Reposted from Tumblr! Keep in mind that this was originally written for people who had no clue what Animorphs was except in a very general way.
Well, you asked for it, here we go.
Who IS Visser Three anyway?Wait, you don’t know?
No idea.Does…Does that mean you haven’t read Animorphs?
The…the weird books with the cheap-looking morphing covers that were in every school book fair in the 90s? Oh my god you haven’t read Animorphs. *Clears throat* *Eyes glow menacingly*
I’m…I’m scared. You should be. RIGHT, so…
Animorphs is a children’s book series consisting of 54 main series books, four Megamorphs books (which were longer), four Chronicles books (which were like backstory for the series and for important supporting characters), and two bizarre CYOA books called Alternamorphs that pretty much everyone hated. Animorphs follows the story of six children - five humans and one alien - who become child soldiers in a war against aliens for the freedom of the entire human race.
Wait, back up, they become child soldiers?Guerilla fighters, really, or terrorists, or resistance fighters, but yes.
Who is this series written for again? Children ages 8-14.
….. what.Yeah, it’s one of those things that’s a lot weirder when you get older. Anyway, all six children end up getting the power to morph. Morphing means that the kids can turn into any animal they touch. They can only stay in each morph for two hours at a time, or they get trapped in morph forever.
And this is the only weapon they have against an entire alien invasion? Yep, although reasonable misunderstandings and misinformation, as I’ll explain, are their *other* greatest weapons.
So then…HOW? What’s up with these aliens they’re fighting?!I’M GLAD YOU ASKED.
They’re fighting the Yeerk Empire, which as you can imagine is run by aliens called Yeerks. The Yeerks aren’t like other aliens from movies in a very important way: they’re parasites. The real form of a Yeerk is a tiny, blind, mostly deaf, slow-moving sea slug with some rudimentary smell and sonar (#29). But the Yeerks have one huge advantage that explains how they established an interstellar empire: they can take over peoples’ brains.
What, like Body Snatchers style?More like what that name implies than how the Body-Snatchers actually worked, ironically! They crawl into your ear -
EW. Yes, anyway, they crawl into your ear, somehow drill a hole through your skull that doesn’t kill you (ignore the inanity of the science here), and get into your brain. Once they’re in there, they flatten completely and get themselves into every wrinkle in your head and take over your body. The worst part is you are completely aware this is happening. This isn’t blissful unawareness, oh no. You are conscious in there, forced to watch as the Yeerk rifles through your memories, feelings, and actions and does whatever it wants. They can even do a dead-on impersonation of you.
Okay, that is *terrifying.* And also kinda kinky if you’re into that.
I’m…going to not examine that statement at all.
You really shouldn’t.
They have some weaknesses that make them easier to take down, like the fact that every three days they have to leave their host to absorb rays of light from an artificial version of their own home Sun.
They can build a Sun and somehow six kids are supposed to take them down?!?It’s kinda handwaved; The devices mostly output the Sun’s rays instead of actually being a Sun. And they themselves didn’t build the originals (Hork-Bajir Chronicles, #8). They take ten years to actually figure out how to build something like a real Sun, although that situation is ambiguous too (#41).
Are a lot of things ambiguous in this series? MY FRIEND YOU HAVE NO IDEA.
Anyway, the thing about Animorphs is that i
t’s basically Baby’s First Introduction to War Crimes it’s weirdly mature for a middle-grade children’s series. The series discusses the morality of war extensively, including topics like: (1) the ethical use of chemical warfare; (2) pacifism; (3) expansionist colonial policies and how they hurt people; (4) whether and to what extent a more powerful nation should extend aid to a less powerful one; (5) genocide; (6) slavery; (7) racism and ethnocentrism…I could go on. It also has extremely compelling and complex characters, both main and side.
For this reason despite it being a children’s series, nearly everyone who read it remembers it fondly and recommends it to adults. It changed our lives. All of our lives.
Okay, I think…I think I get it. Although I’m now wondering how this ever got published. It sold like hotcakes. And also I’m not convinced Scholastic ever read a single Animorphs book.
So what does this all have to do with this “Visser Three” guy in the title? Seeing as he’s the main antagonist, it’s all got everything to do with him.
So he’s the Emperor? Ohhh no. And it’s the fact that he ISN’T the Emperor that dictates the entire course of the Empire itself. And ends up being part of why the Yeerks lose the war.
I guess you might as well get into it then. Right, so Visser Three - whose real name is Esplin Nine-Four-Double-Six Prime - is the main antagonist of Animorphs. “Visser Three” is actually his rank; Yeerks refer to other Yeerks by rank once they make it to Sub-Visser. A “Visser” is um…Okay so this is weird, but the reference is the one used by K.A. herself. (AppleGrant called him “their very own Darth Vader,” so this is what I got outta that.) A Visser is kind of like whatever everyone thought Darth Vader was when Star Wars came out in 1977.
Nobody knew that “Darth” meant a Sith Lord when that movie came out. Most of the moviegoers knew an Empire had to have an Emperor, so they figured “Darth” was some kind of high-ranking general with extremely broad and arbitrary powers. Now if you read the novelization that came out later and watched the later movies, you eventually figured out what a Darth was, but we need to adopt the same mindset here as your Mom munching popcorn in 1977. Vissers are crazy powerful warlords of whole Yeerk fleets. Like admirals that force-choke people.
Huh. When you’re actually reading it, and you’re a kid, “Visser” is no different than any other word you learn, so you get all this by magical child osmosis that we all wish we still had. What it translates to is that Visser Three can kill whoever he wants and nearly do whatever he wants … With some major, major caveats.
A couple more things that need to be established before we get into that. One: There’s a sort of “good guy race” of aliens (who aren’t nearly as good as we’re first led to believe, but that’s another rabbit hole) called Andalites. Visser Three is the only Yeerk who has an Andalite host body. The Andalites are like…hot blue centaur space elves with no mouths and a long tail with a scythe on it.
Well that’s cool. Yeah. Second thing we need to establish is Visser Three’s actual personality, which is also important. To quote myself from a previous rant:
“These traits have made him rise through the ranks of the Imperial Navy at a startling pace for decades. However, despite all of that, he is notoriously impatient, vindictive, impulsive, and extraordinarily selfish and narcissistic. … He is incredibly clever, but his atrocious personality very often turns Esplin into his own worst enemy and sabotages his own plans.”
He is *beyond* egotistical, the sort of person that’s incredibly fun to watch but would be infuriating to be around in real life (unless, for some reason, you’re an ex-golden child who was trained by-accident-on-purpose to instinctively love such people… *cough cough*). His giant ego is basically the reason behind most of the dumber things he does.
The guy is also … larger-than-life, a huge ham, energetic beyond all reasonable comprehension, incredibly Type A, extra, and funny. He both makes jokes that are darkly funny throughout (#20, #21, #33, #25 to name a few of them) and also gets regularly dunked on by the plot in ways that are absolutely hilarious (#9, #27, #24).
He has no patience or time for either failure or lengthy, boring explanations about anything. He quite literally cuts straight to the point regularly and himself tends to speak in a clipped, formal tone to his actual subordinates. The hamminess is mostly reserved for his beloathed enemies. He’s notorious for murdering his own subordinates at an even higher rate than actual Darth Vader, so he’s a terrible person to work for. (I still want that “Galaxy’s Worst Boss” mug.)
He sounds like a ton of fun, actually. He IS though! I love him so much! He’s like the sort of ur-example for every campy 90s villain you’ve ever seen on a kid’s television show!
Which is why I get so mad when people try and paint him as solely buffoonish and incompetent! There was a lot more going on!
Sounds like you’re ready to get into it. I AM.
Let’s goooo~
Okay so Problem Number One is What Visser Three Is Actually Good At.
Is…Is he bad at being evil in the books or something? No, it’s…Okay.
Okay so first off, Visser Three’s host was of basically the same rank he now is when he was taken. This meant that the host was carrying around a ton of battle strategy, naval tactics, and ship capabilities information, relating to the Andalite fleet. Visser Three understood, through his connection with the general, how to use this information and did. Extremely, extremely well. When the protagonist of the Andalite Chronicles, one of the Chronicles books, runs into him, this is what he sees:
“We didn’t have to wait long. The Blade ship fired up its engines and leaped forward. It ate up the few thousand miles in seconds.”
…
“Now there was a new ship on my viewscreen. All black. Shaped like some ancient battle ax. The Blade ship of a Visser.
It swooped in close to the doomed, powerless StarSword. And with its Dracon beams it began to slice away the remaining two engines. The StarSword would not be allowed to self-destruct.”
We’re shown a battle that the protagonist - Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul - is entering, and we’re also shown that the Visser is cleaning up without any issue whatsoever. Since the Visser is already Visser Three in this shot, making him the sixteenth most-powerful person in the Empire, chances are fully 95 percent he was directing the battle as lead admiral. Which means he’s fully capable of doing that, and very successfully.
Think this is a one-off? Guess what, it’s not. Elfangor, who I must mention is an unorthodox but brilliant space fighter, says as much:
“Visser Three thinks he has won our long, private war.”
“It was many years before I saw Earth again. I had fought more battles than I can count. I had won, and I had lost.”
“I lay there dying, knowing that Visser Three would pursue me. Knowing this time, at long last, he would win over me.”
In short, from these statements we can infer:
1. Visser Three has beaten Elfangor in naval combat before this happened, and other people in naval combat before, otherwise he wouldn’t stay a Visser after becoming one;
2. They have been at each others’ throats for more than a decade and a half (Andalite Chronicles’ ending scene happens in 1980, and Animorphs in 1997) inconclusively, meaning the Visser has won and survived a lot of battles.
Oh yeah, and then there’s the insane, impossible move he pulls at the start. Alright, so in Animorphs, Yeerk motherships are called “Pool ships.” They’re these big round flagship things full of Yeerks. They definitely have formidable weapons (#53, #54), but you get the impression that they are not exactly meant for killing things primarily. The “Blade ship” that they’re talking about is Visser Three’s primary ship. It is, by all accounts, a destroyer-class vessel of mid-range size that’s fast, but it can fit inside the Pool ship (#1, #5, Andalite Chronicles, #11).
So…Some naval and air combat information for you. Very basic. Command frigates are heavily defended and usually highly armored. A fleet of destroyers follows the command frigate, along with, in an air combat situation, one-man fighter planes. What all this means is that bringing down a command frigate is no easy task. Remember the Star Destroyers in Star Wars? Those are command frigates.
Andalite command frigates are called Dome ships. Since Dome ships are also where the Andalite soldiers themselves live while traveling during war, these would be very well-defended craft with excellent shields. In fact, they’re designed to preserve lives by ejecting their Domes if they get taken down, and the Domes are designed to enter the atmosphere (#4).
Remember the protagonist from the Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor? He’s the first Andalite the kids meet, after his ship crash-lands, and he has this to say about how he got down there (brackets are mine for emphasis):
“Swarms of their Bug fighters (two-man fighters) were waiting when our Dome ship (the frigate) came out of Z-space (faster-than-light travel system). We knew of their mother ship (Yeerk frigate) and were ready for the Bug fighters (two-man fighters), but the Yeerks surprised us. They had hidden a powerful Blade ship (Yeerk destroyer) in a crater of your moon. We fought, but … we lost.”
Now the Andalites have fought plenty of Blade ships before this. For, as it turns out, around twenty years! They should have expected destroyer-class vessels to be there near the command frigate by any reasonable estimation, and probably had destroyers of their own that we never learn about. But no, no, what’s really insane here…
Is that a single destroyer and its ancillary two-man fighters brought down a command frigate and its entire ancillary guard. We know he has only one, because only one is ever used or alluded to until the moment he becomes Visser One. To put this in perspective, this is like what would happen if maybe twenty to thirty guys with some swords fought over three hundred to five hundred heavily armored people who also had nice swords, and the twenty to thirty guys won. It is completely and utterly insane. What caused this? Somehow, that’s right, Visser Three.
In short, for the entire plot of Animorphs to make any sense, Visser Three has to be amazing at naval warfare, as in better than most.
Huh. Then how does he get painted as incompetent? Because he’s not allowed to
be a war tactician. That’s the problem.
…what?Right, remember how I said that Visser Three’s not the Emperor? That he’s a powerful general? He answers to others.
Who does he answer to? Lots of people. Okay so the Yeerk Empire has an Emperor, but the Emperor is part of a thirteen-member council, called The Council of Thirteen like they’re the Committee of 300 or something. Nobody except other Councilors know which of the thirteen is Emperor, so in practice the Empire is an oligarchy. These guys have total dictatorial control, if they want it, over how the Empire is run (Visser, #2, #37, #21, #41, Hork-Bajir Chronicles).
Then there’s the fact that Visser Three for most of the series is only the third most powerful Visser to begin with. We never meet whoever Visser Two is before #46, but we do meet Visser One - Edriss Five-Six-Two. Edriss is cunning, calculated, underhanded, and secretive (#5, #15, #30, Visser). She’s got high gaslit gatekeep girlboss energy due to her host being a main character’s Mom despite being from a genderless race (#5, #19, #23 and Hork-Bajir Chronicles (it’s heavily implied the Yeerks are genderless from #23 and Hork-Bajir Chronicles, and from their habit of adopting the pronouns of their host)). And for this reason she’s an amazing foil for Visser Three, who has very intense masculine energy, to the point where he gives it off even when he’s pretending to be a woman. He also has the exact opposite personality. He’s loud, bombastic, energetic and blunt. So obviously the two hate each other so hard it almost looks like they want to - *Makes loud comedic boink sounds out of a Warner Bros. cartoon* (#15, #30, Visser).
Okay so…Besides the amazing hate sex they’d have, is any of this important? *Snort* Yeah, yeah it is actually. See, although Visser Three is technically the first person to learn of Earth and infest a human (Andalite Chronicles), Visser One is the first person to actually go to Earth and formulate an invasion strategy (Visser). Her strategy is one of slow, steady infiltration (Visser). Basically, taking humans little by little over time. The Council of Thirteen insists on her strategy being used, even though Visser Three eventually takes charge of Earth (Megamorphs #4, Visser).
Here’s the thing: I love Visser Three, but he’s about as subtle as a brick wall to the face. He cannot perform subterfuge to save his life (Visser, #50-53). So putting a guy whose whole thing is being great at fighting people in direct naval combat and warfare… in a situation where he has to be subtle… You see where I’m going with this.
He would fail so hard, wouldn’t he?Oh yeah. Yeah, no question.
And it wouldn’t have anything to DO with how good he was at his job. It would be like a marine biologist trying to throw down for football. Exactly! EXACTLY. You get it!
He can’t have been thrilled with this situation. Oh he absolutely was not, and he was well aware of how stupid it all was from Day One (Megamorphs #4, Visser). He tries, over the course of the series:
To infest enough important people, or enough people at once, that he no longer has to be subtle (#6, #12, #20-21, #28, #35);
To obtain a weapon powerful enough to render the whole point moot (Megamorphs #1, #14, #27, #36);
To get Visser One out of the picture so that he can finally do what he’s good at (#15, #30, Visser).
Unfortunately, he fails each time, either because he dislikes and doesn’t understand humanity at all (#28), because it was impossible to begin with but there’s no way he could have known that (#14, #27 and #36), because Visser One is slippery and near-impossible to kill (although whether this is due to her own machinations or due to the Animorphs tends to be a bit ambiguous and the balance changes in each book she appears) (#15, #30, Visser), or directly and specifically because of the Animorphs (#6, #20-21, #12, #35).
And the thing is you can’t really chalk that many of these up to his intelligence at all. You can sort of do this with #28, but what’s going on there is that he’s no scientist (he’s well aware of this - Hork-Bajir Chronicles), and none of the scientists he does have can convince him of anything because he’s so arrogant. It also happens, again, because he loathes humans.
So this guy’s ego does get him in trouble. Oh yes it does, but that mostly makes him insufferable, not stupid. Once he finally gets the means to take over the Yeerk invasion himself, he is, just as he promised, remarkably good at open warfare (#46, #50-53), and only fails because…Oh boy. So this…Is funny.
What?Literally the only reason Visser Three doesn’t have the entire human race dead or in shackles by the end of the series (assuming that his plan to create an orbital defense system for Earth didn’t fall apart due to the Animorphs - #23 (implied)) is that the Animorphs
coincidentally run into robot space dogs.I- Excuse me?Right, so in #10, the Animorphs encounter a race of aliens known as the Chee - the robot space dogs. The Chee are pacifists, but they’re also amazing hologram manipulators and intelligence specialists. The Animorphs need their help constantly, but they specifically need their help in #53, where they create a dead-on hologram of the Animorphs’ team member in order to distract Visser Three and infiltrate the Pool ship. A plan that saves Earth and would not have worked without said space dogs. Yes, it’s that ridiculous.
Did…Did Visser Three have any reason to know about said space dogs?!Of course not. The Chee do have a grounded spaceship that’s very deep underwater. And Visser Three knew that there was something underwater, mind, and it was powerful (#27, #36). And he tries to get to it to find out more information or use it, but gets stymied every time. But what it was? That it somehow had anything to do with magical super-advanced hologram-creating robot space dogs? He had NO way to know that.
That’s not even the only time an absurd, bizarre thing he had zero reasonable way of knowing about saved Earth.
When else does it happen? It happens when a magical benevolent space god intervenes multiple times to protect a group of runaway slaves, give the Animorphs information they couldn’t possibly have, or give them abilities that violate the known laws of technology the Visser himself uses (#7, #13, #33).
There’s a space god in this.
Yep.
So then…Why DO people think he’s incompetent and stupid? Well, the series does play his hammy, obnoxious personality and total willful obliviousness toward humans for laughs all the time (#9, #17, #27, #28, Visser). And he really IS ill-suited for a subterfuge campaign. So he ends up looking like a buffoon just because of how he acts, rather than what he actually does. You want to know what my favorite example of this is?
What?Visser. To begin with, we experience this entire book from the perspective of Visser One, a person who absolutely loathes Visser Three. This means that her opinion of him IS that he is just a no-account bumbling buffoon, and it shows from her narration.
Early on in the book, he attempts an absolutely ridiculous lie that is certain not to work, and he seems upset about this, and she dunks him for it. But here’s the thing: barely ten minutes after this happens, Visser Three deploys a far more insidious plan that absolutely would have worked had Visser One not, in fact, been the very thing that Visser Three has been accusing her of being - in contact with the Animorphs.
That’s not even the only clever plan he has all night, either. He somehow figures out something that he uses to incredible effect to paint Visser One as a host sympathizer and a traitor. Actually getting this particular plan to work would have involved considerable advance planning, forethought, and decent understanding of human nature in one case (although he rarely deploys it).
Yet despite the obviousness of all this, the fact that it’s right in front of the audience’s face, because the audience takes Visser One’s perspective, they can’t see past it. They too underestimate Visser Three.
So it’s…It’s perspective. People are judging him more for how he acts as a person (his personality) than for his actions. Yeah, and this kind of hit home for me in a lot of ways, y’know? I’m autistic. “Nobody Listens to X” (insert my name here) is a real phenomenon where I tell people exactly what’s going to happen and nobody believes me because of how I physically present and act. Which in my case are things I cannot help. So when he says <You have always underestimated me, Edriss Five-Six-Two,> I know the dynamic they have instantly, and I have sympathy for the Devil.
That’s…kinda sad. If you dig into why people love the blorbos they love, Sad can always be found.
Any other big reasons people think he’s stupid and in fact he isn’t? Yeah, there’s a big one. Okay so, throughout the series, Visser Three stubbornly believes that most of the Animorphs are Andalites (the space elf blue centaur guys) in morph. Even though the Yeerks get a ton of evidence to the contrary. It gets to the point where nearly all of the Human-Controllers in the whole Yeerk army (Yeerks with human hosts) have guessed the “Andalite bandits” are human, but they don’t dare tell Visser Three for fear of ending up dead. Thing is though, he has a really good reason for believing what he does, and a weird chunk of it comes down to his respect for maybe the only person he did respect.
What’s his reason? Okay, so the Andalites have this ironclad rule about technology. Morphing is a technology that the Andalite Chronicles’ protagonist - Elfangor’s his name - gave to the kids on Earth. But the Andalites are NEVER supposed to share their technology with other species. It’s called the law of Seerow’s Kindness.
Here’s the thing. The last time the Andalites shared tech with someone else, it was the Yeerks. And the Yeerks turned into a multiple-solar systems evil empire! So we have every reason to believe that anyone who broke Seerow’s Kindness would be in such deep space centaur trouble that there aren’t words for it. (Omitted my admittedly funny curse here for a friend.)
Visser Three knows this. He knows it real well. Remember that he’s got an Andalite host? That Andalite host just so happened to, wait for it, name Seerow’s Kindness. HE WAS THE GUY, OKAY? To say the Visser is biased against the idea of humans having Andalite technology is underselling the position he’d be in.
And what about that person he respects? Right, Prince Elfangor. The generals on the Andalite side are called Princes. So, in the Andalite Chronicles we hear about Visser Three’s long and weird history with Prince Elfangor, and in #23 we learn that the Visser had about as much respect for him as he can have for anyone. Even though he ate him. I said Visser Three wasn’t stupid; I never said he was sane.
Anyway, what that means is that the odds of Visser Three ever suspecting that
Elfangor broke Seerow’s Kindness, which is pretty much the only time anyone would have been able to transfer the morphing power to a human, are zero. It just wouldn’t happen. Believing Elfangor would do such a thing would defy everything the Visser thinks about Elfangor: a worthy opponent, an honorable Andalite, a person of great nobility and strength.
Got any more of these? I could go on about how you can be socially inept and torture people for sure, but you can’t be a complete twat if you’re as good at it as Visser Three supposedly is (#2, #25, #33, Visser). I could go on about the points where he does something relatively brilliant and no one, not even the fans, gives him credit for it (#11, #21). I could point out that no matter what people say, it’s not like the clever, shrewd little manipulator in the Chronicles books and the person in the mainline series are actually different people.
But you know what, I think this is at least an hour and a half of material. I’ll leave it here. XD See y’all!
<Fool, you dare talk about me without my permission?>
*Runs away in fear*
