Excuse the rambling, boringness, lameness, and overall opinionated stupidity of this post; I'm using this as an opportunity to attempt to hammer out my headcanon on Visser One while I attempt to write an application for her, and I figured a community of dedicated fans was as good as anywhere to do it. (Also, they made me do it. :| Foul enablers, all of you.)
At any rate, most of my interpretations of Edriss kind of boil down the basics of her motivations and personality to one or two points. First off, I think she's to some degree emblematic of the most basic Yeerk character and motivations, taken to their logical extremes, cranked up to eleven. She's got both the best and worst (to them, anyway) aspects and potentials of their kind. Not to get all Biblical and whatnot, but I think the Yeerks can at their core be defined as Greed--and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Greed is always wanting more, always wanting it better. It's hunger, lust, need. It's painful and uncomfortable and utterly insatiable. You can't be entirely content or satisfied or happy for good at any one point, not when there's still something left out of reach--and there's always something out of reach. There's never going to be something you don't want or can't do. There will always be someone better, something more enticing, something more you can have or something you have that you can improve. It can lead to disgusting excesses and cruel and selfish behavior, but it's also raw energy and drive to be harnessed, the basic building blocks of a personal life and society in general. Greed doesn't let you sit on your laurels and stagnate; if you had absolutely no desires, you'd be dead and wouldn't need anything, anyway. Instead, it pushes you to learn and do and obtain as much as you can, to better yourself and your position, to get out into the world and act and contribute. Greed makes you survive and thrive, because anything is better than stagnating and wasting away and just letting yourself die and fall into nothingness. All hardships can be endured as long as there's the potential for improvement.
That's the basic species-level drive for all Yeerks, I think, when it comes right down to it. They want more. They were utterly shafted in the evolutionary lottery, when it comes to being a sentient life form--they have a mind, but little to nothing to actually do with it. In their natural state, they're weak and helpless, barely mobile, barely capable of comprehending their surroundings. They can't see, can't hear, can't speak, can barely even feel. They can't reproduce without dying in the process, and even then, it's asexual. Their natural state is, frankly, fairly similar to what plenty of stories use as a fate worse than death for their villains, leaving them their own minds and nothing else. It's natural that, once they're aware of what they're missing, they would want to have that. Why not, when everyone else does? There's a whole big universe out there, and anyone would want to be a part of it. They want to experience it and be involved with it. They want freedom and feelings and connections, knowledge, strength, power over their own lives, control of their own fates--the sort of basic autonomy and agency that just about any other sentient species takes as a given right.
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timeasmymeasure
Oh god, this is so long. x_X I AM SO SORRY. YOU ARE ALL MY GUINEA PIGS. (1/4?)
Date: 2010-11-03 02:56 am (UTC)At any rate, most of my interpretations of Edriss kind of boil down the basics of her motivations and personality to one or two points. First off, I think she's to some degree emblematic of the most basic Yeerk character and motivations, taken to their logical extremes, cranked up to eleven. She's got both the best and worst (to them, anyway) aspects and potentials of their kind. Not to get all Biblical and whatnot, but I think the Yeerks can at their core be defined as Greed--and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Greed is always wanting more, always wanting it better. It's hunger, lust, need. It's painful and uncomfortable and utterly insatiable. You can't be entirely content or satisfied or happy for good at any one point, not when there's still something left out of reach--and there's always something out of reach. There's never going to be something you don't want or can't do. There will always be someone better, something more enticing, something more you can have or something you have that you can improve. It can lead to disgusting excesses and cruel and selfish behavior, but it's also raw energy and drive to be harnessed, the basic building blocks of a personal life and society in general. Greed doesn't let you sit on your laurels and stagnate; if you had absolutely no desires, you'd be dead and wouldn't need anything, anyway. Instead, it pushes you to learn and do and obtain as much as you can, to better yourself and your position, to get out into the world and act and contribute. Greed makes you survive and thrive, because anything is better than stagnating and wasting away and just letting yourself die and fall into nothingness. All hardships can be endured as long as there's the potential for improvement.
That's the basic species-level drive for all Yeerks, I think, when it comes right down to it. They want more. They were utterly shafted in the evolutionary lottery, when it comes to being a sentient life form--they have a mind, but little to nothing to actually do with it. In their natural state, they're weak and helpless, barely mobile, barely capable of comprehending their surroundings. They can't see, can't hear, can't speak, can barely even feel. They can't reproduce without dying in the process, and even then, it's asexual. Their natural state is, frankly, fairly similar to what plenty of stories use as a fate worse than death for their villains, leaving them their own minds and nothing else. It's natural that, once they're aware of what they're missing, they would want to have that. Why not, when everyone else does? There's a whole big universe out there, and anyone would want to be a part of it. They want to experience it and be involved with it. They want freedom and feelings and connections, knowledge, strength, power over their own lives, control of their own fates--the sort of basic autonomy and agency that just about any other sentient species takes as a given right.