#edriss

Honestly, no matter how I approach the problem, I just can’t seem to pin down the dynamic of the relationship between Edriss and Eva. The information provided in Visser is too fragmented (and I’ll admit, I’ve never read #50, #51, or #52, so I don’t know if we get any insight into Eva’s personality in those books).

At first glance, you might think their relationship is one of contempt/hatred (contempt on Edriss’s side, hatred on Eva’s). But when you dig a little deeper, you quickly realize that’s not the case. There’s clearly "something else" going on.

Edriss can’t feel only contempt or indifference toward Eva. She went to great lengths to hide from Eva, for years, the fact that she had children. By her own admission, she watched them grow up through the eyes of other hosts. Hosts that, to her, were literally just disposable bodies, and whose opinions meant nothing. But with Eva, it’s different. Edriss outright admits that she couldn’t bear for Eva to know.

And yet, I could not let my host see that I was a mother, too. I could stand her hatred. I could not stand the insinuating pity, the appeals to a shared love.

What Edriss confesses here is that she’s afraid of Eva’s judgment. By extension, that means Eva’s opinion matters to her.

As for Eva, she didn’t hesitate to help Edriss on multiple occasions, from the moment she told her, "<I’ll help, Yeerk, but tell me the truth!>" to the point where she agreed to become her host again rather than escaping with Marco and the Animorphs. Sure, the fate of humanity was on the line at that moment. But shortly before the verdict, Eva says something I find very telling about her state of mind:

<I shouldn’t have helped you,> she said. <Even if it did lead to open war, I shouldn’t have helped you. You filthy, evil thing. I thought I’d found something decent inside you. I thought you were a mother, too.>

From this, I conclude that Eva clearly has some empathy for Edriss. Perhaps she even felt it from the beginning, before she knew about the children. Empathy doesn’t preclude a certain form of hatred.

But this is where I get stuck, because I can’t wrap my head around what Edriss and Eva’s relationship could have been like BEFORE all of that. What were their interactions like in the early days, and could those interactions have evolved into what we see in Visser? It’s not a simple question, because I think an important piece of the puzzle is missing: Eva’s personality.