What if Visser One stayed on Earth and was still in charge of the invasion when the Animorphs were formed?
The humans would lose.
I’m speculating, of course, but that’s my speculation. Edriss 562 — especially Edriss with access to Eva’s brain — is too damn smart to be taken down by six kids and half her own army turning on her. Edriss knows how to pay close attention to Eva’s intelligence and perception without getting sucked into Eva’s blind spots the way that Esplin 9466 is with Alloran. Eva herself is tough, canny, and very good at understanding her enemies and allies alike.
Neither one of them is perfect, to be sure, but ultimately Visser One gets taken down more by Marco’s opportunistic leveraging of misinformation within the Yeerk Empire than by her own errors. Visser One understands humans, and has enormous skill at persuading them. Visser One knows the value of subtlety well enough to lead a covert invasion. Visser One might be more feared than loved, but she still wins several followers out from under Visser Three with her charisma and vision. Maybe most importantly, Visser One set the playbook for the Earth invasion — creating the Sharing, emphasizing the value of voluntary and quasi-voluntary hosts, controlling the flow of information, leveraging Hollywood for social influence — and so she understands how the plan is supposed to play out in practice. Either an invasion with Visser Three using Visser Three’s playbook or one with Visser One using Visser One’s playbook could work, in practice; it’s only when Visser Three is forced to use Visser One’s plans that the whole invasion falls apart.
A few ways that I think Visser One could improve on Visser Three’s plans:
- Recruit with less honey, more vinegar.
- Tom’s yeerk makes multiple attempts to lure Jake and his parents to Sharing meetings, all unsuccessful. However, it’s not until the yeerks know that Jake’s an Animorph that the yeerk in Tom finally gets authorization just to drag their parents down to the yeerk pool by force.
- A better idea would be to drop the cult-recruitment strategy entirely after two failed attempts. All it would take is getting a valuable potential host alone with a controller long enough for said controller to shoot the person in the back with a minimum-power dracon beam. Then the controller could drag the host to the nearest car, get the person to the yeerk pool, and send the Body Snatched copy of the host (who would, of course, insist that nothing is wrong) home within an hour or two.
- Make yeerks more mobile.
- To give credit where it’s due, this is maybe the only good idea that AniTV yeerks ever come up with in 26 episodes of the show: They carry their unhosted brethren with them in thermoses. This makes infestation infinitely easier in less-than-ideal circumstances, because it only requires a half-second of distraction on the part of the host for the controller to dump the yeerk in the unsuspecting person’s ear. There are even fake ear thermometers in the one episode which have been modified to contain yeerks in little kandrona pods, meaning that an EMT-controller can infest someone in front of human witnesses without even arousing suspicion.
- Throughout the book series, that (overall much smarter and more competent) version of the yeerks faces considerable problems with getting single hosts such as Jeremy Jason McCole or Jake’s dad down to the yeerk pool. Given that we know yeerks can travel short distances in ziploc baggies (#29), Visser One would almost certainly leverage travel mugs to her advantage through keeping unhosted yeerks ready to go at a second’s notice as opportunities arise.
- Go for quantity over quality.
- Using the two methods I mentioned above, we could see a situation like Salem’s Lot or Invasion of the Body-Snatchers where the parasites quickly overwhelm the non-parasites with sheer numbers. The yeerks devote a lot of resources toward trying to secure a small handful of high-impact but well-guarded targets — the chief of police, Karen’s dad, the governor of California, the president of France (?), William Roger Tennant. Even when they grab ordinary schlubs, they tend to prioritize ordinary schlubs like Tom Berenson who are young, physically active, well-connected, nondisabled, and reasonably attractive.
- Instead, they could just go full Hufflepuff: take the lot, and treat ‘em just the same. Let’s use Tom as an example. He gets grabbed because of his high school crush. Then maybe the yeerks send “Tom” to get Jake in the door of a Sharing meeting by any means necessary. They infest Jake the instant he’s in the door, and then send “Jake” and “Tom” home to tell their parents that there’s an urgent need for them to come to the car wash downtown. Then they’ve got Steve, who is almost certainly friends with at least a few doctors he can call on the phone and ask to come downtown. Those few doctors each call a few doctors, who each call a few doctors, and pretty soon they’re all
going into business for themselves with this one weird nutritional supplementinfesting their patients en masse. - The one big problem I see with this strategy is that there are approximately 10,000 humans for each yeerk on Earth, which would mean they’d have to focus heavily on infiltrating one town or city at a time and only branching out gradually as more yeerk pools were built and more baby yeerks were spawned. It could still work though, IMHO.
- Fix the culture.
- I miiiiiight just be saying this because I’m a social psychologist, BUT. Some major communications training could go a long way in the Yeerk Empire. As it is, Visser Three’s leadership (and to a lesser extent that of other vissers) incentivizes lying to cover one’s own butt over offering up any kind of helpful feedback or remotely risky suggestions. The Yeerk Empire, in canon, falls because a) Arbron and the other taxxons take the first alternate out that comes along rather than continuing to work for these imperialistic assholes, b) Tom’s yeerk gets fed up with Esplin’s crap to the point of wanting to stick a knife in his back, and c) the empire has been hemorrhaging hork-bajir hosts for years without doing anything about it. The Animorphs come along and give the block tower a big ol’ shove, to be sure, but Visser One and Visser Three have been playing Jenga with it for years by the time it finally falls.
- Visser One might, if she has the chance to run her own house for once, be smart enough to realize that rewarding people who give her bad news is a much much better idea than shooting the messenger. Assuming she does, then we get no fake mind-control hamburgers, no multi-billion-dollar Sea Blade project that goes nowhere, no weekslong infiltration effort to glimpse a useless andalite porta-potty, and no near-catastrophe with the veleek. Mist importantly, there’d be no internal fracturing that leads to the empire’s fall. She’s not great at controlling her temper, so that’s a maybe at best, but assuming she could, then she’s capable of winning loyalty rather than demanding it with temper tantrums.
Assuming that Visser One manages to do all that, and I think she just might be able to pull all that off, the humans lose. The Animorphs would do their best to make a mess along the way, of course, and maybe the invasion would be successful enough to get the andalites’ attention a little early, but it’s still not looking good for the good guys.
It’s worth noting that in canon Visser One figured out that the “Andalite Bandits” were actually human long before long before Visser Three did. There’s a pretty good chance that if she was actually involved in the invasion during the series she would have figured it out earlier
Oh crap I forgot about that! Yeeeeaaaahh, if Visser One’s in charge then humanity’s DEFINITELY screwed.
I distinctly remember a Leeran mind-reader flat-out telling Visser One that the Animorphs are human, he's reading the mind of the "andalite bandit" right here and it's definitely a human, and Visser One just dismisses this as ridiculous.
I mean, apparently she did her own research later, because she realized how odd it was that the kids were never killing humans, but at the time she just ignored all the evidence in front of her.
I'd say that her biggest flaw (besides the whole "my slaves definitely love me for real" thing) is that she very much acts as if it's her against the entire universe. That mindset actually gets her pretty far in the Yeerk Empire, where everyone really is out to get you, but it certainly wouldn't help her reform it.
