Random Thoughts Thread

[Gradius]

Its "body" was introduced in the last two Zerg missions as a plot device to explain how the Protoss could defeat the Zerg. Based on the manual's explanation I was under the impression that the Overmind, being literally the amalgamated minds of all Zerg, existed within all Zerg simultaneously like some gigantic parallel processing network. Killing it would require exterminating all the Zerg it is using as hardware, or at least enough of them that its intelligence and memories are lost forever.

1) The game > the manual. The game is the core product and way more people have played the game than read the manual.
2) The manual says "It is speculated that the Overmind itself is protected deep within the safety of this living fleet."
3) Killing the Overmind requires exterminating all zerg or using void energy.

Again, I did not say they functioned exactly like the Geth. The Zerg were not "freed" from the Overmind, they were driven psychotically insane. The feral Zerg have been retconned a few times, but initially I got the impression they went berserk and started attacking each other.

They were not driven psychotically insane. They reverted to their base instincts and started functioning at their lowest level, which it turns out is a bunch of ferocious killing machines.

I already explained that brain bugs were created to serve as dedicated brains and processing centers. I was under the impression that the hive mind needs Zerg like software needs hardware. If his brood is wiped out, what hardware is he running on?

He has his own body. He's a giant slug. Just like the Overmind is a giant brain.

The natural state of the Zerg is to form packs that coordinate through telepathy (like the Protoss), which was modified to produce a telepathic network or hive mind that unified all packs (like the Khala). The basic hive mind operates by sharing brain function between Zerg through telepathy (not like the Khala), allowing them to act with greater intelligence than they possess individually. This gives rise to a shared consciousness or group mind: the Overmind. The Overmind and the Zerg are one and the same, though this existence is difficult for human beings to comprehend.

The hive mind is naturally decentralized, which is inefficient for coordination. Some Zerg are genetically modified to act as relay stations between packs and given enlarged brains to more efficiently coordinate its own pack. These are cerebrates, or “brain bugs” in military slang. The Zerg developed intelligent breeds to serve as further relay stations, resulting in the overlords, queens and infestors. These command strains would coordinate individual packs, which would collectively form a brood coordinated by one or more cerebrates. All Zerg within a brood share certain genetic modifications, including a behavior bias. This bias leads the brood to pursue a specific directive and modify itself to better fulfill that directive. Through the hive mind, the brood develops a full-fledged personality around this directive. This is standard hierarchy for modern Zerg and ingrained into their genomes.

While cerebrates and overlords may be killed, they are replaceable like any other Zerg. However, their absence will result in a loss of coordination until they are replaced. Because they serve as relay stations to numerous subordinates and share experiences (such as trauma), they may inadvertently act as gateways for simultaneous psychic assaults on their broods. A brood that has been driven psychotically insane by a psychic assault is labeled feral. When a brain bug is so assaulted, this effect is limited only to their immediate brood and its packs. When the Overmind’s proxy (an organism engineered for the invasion of Aiur about which little is known) was so assaulted, all broods were driven feral. Most broods so afflicted will destroy themselves, but those that survive will eventually stabilize and restore themselves to full functionality.

However, a major lingering side-effect is that such a brood is now a renegade: it no longer identifies with other broods and will typically treat them as enemies. It is not in the nature of Zerg to act alone, so these renegades instinctively seek to unite into a greater whole. During the Brood Wars, the broods fought one another with the intent to subsume the others and recreate the Overmind.

I don't agree that the cerebrate gets its personality from genetic modifications of their underlings. They're their own characters and modify their broods according to what they need/want. I also don't agree that zerglings get smarter by having more zerg around, since there's no evidence of that. They have static intelligences. Hydralisks are explicitly smarter than zerglings. I also don't get the relay station and radio tower analogies; if a Cerebrate dies, and "the brain bug is a glorified radio tower rather than their actual consciousness", then shouldn't killing one even without the void disrupt the whole brood? Yet it doesn't. I just assumed that zerg signals are powerful enough to reach across the galaxy, so there's no need to boost it.

Much of the rest of this is fanon and/or can't be falsified, but sounds good to me.

Now your turn?

Basically, the zerg are a hierarchy where each level is genetically incapable of disobeying their superiors. Overmind->Cerebrates->Overlords. They all have their own physical brain, but they're all connected to each other and can feel what their minions are doing. Since they're connected, they have a shared consciousness and can coordinate their brainpower for things like opening warp rifts, strategizing, sharing information, etc. But only command strains determine how this power is dispensed; the zerg at the bottom are basically just tools.

When the Cerebrate gets killed by normal means, its consciousness just gets offloaded to other zerg, which is inefficient, so it regrows its body. When the Cerebrate gets killed by the void, the brood goes feral. As a result, the zerg at the bottom don't have direction and their normal extrasensory input, so they function at their lowest level and fight either each other or anyone else who walks by, though queens and overlords can seem to maintain their own control so that the brood doesn't just all kill itself.

The Overmind wasn't sapient when it was first created because it was just an amalgamation of all zerg (the manual says "semi-sentient"), but it later grew in intelligence and became its own character. We can assume Cerebrates went through a similar process, but either way, they don't rely on their brood to support their consciousness/character, because they have their own physical vessel that adapts/grows as time goes on.

[Mislagnissa]

Cerebrates were killed in Retribution w/o void magic and this disrupted them for a time. Blizzard has not clarified the canonicity, but canon is a moving target anyway and they already retconned away the cerebrates in SC2.

Gradius, you and I seem to be coming at this from opposite directions. I see inconsistencies in the manual and game which I attribute to rewrites and poor proofreading. Retcons further destroy consistency. We cannot argue effectively unless we agree which iteration of the lore to use and which to ignore. What you describe is essentially how Blizzard interpreted the Zerg and used to justify destroying and then retconning away their hierarchy (by comparison, custom campaigns for BW commonly depicted cerebrates being reproduced with ease). I decided to adopt the premise that the Zerg are a group mind not unlike the Flood or Necromorphs, and force everything else to follow from that logic under the rule of self-consistency.

So I suppose we cannot really argue since I am deliberately diverging from whatever passes for canon in this continuity nightmare. If you would like to discuss it further I posited the same scheme in the Enumerate thread.

[Turalyon]

It still needs to give the Zerg orders they may pursue without further direction from it, since it cannot coordinate them all at once. Like Gradius suggested, the broods perceive puzzle pieces that the Overmind arranges into the big picture.

Eh, I was just making a broad joke about how "bizzare and pointless" it is for the Overmind to even speak given how unified and integrated the Zerg hivemind is/ that it's just a Doylist conceit solely for the benefit of the audience member.

I thought the determinant was an awesome idea the way it was presented in the manual: human psychics would be assimilated to create new armies just like every other species before them. I take issue with the way Kerry is presented as Zerg Jesus in defiance of everything explained about the Zerg prior to that point.

I agree that the determinant is an awesome idea but not solely in a plot mechanics way or the opportunities that it opens up since when you look at the bare-bones of it, the point of the determinant and the pursuit of it is merely an excuse to allow the Terrans to have involvement in a three-way conflict. In that context, the vagaries of what that entails, what it actually is and the consequence of it is of less importance than how it's used to inform us of the Overmind character. As such, the determinant is really about how the Overmind fears the Protoss and their upcoming confrontation and how obtaining it is a way to allay that fear.

For me, I've never really felt that Kerrigan was objectively special in Sc1 (BW, on the other hand makes her objectively special which is why the Mary Sue accusations leveled there are reasonable/justified) due to the reasons I listed in my previous post. Adding on to that, she's also not that objectively special because she actually fails in her assigned task of killing the Protoss on Char and is not even necessary for the invasion of Aiur. Her specialness is only that the Overmind subjectively feels that she's special (because cerebrates like Zasz don't feel she's special either). That "specialness" is nothing to do with her being Kerrigan but the Overminds subjective value of the determinant, of which she incidentally represents. Sure, her being the determinant is just a contrived coincidence, but by that measure, anything that ever happens in SC or fiction in general is a contrived coincidence anyway, so it's hard to tell whether one event is more contrived than any other really.

Having the determinant not be the thing that ensures the Zerg ultimate victory, despite having it and being thought to be the key to it, is a nice subversion of expectation in retrospect. It can also be argued that the actual pursuit and acquisition of this determinant is actually the objective reason for why the Zerg were defeated in Sc1. Were it not for the drawing of the Dark Templar to Char by the "determinant" (I'm specifically not mentioning Kerrigan because like I said, the determinant being specifically her is actually inconsequential), the events depicted thereafter may not have occurred: no mind-swapping of info between Overmind and Zeratul, no reveal of a bonafide Zerg weakness, no invasion of Aiur as depicted in Overmind nor ultimate Zerg defeat depicted in The Fall. That this also backs up the notion I mentioned previously that the determinant really only has subjective value and not an objective one is kinda neat too.

[Mislagnissa]

Speaking of feral zerg, their homicidal behavior is strange. I would expect them to act like the primal zerg or their core genus, not incompetent idiot savants. It feels like either they were genetically lobotomized or they always relied on the hive mind for key brain functions like common sense or identify friend from foe.

[ragnarok]

Speaking of feral zerg, their homicidal behavior is strange. I would expect them to act like the primal zerg or their core genus, not incompetent idiot savants. It feels like either they were genetically lobotomized or they always relied on the hive mind for key brain functions like common sense or identify friend from foe.

That depends on how the hive mind works. Remember, Zurvan specifically told Kerrigan that once bound to the hive mind, they lose their identities. Brakk also said that the swarm was utterly mindless and everything. You'd think that would mean if you can cut the command link off from them, they can do little but wander about like discarded tools.

[Mislagnissa]

That depends on how the hive mind works. Remember, Zurvan specifically told Kerrigan that once bound to the hive mind, they lose their identities. Brakk also said that the swarm was utterly mindless and everything. You'd think that would mean if you can cut the command link off from them, they can do little but wander about like discarded tools.

That is precisely my point. Unless the Zerg were lobotomized, their feral behavior should be opportunistic and predatory (like that of the primal Zerg) rather than rabid or listless. The existence of feral hive clusters are flat out nonsensical, since that would require the feral Zerg to have recreated their hive mind to coordinate. That only makes sense if the Zerg naturally congregate to form telepathic networks and spawn cerebrates like the Flood and Necromorphs do.

Regardless of whether the Overmind is an externally imposed slave master or a function of enough Zerg in telepathic communion, it canonically is part of the Zerg's genome just like every other breed. Even if it can be killed and this leaves the Zerg leaderless, this should result in the Zerg spawning new Overminds just like they spawn everything else. That at least would explain how feral hives can exist for any period of time.

[Nolanstar]

The feral hive clusters are likely the work of feral overlords teaming up and trying to keep some semblance of order. Similar to the overlord short story.

[Gradius]

The feral hive clusters are likely the work of feral overlords teaming up and trying to keep some semblance of order. Similar to the overlord short story.

Yep. Pretty much what I just said.

[Nolanstar]

Lol, missed that one sentence when reading yours. Meh, its just additional supporting evidence at this point.

[ragnarok]

The feral hive clusters are likely the work of feral overlords teaming up and trying to keep some semblance of order. Similar to the overlord short story.

I never actually read that one, did that give any specifics of Overlord control?