Reavers by RochesterBrowncaot

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Reavers

POSTED BY: ROCHESTERBROWNCAOT
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 3, 2007 09:55
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VIEWED: 10540
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Saturday, October 22, 2005 4:04 PM

there has been a question floating among me and my friends about the Reavers. How do they reproduce? Is it like in "Bushwacked" where they make people watch and therefore they become one, or are there little Reaver children?
Any other ideas?

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 4:19 PM

PURPLEYIN

just a few days ago there was talk of...(spoiler for film)

Select to view spoiler:

pax p-26 hydro-chlorate being a prion passed on through bodily fluids. River being immune because a) the alliance knew exactly what caused the condition, so could figure out how to immunise someone against it, and b) wanted River to be an assassin/warrior who would probably have to eventually fight reavers at some point, so they probably thought they may as well immunise her.

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 4:25 PM

CHARLIETHEBLOODY

*edit, please note, left it too long whilst writing this so didn't know about what purpleyin posted, that would explain it, is it speculation?*

hmm, thats interesting, I never thought of that.

but in the film they don't seem to have been around for that long, which then makes it odd how people would say they were campfire stories.

can't remember the details so maybe someone who's seen it enough times or got the script in the VC can clarify.

I kinda got the impression that there had been stories before and that the reavers had been fitted into them but they themselves had only been there for about one generation. can't see them managing to keep a child alive to reach adulthood. unless we're just sposed to take it from bushwhacked that they occasionally leave survivors to become like them, though that implys a little too much forethought and purpose han they should have...

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 5:58 PM

BJAY

Ok heres how it goes. Reavers attack some poor settlement. They Rape Eat and sew everyone exept the biggest and the strongest. They make all of them watch it and then they become reavers. They mess up a ship, throw some dead bodies on it and fly off to attack some other settlement. Repeat process. The reavers would turn all the strong men and kill everyone else. So in as settelment of of say a hundred people, there are at least 40 men who are going to get turned into reavers. Then theyll take whatever ship is around and take off.

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 6:13 PM

ERENETH

There could be children, a reaver, afterall, is just a human pushed over the edge...

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 6:33 PM

PYROFALKON

I though that there was just a psychological breaking point, embedded over the last five hundred years. Watching a "reavering" might or might not for lack of a term i like , reaverize a person. You must snap, go beyond the point of no return. Reavers are essentially the psychical embodiemnt of Thanatos, of the id, and you must give into the primal fercoity of such to become a reaver.

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 6:51 PM

JACQUI

Quote:
Originally posted by PurpleYin:
just a few days ago there was talk of...(spoiler for film)

Select to view spoiler:
pax p-26 hydro-chlorate being a prion passed on through bodily fluids.

I really don't think that's the case, because...

Select to view spoiler:

In the big fight scene, we see a reaver jump onto Inara and force her to the ground, biting her on the face before Simon pulls it off her. Later, when Mal rejoins the group, Inara has a big bloody patch on her face where the bite was.

She is perfectly fine after that, at the funeral, at the rebuilding of Serenity and when Mal asks her is she wants to stay on the ship... she's fine and certainly no reaver.

The pax p-26 hydro-chlorate was added to the air systems of Miranda, so we know it is airborne. We also know that it has since been cleared from the atmosphere (because it didn't affect any of our BDHs, nor did it affect Dr. Moran on the capture that she made, and she would have been on the planet a lot sooner than the BDHs. I figure it has a fairly short life span while airborne.

However, once it is ingested it will either sedate your aggression responses to the point where you are inable to function (90% of cases), or overstimulate them to the point where you lose all control (10% of cases). These changes to the aggression responses would remain the same once the poison is still in your system or not.

That was my understanding of it, anyway.

*~*~*
"Your toes are in the sand."
"And your head's up your..."
"Hey!"

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Saturday, October 22, 2005 9:07 PM

MAJOST

It's 1/10th of a percent. :)

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 6:29 AM

PURPLEYIN

good point jacqui.
i still cant see it passed on through the traumatic experiance though.. maybe it gets passed on as an STD. we know the reavers are big into rape...

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 11:33 AM

DREAMTROVE

The best that was posted before I think Doncoat said it.

Reaver is a prion, but you have to eat reaver flesh in order to get it. Ergo, no one gets it on Serenity.

No one before except one person I think, thought that River was built to fight Reavers. I and a couple others posted River is a Reaver, or Reaver-like. River might carry the Prion. But you don't get it unless you eat River. That didn't come out right. Eat River's flesh. No I better give up on this one. Anyway, no one makes a meal out of River, so they don't get it, Inara doesn't eat Reaver. Reavers make their initiates eat Reaver. Yuck. This is the idea anyway.

The PAX is an airborn chemical. It's probably not the prion, if our prion theory holds. But the prion might have been present.

So consider this new synthesis. Reaver Prion is native to Miranda. Anyone eating the food on Miranda, might be eating Reaver Prion. Maybe it's very rare. But the Reaver Prion in the food is at too low a level to infect you because your immune system kills it.

Then enter the PAX. It makes you lose all your will to fight to live. Maybe that includes your immune system. Those who happened to eat Reaver Prion in the early stages of the PAX became Reavers.

Now Reaver flesh is more heavily infected, or Reaver initiation also requires injection with some immune suppressant.

Here's one final idea. Maybe Reaver is a retrovirus. That way it can rewrite the DNA of the infected person, leaving a permanent change even if the virus is discovered.

Either way, surely there's an evolutionary advantage to inciting cannibalism as a side effect for something which can only survive by having animals eat infected flesh.

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 12:27 PM

PURPLEYIN

Sorry for what I’m gonna say, because I know it’s gonna come off all wrong and passive aggressive like...
But why bring evolution into this? It’s not even connected in any way. Also why does the immune system need to be suppressed? If being a reaver means suffering from acute psychosis, and behaving with an extreme pack mentality how does river show any symptoms, or infer an infection? And finally, if this agent, whatever it is, is found within the muscular tissue of infected individuals then it would be found in the blood of the reavers (especially since its so unlikely that someone would lacerate a reaver without causing any tissue damage, in turn leaking the agent into the bloodstream o_0).
Sorry about that.

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 1:19 PM

RONAN

I took the Bushwhacked guy to have suffered from something like the Helsinki syndrome - you know where a captive spends enough time with a captor to begin to behave like them and believe in their 'philosophy'. You get the idea anyway...

Are there lady reavers (reaverettes)?

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 2:24 PM

STILLWATERS

I think Reavers are suffering from two separate psychosis:

The one caused by the PAX, causes extreme aggression/possibly territorial instinct.

The other was caused by the massive deaths on Miranda remember Reavers won't eat anything dead. The dead bodies on Miranda were not molested. The Reaver lurk around the planet. Crazy or not these people watched their loved ones lay down and die, along with millions of others for no apparent reason.

Shiny, lets be bad guys!

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 2:44 PM

WOMBATGRRL

Yes there are reaverettes - see the Serenity Pictorial Guide

Also, they could be campfire stories about them after only a decade or so - think how quickly urban legends spread! (*giggles to self as imagines Mythbusters doing a show on reavers*)

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 3:22 PM

DONCOAT

As far as I know, there's no evidence that there were any stories about Reavers prior to (approximately) ten years before the events in the movie.

The scenes of River's classroom take place when she's nine years old, or eight years before Serenity. That allows at least a couple of years for Reaver stories to reach school-age kids on the core planets. Since the 'verse seems to have instant communication from edge to edge, that's no problem.

Jayne's remarks in the cargo bay are that Reavers showed up within the last ten years "like the bogeyman from stories". He does not imply that there were any stories about Reavers before they appeared, only that there were scary stories about bogeymen.

If Pax is a prion (as I speculated), it could still be dispersed in the air, and ingested after it settles in water supplies or onto food. That could mean that the agent that caused the "apathy deaths" on Miranda could be the same agent (and has varying effects), or the Reaver agent could be a mutated form.

If ingestion is the means of transmission, the Reavers have a way of "reproducing" -- just feed your victim some Reaver flesh (from, say, a facial cut). That would make Reavers a sort of vampire-in-reverse -- you become a Reaver by drinking one's blood, rather than the other way around. Perhaps the Reavers' taste for raw human meat is a symptom of the prion infection as it tries to spread itself; many infectious agents change the behavior of their hosts in ways beneficial to the agent (and not necessarily good for the host).

One thing we don't know is how long it takes to become Reaverized. Prion diseases tend to have long incubation periods, but there's no reason I know of that this has to be true.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ain't about you, Jayne. It's about what they need.

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 10:45 AM

ROCHESTERBROWNCAOT

i just watched the movie again so...10% of 3 million gives us...300,000 Reavers....thats a lot of Reavers

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 11:31 AM

HAWK

If each one of that 300,000 were to reaver up one person each, then that bigger bunch of 600,000 were to reaver up another one each, and so on, and so forth...

That's, like...

That's math I can't even do!

Dis!

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 11:48 AM

SAMEERTIA

Just a thought-

Who says Miranda was the first?
How many other failures did they have that got chalked up to terra-forming events?

And in "Bushwacked" only one man was left alive on the Trans-U, and he wasn't the biggest or the strongest. Perhaps there's something else they look for, some clue that tells them whether someone is vulnerable enough to turn Reaver when forced to stare into the darkness?

December Screen Caps are up at
www.jaynesbunk.com

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 12:19 PM

IWASAFRYCOOK

I don't know if anyone read the very interesting essays in "Finding Serenity," but one of them had some very interesting theories of Reaver Guy from Bushwhacked. It said basically that RG had some very very serious Stockholm Syndrome going on. Going from that theory, the reavers could attack ships and see if anyone gets super-stockholm syndrome (ie survives). If they do, the reavers either leave them (maybe by accident or they forget) or take them on their ships.

Another question entirely: What do reavers eat? They can't live on human flesh alone (protein poisoning would kill them as long as the pax didn't change their physiological structure), and they don't take the food supplies from the ships they pillage, so how do they feed their fleets?

Sorry if there's some inconsistancies, I'm in a rush to leave but I had to write something!

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 12:53 PM

SAMEERTIA

Oooh!
Good question about what Reavers eat. I'm afraid I'm going to have to put the whole thing into the same category as Bester's reg couple. :)

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 1:27 PM

HYDRAGON

I think that the Reavers have little Reaver babies.

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 1:27 PM

HYDRAGON

I think that the Reavers have little Reaver babies.

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Sunday, December 4, 2005 1:29 PM

GRSCJO3

Okay, so, here's what I think.

The pax only affects the small portion of the population (tenth of a percent, or whatever). So for any Reavers to be made from consumption of Reaver flesh, there'd have to be a whole lot of people eating Reavers for this to be anywhere near a substantial influx of population.

When people watch their family and friends being tortured, raped, and eaten, they go crazy. They don't exactly become Reavers, they just go nuts and imitate being Reavers. While this could make for more Reavers from the point of view of the generic person that doesn't know about the pax, it's not to say that the actual Reaver-increased-aggression-through-chemicals is spread. And it probably doesn't happen all that often. I know that if I were a killing/raping crazy maniac, I'd rather kill someone than leave 'em alive to have a new buddy [;-)].

If Reavers go around raping lots and lots of people, their sex drives are probably upped just as much as their agression. Even if not, they clearly still have sex drives, and so likely reproduce amongst themselves. Sure, it would be difficult for a child to grow up in such a situation. But it's not like the Reaver population is booming. Serenity and crew went through Reaver territory and picked up how many ships, at most 40? Big ships, but that's still not a whooole lot of people. And besides internal fighting (which doesn't look to be that bad, since the Reavers don't look like they're fighting each other whenever we see them), it's not like they have a major source of death...

"I'd rather have a show that a hundred people need to watch than that a thousand people like to watch." --Joss

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Monday, December 5, 2005 5:59 AM

SIC

I haven't read absolutely all of the posts, but it seems many of you have the impression of some kind of viral or otherwise infectious medical condition causing the reavers to be reavers.

IMHO, both the series and the movie pretty clearly states that this is a mental disorder, and has no physical manifestation. The only physical part of it is the gas that initiated the whole deal. The original few reavers was made because of the gas, but the ones that are created by the originals are just being mentally tormented to turn into reavers.

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Monday, December 5, 2005 6:33 AM

CYBERSNARK

Quote:
Originally posted by DonCoat:
That would make Reavers a sort of vampire-in-reverse -- you become a Reaver by drinking one's blood, rather than the other way around.

No, actually that's a normal vampire; a vampire drinking your blood will kill you, but to turn you, they have to give you a sip of their blood.

And no, it's not just a Buffyverse thing, it was in Stoker's novel too (Dracula cut his chest and forced Mina to drink).

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Monday, December 5, 2005 7:53 AM

TIENSHAODUH

Quote:
Originally posted by Ronan:
I took the Bushwhacked guy to have suffered from something like the Helsinki syndrome - you know where a captive spends enough time with a captor to begin to behave like them and believe in their 'philosophy'. You get the idea anyway...

It's Stockholme Syndrome.

=================================================
"God has a plan for you, Gaius. He has a plan for everything and everyone." Number Six '33'
=================================================
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan
=================================================
"Another dimension, new galaxy. Intergalactic, planetary." Beastie Boys

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Monday, December 5, 2005 9:04 AM

SIC

Quote:
And no, it's not just a Buffyverse thing, it was in Stoker's novel too (Dracula cut his chest and forced Mina to drink).

... and in Anne Rice's novels as well.

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Monday, December 5, 2005 11:22 AM

RONAN

Thanks for correcting my mistake nearly 2 months after making it and just to get even - there's no 'e' in Stockholm.

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Tuesday, December 6, 2005 3:36 AM

TAPION1IVES

i keep seeing people ask why reavers dont eat/rape each other the way i understand it is that there aggression is sent sky rocketing.
it reminds me of football hooligans and the mob mentality that the doont attack each other because thats there team if you get me.

basically they are like rioters. at least thats what i get from it.

also why wud they need to reproduce 10% of the population of a planet is a lot

**************************************************
Murphy: It must have taken a dozen slaves a dozen days to get you into that getup. 'Course your daddy tells me it takes the space of a schoolboy's wink to get you out of it again.

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Tuesday, December 6, 2005 7:57 AM

TIENSHAODUH

Ease up on the hostilities. Just thought you should know...

=================================================
"God has a plan for you, Gaius. He has a plan for everything and everyone." Number Six '33'
=================================================
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan
=================================================
"Another dimension, new galaxy. Intergalactic, planetary." Beastie Boys

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Tuesday, December 6, 2005 12:12 PM

RONAN

Hostilities? Bit touchy are we? Just have no time for smart asses.

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Wednesday, December 7, 2005 3:08 PM

CYBERSNARK

Quote:
Originally posted by Sic:
Quote:
And no, it's not just a Buffyverse thing, it was in Stoker's novel too (Dracula cut his chest and forced Mina to drink).

... and in Anne Rice's novels as well.

Call me a snob, but I like to consider Bram Stoker as a bit more authoritative than Anne Rice.

Y'know, what with having pretty much invented the genre.

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

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Saturday, December 10, 2005 3:28 AM

SIC

You snob!!

I'm not saying anything against you, snob, I'm just delivering even more evidence to the notion that this is in fact very much the essense of vampirism.

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Wednesday, January 3, 2007 7:19 AM

KEVINGREY

There are a lot of questions still surrounding prions, their transmission, incubation, mutation, etc.

I think this to be the most plausible candidate, personally, since they are the culprit in “Mad Cow” and other such diseases/conditions.

And also because there are still a lot of questions about the mechanics of it, leaving a lot of leeway for sci-fi to build on. Genetic links, suggesting transmission through birth etc. and “mutations”.

Given time and research funding, such could be turned into quite nasty weapons, or altered to try to produce beneficial effects, in much the same way that viral-gene therapy is being used/researched.

Though I agree that most seem to have a fairly long incubation cycle, designer “tailoring” could alter this considering that non-threatening prions are considered to be present in large quantities in the body, in quiescent state. Thus, certain “catalyst” prions could be used to mutate these large quantities in quite a short time-frame, hypothetically speaking.

This would arguably alleviate the need for a continuous pumping of a chemical agent in order to keep a population pacified, as a “one shot” dose could do it, depending on actual transmission between potential hosts, etc. With what we know, or don’t know about prions, there is even the potential, though small, for an airborne transmission between hosts. If tailored, I would think this potential could rise.

Assuming for the most part that the statistics on Miranda hold true, then if Reavers were infectious, there would still only be 1/10th of 1 percent of the population susceptible to their particular mutation of the prions and it could be, that this particular mutation means that all trace of the previous “pacifying” nature of the prions was gone. So, you either become infected as a Reaver, if you fall in the percentile, or the prions are simply harmless to you. One of the two.

Since the brain regulates endocrine activities, it could even be that after initial infection, one of the first things to alter is pheremone production. Meaning that Reavers would be able, like other animals, to “sniff out” those who have become infected and thus, leave the “seed” or take it with them as they continue on.

Since rape seems to be the first assault the Reavers make (“for hours and hours”), this would give time for transmission, rapid incubation and preliminary alteration. By the time they were done and before they settled down to their meal, they may already know which ones have been infected and which ones haven’t by smell alone.

Just my thoughts on this.

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Wednesday, January 3, 2007 9:55 AM

ANNUETTE

Wow just read through all the responses, lots of really interesting science based ones and nothing I could add save the one thing that struck me and creeped me out when discussing it with a friend.

300,000 Reaver population? I wonder how many of those were children to start with? Struck us as a slightly creepy thought since all the 'dead' scenes on Miranda had adult corpses in.

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