8.9 KiB
[SPOILERS] Animorphs: The Reckoning - Where is Visser One?
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Author: u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire.*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4m2f2n/spoilers_animorphs_the_reckoning_where_is_visser/
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Score: 20
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Created: 2016-06-01T17:29:33
Post:
As the title indicates, this is a massive spoiler if you're following Animorphs: The Reckoning, but haven't read canon Animorphs. Leave while you still can. Stop reading this right now. Why are you still reading? Stop!
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Canon Animorphs was a kind of a mixed bag. The stories alternated between incredibly stupid, incredibly awesome, or both at the same time. Sometimes the kids went on extragalactic adventures to save vegetarians yeerks from extinction by teaching friendship and kindness and love to unstoppable bioengineered genocide machines (everything in this sentence being accurate and litteral), and it was awesome. Sometimes Cassie was a temporal anomaly, or Tobias was Elfangor's son, or Rachel morphed into a starfish, or Andalite toilets happened, or Atlantis, anyway, it got pretty stupid. Visser One is both.
I mean, the premise is a bit silly. Visser One, by definition the most important general of the entire yeerk military... just happens to be the missing mother of one of the story's protagonists? So, okay, it's a very, very big stretch. But. Her arc was awesome. While she's the main source of angst for Marco for most of the story, she only appears in five books out of the sixty-something of the series, including the only yeerk POV book ever. In most of those books, Marco has to struggle with the fact that for the Animorphs to ever win, he'll need to kill of help kill Visser One, and by extension his mother, which brings the whole "Every single bad guy we kill takes an innocent human shield with them" thing home to Marco, and shows his cynical, ruthless side best - he makes his defining "Ruthlessness is finding the shortest path from point A to point B" speech in one of the V1 books.
So anyway, does Visser One, aka Edriss as Marco's mom exist in The Reckoning? So far, impossible to say, but here is the evidence for and against:
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Marco's mom is registered as killed in a boat accident, the same way Edriss faked her death in canon.
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Visser Three is, well, number 3. Considering what we already know he achieved (capturing Alloran and jumpstarting the war), it likely that both V1 and V2 have achieved extremely significant feats to outrank him. In canon, Edriss's claim to fame was discovering and infiltrating a Class Five species. Given what Elfangor said about there being enough humans on Earth to take over the galaxy, it's not impossible Edriss did the same in Reckoning.
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However, in canon she faked her death to go on to her next assignment, after giving the Earth invasion a significant head start through the Sharing (which I guess here is symbolized by the local YMCA pool?). Since that obviously didn't happen, and the invasion is still extremely recent, the timeline would obviously have to be different from the Visser book.
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Marco's identity is now known by Visser Three. Since he didn't seem to draw any connection so far, we'd have to assume that Edriss kept her host's identity from Visser Three for some reason (possible, especially if V3's invasion of Earth isn't completely official, as has been hinted).
So here's hoping. I'm not sure Visser One would work as well in Reckoning as it did in canon anyway, since the fic has a lot less bantering, staring at each other in the blank of the eye, and other improbable interpersonal conflict between people with guns. On the other hand, the fic has also dropped a lot of hints for each of the Chronicles books (Elfangor's time on Earth, interspecies romance on the Arn homeworld, the Ellimist arc), so I'm really hopeful there will be a big reveal in the next Marco chapter.
Anyway, that's me speculated out.
Comments:
u/xamueljones [+8] My arch-enemy is entropy (3 hours later)
Normally I'd say no because it's so improbable that it strains belief, but with godlike beings playing around with probability, it's possible for Marco's mother to also be host to Visser One.
However like you said, the timeline is too tight for it to make much sense. Visser One would still be on Earth and likely to be the one in charge of things rather than Visser Three. Or maybe she got the rank for discovering the human species, but Visser is charged to conduct the invasion due to his greater experience (?).
It's possible for Visser Three to know about Marco and to see the Eva without making the connection if Marco doesn't look too much like his mother (and I expect aliens to be bad at understanding human facial features), and why would Visser One bother with sharing her host's name?
u/Alphanos [+4] The Bright Powers (14 hours later)
The whole situation isn't nearly as improbable as it first looks.
Regarding rank, it makes perfect sense that Visser Three, the general in command of deployed troops for a specific operation, isn't the grand commander of their entire military. Visser One had the foresight to see the value of seeking and successfully locating a species and a world with overwhelming strategic importance to their empire. Now she's seen as the one with vision, and is put in charge of making the big strategy decisions overall. Finishing the specifics of the key operation she planned out can be delegated - but still to someone very high up who can be relied upon to do the job well.
It's actually a very rational-setting aspect of the story for the Yeerk Council of Thirteen to recognize the ramifications of Visser One's accomplishment and put her in a position to empower her to do more of the same. It also says (for the humans) very scary things about Yeerk high command's efficiency in meritocratically allocating their people according to their best skills.
Regarding the connection to the protagonists, this too has fewer leaps than it might first look like. Visser One either selected the initial target town for the operation based upon knowledge from her host or (more likely) picked a host to get more specific details after deciding where a good initial location for the invasion would be. So the invasion starts in the town Visser One's host was from, either way. Elfangor's ship crashes nearby because he was hoping to manage to take out their Pool, even if he didn't succeed at that. We already know that the Ellimist has been using his influence to arrange for a very specific group of people to be the ones "randomly" stumbling across Elfangor's ship. If Visser One's host's son lives in the same town that Elfangor's ship crashes in, due to the reasons above, then it's not much extra work for the Ellimist to ensure he's part of the group.
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (7 hours later)
I too am very interested in people's theories on this topic.
^Mwahaha.
u/Bowbreaker [+6] Solitary Locust (2 hours later)
I haven't read any of the original Animorphs but I don't have a problem reading quasi-spoilers seeing how any or all of it could be subverted in this fanfic. If anything it gives me more context to enjoy the story with.
To get to the point, when you say Visser One is Marco's mom you mean that her host body is his mom, right? Or was said body taken over so long ago that it's original personality is pretty much irrelevant to Marco's family?
u/callmebrotherg [+6] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (2 hours later)
TBH, if you read The Reckoning first then canon's probably going to be ruined for you.
u/CouteauBleu [+7] We are the Empire. (4 hours later)
Indeed. Kind of like watching Batman v Superman after reading the Metropolitain Man, the flaws and logical inconsistencies become really glaring.
u/callmebrotherg [+7] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (4 hours later)
Rational Fiction Will Ruin Your Life
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (4 hours later)
To get to the point, when you say Visser One is Marco's mom you mean that her host body is his mom, right? Or was said body taken over so long ago that it's original personality is pretty much irrelevant to Marco's family?
The first one. There was a one-time villain who was a Controller whose personality started to merge with its host (neither of which was very stable to begin with). She was kind of a complete cartoon supervillain, though, so I don't know if she's going to be included.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+7] (a day later)
My theory: V3 just fucked up big time by wiping the town off the map. V1 called into to do some political Yeerk smackdown.
u/CouteauBleu [+6] We are the Empire. (a day later)
Nothing conveys "I screwed up" better than having to wipe out an entire city and its surroundings by meteor strike to hide the evidence.
u/NaricssusIII [+2] (2 days later)
"Subtle" and "meteor strike" don't typically coexist, yeah