General Discussions

How do Reavers pilot ships, them being insane cannibals and such?

POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Thursday, December 2, 2021 20:06
VIEWED: 48258
PAGE 12 of 19

DONCOAT

Sunday, October 16, 2005 11:06 AM

Kaylee: "I love my Reaver!"

Select to view spoiler:

Actually, she just might, since they did bring her and Simon together!

GERSHOM

Sunday, October 16, 2005 2:14 PM

My two kopeks worth:

River was intended as the Operative to the power 10 - imagine a controlled telepathic assassin able to get the truth and then ensure no-one else survives to know... However she's more unpredictable than the expected, hard to control someone whose telepathic and can see through your lies and add to that her hyper-intelligence and you have River using a type of self-induced autism to escape the programming...

There is a theory that Autistic people are too intelligent and therefore reject certain aspects of reality that they find - difficult... Once the programming is shattered, she is able to merge everything back together under her own control (apparently)...

Mankind is a social animal, even in its most psychotic, only the strongest survive variations, it groups together into clans and its leaders will allow those like them to survive and serve them even if only because even the alphas know that it might be able to take any one or even two others down dbut would not survive if all the others worked together against it, even if only for a moment - human velosiraptors anyone? So social co-operation exists but only while it serves their own interests. Even Reivers have to sleep sometime and need someone to guard their back...

Alliance allows Reivers to survive a) because it protects their secret at Miranda and because b) as it allows the Government to control the outer colonies and stop a larger percentage of its core planet population from moving out... It has possibly got a little out of hand in recent years but as its only the outer colonies being hurt so far why worry... The threat of reivers will help them control the core. Fear is a wonderful social control as many governments have found.

Reactor breach on Reiver ships - perhaps this is the only way they can make their converted transports go as fast as they want? They don't have a genius Kaylee to tinker with their engines so they settled for a fast and dirty answer to make them faster and more maneuverable? Like the pirates (and Scot's Reivers like my own ancestors) they know that they will only have a short lifespan anyway (you'll never see an old, infirm Reiver, the clan will kill it as soon as it starts to get weak and less powerful) so why worry about the long-term effects - yes it will make a large percentage sterile over time but as Chernobyl has proved, a percentage will be able to reproduce and birth mutations are generally either result in still birth, early termination or cause cancers later but given their short lifespans caused by lifestyle who would care anyway?

BROWNCOATBABE

Sunday, October 16, 2005 2:51 PM

This is majorly OT, someone mentioned the script?

I am dying to get a hold of a copy-I have a final due in a couple months and I want to do a Serenty and Chinese Philosophy, so if anyone can point me to a link....or the script?

On this reaver thing, the PAX is some nasty stuff...I'm just still hung up on the whole reproduction thing. I'm not into the creating reavers with transmitting the pathogen by breathe, but one wonders if there were 30,000 about 12 years ago...some of them must have died off. Maybe not even half, maybe not even 1/4, but some will have died off...I hope.

Some of this dicussion is geting into the zombie realm, and it's clear reavers are still humans (forgive me, I've only seen the movie 3 times) I think Jayn says something like

Select to view spoiler:

"Don't know how a fella goes so wrong, cuttin his own face"

so they are still human, right? I'm not entirely eduacted in this area (see below).

Never seen the series, but am saving my monies to buy it...wish to god I had started earlier. Also, yay for a fandom that desn't degrade into insults everytime we differ in opinion.

DREAMTROVE

Sunday, October 16, 2005 3:01 PM

Citizen

I'm fine to agree to disagree. I think I've figured out why we won't come to an agreement on this. I think you're analyzing this from a point of few of psychology, which I regard as a philosophy, which I don't subscribe too. I understand the whole thing from a perspective of the physical sciences, so it would put you in a position analogous to arguing the existance of God with an atheist. Re: naysaying posts, you naysayed my stop naysaying post. I think as long as you naysay excessively you're going to get flamed for it. Sometimes people are wrong, admittedly, contradicting them is fine. I was actually getting irritated reading your exchange with chris, not with me. But anyway, water under the bridge over the damn.

Quote:

orignally posted by The Black Rabbit
They just need a hug. Won't someone love the reavers?
Quote:

Hug a Reaver? Love a Reaver? Well, if we take the "River is a Reaver" angle, I'm in.

Gershom:

I don't think River would resort to normal after her programming is cancelled out. I think these are almost separate issues. But I agree re: Alliance, and it's attitude towards reavers, on reaver behavior. Good points all.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME

SLAYTHIS

Sunday, October 16, 2005 5:00 PM

Hey Babe,

The complete shooting script is contained within the "The Official Visual Companion." I don't know if the script is on-line anywhere, but this book is well worth owning. I'm sure you can find it at any book-store chain, but just in case, here's the Amazon link...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1845760824/103-7991794-1775838?v=glan
ce&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance

GERSHOM

Sunday, October 16, 2005 5:31 PM

Dreamtrove,

Quote:
I don't think River would resort to normal after her programming is cancelled out. I think these are almost separate issues.

I never said normal, I said under her control - Her first fight is River as the Allience puppet operative while I would say River vs. the Reavers at the end of the film is an example of River in total and absolute control of herself, accepting her new abilities as part of her overall personality in the same way that she accepted that at three she was capable of correcting Simon's spelling!

"Every heist, he's gotta start yelling my name..."

DREAMTROVE

Sunday, October 16, 2005 5:59 PM

Oh sorry misunderstood. Anyway, it's a long time before she does the killer tralk thing. ie. we could have used it earlier. I think that two factors will make it continue to be random:

1. Periods of lucidity for lunatics are pretty random.
2. It's better for the story. If she can go all Yu Shu Lien on us whenever she feels like it, then it's totally broken. Much better as a sometimes thing.

she's going to kill us all. That oughtta distract us.

CARNYASADA

Sunday, October 16, 2005 6:22 PM

I think you all are working overtime to explain something that doesn't really require a complicated explanation.

Assume a starting pool of 30,000 Reavers 12 years ago. How many Reavers would it take to man the fleet shown in the movie?

Number one: The large number of ships shown doesn't necessarily imply enormous numbers of Reavers. Firefly has a "crew" of seven (in the movie), but only two are really needed to run the ship.

We never see more than a couple dozen Reavers in a shot; it's possible that no more than 50-100 were crewing the large Reaver vessel that attacked the town. A highly aggressive, armed force with the advantage of surprise taking on a mostly untrained and underarmed civilian population already demoralized by the Reavers' reputation wouldn't need to overwhelm them with numbers.

Many of the vessels in the Reaver fleet were considerably smaller than the vessel that attacked the town; many might not carry a crew much larger than Firefly's.

Even assuming mortality of 30 percent over the past 12 years, you would still have 20,000 Reavers, or theoretically enough to crew 100+ large vessels plus 1,000 or more Firefly-sized vessels.

On the other hand, it strains credulity to think of the Reavers successfully breeding -- and, importantly, raising! -- children. Even if Reavers were able to have kids, the oldest kids would be preadolescent and pretty useless for either piloting spaceships or carving up settlers.

Other than the isolated survivor in "Bushwhacked," we have no evidence the Reavers "recruit" replacements -- none of the news reports or rumors talk about kidnappings, just killings. I think it's more likely the survivor was displaying an idiosyncratic response to the psychological strain of what he went through. I would point out that Agent Dobson also apparently "survived" a Reaver attack, and yet was not much Reaverish in the comic books than he was when we first met him in the series.

Finally, could the Reavers be creating "instant Reavers" by infecting captives? Again, news reports and rumors we hear don't talk about kidnappings, only killings, so where are these captives coming from? You'd have to have large numbers disappearing to make much of a difference in the number of Reavers. I think the prion theory of Pax is an interesting one, but prion diseases typically take years -- even decades -- to develop. Are Reavers going to be willing to wait for this?

I think it's more credible that the Reaver fleet is crewed by the remnants of the original Reavers than that new Reavers are being created or even need to be created.

MORNINGREIGN

Sunday, October 16, 2005 6:39 PM

Warning... this thread is all spoiler. If you've read this entire thread and still have no clue about the plot, you obviously have the operative's detachment. I salute you.

...

Granted, this is a science fiction story, but...

What if the women in the holo is wrong about .1% being driven mad? She was making a supposition and she was, after all,... in a hurry. I think if you presumed .1% were already mad, it would be a pretty low number.

I think the reavers could easily have been the crazy people amidst the sane majority. It's possible they were the ones left behind after the civilized folks lapsed into apathy.

Maybe the .1% who survived did so merely because extreme aggressiveness leaves one immune to apathy.

After the structures of civilization collapse, how many examples of extreme, brutal behavior can you think of? Genocide 'Killing the other' as someone earlier put so well happens now.

Perhaps 'reaverism' as triggered by solitude at the edge of space is the same as that triggered by PAX and also the same as that caused by the significant emotional event surviving a reaver attack would have to be.

Solitude can and has driven people mad. (Edge of Space/civilization and there is only me)

So can being the sole survivor of a disaster. (Everybody died but me)

And, this can also be true of those surviving a brutal assault. (Reavers came and left only me... and I'm not so sure about me)

Even if the PAX effect started the barbarism of the reavers, it isn't necessarily necessary for the effect to continue for the reavers to continue.

The idea of a reaver isn't unbelievable. They look like barbarians and the actions of barbarians often appear insane and unsustainable to folks too civilized to have come across such.

DREAMTROVE

Sunday, October 16, 2005 6:44 PM

I don't think this discussion was really ever about trying to justify what happened in the movie. We're not Joss apologists. I assume everyone is more interested in what is going on with the Reavers.

BTW, on a footnote, someone made the note about "reverse" I think that might be solid, because there may be a reason they are called reavers and not savages, cannibals, raiders or any of a number of other things. Joss might have had that in mind. Most of the time when people say to him, "did you plan it this way or was it an accident?" he says he planned it. Sometimes I thnik he might be lying. But then sometimes I think he's lying when he says it was an accident.

I'm sure everyone's heard the explanation of the numbered shirts in buffy as "we just wanted to f*&k with people." Maybe, Joss.

Bushwacked shows us not just that it happens in frount of our eyes which is undeniable, but that it's what everyone expects to happen, which is pretty near proof enough for me.

Quote:

prion diseases typically take years -- even decades -- to develop.

BSE does, I don't think we know nearly enough about prions to make this kind of generalization. Someone could encounter HIV and make that assertion about viruses, or encounter Lyme Disease and make that assertion about spyrochetes (sp?)

In short if you put a fast acting prion into a story, no one's going to say "nah, that can't happen" or if they do, they can very easily be wrong.

As to reaver kidnappings, since the reavers take the people they eat, and don't generally leave the bones around to be counted, even if someone would and could go through and say "we don't have harry's skull, he must be a reaver" they can't, because they don't have the bones. So no one knows what happened to any other the people taken by reavers except that they never come back.

Re: comics, I haven't read any, but comics and books associated with other series have always been treated pretty much like fan fic, as far as the show's bible is concerned. The events there don't get entered into the core source material, and often conflict with it.