaire banker. By chance she observes Cassie leaving a battle and begins to follow her, convinced she has some connection to the Andalite bandits. Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, they are stranded together in the woods and Aftran learns Cassie's secret, forcing Cassie to face the other side of the war head on.

---

• Animorphism: After she's rescued by the Animorphs, they give her the morphing power. She doesn't keep it very long though.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: She views infestation as just what a Yeerk has to do to gain sense and expand, and that it's no different from a human raising cattle to eat them. Her mind is eventually changed.
• Creepy Child: In her first few appearances, before Cassie figures out what she is.
• Even Mooks Have Loved Ones: The Hork-Bajir Controller Cassie killed at the beginning of the book turns out to be Aftran's brother.
• First-Name Basis: Karen's last name is never revealed.
• Mook–Face Turn: Her time with Cassie and witnessing her willingly becoming a caterpillar nothlit convinces her that the Animorphs are not the selfish bigots that she envisioned them as. She subsequently voluntarily frees Karen and later founds the Yeerk Peace Movement.
• Mercy Kill: Subverted. After she's rescued in The Sickness, she asks Cassie to kill her so that she doesn't have to starve to death. Instead, Jake lets her become a whale nothlit.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Two different instances.
  • Karen's pleas for freedom, while ignorable, were wearing Aftran down and Cassie's example was the last straw. Thus she's convinced to let Karen free, on one condition.
  • Aftran forced Cassie to become a caterpillar nothlit for Karen to be freed, but changed her mind when seeing Cassie was actually keeping her end of the bargain. She tried her hardest to warn her to demorph, but unfortunately Cassie was too small to hear her.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Founds the Yeerk Peace Movement, which allies members who refuse to take unwilling hosts. When Visser Three discovers this, he certainly isn't thrilled.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Invokes this many times during her debates with Cassie, saying infestation is just like humans killing to eat.
• Punch-Clock Villain: It's not slavery to her, it's just what she has to do to survive.
• Put on a Bus: Ultimately, after Cassie helps her escape execution in The Sickness, she chooses to permanently become a whale nothlit, rather than perish from Kandrona starvation, gaining, as the kids put it, a fast, powerful form with strong senses and the ability to communicate.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She gives Cassie a few in The Departure.
• Recurring Character: Aftran appears in The Departure and The Sickness.
• Redemption Earns Life: Her choice to try and save Cassie from being trapped as a nothlit, and later to found the Yeerk Peace Movement, earn her salvation from the death sentence that Visser Three passes on her.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Set Karen free at the cost of being a blind slug again, or keep her enslaved and live with her screams in your mind?
  • Aftran invokes this upon Cassie by saying she'll set Karen free if Cassie is trapped in a caterpillar body. If Cassie doesn't do it, then Aftran keeps Karen's body.
  • In the end, ask Cassie to kill her quickly, or wait for the slow, agonizing death by Kandrona starvation? Cassie manages to Take a Third Option.
• Sapient Cetaceans: At the end of The Sickness she willingly becomes a humpback whale nothlit.
• Secret-Keeper: She willingly keeps the Animorphs' true identities a secret.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: She becomes a whale permanently so she'll no longer have to seek Kandrona rays.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Throughout The Departure she is stalked by a leopard.

Tidwell (Illim)

Tidwell (Illim)

Debut: Animorphs #29: The Sickness (1999)

When I first entered Mr. Tidwell, I was not part of the peace movement. He was an involuntary host. No. That is too nice a way to say it. He was my host, my slave. [...] It didn't happen all at once. But gradually I realized that I did not want to inhabit Mr. Tidwell's body if it meant sacrificing his freedom for mine.

The strictest teacher at the kids' school, and, unbeknownst to them, a Controller in the Yeerk Peace Movement. He contacts the team not only to help them escape the school when an alien disease is causing Ax to undergo Power Incontinence, but to warn them that Visser Three is preparing to execute Aftran.

---

• The Atoner: Illim, at least, is motivated by a desire to make up for having once been a complicit cog in the Yeerk war machine.
• Brutal Honesty: A subtle difference in characterization between Illim and Tidwell. Tidwell is more diplomatic and well-spoken, while Illim is factual and somewhat poor at expressing emotion. When Cassie asks for assurance that it is indeed Tidwell who is about to speak during their first conversation, Illim coldly tells her he can't give it, that she can believe him or not. He is equally blunt when she tries to complain that they can't free Aftran due to a disease outbreak in their ranks; that Aftran will be tortured until she cracks, and then the information she knows will be used to annihilate the nascent Peace Movement, and to kill or infest all the Animorphs and everyone they care about.
• Creepy Blue Eyes: Averted. Mr. Tidwell has "watery blue" eyes, but he's not in any way creepy, he's just a middle-aged man who happens to be a Controller.
• Crusading Widower: Played with. Mr. Tidwell is widowed, and losing his wife was a defining moment for him as a person, leaving him alone and without purpose. It was this loneliness that allowed him to embrace Illim, and this lack of purpose that drove him to do something with the freedom that Illim gave back to him. But he isn't a straight example of this trope, since the Yeerks didn't kill his wife.
• Defector from Decadence: As he himself says, he was not always a peacenik with abolitionist sentiments. But, between his long association with Tidwell and being exposed to the ideas of the Peace Movement, he decided to work as a subversive within the Empire. He's even formed a rather friendly and symbiotic relationship with Tidwell.
• Heel Realization: Tidwell appears to have been Illim's first host, since it was experiencing his distress that led Illim to conclude that taking involuntary hosts was wrong.
• Heroic B So D: Tidwell admits that before he was involuntarily infested, he'd been coping extremely poorly with his grief after his wife's death, and that when Illim converted to the Peace Movement, he decided to help out and do something with his life.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: By the time they make contact with the Animorphs, Tidwell and Illim have actually become friends. Tidwell even admits that Illim is good company, and that he had been rather lonely and listless since the death of his wife and enjoys having someone to talk to. He is later a bit weirded out at the idea of Cassie becoming a Yeerk and entering his head.
• Humanity Is Infectious: In a sense, as it was being exposed to human values via his initially-unwilling host that allowed Illim to make a very un-Yeerkish choice by deciding that taking hosts against their will was morally wrong^note As we learn when Cassie morphs Illim, Yeerks are actually hardwired by their own biology to find the sensation of taking a host body pleasurable, regardless of the host's feelings.
• The Infiltration: With all other alternatives exhausted, Tidwell and Illim agree to help Cassie do this pretty directly. Illim grants Cassie his DNA, and she puts him in a ziplock, morphs him, enters Tidwell's head, and then the three of them walk right into the Yeerk Pool so she can figure out how to extract Aftran.
• Last-Name Basis: Tidwell surely has a first name, but it is never revealed over the course of the book.
• Mook–Face Turn: Like Aftran, Illim was just a common foot soldier in the Yeerk Empire before deciding that taking hosts involuntarily was wrong.
• Non-Action Guy: As committed as Tidwell and Illim are to the Yeerk Peace Movement, the fact remains that Tidwell is a paunchy middle-aged man with no combat training. As he wryly admits to Cassie, he's probably not going to be throwing down with Hork-Bajir very successfully.
• Number Two: While not stated outright, it can be inferred that Tidwell and Illim effectively serve this role to Aftran in the Yeerk Peace Movement, or at the very least are among her trusted inner circle. They are the ones chosen to contact the Animorphs for help, and Aftran divulged all their identities to them, information she hopefully doesn't give out willy-nilly to every Controller in the Peace Movement. They also knows the group's exact size and which Yeerks have what hosts, information one would expect a trusted second-in-command to know.
• The Only One I Trust: Because Cassie is the only Animorph that Aftran trusts, she is also the only Animorph that Illim and Tidwell trust, at least implicitly.
• One-Shot Character: Never makes another appearance after his debut, though he represents one of the few insights we ever receive into the Yeerk Peace Movement from the inside. He's mentioned a few more times in later books that deal with the Peace Movement, but never makes another appearance and never contacts the Animorphs after the war, for intuitively-obvious reasons.
• Only One Name: Both Illim and Tidwell are only known by one name; neither Illim's Yeerk number designation nor Tidwell's first name are ever revealed.
• Only Sane Man: Interestingly, Illim (the one Yeerk controlling a host voluntarily that we meet) is more psychologically stable than many other Yeerks the Animorphs encounter, suggesting that not only is joining with hosts in a cooperative union more ethical for Yeerks, it's also more beneficial to their mental health. This might explain the oft-described Yeerk preference for a voluntary host.
• Secret-Keeper: Tidwell and Illim know the identities of all the Animorphs and like Aftran, both protect that knowledge from the greater Yeerk Empire.
• Shown Their Work: When Cassie morphs Illim he is sealed inside a plastic bag, which feels like it ought to a be a death sentence. But real-life slugs can actually survive a few days in the same situation since their bodies require very little oxygen.
• Stern Teacher: Originally introduced as "the strictest teacher in school," it turns out Tidwell and Illim both are actually decent, humanized (for lack of a better word in the latter case) people.
• Symbiotic Possession: A rare heroic example from a series where willing hosts are usually The Quisling. Illim introduces himself by claiming that both he and Tidwell are part of the Yeerk Peace Movement, and the two have since become close friends. They even do the "handing off control" thing most Yeerks in the series are very unpracticed at with great ease in their first scene. This suggests the symbiotic, more-benign form of union rather than infestation that is later explored by the Iskoort.

John Berryman Jr. (Visser Four)

John Berryman Jr. (Visser Four)

Debut: Animorphs #18: The Decision (1998, mentioned), Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret (full appearance)

One doesn't want mere baboons blundering about with Time Matrices, does one? Who knows what harm they might do?

The commander of the Yeerk invasion of Leera, Visser Four is demoted and assigned lowly actor John Berryman as punishment after the Animorphs thwart his plans in The Decision. While on Earth he finds the Time Matrix and attempts to use it to alter history in his favor. He's the main villain of Megamorphs #03: Elfangor's Secret.

---

• Big Bad Wannabe: After getting the Time Matrix, his goal is to rewrite all of history to favor the Yeerks. In practice, what he achieves is decidedly less impressive. He screws up history and makes an annoyance of himself, but never really accomplishes anything. Lampshaded by the Drode, who refers to him disparagingly as a 'mere baboon' with no idea what he's doing.
• Butterfly of Doom: Meddling with history turns out to be too complicated for him. When he tries to kill Einstein at Princeton University in 1934, he finds that preventing the United States from being founded resulted in him never immigrating. When he tries to warn the Nazis of the Normandy landings, he finds that the Nazis don't even exist, part of Germany is allied with France, and another German faction arrests him.
• Conflict Killer: Visser Four is unique in being the only threat in the series that forces Crayak and the Ellimist to agree to a truce, however temporary.
• Dirty Coward: He runs from the heroes every time he encounters them and flees his host after he's crippled.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: He literally screams "I have the POWER!" when the kids first corner him.
• Early-Bird Cameo: He's first mentioned (though not seen) in The Decision.
• Evil Gloating: When Rachel's shot to pieces in front of him in the Battle of Trafalgar. It doesn't stick.
• Evil Is Petty: Tries to change the outcome of various wars throughout history in order to make humanity more easily conquerable (and according to the Drode, succeeded). Except for Agincourt. That was just so his human host would stop endlessly quoting the Band of Brothers speech from Henry V at him.
• Godwin's Law of Time Travel: Inverted. His actions accidentally caused the Nazis to never be formed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Once the kids admit that they won't be able to undo everything he's done, Cassie gently asks him how his parents met. After a moment's hesitation, John tells them, knowing full well what they're going to do.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Subverted. His actions unintentionally turn Adolf Hitler into an insignificant jeep driver who never harmed anybody. Not that it saves Hitler.
• Kill It with Fire: After the Yeerk crawls out of his crippled host, Marco grabs him and throws him into the wreckage of a burning tank, saying his only choices are to starve or burn.
• Powder Trail: He uses this to blow a hole in HMS Victory.
• The Power of Acting: Aside from the Psychic Static John Berryman uses it for, Visser Four uses his host's experience to more effectively disguise himself. He blends in well at Agincourt and Trafalgar, but abandons disguise after that as the Animorphs already know what he looks like, and blending in becomes less and less of a concern for him.
• Psychic Static: John Berryman Jr. has Henry V memorized, and constantly recites it at Visser Four so much so that the very first thing he does when he finds the Time Matrix is try to change the result of the Battle of Agincourt so that Shakespeare would never be inspired to write it.
• Ret-Gone: John Berryman Jr's final, willing fate.
• The Story That Never Was: In order to repair the damage that Visser Four did to the timeline, the Animorphs erase his host John Berryman from existence by preventing him from being born. This makes it so that Visser Four never had a host to find the Time Matrix, wiping out the entire alternate timeline.
• Villain of the Week: In Megamorphs #3: Elfangor's Secret.
• Villainous Friendship: The Andalite traitor in The Decision says that Visser Four and Visser Three are 'such good friends'. If that's true, Esplin's influence wasn't enough to keep him from being demoted after losing Leera. Then again, despite the catastrophe on Leera (which the Andalite commander described as potentially being enough to turn the entire war against the Yeerks) he at least escaped execution.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: When the Animorphs erase Berryman from history, Visser Four is spared — all that changes in his history is that Berryman never becomes his host and he never gets the Time Matrix. Despite this, he never appears again, possibly due to his "demotion."
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Amusingly inverted. The heroes completely fail to stop him from scrambling history until he's scrambled history so badly that he's started to thwart himself, except for the very first thing he tries to do: kill Henry V so his host will shut up with the Shakespeare already.

Taylor (Sub-Visser Fifty-one)

Taylor (Sub-Visser Fifty-one)

Debut: Animorphs #33: The Illusion (1999)

Join me in my madness, Andalite.

A sadistic Yeerk sub-visser responsible for capturing and torturing Tobias, Taylor is a horrific example of what happens when a host with a fractured psyche is infested by an already unstable Yeerk. Later gets the kids involved in a plot to murder Visser Three in revenge for her demotion. It turns out to be a trap meant to eliminate both the Animorphs and the Yeerk Peace Faction.

---

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In-universe. Tobias sees her as a badly, badly Broken Bird, and feels a lot of pity for her, even empathising to a degree, despite being absolutely terrified of her. Rachel, on the other hand, sees the girl as deserving to burn for her choices. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
• Arch-Enemy: To Tobias, as he becomes afflicted by a twisted form of Stockholm Syndrome after being tortured by her.
• Agony Beam: Uses one on Tobias, to terrifying effect, completely shattering his psyche.
• Alpha Bitch: Comes across this way in her saner moments, what with her rants about her popularity and how important it is to her. It's not clear how much is the host's personality or the power-hungry Yeerk.
• Ambition Is Evil: Even more than Visser Three.
• Arm Cannon: Not quite, but her prosthetic arm does fire darts and emit gasses that are capable of paralysing the target. And she may have an actual cannon or grenade launcher in there; it's unclear whether she used a handheld Dracon beam or an integral weapon to destroy the natural gas pipeline.
• Artificial Limbs: One of Taylor's arms is a prosthetic, as is one of her legs.
• Ax-Crazy: In addition to being an obvious psychopath, the former Sub-Visser Fifty-one suffers from rapid mood swings, and is unable to differentiate between herself and her host, frequently confusing memories and events, and speaking of the two of them as one being. She's also absorbed the real Taylor's narcissism and obsessive need to be pretty, and added rampant paranoia and anger at all the people who betrayed her. It's a horribly unstable mix — she makes Visser Three, Crayak, and a whole host of alien monsters look stable by comparison.
• The Baroness: Taylor may be pretty, but she's as cold and ruthless as any Rosa Klebb type.
• Beauty Is Bad: She originally agreed to be infested in exchange for Yeerk Magic Plastic Surgery after a fire destroyed her face.
• Becoming the Mask: Sub-Visser Fifty-one wasn't even supposed to keep Taylor as her host originally — she was a stepping stone to infest Taylor's mother, a chief of police and the Yeerks' true target. But the Sub-Visser ends up falling in love with Taylor's life and palms off her mother to a lower-ranked Yeerk so she can play out Taylor's life for herself. Ultimately, this ends with the Sub-Visser completely unable to distinguish herself from her host. By Book #43, she's more or less regained control of herself, and now has Taylor firmly under her thumb.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: She tortures Tobias using a machine to electrically stimulate the brain's pain and pleasure centers. It's so effective, he actually breaks down and volunteers information on his friends, but by that point, Taylor herself is too far gone to care.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Taylor's a great Torture Technician, but it's hard to see any qualities in her that merited being promoted to Visser Three's second-in-command. Well, other than being as Ax-Crazy as he is.
• Cyborg: The human girl who lost limbs and half of her flesh in a fire was healed by advanced alien technology. Her artificial limbs carry conventional and chemical weapons.
• Dark Action Girl: Taylor would rather manipulate than fight; she's nowhere near the badass that Rachel can become, and maybe not even at Cassie's level. But the girl can still take and dish our far more damage than you would expect her to be able to, and seems to be one of the few Yeerks who didn't get her training at the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. In Book 43, she's able to take out the entire team (minus Cassie and Tobias) when she catches them by surprise, and fights a Taxxon-morphed Tobias on a fairly even basis. Not bad for a (relatively) normal girl.
• Deal with the Devil: Taylor the girl made one with the Yeerks in order to be pretty again. It involved selling out herself and her mom. Taylor the Yeerk makes another one with Visser Three following her demotion from Sub-Visser, becoming part of his plot against the Animorphs and the Peace Faction in return for promotion. And the Animorphs make one with her in order to try and assassinate Visser Three.
• Despair Event Horizon: Taylor crossed it when she lost everything in the fire.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: To Tobias in The Test.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Can verge on this, when she's not using her situation to her advantage.
• Double Consciousness: Literally, sort of; see Humanity Is Infectious below.
• The Dragon: To Visser Three, apparently. She claims to be second-in-command in Earth's sector.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Tobias sees her as his. Like him, she had a good inherent nature but is a damaged person from a lousy background, who became involved in the war due to alien intervention in her life. Like him, she has a lot of insecurites that prevent her from dealing with life, and Tobias frequently compares her decision to become a Controller to his own entrapment in hawk morph. Tobias, of course, is still a hero, whereas Taylor...well just look at the list of tropes she's associated with.
  • Also to Rachel, since both are blonde, immaculate-looking valley girl types who are capable of extraordinary violence and are associated with Tobias.
• Evil Makes You Ugly: Taylor's still very pretty, but since the Sub-Visser can't manage to fake humanity convincingly, it doesn't matter at all — people feel uncomfortable around her, even when she smiles, and turn happily towards Tobias-morphed-as-Taylor, who looks identical.
• Fallen Princess: Taylor the girl was homecoming queen, tennis champion, and the envy of her school. After the fire she was left an insecure wreck, and now she's a torture-happy administrator who's literally unable to differentiate between the Yeerk and the host.
• Femme Fatale: Seems like she's going for this, but is too sick to fully achieve it. At one point, Tobias meets with her in morph as her (they're pretending to be identical twins), and notices that while he's getting a lot of male attention, nobody's attracted to Taylor, because she is so obviously dead inside. It's especially noticeable because Tobias hardly ever refers to himself as human, but does say that he's a lot more human than Taylor.
• First-Name Basis: Taylor's last name is never revealed.
• Heel–Face Turn: Taylor the Yeerk fakes one in order to bring the kids in on her plot. Taylor the human pulls one in Book 43, temporarily taking control of her body in order to warn Tobias out of trusting her master.
• Humanity Is Infectious: Taylor's human and Yeerk personalities seem to be closer than in most Controllers, making Yeerk!Taylor somewhat unable to differentiate herself from her host. Whether this is the cause or effect of her insanity (or both) is hard to determine. Edriss experienced a similar confusion of identity before becoming Visser One, but less extreme.
• I Am Legion: A fairly disturbing example; the union of an unstable girl with an unstable Yeerk has left Taylor with no idea of who or what she is. She manages to keep up a façade of sanity, but as Tobias gets into her head she starts referring to herself as Yeerk and girl at once, and eventually abandons the pretense of a dual identity altogether.
  Taylor: I waited down in the pool, not knowing what host, I'd only ever been Hork-Bajir before. I allowed myself to be infested, she opened herself to me, willingly. Until that moment, until I was lying on my stomach, my head held over the surface of the pool, she hadn't known, of course, how could she? How could I?
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Sub-Visser Fifty-one's arrogant, icy facade is used to cover up the fact that she's internalized much of Taylor's self-loathing.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: Yeerk cybernetics were used in reconstructing her arm and face.
• Manipulative Bastard: Plays mindgames with Tobias, tricks the kids into helping her plot to attack the Yeerk pool, and generally manipulates everyone's emotions for kicks and profit. She's good at it too, to the point where Tobias cannot get her out of his head.
• Mood-Swinger: Taylor can shift from cold and in control to wheedling to psychotic rage in a moment.
• Narcissist: The real Taylor can come off this way, due to having her thoughts filtered through the Sub-Visser.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Claims she and Tobias aren't in order to screw with his mind. On some level, he seems to believe her.
  • Specifically Tobias thinks about this in her first appearance, when it becomes clear that her perception of the human-Yeerk relationship is similar to Tobias's Double Consciousness about being a hawk.
• The Peter Principle: Credit where credit's due. She's a somewhat decently skilled scientist, an expert Torture Technician, and a grand master at emotional manipulation; traits that prove quite useful for when all she has to do is handle her personal science projects and torture Tobias For the Evulz during her free time. And the fact that she's even crazier than Visser Three^note the original human Taylor was already not entirely right in the head before she became a controller, and her own mental issues ended up rubbing off on the yeerk that chose her as a host body makes her frighteningly skilled indeed at these activities. Unfortunately, the same mental instability and skill at petty torture that makes her so skilled at putting Tobias through the ringer on a small and personal scale end up also proving her to be an immense liability to the yeerks whenever she has to handle important military matters in her official position as Visser Three's personally appointed 2nd in command as a result of her constantly wasting time and resources on acts of petty sadism, developing confused sympathy for her enemies in her most mentally unstable moments, and being worrisomely prone to losing her composure entirely any time her plans fail to go the way she wants them to. And to make a long story short, both major yeerk projects Visser Three chooses to trust her with ultimately end in disaster as a direct result of her simply being too crazy to be trusted with any true responsibility.
• Psycho for Hire: Or whatever the "gainfully employed by a megalomaniacal alien empire" equivalent is. She's a voluntary controller because the Yeerks helped get her life back, and immediately turned over her mother as payment.
• Puppeteer Parasite: Sub-Visser Fifty-one, whose actual Yeerk name is never revealed.
• The Quisling: Taylor sold out her species for a chance to be pretty.
• Recurring Character: Appears in The Illusion and The Test, both written by the same ghostwriter.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilised: Subverted. She pretends to be a member of a Yeerk resistance movement in order to gain the kids' assistance in Book 43.
• Robotic Torture Device: To which the Agony Beam is attached.
• Sanity Slippage: From the moment she's introduced in The Illusion there's a hint of something wrong about her- she refers to herself by her host name and insists others call her that as well, something ranking Yeerks almost never do. But she presents a powerful façade, and it's not until Tobias turns the tables on his interrogator that the first cracks begin to show. From that point the pretense of sanity crumbles in very short order.
• Self-Made Orphan: Spiritually at least. Part of Taylor's deal with the Yeerks involved allowing not only her own infestation, but that of her mother as well.
• The Sociopath: Not Taylor the girl, who is at worst a narcissist, but the Yeerk Sub-Visser? Every bit as much as Visser Three.
• Sociopathic Soldier: Even for a member of the Yeerk military she's a twisted bitch.
• Stockholm Syndrome: Causes it in Tobias, who becomes uncomfortably attached to her.
• Teens Are Monsters: Taylor's somewhere in high school, and was willing to betray the human race for a new face.
• Torture Technician: Mentally, physically and emotionally, using a machine which stimulates the pleasure and pain centers of the brain.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: On some level. When Tobias acquires human-Taylor and later morphs into her, he expects to find some inkling of her cruel, manipulative side, but what he finds in her genetic nature is "gentleness, fear, and joy", with very little cunning or hatred. Her worst traits are from nurture, her choices, and the Yeerk.
• Villain of the Week: Twice, appearing in books #33 and #43.
• We Can Rule Together: Offers Tobias this deal in The Test. He turns her down.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Tobias almost shuts down when he runs into her again in The Test.

The Inspector

The Inspector

Debut: Animorphs #37: The Weakness (1999)

That's where this thing belonged. In a cartoon. Where the impossible is possible.

A candidate member for The Council of Thirteen, sent to investigate Visser Three's progress on earth. Is hosted by a Garatron, one of the Yeerk's "Newest and most capable host species." A real problem in The Weakness.

---

• Always Someone Better: To quote the last words said to him by Marco in cobra morph:
  "Hey Yeerk. You're fast. I'm faster."
• Crippling Overspecialization: His Super-Speed makes him more than a match for the kids, but his combative personality makes one wonder why the Council ever picked him to be their representative (until one remembers their stellar track record for these things, anyway).
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Bitten by Marco's cobra morph and left to die by the Visser. Ouch.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Any physical confrontation with the Inspector's ungodly fast host tends to end this way for the heroes. Except if one morphed a snake.
• The Dog Bites Back: He spends the whole issue mocking and humiliating Visser Three. When Marco poisons him, Visser Three lets him die, and lets them escape.
• Evil Counterpart Race: His host species, the Garatron, looks suspiciously like an Andalite, complete with a tail and No Mouth. Ax has no explanation for this, and it's Left Hanging since no other Garatron appear again.
• Eviler than Thou: With Visser Three, on a political, though not physical basis.
• Foil: He's a nice foil for Rachel, given that her Pride is examined and deconstructed in the book he appears in.
• Fragile Speedster: Has cartoonishly high Super-Speed that makes him an absolute nightmare to defeat in direct physical combat. But due to his host body being incredibly light and frail, it can be assumed that it wouldn't be too hard for him to be put out of commission on the unlikely chance he actually got hit by an especially powerful blow. And worse yet, the equally cartoonishly high metabolism his host body possesses alongside his super speed ends up sealing his doom after getting bitten by the incredibly venomous bite of Marco's cobra morph.
• Glass Cannon: His Garatron host body is extremely fast and can lacerate even large animals with whips of its tail (and without even having a blade on its tail to boot!), but it's smaller and lighter than an Andalite, and its faster metabolism renders it devastatingly vulnerable to poison.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He represents them, being the appointed representative of the Council of Thirteen.
• Insistent Terminology: "You will address me as Councillor Thirteen, Visser."
• Jerkass: He's the very definition of a Smug Super, lords his powers over even his fellow Yeerks, and his entire character is just ambition and gloating. It's safe to say he qualifies.
• Large Ham: On par with the Visser. When the two of them are together, it's like a pork convention.
• Monster of the Aesop: In a book about Rachel learning to deal with her own hubris, who should show up? A villain whose overconfidence enables his defeat.
• Motor Mouth: He speaks incredibly rapidly, represented by speech with no spaces between words.
• No Mouth: The Garatron host, another of its numerous similarities to Andalites.
• Not Worth Killing: He feels this way about the Animorphs. At least, not when he'd rather see them humiliate Visser Three.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: His Garatron host body is of very similar build to Ax actually, albeit lighter.
• The Peter Principle: Is a truly formidable warrior thanks to being one of the few (if not only) yeerks in existence to have taken possession of a Garatron; a creature with ludicrously high speed. And indeed, said speed makes him capable of subjecting the Animorphs luckless enough to go up against him to a humiliating defeat every time they attempt to fight him directly. Unfortunately, as a direct result of being well aware of just how powerful he truly is, he's far too arrogant and smug to even consider using any battle strategy other than 'beat his enemies up at cartoonishly high speed'. These factors eventually prove his undoing when the Animorphs dealing with him eventually manage to figure out a way to make good use of the one unexpected advantage they do turn out to have^note the biting speed of Marco's cobra morph being just the tiniest bit faster than the Garatron body's running speed, and Visser Three (whom the Inspector had gone out of his way to humiliate and embarrass throughout the book he appears in) chooses to not even bother trying to get him the medical attention he needs afterward and leaves him to die.
• Pride: Even as Yeerks go, he's pretty stuck-up.
• Required Secondary Powers: Instant acceleration and deceleration.
• Smug Snake: Par for the course for most Yeerks, though the Inspector really pushes the envelope, being a sneering jackass to everyone, including Visser Three.
• Smug Super: Jeez, a little overconfident, aren't we Inspector?
• Super-Speed: To cartoon levels. He runs down several cheetahs with ease but even he isn't faster than the biting speed of a cobra.
• Tail Slap: His preferred method of attack. Even though his Garatron host lacks the tail blade of Andalites, his super speed makes his tail whips nasty enough to lacerate polar bears.
• Villain of the Week: And an extremely successful one. In the one book he appears in he nicely upstages Visser Three as the biggest threat to the cast.

Admiral Carrington (Visser Two)

Visser Two

Debut: Animorphs #46: The Deception (2000)

I don’t fear death. You may kill me now, if it pleases you. The plan will unfold whether I live or die. What I fear is failure.

Appearing only late in the series, Visser Two is a Yeerk distinguished primarily by his fanatical loyalty to Esplin 9466. Joining his newly promoted master on Earth, he hatches a diabolical scheme to ignite World War III between America and China.

---

• False Flag Operation: He's given a U.S. Navy admiral for his host and plans to use that host to false-flag a war between the U.S. and China.
• General Ripper: His host's an admiral, not a general, but he's still a high-ranking military officer who is the Yeerk equivalent of a patriotic madman.
• Insane Admiral: He's infesting a Navy admiral and is clearly not playing with a full deck of cards.
• Mysterious Past: His fanatical loyalty to Esplin 9466 doesn't really fit with him occupying a rank that would have been higher than Esplin's for most of the war. Given that he only appears after Esplin's promotion to Visser One, fan speculation runs rampant that he was a Yeerk of lower rank promoted along with Esplin, possibly even the previously-appearing Visser Four.
• Non-Action Guy: For all his tough talk, he's hardly in the former Visser Three's league, or even in the ranks of unpowered-but-still-tough Yeerks like Visser One and Taylor.
• Psycho Supporter: So much so that he names his Evil Plan Operation 9466 in honor of his master.
• Sycophantic Servant: He's downright Renfield-esque in his slavish devotion to Esplin, constantly referring to him in fawning terms and even naming his evil plan after him.
• Undying Loyalty: For better or worse, he's completely devoted to Esplin.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Him and his evil plan both would have been a lot more threatening if they'd appeared early in the series. But since they hit the scene after the series had officially hit its "shit got real" phase, he's treated as something of a Starter Villain for the final arc.
• Villain of the Week: He only appears in The Deception.
• Victory Through Intimidation: Ax defeats him by threatening to bomb the Yeerk Pool if he doesn't call off his attack.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: He never appears again after The Deception and his final fate is unknown.

Tom Berenson (and his Yeerks)

Tom Berenson (and his Yeerks)

Debut: Animorphs #1: The Invasion (1996, Tom and his first Yeerk), #6: The Capture (second Yeerk)

I had to rein in a powerful desire to go after him. It's hard to conceive of the impotent rage you feel watching someone you love be reduced to a mindless puppet.

The real Thomas Berenson was the eldest son of Jean and Steven Berenson, and Jake's brother. Although three years older, Tom is described as almost identical to Jake in looks, though different in temperament. Growing up, Jake and Tom were extremely close, but Tom became more distant due to his infestation (prior to Elfangor's crash). His status as a Controller caused Jake a great deal of emotional suffering, as the latter saw it as his duty to rescue him.

Although he may have been infested by several Yeerks, the reader only meets two. The first was at the start of the series, an overly-ambitious grunt (Temrash 114) who was promoted out of Tom, ended up managing to infest Jake, and was starved to death by the other Animorphs. The second, at the end of the series, was a much more dangerous and capable enemy who rose to minor success by becoming one of Visser Three's most capable lieutenants. After Visser Three refused to promote him past the rank of chief of security (a position he achieved despite a stunning failure to notice what might be the single biggest security breach in the war for months) Tom's Yeerk became sick of taking orders from superiors he perceived to be incompetent failures, and began scheming for ways to amass greater power for himself.

---

• Alas, Poor Villain: Invoked when Temrash starves to death in Jake's head. Jake comments that it is the strangest and saddest experience of his life and led to his encountering Crayak.
• Ascended Extra: For most of the series Tom is a background villain, only having any starring roles in two books (The Capture and The Conspiracy). Come the final five books, he takes Taylor's role as The Dragon to Visser Three and even eclipses him in threat level to the kids, being a much more proactive character than the Visser by that time.
• Ambition Is Evil: Both Yeerks, though Tom's second Yeerk came a lot closer to realizing his aspirations.
• Animorphism: Very late in the series, Tom acquires the morphing ability. He adopts a jaguar and cobra as his primary battle morphs.
• Bad Liar: Temrash doesn't put much effort into imitating his hosts. He dismisses Tom's old hobbies as unimportant and blows his cover as Jake by failing to conceal his hatred of "Andalite filth." Tom's second Yeerk is noted to be much better at imitating him.
• Big Brother Worship: Jake had this for Tom, until he learned he was a Yeerk.
• Big Man on Campus: Tom was the leading scorer on the varsity basketball team, and Jake recalls how he was the "big basketball hero" at school. Once he became a Controller, however, he quit the team.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Tom's first Yeerk had this in spades. For better or worse, his second Yeerk was much more cunning.
• Bound and Gagged: Tom's first Yeerk fantasizes about seeing the Animorphs like this on the floor of Visser Three's Blade Ship. It's a disturbing little image.
• Cain and Abel: With his, or more specifically his host's, brother, Jake.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Ironically, Visser Three never clicks to it until the end. Jake does.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Tom's second Yeerk is good at backstabbing his boss, but as with other Yeerks, he fails at any other job he takes on. And given his failure to backstab Jake, he's really not even very good at that. Most of his mileage comes from the Visser being so burnt out that he delegates most of his authority to Tom, which he takes full advantage of.
• Dirty Coward: He sells Visser Three out to the Animorphs in the hopes of stealing his Blade ship and escaping before the Andalites show up.
• The Dog Bites Back: Finally lashes out at the Visser for years of abuse.
• The Dragon: By the time the war goes public, he seems to have taken Taylor's role as Visser Three's second.
• Enemy Mine: In The Answer it's revealed that he's allied himself with Arbron.
• Evil Gloating: He indulges in The Answer at the expense of the Visser.
  • In the Alternate Universe of Megamorphs #4, Rachel disarms the gun-toting Tom before beating him half to death with a bat. He gets the last word as
  Tom: "The real war is about to begin. We'll have you all! You're our meat! You're our meat!!"
• He Knows Too Much: A non-fatal version, as it resulted in infestation rather than death (at the time). According to Temrash's memories in The Capture, Tom initially joined The Sharing because a pretty girl he liked was a member. During one meeting, she went off to meet with other Yeerks. Tom, thinking she was sneaking off to see another guy, followed her and saw Visser Three in Andalite form, and for this was captured, dragged off to the Yeerk pool and infested.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: He tries to use this on Jake in The Answer to make him more receptive to his offer of an alliance.
• Impersonation-Exclusive Character: Tom is a constant presence throughout the series, but the only time he's seen without a Yeerk controlling him is at the climax of the first book. Most of his characterisation comes from Jake comparing his Yeerks' impersonation to the real Tom he knew, with a side of Temrash's memory of Tom being broken and begging the Yeerk not to have Jake infested.
• Informed Ability: He claims he's acquired the morphing power for his own Yeerk body. We never really learn if this is true or not, because that would mean de-infesting Tom, and he's a sadist who enjoys putting both Jake and Tom in a bad position.
• Kicked Upstairs: Implied to be the reason why he's promoted to security chief in spite of his stunning failure to notice one of the 'Andalite bandits' living under his own roof.
• Mook Promotion: Promoted from random mook to chief of security.
• No Name Given: Tom's second Yeerk. Even among fellow Yeerks, he is referred to simply as Tom. Jake is frustrated that the Animorphs do the same because that's not Tom, but he does it himself.
• Panthera Awesome: He's acquired a jaguar battle morph, though we never get to see it.
• Polite Villains, Rude Heroes: Deliberately invoked in The Answer:
  Tom: Oh, you're a surly bunch, aren't you? No one talks to me. No one but Rachel, who told me to... well, you can guess what Rachel told me to do.
  Jake: Whatever she said goes for all of us.
  Tom: Surly and unpleasant. Oh well.
• Replacement Goldfish: His original Yeerk gets killed early in the series and a new Yeerk quickly infests him.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Jake has Rachel reward Tom's Yeerk for his assistance by killing him.
• Scaled Up: Fitting his deceptive and duplicitous personality, one of the last morphs he's seen utilizing is a cobra.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Tom, the human, himself, is always present and his presence is a major motivator for Jake in a way that some unrelated infested person wouldn't be, but he was infested before the start of the series and aside from a flicker of an anguished expression at long intervals he has no agency to speak of.
• Smug Snake: Both of Tom's Yeerks are classic examples: arrogant, sure of their own supremacy, and incapable of believing they could be outsmarted.
• The Starscream: Believes he is more deserving of promotion than all his fellows, and turns on the Visser when he won't give it.
• Starter Villain: Tom's first Yeerk is only around for the first six books, but he's infested by at least one other Yeerk for the entire rest of the series.
• Strong Family Resemblance: In his one scene as a free human, the climax of the first book, while trying to escape the Yeerk pool he attempts to fistfight two Taxxons and ultimately throws himself at Visser Three's monstrous fire-breathing morph when escape becomes impossible. These are things Jake and Rachel would absolutely do.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Played with. Tom is hardly all-powerful, but he's more or less the final series antagonist and we never learn his Yeerk's name.

Council of Thirteen

Council of Thirteen

Debut: VISSER (1999)

Nine Hork-Bajir, two Taxxons, and two whose host bodies were so concealed that I could not guess at their form. They were dressed in dark red robes, so dark that they were almost black. They stood, motionless, held in place, suspended by gravity-neutral fields, fed by a continuous refined current of Kandrona rays.

The ruling body of the Yeerks, containing the highest positions in the Empire. It is comprised of The Emperor and twelve others. The identity of the Emperor is kept secret to everyone outside the council, in order to combat assassination attempts.

---

• Blue-and-Orange Morality: They're not cackling cartoon supervillains and at least one of them is capable of being Affably Evil, but their concepts of right and wrong, along with politeness and rudeness, are completely divorced from human morals and values. A good example is at the end of VISSER when Edriss has been acquitted and Eva briefly seizes control to scream in protest; the Councillors react roughly in the same way Americans would react to someone belching in a restaurant.
• Boring, but Practical: Most of the Councilors control standard Hork-Bajir or Taxxon bodies. Justified by those being the two most capable species that the Empire has conquered.
• Decoy Leader: Ultimately the real purpose of the council is to act as this for the Yeerk Emperor. Because the Emperor's identity is kept secret, to ensure he was eliminated one would have to kill all thirteen members of the council.
• The Emperor: Is ruled by one.
• Evil Mentor: Garoff 168, the only Councilor that is identified by name. He took Edriss under his wing after her promotion to Visser One and she strongly suspects he may well be the Emperor, but it's never confirmed.
• Greater-Scope Villain: They're the rulers of the Yeerk Empire, but they have little influence over the individual obstacles encountered by the Animorphs, which are mainly provided by Visser Three. However, they are still not as powerful as Crayak, the ultimate evil in the series.
• In the Hood: They all wear cowls to conceal their identities.
• Karma Houdini: While the Empire falls by the end of the series, the Council is never apprehended.
• Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering: The borderline Enemy Civil War politics that the Yeerk Empire lives by come directly from the top down. When they debate Edriss and Esplin's fate in VISSER, they lose a couple of members trying to decide upon a verdict.
• The Paranoiac: The Yeerk Emperor, given that whoever they are, they have twelve underlings whose job at the end of the day is to be meat shields to protect them from possible assassination attempts.
• The Peter Principle: The process by which they promote vissers. Sometimes this works out for them (such as when they promoted the unknown Edriss 562 straight to Visser One), and sometimes it doesn't (promoting the similarly unknown Esplin 9466, which they all lived to regret).
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Garoff tries to be one, at least as far as is possible for a conquest-hungry Yeerk. He carefully weighs Edriss's tale and while he forces her to reveal all her memories, he inserts himself alone into her mind rather than force her to suffer Esplin rooting around in it.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Like Esplin's personal guard, the Council all favor red and black in their wardrobe.
• Shadow Dictator: The Yeerk Emperor's identity is not known outside the council, as mentioned above.
• Spanner in the Works: Edriss served up the fabled Class 5 species the Yeerk Empire had been so long searching for all but gift-wrapped, with a subversive organization already established and a plan that, while very long-term in scope, ultimately would have resulted in the eventual conquest of Earth without a single shot being fired. So what does the Council do? They transfer Edriss away from operations on Earth and send in Esplin, the ultimate Yeerk General Ripper who wouldn't know subtlety if it slugged him in the face. And to further establish the Council as Incompetence, Inc., they double down on this at the end of VISSER, even after it has become abundantly clear that Esplin's efforts on Earth are going nowhere. This utter inability to send their generals to where they are needed is what ultimately winds up costing them not just the campaign for Earth, but multiple ongoing invasions on other planets such as Leera and Anati as well.
• The Spook: Two of the Councilors inhabit host bodies that are so hidden by their robes that even Edriss cannot figure out what they are.
• 13 Is Unlucky: The number of their members is clearly meant to invoke classic Western triskaidekaphobia, though as aliens the Yeerks certainly don't share this approach and may even venerate the number. Esplin reveals in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles that while the number of Vissers and Sub-Vissers fluctuated early in the Empire's history, the Council has had thirteen members since "ancient" Yeerk history.
• The Un Fought: They never set foot on Earth personally and the Animorphs never get to take a crack at them in any way, shape, or form.
• Villainous Glutton: The Two Taxxon-Controller Councilors are hideously bloated compared to regular Taxxons, having their Horror Hunger sated by Gedd attendants always on call with fresh meat. Sometimes this isn't enough and the attendants become meals themselves.
• We ARE Struggling Together: As mentioned above, they are plagued by infighting, and actively encourage the culture of infighting among the vissers that leads to their operations so often being hindered.
• With Us or Against Us: They're the ones who set the law that any sympathy for a host species at all be a crime so severe it warrants agonizing death.
• You Have Failed Me: They spare Edriss's life at the end of Visser but after she loses Anati as well they sentence her to death. Bizarrely, they send her all the way back to Earth for her execution, which allows the Animorphs to rescue Edriss's host Eva.

Andalites

Andalites in general

• Aliens Never Invented Democracy: Averted, as the Andalite government has a vaguely democratic ruling body called the Electorate.
• Aliens Steal Cable: Ax mentions at one point that he briefly studied humans in school from television transmissions.
• Alternate Animal Affection: Well, alien rather than animal. Since they don't have mouths, Andalites kiss with their hands, particularly their palms.
• Armies Are Evil: The Andalite military is overloaded with Colonel Kilgore and General Ripper types, and enforces brutal honor codes on its troops while promoting a "warrior pride" ideal that institutionalizes xenophobia, sexism, and ableism. Andalite civilians from the final book are noted to lack the "arrogant Andalite" characterization that has become a stereotype, and the Electorate generally seems to mean well. Individual soldiers, such as Elfangor and the commander in Book #18, are often decent men, but the army as a whole is not good people.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Downplayed in the case of Andalite females, who have shorter, blunter tail blades than Andalite males, "more like scalpels than scythes". But you do not want to get in the way of any Andalite tail blades, they're all too good at chopping heads off, as Visser Three often likes to demonstrate.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Why they seem to be Always Lawful Good at first, they turn out to be not much better than the Yeerks. They are ableist, and look down on almost all other species. In The Andalite Chronicles and Hork-Bajir Chronicles, we find out they tried to wipe out the Hork-Bajir to keep them from falling into the hands of the Yeerks (although the Andalite responsible was at least branded as a war criminal,) and at the end, we find out they plan to "quarantine" humans for the same reason, and only change their minds because the Animorphs manage to defeat the Yeerk Empire in time.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: Andalite stalk eyes can see infrared and they have a compass-like sense of direction that allows them to always be able to determine cardinal directions. They also have an uncanny ability to keep track of time, right down to human minutes.
• Claustrophobia: A side effect of evolving from herd animals who live on open grasslands, occasionally used against them. Andalite spaceships include a large "Dome" area that mimics their natural habitat in order to mitigate this.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: The excuse given is that the Andalites have fur and therefore never found a reason to clothe themselves, but they're a spacefaring race without spacesuits, which strains credulity. In The Andalite Chronicles Elfangor uses "emergency air hoods" to go outside a space ship briefly. It's mentioned that the hoods contain a gas mixture that somehow prevents decompression when inhaled, but they're calibrated specifically for Andalites and less effective when worn by humans, and how they'd protect from the deadly radiation space is full of isn't explained at all; the morphing technology that might present an out through its ability to repair genetic damage is too new for that.
• Eye on a Stalk: They sport two in addition to the more standard two front-facing eyes, allowing them to look in all directions around themselves at any given time.
• Fantastic Racism: And Fantastic Sexism, and Fantastic Ableism, and... Look, the Andalites are not very enlightened about these sorts of things for a higher-tech species, though they at least seem to have gotten over racism towards other kinds of Andalite. Actually, we never see any other kinds of Andalites, nor is it made clear if Andalites even have different types, or whether a human would recognize what Andalites consider "different types," considering how esoteric human racism can be.
• No Mouth: Andalites instead have three vertical slits that serves as a nose, and either osmose nutrients through their hooves or outright eat through them.
• No Sense of Humor: The stereotype of Andalites is that they're all way too earnest and stick-up-the-butt to appreciate jokes. Books from their perspective leaven this a bit; they do have a sense of humor but it's not quite analogous to a human one, and cross-cultural contamination with humans at the very least can eventually help an Andalite appreciate human humor. Notably after spending way too much time with Marco Ax is shown to develop a a tendency towards both bone-dry deadpan sarcasm and Black Comedy.
• Odd Organ Up Top: Andalite brains contain an organ called the tria gland which regulates the immune system and so is some sort of lymphatic organ. For comparison, the few glands human brains contain are all part of our limbic systems, and an organ like the tria would be very implausible unless it was located outside of the skull.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Four hooved legs, scorpion tail, thin upper body, No Mouth.
• Proud Warrior Race: What they've become in the present day thanks to the Yeerk war elevating the Andalite military to a higher role of importance than they normally have. The ending implies that the pendulum has begun to swing back on this and that being a Proud Warrior Race Guy will no longer be so important to them going forward.
• Sensory Overload: In a slightly amusing parallel to their enemies the Yeerks. While Yeerks have no sense of sight and so are prone to overloading on sight the first time they enter a host with good vision, Andalites have a very reduced sense of taste compared to humans and so are prone to overloading on taste when they morph humans. At the end, this even leads to an Andalite tourist craze, with many civilian Andalites visiting Earth just to morph human and experience the exotic taste of human foods.
• Superior Species: Deconstructed - Andalites are definitely technologically superior to humans, and the Ellimist Chronicles implies they've also been around longer, but neither of those things correlates to them being better than humans, as is gradually revealed over the course of the series. Culturally Andalites share many similarities with humans, in some ways they seem more enlightened (no intra-Andalite wars are ever mentioned) but in others they are just as bad if not worse than humans (their attitudes regarding the disabled are a memorable example). Ax seems convinced Andalites are only more advanced because they started earlier, and is stunned on more than one occasion by how quickly humans have advanced in a relatively short span of time. The ending caps this comparison off by having Andalites and humans intermingling freely, with the implication that each species is on a more-or-less equal footing and in a place to learn from each other.
• Telepathic Spacemen: Having no mouth, this is their default method of communication. In the past they used a language of hand signals, and it's possible they acquired this ability from being...
• Touched by Vorlons: The Ellimist Chronicles implies that the Andalites acquired their telepathic ability from Toomin growing an Andalite body for himself and living among the Andalites to reconnect with his mortality, even going so far as to have children with them.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: An Andalite character is the Trope Namer, and all Andalites seem to have this ability.
• Unusual Ears: Andalite ears are larger than human ears and quite elvin in shape.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: When Tobias morphs an Andalite for the first time, he's flabbergasted to realize that the strongest of their natural instincts is optimism. Ax, who was somewhat amused and apparently waiting for it, explains that a lot of Andalite culture is about learning to temper that optimism. It is this instinct for optimism and working to make the best of things that restores hope to the jaded Ellimist partway through The Ellimist Chronicles.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Andalites have been portrayed with four different fur colors: dark blue is most common, as seen with most Andalite males, while light blue and purple are both colors exhibited by Andalite females (though this may vary, as the female Andalite Aldrea is shaded slightly differently between the US and UK rear covers, being merely light blue (and facing the viewer) in the UK version but shaded more darkly, almost purple, on the US cover). Finally, there is at least one example a red-furred Andalite in merchandise, though that's almost certainly a non-canon case. At the very least, Andalites definitely come in different shades of blue.

Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul

Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul

Debut: Animorphs #1: The Invasion (1996)

You are one in a legion of great warriors. Valiant Andalites who have died for freedom. Your lineage is courage and bravery. If you live, you carry our torch. A burden carried by many. A singular honor. . . .

An Andalite general, military genius and war hero, Elfangor was made a household name for his contributions to the Andalite-Yeerk war effort. Though this was not generally known amongst his own people, he spent a great deal of time on Earth permanently morphed as a human; a sort of self-imposed exile after a miscalculation led to the infestation of his superior officer, Alloran. His longstanding and well-known subsequent rivalry with Visser Three ended with his death at the hands of the latter after a battle in Earth's orbit, though not before he was able to give the morphing power to Jake and his friends.

---

• The Ace: Amazing fighter pilot, clever strategist, great personal combatant, and, in an army of brutal honor codes and ingrained prejudices, a genuinely kind, caring, compassionate person to andalite and non-andalite alike, without discrimination.
• Always Someone Better: From Ax's perspective.
• Aloof Big Brother: Wasn't around for much of Ax's childhood, as he was making a name for himself in the war.
• Animorphism: He has morphing power, but didn't use it as often as the Animorphs. This inexperience with it may have been what allowed his death, as the more experienced Animorphs frequently healed from worse injuries than his.
• Back from the Dead: Subverted twice. In an alternate Yeerk-controlled future, Jake is surprised to run into Elfangor, but it turns out to be Tobias as a nothlit in Ax's decade-older body. The second time, during Tobias' torture by Taylor, he hears Elfangor's voice in his head and starts seeing his memories somehow passed down genetically.
• Been There, Shaped History: In the third half of The Andalite Chronicles, he mentions giving some programming tips to his human friends Bill and Steve.
• Big Brother Mentor: To Ax
• Broken Pedestal: Elfangor's reputation precedes him, even after death, and it's initially believed by everyone that Elfangor was the perfect warrior and, from Jake's perspective, the perfect leader, someone to emulate. It becomes apparent, though, that his reputation is the result of misplaced idolization and Andalite propaganda, and that, like the kids, he made mistakes while doing the best he could. He was however an exceptional Badass and a War Hero, Visser One later states that no other singular Andalite hurt the Yeerks as much as he did. His name has practically become a curse word to the Yeerks. Jake is particularly crushed to find out what Elfangor was really like behind all the propaganda and hero worship:
  Jake: It's all your fault! I used to see you as a hero, Elfangor. A leader. But the truth is you just couldn't see another way out! You sentenced us to hardship and pain and suffering. We were just kids! You made us question every value we had ever learned! You had no right to heap that weight on us, huge and impossible. You used us!
• Cruel and Unusual Death / Eaten Alive: Visser Three doesn't just kill him, but morphs into an Antarean Bogg and eats him.
• Death Seeker: Elfangor seems to be a good example of this after he gets pulled off Earth by the Ellimist. His first action was ramming the Blade Ship with his little fighter in what should have been a suicide run only to survive, turn the tide of battle, and become a war hero whose example was held up as a golden standard. And at the end of his life, he really wasn't out of options - he could have morphed, or even used his ship's shredder to cut through the concrete surrounding the Time Matrix.
• Disappeared Dad: To Tobias
• Do Not Go Gentle: While mortally wounded and facing Visser Three, Elfangor dies on his feet, striking at the Visser with his tail blade even as the Visser morphs into an Antarean Bogg and devours him.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: During his first appearance he talks as if he is unfamiliar with human culture and sees Visser Three only as a dangerous Yeerk leader. As seen in The Andalite Chronicles, he in fact spent years as a human and is very familiar with Esplin 9466. This was actually fixed in the much-maligned live action series, where he instead accidentally reveals he knows Tobias by name, then cryptically tries to pass it off. It was also fixed in the 2011 re-release, which slightly edited the Elfangor/Esplin conversation to be more consistent with Elfangor's later characterization.
• Going Native: With humans in The Andalite Chronicles.
• Heartbroken Badass: After the Ellimist removes him from his life and family on earth and returns him to the war.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Gave up his human life to return to his people and save them from a Yeerk ambush.
• Honor Before Reason: In The Andalite Chronicles. Thanks to Arbron's influence he does lighten up a bit.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: In The Andalite Chronicles.
• I Am Dying Please Take My Macguffin: He starts off the series by handing the morphing cube to the kids.
• In the Blood: Going Native on earth seems to run in Elfangor and Ax's family
• Interspecies Romance: With Loren in the backstory. Almost immediately after meeting this strange bipedal alien he's fascinated and delighted by her, and this just never stops.
• Like Father, Like Son: He fights the Yeerks, becomes a nothlit at one point, has this reversed by the Ellimist, falls in loves with a spirited blonde Action Girl… His son Tobias later follows in his footsteps.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Tobias is actually his son.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: He appears in a vision to Tobias in The Illusion where he soothes his son's pain with a tail blade on his forehead and encourages him to carry on with the quote detailed above. When Tobias tells Ax about this, he tells his nephew that his experience is eerily reminiscent of an ancient Andalite belief called Utzum, which postulated that certain genetic memories could be passed through DNA by Andalite medicine men which would be seen in an Andalite's dying moments to ease their passage. It's never made clear whether this is the case, or whether Elfangor was reaching out to Tobias from the beyond in some more tangible way, or if it really was just a feverish hallucination brought on by Taylor's torture.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After he kills a bunch of Hork-Bajir in battle and then again when he realizes he's responsible for Alloran being infested.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Andalites have a tendency to be hierarchical and xenophobic, convinced in their own superiority and not caring all that much about alien lives. Elfangor delights in humans and human culture. He defies a superior's order to kill helpless enemies, without agonizing over questioning authority the way Ax later does, and decides Andalites can't be trusted with the Time Matrix. At the end of his life he breaks the law of Seerow's Kindness and also sends the kids courage and tells them that the Hork-Bajir are good people to be pitied for their enslavement.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Accidentally helped the then Sub-Visser Seven hijack Alloran's body.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Yeerks come to know him as "Beast Elfangor."
• Odd Name, Normal Nickname: While living on Earth in human disguise, Elfangor goes under the name Alan Fangor.
• One-Shot Character: His only present-day appearance is in The Invasion, but he does get an entire Chronicles book dedicated to his past in The Andalite Chronicles, and hallucinations/visions of him crop up in both The Illusion and The Familiar, which may or may not classify him for Recurring Character status.
• Papa Wolf: Fights to protect the son he never met.
• Posthumous Character: His actions created the Animorphs, motivated his younger brother, and served as a light to the Andalites and threat to the Yeerks even after his death.
• Pursued Protagonist: The future Visser Three chases him down relentless throughout The Andalite Chronicles, and ultimately up to his death.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: Despite everything, some of the Animorphs, including Ax and Tobias, ultimately come to accept that, while Elfangor wasn't a perfect, flawless paragon, he was still a good and heroic person who made the galaxy a better place.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Eventually reversed by the Ellimist (who, ironically, later did the same for Elfangor's son).
• Starcrossed Lovers: With Loren. He dies without her ever remembering him.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: He's the Straight Man to Arbron's and Loren's wise guy.
• Sue Donym: While on Earth, he takes the name of Alan Fangor.
• Super-Empowering: He gave the Animorphs their powers.
• Taught by Experience: His first scene in The Andalite Chronicles consists of him training to tailfight and doing poorly against an old instructor. In actual battle he turns out to be a natural with his tail.
• Take Up My Sword: Asks the kids to.
• Warrior Prince: Literally. In Andalite culture, 'Prince' is a military rank and not a title.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: At the beginning of The Andalite Chronicles.
• Worthy Opponent: It's revealed in The Pretender that Visser Three eventually came to regard him this way.

War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corass

War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corass

Debut: Animorphs #1: The Invasion (1996, as Visser Three's host), Animorphs #8: The Alien (1997, first full appearance)

I will forever be Alloran, Butcher of the Hork-Bajir. Alloran, the only Andalite to ever be taken alive by Yeerks. But disgraced, even despised, for whatever I am worth, I am yours to command.

Visser Three's host, and formerly Elfangor's commanding officer. Perhaps the best example of the ruthless mentality of the Andalite military, Alloran was infamous even before becoming the only Andalite to ever be taken by a Yeerk. Shunned and hated by even his own people, he becomes more humble and pacifistic during his time as Visser Three's slave.

---

• Animorphism: Alloran has a whole host of horrific morphs at his command thanks to the Visser.
• The Atoner: After he's freed, the sheer melancholy as he flatly states that he'll have to live with what he's done and being forever known as the only Andalite ever taken as a Controller makes it very likely he'll become one of these.
• Break the Haughty: Years of enslavement by one of the most evil Yeerks ever to live, watching himself forced to commit atrocity after atrocity and living with the shame of being the only Andalite ever made into a controller pretty much beat all the pride and arrogance out of him forever, and at least some of the Fantastic Racism.
• Cynical Mentor: To Elfangor and Arbron in The Andalite Chronicles.
• Death Seeker: In The Alien he begs Ax to kill him.
• Destructive Savior: Aldrea lampshades it. "Will you save the Hork-Bajir by destroying them?"
• Fate Worse than Death: He's a Controller for nearly twenty-five years. Even worse, he's got Visser Three controlling him, one of the most evil Yeerks of them all.
• General Ripper: In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles. He tried to wipe out the Hork-Bajir once he realized they couldn't be saved from the Yeerks. By The Andalite Chronicles he has less authority, but still seeks to kill helpless opponents.
• Genius Bruiser: Downplayed. There are smarter characters, there are stronger characters, but he's both smart and dangerous. Even aside from his tailblade and willingness to fight dirty, he's got a lot of horrible morphs, and The Beginning proves that he can think very quickly even when concussed.
• Heel–Face Turn: When the Andalites refuse to accept Jake's terms during negotiations over the captured Pool ship, and Ax is told he is too low-ranking to challenge the officer's decision, the recently freed Alloran takes up the challenge for him. The Andalite officers promptly reconsider. Not bad for an ex-General Ripper.
• Hidden Depths: He makes some strangely poetic turns of phrase and designed his own Cool Ship, suggesting he's more than the General Ripper he first appears to be.
• I Call It "Vera": He calls his beautifully-designed personal ship the Jahar, after his wife.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: See Death Seeker above. After begging Ax to kill him he tried to turn his tail on himself, but was too weak from being envenomated.
• It Never Gets Any Easier: After leading Elfangor and Arbron into their first battle, the first time they kill anyone, he curbs his impatience at their shock and tells them yes, it's hard, and it never gets easy.
• Motive Rant: He gives Elfangor one in The Andalite Chronicles, regarding having to cross lines to beat the Yeerks and defending his use of a quantum virus against the Hork-Bajir.
• One-Man Army: He still has all of the morphs he acquired while infested by Visser Three. You want to throw down with him? Be our guest.
• Pet the Dog: With Arbron and Loren at various points in the Andalite Chronicles, showing that he's not all bad deep down, and adding pathos to that horrible moment when it's revealed Visser Three is within him.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Though he's more vicious about it than many. In the final book, after escaping the enslavement of Visser One, Alloran has been humbled but retains enough edge to prove a cunning and deadly effective ally, both in combat and in Andalite politics.
• Recurring Character: As Visser Three's host, one could call Alloran arguably a main character of the series, though the number of times we see him free of Esplin's influence can be counted on one hand. He is first met in The Alien, when the Animorphs force Esplin to momentarily abandon his body and we realize how broken he is in the present day. From there he features in both The Andalite Chronicles (as a main character) and The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (as a secondary character later in the book), both of which detail his past and explain how he got to where he is today. Finally he is freed of Esplin in the last book of the series, The Beginning.
• Redemption Earns Life: Well, life and freedom from an alien Puppeteer Parasite in his case.
• The Scapegoat: By The Andalite Chronicles he's been disgraced as the Butcher of Hork-Bajir, responsible for the Quantum Virus, in a way that suggests he went rogue and was the sole responsible party. He even tries to justify its use in a rant partway through the book, surprising Elfangor and implying a cover-up. But it's clear from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles that development of the virus was an effort made by many Andalites in tandem and may have been officially sanctioned, that he supervised the project but was not actually responsible for the release of the virus. Given that Andalite forces later attempt similar tactics - his brother tries to use a new Quantum Virus, the fleet plans to raze Earth - it seems like he should fit right in.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: He is already like this in The Andalite Chronicles and he even has a Pet the Dog moment with Loren when he defends her father from Chapman's insensitive remarks. In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles we see a younger Alloran become the disgraced veteran that Elfangor meets. The image of Alloran painted in both books makes it clear that he's been deeply traumatized by the atrocities he witnessed and committed during the war against the Yeerks.
• Synthetic Plague: In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles this is his secret weapon.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: No, really. From the short description he sounded almost like Arbron or Marco - the captain who was an aristh with him says he was gentle and funny.
• Warrior Prince: Literally. In Andalite culture, 'Prince' is a military rank and not a title.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Thought that exterminating the Hork-Bajir was the only way to save the galaxy from the Yeerks, as it would deny them their most useful and dangerous host bodies. The worst part is, he might have been right.

Arbron

Arbron

Debut: The Andalite Chronicles (1997)

Aristh...I mean, Warrior Arbron is a casualty of war.

One of Elfangor's fellow cadets from his days with Alloran. Gets trapped in Taxxon morph partway through The Andalite Chronicles.

---

• And I Must Scream: Trapped in Taxxon morph.
• Animorphism: It doesn't end well for him.
• Back for the Finale: First appears in The Andalite Chronicles (which is set before the series and was released early on in the series), then reappears in the second-to-last book, The Answer.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Trapped in Taxxon morph.
• Dark Is Not Evil: A pretty striking example. He's trapped as a giant, cannibalistic centipede. He's one of the good guys.
• Deadpan Snarker: A rarity among the Andalites.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Survives a couple of decades as a Taxxon, which in itself is pretty bloody awesome, and turns up to fight on Earth in the series finale. Then after the war, he gets shot and killed by poachers. Go figure. Although Cassie's narration implies that this may have been more Driven to Suicide or No Place for Me There, since Arbron's role as protector as the Taxxons is ended by that point, as all Taxxons have morphed into giant snakes to escaped their Horror Hunger.
• Enemy Mine: In The Answer he returns, having allied himself with Tom of all people.
• Extreme Omnivore: Taxxons can eat and digest pretty much anything.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With Elfangor.
• First-Name Basis: Arbron is the only Andalite character whose full name is never revealed.
• Foil: To Elfangor; he'll crack jokes and is pretty easygoing, in contrast to Elfangor's more serious nature.
• Going Native: Although he retains his sense of morality.
• Hive Mind: He joins forces with the Living Hive, a kind of Taxxon queen.
• Horror Hunger: When in Taxxon morph.
• La Résistance: Joins, of all things, the Taxxon resistance in order to get back at the Yeerks.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Elfangor tries desperately to get him to come along with he and Alloran when they leave the Taxxon planet. Arbron refuses.
• Only One Name: Unlike every other Andalite, we never learn Arbon's full name. He probably has one since three names is Andalite convention, but as far as readers ever know he's just... Arbron.
• Pet the Dog: Alloran's promotion of him is pretty touching.
• Recurring Character: After looking like a One-Shot Character for most of the series, he made a surprise reappearance in The Answer and got a token namedrop in the final book of the series, The Beginning.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Trapped as a Taxxon. Even after the good Taxxons on Earth become anaconda nothlits, there's no hope for him to join them because he already is a nothlit.
• Unexpected Character: Let's face it, no one was really expecting him to return in the finale the way he did.

Prince Seerow

Prince Seerow

Debut: Animorphs #8: The Alien (1997, mentioned), The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (1998, full appearance)

The Yeerks were so fascinating. Highly intelligent, yet so limited physically. It's as if the Hork-Bajir are the exact opposite: physically impressive. Mentally . . . well, simple.

An Andalite Prince who led expeditions to other planets. Once a highly revered leader, he became forever known as a fool after he gave space faring technology to the newly discovered Yeerks. His disastrous actions led to the Andalite Navy passing the law of Seerow's Kindness.

---

• Alien Non-Interference Clause: The Law of Seerow's Kindness states no Andalite should give their advanced technology to less advanced species. Because that went horribly wrong when tech was given to the Yeerks.
• Extreme Doormat: By the time he and his family arrive on the Hork-Bajir world he has become this, passively enduring the open contempt and insults his fellow Andalites heap upon him. And heap it they do.
• The Farmer and the Viper: In hindsight, giving advanced weapons and ships to a species that parasitically takes over hosts wasn't all that great an idea.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: All he wanted was for all species to travel through the stars together. Instead he unwittingly unleashed the parasitic Yeerk Empire upon the galaxy.
• Happily Married: Seerow is a married Andalite, and while his wife is never named, the fact that she stuck by him after his disgrace and doesn't resent him the way his children do speaks volumes about her personality. For his part, he's affectionate with her, and as they are both scientists at heart they share common interests.
• Heroic B So D: He's a broken man by the time of the main body of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles and never really recovers before his death.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: And as a result, he became known as the shame of the Andalite people.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Starts off the Yeerk-Andalite war. However decades later Cassie tries the same thing, and thanks to everyone being a bit older and wiser, Seerow's hopes actually become a reality.
  • What Cassie does is give the Yeerks morphing. If Seerow had done that, they might not have even considered parasitic conquest, since they would not have needed to infest other sentient beings. Perhaps, cruel irony, he didn't even have access to it at the time, or simply didn't think of it, given how new and novel the morphing tech is in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.
• One-Shot Character: Despite his name being infrequently mentioned in the series itself, Prince Seerow's only appearance is in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.
• Posthumous Character: His actions kicked off almost all the plot, and the law bearing his name becomes increasingly relevant in regards to the Animorphs, who were illegally given their powers. Sadly, though, he's been dead for some thirty odd years by the time we're "introduced" to him.
• Selective Obliviousness: Aldrea notes at one point that her father continues to cling to the idea that only the Yeerks who actually left their planet were scheming against him while those still on their homeworld were as benevolent as he believed. She doesn't have the heart to point out to him that the remaining Yeerks are basically blockaded in by the Andalite fleet so that they literally can't leave their planet at that point.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: He's an anomaly in the Andalite military, being an officer with a generous and idealistic personality, and while he's not completely pure (he does have a smidgen of the classic Andalite arrogance in regards to less intellectual races, as seen by his disinterest in the Hork-Bajir), the Yeerks are largely right when they call him "the one good Andalite". At the least, he's one of a rare handful of them who isn't a Jerkass.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: The Yeerks consider him "the one good Andalite." Their actions indirectly lead to his death and turn his daughter into a rebel thorn in their side for years.

Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan

Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan

Debut: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (1998)

No, I won't help you to understand. But I will help you kill Yeerks. That, I will do. I will help you kill them. And kill them. And kill them! And kill them all!

The daughter of the infamous Prince Seerow and heroine of the Hork-Bajir Chronicles. She makes a guest reappearance in The Prophecy.

---

• Action Girl: Big time. She and Dak are the leaders of the Hork-Bajir resistance.
• Animorphism: Notably, the tech is new and novel in her time.
• Back from the Dead: In The Prophecy, sort of.
• Break the Cutie: In the first fifty pages of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles she loses her pride, her home and her entire family.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: At first, she treats her own father like crap, just like the other Andalites, and isn't at all happy about having to live out in the space-boonies with a bunch of dimwitted primitives. She grows as a person as the novel progresses.
• Dead Man Writing: During The Prophecy, when she occasionally narrates from Cassie's body.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Her peers on the Andalite world nickname her 'Seerow's Unkindness'.
• Entitled Bitch: She comes across like this in her treatment of Dak Hamee.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Between her family, her Virtual Ghost, and a few well-placed weapons caches, Aldrea, despite her death, contributes to the eventual salvation of her adopted race.
• Friend or Foe?: A lot of her time in The Prophecy is spent with the Animorphs wondering if she's on their side or just using them. By the end of the book, she invokes this trope to manipulate Toby into going back to Earth where her people need her, rather than staying on the Hork-Bajir homeworld to try to lead the resistance there.
• Going Native: A major theme of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, as she grows increasingly disgusted with her own race's ruthless treatment of others and her own entitled attitude, culminating in willingly embracing Shapeshifter Mode Lock and choosing to live in the reduced-lifespan body of a Hork-Bajir with the man she loves. During The Prophecy she demands to be referred to as a Hork-Bajir rather than an Andalite, and even seems to have fully adopted the Hork-Bajir religion as her own.
• Guest-Star Party Member: In The Prophecy, where her Virtual Ghost inhabits Cassie's body for most of the novel, the two of them switching control and narration duties from chapter to chapter.
• Heel Realization: At the end of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, she realizes that she's been mistreating and using Dak for her own ends, and... well, read a few tropes down.
• Identity Impersonator: She acquires and impersonates Alloran to get access to his database.
• Interspecies Romance: Eventually falls in love with Dak, and, after permanently becoming a female Hork-Bajir, they manage to have a family, despite the slow death of their race and their world. Her descendants are the first two free Hork-Bajir in generations.
• Posthumous Character: When we are first introduced to her in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles she has been dead for some thirty years. Despite this, she appears once more in The Prophecy thanks to the Arn's ixcilia procedure.
• Revenge Before Reason: Fixates more on hurting the Yeerks than protecting the Hork-Bajir, pushing them to greater violence. Dak is uncomfortably aware of this.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: While Dak is fighting the Yeerks to defend his people, Aldrea fights them for revenge for the murders of her father, mother, and brother. In particular the rebellion's attack on the first Hork-Bajir Yeerk pool is this, as Aldrea's Battle Cry illustrates:
  Dak Hamee: (ordering the Arn monsters to attack, he looks at Aldrea meaningfully) Kill.
  Aldrea: (doesn't even look at Dak, staring straight at the Yeerks) For my mother. For my brother. For my father, Prince Seerow. KILL!
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: At the end of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles she willingly allows herself to be trapped in Hork-Bajir morph.
• Sharing a Body: With Cassie in The Prophecy.

Estrid-Corill-Darrath

Estrid-Corill-Darrath

Debut: Animorphs #38: The Arrival (2000)

Estrid, you are beautiful, you are brilliant. But I really do not think I like you very much.

A young Andalite prodigy and member of Unit 0, Estrid is presented as one of the first female arisths. She is assigned to the unit by Arbat and maintains a close relationship with him. In truth she is his student, the mastermind behind a deadly new weapon. She briefly serves as Ax's love interest.

---

• The Ace: Deconstructed - Estrid has many of the traits of a classical Mary Sue, being a brilliant and beautiful prodigy who's also an expert tail fighter and one of the only two estreen in the series. She is presented as one of the first female arisths in a culture where women are typically shoehorned into supporting roles and does basically whatever she pleases. Yet in spite of all this, the book slowly reveals her gaping character flaws - she's impulsive, undisciplined, self-centered and arrogant, with many of the same traits Ax had when he first joined the Animorphs. This is reflected in Ax's view of her - while he is initially smitten by her beauty, as he comes to know her his passion cools, and in the Yeerk Pool he ultimately rejects her altogether. This is a huge turning point in his character and it wouldn't be possible without Estrid there to personify his former values.
• Animorphism: A human girl, and a rabbit.
• Badass Family: This is offered as an explanation for her more blatant Mary Sue traits: Estrid's mother is a 'morph dancer' and her brother is Ajaht-Litsom-Esth, the highest scoring exhibition tail fighter on the Andalite planet.
• Body Horror: Subverted - Estrid is an estreen like Cassie, except even more skilled. She is the only morphing character seen to morph real clothes rather than just spandex.
• Child Prodigy: As a prodigy who was both young and a female, she was snubbed and scorned during her time at the Andalite University of Advanced Scientific Theory.
• Feet of Clay: When she goes to the Yeerk Pool she quickly loses her composure and panics. This leads to the above quote from Ax.
• Genius Sweet Tooth: She's as much of a Big Eater as Ax.
• Heel Realization: After Arbat reveals his plan, she has a change of heart and helps the Animorphs stop him.
• Impossible Genius: She invents a virus that's even more deadly than the Quantum virus completely by accident.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Her backstory, as briefly explained to Ax.
• Love Interest: Briefly serves as Ax's.
• Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: At one point Ax believes her to be this to Arbat.
• Not So Above It All: She scorns the Animorphs for their (staged) breakdown, but when she has to go to to the Yeerk Pool she freaks out.
• One-Shot Character: Appears only in The Arrival.
• Redemption Earns Life: Despite not changing much in terms of her personality, she does eventually realize what she was doing was wrong and does try to help the Animorphs. For this, she is allowed to survive the Yeerk Pool and is last seen leaving Earth with Gonrod.
• The Squadette: She was the only female member of the Andalite squad, though she wasn't actually a true soldier.
• Synthetic Plague: She more or less accidentally creates Quantum Virus 2.0.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Wants to destroy the Yeerks, which would certainly make the galaxy better. If she winds up destroying humanity in the process, so be it.

Commander Gonrod-Isfall-Sonilli

Commander Gonrod-Isfall-Sonilli

Debut: Animorphs #38: The Arrival (2000)

I command here. Am I clear on that?

The commander of the Andalite task force Unit 0, Gonrod is a counterpoint to the usual Andalite officer - while full of bluster and arrogance, he doesn't have a lot of competence to back it up. He's eventually revealed to be little more than an Unwitting Pawn of his ostensible subordinate Arbat, recruited to serve as an expendable pilot.

---

• Ace Pilot: And how! Even Ax is forced to note that for all his failings as a commander, Gonrod is a truly excellent pilot.
• A-Team Firing: In contrast to the sharpshooters Aloth and Arbat, Gonrod is a mediocre marksman at best. The one time he's seen with a shredder, he's firing wildly into a crowd of Hork-Bajir.
• Boxed Crook: He was serving a sentence in military prison for cowardice under fire. Taking this mission meant clearing his record.
• The Cavalry: Tobias talks him into being this, giving the Animorphs and Estrid a way out of the Yeerk Pool.
• Decoy Leader: Appears to be the leader of the Andalite task force, but Arbat is in charge of the real mission.
• Dirty Coward: He lies somewhere between this and Lovable Coward. While clearly not a sympathetic character, Gonrod is far from a monster.
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: When he's relieved of command and confined to quarters by Arbat, Tobias finds him and talks him into flying their ship into the Yeerk Pool.
• The Neidermeyer: At first.
• Nervous Wreck: Ax notes that Gonrod is 'extraordinarily ill at ease for a commander'. It's the first real hint that he's not the one calling the shots.
• One-Shot Character: Appears only in The Arrival.
• Paper Tiger: He presents himself in his first appearance as the usual forceful Andalite commander, but Jake is able to force him to cooperate fairly easily by having Cassie and Marco morph snakes to immobilize Arbat and Aloth. That's the first hint of his Paper Tiger nature, and once attacking the Yeerk Pool enters discussion it becomes very clear that Gonrod is a long way off from the confident commander he's pretending to be.
• Redemption Earns Life: Like Estrid, his aid of the Animorphs earns him an escape from the Yeerk Pool and a trip back home, though with his mission a failure it is likely he returned to prison.
• Tears of Fear: The idea of attacking the Yeerk pool scares him so much his thought-speech is described as 'tearful'.

Aloth-Attamil-Gahar

Aloth-Attamil-Gahar

Debut: Animorphs #38: The Arrival (2000)

You want to know the secrets? You want to know who we are? I will tell you, little Aximili.

An Andalite sniper and member of Unit 0. As the team's sharpshooter, Aloth is tasked with the assassination of Visser Three. Jaded and cynical, Aloth wears his grim position as an assassin lightly. Like Gonrod, he is an Unwitting Pawn of Arbat, recruited to be little more than expendable muscle.

---

• Badass Normal: There is no indication that Aloth has the ability to morph. It doesn't stop him from being incredibly effective.
• Boxed Crook: He was serving a life sentence in military prison for selling the organs of his fallen comrades.
• The Brute: A curious example - while Aloth's experienced and definitely intelligent, his main role on the team is sheer muscle, and Ax even refers to him once as 'a thug'.
• Cold Sniper: He lies somewhere between this and Friendly Sniper. While definitely ruthless, Aloth is largely open and amicable to his teammates.
• Combat Pragmatist: Even by the standards of the unsentimental Andalites he's pragmatic. Unfortunately, his pragmatism is such that he is willing to break laws if he considers it pragmatic to do so, leading him to harvest organs from fallen soldiers for his own profit.
• Deadpan Snarker: He gets quite a few choice lines. The guy's almost like an Andalite Marco.
• The Gunslinger: Lacking the morphing power (or being incompatible with it), he primarily uses firearms in battle.
• Hidden Depths: Despite being considered little more than dumb muscle, Aloth has a few moments of surprising insight, and while his opinion of the Andalite military is jaded, his observations are pretty much spot-on.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Estrid notes that Aloth is a top sniper who scored the highest target impact rate in the history of the academy.
• Jaded Washout: Has a deeply cynical outlook on the Andalites, but is largely right.
• Jerk Jock: Like most Andalite warriors, he has an insolent personality towards those who aren't warriors. In particular he is disdainful of Arbat, though he also looks down on Gonrod for being a coward.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: He gets one in Chapter 19, gearing up for the assassination attempt on Visser Three.
• One-Shot Character: Appears only in The Arrival.
• Organ Theft: While on the front lines, Aloth harvested the organs of his fallen comrades and sold them on the black market.
• Pretty Little Headshots: When he is killed, he's shot 'cleanly through the head'. Justified, since shredders are ray guns.
• Professional Killer: Played with - he's the designated assassin of Visser Three, but he was never meant to succeed in his mission.
• The Quiet One: He present this façade to outsiders, but around comrades he shows his true colors as a Deadpan Snarker.
• Sociopathic Soldier: A mild example, as he harvested organs from the enemies he felled in battle, reasoning that the dead had no use for them and that he deserved some additional compensation for his work. As the Andalite forces have strict laws against the selling of organs, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
• Villain Respect: Despite being ultimately a bad guy, or at the least not a good one, he still has virtues, one of which is a warrior's respect for other warriors. In particular he respects Elfangor intensely, telling Ax he had trained under his older brother for a little while and that he could tell Elfangor had "seen things".
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Magnificently averted. He is one of the few characters to try just shooting Visser Three - and if not for Arbat's sabotage, he'd have succeeded too.

Intelligence Advisor Arbat-Elivat-Estoni

Intelligence Advisor Arbat-Elivat-Estoni

Debut: Animorphs #38: The Arrival (2000)

The people must be led by the few who are willing to make the very hard choices. The people are happy in their ignorance. But we in the Apex Level cannot allow ourselves to be sentimental.

An Apex Level Intelligence Advisor and the elder brother of Alloran-Semitur-Corass. Veteran of over twenty conflicts, Arbat is assigned to the Andalite task force Unit 0, ostensibly tasked with the assassination of Visser Three. The true mission of Unit 0, known only to Arbat himself, is to unleash a deadly new biological weapon against the Yeerks.

---

• Animorphism: Though he mostly uses it to become human.
• Anti-Villain: His goal could potentially save Earth...
• Badass Bookworm: It turns out he was a professor, not a warrior. However, he then proves the badass part by shooting a target the size of a coin behind him while it's flying.
  The disc flamed. It was not an impossible shot. I might have made it.
  With practice.
  But it was an impressive shot nevertheless.
  <One does not rise to Apex Level without some basic skills.>
• Chekhov's Gunman: When first introduced, he's just one of the crew, and not even a very prominent member of the crew at that (Gonrod and Estrid seem to be the ones calling the shots). In truth, he's not only The Man Behind the Man to the crew, but is also hatching a scheme which could alter the course of the entire Yeerk/Andalite conflict.
• Broken Pedestal: To Estrid. He was once her mentor, but ultimately he disgusts even her.
• Cain and Abel: Him and Alloran. He's the Abel, Alloran's the Cain.
• Cruel and Unusual Death. Maybe.
• Eaten Alive: By Taxxons.
• The Chessmaster: Being at the Apex Level, this sort of comes with the job description, Notably, the only character in the story who knows his plans is Estrid, and even she's being manipulated by him to a degree.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Not as much as Aloth, but Arbat is still an excellent shot. When he wants to be.
• Left Hanging: He's last seen Left for Dead by the heroes, wounded and facing an army of Taxxons.
• Knight Templar: Possibly as a result of his brother's enslavement.
• The Leader: Type I, though he uses Gonrod as a decoy leader.
• The Man Behind the Man: Of Unit 0.
• Minored in Ass-Kicking: Despite being an aging professor, Arbat is a sharpshooter with the morphing power, putting him on par with the Animorphs.
• Motive Rant: He gives one to Ax after his scheme's uncovered. It's notable for making the normally-unflappable Ax want to tail whip him.
• One-Shot Character: Appears only in The Arrival.
• The Professor: His cover story to his crew is that he's a retired professor of technological history. Of course, he's anything but retired, though it's anyone's guess if he was actually a professor, though given his patient personality, it's likely.
• Renaissance Man: Master planner and tactician, sharpshooter, morpher, probable history professor... the guy wears a lot of hats, and wears them well.
• The Strategist: Apex Level Intelligence is the highest level of advisory to the Andalite War Council. They plot. They plan. And they know everything.
• The Stoic: As his quote above demonstrates, he considers himself to be this, and is more than willing to commit acts the common human (or Andalite) would call atrocities if he believes it's for The Needs of the Many
• Synthetic Plague: He plans to wipe out the Yeerks using one. Sound familiar?
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: His plan is almost sure to cripple the Yeerks, but may doom humanity as well.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: See Estrid above.
• Villain of the Week: And an extremely successful one. In the one book he appears in he nicely upstages Visser Three as the biggest threat to the cast.

The Highest Powers

The Ellimist

The Ellimist

Yes, that's right! The Ellimist has been that little icon telling us to watch the TV series the entire time!

Debut: Animorphs #7: The Stranger (1997)

We watched the rise of other species throughout the galaxy. Helped at times, when we could. We wanted companions. We wanted to learn. We imagined a galaxy filled with millions of sentient species, each with its own science and art, its own beauty.

An All-Powerful Bystander, the Ellimist is a being so powerful he can directly manipulate the fabric of space-time, rewrite history, travel through time and cross between dimensions. He ultimately wants the Animorphs to prevail and save Earth, but he is bound by the rules of the nebulous Game, which prevents him from offering direct assistance unless it's in a Bargain with Heaven.

---

• All-Powerful Bystander: Not technically all-powerful, but so close as to make little difference from human perspectives. It's eventually revealed he has justified reasons to use such indirect and roundabout methods: he can't get fully involved without Crayak doing the same, and the last time they went all-out against each other, the results were nothing short of catastrophic.
• Ascended Fanboy: In-Universe; as a mortal, he was of a race called the Ketrans and enjoyed playing complex simulation games where he helped lesser races grow by indirect assistance. Now that he's powerful enough, he's doing the exact same thing for real.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: He became the Ellimist when his bio-mechanical body of a small fleet of spaceships was drawn into a black hole while some remained in real space and the rest was still in Z-Space, thereby causing him to exist in multiple dimensions at once.
• Balance of Good and Evil: Justified; if he oversteps the boundaries too much, then his Evil Counterpart will strike back.
• Big Good: The most powerful known being in the universe (second if you count the one who exiled Crayak) and dedicated to spreading and preserving sentient life.
• The Chessmaster: It turns out that he was behind at least four of the kids becoming Animorphs.
• Complete Immortality: At least unless the entire universe were destroyed, too.
• Cosmic Entity: Lives within/beyond the normal bounds of space-time.
• Creative Sterility: Not him, but rather he uses this to defeat Father in his mortal days. Father was a carnivorous parasitic seaweed-like creature that joins with his prey and absorbs memories. Once the Ketrans made the mistake of visiting Father's planet, everyone on board was killed and assimilated into Father, except Ellimist who was the Sole Survivor, whom Father kept alive as a game partner to prevent boredom. Due to his wealth of knowledge, Father always won their games, until he introduced a game of creativity: music. Father could only mimic and copy what he saw, but Ellimist was able to create on his own.
• Enemy Mine: After a low-level Yeerk's Controller is able to get his hands on the Time Matrix and change history for the worse, the Ellimist is forced to call a temporary truce with Crayak to give the Animorphs the power they need to stop the newly-ascended Visser Four.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": His real name is Toomin; "Ellimist" was basically his screen name when he was a Ketran gamer.
• Exact Words: One of his favorite methods of Loophole Abuse, as described below, is using this trope. For example, he promises Tobias that he'll give him back his human form if he agrees to help form the Free Hork-Bajir Colony. When Tobias does, the Ellimist restores his morphing power, then rewinds time to give him the chance to acquire his old self as a morph, thus fulfilling the terms of their deal (he never said that he'd permanently turn Tobias back into a human, only that he'd get his human form back).
  • In Elfangor's Secret, Crayak only agrees to the Enemy Mine described above on the condition that "one of the Animorphs" dies during their trip through time. The Ellimist agrees, and sure enough, Jake is killed. But during the rest of the adventure, the other Animorphs discover that they're somehow able to come back after being grievously injured or torn apart. They realize that the deal stated that "one of them" would die—and now that Jake has, the others are functionally immortal, as the Ellimist chose to interpret Crayak's words literally so that only one of them would die.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Usually, he appears as an Ambiguously Human old man; once he appeared as a geeky girl from their school.
• Godlike Gamer: A literal example. He enjoyed playing his species' equivalent of video games before becoming a Sufficiently Advanced Alien and Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence. Ironically, the one time we see him playing a video game, he loses. It's become a meme in the fandom that "God is a gamer◊" is canon.
• God's Hands Are Tied: If he interferes too directly, Crayak will respond in kind, and the last time they fought each other head-to-head it caused galactic-level devastation.
• Grandpa God: His most common form is the "Saintly Old Man" guise as seen on this page.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: The Ellimist is a Sufficiently Advanced Alien who is willing to help the heroes, but only does so in incomplete or misleading ways, hence why another species familiar with him, the Andalites, has their word for Ellimist mean "trickster". It eventually turns out the reason why he doesn't help the heroes more actively is because there is another being just as powerful as he is, the malevolent Crayak. As the last time the two battled each other at full strength resulted in galactic disaster, the Ellimist and Crayak are under an agreement to never directly battle each other again and instead duel through guiding species and heroes of their choice, like a cosmic game of chess.
• Green Aesop: In his first appearance he portrays himself as something of a space conservationist, telling the kids that free humans will be Extinct in the Future and that he wants to take the Animorphs, their families and a selection of other humans off-planet to a world where they will be safe (a preserve according to Cassie, though Tobias more uncharitably calls it a zoo). As it turns out, he actually doesn't want to take the kids off-world at all, and the space conservationist story is just a "Leave Your Quest" Test while he engages in a bit of his trademark Loophole Abuse and hopes one of them is smart enough to figure it out.
• I Am Legion: Throughout most of his appearances, he refers to himself in the plural, making it unclear if he is a singular entity or part of a collective, or even a race of creatures like him. It is eventually revealed he is a singular individual who absorbed millions of minds in a freak incident, explaining his predilection for referring to himself in the plural.
• Immortal Genius: A Cosmic Entity that never ages and likely can't be killed without destroying the entire universe as well. Not only is he virtually omniscient across time and space, but having been alive for millions of years, he's also a wellspring of information on subjects that most species have long forgotten. On top of playing an incredibly complicated game with Crayak for the fate of the universe, he also engineered an entire race to further his goals and created the legendary Time Matrix at some point in the distant past. Indeed, it's revealed he first achieved immortality by drawing upon the knowledge he acquired from Father to create a unique starship that could preserve his aging body, upgrading himself over the centuries until he transcended physical existence altogether.
• Last of His Kind: He is the last surviving member of the Ketran race. By the time the series proper begins, he is the last Ketran only in mind, as his original Ketran body was destroyed in a black hole when he ascended.
• "Leave Your Quest" Test: He gives one to the Animorphs in The Stranger.
• Little Miss Almighty: One of the forms he appeared before the group in.
• Living Ship: During his Third Life.
• Loophole Abuse: He's forbidden to interfere directly except when he makes a deal with Crayak, but gets around it by sneakily arranging for them to realize things on their own that they wouldn't have without him. This is actually the defining trait of him in his first appearance, where he shows the Animorphs a vision of a Bad Future, and a background event clues them in to the location of the Yeerk Kandrona in the present.
• Manipulative Bastard: He might be the Big Good of the series, more or less, but Good Is Not Nice. And he's not above guilt trips, the above Loophole Abuse, and just metaphorically twisting the arms of his pawns to get what he wants out of them. Elfangor and Tobias in particular are among those hardest leaned on by him.
• Million to One Chance: His evolution from Ketran gamer to demigod is due to a series of freak accidents, each more improbable than the last.
• Mysterious Backer: He tries to help the heroes, but he is either too roundabout in his methods to really gain their trust or too caught up in his game with Crayak to help at all.
  • The last Megamorphs heavily implies that the team basically exists because he arranged things from behind the scenes, including the Contrived Coincidences of getting members who were already unknowingly connected to the conflict in some way.
• Overly Long Name: His official name (which really only applied during his First Life) is Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger, Forty-one.
• Pet the Dog: He can't intercede to prevent Rachel's death but the framing device of The Ellimist Chronicles is him recounting his life story to comfort her in the moments before her death.
• Pointy Ears: In his favored form.
• Reality Warper: He can pretty much do anything.
• Recurring Character: He appears in a handful of books, but his influence is felt in many more.
• Starfish Alien: We never get a clear description of what Ketrans look like. We only know that they have wings, quills, arms, pods instead of feet, docking talons, and live on gravity defying crystals.
  • Our Angels Are Different: The vague description of the Ketrans is somewhat reminiscent of the description of Cherubim from the Book of Ezekiel (a winged Humanoid Abomination with a bestial head and feet). Given that the Ellimist is essentially a god, this may have been intentional.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: At one point, Rachel comments he's advanced compared to humans in the sense that humans are more advanced than cows. He would probably argue that it's not quite that extreme, though.
• Time Stands Still: His general m.o. if he wants to talk with you.
• What If God Was One of Us?: In The Ellimist Chronicles, he places part of his essence into the body of an Andalite and lives among early Andalites in order to reconnect with his sense of mortality.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Though he arguably doesn't have one anymore. He usually manifests an Ambiguously Human old man (as shown in the picture). In The Andalite Chronicles, he does allow Elfangor to see his true form, but Elfangor can only describe it in really vague terms.

Crayak

Crayak

"Crayak" by mrsinister616

Debut: Animorphs #6: The Capture (1997, unnamed), #26: The Attack (1999, full appearance)

I will cleanse this galaxy of all life. Then, when no sentient thing is left alive, I will kill you, Ellimist. That's my game. Shall we play?

Foreshadowed early on, the Crayak remains a mystery until halfway through the series, when the Ellimist reveals his story. A being of power equal to the Ellimist but with very different goals, the Crayak is a malevolent being chased from his home galaxy by the one power in the universe that can defeat him. He seeks extinction on a galactic scale, and eventually the ability to control all of space-time as his own.

---

• All-Powerful Bystander: Like the Ellimist, he is not truly all-powerful, but he is so close, it makes little difference from a human perspective.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • To the Ellimist, with the two of them having warred with each other for millennia due to their opposing goals, Ellimist wishing to sustain life and Crayak wishing to eradicate it.
  • To Jake, with Crayak developing a burning hatred for the boy ever since he destroyed Crayak's creation, the Howlers, a race he primarily used to end other species. Ever since, Crayak has tried over and over to murder Jake through indirect means.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: Much like the Ellimist, he found a way into the fabric of space and time.
• Bad Boss: Towards the Drode. Though the Drode serves loyally, Crayak is fully prepared to let Rachel annihilate him if it means securing her loyalty. He's also stated through implicit reasoning to have annihilated all Howlers who lost or were exposed to ideas that might make them less murderous before those memories could taint the racial pool and diminish their effectiveness as his allegedly unstoppable slaughter-machine shock troops.
• Badass Boast: Brags to Rachel that while there are many masters of illusion in the universe, only he is a master of reality. This isn't exactly true, since the Ellimist can do anything he can do, but he gets points for chutzpha.
• Bizarre Alien Limbs: As with the Ellimist, Crayak's original biological form is somewhat ill-defined, being described only as a cycloptid creature "evolved for the surface, or perhaps even for a subterranean life". Aside from the eye, his only firmly described features are massive, muscled limbs that no wings could ever lift.
• The Chessmaster: Implied; after all, he's good enough to take on the Ellimist in a Cosmic Chess Game.
• Chekhov's Gunman: He first appears as a bizarre, ominous hallucination when the Yeerk in Jake's head dies. It turns out that briefly seeing past life and death allowed Jake to glimpse Crayak.
• Complete Immortality: Like the Ellimist, he has transcended the boundaries of life and death and is no longer possible to kill, or even harm, in any tangible sense.
• The Corrupter: He plays this role to Rachel, tempting her with god-like power in exchange for murdering Jake.
• Cyclops: Even before ascending, Crayak's original form was a monstrous, one-eyed creature.
• Diabolus ex Machina: He has no Origin Story beyond "He was kicked out of another galaxy by an even more powerful super-being". Even in ''The Ellimist Chronicles", which gives the Ellimist's Origin Story, Crayak just shows up in his planetoid/spaceship about half way through with no explanation.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: According to the Ellimist, he wants to fill the universe with "conflict, pain, and terror", apparently for its own sake. The closest he gets to an ideological motive is that he wants there to be a single surviving Master Race which has dominated, consumed, or absorbed all others for him to dominate and rule over like a god, and a universe of constant, horrific violence and brutality serves to accelerate that end, but it's also made abundantly clear that he enjoys the pain and suffering of others for their own sake as well.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Jake has a vision of him early in the series as Tom's former Yeerk is dying in his head, but has no idea what he's looking at until significantly later.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: He actually tried to destroy Earth once, at some point during the Mesozoic era. Thanks to the newly-ascended Ellimist, the attempt failed.
• Eldritch Abomination: He has the appearance of a giant red eye and even without being an Omnicidal Maniac, he looks pretty terrifying.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In Megamorphs Three, a Yeerk using a Controller named John Berryman is able to locate the Time Matrix, and he uses it to change history so that the Yeerks can more easily invade. Crayak, for all his omnicidal tendencies, views this as cheating in the Game (one of the decided rules was that alternate realities are out of play) and agrees to a temporary truce with the Ellimist to fix things. It's downplayed in that Crayak still uses the opportunity to try to permanently kill Jake, but he was still willing to let the others fix the problem so that the Game would remain fair.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: His attempts to sway Rachel to his service in The Return are fairly limp, and mostly reliant on the hope that she'll go Drunk on the Dark Side. When she doesn't, he takes his cosmic ball and leaves in a huff. On the other hand, the offer he extends through the Drode remains open until the end of the series, and it's anyone's guess if she fulfilled it.
• Evil Counterpart: To the Ellimist.
• Evil Gloating: The Drode's first appearance in The Exposed was half following the rules of the Game and giving the Animorphs one hint to keep things fair. The other half was Crayak indulging in this, by proxy.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: When the Ellimist first meets him, he had a moveable planetoid he uses as a spaceship, which is described as "dark and gloomy".
• Evil Mentor: Tries to become this to Rachel. It doesn't work, though the curiously-worded nature of his offer to her spawned more than a few fan theories about her final fate.
• Evil Is Petty: After The Attack, he spends most of his remaining appearances coming up with ways to punish Jake for what he did to the Howlers.
• Evil Sounds Deep: If you're unfortunate enough to meet him in person, his voice feels like being shaken apart at the atomic level.
• Expy: He's explicitly based on Sauron, as K. A. Applegate is a big fan of J. R. R. Tolkien.
• Faceless Eye: His appearance is a giant blood-red eye.
• Fate Worse than Death: He is unsatisfied with watching the universe as a passive observer and would choose his own destruction over that fate.
• For the Evulz: He massacres species and enjoys the suffering and torment of others because, hey, it's something to do. When he and the Ellimist first acquire their near-omnipotent powers, the Ellimist suggests that, since they're incapable of killing each other now without collapsing space-time and killing everything including themselves, and can just undo any damage the other does to the galaxy if they don't, they could call a truce and just watch the advance of evolution. Crayak refuses because he finds the idea boring.
• Giant Eye of Doom: His appearance is described as being a giant blood-red eye and considering he is evil incarnate definitely fits this trope to a T.
• God of Evil: He comes across as this, especially since, unlike the Ellimist, his backstory is never revealed. Additionally, the author admitted to modeling him after personifications of 'pure evil' such as Sauron from The Lord of the Rings.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The ultimate evil in the series who has been responsible for everything occurring. The Yeerks taking over other species was his doing in a great big game with Ellimist.
• Hero's Evil Predecessor: When the Ellimist first meets him he's brand new to the cosmic god wannabe game, while Crayak has apparently already been doing it for some time, and indeed delights in running circles around the Ellimist with cruel Sadistic Choice scenarios until Toomin finally has enough and decides to Take a Third Option. And in a narrative sense, he actually debuts a book before the Ellimist himself, though he is unnamed in it.
• I Lied: To David. He promises him revenge against Rachel, but merely uses him as a tool against her.
• Immortal Genius: He's been around for almost as long as the Ellimist, has more or less the same strengths and limitations, even a fairly similar backstory, complete with his first body being preserved inside a starship. He's used his intellect to create monsters, tempt unsuspecting victims into Faustian bargains, and plot the creation of a universe built on an especially brutal form of social darwinism.
• Karma Houdini: Being a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, he is far too powerful for the Animorphs or the Andalites to do anything to punish him. It's possible the Ellimist will manage to destroy him someday, however.
• "Leave Your Quest" Test: Playing up his role as the Ellimist's Evil Counterpart, Crayak extends Jake an offer to alter history so he never met Elfangor. Jake accepts this offer, and it's the basis for Megamorphs #4.
• Living Ship: He first appears to the Ellimist as this.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: When the Ellimist first explains his modus operandi to the Animorphs, one of them compares him to a Nazi. Ellimist admits the comparison is partially correct, but cautions that Crayak has very different views of absolute power and no particular attachment to any one race.
• No Indoor Voice: Similar to Visser Three, he communicates with a form of thought-speech. Jake describes it as sounding like he's screaming at the top of his lungs.
• Noodle Incident: The only clue we get about his backstory is he was kicked out of another galaxy by a being more powerful than even him or the Ellimist. Who said being was and why they banished him are never explained.
• Nothing Is Scarier: When he first appears on-page, twenty books and nearly two years before he is given any kind of explanation, Jake doesn't know what to make of him, and even expects to have nightmares about him. (At the time, the memory of the Yeerk in his head dying is too fresh, but he's having recurring nightmares about Crayak by The Attack.)
• Omnicidal Maniac: "I play the game of genocide..."
• Plague Master: In The Ellimist Chronicles, he makes an entire race starve by creating a parasite that eats all their crops.
• Plot Hole: Unlike with the Ellimist, it's never explained how he went from just a really powerful alien to a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. The Ellimist Chronicles just say he found a way to "follow" the Ellimist into near-omnipotence.
• Reality Warper: For example, he rewrote history in the last Megamorphs book.
• Recurring Character: Though his presence is often felt, the Crayak himself only personally appears in The Attack, The Return and The Ellimist Chronicles.
• Sadistic Choice: When he first met the Ellimist he put him through various scenarios where he faced the doom of multiple planets and had a way to save one or another, but never both or all.
• Satanic Archetype: He both a pseudo God of Evil and (due to the rules of The Game) mostly just tempts people to do evil rather than working directly. His (rather vague) backstory about an even more powerful being exiling him is pretty obviously based on the story of Satan being banished from Heaven.
• The Social Darwinist: His goal is to pit race against race, species against species, the winner growing stronger with each engagement, until only one species is left, whom he will then dominate and have revere him as a god.
• Someone Has to Die: He agrees to help the Animorphs follow Visser Four through time in Megamorphs #3. In return, he demands that one of their number must die. Jake ends up biting the bullet, but thanks to some Time Travel Loophole Abuse, it doesn't stick.
• Sore Loser: He really doesn't take it well when the Animorphs defeat his Howlers. In fact, he spends the entire rest of the series trying to kill Jake as revenge for it.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: He had super-advanced technology even before ascending to near-godhood.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: Essentially threatens this to get Ellimist to agree to their Cosmic Chess Game arrangement; he doesn't want to force a fight within the fabric of space-time itself that would ensure his own destruction, but would do so if the only other option was eternity as a passive observer.
• Talking in Your Dreams: He appears to both Jake and Rachel in dreams.

The Drode

The Drode

Debut: Animorphs #27: The Exposed (1999)

Yes, yes, oh yes. Mustn't upset the balance. Not directly, anyway. But! Create problems? Yes. Create opportunities? Yes. Play the wild card? Of course.

An alien being who resembles a humanoid dinosaur, he serves Crayak and acts as his representative. He has incredible powers, presumably a gift from his master. The series' weirdest points are usually his doing.

---

• Beast with a Human Face: His body is similar to that of a therapod dinosaur, but his face is oddly humanoid.
• Breaking Speech: His first appearance in The Exposed has him pop out of nowhere and snarkily pick the Animorphs apart one by one.
• Deal with the Devil: Implied, but not confirmed. See Last of His Kind below. He also pitches one to Rachel that remains one of the great unanswered questions in the series.
• The Dragon: To Crayak.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Is absolutely enraged that the Pemalites and Chee would choose to be actual pacifists.
  And you wonder why Crayak destroyed the Pemalites. What tedious creatures they were. Pacifist androids! What is the point of machines that cannot kill? They could have ruled the galaxy with their Chee as warriors!
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: He likes to joke, but...
• Evil Sounds Deep: Inverted, as his voice is specifically described as "high, shrill, grating."
• Evil Mentor: Tries really hard to become one to Rachel.
• Exact Words: "Your cousin's life is your key to salvation in the arms of Crayak." Notice he never specifies which cousin he meant.
• From a Single Cell: He can regenerate, possibly from any wound. Rachel rips his head off in The Return to no effect.
• Giggling Villain: He's prone to giggling when he thinks he has the upper hand, particularly in The Return.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Enjoys Rachel's penchant for violence.
• Last of His Kind: It's implied that he sold out his entire species so he could become Crayak's right-hand man.
• Loophole Abuse: Like his master, he is bound by the rules of The Game. That doesn't stop him from bending the rules to achieve the outcome he desires.
• Manipulative Bastard: In his debut appearance he pulls the strings of the Animorphs, the Chee, and the Yeerks, all in hopes of punishing the Animorphs for their recent victory over Crayak's Howlers.
• Mouth of Sauron: Since Crayak rarely appears in the flesh, the Drode frequently does his talking for him.
• Out-Gambitted: In his first appearance, thanks to the timely intervention of Erek.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Ellimist doesn't have any kind of herald, so the reveal that Crayak does was one that none of the Animorphs ever saw coming.
• Reality Warper: Shares this power with Crayak.
• Recurring Character: He appears in The Exposed, the last two Megamorphs books, and The Return.
• Smug Snake: Despite all his cosmic power, he's really nothing more than Crayak's errand boy, and as Crayak demonstrates in The Return, he's more than willing to replace the Drode at any time.
• Teleporters and Transporters: Having a fraction of his master's Reality Warper power, he can appear and reappear wherever and whenever he wants.
• Terms of Endangerment: He refers to Rachel as "Rachel of the dark heart."
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: One of the rules of the Game he is bound by, much to his disdain. This has loopholes, though — while he can't take life directly, he can maneuver victims into scenarios where someone else will kill them, as he tried to do with the Animorphs and the Yeerks. He is also capable of setting the Chee to self-destruct, revealing that some variant of What Measure Is a Non-Human? (or What Measure is a Non-Organic) is at play.
• Wild Card: His name literally means "wild card."

The One

The One

Debut: Animorphs #54: The Beginning (2001)

You have done well to come this far. You have come to find your friend. But the Andalite is part of me now. As you will soon be.

A Diabolus ex Nihilo that shows up in the last few pages of the final book. He gathers the remnants of the shattered Yeerk Empire under his aegis and plots to assimilate the Animorphs into his being. The book ends with the Animorphs ramming his ship and the outcome of the conflict is never revealed.

---

• The Assimilator: Apparently assimilates a lot of beings, including Ax.
• Body Horror: It's revealed he's inflicted it on his captive Ax.
• Bolivian Army Ending: "Ram the Blade ship."
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Implied. Two of the four forms he shows the Animorphs are mechanical creatures.
• Diabolus ex Machina/Diabolus ex Nihilo: Just when it looks like the war is finally over for the Animorphs, out like an evil space jack-in-the box pops this thing.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: What exactly does the One want? Why does it assimilate beings when it seems plenty powerful on its own? Where is it even going? Good luck figuring any of that out, it's just there for two pages of generic villainy.
• A God Am I: To the point where Yeerks start worshiping him.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The leader of the Yeerk survivors and the final enemy faced by the Animorphs.
• Light Is Not Good: He appears to the Animorphs heralded by "searing light."
• Minor Major Character: His only appearance covers all of four pages.
• No Mouth: Subverted in nightmarish fashion. See Body Horror above.
• Path of Inspiration: Hinted at. The Yeerk remnants he leads worship him as a god and his lieutenant, Efflit One-Three-One-Eight, carries himself in a manner more befitting a High Priest than a ship's captain.
• The Remnant: He leads it.
• Space Elves: One of his forms is described as a "sweet, feminine, almost elfin visage."
• Mind Probe: Apparently, since he instantly knows that the Animorphs are hiding on their ship.
• Too Many Mouths: One too many, given that he gives a horrifying, red-rimmed mouth to Ax.
• Unseen Evil: We never see his true face and he is described by Marco as "every corruption and every evil."
• Unrobotic Reveal: When it first shows itself to Jake and company it has a mechanical face, but this quickly dissolves into the "sweet elfin visage" mentioned above before revealing what is apparently its newest face, Ax.
• Walking Spoiler: He literally shows up within the last few pages of the final book with no build-up.

Others

Melissa Chapman

Melissa Chapman

Debut: Animorphs #2: The Visitor (1996)

Melissa was an innocent. She didn't need to see what was going to happen next.

Principal Chapman's daughter and Rachel's estranged second-best friend. She plays a prominent role in one of the early books and is relegated to a distant background character for the rest of the series.

---

• Alternate Self: In the alternate timeline of Megamorphs #03 Melissa has taken Rachel's place on the team. Where's Rachel herself? You don't want to know.
• Bound and Gagged: Marco leaves her this way in The Conspiracy.
• Broken Bird: Apparently used to be happier, until her parents started acting strange for reasons she does not understand.
• Cool Cat: Her pet cat, Fluffer McKitty. He ends up becoming Rachel's very first cover morph.
• Demoted to Extra: Her appearance in the second book, as well as her ties both to Rachel and a high-ranking Controller, seemed to indicate she would become a much more frequently-recurring character than she did. She only ended up appearing in two other books and actually made more appearances in the infamous television series!
• Hostage Situation: In The Conspiracy.
• Morality Pet: To her parents.
• Parental Neglect: Or so it appears. In reality, her parents have both made the ultimate sacrifice to protect her.
• Promoted to Love Interest: In the alternate reality of Megamorphs #03, she is dating Tobias.
• Recurring Character: She appears in The Visitor, The Conspiracy, and Megamorphs #03: Elfangor's Secret.
• Stepford Smiler: She tries to put up a brave face to cover for the fact that she's deeply depressed.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: She and her parents are absent from the ending and it's left unclear whether or not they survived.

Loren

Loren

Debut: The Andalite Chronicles (1997)

She's a million light-years from her home, Arbron. Confronting species she never knew existed. Suddenly thrust into the middle of an intergalactic war. I think she is very brave.

The heroine of The Andalite Chronicles and Elfangor's love interest. She's Tobias's mother.

---

• Action Girl: Quite tough for a thirteen-year-old up against the future Visser Three.
• Alien Abduction: Her introduction to the series is thanks to her being abducted by the Skrit Na.
• Animorphism: From The Diversion on up.
• Back for the Finale: First appears in The Andalite Chronicles (which is set before the series and was released early on in the series), then reappears in The Diversion, The Ultimate and The Sacrifice, three of the last six books in the series.
• Badass Normal: In The Andalite Chronicles.
• Batter Up!: She takes on Esplin's Mortrons with nothing but a baseball bat.
• Disability Superpower: In The Diversion she is able to master morphing very quickly. The Auxiliary Animorphs later exhibit this same knack, and the Animorphs speculate it may be because they are physically disabled, forcing their minds to become stronger.
• Disappeared Dad: Her dad, a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD, walked out on her and her family.
• First-Name Basis: Like most members of the series.
• Groin Attack: Delivers one to Hedrick Chapman (who is about to shoot Elfangor with an Andalite Shredder) during the events of The Andalite Chronicles. Elfangor describes the attack as "kicking him with both of her 'artificial hooves' right where his legs joined his body" as well as him "believing that said kick was quite painful to him".
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: It's the first thing Elfangor notices about her.
• Heroes Love Dogs: She has a seeing eye dog named Champ that she loves quite dearly.
• Interspecies Romance: With Elfangor
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Averted, but not completely.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: She's a headstrong blonde who can kick ass, much like her son's girlfriend.
• Little Miss Badass: She repeatedly took on aliens without Elfangor's help—in fact, she had already subdued her Skrit Na abductors when he and Arbron first met her.
• Mama Bear: In The Diversion.
• Missing Mom: To Tobias. Justified in that she was blinded and lost her memories in a car accident, and considered herself unfit to raise a child.
• Motivational Kiss: Gives Elfangor one before he goes into battle. He doesn't understand what it is, but doesn't mind.
• Mysterious Parent: Tobias knows pretty much nothing about her except her name.
• Parents as People: As Tobias's mom, she gets her own backstory and adventure in The Andalite Chronicles.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Messing around with the Time Matrix causes her to age a few years prematurely, from 13 to 18.
• Plucky Girl: She's more or less Rachel lite.
• Someone to Remember Him By: The Ellimist wipes her memories of Elfangor and replaces him with a human husband... but leaves her with their son.
• Starcrossed Lovers: With Elfangor
• Throwing Off the Disability: She's blind and crippled in The Diversion, but is healed by morphing.
• Trauma Conga Line: It's revealed in The Diversion that after her adventures in space that she got in a car accident that robbed her of her sight, fought for years with insurance companies only to get shafted by them, and ultimately found herself in a run-down house on the bad side of town.
• Unexpected Character: While fans had been waiting for elements of her plot to be addressed for quite literally years, no one was really expecting her to pop back into the main story the way she did.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: She's curiously absent from the last book.

Erek King

Erek King

Debut: Animorphs #10: The Android (1997)

This will be a meeting of allies, Marco. You see, we, too, fight the Yeerks.

Erek King was a member of the Chee, a race of ancient androids that had been living in secret on Earth for thousands of years. He revealed the existence of his people to Marco after it became apparent that they were both secretly fighting for the same cause. Though he was at heart a pacifist and found physical violence abhorrent, he and other Chee helped Animorphs in their missions by gathering information and providing alibis.

---

• The Ageless: Still running fine after thousands of years.
• Android Among Us: Looks just like a kid.
• Ascended Extra: The Erek character was the result of a Contest Winner Cameo and was only going to appear once. He ended up being one of the most important secondary characters.
• Actual Pacifist: Thanks to his programming; the one time he was reprogrammed, he was so sickened by what he was capable of that he immediately rewired the violence prohibition back in.
• Badass Automaton: At "full powers", he completely annihilates a Yeerk force that would've slaughtered the team. After voluntarily resetting himself, he still makes a very effective shield against the Howlers, and managed to travel out to the Pemalite ship in a matter of moments when it took the Animorphs the better part of an hour just to get down that far underwater.
• Badass Pacifist: Seriously, check out some of the stuff he pulls in The Attack. Mostly involving using himself or his holograms and forcefields to tank attacks for the kids.
  • He's no slouch in The Exposed, either. Rachel guesses that it only took him a few minutes after having his functioning restored to leave his house, get to the coast, get so far out to sea, dive down to the location of the Pemalite ship, and activate its own violence prohibition so that the Yeerk forces couldn't hurt the Animorphs. This took the Animorphs hours, and they had to morph sperm whales in order to catch a squid that they could morph in order to dive down that far.
• Bearer of Bad News: If Erek shows up, it's usually to alert the team to some new Yeerk project. He even points this out in The Sickness when informed of Ax's disease, joking that usually he's the one giving them bad news.
• Been There, Shaped History: Franklin Roosevelt got the name for the "New Deal" from Erek during a game of poker. Mr. King was Louis Pasteur's lab assistant and gave him the idea to try killing bacteria with heat. Erek's also played many less glamorous roles, such as a slave labourer on the Pyramids.
• Beware the Nice Ones: In his first appearance, but The Attack and the final book also show he can be quite vengeful without being violent.
• Contest Winner Cameo: Named after a real-life Animorphs fan whose cameo went a bit further than he expected.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In The Android.
• Deadpan Snarker: "I gotta stop hanging around with you people. You people are just plain strange."
• Deceptively Human Robots: He appears human as long as he can project his hologram.
• Do-Anything Robot: To some degree in The Attack.
• Drop-In Character: Shows up every once in a while to give intel and occasionally help in other ways.
• Foreign-Language Tirade: In The Answer. See What the Hell, Hero? below.
• Guest-Star Party Member: In The Attack.
• Heavy Worlder: The Pemalite home world's gravity was four times stronger than Earth's, accounting for Erek's obscene strength.
• Historical In-Joke: Five thousand years of possibilities!
• Hologram: His human form is one, and he can project basically whatever he wants - boulders, dump trucks, and so on.
• Holographic Disguise: Erek's default human form is a disguise, but he can increase the range of the hologram allowing him to talk with the Animorphs in secret.
• Hologram Projection Imperfection: In The Exposed.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: At first Marco thinks he's working for the Yeerks. Erek shoots him down pretty quick with this.
• Ignored Epiphany: He learns the truth about the Howlers in The Attack after uploading their memories. He doesn't care, because his hatred for them is too deep to forgive.
• I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure: Inflicted on Erek by Jake in The Answer. He forces Erek to help the group by threatening Chapman's life - while Chapman is no friend of Erek's, his programming forces him to comply to save his life.
• Just a Machine: In The Exposed, the Drode attempts to justify setting the Chee to self-destruct by invoking this, though the Drode is no stranger to just being an asshole.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: Variable. The word "Chee" means "friend" in the language of their creators, the Pemalites, but the Drode is able to get around his usual loophole against killing sentient creatures when he sets the Chee to self-destruct. He explicitly points out that the sperm whale he beached for the kids to morph is just sentient enough that he can't kill it, so it will survive, but the Chee? They're just machines.
• Mission Control: He evolved into this in later books.
• Mr. Exposition: Lampshaded - Applegate herself admitted she got too reliant on using Erek as an expository device.
• The Mole: Pretends to be a Controller in order to get information to the main characters.
• Morality Chip: Cannot perform violence for any reason.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After momentarily having his Morality Chip deactivated.
• No Hero to His Valet: He's in the unique position of knowing exactly how bad the kids are at the whole "hero" thing and will usually keep his mocking gentle. He has faith in the kids succeeding on any given mission, but openly wonders how they haven't died yet. Interestingly, most of the jobs he talks about having in his past lives — Catherine the Great's hairdresser, Franklin D. Roosevelt's butler, and, yes, Ludwig van Beethoven's valet — would have given him the opportunity to have this view of famous historical people. Much like the Animorphs themselves became.
• Non-Action Guy: From the end of The Android on up.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: He and the other Chee can tank Dracon beam shots, though he admits a full power blast, sustained for long enough, would destroy him. The Chee who poses as Erek's father is also able to hold Rachel immobile while she's in grizzly bear morph without any issues. During The Attack, the Howlers don't bother actually trying to fight him when he uses his body as an obstacle; they realize it would take too long to be worth it compared to trying to hunt down or destroy the Animorphs he's defending.
• Older Than They Look: By several millennia.
• One-Man Army: Very briefly; the one time he adjusted his programming for violence, he single-handedly killed two dozen Hork-Bajir.
• Person of Mass Destruction: If he and the Chee had joined the war in earnest, the Yeerks would have been defeated in a week.
• Photographic Memory: Marco suspects this is the main reason the Chee are programmed to be non-violent. While an organic's memory gets fuzzier over time, any Chee who kills will have to live with a crystal-clear memory of it forever.
• Really Five Thousand Years Old: At least.
• Renaissance Man: Five thousand years is a long time to pick up skills. He's been a politician, a hairdresser and a valet - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
• Robot Names: In The Android we learn all Chee have their own names, such as Chee-Ionos. Curiously, we never learn Erek's.
• Robotic Reveal: Originally when his hologram momentarily flickered, later when Marco's spider morph could see through it.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: Built into all Chee. We never see it in action, but they're threatened with it in The Exposed.
• Super-Speed: He's more than capable of it, as is richly demonstrated in The Exposed.
• Super-Strength: Thanks to his being a Heavy Worlder. At one point he is described as being able to fight every person in a mall, beat them all and then tear the mall down. As seen in The Android, this is no exaggeration.
• Teach Him Anger: Played with. The Chee know what anger is, but they're programmed to be Actual Pacifists and can't harm a living being. In the first book they appear in, Erek reprograms himself to remove the prohibition...and is promptly horrified at the results. And since they're robots with a Photographic Memory, he can never forget what he's done.
• Time Abyss: He's been alive for somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand years.
• Tinman Typist: His aversion of this is a plot point in the series finale. If Ax, as an organic typist, was capable of hacking the Pool ship, then Erek, with his direct interface capabilities (previously displayed in #26 and #29), wouldn't have been blackmailed by Jake in the final books.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Two of them during the series' climactic mission.
  • "This is so low. This is so far beneath you, Jake..." [unintelligible] "...I was offering you my opinion of your morals and your ethics and your sense of decency. I was speaking an ancient Mesopotamian dialect known for its wide variety of curse words."
  • "A what?! A what did you need? You're going to tell me you needed a diversion so Jake massacred seventeen thousand sentient creatures? A diversion?!"

Jeremy Jason McCole

Jeremy Jason McCole

Debut: Animorphs #12: The Reaction (1997)

Look, Disaster Girl, or whatever you are, how about if you and your friend stumble on out of here? I need to get made up. And I don't need an audience.

A teenage actor who is hired by the Yeerks to be the Sharing's spokesman. The Animorphs (specifically Rachel and Cassie) hope to rescue him from infestation, only to find to their disgust he's aware of what the Yeerks are and is joining them willingly in exchange for making him a major movie star.

---

• Ambition Is Evil: Visser Three remarks on Jeremy's ambition and says he wants "so much more than you'll ever get without my help." And, of course, he's selling out his whole species to satisfy that ambition.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: He's got an unpleasant personality from what we see of him, calling his millions of teenage fans "dopey" and remarking that he's sick of being "Mr. Goody Good" all the time. Odds are David would have gotten along with him.
• Broken Pedestal: Rachel has a teenage girl's crush on him and dreams of saving him from the Yeerks... until she finds out that he doesn't need saving at all because he's actually making a deal with them.
• Deal with the Devil: He joins up with the Yeerks when they promise to help him break into Hollywood proper.
• Dirty Coward: The Yeerk infesting Jeremy bails out of its host when it looks like he's about to become crocodile lunch.
• Les Collaborateurs: Even after the realizes the Yeerks are aliens, he's perfectly willing to work for them until he realizes what being a Controller actually means.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: He almost gets eaten by one.
• Nice Character, Mean Actor: His Power House character is a nice guy, but the real Jason is anything but.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's based off 90's teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas.
• The Quisling: Visser Three recruits him in the hopes of making him the public face of the Sharing.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Jeremy's choice to sell out to the Yeerks winds up costing him his freedom (if briefly), his career, and all of his ambitions. And with the truth of the Yeerk war eventually coming out, chances are life didn't get much better for him after the war's end.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After his Yeerk is killed, he abandons show business and flees to Uzbekistan.
• Small Name, Big Ego: He's the lead young actor in a TV show, but it's specifically stated that his career is on the decline, and a producer even calls it "over." This doesn't stop him from giving the Barry and Cindy Sue show crew the always-dreaded "Do you know who I am?" line.

Dak Hamee

Dak Hamee

Debut: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (1998)

These are my people who will die today. Be quiet, Andalite. Be quiet.

A Posthumous Character who led his people the Hork-Bajir against the Yeerks who sought to conquer them. He was a seer, an extraordinarily rare mutant among his people gifted with genius-level intelligence.

---

• A Child Shall Lead Them: He's the Hork-Bajir equivalent of a teenager and leads his people in their desperate fight against the Yeerks.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Dak often feels lonely and wishes he had a peer, being the only Hork-Bajir with comparable intelligence to a human, Andalite, or Yeerk. He lives to see his world conquered and his people exploited and enslaved by alien visitors.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Like all Hork-Bajir.
• Child Prodigy: He was the first chronological Hork-Bajir seer, and his gifts were apparently passed down to his granddaughter Toby.
• Doomed by Canon: No matter how sympathetic Dak may be, we already know his fight will end in failure because it's long since been established that his people have been Yeerk slaves for generations.
• Fling a Light into the Future: His rebellion with Aldrea was ultimately crushed, but the things he left behind, through his grandchildren, who became the first free Hork-Hajir in a generation, through his story, and through a well-hidden weapons cache, ultimately brought a happy ending to his race.
• Genius Bruiser: He's smarter than most humans and eventually becomes a very capable fighter, much to his sorrow.
• Good Old Ways: After seeing what the Andalites and Yeerks do with the power of science, he quickly comes to prefer his own people's culture to theirs, no matter how primitive it is by comparison.
  Dak: You Andalites have more respect for the vicious Yeerks or the cowardly Arn than you have for the Hork-Bajir who fight and die at your sides. All that matters to your people is intelligence. Well, I've learned enough about Yeerk and Andalite and Arn intelligence to make me sick.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Like all Hork-Bajir.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Before the arrival of the Andalites he was apart from his people, not shunned but viewed as "strange" by the elders and even his own mother. He, in turn, was frustrated at being in many ways the only adult on a planet of children, and initially embraced Aldrea and the Andalites for offering him companionship on his intellectual level. Sadly, he came to learn that intelligence doesn't necessarily equal goodness.
• Interspecies Romance: After Aldrea becomes a female Hork-Bajir nothlit, they eventually start a family together.
• La Résistance: Forms one with Aldrea, though they eventually lose.
• Noble Savage: As a Hork-Bajir with a rare genetic mutation that makes him as intelligent as any other sapient, Dak is still the most sympathetic, moral character in his novel, despite (and perhaps even because of) his primitive culture.
• One-Shot Character: He only appears in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.
• Posthumous Character: By the time the series starts he has been dead for over thirty years.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: He gives a pretty good one to Aldrea telling her all the reasons the Andalites suck.
• Reluctant Warrior: Never wanted to have to fight, or to teach his people to.
• Superpowerful Genetics: His high intelligence is the result of an error in the Arn's genetic hardwiring of the Hork-Bajir. They're by default coded to be dim, but one in every ten thousand of them is gifted with high intelligence like Dak's.

Toby Hamee

Toby Hamee

Debut: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles (1998)

A fool is strong so that others will see. A wise person is strong for himself. The Hork-Bajir will be strong for the Hork-Bajir. That way, when the Yeerks are all gone, we will still be strong.

The daughter of the first two free Hork-Bajir in generations, Toby Hamee is a seer, a rare anomaly among Hork-Bajir born with genius-level intelligence. Her keen mind and charisma quickly elevate her to leader of the free Hork-Bajir. Generally cautious and levelheaded, she puts the survival and well-being of the Hork-Bajir colony over all else in every situation.

---

• A Child Shall Lead Them: The other Hork-Bajir follow her unquestioningly, despite her age.
• Ambadassador: After the war's end Toby becomes the official liaison between her people and the United States government.
• Ascended Extra: As leader of the free Hork-Bajir, Toby becomes one of the most important secondary characters.
• Battle Cry: She and her Hork-Bajir have one - "Free or dead!"
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Like all Hork-Bajir.
• Child Prodigy: As a Hork-Bajir seer, she is easily the most intelligent of her friends and family.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The free Hork-Bajir endured much suffering in slavery to the Empire, then more as resistance fighters. But, eventually, after great hardship, they make a new home on Earth, and live out their days in peace.
• Foil: For her great-grandfather Dak. He never forgave himself for teaching the Hork-Bajir violence, but having been born after most of their species is enslaved, she feels no guilt for doing anything necessary to defeat the Yeerks.
• Genius Bruiser: She's a genius pretty much from birth and grows up to be just as tough as any member of her species.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Like all Hork-Bajir.
• La Résistance: The free Hork-Bajir, which she leads.
• The Leader: Type I meets Type IV.
• Line in the Sand: Literally. After the Yeerks find out where the Hork-Bajir valley is located, they plan to storm it and kill everyone. Jake and his friends attempt to explain to Toby that going into battle is suicidal, and to demonstrate his point Jake draws a line in the sand and asks the Hork-Bajir to vote on which course of action is the smartest. Jake's point backfires when every Hork-Bajir votes to fight back.
• Named After Somebody Famous: In-universe; the Hork-Bajir have come to idolise Tobias somewhat for being the key player in freeing them, and Jara named Toby after him as a mark of honour.
• Noble Savage: Less so than most of her species, though.
• Rapid Aging: Due to Hork-Bajir biology she is fully-grown in about the space of two years. And thanks to her seer genes, she is capable of speaking clearly just a few days after being born.
• Rebel Leader: An ally to Jake and the other Animorphs, but decidedly independent from them.
• Redshirt Army: In the last few books, though Toby herself survives.
• The Strategist: Is at least as good at planning as the Animorphs, but tends to only get involved when the Hork-Bajir are part of the plot.
• Superpowerful Genetics: And they're accidental at that! Note that the superpower in question is heightened intelligence, she got extra-human strength on top of being a walking mass of sharp objects from regular genetics.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Thanks to being a Hork-Bajir seer.
• Supporting Leader: She's not a main character and never gets to narrate a book, but she does lead the Hork-Bajir, making her this to Jake.
• You No Take Candle: Averted—she's the only free Hork-Bajir who doesn't talk this way.
• Younger Than They Look: During the events of the series she is only a year or two old.

Quafijinivon

Quafijinivon

Debut: Animorphs #34: The Prophecy (1999)

I have very little time, humans. No time at all for pleasantries. I will live for only four hundred and twelve more days, give or take a few hours, that is a biological fact.

The last of the Arn, the race of brilliant bioengineers who created the Hork-Bajir and, basically, their world's current biosphere to terraform it after an ecological catastrophe. He is close to death, and wishes to make up for his race's sins by using cloning technology to recreate Hork-Bajir on their homeworld with samples from the free colony on Earth... and using the ixcilia of Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan to get a head start.

---

• The Atoner: Quafijinivon does seem vaguely regretful of his race's sins, and makes no serious effort to justify their past misdeeds. He claims to just want to make up for their previous mistreatment of their creations, and seems sincere.
  "Friend Hork-Bajir: I am deeply grateful for the gift of your DNA. I will do everything in my power to aid the new colony in banishing the Yeerks from your home planet. Believe me, or do not, but I tell you that I, the last of the Arn, will atone for the sins of my people."
• Bolivian Army Ending: In an ironic mirror of the ending of the series itself, his final fate appears to be this. The Animorphs are successful in retrieving Dak and Aldrea's weapons cache, and he has everything he needs to produce his Clone Army below, but even with these factors he and his Hork-Bajir clones face a planet entirely under Yeerk occupation, and given how well the last resistance ended it's not likely his forces will achieve or did achieve by the series end any meaningful victory. Even when discussing the plan the heroes all admit that it will be at best a sideshow to distract the Yeerks from their invasion on Earth. But, we never hear his little rebellions was stamped out either, so hope springs eternal.
• Clone Army: He harvests the DNA of the Earth Hork-Bajir colonists to create a clone army to reignite resistance on the Hork-Bajir world. Notably, he does ask for permission, and all the Hork-Bajir give their DNA to him freely.
• Cool Old Guy: He takes a lot of death threats in stride after arriving on Earth, since he knows his race has a very bad reputation for their handling of the whole situation on their homeworld, and believes they deserve it. In the end, he does right by the Hork-Bajir for the first time in his race's lifespan.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Like all Arn, Quafijinivon is an incredible master of bioengineering and genetics, and incredibly weak at seemingly every other field of science. He had to steal a Yeerk ship to fly to Earth, since his race never had the technology to build more of their own, and he has no ability to scan for the Hidden Supplies Aldrea and Dak left behind.
• Fantastic Science: While the Arn's technology has up to his introduction been relentlessly practical, the ixcilia and everything about is is... fantastic. The basic concept of it is scientific in nature (brainwave patterns harvested from a living being before their death), but the way in which it is used (a ritualistic ceremony far more befitting a shaman than a scientist, complete with weird ingredients and a liquid with a Sickly Green Glow) is very out of step with everything else we know about the Arn. Even Quafijinivon himself calls it unusual.
• Glowing Eyes: Borderline, as like all Arn he has very bright eyes that "glittering intensely like diamonds lit from within".
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Quafijinivon's goal is heroic, but because of his people's history for cowardice and manipulation none of the Animorphs like him very much. And Aldrea just flat-out hates him. They do, eventually, all come to terms with each other by the end of the novel, after seeing that he is sincere in his desire to help.
• Hidden Supplies: His reason for bringing Aldrea back (sort of) via the ixcilia process. Before their deaths, Aldrea and Dak stole a Yeerk transport ship filled with weapons, and he hopes that Aldrea can guide them to it.
• The Immune: Quafijinivon reveals that his race modified a blood vessel in their brains to make infestation lethal to themselves and any Yeerk possessing them, under the logic it would cause the Yeerks to leave them be if they were useless as hosts. Then, sadly, points out it instead made the Yeerks use them for menial slaves, slowly killing them all off with exhaustion, and for sport and target practice.
• Insufferable Genius: Much less insufferable than the other Arn, but he does have his race's natural haughtiness with regards to biology. The first thing he says when he meets the Animorphs is to criticize their 'unstable platform' (just two arms and two legs, unlike the four-legged and tailed arn, or the two-legged and tailed Hork-Bajir) and the 'simple bilaterial symmetry' of their biology. Still, he's gentle about it compared to the Smug Snake Arn from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles.
• Last of His Kind: He himself says he is the last Arn, and that he has a little over a human year before he too will die.
• Miniature Senior Citizens: He's an elderly Arn, and like all his people is of a diminutive height relative to Hork-Bajir and Andalites.
• Mission Control: Once the team arrives on the Hork-Bajir world he serves this purpose to them, advising and guiding them on their travels across a planet that is foreign to all of them except Aldrea, who is returning to a world much-changed from how she remembers it.
• Older and Wiser: The Arn in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles refuse to acknowledge the gravity of their situation for the majority of the novel. Quafijinivon, by contrast, comes across as clear-eyed and without illusions about his situation and the fate of his world.
• One-Shot Character: He only appears in The Prophecy, and given that book takes place midway through the series it's likely he died before the series end. At the least, he's definitely deceased by the time of the three year timeskip in the final book.
• Redeeming Replacement: Essentially, the second Arn in the franchise to be named and characterized is also the first Arn to have sympathetic qualities and to try to do right by the Hork-Bajir.
• Starfish Alien: Like most aliens in the franchise, he looks nothing like a human, having four legs, two arms, wings, being covered in green feathers, and having luminous, crystalline eyes full of pinpricks of light. Artist's impression.◊
• The Stoic: Being of a naturally stoic (if smug) race by default, and then having endured decades of Yeerk occupation of his homeworld, he has a dry personality. Cassie notes the emotion in his voice when he asks her if the ixcilia took root and remarks inwardly that it's the first real emotion he's shown since his landing.
• Virtual Ghost: The Arn apparently have the technology to create personality and memory backups of specific individuals, called ixcilia, though the process is apparently unstable, temporary, and requires a deeply-compatible host.

Queen Soco

Queen Soco

Debut: Animorphs #36: The Mutation (1999)

I will discover the truth, Surface-Dwellers. Have no doubt of that. But I am also a magnanimous queen. Feel free to further explore the Nartec world. We will meet again later. Perhaps.

Queen of the Nartec, a villainous group of merpeople encountered in The Mutation. She plots to take her people into a war with the surface world, but hasn't reckoned on the Animorphs... or Visser Three.

---

• Atlantis: Queen of it.
• The Butcher: Marco dubs her "Queen Psycho."
• The Caligula: She rules her people with all the restraint and sanity of the trope namer.
• Conflict Killer: She and her people are enough of a problem to force a temporary alliance between the Animorphs and Visser Three.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Likes having survivors of shipwrecks vivisected and stuffed.
• Evil Versus Evil: She's ambitious, but she really wasn't ready to go up against likes of Visser Three.
• Eviler than Thou: See above. They never directly encounter one another, but boy does he flash-fry a bunch of her troops.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Blood-thirsty ruler of a dying civilisation, she's enough of a problem to force an alliance between the Animorphs and the Visser.
• Green Rocks: See below.
• Karma Houdini: She's never mentioned again after The Mutation so we never learn if she got her comeuppance or not.
• Mutants: She and the rest of the Nartec are all mutated humans. It's implied their mutation came out because of radiation exposure.
• Omniglot: Possibly. At the least she speaks English, German, French, Chinese, one of the Scandanavian tongues and (probably) Japanese.
• One-Shot Character: She only appears in The Mutation.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: More amphibious. And totally nuts.
• Royally Screwed Up: Pretty much a psychopath.
• Small Name, Big Ego: She seems to think that she's the Big Bad of the series, and while she forces the Animorphs and Visser Three to team up to beat her, really isn't a bigger threat than the Yeerk Empire outside of her own domain.
• Take Over the World: Has delusions of doing this.
• Unscaled Merfolk: Nartec are more humanoid, though weak outside of water.
• Villain of the Week: In The Mutation.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The Beginning never mentions if the Animorphs dealt with the Nartec post-war like they said they would.
• Wicked Cultured: She speaks numerous foreign languages and keeps a great museum...of dead people whom she had killed and stuffed.

General Sam Doubleday

General Sam Doubleday

Debut: Animorphs #53: The Answer (2001)

See the stars on my shoulder there, son? I'm a major general, U.S. Army. You're a kid who can turn into a bug. I take my orders from the chain of command, and that ain't you.

A three star-general and the leader of ATF-1 (Alien Task Force One), the U.S. Army's answer to the Yeerk invasion. He doesn't take kindly to Jake and the kids at first, but agrees to help them after he's been brought up to speed.

---

• Aggressive Negotiations: He has Jake arrested four times before he starts listening to him.
• Badass Normal: He's no member of the Armchair Military and fights bravely beside his troops on the ground.
• The Brigadier: He's a no-nonsense ranking officer battling against extraterrestrials.
• Four-Star Badass: Two Star, actually; he's a Major General.
• Frontline General: He leads his men personally in the final battle.
• Last Episode, New Character: He doesn't show up until one book before the end of the series.
• Last Stand: He leads the US Army's final stand against the Yeerks.
• The Leader: Type II.
• Old Soldier: His age is stated as fifty-four years old. It's safe to say he counts.
• Recurring Character: He appears in the last two books.
• Suicide Mission: Most of his forces are slaughtered to buy the Animorphs time to take over the Pool ship. The Animorphs manage to save some though, and he attends Rachel's funeral.
• Supporting Leader: He's Out of Focus compared to Jake and even James, but leads America's armed forces against the Yeerks.
• The War Room: He runs his campaign against the Yeerks out of one. Jake notes that it seems an awful like what you'd see in a movie; old guys chomping cigars, guys in suits and a big map (that has his hometown crossed out, presumably because it isn't there any more).

---