animorphslj | Character discussion: Visser One

buffyangellvr23.livejournal.com posting in

...That's the first Visser One. I found it interesting how she started playing politics against Visser Three after she got her position yanked, and the Anis were kinda in the middle...she didn't tell about them because of the intent to use it against Visser Three, but there was a lot of deception and trickery by the group to keep her from the free Hork-Bajir while at the same time trying to stick one to the Visser.

What I don't get, why didn't she drop out of Eva earlier and go for the Kendrona when she was being executed? Would she have been stomped if she had?

Threaded | Flat

From:

anijen21.livejournal.com

I'm too buzzed to say anything of value rn but I look forward to hear what

lisacharly has to say!

From:

lisacharly.livejournal.com

OMG EDRISS IS SO MUCH COOLER THAN ESPLIN NEENER NEENER.

From:

kleenexcow.livejournal.com

Oh, man. Visser One added so much to the series, I think. I appreciated that while Visser Three was this crazy-ass psycho side of the Yeerk invasion, Visser One was sooo much more of a politician. It made the Yeerk perspective so much more multifaceted--they weren't all out to kill us for the lulz, some were just doing their job. I mean, she had ambition, and she was certainly capable of being ruthless, but I don't think she was ever evil for the sake of crazy like V3. Visser One proved time and time again that she recognized that sometimes letting someone live could could actually work to her advantage. You know, until she went on trial as a traitor.

I felt the revelation with her having kids, and that being the reason she didn't want all-out war, was brilliant, especially considering that the Eva-Marco relationship always colored our perception of Visser One. In fact, all of Visser was brilliant. I do wish that we'd run into Madra and Darwin again, though. In my personal canon, Eva and Peter searched them out and adopted them after Marco disappeared.

Can you think of any incident involving Visser One where an Animorph other than Marco was narrating? I can't think of any. It would have been interesting to see an action scene with her from an outside perspective.

Jake says "We may prefer Visser Three to be in charge. He makes stupid mistakes. His people all hate and fear him, which makes people less effective. And, we know him. Know what to expect. Visser One might be a more dangerous enemy."

From:

lisacharly.livejournal.com

The Visser One storyline is the strongest single arc in the series for me, up until the point where it crashlands into mediocrity in #45. I love that it introduces political mindgames to the series as early as #5. And Visser is my favorite book in the series, with either #30 or #15 being my favorite in the series proper. So, um, I like me some Edriss.

Edriss, to me, is the invert to Aftran. If Aftran's capable of empathizing with her hosts and capable of wonder at the complexities of the human mind. Edriss is too, with one caveat; just because she understands (or thinks she does) doesn't really mean she cares, or even better, doesn't mean she won't use it to get exactly what she wants.

Edriss thinks she understands human love. She doesn't. She doesn't even get close. The most chilling line in Visser besides "I made Jenny Lines breathe" is "...I could always infest Madra, place some well-trained Yeerk in her head.
Then she would love me. She’d have no choice". I mean, seriously, WTF Edriss, that's not how it works you nutter. She sees the consequences of human emotion but doesn't really grasp the WHY. There's also a great series of lines where Edriss rages at Allison Kim for 'betraying' her, arguing that she treated Allison kindly and was used, betrayed, tricked. Edriss honestly doesn't see why her hosts all hate her. She has the reputation as the Yeerk who opened up the human mind, but she can't really shift her perspective to that of her hosts. She can only project what seems logical and rational to her onto them, and then gets flustered when they respond like humans instead of Yeerks.

That said, for those shortcomings, she's still better at it than other Yeerks, because she can predict what humans will do, as she did by creating the Sharing and by anticipating how Allison Kim would return to the hospital. That's part of why she hates Marco so much during Visser - she can't predict him, and then partway through the book he turns the tables on her in a way she didn't anticipate. Oh does she hate him. But she's easily smarter than Esplin and probably than a few of the Council Members, and is the most devious and intelligent Yeerk we see in the series.

In T9, someone brought up the idea that Allison may have been cultivating the love for Hildy/Essam and not Edriss, as a way to fuck with Edriss/assert autonomy. Upon rereading some chapters, it seems like that may be implied, that Allison is 'playing' Edriss by trying to push her towards Hildessam. Possibly Allison was even trying to set Edriss up for a challenge, sort of a 'bet you can't seduce him' sort of thing, because Edriss is totally in it for the challenge. I get the sense that while Edriss is ambitious and manipulative, it's not so much because she wants the glory, it's because she likes the challenge. She likes the challenge of ascending the ranks. She likes the challenge of finding a Class Five species, of being in a clever host, of trying to master human emotions. She absorbs knowledge like a sponge. She's outright disappointed in Jenny Lines for not fighting back.

I do love that she listens to her hosts' advice, though. The bits where she and Eva are piecing together what's going on in the trial are some of my favorites, and I can't see Esplin asking for Alloran's advice, for example.

Anyway, the point is that I love Edriss and find her absolutely fascinating. I have more thoughts on this, but I just want to put this up there because people are apparently psyched for Mah Magnificent Thoughts. <3

From:

hookedonhumans.livejournal.com

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.