Rever Theories
POSTED BY: Kaythryn
UPDATED: Monday, May 5, 2003 18:53
VIEWED: 7801
PAGE 3 of 4
You know, none of the John Wayne "Rio" formula movies (I think there's at least three) have Indians, neither does Big Jake,Cahill US Marshall,Pale Rider,Shane,The Magnificent Seven, The Cowboys... I stand corrected. I guess you can have Westerns without Indians. However, there's always bad guys whether they're cattle rustlers or land grabbing railroad men.
I think Joss is using the Reavers to generate that tense, scary feeling the 'bad guys'give you when they appear on the screen, whether they're Indians, Commancheros, Banditos, Cattle Rustlers etc.
I loved the intensity of the moment when the crew quietly slipped by the Reaver Ship in Serenity. It was great, albiet proably more like a submarine movie than a western. You just knew this was a force you don't want to mess with.
I really miss this show. I hope I get to see those three unaired episodes.
Keep flying man.
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Firefly is not only a space western, but a
frontier space western.
JW went with no Aliens, and needed a " fear of the unknown " component.
We are not suppose to understand the reavers, or even know that much about them, they are that boogie man come to life, the scary because you just don't know thing.
In many Westerns Indians were sterotyped into this component, as in real life there was fear and prejudice, unknown hate, making threats of of fear.
Total fic here, how about the reavers are a cult based upon the alliance buried discovery of alien artifacts. This cult completely rejects civilization ( such as it is ) and attempts to either destroy or convert it whereever they find it through ritual torture and cannibalism. They desicrate themselves as well to appear more alien, or at least less human, ( as maybe these " unknown alien artifacts " reveal themselves to be) also reflecting their rejection of both the current order and what they are.
I think this would explain the " ritual " way reavers treat their captives, violence such as this in a group dynamic without purpose is rare, and many cults are high ordered and functional as opposed to dysfuntional manaics. Not only do they operate spacecraft, but they convert and modify them ( grapplers, running without core containment ) Their culture must provide both a command structure, and a support structure ( supplies, fuel, parts, etc ) as they left behind some obvious plunder on the ship in bushwacked, I don't think they are pirating as I thought from the pilot.
Broken people are more easily influenced by cults, perhaps some former browncoats fell onto this path. Maybe Mal and Zoe at one point attempted to retrieve some comrades fallen to this fate, and their expriences are based upon this action. As Mal said of the bushwacked survivor, pity would be shooting him. I think he tried to bring someone back before, and ended up showing him this mercy.
I prefer to think the Alliance was responsible for whatever happened at Shadow, and that fuels Mals hatred of them.
If nothing elses my ranting might provide many plots and subplots. I wish I had time to try to write some fanfic, I haven't written in a long time and the idea has some appeal.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Veteran:
You know, none of the John Wayne "Rio" formula movies (I think there's at least three) have Indians...
well, just to be persnickity for a sec, considering the ratio of white actors who played indians back in the day versus native actors who played indians...there really weren't many indians actually in the old westerns
i do like a man who knows his westerns, though.
Rio Bravo was the best of the rio formulas, mainly i think by virtue of being the first. it has a specialness for me simply cuz the first time i watched it was with my dad, the all-time western fanatic.Quote:
However, there's always bad guys...I think Joss is using the Reavers to generate that tense, scary feeling the 'bad guys'give you when they appear on the screen...
it's a huge part of any western. without the bad guys, it's just the good guy, a girl and a horse -- just wrong, really. nothin for the good guy to do to impress the girl.
that moment when Serenity and the Reaver ship pass in the black was very much like a submarine movie, wasn't it? good perspective there Veteran--a great way to combine the outer space aspect with the western, where the same scene would have been done by getting off the horses, wrapping hooves and sneaking by the bad-guy/indian/confederate camp all quiet like, only moreso because we nevery actually saw the Reavers, just their ship. had me at the very sharp edge of my seat, waiting for the
i have a notion that the three unaired eps will show up this summer sometime...fingerscrossed on that one.
"I'm still flyin'...that's enough." ~ Mal
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Quote:
Total fic here, how about the reavers are a cult based upon the alliance buried discovery of alien artifacts.
This isn't a bad idea but, I'd prefer it if there were no aliens, or reference to them. Joss left aliens out to put Firefly in a unique set of Sci-Fi stories. Because of that, I think the blackness insanity maybe the only explanation of why Reavers exist that we get.
You're right, Reavers definitely have to have hierarchy and support. Space travel is way to complex for them not to have these things. This complicates the insantiy explanation. I suggest that Reaver bands are held toghether individuals who've retained enough faculties to keep things running.
I'm not so sure about the treatment of the victims being ritualistic. If it is, it ties in neatly with the Reavers as Indians idea. I've heard a few descriptions of mutilized horse soldiers and what the mutilization meant. I think the mutilization is due to the Reavers insanity and serves as a plot devise to instill that pins and needles feeling Joss wants us to have when they're nearby.
I think your idea about Mal and Zoe trying to rescue a comrade from becoming a Reaver is great. If you are thinking about writing a fanfic you should run with that one.
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Well, I've read this entire thread with intense interest because the reavers are a fascinating element of the Firefly universe/galaxy/solar system (that's an entirely different thread) that we may never see again because our options for exploring this time and place have become so limited
I agree with those of you who say this is NOT some alien influence, direct or indirect though it may be. I further do NOT think they are related to some Alliance conspiracy, perhaps connected with the (as yet unknown) research on River, if only because Joss has never been that obvious.
I'm willing to suspend my disbelief as far as allowing these guys to retain their ability to fly spaceships while appearing to be total savages (OK, don't get me started on the whole Levi-Strauss thing about savages versus natives thing) if only in understanding if they occupied a single planet, and were therefore planet-bound, we could easily avoid going there; they have to be mobile to present a credible threat.
What I do recall are the interviews with Mercury & Gemini and Apollo space crews, some from Tom Wolfe's original The Right Stuff, as published in Rolling Stone way back when. Those of you who are familiar with that article or his final published book will recall these key differences: the three-part article followed the program from the X-15 through the Apollo program, instead of concentrating solely on the Mercury program as the book (and terrific film adaptation) did.
The main thing I remember is their discussion of the vastness of space.
There are few ways for us to comprehend the size of that place that's not here on Earth. Maybe you've lain on a dark and deserted beach for an hour, staring at the stars (takes about 45 minutes for your eyes to really adjust) until you can see the band of stars we know as the Milky Way stretch way out over both horizons. Maybe you've see pictures from the Hubble telescope, with graphs and charts describing relative sizes in terms of light years and parsecs and how many Empire State Buildings it equals and think you understand.
Well, you don’t.
Space is big. Bigger than we humans can easily comprehend. If you lie on that beach for that hour and see the Milky Way in all its splendor, you’ll truly know the meaning of small, ‘cause that’s what you’ll feel like. You want to know what your place in the universe might be? You are the tiniest speck of dust on the bottom of huge black bowl.
And now I have one word for you: AGORIPHOBIA.
The opposite of claustrophobia, the fear of wide-open spaces, common enough here on Earth, in our time, that there are people who cannot even leave their homes for fear of the great beyond, which for them translates as the mall or even the mail box down on the next corner.
Now let’s consider a planet-wide population forced to evacuate Earth-that-was; there can be no exceptions. If you are agoraphobic, well, we’ve gotta take you with us, ‘cause otherwise, you die.
Out in the black, this would become acute, unrelenting agoraphobia, with no hope of relief and no home to go back to, nowhere to go but out of your mind.
I'm a mean old man.
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I also like the fact the show has no aliens,
but you would need something to base this cult on. Maybe there are no aliens, but the possibility and / or belief of aliens exists and the reavers believe they are the aliens ( self mutilation ) You wouldn't need the aliens, and the idea of something else out there even if they haven't seen anything yet must exist, even if Wash would call it Science Fiction.
In Bushwacked the dead were hanging from the ceiling, I think that must be part of some kind of ritual.
I would really like to try a fanfic, thanks for the encouragement. I think I will rewatch Bushwacked, and maybe read about cannibal rituals first, I think maybe a Aztec influence might have the right sort of feel. I used to have a book about the buffalo soldiers ( 10 US Cav ), and it had a few desciptions of rituals they wittnessed, but I can't find it.
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I suggest you also find out what you can about the Essex, a Nantucket whaler that was the inspiration for Moby Dick. The ship was rammed by a whale. There were three boats of survivors. One was lost but the two boats that made it resorted to cannibalism. One group only ate the dead. The other group started drawing lots, there were only two of these poor bastards left when they were found, gnawing on bones of their commrades. History Channel did a good show on it.
Any way good luck, I look foward to reading your fic.
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[url= http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=8&t=1712]Fireflyfans.net[/url]
It's an interesting theory, but I think it conflicts with the underlying defination of what a Reaver is, as defined by JW. Namely, that Reavers are people that when out into the black, and the black drove them insane. It's a frightening idea that people can go that wrong. That void can suck out our humanity to that extreme. The idea that Reavers are created, artificial, somehow makes them more.... tangible, and less frightening. I think that Whedon would leave the Reaver's exact origins a mystery, if only to add to their mythic atmosphere, and therefore to their scariness.
actually, those 'reavers' reminded me alot of Privateer's 'Retro' faction - not to mention C.J.Cherryh's detailed descriptions of people who went into "hyperspace" without drugs to calm them down/zone them out.
The question remains. Is this a common symptom of hyperspace madness (the reaver/retro scavenging lifestyle) or is it a 'religion' or other organization with a base/common ground/philosophy/leaders?
[list]personally, i always figured the 'Retros' in privateer to be some sort of religion gone wild in the attempt at rationalizing the fact other sentient races challenged the "god made us in his image" spiel....As for the reavers? Always seemed to me that it was a more realistic take on the 'anti-tech' retros that seemed so campy in Privateer[/list]
I do like the theory proposed by the originator of this thread. very interesting, especially since i doubt the 'reavers' were to be some mysterious entity, but had some purpose for existing (in the plot) beyond "atmosphere"...especially since the "blue hands" were also mysterious.
the "blue hands" reminded me of the psychic division in Babylon5
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Now this amazes me, since the game wasn't all that popular, that I was aware of.
I wonder just how many folks who played and loved Privateer became Firefly fans ?
One must admit, there are quite a few similarities, and I love Firefly for many of the same reasons I adored Privateer.
As for causes of the Reavers, consider how mad someone removed from civilization and humanity becomes over time even here on earth ?
Castaways on the open sea, for example...
What's so scary about the Reavers is how the seed of such a thing is inside each and every one of us, waiting only on the proper conditions to make it grow.
THAT, is what scares us, moreso than the Reavers.
-Frem
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This is gona be a long rant, hope you like it.
OK, here’s what I got for "facts." There are no aliens, the Revers are the personification of the myth of the savage. This comes from JW, he said something to the effect of he loved the western idea of the evil Indians but wanted it to be pure in this. There is no underlying reality of humanity, there was no land stolen, the stories of them are totally true, they are simply evil. Although if you want to get right down to it they aren't really evil, because for that there would have to be some morals, some thought.
Here’s what I have in the way of theories. Mal must have seen Revers do what they do, it’s the only way he could possibly know. But I think that it might have been before Serenity valley. Think of it, the only thing that gets him through it is his faith in god, it makes his faith stronger because he can’t survive without believing that there is something stronger that is good, then in Serenity god shows that he isn’t there, and Mal loses all faith.
It’s probably more likely that it happened the other way around though. And that the only reason he didn’t go insane is because god’s failure, and his loss of faith (which was probably the only thing that kept him going through the war) had left him with nowhere lower to sink. Because he would have already lost the will to live, and stopped caring, seeing the atrocities would have no effect on him. After that he would have slowly regained his humanity.
What I want to know is what else is out there, Joss makes it seem like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the device that showed someone the entire universe and them in comparison (I’ve forgotten what it was called but it was on Frogstar B.) That no one can survive it intact. But experience on earth has show us differently. People separated from society can take many different paths, so there might be things other than Revers.
Some people crave the isolation, and might excel in it. I doubt that, but it is possible. Others might make their own society to make up for the lack of one, and push themselves further into the void. They could think of themselves as gods, the only things in the black, and decide that space belonged to them. They might become experts in space its self, basing their religion off of the fullness of space as their bodies adapt (exposure to radiation present outside planetary atmospheres and magnetic fields would cause rapid evolution, as well as lots and lots of death) so that they can feel the magnetic and electric fields. People already can feel these things to a small extent, but if they could attune themselves to them, or see them than they wouldn’t face the nothingness.
People might also reject society and instead become more natural, the Revers are the opposite of natural. This doesn’t mean that they set down on a planet and abandon technology, but it would be possible for them to rely on instinct, rather than thought. In nature there is no seeking to expand, nor are possessions valued, there is also not sadism. Human beings operate on thought augmented by instinct, the reverse could also work. A crew wouldn’t have to know what they were doing to keep a ship flying, they would just need to know what to do. Any interaction between these weird people and outsiders would be interesting to say the least.
Because nature is all about doing as little as possible it is likely that such a group would steal food in a prepared state, or livestock, rather than eat people. It is likely they would also need to steal parts for the ship, which would be done by figuring out what was broken, tracking down another ship, and stealing the part that looked like it. People like Kaylee who can figure out machines with minimal training would be highly prized, also pilots would be in positions of power because that’s not easy to do either. I don’t know how you would work this into something but it is one course that might be taken.
My favorite possibility is the nuts ones, when people are isolated they often begin to
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