StarCraft & Atmosphere

[Mislagnissa]

Actually in the SC1 lore it was heavily implied, but never actually STATED, the Xel'Naga created the crystals. The Overmind did understand more, but it seemed like it needed to harness their power to assimilate the Protoss, which would merely be a way to get around the Khala.

Nice catch. I figured that attacking the Psi Matrix (which relayed the Khala, since Tassadar's ignorance of the inquisition suggests that it has limited range) was the intended goal. This would explain why Fenix's lightsabers failed in mid-combat, which makes a huge amount of tactical sense, whereas later sources (I don't know which) claim it was due to lack of maintenance.

Then how would you explain why all the other infested terrans only turned out mindless drones? (If you were to use a lore reasoning)

I wouldn't. I would write fanfiction where the Zerg successfully build armies of psychic infested Terrans after spending the decade before the Great War refining the process.

You think after Zasz's brood went feral the only way to deal with it is to destroy it completely?

That is what we saw in SC1. If it was possible for any sufficiently powerful or intelligent Zerg to reclaim feral Zerg, we would have seen it happen then. Instead the entire brood had to be exterminated, and it's ambiguous as to whether this was necessary before the Overmind woke up. If the brood had to be destroyed before the Overmind woke up, or doing so sped it waking up, that suggests some kind of psychic connection that transcends death.

In fact, the intricacies of cerebrate death are never really explored. Initially the implication was that cerebrates were literally the brains of their brood, with the hive mind being their incorporeal nervous system or materialistic equivalent of a soul. When you kill someone's brain, you can't just perform a head transplant and expect them to be fine. In Brood War and SC2, Zerg became subservient to anything capable of transmitting the correct psychic waves as part of their overall decay of narrative agency.

BW didn't forget the infighting as you claimed. The whole point of the swarm's function in the BW was because Kerrigan controlled half, and Daggoth's forces controlled the other half and neither wanted to share. Hell the whole point of Kaloth infesting Stukov probably reflected this too, because the Cerebrates wanted a way to deal with Kerrigan

All of the cerebrates teamed up to fight Kerrigan, who inexplicably gained the ability to control billions of Zerg and to manage mutation all by herself. QoB is a textbook mary sue by this point, since her entire shtick is that the plot writes itself around her in defiance of previously established rules and character motivations. Cerebrates are gigantic brains, straight out of Starship Troopers, presumably because all that brain mass is necessary to manage the thousands to millions of Zerg which make up each brood. Kerrigan might be able to make heads explode like in Scanners (how she killed her parents), but that doesn't equate to being able to pursue a thousand simultaneous trains of thought.

This is the whole point of why people wanted a better ending when they began writing the storyline for SC2. BW's ending made it seem like everyone's sacrifice had been for nothing. And Duran's plans merely suffered a temporary setback due to the loss of the swarm to Kerrigan, and he simply went around that by using terran tech to breed the hybrid instead.

SC2 outright ignores most of the events of BW, particularly the damage done to the Dominion. WoL might as well have started immediately after Episode I for all the difference it makes.

Oh. I mistook what you said, "Without the Overmind to give a constructive direction, they end up being far more dangerous to the Terrans and Protoss", as being something you agreed with.

I say that because of strategic concerns. Previously the Zerg had very specific goals and pursued those goals to the exclusion of all else. For example, one could argue that the Protoss ultimately took more Terran lives than the Zerg did, since the Zerg were seeking out psychics rather than trying to kill everything (which, according to the SC1 manual, constitute less than 1% of the population, which the Zerg can sense with their innate psychic sensitivity). Without the Overmind to regulate them, the feral cerebrates (not to be confused with feral broods) would probably cause loads of needless collateral damage in their panic and scramble to survive.

[ragnarok]

That is what we saw in SC1. If it was possible for any sufficiently powerful or intelligent Zerg to reclaim feral Zerg, we would have seen it happen then. Instead the entire brood had to be exterminated, and it's ambiguous as to whether this was necessary before the Overmind woke up. If the brood had to be destroyed before the Overmind woke up, or doing so sped it waking up, that suggests some kind of psychic connection that transcends death.

In fact, the intricacies of cerebrate death are never really explored. Initially the implication was that cerebrates were literally the brains of their brood, with the hive mind being their incorporeal nervous system or materialistic equivalent of a soul. When you kill someone's brain, you can't just perform a head transplant and expect them to be fine. In Brood War and SC2, Zerg became subservient to anything capable of transmitting the correct psychic waves as part of their overall decay of narrative agency.

They're just the arms and legs of the Overmind to make control a bit easier. It's no different than what Kerrigan later did with the broodmothers.

All of the cerebrates teamed up to fight Kerrigan, who inexplicably gained the ability to control billions of Zerg and to manage mutation all by herself. QoB is a textbook mary sue by this point, since her entire shtick is that the plot writes itself around her in defiance of previously established rules and character motivations. Cerebrates are gigantic brains, straight out of Starship Troopers, presumably because all that brain mass is necessary to manage the thousands to millions of Zerg which make up each brood. Kerrigan might be able to make heads explode like in Scanners (how she killed her parents), but that doesn't equate to being able to pursue a thousand simultaneous trains of thought.

No, that deals more with the whole hive mind matter, and that the corrupted zerg are largely mindless, as the primal zerg claimed much later on in HotS.

SC2 outright ignores most of the events of BW, particularly the damage done to the Dominion. WoL might as well have started immediately after Episode I for all the difference it makes.

I wasn't convinced how Mengsk could have rebuilt so much in 4 years. If it was just Korhal, it would have worked fine, but not ALL the planets. What they should have done in WoL was reveal that Duran offered Mengsk a deal to rebuild everything, and in return he must breed the hybrid from him. Given Mengsk's arrogance in thinking he could control it, it'd make sense he'd accept.

[Turalyon]

One thing I always had as part of my headcanon was that the Overmind was using the Khaydarin Crystals to "hack" into the Khala and influence the Conclave. Would explain some of their completely bone-headed tactical moves during the war.
Post SC2 it makes even more sense to me as it would seem that the Khaydarin Crystals act as a form of backdoor into the Khala that allowed Amon easy access. If the Overmind has succeeded in implanting itself into the Khala with Amon steering its moves he would have likely created the Hybrid Form he desired right then and there and proceeded to destroy the universe with Hybrid, Zerg, and Protoss under his control.

This is a pretty neat theory that ties the two together. The only issue I have with it is that it leans too heavily into artifice/ plot device machinations and that it devalues the Protoss identity. It's annoyingenough to have the Conclave being dismissed as just being evil/stupid, let alone make that supposed evil/stupidity a result of some other plot device. Their motivations/concerns and actions were quite legitimate and are based on their racial history.

This would explain why Fenix's lightsabers failed in mid-combat, which makes a huge amount of tactical sense, whereas later sources (I don't know which) claim it was due to lack of maintenance.

I like to think that the explanation behind Fenix's psi blades failure is more to do with his characterisation than anything else. Since the blades are generated partially from their minds and require focus, their failure could've been a depiction of Fenix losing faith/becoming disheartened. Given the lack of facial gestures, I think this was the only way they could depict that.

I would write fanfiction where the Zerg successfully build armies of psychic infested Terrans after spending the decade before the Great War refining the process.

This would imply that it would've been easy for the Overmind to be able to find an intact psychic Terran and one who wouldn't resist it. Clearly, it wasn't an easy task for the Overmind since it only succeeded out of pure luck when it came across Kerrigan at New Gettysburg.

I say that because of strategic concerns. Previously the Zerg had very specific goals and pursued those goals to the exclusion of all else. For example, one could argue that the Protoss ultimately took more Terran lives than the Zerg did, since the Zerg were seeking out psychics rather than trying to kill everything (which, according to the SC1 manual, constitute less than 1% of the population, which the Zerg can sense with their innate psychic sensitivity). Without the Overmind to regulate them, the feral cerebrates (not to be confused with feral broods) would probably cause loads of needless collateral damage in their panic and scramble to survive.

Keep in mind that the feral Zerg are not only dangerous to others, but more importantly, they are now just as dangerous to themselves without the Overmind (as The Culling showed on a smaller scale)... or were supposed to be. The ferals should also be less effective in tactical maneuvers/as a military force without the Overmind even if they weren't busy attacking themselves. Either way, the Zerg under the Overmind showed no compunction to killing others or mitigating its damage in it search for psychics since the game tells us expressly that the Zerg laid waste to 9 out of 13 of the Terrans worlds. Taken together, the Zerg with the Overmind are and should be more dangerous (if not, less manageable at the least) than Zerg without the Overmind.

[ragnarok]

I like to think that the explanation behind Fenix's psi blades failure is more to do with his characterisation than anything else. Since the blades are generated partially from their minds and require focus, their failure could've been a depiction of Fenix losing faith/becoming disheartened. Given the lack of facial gestures, I think this was the only way they could depict that.

You were supposed to say the reason for this was because he didn't use duracell batteries, Tura

[Mislagnissa]

They're just the arms and legs of the Overmind to make control a bit easier. It's no different than what Kerrigan later did with the broodmothers.
No, that deals more with the whole hive mind matter, and that the corrupted zerg are largely mindless, as the primal zerg claimed much later on in HotS.

Every expansion and sequel has retconned how the zerg and the hive mind works. I am operating on the SC1 manual explanation that the Overmind and his cerebrates are functions of the swarm itself rather than external agents.

This would imply that it would've been easy for the Overmind to be able to find an intact psychic Terran and one who wouldn't resist it. Clearly, it wasn't an easy task for the Overmind since it only succeeded out of pure luck when it came across Kerrigan at New Gettysburg.

There’s a disconnect between the Zerg backstory in the manual and the events of the game due to script rewrites.

In the manual, it was stated that less than 1% of the human population is psychic. Since there are billions of humans across the Koprulu sector, this means that there are millions of psychics. All Zerg are inherently able to sense psychics, which is how the probes found humans in the first place. There were clearly enough human psychics present that the Zerg considered it economical to send the entirety of the swarms in the galaxy (or nearly enough) to that sector, a logistics nightmare which took 60 "years" (implied to be Earth units, as it isn't clear if the backstory is written in-character or out-of-character). When they arrived, they spent an unknown amount of time (later sources specify over a decade in Earth units) studying the Terrans (and being studied in turn) until the Protoss arrived and glassed Chau Sara.

IIRC, Kerrigan was supposed to have died on Tarsonis until the writers decided they liked her enough to bring her back in the Zerg campaign. They rewrite her as a completely different character (or tweak a Zerg character that existed in a previous draft), destroying whatever they originally liked about her and defeating the point of bringing her back. The other psychic zerg were written out of the story and QoB carried their entire narrative load, making her into a walking weapon of mass destruction. The last two missions of the Zerg campaign are probably the only parts of the pre-QoB drafts that were left unaltered.

In later sources, QoB is made into an even bigger Mary Sue who was gifted with numerous impossible properties. She was the most powerful psychic ever (out of human and protoss), she was the only psychic to be compatible with the Zerg, she took over the swarm with ease, she manipulated everyone (into doing what they were already going to do) with ease, she took over the sector with ease, etc.

I simply cannot take the canon events seriously.

Keep in mind that the feral Zerg are not only dangerous to others, but more importantly, they are now just as dangerous to themselves without the Overmind (as The Culling showed on a smaller scale)... or were supposed to be. The ferals should also be less effective in tactical maneuvers/as a military force without the Overmind even if they weren't busy attacking themselves.

No argument there.

The sane zerg understood strategy and concentrated on targets of strategic importance like military installations. The leaderless cerebrates are likely engage in acts of panic or madness or vengeance or something that contradicts the directive to infest and assimilate, such as attacking targets of no strategic value or bombarding cities from orbit.

The feral zerg engage in indiscriminate slaughter and while they will certainly decimate themselves, natural selection pressures will ensure the survivors will be predisposed to attacking non-zerg. The command strains like queens and overlords may not be equipped to deal with the situation, but they retain their near- or above-human intelligence while feral as well as their command of receptive hives and minions (which isn’t a lot, but it’s still an advantage against the leaderless minions). The psychic strains created using human genetic material, assuming they exist in this scenario, might even be able to pull off QoB’s mind control shenanigans on a smaller scale to form warring guerilla broods.

The Protoss power base is already broken so they aren’t equipped to deal with a second planet-wide war, much less one with hundreds of new sides that breed armies in days.

Either way, the Zerg under the Overmind showed no compunction to killing others or mitigating its damage in it search for psychics since the game tells us expressly that the Zerg laid waste to 9 out of 13 of the Terrans worlds. Taken together, the Zerg with the Overmind are and should be more dangerous (if not, less manageable at the least) than Zerg without the Overmind.

Judging by the huge militaries and complacency seen in BW and SC2 despite three Zerg invasions that were each stated to have laid waste to numerous planets, the Zerg didn’t kill enough people to make any difference.

On a more serious note, the Zerg detect and need psychics. In order to acquire the millions of psychics on each world, they would have to concentrate on areas with large numbers of psychics and would have to take steps to ensure their targets survive to be infested. I can see that leaving large numbers of people alive in less densely populated areas where it would be more difficult to find individual psychics. At that point in time they aren’t trying to exterminate the human race, so they may have strains dedicated specifically to abducting people en masse like the tripods in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

[ragnarok]

Every expansion and sequel has retconned how the zerg and the hive mind works. I am operating on the SC1 manual explanation that the Overmind and his cerebrates are functions of the swarm itself rather than external agents.

I felt that was because they didn't want to dive deep into the zerg except to say they're basically mindless puppets. To a small degree I felt this was exactly how they did with the Xenomorph and how as the Alien series went on, we saw retcons of their function.

Regardless, I chose to use what was given from HotS and go from there.

[Turalyon]

Wall-o-text, how I missed thee...

Since there are billions of humans across the Koprulu sector, this means that there are millions of psychics.

That there were "billions" of Terrans in the K sector as of the start of Sc1 is an overstatement. While technically possible to reach "billions" from a founding population of 32k over 200 years, it requires optimum and sustained conditions to be possible. Also, can it be said that all psychics are the same? Given the ability is somewhat latent in Terrans, some may have the potential but it may not be able to be translated across via assimilation.

Whatever the case, even if the chances were 99% of finding a psychic the story still has it that the Overmind didn't find or assimilate this potential until New Gettysberg. The reason is not elucidated as to why but one can only surmise that whatever the reason, it was not so simple a task for the Overmind.

All Zerg are inherently able to sense psychics, which is how the probes found humans in the first place.

Originally, it's unclear whether the Zerg are innately able to sense/be attracted to psionics since it's inferred that such interest in psionics is due to the Overmind's motivation for wanting to assimilate psionic potential from humans. BW more or less clarifies that it was always innate however...

There were clearly enough human psychics present that the Zerg considered it economical to send the entirety of the swarms in the galaxy (or nearly enough) to that sector, a logistics nightmare which took 60 "years" (implied to be Earth units, as it isn't clear if the backstory is written in-character or out-of-character).

It was not an economic based decision on the Overmind's part but an emotional one because it feared the Protoss psionic power. The manual itself says the Overmind was "greatly disturbed" and "on the verge of despair" before finding psionic potential in humans.

IIRC, Kerrigan was supposed to have died on Tarsonis until the writers decided they liked her enough to bring her back in the Zerg campaign.

I've heard different things about this over the years. It's clear that her reintroduction in the Zerg campaign was due solely to author conceit, but not just because they liked the character but also because Metzen, at the time, felt that the Zerg needed a human lens to see the Zerg.

They rewrite her as a completely different character (or tweak a Zerg character that existed in a previous draft), destroying whatever they originally liked about her and defeating the point of bringing her back.

Of course she's different (not just in the physical sense), she's gone through an experience like no-one else has before. Terran Kerrigan was a naive individual who learnt, too late and with harsh consequence, a bitter lesson that changed not only her physical shape but her outlook on things. I like to think of infested Kerrigan as being the true human Kerrigan (one who has embraced the inner darkness she always knew she had), not the naive and repressed Terran individual we see in Rebel Yell. Her development is quite continuous and not a random arbitrary change as you make it out to be.

The last two missions of the Zerg campaign are probably the only parts of the pre-QoB drafts that were left unaltered.

You're probably right about that and it's ultimately to the given story's detriment because the last two missions stick out as being far removed from the story the previous missions have built up. On a constructed narrative level, Kerrigan really needed to be involved in some capacity in those last two missions.

In later sources, QoB is made into an even bigger Mary Sue who was gifted with numerous impossible properties. She was the most powerful psychic ever (out of human and protoss), she was the only psychic to be compatible with the Zerg, she took over the swarm with ease, she manipulated everyone (into doing what they were already going to do) with ease, she took over the sector with ease, etc.

This all started because of BW's depiction of Kerrigan. Sure, the narrative and the characters do tend to bend toward making Kerrigan (the Zerg are also similarly made to be OP despite having no Overmind) better than what she actually is but at least it's consistently doing that throughout BW.

The feral zerg engage in indiscriminate slaughter and while they will certainly decimate themselves, natural selection pressures will ensure the survivors will be predisposed to attacking non-zerg.

This natural evolution you speak of here would've been some interesting territory to explore in BW but it would've been too soon to implement after the Overmind's death. The Zerg needed to suffer a tangible consequence of losing the Overmind and whilst we didn't see it in the way you would expect, having them be dominated and used by some crazy, hybrid freak in Kerrigan for her own personal goals is a pretty good alternative option in retrospect. Hell, I would've liked to see this natural evolution occur in Sc2 as a response to Kerrigan's rule and that this natural evolution without guidance by a hivemind or overt control be the basis of the primal Zerg, not the shonky tacked on version we got in HotS.

The Protoss power base is already broken so they aren’t equipped to deal with a second planet-wide war, much less one with hundreds of new sides that breed armies in days.

But it should've been on more even footing by the end of Sc1. Those hundreds of new sides are just as much of a threat to themselves than they are to others and given their close proximity, the Zerg would've been tearing at each other first. It's important to highlight this because one of the common themes in Starcraft is the strength found in unity. Given the Zerg had the ultimate version of this and was most successful with it, it needs to be shown that when they don't have it, that there's some bad shit to be in (just like the reverse of the Protoss progress in achieving unity)

Judging by the huge militaries and complacency seen in BW and SC2 despite three Zerg invasions that were each stated to have laid waste to numerous planets, the Zerg didn’t kill enough people to make any difference.

Hah! Tell me about it. Raynor says billions were killed? Eh, peanuts really.

On a more serious note, the Zerg detect and need psychics.

I would say the Overmind didn't really need psychics, just that it really wanted them badly. It could invade Aiur and it was seemingly doing well all without Kerrigan's direct help, afterall.

[Mislagnissa]

Wall-o-text, how I missed thee...



That there were "billions" of Terrans in the K sector as of the start of Sc1 is an overstatement. While technically possible to reach "billions" from a founding population of 32k over 200 years, it requires optimum and sustained conditions to be possible. Also, can it be said that all psychics are the same? Given the ability is somewhat latent in Terrans, some may have the potential but it may not be able to be translated across via assimilation.

Whatever the case, even if the chances were 99% of finding a psychic the story still has it that the Overmind didn't find or assimilate this potential until New Gettysberg. The reason is not elucidated as to why but one can only surmise that whatever the reason, it was not so simple a task for the Overmind.



Originally, it's unclear whether the Zerg are innately able to sense/be attracted to psionics since it's inferred that such interest in psionics is due to the Overmind's motivation for wanting to assimilate psionic potential from humans. BW more or less clarifies that it was always innate however...



It was not an economic based decision on the Overmind's part but an emotional one because it feared the Protoss psionic power. The manual itself says the Overmind was "greatly disturbed" and "on the verge of despair" before finding psionic potential in humans.



I've heard different things about this over the years. It's clear that her reintroduction in the Zerg campaign was due solely to author conceit, but not just because they liked the character but also because Metzen, at the time, felt that the Zerg needed a human lens to see the Zerg.



Of course she's different (not just in the physical sense), she's gone through an experience like no-one else has before. Terran Kerrigan was a naive individual who learnt, too late and with harsh consequence, a bitter lesson that changed not only her physical shape but her outlook on things. I like to think of infested Kerrigan as being the true human Kerrigan (one who has embraced the inner darkness she always knew she had), not the naive and repressed Terran individual we see in Rebel Yell. Her development is quite continuous and not a random arbitrary change as you make it out to be.



You're probably right about that and it's ultimately to the given story's detriment because the last two missions stick out as being far removed from the story the previous missions have built up. On a constructed narrative level, Kerrigan really needed to be involved in some capacity in those last two missions.



This all started because of BW's depiction of Kerrigan. Sure, the narrative and the characters do tend to bend toward making Kerrigan (the Zerg are also similarly made to be OP despite having no Overmind) better than what she actually is but at least it's consistently doing that throughout BW.



This natural evolution you speak of here would've been some interesting territory to explore in BW but it would've been too soon to implement after the Overmind's death. The Zerg needed to suffer a tangible consequence of losing the Overmind and whilst we didn't see it in the way you would expect, having them be dominated and used by some crazy, hybrid freak in Kerrigan for her own personal goals is a pretty good alternative option in retrospect. Hell, I would've liked to see this natural evolution occur in Sc2 as a response to Kerrigan's rule and that this natural evolution without guidance by a hivemind or overt control be the basis of the primal Zerg, not the shonky tacked on version we got in HotS.



But it should've been on more even footing by the end of Sc1. Those hundreds of new sides are just as much of a threat to themselves than they are to others and given their close proximity, the Zerg would've been tearing at each other first. It's important to highlight this because one of the common themes in Starcraft is the strength found in unity. Given the Zerg had the ultimate version of this and was most successful with it, it needs to be shown that when they don't have it, that there's some bad shit to be in (just like the reverse of the Protoss progress in achieving unity)



Hah! Tell me about it. Raynor says billions were killed? Eh, peanuts really.



I would say the Overmind didn't really need psychics, just that it really wanted them badly. It could invade Aiur and it was seemingly doing well all without Kerrigan's direct help, afterall.

Again, rewrites and sequels turned a previously sensible plot into a mess. If the Great War was as devastating as implied then Mengsk would have been ruling over a tiny fraction of what used to be the Confederacy. They would be quickly wiped out by a second Zerg invasion.

StarCraft never handled scale very well. We have absurd levels of population growth and industry on the Terran side. We have conflicts devastating dozens of planets, killing many billions, yet lasting only a few months at a time. The numbers even change between games, to the point where SC2 makes the Confederacy responsible for wiping out a third of their own population when they bombard Korhal because a single politician got uppity.

[ragnarok]

StarCraft never handled scale very well. We have absurd levels of population growth and industry on the Terran side. We have conflicts devastating dozens of planets, killing many billions, yet lasting only a few months at a time. The numbers even change between games, to the point where SC2 makes the Confederacy responsible for wiping out a third of their own population when they bombard Korhal because a single politician got uppity.

I saw that more from the transition from SC1 to SC2, given the number of terrans killed in SC1. Hell, the WoL invasion alone killed 8 billion people, yet HotS made it seem like that was largely negligible.

[Visions of Khas]

Its like they want to play with the same scale of destruction as WarHammer 40K, but the lighter tone doesn't mesh well with that kind of grim dark.