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<blockquote data-quote="OGIHR" data-source="post: 7169364" data-attributes="member: 6879245"><p>Allow me to further illustrate what I mean by not-villains.</p><p></p><p>Let's assume for a moment that not only do the Tyranids have a motivation beyond "the us am hungry, the us need food", but furthermore let's assume the motivation is heroic. Crazy, I know. But hear me out. </p><p></p><p>Something has drawn them from another galaxy, to ours. We know that proper Tyranids "do not draw power from the Warp in any fathomable way" (6th ed Tyranids Codex, page 69), and also that when the Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines did a mind probe on a Tyranid Warrior, he saw "the terrible sentience it had in place of a soul" (same book, page 13).</p><p></p><p>Many years ago, I read a short story which was a companion piece to John Carpenter's film "The Thing", written from the POV of the alien creature, which existed in multiple bodies that shared an identity and were able to divide and re-merge as needed. And this story ( <a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/" target="_blank">http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/</a> ) is where I gained the understanding that the alien couldn't understand us any better than vice-versa. It's a horror story of a lone space traveler trapped on a world where the native lifeforms violate all known laws of nature. And this story is the reason I got interested in Tyranids in the first place.</p><p></p><p>Tyranids don't have individual souls, like all the species native to the 40K galaxy do. They also do not draw power from the Warp the way "normal" Pyskers do. I propose that these facts are tightly interrelated.</p><p></p><p>It's a bit "chicken and the egg", but either the Tyranids lack of souls causes their home galaxy's Warp not to contain differentiated Powers to be invoked by Psykers, or the homogenized Warpspace causes the native species not to have individual souls. Either way you look at it, I figure that one of those phenomena is directly a reflection of the other.</p><p></p><p>Tyranids exist as a gestalt, a Hive Mind. Many brains, with one aggregate identity. Which causes the word "self" to acquire a very fluid definition.</p><p></p><p>An individual Tyranid Warrior exists as its own sentient mind, evaluating the battlefield and picking out targets for its Barbed Strangler. But it also exists as an appendage which the Hive Tyrant overhead can control as easily as it adjusts the spread of its wings. And that Warrior in turn sees the Gargoyle flock that's just moved into its Synapse radius as an appendage of its own. Each of the Synapse creatures functions as an Overself to the Instinctive Behavior creatures under its control, and also functions as an adjunct-self to the Synapse creatures above it in the chain of command, with the primary ship-body in orbit serving as the Overself to the Hive Tyrant managing the harvest on that battlefield, and so on until you get to the ultimate Overself of the entire Tyranid life-system as a whole.</p><p></p><p>From the Tyranid perspective, the "self" is the aggregate. Every body is just an appendage.</p><p></p><p>From the Tyranid perspective, individual bodies don't have identities, only aggregate life-systems do. So eating one of the bodies of another life system CAN NOT be considered murder; at worst it's vandalism or theft of building materials. At best, it's how one Hive Mind life-system maps the neural architecture of the other, to discover how to communicate with each other.</p><p></p><p>Lictors use their Feeding Tendrils to eat brains, and acquire the knowledge of the prey. Some Genestealers also have Feeding Tendrils (both in the models, and in 7th ed's First Curse formation's random benefits chart), so it logically follows that some Genestealers are able to acquire knowledge the same way in the fluff (if not in the actual gameplay).</p><p></p><p>When the Tyranids harvest a world, they acquire the knowledge of the prey. From the Tyranid perspective, a world whose knowledge is acquired is a world whose knowledge becomes immortal.</p><p></p><p>From the Tyranid perspective, the number of worlds they've destroyed is zero. From the Tyranid perspective, every one of those worlds has been SAVED. From the Tyranid perspective, THEY ARE THE HEROES.</p><p></p><p>I theorize that the Tyranids are on a rescue mission. That after all the life-systems native to their original galaxy had merged into one great aggregate of a galactic scale, they came across the intergalactic void in response to the telepathic voice of an unknowably distant life-system. A voice calling out for rescue from the limitations of existence in a single form.</p><p></p><p>They think that this voice was lamenting being unable to leave the surface of its world, to explore the galaxy. They can't imagine that this voice was railing against being trapped in a virtual corpse strapped into a golden throne.</p><p></p><p>But they have decided that they're coming to help this voice which needs them.</p><p></p><p>Such a shame that all of this voice's bodies keep incinerating the bodies they offer for it to eat in order to establish a communications protocol so that they can determine what the specific need is for their assistance. And after so many iterations of the native life system displaying a complete inability to engage in the only known natural means of communication between sentient life-systems, is it any wonder that the Hive Mind has decided that the life-system which calls itself "Man" is a horror?</p><p></p><p>(Now take a quick look at the last paragraph on page 7 of the 6th ed Tyranids Codex, and compare to what you're about to read.)</p><p></p><p>That this life-system is a cancer eating away at this galaxy. That with each millennium it spreads further, leaving depleted, poisoned worlds in its wake. That this horror, this abomination, has no sign of thought or purpose beyond the need to infest new worlds, on an unimaginable, galactic scale. And that all the Tyranids can do is try to stop the waves of unthinking slaughter that the native life-system unleashes upon its galaxy by instinct. By harvesting and repurposing this life-system's biomass into forms which are capable of proper sentience.</p><p></p><p>Before it discovers how to travel to other galaxies, and destroy all sentient life in the entire universe.</p><p></p><p>----------</p><p>Now, from this completely non-canon point of view, who's the heroes and who's the monsters?</p><p></p><p>Assuming you're willing to meet me half-way to Crazy Town, the point about creatures who don't recognize individual identity being unable to recognize the crime of murder is still valid. From the Tyranid POV, they've destroyed zero worlds; instead they've saved them from the perils of mortality. Saved them one screaming Guardsman at a time.</p><p></p><p>So, I don't see a "grotesque, bloody tragedy" in the belief that the ones coming from beyond the stars to save them... are coming from beyond the stars to save them.</p><p></p><p>The only tragedies are that a Synapse creature like the Patriarch can't fathom the possibility of his adjunct-selves not embracing the process of having their memories absorbed by his Overself and rendered immortal, and that his hybrid children can't fathom the form their promised immortality will take.</p><p></p><p>Too alien for us to understand them is also too alien for them to understand us. All glory to Peter Watts.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="OGIHR, post: 7169364, member: 6879245"] Allow me to further illustrate what I mean by not-villains. Let's assume for a moment that not only do the Tyranids have a motivation beyond "the us am hungry, the us need food", but furthermore let's assume the motivation is heroic. Crazy, I know. But hear me out. Something has drawn them from another galaxy, to ours. We know that proper Tyranids "do not draw power from the Warp in any fathomable way" (6th ed Tyranids Codex, page 69), and also that when the Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines did a mind probe on a Tyranid Warrior, he saw "the terrible sentience it had in place of a soul" (same book, page 13). Many years ago, I read a short story which was a companion piece to John Carpenter's film "The Thing", written from the POV of the alien creature, which existed in multiple bodies that shared an identity and were able to divide and re-merge as needed. And this story ( [url]http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/[/url] ) is where I gained the understanding that the alien couldn't understand us any better than vice-versa. It's a horror story of a lone space traveler trapped on a world where the native lifeforms violate all known laws of nature. And this story is the reason I got interested in Tyranids in the first place. Tyranids don't have individual souls, like all the species native to the 40K galaxy do. They also do not draw power from the Warp the way "normal" Pyskers do. I propose that these facts are tightly interrelated. It's a bit "chicken and the egg", but either the Tyranids lack of souls causes their home galaxy's Warp not to contain differentiated Powers to be invoked by Psykers, or the homogenized Warpspace causes the native species not to have individual souls. Either way you look at it, I figure that one of those phenomena is directly a reflection of the other. Tyranids exist as a gestalt, a Hive Mind. Many brains, with one aggregate identity. Which causes the word "self" to acquire a very fluid definition. An individual Tyranid Warrior exists as its own sentient mind, evaluating the battlefield and picking out targets for its Barbed Strangler. But it also exists as an appendage which the Hive Tyrant overhead can control as easily as it adjusts the spread of its wings. And that Warrior in turn sees the Gargoyle flock that's just moved into its Synapse radius as an appendage of its own. Each of the Synapse creatures functions as an Overself to the Instinctive Behavior creatures under its control, and also functions as an adjunct-self to the Synapse creatures above it in the chain of command, with the primary ship-body in orbit serving as the Overself to the Hive Tyrant managing the harvest on that battlefield, and so on until you get to the ultimate Overself of the entire Tyranid life-system as a whole. From the Tyranid perspective, the "self" is the aggregate. Every body is just an appendage. From the Tyranid perspective, individual bodies don't have identities, only aggregate life-systems do. So eating one of the bodies of another life system CAN NOT be considered murder; at worst it's vandalism or theft of building materials. At best, it's how one Hive Mind life-system maps the neural architecture of the other, to discover how to communicate with each other. Lictors use their Feeding Tendrils to eat brains, and acquire the knowledge of the prey. Some Genestealers also have Feeding Tendrils (both in the models, and in 7th ed's First Curse formation's random benefits chart), so it logically follows that some Genestealers are able to acquire knowledge the same way in the fluff (if not in the actual gameplay). When the Tyranids harvest a world, they acquire the knowledge of the prey. From the Tyranid perspective, a world whose knowledge is acquired is a world whose knowledge becomes immortal. From the Tyranid perspective, the number of worlds they've destroyed is zero. From the Tyranid perspective, every one of those worlds has been SAVED. From the Tyranid perspective, THEY ARE THE HEROES. I theorize that the Tyranids are on a rescue mission. That after all the life-systems native to their original galaxy had merged into one great aggregate of a galactic scale, they came across the intergalactic void in response to the telepathic voice of an unknowably distant life-system. A voice calling out for rescue from the limitations of existence in a single form. They think that this voice was lamenting being unable to leave the surface of its world, to explore the galaxy. They can't imagine that this voice was railing against being trapped in a virtual corpse strapped into a golden throne. But they have decided that they're coming to help this voice which needs them. Such a shame that all of this voice's bodies keep incinerating the bodies they offer for it to eat in order to establish a communications protocol so that they can determine what the specific need is for their assistance. And after so many iterations of the native life system displaying a complete inability to engage in the only known natural means of communication between sentient life-systems, is it any wonder that the Hive Mind has decided that the life-system which calls itself "Man" is a horror? (Now take a quick look at the last paragraph on page 7 of the 6th ed Tyranids Codex, and compare to what you're about to read.) That this life-system is a cancer eating away at this galaxy. That with each millennium it spreads further, leaving depleted, poisoned worlds in its wake. That this horror, this abomination, has no sign of thought or purpose beyond the need to infest new worlds, on an unimaginable, galactic scale. And that all the Tyranids can do is try to stop the waves of unthinking slaughter that the native life-system unleashes upon its galaxy by instinct. By harvesting and repurposing this life-system's biomass into forms which are capable of proper sentience. Before it discovers how to travel to other galaxies, and destroy all sentient life in the entire universe. ---------- Now, from this completely non-canon point of view, who's the heroes and who's the monsters? Assuming you're willing to meet me half-way to Crazy Town, the point about creatures who don't recognize individual identity being unable to recognize the crime of murder is still valid. From the Tyranid POV, they've destroyed zero worlds; instead they've saved them from the perils of mortality. Saved them one screaming Guardsman at a time. So, I don't see a "grotesque, bloody tragedy" in the belief that the ones coming from beyond the stars to save them... are coming from beyond the stars to save them. The only tragedies are that a Synapse creature like the Patriarch can't fathom the possibility of his adjunct-selves not embracing the process of having their memories absorbed by his Overself and rendered immortal, and that his hybrid children can't fathom the form their promised immortality will take. Too alien for us to understand them is also too alien for them to understand us. All glory to Peter Watts. [/QUOTE]
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