Visser One

Visser One is a well-known villain in Animorphs. She first appeared in Animorphs #4, when Marco found out the horrifying truth that, not only was his father still torn apart from his mother's death, but his mother was still alive . . . as the host of who he knew then as the most powerful Yeerk in the entire empire. He felt a great deal of conflict over this person, who was his mortal enemy, the leader of the invasion of Earth, and yet the person he loved the most, the last person he ever wanted to endanger or kill; his mom. As he continued in the war, growing more ruthless, he realized that, for the good of the world, he would have to kill her. He tried to trick Visser One, on earth in exile to battle with Visser Three and have them both kill each other. He was horrified at himself near the end, but still ready to sacrifice his mother for the the sake of the world.
Recently, we got to hear Visser One's side of the story.

Her name is Edriss 562. She was the first one to really discover Earth. She searched for humans based on the reports of a possible Class-Five species that had been identified on the Taxxon home world and later escaped. When the authorities put her in a position in which she nor anyone else could pursue this potentially invaluable information, she decided to steal a ship and, along with a loyal subordinate named Essam 293, set out to find Earth.

Upon locating the blue planet in the solar system, she set herself to seeing how it could be enslaved. She could not justify her disobedience of superior orders unless she presented to them what they had been searching for for years: a Class Five species. A Class Five is the ideal host species for the Yeerks: able to be infested without physical debility, exist in large numbers, and don't possess the technological power to defend themselves. So the two landed on Earth and Edriss 562 became the first Yeerk to ever infest a human. Going from a defeated Iraqi solider to an airhead drug-addict in Hollywood, Edriss began to have a negative view of humans in general. She knew they were weak and could be manipulated easily. This was when she first thought up the concept of The Sharing: leading humans into willing infestation. To start this, she found a smaller, less glitzy place to base from. It turned out to be the Animorphs' home town, the location as ambiguous as ever. There, with her new host, Allison Kim, and Essam's host, Hildy Gervis, they started a new life there, learning about humans and building The Sharing, until they reported back to the Empire with their wonderful news. Yeerks were sent to Earth by masses, Visser Three took over the planet's assimilation as Edriss rose to power, eventually becoming Visser One, eventually taking as a host Eva, Marco's mother. She staged her own death so she could leave Earth and take her position, returning to the planet only for projects like the shark-Controllers. The Yeerk invasion we know today.

Except for one detail. Hidden from everyone, even her host Eva, until her inquisitor did a mind probe and found out the secret she had kept of two unaccounted years on Earth. It seemed that both Edriss and Essam, in an effort to fully understand these humans, had gotten too caught up in them. Essam naturally sympathized with the human emotions and Edriss was in some ways tricked by her host Allison into merging with the human psyche and experiencing human emotions. She found herself falling in love with Essam, an emotion that was only enabled by her human host, just as Allison and Hildy were falling in love. They decided to get married, have children. They had twins, a girl and a boy. At first Eva was as shocked and horrified to learn this as the Council of Thirteen. She thought that Edriss and Essam had only gone through with procreation for the purpose of making fresh new hosts. But they all found out that Edriss had loved the two children, Darwin and Madra, just as much as Allison had, seeing them as her own children even though it was biologically impossible for Yeerks to be parents, and had loved them dearly even though she sought to enslave their race. Their names had a special significance: Darwin's name was Edriss's little joke. He was the child of four parents, an impossibility of evolution. Madra's name shows the their longing for the inaccessible Yeerk homeworld: Madra is the Yeerk planet's solitary moon.

This was part of the reason Visser One wanted started a slow, subtle invasion, a slow subjugation by means of The Sharing. While she still held her old ambitions, still wanted to master the planet and the species, she still in a strange way cared for them, especially the two who she called her children. That, combined with her native subtlety, caused her to risk her life, to once again commit a small betrayal to her people for her larger purpose. To discredit Visser Three, for he was the only one standing in the way of her taking control of Earth. The dual motivations of power and concern for her children's safety at the mass military invasion Visser Three wanted to wage on the planet caused her to contact her mortal enemy. Eva's son Marco.

So, in a way, it all worked out. While Visser Three remained in charge of the Earth invasion, there would be no war on Earth, because to do so would attract the attention of the Andalites who would easily crush the small defenses available for Earth. So Visser One was sent to the Anati system, the preferred place of attack.

All the problems were solved, at least as far as the storyline goes. The Animorphs and Visser One came at a draw, each covering for the other because each held the secret that would be their enemy's undoing. Visser One, and thus Eva, were sent to a far away planet, and while Eva grieved for this, maybe it was all for the better. After all, Marco's father had already started a new life, marrying another woman and burying his first wife in the grave forever.

But the only unresolved issue lies in Visser One. It is this Yeerk, the single most powerful warlord in the Empire, one whose nature, even after her entire life, her hidden thoughts and history being poured out for all to see, cannot be truly identified on any existing moral scale. To start out with she was a member, a leader, of a race that many call evil by it's very nature: the enslaving of other species, stripping them of their freedom and individuality for their purpose of conquest, viewing the annihilation of lives as nothing more than a possible inconvenience. Yet from Visser One and her race's point of view, she was to be revered as a hero. She was a great leader, one who knew the meaning of mercy. Defying the authorities, she escaped to find Earth, the home of almost six billion wonderful host bodies. She risked her life, going through a series of host bodies in order to set in motion the invasion of the greatest world the Yeerks would ever conquer. Their key to their final dream: defeating the hated Andalites. She may have committed many crimes in the process, but was it not for a higher purpose?

But even more difficult to judge is her love/hate relationship regarding humanity. At first she had generally negative feelings toward them, alternately shocked and disgusted. With Allison Kim, she came to admire them, for their resourcefulness, courage and determination, and realized that her first-impression judgements were wrong: not all humans are alike. It was also through Allison that she experienced emotions she had never heard of, emotions that were impossible for Yeerks in their basic form. Affection, marriage, children, she went through it all. She felt the emotional tie of a mother even to the ones to whom she had no biological link. She discovered love.

But at the same time, side by side with this love, was its antithesis; undeniable evil. Visser Three killed and enslaved and even mentally tortured her victims without remorse. Even as she fell in love with Earth, she wanted to own it, command it all. She did not really care about humanity's fate, and would cold-heartedly eliminate any of them who posed a threat to her plan, except for two small nine-year-old children to whom she is a sort of surrogate parent. For these two lives, she fought with all her political power to prevent a war on Earth. She didn't care if their race was enslaved, as long as they did not die. And even these two links to the better side of herself have their compromise: she wanted her children, at least her own children to be free and not made into host bodies by one of her true kind. But she also thought to herself, even though she wanted her hopefully free daughter to know her and love her as a mother--  "if not, then I could always infest Madra, place some well-trained Yeerk in her head. Then she would love me. She'd have no choice." So, even the positive emotions could be turned for negative purposes. While true love is separation of selfishness in concern for the other, Visser One, at times, wanted to control everything she claims to love for her own self-gratification. Her human children, but also Earth itself.

Of course, this relates to her dual nature. She is a loyal Yeerk, but also almost human. Since she was the first, there were no instructors before her to desensitize her to human emotions and the joys of being alive on Earth. But her Yeerk regulations and morals are alien to those of Earth, so she keeps them separated. She can risk her life to save a person in one moment, and go to kill someone the next. She never let Eva know that she had had two children of her own, that possibly she might have secretly shared the anguish over her son being lost to her. She had picked Eva for the very reason that she had a normal family, and that Visser One could live that way, for a brief while, as a normal human mother, even though she had to deafen herself to Eva's despondent cries for son and husband.

In fact, just as the things that were considered good and virtuous for a Yeerk were evil to a human, Edriss's human-born "good" was considered abhorrent to her native race. So while, this profile can't really come to a conclusion, since VISSER itself doesn't have any real conclusion other than everything is safe for the moment, I'll just end to say that Visser One is a demonstration that morality truly is relative. And that one doesn't have to have a two-sided brain for ones personality to be that way.           

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