Reavers!

POSTED BY: zoid
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 16:24
VIEWED: 10220
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TALVIN

Friday, April 9, 2004 2:24 AM

Cultural Cannibalism (as opposed to Jeffrey Dahmer and certain other sorts) was (is?) far more common than people realize. I don't have the time or resources for a thesis on it tonight (you may all breathe a sigh of relief now) but I will toss out a few things that I recall reading about it:

1) It had spiritual or religious significance.

2) It was not intended to terrify the foes so much as to honor them.

3) Eating their flesh was supposed to give some of the qualities of the slain, their courage/ferocity/what have you.

4) The "long pig" idea of a whole body being roasted over a fire and feasted upon makes good horror stories, but in reality the cannibalism ritual (and ritual it was) usually centered around some specific part: heart, brain, perhaps liver...all depended on what symbolism that culture used. Nor were humans ever a primary food source. Used in sacred ritual only.

5) Sewing the skin into clothing? Well, a few Nazis were fond of the leather that could be made from human skin, and let's not discuss that any further, thanks. If you wish to carry the idea that consuming/using the flesh confers the attributes of the slain a bit further, it fits with the whole.

Too,let us consider:

A) Mal says that if they run, the Reavers have to chase them--it's their way. (Exact quote escapes me.) This implies some form of ethical and moral code they live by, which tends to go along with the spiritual significance thing.

B) We hear alot about famine out on the Rim. With that in mind, eating the dead could be simply a matter of letting nothing go to waste (in their view). Read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. What if that guy in Bushwhacked was *unclean*, *unworthy* of joining the spiritual community in some way? Leaving him alive could have been a form of insult and rejection. His later actions? A twisted form of atonement.

C) This is all very well and nice, but my arguments have one great potential fallacy: they assume that Joss reads the same sorts of books and articles that I do (which, admittedly, is most anything I could get my hands on since pre-school. Drove the parental units nuts.)

"OK. I give up. I admit it. I'm a Browncoat."

EMBERS

Friday, April 9, 2004 2:39 AM

I'm pretty sure the whole 'raping to death' aspect kind of refutes the concept of cannibalism to honor one's ememy...

I also think it is too much to just assume that Reavers are the Firefire version of Native Americans... It is just as likely that they are the 'Jesse James gang', coming in to rob and kill and disrupt society....

Personally I think Joss just wanted to come up with something vaguely terrifying, something much worse than the Alliance could ever be.

TALVIN

Friday, April 9, 2004 2:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by embers:
I'm pretty sure the whole 'raping to death' aspect kind of refutes the concept of cannibalism to honor one's ememy...

Don't be so sure! There have been and are some awfully strange customs out there.

If we are willing to perform Fraternity Initiation Hazings on people we wish to honor as worthy of being our friends and equals, we'll do most any weird thing to our enemies.

And we are *ahems* "civilized".

Quote:

Personally I think Joss just wanted to come up with something vaguely terrifying, something much worse than the Alliance could ever be.

Oh, I agree! Just pointing out that there are some solid models from history that resemble what he is using. It's all the more terrifying when you realize that they probably consider their actions normal, moral, and ethical.

HARDBURN

Saturday, April 10, 2004 3:19 AM

Just wanted to post reguarding the Reaver's and Radiation since I was rewatching Serenity last night. Just gonna quote Wash on this one.

"I'm picking up alot of Radiation... they are operating without a core containment... that's suicide."

I made sure to rewind it he definatley says the part about Radiation. Now that isn't an end to the debate entirely, but it definatley pushes me towards that side of it.

LJOSALF

Saturday, April 10, 2004 5:59 PM

I sit corrected! Radiation *is* involved when you operate without core containment. And that *is* suicide.

So, is this standard operating procedure for all Reaver ships all the time? They shouldn't pose too much of a longterm problem then, unless the Reavers are immune to the laws of physics or can psychically deflect radiation. Maybe they travel in lead-lined cryo pods until they get close to their target, then they wake up, rape, kill, and skin folks and jump back into their cryo pods for the trip back to base.

Ljosalf

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

HARDBURN

Monday, April 12, 2004 3:42 PM

I guess the best we can do is speculate since they aren't discussed any further in the series. I always figured that they are just so crazy that they don't care anymore. I'd have to assume that the engine must pump out radiation at a level that they can withstand for some time. Maybe Wash is only saying it's alot of radiation, because he should be picking up next to none. As long as there was a low amount of radiation the effect would take a while to do them any serious damage. A fanfic I was reading and had an interesting idea about Reaver's though that they might not always kill everyone, but recruit people. In a way similar to what happened in Bushwacked. Since a Reaver raiding party destroyed an entire town according to Mal in Serenity, maybe when they are running low on people they just pick up some more.

AMNESIAC

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 9:50 AM

I just don't see how the Reaver/Native American parallel came up. I don't think it's quite right to assume that Firefly is a direct copy of old Western films set in space with direct 1 to 1 relationships between all the different story elements. Firefly is more complex than that, and it takes parts from almost every genre. The Reavers seem to be from the world of Sci-Fi horror. The're the souless destructive beast that can turn you into them. I think Native Americans have been squeezed into the 'Monster' role by hack writers of bad films, but I don't think that is the case with Firefly. Yes the firefly crew fights Reavers, and John Wayne fought Native Americans, but I think that's the extent of the similarities between the two groups.

STEVE580

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 10:48 AM

I disagree; I don't think that the reaver/native American parallel should be dismissed so quickly. To the colonists, these peolpe were savages, and they were feared. The tribes lived away from civilizitation - that is to say, they were an external threat. I do think that reavers are the native Americans of this space western. Barbaric, with lesser technology, living on the edge of space...the parallels are there.

-Steve

BLAZINGBUG

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 3:59 PM

I think the confusion may come from refering to Reavers as a Native American analogy. They aren't.

Reavers are an "Injun" analogy. They are analogous to a fictional treatment of Native Americans common to early Westerns.

As Steve said, they fill the role of barbaric savages that the people living at the fringes of civilization have to fear and whom people in the Core regard as campfire stories.

Bushwhacked is a great example. It has elements of the classic, "The Searchers." Throughout most of that movie John Wayne's character makes the same comment about his niece kidnapped by Indians that Mal does about the survivor of the Reaver attack, that death would be preferable to living after being among them.

Only Joss turns it on its ear (once more) by removing the racial and cultural influences and truly making Reavers the barbarism within humanity.

Now, as a social commentary they represent the extreme side of humanity's barbarism when it fails to be open-minded. For what greater a concept to comprehend than the vastness of space and existence, and thus how much farther does humanity fall when it fails to do so.

So in a way the Reavers could represent both the "Cowboys" and the "Indians." The "Indians" by way of their function in the story, and symbolically, the "Cowboys," like Wayne in "The Searchers," who would commit barbarism due to their narrow-mindedness.

Or maybe they're just cool bad guys.

"Wacky fun..."

DORAN

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 4:24 PM

I'd really like to see a fashback sometime to show the event that allow Zoe and Mal to have som much knowledge about Reavers.

Perhaps there isn't one event.. maybe it's knowledge accumlated over the years in space.

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