Amph Still Flying: Serenity

i hate it when my fellow reavers laugh at me! one time i got confused when i went into a battle.. was it eat then kill, or kill then eat? the guys mocked me for days back on the ship. but at least, i'm better off than jenkins. he ate a part of someone's brain and spinal fluid, and now we think he's getting mad cow.

 

Day 1: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.
Day 2: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.
Day 3: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.
Day 4: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.
Day 5: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.
Day 6: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.
Day 7: Saw Betty Hopkins at church, I can't believe she'd wear white after labor day.
Day 8: Raped, murdered, cannibalized.

 

So... are most of you agreeing with me or Balrox at this point? I can't tell.

-P!-

 

I'm with Balrox. Sorry, Trell.

Yes, I know we haven't seen any Reaver young or female Reavers (that we could tell) but this doesn't mean they don't exist. As it is, we haven't seen much of the Reavers at all, male or otherwise. So we can't assume they don't exist. Of course, it's not like they have a nurturing family life or anything, but they must have some sense of self-preservation.

 

It's probably a combo. I'd guess sheer numbers first, but then maybe children and survivors.

I don't buy too strongly into the children theory - since Reavers are so aggressive, that would make them rather unsuited for raising young children, plus it raises the Pax-heredity issue. But it does seem possible.

The surivor theory I don't think is too plausible either. I think the guy escaped being seen, or was kept alive due to some bizarre psychological compulsion, but I don't think the Reavers intentionally left him behind.

But - the impression I get is that Reavers are capable of rational thought. Remember they had an entire world at their disposal, and yet none of the bodies seemed mauled, and the researcher didn't seem to indicate that any of the people on the planet had been disturbed by the Reavers.

"These are just a few of the images we've collected. As you can see, it isn't what we thought. There's been no war, no fighting. It's the Pax. The G-23 hydrochloric Pax we released into the atmosphere. It was supposed to make the population more peaceful, to weed out aggression. Well...it worked. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped going to work, eating, anything. There's 30 million people here, and they just lay down and let themself die. *noise* I don't have much time. About a tenth of a percent of the population's aggression response increased exponentially...They've already killed most of the crew. And what's more, they've...done things...to them."

Oh, and am I the only person who heard Kaylee's line as "You mean to say...us six?" ie the crew of Serenity?

 

What is everyone else saying Kaylee's line was?

 

"You mean to say as...sex?" I think the implication was that she was going to say something like "You mean to say as boyfriend/girlfriend", but she decided to cut to the chase and ask what she really wanted to know.

M. Scott

 

Well screw this, I'm gonna live!

 

If Kaylee came from New Zealand it might sound as WMCoolmon heard it.

 

It came in at number 2 on the Irish box office charts. Not that that means much as it only amounts to a piddling ?106,862. It's been reviewed really well here, but there's been no marketing for it at all. I've only seen one tv ad, and no bus posters or magazine adverts. On top of that, I had probably one of the worst experiences at the cinema watching it because of the audience. Talking the whole way through it! And clapping!

 

I think that we can probably stop with the blacked out spoilers now- the movie's been out for 2 1/2 weeks now.

 

This is hilarious: Serenity in 2000 words: http://www.swartzer.com/writing/serenity2000.php

 

my guess is that Reavers, though cannibals, aren't carrion eaters. some carnivores won't eat carcasses they come across because instinctually they know that the safest meat is meat you've killed yourself. (other carcasses might be bodies of animals that died from sickness, or carcasses lying around might have started rotting). reavers might know better than to try to eat corpses of people who died for no outward reason at all.

it could also be that reavers were crazy/smart enough to get off Miranda and decide not to go back. once the reavers left miranda, no one was left to disturb the PAX victims until Serenity came along. perhaps the crew of the research ship realized the death and destruction and sent down teams to rescue survivors.. not realizing that the only survivors were Reaveriffic. these survivors were brought up to the research monitoring ship and started ripping the crew apart, and the holomessage was recorded, but it was lost in the crash on miranda. but the reavers moved onto the rest of the ships around miranda and formed the core of their fleet.

 

Except we've seen that happen. We know that new Reavers (at least to some degree) are got by making crews of captured ships watch the torture.

Also, I doubt that their are Reaver children. The ships that Reavers permanently live in are shambolic and have no core containment. The kids would die from radiation sickness. Let's not forget, that kids of that age haven't been driven insane yet and so can't push their body to the extent that the adults can.

 

Extra points for use of the word "shambolic."

 

Elsewhere someone made a good point:

Given the so-called "box office slump", and the extremely high margins, both in terms of profits and sales, to be found in the DVD market, it's actually fairly unlikely that Universal ever expected Serenity to be a box-office smash. A theatrical run these days is not much more than marketing for a DVD release. People see the name on the marquee for a little while and go "Hmm. I'll check it out on DVD." And Serenity is almost certain to become a smash on DVD once people rent it on a whim, fall in love and start spreading the word about it. Combine that with other favors Joss is going to be doing for Universal (like Wonder Woman), and they'll probably be willing to keep him going on pet projects as long as he keeps turning things around for them.

M. Scott

 

And the phrase "are got".

 

i wonder if that lack of core containment causes sterility among reavers...

 

No, we've seen a guy who's been around Reavers for at least a few solid hours (As in the Pax could have taken effect.) then become rather Reaverish. We have no actual proof that there was any sort of planned effort to use this method to turn him into a Reaver other than what Mal and the crew has heard before. They also heard that going to deep into space will turn you mad and into a Reaver. They were wrong there, why not in the area that makes extra amounts of not sense?

-P!-

 

If Pax carried some sort of contagion, then at least one crew member of Serenity would have become a Reaver because River was given dosages of the drug.

I doubt we'll ever really know the true nature of Reavers, particularly if we don't get another movie.

 

But it effects only 1 in a thousand people in a Reaver fashion. The part that causes that could be genetic. Also, they could have simply not been around it long enough to become affected in either way we've seen.

-P!-

 

I don't get why you all think there were more than 30,000 Reavers at Miranda. We don't know how many people each of those ships carried and I'm willing to bet a good portion of the Reaver population were killed in the final fight (considering the Alliance troops showed up dirtside) so its quite possible the Reavers are no longer a threat.

 

there is no proof that Pax needs only a few hours to work. for people to die of starvation takes weeks - it might require a very long exposure to Pax to get it to work. plus if the reavers were so keen on aerosoling a ship just for one person, why not use it on the whole boatload and turn them all into either pax victims or reavers? further, why leave their experiment behind if they are investing this much pax? it would make sense to not mix your potential new family with your food.

your theory is very iffy:
If the reavers somehow got stores of Pax for themselves or learned to make it themselves..
If they managed to pump a prey ship full of it and somehow beat the odds of finding someone who has that 0.1% chance...
If they manage not to kill/rape/eat that person during the time it takes for the pax to settle in...

 

My theory is basically little more than we know that what Mal and crew think about Reavers has been, and seems to be total bunk.

A freaky disease thingy made Reavers. Somehow this thing is making more, since it makes actual sense, and the method Mal thinks is at work does not make any sense at all.

Pax could be a virus or bacteria of some kind. It could have mutated to become more infectious, yet need a different introduction method, like spit or blood or something.

Basically, I'm not sure how Reavers are made. I just know that saying that Reavers make other Reavers by making people go crazy is the dumbest idea I've ever heard, and that in all likely hood the substance that first created the Reavers probably somehow is still making more. I don't know how. I just know that when even Jayne thinks something's dumb, we should be on to it too.

-P!-