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Date Posted: 06:36:37 10/04/05 Tue
Author: lunasea
Subject: The Origins of Aggression (spoilers Serenity)

This essay is written on a purely literary level. I have stated elsewhere that metaphorically, what the crew says causes the Reavers is true. It isn't the black emptiness of space that turns the Reavers, but the black emptiness of the existential void. I would be happy to elaborate on this for anyone interested.


I'm tempted to tell him, and you, gentle readers, that I know the answers to all these questions about the Reavers. That the answers dwell in the Serenity movie. But that isn't strictly true. In going from television show to feature film, the rules change. Parts of the board are wiped clean. The mythology of the Reavers on Firefly is not quite the mythology of the Reavers in Serenity.
~~Jane Espenson in Finding Serenity

Joss Whedon scoffs at the idea of continuity when it comes to telling a better story. We've seen this happen with the Buffyverse. Jane infers that this also happens in Serenity. From the first scene, we see how loosely Joss plays with canon when Simon's rescue of River is rewritten. But how about the Reavers? Does Joss trash canon as Jane Espenson says in the above paragraph?

That depends. Do you consider the crew of Serenity to be reliable sources?

We first hear of Reavers in "Serenity."

ZOE
You've never heard of Reavers?

SIMON
Campfire stories... Men gone savage
at the edge of space, killing, and...

ZOE
They're not stories.

SIMON
What happens if they board us?

ZOE
If they take the ship, they'll rape
us to death, eat our flesh and sew
our skins into their clothing and if
we're very very lucky, they'll do it
in that order.

I doubt anyone would contest Zoe's description of them. The part of the mythology in question is the origins of the Reavers. Is Simon a reliable source? He believed them to be campfire stories. The origin story was just a scary story, a story which plays out later in "Bushwhacked." Zoe corrects him on the story part. She doesn't correct him on the origin part. It can be assumed that what Simon describes is what Zoe believes. Do not assume it is what Reavers are.

In "Serenity" we see how everyone is terrified of the Reavers and handles this fear each in his or her own way. This fear continues in "Bushwhacked" where we get more of the Reaver mythology.


BOOK
Of course they are. Too long removed from
civilization, perhaps -- but men. And I believe
there's a power greater than men. A power
that heals.

MAL
Reavers might take issue with that philosophy.
If they had a philosophy. And if they weren't
too busy gnawing on your insides.
(then)
Jayne's right. Reavers ain't men. Or they
forgot how to be. Now they're just... nothing.
They got out to the place of nothing. And that's
what they became.

Mal agrees with Simon's assessment of Reavers. The question before us again is Mal a reliable source for this. He is reliable when it comes to what they do, as we see in "Bushwhacked." I have little doubt that he has come across towns after they have been raided by Reavers. We know that he has lost people he knows to Reavers.

We find out something in "Bushwhacked" that the Reavers are technologically advanced enough to rig a booby trap. This is not a rare occurrence. This does not quite fit with the view of them as irrational savages. We know they run with insufficent core containments. This furthers the idea that they are insane.

The Alliance officer believes as Simon does, that Reavers are just a story.

HARKEN
You saw them, did you?

MAL
Wouldn't be sitting here talking to you
if I had.

HARKEN
No. Of course not.

MAL
But I'll tell you who did -- that poor bastard
you took off my ship. He looked right into the
face of it. Was made to stare.

HARKEN
"It?"

MAL
The darkness. Kinda darkness you can't even
imagine. Blacker than the space it moves in.

HARKEN
Very poetic.

MAL
They made him watch. He probably tried to
turn away -- they wouldn't let him. You call
him a "survivor?" He's not. A man comes up
against that kind of will, only way to deal with
it, I suspect... is to become it. He's following
the only course that's left to him. First he'll
try to make himself look like one... cut on himself,
desecrate his own flesh... then he'll start acting
like one.

Mal was dead on in his assessment of what happened and what would result. This furthers the idea that it is darkness creates the Reavers. There are two types of darkness, the edge of space and the Reavers themselves. The second did create a Reaver.

But in Serenity we see the actual origins of the Reavers. How does one reconcile this with what was shown on the show so that there isn't a change in the mythology that results in a continuity problem?

First, don't consider anyone on Serenity to be a reliable source when it comes to the origin of the Reavers. How could they possibly know? Since they don't know, they have to create their own story to explain their savagery. What would cause that sort of increased aggression and outright savagery?

On the show, the Alliance and Reavers represented two poles. The oppressive order of the Alliance on the one hand; the murderous anarchy of the Reavers on the other. Mal has to find some way to walk a tight rope between them. This is no easy feat.

It is natural for the kids on the core planets to envision the Reavers as what they most fear, the opposite of their version of the Alliance. Same with Mal. Out in space, things are not harmless. The stories about Reavers keep him from going out too far. It is easy for him to believe what he has been told about Reavers.

The statements of the crew of Serenity in Firefly cause the Reavers to represent the opposite of government intrusion. In Serenity they represent the worst of government intervention. I have written about the removal of free will from the people of Miranda, so I will not repeat myself here. (the central metaphor of Serenity)

Reavers not only represent the worst of government intervention, but the government abdicating their responsibility. Mal forces them to take responsibility as he brings the entire Reaver population right to the Alliance.

The stories circulated about Reavers allow the government to ignore them. It is possible that these stories were created by the Alliance in a misinformation campaign. The campfire stories have to come from somewhere. Those stories can be circulated through the pilots that go to the outer rim. These stories make sense to both groups.

In this way, Joss hasn't violated his previous mythology of the Reavers. He has shown how the crew of Serenity to be mistaken, which meshes with what Joss showed in Sernity, the ignorance of people about what happened to Miranda. They even believe it to be an unhospitable rock where teraforming didn't take. This is a lie circulated by the Alliance. A lie that River knows to be a lie.

Why does River know this? It is put forth by the Operative that she read a government official who knew the truth. How then was her memory of Miranda related to the trigger? She is the sole child who doesn't go to sleep in her memory. That child would be the Reaver. River possesses the aggression of the Reavers, but is not as uncontrollable. The aggression planted into her brain under controlled conditions, unlike the Mirandans turned Reaver, would serve the Alliance's purposes to make her an assassin.

This fits with what Serenity shows of the origins of the Reavers, not what Firefly says. River has a special connection to the Reavers as we see in "Bushwhacked" and Serenity. This connection is not just precognition, but a feeling so strong it is immobilizing.

All of this "new" mythology, fits with what we saw in Firefly when one realizes what the crew says is not necessarily how the Reavers were created. What we see of the Reavers savagery meshes with the explanation we are given in Serenity as well as the Reavers proficiency with technology. It furthers what we know about what was done to River. This is not a undoing of the mythology, but an expansion of it. This concurs with Joss' statement that the movie was the compression of a two year arc, an arc set up in the first season.

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