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John Wick of Dogs posted:It's very relatable. He's like "gently caress yeah they got oranges here!" And if you pay attention, there's always a bowl of oranges in his quarters on B5.
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Feb 20, 2024 20:15
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Narsham posted:But we know that humanity, not just the Minbari, will eventually "ascend," and I think it's hard to make a case that the Minbari, even after the Earth-Minbari War, are worse than human beings are over the course of the series and afterward. Narsham posted:Yes. PP's the one assuming that there's some sort of virtue associated with getting to go "beyond the rim" as a species; I'm suggesting that the show doesn't establish that, but acknowledging that it's unclear whether some form of merit can be associated with a species not destroying itself. You just can't make that argument directly. You made the assertion that it's hard to make a case that Minbari are worse than human beings in the context of ascending over the course of the series and afterwards, I responded to that my making the case that Minbari are worse under several possible standards of 'worse', including 'some sort of virtue' and 'willingness to explore new technologies' to show that it's not actually hard to make such a case. From a 'virtue' standpoint, Minbari have a lot of unsavory elements like a theocratic, militaristic government (while humans have a secular, civilian government). From a 'not self-destructing' standpoint, Minbari are prone to starting war with other races and themselves and have a very low threshold for starting genocide (as opposed to humans, who are big on diplomacy, don't try any extermination, and are repeatedly criticized for not engaging in enough war). From an 'embracing new ideas' standpoint Minbari society appears to be very rigid and confining and are very keen on following the bad path favored by the Vorlons (as opposed to what we see of humans). From an 'advancing technology' standpoint, Minbari explicitly reject studying certain field sof technology, and don't seem to invent much on their own (as opposed to humans who rabidly study anything they can get their hands on). From an 'advancing mental abilities' standpoint, Minbari have had teeps for a thousand years without change (while psi corps has already produced a massively transhuman psychic being). I'm not assuming that you need 'virtue' to ascend, I am saying that it's very easy to make the case that Minbari are worse than human beings by a variety of metrics, one of which you can summarize as 'virtue'.
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Feb 20, 2024 21:02
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One of the show themes it always comes back to Minbari are essentially massive hypocrites who value the "Face" other races see more then their own principles and genuinely think they have reached a perfect state of society with no need to fix or improve anything. Change is the enemy, but also once someone forces change then the true face of Minbari is revealed and they are just as selfish and greedy as those lower races they look down on. It would be interesting to know if the Vorlons viewed the Minbari as stagnant and lacking any potential for ascending because their souls were essentially having to reincarnate outside their own race in some cosmic sense of self preservation(technically because of Valen, but also how dire it was for him to actually take that role in the first place).
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Feb 20, 2024 22:28
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Wasn't the reincarnation bullshit? The Triluminary was detecting Human DNA, from Valen, the Minbari just misinterpreted it to mean something else.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:35
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Q_res posted:Wasn't the reincarnation bullshit? The Triluminary was detecting Human DNA, from Valen, the Minbari just misinterpreted it to mean something else.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:49
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Q_res posted:Wasn't the reincarnation bullshit? The Triluminary was detecting Human DNA, from Valen, the Minbari just misinterpreted it to mean something else. The triluminary being just a “Sinclair’s DNA Detector” (not even a human DNA detector, since, presumably, they tried it on other human prisoners and it didn’t glow) misinterpreted does not invalidate the broader Minbari understanding of the nature of the soul or the patterns of reincarnation to which Minbari souls have been subjected.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:53
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They explicitly state that newer generations of Minbari are "less" whatever that means.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:55
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I thought Delenn said that the other human pilots they tested did make the Triluminary glow.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:55
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Q_res posted:Wasn't the reincarnation bullshit? The Triluminary was detecting Human DNA, from Valen, the Minbari just misinterpreted it to mean something else. This would require all living Minbari to be descended from Valen. A mean feat for a species that lives to be about 120 years old given that Valen only went back 1000 years.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:55
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Chevy Slyme posted:The triluminary being just a “Sinclair’s DNA Detector” (not even a human DNA detector, since, presumably, they tried it on other human prisoners and it didn’t glow) misinterpreted does not invalidate the broader Minbari understanding of the nature of the soul or the patterns of reincarnation to which Minbari souls have been subjected. I just watched S2 E1 when Lennier first explains this he says Sinclair was the first person they captured, and that after they detected a Minbari soul they captured and tested others, and I was pretty sure he said they found other Minbari souls and it confirmed what was going on.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:57
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CainFortea posted:This would require all living Minbari to be descended from Valen. A mean feat for a species that lives to be about 120 years old given that Valen only went back 1000 years. So you're saying that, canonically, Sinclair fucks
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Feb 20, 2024 22:58
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Chevy Slyme posted:The triluminary being just a “Sinclair’s DNA Detector” (not even a human DNA detector, since, presumably, they tried it on other human prisoners and it didn’t glow) misinterpreted does not invalidate the broader Minbari understanding of the nature of the soul or the patterns of reincarnation to which Minbari souls have been subjected. Except Lennier said in Points of Departure that they did try it on other humans and it did glow. Or at least it did enough of the time to make them believe that humans have Minbari souls. Also watching Revelations and I never realised that there's essentially a town or city in the inner ring that you see every time they do the establishing shot of the bar they hang out in.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:58
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CainFortea posted:This would require all living Minbari to be descended from Valen. A mean feat for a species that lives to be about 120 years old given that Valen only went back 1000 years. At the ~800 year mark, we're up to ~.5% of humanity being descended from Genghis Khan, and he only lived to 60 or so.
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Feb 20, 2024 23:11
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Chevy Slyme posted:At the ~800 year mark, we're up to ~.5% of humanity being descended from Genghis Khan, and he only lived to 60 or so. And Sinclair probably hosed a lot more often
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Feb 20, 2024 23:28
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Isn't everyone in Europe supposedly descended from Charlemagne?
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Feb 21, 2024 00:00
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MrL_JaKiri posted:He's deliberately playing up the gooberness One of my favorite little moments in S2 is when he drops the act for a scene and talks about how he's tired of deceiving his subordinates. edit: Also, seriously, oranges are great and it's a wonder of the modern world that I can buy 3lb bags of easily-peelable small oranges. (I'm having one right now, you see, so I think of this.) Vavrek fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 00:07
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Eighties ZomCom posted:Isn't everyone in Europe supposedly descended from Charlemagne? Sort of, but it's also much less special than the phrasing makes it suggest. The idea is that if you go back enough generations, then you'll get to a generation where everyone in it is either related to all living humans or has no living relatives. A paper from about 10 years ago claimed that this point for European heritage was about a thousand years ago, and we know that Charlemagne has living descendants, ergo everyone with European heritage is descended from Charlemagne. This is also true for a vast number of others (also I think the leap from "lots of common ancestors even from pairs from very disparate parts of europe in only the last 1000 years" to "only common ancestors in only the last 1000 years" is a bit of a big one that is unsupported by the argument they make. Context: I do population genetics research.). But we don't need to know any of that because the series already gives context - Delenn is referred to as a child of Valen and this is something noteworthy.
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Feb 21, 2024 00:43
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pentyne posted:They explicitly state that newer generations of Minbari are "less" whatever that means. People are always saying that about the new generation though. It could be anothe Tolkienesque thing like the waning of the elves, but it seems more like just Minbari society has stagnated. CainFortea posted:This would require all living Minbari to be descended from Valen. A mean feat for a species that lives to be about 120 years old given that Valen only went back 1000 years. It doesn't react strongly for every Minbari though; just Delenn. That was a whole thing in In The Beginning.
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Feb 21, 2024 01:30
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If it's detecting his DNA it should not react at all to someone who isn't related. My theory isn't reacted with her very strongly because she was going to be going through the transformation
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Feb 21, 2024 02:18
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CainFortea posted:If it's detecting his DNA it should not react at all to someone who isn't related. Define "related". You and I (whoever you are, and whoever I am) share a common ancestor an absolute maximum of 200,000 years ago. Almost certainly MUCH less than that, especially if we have any ancestors from the same general continental-scale regions. Are we related?
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Feb 21, 2024 02:46
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Powered Descent posted:Define "related". We aren't talking about a nebulous Mitochondrial Eve. We're talking about an event that specifically only happened 1000 years ago. It's very silly to suggest that the in universe soul detector thing is actually detecting one dude's DNA in his ancestors when he only showed up 1000 years ago.
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Feb 21, 2024 03:21
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It's a hell of a lot less silly than a "soul detector". edit: Especially given that it doesn't react to all Minbari as strongly as it did to Delenn and Sinclair. Given their caste system, 1000 years might be plenty of time to spread his genes through just the Religious caste. Do we ever see a non-Religious Minbari exposed to the Triluminary like that? Spreading his DNA through less than 30% of the Minbari population is a vastly different proposition than spreading it through their entire population. Q_res fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 05:13
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Q_res posted:It's a hell of a lot less silly than a "soul detector". We're talking like 10 generations. In a show with a literal Soul Hunter it's far sillier to assume that the billion religious cast members are all 10 generations removed from one dude. Also, perhaps it responded stronger to them because they're the two who used it.
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Feb 21, 2024 08:06
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CainFortea posted:We're talking like 10 generations. In a show with a literal Soul Hunter it's far sillier to assume that the billion religious cast members are all 10 generations removed from one dude. My dude, there are significant numbers of five adult human generations living right now: Silent, Boomer, Gen X, Millennials and Zoomers. Even if Minbari live slower as well as longer it's still probably been at least 30 generations in the thousand years since Valen.
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Feb 21, 2024 10:08
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:You made the assertion that it's hard to make a case that Minbari are worse than human beings in the context of ascending over the course of the series and afterwards, I responded to that my making the case that Minbari are worse under several possible standards of 'worse', including 'some sort of virtue' and 'willingness to explore new technologies' to show that it's not actually hard to make such a case. I'm not sure I'd quote the human government in B5, secular civilian or not, as a point of virtue. There's a lot more to virtue than simply having society organized a certain way. For most of B5's run (and part of the future we see in the S4 finale) Earth's secular, civilian government is also explicitly fascist and xenophobic. For "virtue" to be a factor in this question of ascending, it has to be on the level of the individual, and then consequently somehow reaching a critical mass.
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Feb 21, 2024 20:09
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We misheard Lennier, he actually said they found out humans have "Minbari's holes"
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Feb 21, 2024 20:46
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John Wick of Dogs posted:We misheard Lennier, he actually said they found out humans have "Minbari's holes" Woo hoo?
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Feb 22, 2024 01:32
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You gotta pay the Kosh toll If you want to get into the Minbari soul
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Feb 22, 2024 04:47
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John Wick of Dogs posted:We misheard Lennier, he actually said they found out humans have "Minbari's holes" Are you saying this whole time the Minbari were actually losing their holes, not their souls?
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Feb 22, 2024 20:15
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Gyrotica posted:Are you saying this whole time the Minbari were actually losing their holes, not their souls? The weren't Minbari being born without holes, there were less Minbari being born at all, and the humans, they were being born with those holes
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Feb 22, 2024 20:22
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CainFortea posted:We're talking like 10 generations. In a show with a literal Soul Hunter it's far sillier to assume that the billion religious cast members are all 10 generations removed from one dude. How long Minbari live either doesn't matter to the question, or it implies that any Minbari couple will have a higher number of children than the human couple equivalent, because fertility and cultural expectations toward reproducing are going to make the difference. If Minbari can live to 200 but aren't reproducing much after 40, their reproductive "generations" will be similar in length to humans; if Minbari "empty nesters" can have a second and third set of kids and stop in their 100s, then the generations might be longer but the number of children per couple will be higher. If Minbari are "elves" and have difficulty conceiving kids to begin with, Sinclair's half-human biology might mean his offspring are more likely to have more children. But we don't know, and it really doesn't matter. If we assume every Minbari couple have 2 children, and we assume that all of Sinclair's offspring go on to reproduce and hit this "2 kids" target, and if we assume no cross-marrying within the "special" children (not incest, but you get 8 generations away and it wouldn't be), then we're probably undercounting on one side and overcounting on another. 1000 years is 30 human generations. But let's see what the numbers look like approaching that. 10 generations = 2,048 offspring. I know you're arguing for that number, but that's assuming that over a 100-year period, Minbari have 2 kids each. That's probably leading to a population collapse over 1000 years. Human generations in 1000 years would be around 30. But let's see what the middle milestones look like: 15 generations = 65,536 offspring. 20 generations = 2,097,152 offspring. 25 generations = 67.1 million. 30 generations = over 2 billion. Even 2 million is going to be pretty high. But we only ever see one Minbari tested with the Triluminary, so it doesn't much matter on that side of things. It's unclear how much genetic similarity would be required for a human to show up on the Triluminary, if that's what it measures. It may not be picking up "Sinclair DNA," but rather "human DNA," which would mean that however many Minbari show up, every single human pilot would produce a response. But Sinclair's response would be overpoweringly strong, because of course, he IS VALEN, so even if the device is picking up a "partial match" with other humans and with Minbari descendants of Valen, it's going to go wild when exposed to Sinclair's DNA, and the reasonable interpretation is that this pilot has Valen's reincarnated soul, because obviously a human fighter pilot isn't also a Minbari who lived 1000 years ago.
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Feb 23, 2024 02:03
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Narsham posted:How long Minbari live either doesn't matter to the question, or it implies that any Minbari couple will have a higher number of children than the human couple equivalent, because fertility and cultural expectations toward reproducing are going to make the difference. If Minbari can live to 200 but aren't reproducing much after 40, their reproductive "generations" will be similar in length to humans; if Minbari "empty nesters" can have a second and third set of kids and stop in their 100s, then the generations might be longer but the number of children per couple will be higher. Nah, it's just a soul thingy.
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Feb 23, 2024 06:23
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Just got to Season 4 again. It strikes me that the Eye of Za’ha’dum seems to be very telepathic in how it mass mesmerizes people, speaks to them in the voice of their father (a common motif in bab5), and urges them to come land on the planet. Is it ever explained beyond being a techno eye of Sauron kind of deal? Seems odd for a species so weak to telepathy.
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Feb 23, 2024 06:55
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cmdrk posted:Just got to Season 4 again. It strikes me that the Eye of Za’ha’dum seems to be very telepathic in how it mass mesmerizes people, speaks to them in the voice of their father (a common motif in bab5), and urges them to come land on the planet. Is it ever explained beyond being a techno eye of Sauron kind of deal? Seems odd for a species so weak to telepathy. It's techno-magic.
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Feb 23, 2024 15:31
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Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail, upgrade it Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick erase it Write it, cut it, paste it, save it, load it, check it, quick rewrite it Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, rip it Techno-magic Techno-magic
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Feb 23, 2024 15:59
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Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they will infect your browser with 3d popups
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Feb 23, 2024 22:16
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Gnome de plume posted:Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they will infect your browser with 3d popups 
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Feb 23, 2024 22:38
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cmdrk posted:Just got to Season 4 again. It strikes me that the Eye of Za’ha’dum seems to be very telepathic in how it mass mesmerizes people, speaks to them in the voice of their father (a common motif in bab5), and urges them to come land on the planet. Is it ever explained beyond being a techno eye of Sauron kind of deal? Seems odd for a species so weak to telepathy. The technomage novels touch on how it works, there's a technomage (IIRC the first technomage) who's mind is wrapped up in it and forced to operate it. I haven't read them in long enough that I don't remember more than that, but that's a place to look if you want more info. The wiki entry on it mentions that there's some more detail on it in the Mongoose B5 RPG, but that's non-canon. Also, do we ever really see that the Shadows themselves are weak to telepathy? Their regular ships are, but those aren't piloted by Shadows, it's enslaved other races, and the shadows seem to keep their actual selves off of the front lines. The Shadows themselves might actually be good at telepathy for all we know, they didn't seem to get hard-stopped the way ships do when they attacked Kosh on B5. My head canon is that Shadow ships being vulnerable to telepaths has something to do with how they interact with hyperspace. It's established that hyperspace boosts telepathic abilities (Bester mentions that it's something Psi-Corps tries to keep secret at one point) and we see that Shadow ships fade in and out of hyperspace instead of ripping open gates like everyone else does. So I think it's likely that the reason shadow ships are so vulnerable to telepaths is that their pilots and structure are tied into hyperspace in a way that other ships aren't, and that there are probably good reasons the other elder races don't use that fade technique.
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Feb 27, 2024 15:49
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Shadow ships are piloted by operators mentally bonded to it, and telepaths can disrupt that connection, making the ship helpless. At least that's what I gathered from the episode "Ship of Tears."
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Feb 27, 2024 17:39
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:The technomage novels touch on how it works, there's a technomage (IIRC the first technomage) who's mind is wrapped up in it and forced to operate it. I haven't read them in long enough that I don't remember more than that, but that's a place to look if you want more info. The wiki entry on it mentions that there's some more detail on it in the Mongoose B5 RPG, but that's non-canon. Also, do we ever really see that the Shadows themselves are weak to telepathy? Their regular ships are, but those aren't piloted by Shadows, it's enslaved other races, and the shadows seem to keep their actual selves off of the front lines. The Shadows themselves might actually be good at telepathy for all we know, they didn't seem to get hard-stopped the way ships do when they attacked Kosh on B5. As an aside, there could be lots of reasons other First Ones don't do it. #1: It conveys some kind of actual technical disadvantage (as you posit), but the Shadows do it for Shadow reasons (they think it looks really cool and ominous). #2: They never figured out how the Shadows do it. This is not particularly far-fetched: while they might have been around a million years, the technology could be fiendishly complex, and there are real-world examples of much simpler technology we just straight up lost that we can't reproduce accurately or only did so fairly recently (like the whole Damascus steel deal, and IIRC some kind of special welding they perfected in WW2 for ships but got lost afterward - can't find the source, maybe made that one up?) #3: They know how to do it, but the Shadows did it first, and they don't want to look like they need it. Personally I like the options that play into First One pettiness and hubris.
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Feb 27, 2024 18:00
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