Stockholm syndrome is now recognized as a survival mechanism—by bonding with their captors, victims force those captors to see them as human beings like themselves, rather than as a threat or an annoyance that can be readily disposed of.
Psychologists have recognized four factors that are needed to bring about Stockholm syndrome:
A perceived threat to one’s survival and a belief that the captor would carry out the threat.
Some small kindness from the captor to the captive—such as allowing him to live.
Isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor.
Seeing no chance of escape.
Those all obviously apply in “Bushwhacked.” The lone surviving settler saw the rest of his company slaughtered, so there was obviously a threat to his survival; he was allowed to live; he was left alone aboard an abandoned wreck, where the chances that the ship would ever be found were slim.
So here, perhaps, is an explanation for that would-be Reaver. No, he didn’t develop a craving for human flesh, nor was he possessed by the evils he had seen—but he identified with the Reavers in an extreme case of Stockholm syndrome, in an attempt to survive. He saw them ruthlessly slaughter anyone and anything aboard the settlers’ ship—except each other. The only way to be sure of surviving the Reavers was to be a Reaver.
And now that he’s rescued, he does his best to become one—not because it’s the only way to deal with the horrors he’s seen, but in case they come back.
No, that’s not rational—but neither are Reavers, and neither are our survival instincts. The odds are excellent that he’ll never see the Reavers again; after all, most of the billions of citizens of the Alliance never encounter them—but he’s had that long shot come in once, and he had a second long shot come in when he survived the attack…
So he’s not taking chances. To him, in his damaged, unthinking state, the fact that it’s far more likely he’ll get killed (as in fact he does) by acting like a Reaver than that he’ll ever encounter Reavers again just isn’t going to register. He knows what he saw, he knows how to survive it, and he does what he must.
To Mal Reynolds, it’s a matter of a mind being broken, a soul destroyed, by what it’s experienced—the survivor can’t cope with the horror except by becoming a monster. He’s been bitten by the werewolf, clawed by the wendigo, and must become one.
That certainly fits with the myth, but the reality, surely, is simply the Stockholm syndrome writ large—our survivor has moved Reavers to an uncontested first place on his personal threat list, and knows, to the bottom of his heart, that the only thing the Reavers won’t kill is another Reaver. He has presumably seen what Zoe described in “Serenity”—seen the Reavers rape people to death, seen them eat their victims’ flesh, and seen them sew their victims’ skin into their clothing—and he wants, more than anything else, to be sure that doesn’t happen to him.
That this will make him a monster himself—well, he probably doesn’t care.
Had he lived, he might have defended himself by saying that he was just trying to survive, that he was only pretending to be a Reaver—but as Kurt Vonnegut says in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
This sort of effect is quite likely something the Reavers want, so far as they want anything beyond blood, death, and terror. It makes their jobs easier if their victims are so utterly terrified that they don’t dare fight back; in fact, I’d suspect that they leave these occasional survivors deliberately, just to promote their own legend and weaken resistance.
And it might help their own mental health, if you can call it that—they can tell themselves that the way their victims imitate them shows that they’re right, that their lifestyle is natural and reasonable for human beings, as demonstrated by the way other people adopt it once they’ve seen it in action.
Which brings us back to Sawney Beane. While there are no detailed transcripts, he and his clan are alleged to have gone to their deaths protesting vigorously, saying they had just done what they needed to do to survive; the children and grandchildren in particular had no reason to think they were doing anything wrong, or even unusual, since they had never known any other life.
Do the Reavers know they’re human? Do they remember where they came from?
Jayne says, “They ain’t men.” Mal says they are, albeit pretty poor ones. What do they think, themselves?
The TV series left us with so many questions. How did they get there? Did they start out as ordinary pirates, and degenerate?
It’s clear from one single observed fact that they really are degenerate, that it’s not an act put on to enhance their terrifying reputation—they fly ships with unshielded reactors.
That’s suicidal. It’s insane.
But do the Reavers know that? They know how to operate their ships, and presumably how to repair them, but do they understand how they work?
Before “Serenity,” we had to ask whether they were civilized men gone bad, like Sawney Beane, or were they the grandchildren, unaware they could ever be anything better than they are? Could it be that the Reavers, monsters though they are, did have families and raise children, whom they brought up in the family trade, as the Beanes did, and these children are unaware that they’re monsters? Those unshielded reactors would seem to imply that they don’t know what they’re doing, that they’re innocents, in their monstrous way. It may be that these people lost their humanity over several generations, rather than in a single lifetime—we’re never told, on the series, how long the Reaver menace has existed. Long enough for tales to be widespread, but not universal—how long is that, in the “Firefly” ’Verse?
Or perhaps the reactors are unshielded because the Reavers really are suicidal—they do know who and what they are, and are deliberately courting death out of some lingering remnant of guilt or shame. Even once we learn their origin, we don’t know all that much about their psychology beyond the fact that they’re driven by uncontrollable, inhuman, drug-induced rage. There may be lingering humanity beneath the madness—guilt, fear, and empathy, utterly swamped by their fury, but not actually gone. Maybe they are suicidal on some level.
But there are so many faster, easier ways to die in space! Perhaps it’s not an actual guilt-induced death-wish, but merely fatalism. They don’t care whether they live or die. Whatever might once have motivated them, other than rage, has presumably been lost, and nothing has filled that void; they have no morality we would recognize, make no effort to improve themselves—but they don’t simply suicide, either. Perhaps the drug that destroyed their humanity has left them so empty they cannot even bring themselves to care enough about anything but aggression and hatred to do that!
But why prey on others? Why not fight one another, instead of raiding elsewhere? No, on some level they must still want to survive, even if it’s only to destroy—the dead can’t kill.
Even after the movie, there are so many unanswered questions about the Reavers, and before we got our explanation in “Serenity” they really were rather hard to believe in. Could there really be such a culture surviving out there, interstellar heirs of Sawney Beane? Especially since Sawney Beane probably never existed.
I imagine you protesting at that, given what I said earlier in this essay, and I don’t blame you; I did write as if Beane’s history were fact. And for more than a century and a half, the tale was indeed accepted as fact—from 1719 until the 1890s no one seriously questioned the story. There were all those lovely corroborating details—the name of king who had the Beanes executed, the place the execution took place, and all the rest of it.
But then some spoilsport historians began taking a closer look, and began noticing things like the fact that the name Sawney Beane doesn’t seem to appear anywhere prior to 1719, even though he was allegedly executed about a century earlier. They noticed that the stories say that James I took four hundred men to Scotland to hunt down the Beanes, but that records of King James’ reign make no
mention of any such expedition; one would expect some documentation any time a company of four hundred soldiers went traipsing off after a gang of cannibals with the king himself in command.
They checked the court records at Leith, and found no mention of the execution of forty-eight murderers at the king’s express order. The stories say that the niceties of trial and sentencing were dispensed with, and that Sawney and his sons had their limbs lopped off and were left to bleed to death, while the women and children were burned alive; while that’s certainly not any more barbaric than some very real killings, it is the sort of thing that would be recorded as an event of some moment—exsanguination and burning were not common methods of execution, even in the 17th century.
There’s also the whole question of how a thousand travelers could be murdered in a thinly-populated area like 17th-century eastern Scotland without creating an immense panic that would have been mentioned in any number of contemporary accounts.
It seems likely, then, that the whole story was made up, and its publication in 1719 in a book of stories about famous criminals was intended not so much to accurately record history as to help sell lurid books.
Yet readers believed it implicitly for well over a century; no one seriously questioned it. Even now, many people believe it—I’ve heard it told as fact, and only learned just how unlikely it is to be true when I began researching this essay.
Why are people so eager to believe in stories like this, stories telling us that civilization is only a thin veneer, easily sloughed off when it becomes inconvenient? In fact, ordinary people are capable of appalling atrocities, of ferocity and cruelty as bad as anything found in the animal kingdom. We need only look at the historical record to find innumerable instances, from soldiers collecting ears to conquerors building pyramids of skulls, from abusive parents torturing their own children to religious persecutions in every century, from pogroms to death camps, of how hideous human behavior can be—but in almost every case, the participants in these abominations returned to human civilization and went about their lives afterward. The survivors of the Donner Party did not become slavering monsters living in caves like Sawney Beane. Soldiers who committed ghastly atrocities returned home to marry and raise children. Civilization is not a veneer we can easily lose forever at all—instead, it’s something we can close away temporarily, and restore when the crisis is over.
But that’s not how the stories tell it, because that’s not how we want it. We tell each other that our humanity is delicate and precious, that if we go too far it will be irretrievably lost, because if we admit that we can be monsters and then become human again and go on as if nothing had happened, then it’s that much more tempting to be monsters. It’s like a mother telling her child, “If you keep making faces like that, your face will freeze that way!” It’s not true, the mother knows it’s not true, often even the child knows it’s not true, but it reduces the temptation to make faces, because hey, what if your face did freeze like that?
What if committing an atrocity did mean you could never be human again?
So we tell ourselves stories of people who became monsters and could never again be human.
I started out by saying that the Reavers might seem absurd, were it not for known cases like Sawney Beane. Now, we see that Sawney Beane probably never existed—that in fact, I haven’t been able to find any reliably-reported cases of small groups reverting to that sort of extreme barbarism for an extended period. Does that mean that the Reavers are absurd, an impossible element in the otherwise vaguely plausible backdrop of “Firefly,” merely another cautionary tale with no basis in reality?
Well, sort of; if we take them at face value, as the heirs of Sawney Beane, then yes, they do start to look a bit ridiculous, like the monsters in old campfire tales that may scare you when you’re out in the dark woods, but just seem silly by daylight. After all, how could such a vicious culture survive out there? What do they do for food? Yes, they’re cannibals, but in order to sustain a viable fighting population they would need to eat a lot of people; they wouldn’t be a mere legend to the inner worlds, but a menace the Alliance would be determined to wipe out. Not to mention just how unhealthy a diet of nothing but human flesh is. Historically, cannibals have eaten people for ritual reasons or in emergencies, not as a regular diet; it’s just not practical to live entirely on humans.
Where do they get fuel for their ships? We know that Serenity needs lots of expensive fuel; presumably all ships do. Where are the Reavers getting theirs? Even after we learn that they had an entire formerly-civilized planet as their home base, would it have enough fuel stored away to supply them for decades?
Why do they leave the ships they attack as intact as they do? Why haven’t they stripped the wrecks of every salvageable spare part, every trace of food, every bit of fuel? The drifting wreck in “Bushwhacked” still had all its air—and they left uneaten corpses aboard! How can they afford to leave that food supply behind?
Clearly, these are not true scavengers. They do look impossible, and it’s easy to see why the people of the core planets consider them a myth.
But we know the Reavers are out there! How can this be?
Well, “Serenity” gave us one explanation, but before the movie’s release I came up with my own theories.
One possibility was that Joss Whedon and company didn’t think this thing through, and just came up with scary monsters without working out the details, but I think we can dismiss that theory for a very simple, obvious reason: It’s no fun. So what other choices do we have?
We knew at least one large shipful of these terrifying raiders existed, and probably more than one, going by the reactions of Serenity’s crew to the events of “Serenity” and “Bushwhacked.” We knew they needed food, fuel, and resources to keep their ships flying and their crews healthy—or as healthy as they can be, flying with unshielded reactors and eating human flesh—and that their depredations couldn’t really be supplying all their needs, or they would be much more thorough in their scavenging.
So they must have some other source of supply.
Which means, I thought, that someone is deliberately funding and supplying the Reavers.
It’s the only possibility I could see. As I’ve said, despite how common it is in fiction, we have no real historical examples of small groups reverting to barbarism for extended periods of time—but we do have examples of entire civilizations going blood-mad, from the Aztecs to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and we do have countless examples of civilized soldiers using terror and deliberate atrocities to scare their enemies into staying clear: from Tiglath-Pileser to Attila the Hun, from the Norse berserkers to the Mormon Danites, from the shrunken heads of the Amazon jungle to the headhunters of Borneo, human beings have always used terror to say, “Don’t mess with us.”
Someone out there, I concluded, was trying to send the expanding Alliance that familiar message.
But whoever it is didn’t want an open fight; presumably, they knew they’d lose a real war. They were just trying to discourage the Alliance from expanding into “Reaver territory,” trying to make it too expensive, too risky, to go in that particular direction, all without letting the Alliance know there’s a real enemy out there. They were playing the role of boogeymen, of the monsters from the id, of Sawney Beane, to scare intruders away, trying to maintain a careful balance between being too small to have an effect, and too big to ignore. They deliberately modeled themselves on the most horrific legends they can find, and relied on their victims being too frightened, too demoralized, to realize that a genuine Reaver society, with nothing backing it up, is impossible. After all, people believed in Sawney Beane for more than a hundred years before anyone even began to question the story—why would anyone doubt the reality of the Reavers, when there’s solid evidence of their depredations?
It all fits.
Just who were the Reavers, then, if not the actual society that sent the ships out? Were they volunteers, or draftees?
W
ell, wait a minute—who would volunteer to go out on an unshielded ship to murder and eat men, women, and children? What sort of society would expect draftees to do that?
Maybe they really aren’t men. Maybe Jayne was right all along.
Androids, perhaps? Madmen? Criminals offered amnesty if they survive?
And who did send them? Who’s out there? Aliens? Bitter remnants of the rebel Independents, seeking revenge on the Alliance? Some bizarre corporate offshoot within the Alliance, for reasons we can only guess at?
We didn’t know—until “Serenity” came out and shot my lovely theory to pieces.
Ah, well.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Matchmaking on the Hellmouth
Originally published in Seven Seasons of Buffy
Note: While I’ve read the comic books for Seasons Eight and Nine, they had not yet appeared when I wrote this, and I choose to ignore them here. Assume, while reading this, that only the seven seasons of the TV series, and the five seasons of “Angel,” count, and all spin-offs are apocryphal.
As the Chosen One, the Slayer, Buffy Summers is doomed to spend her life battling monsters. Is she doomed to loneliness, as well? Must she go through life unpartnered? Sure, she has her friends, but let’s face it, her love life has been a disaster—every relationship has failed spectacularly. Only three ever really even got off the ground, and all of them crashed and burned. Angel’s curse pretty much destroyed any chance for long-term happiness there, she and Riley never managed a solid emotional connection, and Spike—well, that was messy, wasn’t it?
So who’s out there who might be a fit lifemate for the Slayer, the Chosen One?
First off, I think we can immediately eliminate any ordinary, untrained human being. Those around Buffy are inevitably going to encounter the creatures of the night—demons, vampires, evil gods, the entire panoply. We got a look at this all the way back in the first season, with Owen in “Never Kill A Boy on the First Date,” and again with Scott in the third season, and even Parker in the fourth. Anyone in Buffy’s life is going to get involved in her Slaying, and a normal man’s life expectancy in such a situation, Xander notwithstanding, is not likely to be very great. Bringing a new arrival up to speed, and teaching him to cope with the menaces Buffy faces, would be risky and time-consuming, to say the least. Furthermore, an ordinary mortal boyfriend’s presence is likely to endanger Buffy, as well, as she finds herself worrying about defending her man at times when she really doesn’t need any distractions.
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