How do Reavers pilot ships, them being insane cannibals and such?
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Thursday, December 2, 2021 20:06
VIEWED: 48258
PAGE 14 of 19
I think we (as in YOU guys) are missing one element that has been present in many of the episodes and the movie. We are not privy to ALL the information! We do not KNOW what is really happening all the time and the reports we get from the crew are often flawed.
With that in mind, consider how many of histories "savage" societies were treated. With fear and paranoia. Reports were exaggerated and fabricated.
This is not to say that the Reavers are not bloodthirsty, raving, cannibals. But be careful in your suppositions. Native Americans were all considered bloodthirsty savages at one point, as were most of the tribes of Africa and the vikings. Some tribes were indeed cannibals, but it did not stop them from having a society of sorts. This is not to say the Reavers are anything like the above mentioned races. Just look at the other "barbaric" races in Sci-fi history. All have a horrible, fear-inducing pathos that is barely overcome by heroics or the "you must be a monster to fight a monster" scenario. I do NOT support the "River is Reaver" theory either!
I think that there are too many analogies to the old west to ignore Reavers as a such as well. The represent what we fear: "rape, cannibalisms, desecration of the dead. The fact they were created by the "enlighten" society is ironic and borders poetic justice (when they are lead as a diversion for the Serenity crew).
So to answer your question directly, "How do Reavers pilot ships, them being insane cannibals and such?" because they NEED to. They need to be on the same playing field to be a threat. You can't just stick them on a planet that anyone can avoid. They need to be in your face.
Your real question should be, "ARE the Reavers insane?" Are they a by product or a mistaken mutation. Many people can act in the heat of anger with deliberate and calculating efficiency. And our society (American that is I don't know too much about other countries) is filled with brilliant yet insane murders (Ted Bundy as an example).
I think if the series continues (and I pray it does), the Reavers will play out to be more like vikings on PCP (to butcher a previous assumption). They can act in conjunction (albeit in a horrid state) and as they move in for the attack they are filled with a blood lust that defies "rational" explanation that explodes into the worst a human can imagine.
Or... I could have been drive3n insane by the fact that I just spent the last 2 and half hours reading this entire thread and it is now 3:20 am (which would explain why I even bothered to post in the first place)!
Cheers
THE Dramaing!
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
(Out of curiosity what is the minimum possible assistance needed for a strong infant to survive until able to fend for itself?)
Infants have survived from a few months old by being nursed and looked after by other species such as nursing bitches (or even slightly older children) etc. However children as young as three have survived on their own despite pretty horrific lifestyles (the ghettos and death squads of South America for example) however they rarely thrive, their natural intelligence generally being used merely to continue surviving, and again co-operative behaviour becomes the norm' - after all while you have little to fear a couple of six year olds even armed with sticks and stones, an entire tribe of armed six year olds could succeed in killing (and eating) an adult, especially if said adult was lured into a trap first.
IF and I do say IF, children are surviving on the Reiver ships then they could very easily be clanning together from a very early age against the threat of adults to create no go areas in extremely inaccessible and hostile areas of the ships.
I'd suggest a quick read up about the sewer children of Brazil or the rookerys in Victorian London as possible examples.
Now that might make an interesting adverture - Serenity dead in the sky, their only chance of survival is to board an apparently dead Reiver ship and remove spare parts. however Kaylee finds a Reiver child and refuses to abandon her (a female child has a higher emotional value than a young male to most people) but then a rival child gang arrives and wants to destroy the last survivor of the juvie war... Ouch!
"Every heist, he's gotta start yelling my name..."
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Unless we're granting unscientific radiation resistance, I find the possibility of Reavers breeding to be negligiable, unless either they have a nonradioactive home base somewhere or it's just Joss's bad comic-book science.. which is, unfortunately, the most likely possibility, but not an enjoyable one to fanwank, so I'll move on.
Have we seen any female Reavers? I haven't noticed any. Maybe there aren't any. Or, alternately, the Pax affects them differently. Perhaps Reaver society is matriarchal, with females flying the ships and making complex group decisions while the males just snarl and pounce whenever fresh meat is around. Perhaps the skin trophies that we always hear about but they don't seem to wear when we actually see them are just something they put on after the battle is won, as a sort of... I suppose there's really no UNdisturbing way to say this, but we are talking about cannibal serial killer rapists here, so presumably the overly squeamish have already stopped reading... intimate apparel. Want to score with that hot Reaver lieutenant? Pick up a nice bottle of wine, kill someone, and dress up in their skin.
I'll be in my bunk.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Or, for an alternate theory, what if the Reaver legend pre-dated the Pax? It's not uncommon at all for people to embrace strange archetypes when deteriorating psychologically. Jayne even made that "like the bogeyman out of stories" comment, and while it was such bad OOC dialgue that it made me cringe, maybe he wasn't speaking figuratively. Maybe Reavers really were a campfire story for decades or even centuries before people en massse started emulating them. Serial killers in 18th century France, for example, often believed themselves to be werewolves. Certain American Indian tribes had the Wendigo legend, which told of people forced by circumstances to abandon their humanity and become cannibalistic ogres. Or if you'd like a more contemporary example, how about when Gilligan got bitten by a bat and thought he was a vampire? If the "rules" for Reaver behavior were already established, I can see the same behavior being manifested by space-mad travellers, reverse-effect Pax victims, and the occasional driven- mad by- watching- Reavers survivor as well.
I'll be in my bunk.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Dramaking,
I agree entirely. That's why all of this is speculation. ie. one possibility: reaver is a prion. or reavers are empathic, river is a reaver or whatever. No one is saying, "Hey, I know the fact about reavers and it's XYZ." The fun thing about an unknown is rampant speculation.
Reavers are clearly the firefly old west equivalent of indians, but that doesn't mean they are indians.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
... or the PAX could be a mislead, and the reaver-izer could be a parasitic organism that lives on miranda, and anyone who spends x number of years or months the could become a reaver, only for most settlers the PAX got them first.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
In the series it is stated that River's abilities are hyper-awareness, they removed the part of her brain that allows her not to feel Simon,"She feels everything, she can't not". What intuition and "psychic abilities" are, could be argued, are they a realization of the subconcious. The genius child and the harnessing of the subconscious to have "superpowers" is a staple of sci-fi, i.e. one of my favorite reads This Alien Shore. Did the conscious develope to protect us from the subconscious. Most of the experminting was done in River's sleep, when River's subconscious was at the forefront. I'm taking some large leaps here, but we really know very little about the human brain, so it would be hard to ague any point about the brain. Things that we beleived to be true in the more developed physical sciences are being disproved all the time, let alone the half mythology of psychology and psychiatry is a "practice". Individuals spend many, many years going to school to learn how to control the human brain through chemicals, and they would like you to beleive that they know what they are doing. We like to fools ourselves into beleiving things inoder to protect our sanity. What happens if this was removed and we were brilliant already? Would this be insanity, by definition obviously, yes? Are River and the reavers similar yes. They both have something removed which allows us to survive in a society. Could the reavers survive as a society doubtful. If every invidual was ultra-aggresive to that point they would kill each other off rather quickly. Could they fly a ship most definately. Can you drive while intoxicated or on PCP? I have no evidence to support being able to drive on PCP and have never done PCP myself. There would have to be alpha-males, ect. in any group of animals. I would find it interesting to have an explination for River's miraculous recovery in the movie? Did part of River's brain heal it's self all of a sudden or did another part of her brain adapt to take over the function of the part that was removed? Exposing the Reavers for what they were to the public caused her to be healed? From what little I know of Joss I find it hard to beleive he would leave this big of a plot hole?
Imagination is more important than knowledge HA
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Unless we're granting unscientific radiation resistance, I find the possibility of Reavers breeding to be negligiable, unless either they have a nonradioactive home base somewhere or it's just Joss's bad comic-book science.. which is, unfortunately, the most likely possibility, but not an enjoyable one to fanwank, so I'll move on.
Do we actually know what type of reactors are supposedly used in the Firefly Universe? Fission or fusion or some hybrid form of reactor? And if fission using what isotope? U-235 is the most common used currently but in 500 years time?
The reality is that I don't know so I can't give a definitive answer re the effects, however if we assume its similar to today's Fission reactors this theory of Reivers all being sterile doesn't hold water (if you excuse the pun).
As the firemen who fought chrynobyl's U-235 containment breach discovered, personal survival after major exposure is remarkably short - I believe all those directly exposed died within 6 weeks. Yes they were probably sterile but who bothered to check.
Many of those living nearby (I spent some time in the city of Gomel in Belarus which suffered major contamination from Chernobyl thanks to prevailing wind conditions at the time) survived though many would die early from cancers and the accumulative effects of the contamination. However, despite the continuing high levels of background radiation (it was in the air, in the soil, their foodstuffs etc.) people were still giving birth... Same thing occurred after Heroshima et al.
Automatic sterilisation requires either major or long-term exposure to radiation, the type that kills the exposee within a few years at most and most of these Reivers have been around for what? About ten years?
Something doesn't add up if we are to automatically assume all reivers are sterile as a result of radiation poisoning. Sure most of the adults may be completely sterile now but they don't seem to be so ill and cancerous that they can barely move etc. Radiation poisoning sufficient to cause sterility would leave other disabling signs as well and would definitely affect their stamina.
Also what about children born earlier in the exodus? Before the radiation was sufficient to sterilise? What about children born downside who were affected by the Pax?
Whatever type of containment breach Joss was talking about on Reiver ships it certainly isn't an all out meltdown...
What might occur, as it did in Gomel and Heroshima, is an increase in the number of miscarriages and early deaths, a massive increase in childhood leukememia resulting in vastly reduced lifespans and possibly long-term genetic damage of the second generation but to rule out all births as a result is I think unrealistic.
So if some Reivers COULD breed, at least in the early years, have they?
I agree that we haven't as yet seen any female Reivers but homocidal maniac's are rarely celebate and it doesn't look to me as though there are sufficient raids on normal settlements to account for Reiver sexual satisfaction especially if they then kill and eat their victims.
So what's left? Female reivers onboard possibly as sex slaves of the Reiver Alphas (and thrown to his men when he no longer wants them); Female Reivers as equals possibly acting as the pilots and mechanics perhaps; or a male only Reiver society functioning as a sort of prison culture with same-sex rape occurring onboard? Reivers as Greek warriors on PCP?
What I definitely don't see occurring on Reiver ships is a celebate lifestyle.
If I get a vote (and this is after all just speculation at the end of the day) then I'd vote for Reiver females as equal members of the clan and I'd still vote for the inclusion of feral Reiver young...
Jayne.. 'I don' care if he's just a young'un Kaylee he's still an Ai ya Reiver an' he's tryin' to eat ma' gorram leg!!! BANG!'
"Every heist, he's gotta start yelling my name..."
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I agree for the most part. I think some know a lot quite a bit more about the brain though. Psychiatrists in general, and even at the expert level, know dick about the brain. I have talked to many many. The people who know are researchers who work with mice. For those who don't know, a human is essentially a mouse for all practical purposes (human is a monkey, and monkey is an evolution of mouse.)
Removing the balance that makes us "normal" would not make us a genius. It can be done with drugs, temporarily. You can create a sense of much heightened awareness. It's important to realize that River was already a genius before they did this to her. We gather she was an einstein level genius.
We know what was done to her surgically because Simon can physically see it on the scan. He wouldn't necessarily know if anything else was done to her, say chemically.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I agree they wouldn't be sterile. I think they'd have mutant kids.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME