Short opinion: Have I mentioned recently that Eva deserves her own novel series? Because Eva deserves her own novel series.
Long opinion:
Seriously, I find Eva so fascinating as a character. She goes through utter hell in this series and allows that fire to forge her into steel rather than finding herself broken down the way that Chapman and Tom and Alloran are. I think a lot of it has to do with her certainty about who she is as a person and where she stands in the world before she gets taken — she knows what makes her herself and she uses that knowledge to protect herself even as a different being is using her body to pretend to be her. By contrast, pre-infestation Chapman is very willing to change as the situation calls for it, pre-infestation Alloran is Not a Good Person thanks to living a life unexamined, and pre-infestation Tom is just some kid who hasn’t had the chance to figure out who he is yet. Eva knows who she is: to Peter, to Marco, to herself. She knows what her principles are, and what she is and is not willing to sacrifice for them. She knows that the world is an ugly place where usually one’s dreams do not work out and good does not triumph over evil. That knowledge allows her to know Visser One as well.
Visser One, by contrast, is a self-deluding egoist who cannot see and acknowledge her own flaws. In many ways Edriss 562 is the worst kind of abuser, because she’s the abuser who not only falls in love with her victims but also genuinely believes that her victims love her back, in spite of Allison Kim trying to commit suicide to escape her control and then later going to heroic lengths to keep their children away from Edriss. Furthermore, given how much Eva ends up helping Edriss throughout this book (keeping her from blurting out too much about Madra and Darwin, figuring out that an Animorph attack will discredit Visser Three, correctly assessing how much the Council does and does not know about the Earth invasion), I actually wonder if Edriss 562 would have been able to maintain her position as Visser One for very long at all if she didn’t have Eva as a host.
Anyway, I could gush about Eva all day. But let’s talk about what excellent foils Visser One and Marco are instead.
- Marco is the Animorphs’ chief strategist, just as Visser One is the chief strategist for the Yeerk Empire’s Earth invasion. Jake and Visser Three respectively might be the ones out front and visible, but they’re both too impulsive and too self-confident to manage long-term battle plans without the subtle influence of their strategists’ big-picture thinking.
- Visser One gets described in this book as “addicted” to humans, relating back to not just Marco’s close connection to human technology but also his human-like battle morph. They both embrace and use humans’ uniquenesses on a scale we don’t see with anyone else except maybe Elfangor.
- Most of the plot of this book is about Visser One desperately, compulsively denying how much she cares about her own family — Marco does exactly the same thing (#15, #30, #35) throughout the series. But also witness the INSANE lengths both of them will go through to protect said families (Edriss sabotaging her entire empire for Madra and Darwin, Marco risking his whole team to protect his mom) both in this book and in the series as a whole, which gives the lie to their alleged ruthlessness and refusal to care for their close others.
- They also have some awfully funny ways of showing that love. Marco never goes to the extreme of holding four humans hostage while lying to himself about how said slaves are just like family, but he does deliberately sabotage his dad’s relationship with Nora in order to rekindle his parents’ marriage, which is still machiavellian as hell.
- Neither one of them particularly wants to be in the war at all, except for said families; Marco nearly quits for his dad’s sake and only doesn’t for his mom’s sake (#5) and Edriss nearly quits for Essam’s sake but only doesn’t for the twins’ sake (Visser).
- Which leads to both of them having the same Achilles heel: Marco has no chill at all about his dad. Edriss nearly gets herself killed when reacting to Darwin.
All of which makes it fascinating to watch the rumors about these two mortal enemies working together become a straight-up self-fulfilling prophecy in this book. Visser One only lets the Animorphs go in #5 to spite Visser Three (and we finally learn in this book exactly why she hates him so much), but as of MM1 and #8 there are already whispers that she released them as part of an agreement. The events of #15 incriminate Visser One when the Animorphs let her go to save Eva, but in #30 the Animorphs actually are trying to kill her for real… but they don’t succeed, which makes her look guiltier. All this forces her into a corner in Visser where she has no choice but to (briefly, grudgingly) gang up with the Animorphs for real. Without the severely damaging rumors that Visser One has some kind of secret alliance with the “andalite bandits,” there would never be a secret alliance between Visser One and said bandits.
Well, less an alliance and more of a hostage negotiation. With Eva playing the part of The World’s Worst Hostage, in that she both refuses to cooperate with her captors enough to keep herself alive and also refuses to cooperate with her rescuers enough to escape the situation.
Because Eva’s the missing link between Marco and Visser One in more than one way. She loves her family but understands that the big picture has to come first, just like Marco and Edriss both, but she also doesn’t lie to herself. She doesn’t give in to Marco’s pipe dreams of their family being reunited as if nothing ever happened to come between them, instead outright expressing her approval of Peter’s decision to remarry. She doesn’t buy the bullshit Edriss peddles about how Allison Kim and Hildy Gervais were “happy” or “in love” in a relationship that pushed them both to the brink of suicide with the severity of its abuse, instead offering outright contempt for Edriss’s idea of what family is supposed to look like. She accepts that there are fates worse than death — and she accepts one of those fates at the end of this book. Because as much as Edriss and Marco are both stone-cold killers when it comes to protecting their loved ones, neither one of them can hold a candle to Eva for sheer badass nerve and willingness to endure hell itself for the sake of her family.
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