DTurtle posted:

Wait a second, the Zerg weren’t a project of the Xel‘naga as a whole, but just a single "fallen" one?

PurpleXVI posted:

FINALLY I CAN COMPLAIN.

NO, THE PRIMAL ZERG AREN'T "DINO ZERG." THEY'RE loving "DRAGON ZERG."

THEY DID ALL THIS poo poo JUST SO THEY COULD HAVE ANCIENT WISE POWERFUL DRAGONS IN THE SETTING.

Xarn posted:

Important collection, this isn't Welcome to the Jungle. That was TvP, this is ZvZ

This mission is also waaay worse to play.

aniviron posted:

Zeratul: You will not see me again

Me: Oh thank god.

Grammarchist posted:

Abathur is still the standout star of Hearts. He's just so proud of his work and rightfully disdainful of the primals.

Omobono posted:

Dune: the Jamis vs Paul duel to the death. On one side, a 30-something Fremen, an hardened warrior and brutal killer. On the other side, a 15 years old noble, never faced a day of burden or hunger or thirst in his life; all his combat experience is training, and the narration actually spends some words in describing how said training is handicapping Paul because the duel's rules are way outside the way he was trained. Under the Noble Savage rules, the result should be obvious, no?
End result: Paul clowns on Jamis, HARD. Paul defeats Jamis so decisively that in two different occasions during the duel Stilgar has to intervene to prevent the rest of the Sietch from lynching Paul, because they believe the latter is cruelly mocking Jamis.
And yet at no point nobody, including the author, stops to think that maybe this Noble Savage that just got clowned on by a whelp half his age isn't actually that good at fighting.

GunnerJ posted:

Kind of off topic but didn't Paul have some space magic on his side here?

Omobono posted:

-snip for space-

Poil posted:

I've got bad news.

Omobono posted:

I don't think so, his Space Magic is prescience and it wasn't under his conscious control yet. No seeing the future during that duel IIRC.

GunnerJ posted:

Hm maybe that's just how I internally "justified" something that otherwise makes no sense, then. Like sure, there's no way Paul is a more capable fighter, but if he's getting subconscious "danger sense" or whatever, he basically knows every move his opponent makes in advance. But I don't actually remember what happened in that scene so!

Tenebrais posted:

See this is part of why I liked the idea that the primals evolved from zerg left behind. Then there's good reason for them to have zerglings and hydralisks and ultralisks, since they did originally have those forms in their genome. Could even go one step further and give them only either units from Starcraft 1 and ones new to this mission chain (which is basically to say, don't give them roaches).

Cythereal posted:

I re-read the book fairly recently after Dune 2021 made it to Netflix, and yeah there's no space magic at work at that point. Paul is Just That Good.

And also one of the most brutal tyrants the galaxy would ever see, down the road.

DTurtle posted:

No, no, no!

The SC1 manual is very clear, that the "original" Zerg are small parasitic worms capable of taking over and assimilating other creatures and doing some targeted evolution. AFTER killing the Xel‘naga, the Zerg went on a rampage through the galaxy, assimilating creatures and integrating them into the Swarm. Zerglings, Hydralisks and (most) other Zerg units even have the explicit planetary systems named where they are from. There shouldn‘t be any "normal" Zerg units on Zerus…

Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:

There's a non-zero amount of space magic- he's already gone through the start of becoming a people-computer and courtesy of spice exposure he's getting more frequent bursts of foresight/pastsight, and also his mom has used some of her space magic to try to make the other guy fight worse

but it is explicitly called out that during the fight his futuresight is giving him absolutely nothing to work with, there's too many variables, all he can tell is that there's a lot of futures that involve him dying here and he did not need space magic to know that.

DTurtle posted:

No, no, no!

The SC1 manual is very clear, that the "original" Zerg are small parasitic worms capable of taking over and assimilating other creatures and doing some targeted evolution. AFTER killing the Xel‘naga, the Zerg went on a rampage through the galaxy, assimilating creatures and integrating them into the Swarm. Zerglings, Hydralisks and (most) other Zerg units even have the explicit planetary systems named where they are from. There shouldn‘t be any "normal" Zerg units on Zerus…

GunnerJ posted:

I feel like the movie did at least a little bit more to try making it make sense by showing some visions of Jamis killing Paul so you kinda got the sense he's maybe seen the fight play out in his head a few times in advance or whatever. (To your other point, the movie also does a lot to signal that Paul is actually really bad news, which I appreciated.)

Sanguinia posted:

I'm seeing several people refer to the Primal Zerg as a Noble Savage trope, and I kind of get it, but I think that's a bit of a stretch tbh.

Aces High posted:

In the Sci-fi channel miniseries, Paul's line is "he taught me that when you kill, you pay for it", which is a powerful sentiment in its own right, but wasn't what Herbert wrote. This scene also frames it as Paul having to make that statement, as opposed to the book where he feels compelled to offer it to demonstrate to the rest of the Fremen that he is one of them and will honour their customs and traditions.

Frank Herbert posted:

Paul felt the diminishment of his self as he advanced into the center of the circle. It was as though he lost a fragment of himself and sought it here. He bent over the mound of belongings, lifted out the baliset. A string twanged softly as it struck against something in the pile.
“I was a friend of Jamis,” Paul whispered.
He felt tears burning his eyes, forced more volume into his voice. “Jamis taught me ... that ... when you kill ... you pay for it. I wish I’d known Jamis better.”
Blindly, he groped his way back to his place in the circle, sank to the rock floor.

Karia posted:

Kith posted:

He is, effectively, a giant head supported by teeny tiny crab legs.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

Even setting aside the worms thing, which stinks, the SC1 manual had all these neat entries about how the Zerg scoured the galaxy for all the nastiest apex predators or other cool critters, and assimilated and adapted them until they were advanced enough to go toe to toe with sci-fi human guns and all the space elf magic the Protoss use to compete. Like, the zergling was a desert critter hybridized with like ten other adaptable predators to create a soldier that'd thrive anywhere, and the ultralisk was the biggest, sturdliest pack herbivore adapted with all the organic knives you can put on a body.

nope turns out that they're all just one species of noble savage that convergently developed together in a jungle somewhere, which is not only stupid, but commits the far greater crime of being boring. They didn't even use their magic hyper-evolution to evolve into anything new and cool, all they could muster in the time since the Xel'naga just Amon was around was to pop out a single new unit type.

GunnerJ posted:

Hm maybe that's just how I internally "justified" something that otherwise makes no sense, then. Like sure, there's no way Paul is a more capable fighter, but if he's getting subconscious "danger sense" or whatever, he basically knows every move his opponent makes in advance. But I don't actually remember what happened in that scene so!

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

It's less the interactions and more the framing that Kerrigan has to go learn something from the "original" Zerg in order to become the best swarm queen she can be. Maybe noble savage isn't the right term, but it smells a whole lot like a sci-fi version of the old "the civilized man has lost his way and needs to get in touch with his roots" trope.

Kith posted:

The only noteworthy exception is the Primal Mutalisk, who for some reason is unique in that it has iridescent quad-wings and a different tail that ends in a stinger instead of the usual Mutalisk rear end-mouth.

Aces High posted:

well poo poo, I gotta go reread the book then. Possibly to figure out why I was so certain that Paul said something else

MagusofStars posted:

This is the part that I find most annoying about the concept of the Primal Zerg too. The whole concept of the Zerg in SC1 is that they basically are an amalgamation of every species they've encountered in their development across the universe - the hydralisk was a peaceful herbivore caterpillar that the Overmind was like "but what if it could stand up, shoot poisonous spines at high velocity, and had a killer instinct". And from a story perspective, that was a huge part of the Zerg's entire motivation to continually expand and push for more territory, because the only way they can continue to develop and evolve as a species is to constantly find new frontiers with new genetic material to assimilate.

Then SC2 basically deletes that entire thing because actually, the Zerg were a fully formed species on one planet, forget about that whole assimilation thing...oh wait, except for Evolution Missions, those actually are still built around the Zerg's original concept even though we've made that non-canon.

quote:

As the Zerg incorporated more and more host creatures into their fold, they began to assimilate their various genetic strains and processes. Zerg chemistry began to mutate and adapt according to the volume of new genetic material being processed. However, as diverse as the range of host creatures became, there was always the undeviating drive to consume only the most evolutionarily advanced species encountered. The Zerg were innately selective as to which species they consumed, ensuring that at every stage of their development they were at the top of the proverbial food chain. Any race that the Zerg came across that was deemed unworthy of assimilation was eradicated to further purify the strains.

The Xel’Naga soon made an alarming discovery. The original races assimilated by the Zerg were hardly recognizable after only a few generations of their inception. Somehow the Zerg had developed the ability to supercharge and steer the latent evolutionary processes within their host creatures. The host creatures fell prey to the effects of gradual physical mutations that caused all of the various strains to grow armor piercing spines, razor-sharp limbs, and ultra dense carapaces. Over a surprisingly short amount of time, the strains grew to resemble a terrifyingly ravenous and unified race.

Kith posted:

Sanguinia posted:

The Roach also has some very neat detail work done on its carapace. The others being so lame, especially the always-iconic Hydralisk, is a real let-down.

DTurtle posted:

No, no, no!

The SC1 manual is very clear, that the "original" Zerg are small parasitic worms capable of taking over and assimilating other creatures and doing some targeted evolution. AFTER killing the Xel‘naga, the Zerg went on a rampage through the galaxy, assimilating creatures and integrating them into the Swarm. Zerglings, Hydralisks and (most) other Zerg units even have the explicit planetary systems named where they are from. There shouldn‘t be any "normal" Zerg units on Zerus…