Visser Three's cruelty.

[Unknown User]

Obviously I know that V3 was pure evil and that cruelty was second nature to him, but their are times when he seems more vicious than others. Know of any particular instances?

I offer this one; In one of the books (the one where Rachael morphs cheetah on the cover) Jake leaves town and the Animorphs have to deal without him. While he is gone the Garatron inspector shows up! At one point Marco poisons the inspector with cobra's venom and visser three taunts him as he begs for help and slowly dies.

[Terenia]

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Canon Visser Three is a campy, Scooby-Doo-esque villain who spouts off cliche phrases and is evil just for the sake of being evil. Not a very appealing villain, really.

Now, if you look at the offshoot books (HBC, TAC and even Visser to some extent) you get a much better look at Esplin 9466 as a three-dimensional character - someone who was so driven to reach the top that he made significant sacrifices, especially moral ones.

Visser Three does a lot of cruel things in the series - I mean, he eats Elfangor and makes a joke about it immediately afterwards, while Taxxons are feeding off of the body parts that missed his mouth.

I love three-dimensional Visser Three, who has a motivation for being "evil", and who does some truly twisted things that aren't downright stupid. I think that a lot of the canon books have him doing evil things just for the sake of "being evil', with no real rhyme or reason.

Clearly as time went on he somewhat lost his mind. I think that this is in part due to the fact that he was inhabiting Alloran, who was a few crayons short of a Crayola box. Together they made a rather unbalanced team.

[Unknown User]

I completely agree with your analysis of Esplin! There are points in THBC where I find myself rooting for him just because of his desire and drive; his determination.

[Serraph105]

yeah he certainly has his cruel moments. Although I think the one tc mentioned had motivation because he really didn't like getting inspected. Although he certainly overreacts a lot. For example any time a Hork Bajir brought him bad news he cut off it's head. If nothing else (much like Visser One said) it was a waste of a host body.
On a side note it's also interesting he is the only yeerk (with the possible exception of Aftran) who told us why yeerks had a motivation to enslave numerous species. They wanted to see the universe in all it's glory and their host bodies eye's allowed them to do that.