#killikposting

[miraluking-respectfully]

So Lyde got to have her reunion with Vector today! And I'd already watched other people's version of the cutscene on youtube, so I kind of knew how that was going to go. Something I'm glad I wasn't spoiled on, however, was The Hole

Y'know. The giant hole in the wall, directly across from Vector.

Its positioning in relation to him gives the general impression that, upon hearing his wife was back in town, Vector was seized with such euphoria that it rippled out into the entire nest, and he was borne upon a tidal wave of bugs and burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man.

After which he seated himself politely in the nearest chair to await her arrival.

environmental storytelling

[killikhive]

tumblr user killikhive unsurprisingly having many thoughts about killks and killik ecology

[miraluking-respectfully]

family portrait

[miraluking-respectfully]

FDSFUHIFDGHF GIRL HELP I STARTED RECORDING THE REUNION CUTSCENE AND THE MOMENT VECTOR BROUGHT UP THE NEST THE GROUND BEGAN VIOLENTLY SHAKING

so yeah, as far as i'm concerned, oroboro sensed that Lyde was back from war & immediately made a bee-line (hah) to her location

[miraluking-respectfully]

saw this post on my dash & immediately experienced whiplash bc my bug-infested brain assumed it was about IRL KILLIKS and not. carpentry.

[miraluking-respectfully]

what she says: i'm fine

what she means: it's Iesei. it's fucking IESEI, i-e-s-e-i, YAY-say, it isn't LEI-sei, with an L. i know this because all killik hive names are palindromes and they all start and end with vowels, the SAME vowel, this is extremely consistent through the entire game and also supplemental material. except in this ONE instance. and i know it isn't an exception, because the captioning for that cutscene spells it right; but both Vanessa Marshall AND Ifan Meredith get it wrong, so that means they either both read that uppercase "I" as a lowercase "L" or else one or both of them asked and whoever directed them during those recording sessions gave them the wrong answer. it drives me fucking insane because HOW did nobody CATCH this, THE HIVES ARE ALL PALINDROMES, WHO FUCKING PERMITTED TH

[miraluking-respectfully]

I wanted my next longpost about DNT to focus on what this book reveals wrt the process of Joining. Instead, I accidentally went on a rant in the Discord server about the Killiks as a people during this particular era of galactic history in-universe, and by extension, Raynar Thul.

Raynar Thul, aka UnuThul, is a Joiner of Unu of some significance who I've put off explaining because when I entered the book, I knew about him and I considered his presence abhorrent. I've since gotten over some of those feelings, but I'm better off copy-pasting my Discord Rant than to try and summarize here.

Spoilers for The Joiner King below, but don't worry about that too much, as I'm kind of reading this book so you don't have to.

Call me Bug Walker.

*bad rimshot*

Begin Copypaste

The trouble with this particular novel is that while it's EXTREMELY juicy with Bug Lore, half of what it reveals about Kind society/culture/biology are New Developments™️ that i'm having to untangle from what could feasibly have been present before, ie, within the SWTOR era. Basically the premise of this book is that the nest has been undergoing some Changes due to the influence of a highly Force-sensitive Joiner, who was then able to extend his will over the nest as a whole. So discovering which is the nasty yucky invasive anthropomorphism introduced into my bugs by this character and which is the acceptable seasoning of anthropomorphism inherent to the development of a fictional intelligent species is not always super cut and dry

Like, the care given to individual casualties is an explicitly new development (makes sense, there aren't a ton of eusocial hive insects IRL that perform triage), but is the spaceport they built? Is the trade they're performing with other species? Is the Colony involving multiple distinct nests sharing a unified hive mind as opposed to a bunch of them? I'm like, not sure

Which is kind of funny, because the idea that the Killiks were a static culture until this One Guy with the right levels of space magic crashed into their planet & exerted his will over them with his last burst of near-death strength Also Really Bothers Me(edited)

"Well, Mads, if you like an aspect of Killiks 2.0, you can just pretend it's always been present in Killiks 1.0!" I don't waaaannaaaa

I want the LEAST anthro version of my bugs!!! I want the version of them BEFORE Raynar Thul got his grubby little mind all over them!

Joiners as a concept are fuckin sick not only because of what the bugs can give to them but for what they can give to the bugs. Joiners aren't Oops! All Hive Mind, they are two minds. Your old personality and memories still exist, but your understanding of the world and your priorities are now one with the Hive. And because I <3 TLT and I'm really big on the permeability of the soul rn, that suggests to me that the character and personality of a hive would change, slowly and surely, depending on the types of Joiners incorporated into it. It would have to. If the hive mind pre-Raynar has no clear source, no clear singular will behind it (disclaimer: IDK if this is true, I have 2.75 more entire book to read), then it could only be shaped and influenced by all its participants, bug and otherwise.

Raynar's existence + influence over the Colony doesn't preclude this possibility, but like. He does raise a question,

that being, could any Forcie have done this under the right circumstances? if not Why not

Like the book hasn't stated it outright but the wiki seemed confident that this guy has been the only Forcie Joiner to get subsumed, and while I don't know if that's a wholly accurate statement bc fucking nobody has read these books, the fact that the books gave the wiki authors that impression BUGS ME (pun intended)

This is the first EU book I've ever read. IDK what kinds of fuckin galactic percentages of Forcies to non-Forcies it's assuming. Obviously the number would be low because this book takes place a point when the Jedi are bouncing back from a painful extinction, but that extinction was recent, it was artificial, and also as we all know well Jedi =/= all Force users and statistically it is buckwild crazy to me that the Killiks would exist for 20,000+ years (the migration Vector mentions was introduced here btw! These are the Kind that left Alderaan, that he was looking for!) and at no point would they have picked up a strong-willed Force-user before this one dude

Now, there IS a confounding factor here. Which is, I imagine any other Forcie Joiners pre-Raynar were not, um. Trying to influence the nest as hard as he was

For starters he's just super duper strong in the Force, but also, he Joined because he crashed into a planet and crawled out of his ship half-dead and super on fire after watching multiple of his friends die horribly, and the will he exerted over the Killiks was a last-ditch effort to get them to save his life as opposed to eating him

that is a SPECIFIC-ASS set of circumstances and maaaybe if such a thing happened again within a different and unrelated nest, the same thing could have happened. Maybe it wasn't the presence of Force abilities that caused this one guy's brain to redirect the flow of the collective mind, but the effort he was putting behind it, effort that previous Force-sensitive Joiners had not found a need to wield

And also, like, UnuThul is 100% a Joiner. He is no more the same guy he was going in than Vector is, this is made clear

Bright side: as I said, I have A TON of this book left to go. And there have been a bunch of really strange happenings within the nest that Raynar in his Dawn-Herald-On-Steroids role seems as baffled by as the rest of the Kind. So maybe the next Big Reveal is gonna blow my ass clean off, slash positive, and make this all sit right with me.

But nonetheless I am bovvered. I am bovvered that a hive mind could develop a person in the drivers' seat for any reason. It feels too easy and it feels too anthropomorphizing, and both of those make it reeeally boring

End Copypaste

[miraluking-respectfully]

i can only assume they did this to hurt me

[miraluking-respectfully]

not to be hivebrained on main but my other answer re: the star wars species poll is a killik. like actually. sure i value my individuality & all that but sitting through the onboarding process at my new job has reminded me how much of a chore it is to forge my own place within the constraints of humanoid society. assign me one instead pls

[miraluking-respectfully]

it was a compliment ig

[miraluking-respectfully]

now that i'm out of the life-stalling brain-infecting obsession phase of enjoying dragon age, maybe i can find some time to jump back into - well, into SWTOR, but also The Bugtext...i remember i was enjoying it but i kept kinda being confused and frustrated by all the references to other EU books. like Thrawn is fucking here now, did I mention that? the chiss feature pretty heavily in this and while the catchup-exposition-to-plot ratio is pretty adept i still regularly have no clue what anyone's talking about ��

[miraluking-respectfully]

One thing the space bug book has failed to clarify to my satisfaction yet is what the reproductive situation is with Killiks. We've seen the Killik nursery, but nobody has addressed whether we're working with a primary egg-laying reproductive fertilized by many drones (like wasps/bees) or two primary reproductives, one of which fertilizes the other and one of which lays all the eggs (like termites). This is very important to me & Troy Denning's silence on matters of bug sex is deafening

[killikhive]

re: my ideas of weird killik associated species. there is so much to work with from irl ant-associates look at this. imagine something like this but with killiks

[miraluking-respectfully]

been wanting to draw raynar/unuthul lately but also i hate that guy

[miraluking-respectfully]

Before I go to bed, here is a little treat: descriptions of various castes of Killiks! (cw for giant bug imagery)

and my personal favorite,

[miraluking-respectfully]

haven't had the energy to read more Bugtext nor type up anything very detailed about what i've read thus far. but the book has insinuated one thing about killik reproduction, which is that there doesn't appear to be drones & a primary reproductive, everyone just fucks each other nasty.

i googled if there is a precedent for this in nature and there is! it's more "everyone lays eggs that hatch into genetic clones" rather than "everybody mates", and it happens on a synchronized cycle. like menstruation.

however given the immense genetic diversity of killiks & the fact that there are hostile NPCs in swtor called "queens" (except they kick your ass rather than being massive and laying eggs in a room all day) i am confident that this is not necessarily the rule for all nests everywhere