Quote from: Corporal Hicks on May 10, 2018, 07:29:44 AM
It's the worse part about her! A skull would really make the crest really stand out.
I'm about to make a long ass post so bear with me
You know what I always thought (now this could be totally, totally f**king wrong) is that the design of the queen implied that like most arthropods, it molted. Cameron said originally that a certain Alien is hormonally, or randomly chosen to not necessarily be female how we understand it, but to be reproduce asexually. That means, quite the growth spurt. Whether it be an exoskeleton and endoskeleton, or just an exoskeleton, one Alien has to grow AT LEAST several more than twice its size. Its been my headcanon that the head of the Queen is tongue, and so goes molting for the animal. Because I assume that, similar to a fly (though not as extreme), the tongue is more of a proboscis than a tongue and it uses ton tongue to feed, with the front pair of teeth aiding in the process to chew in order to make it easier for the tongue to swallow whatever matter it eats. Also why the tongue is always the first mechanism of the feeding process to sort of shoot out of the mouth.
Now, it may seem somewhat farfetched given the future continuity of everything but I have a feeling Cameron in the design of the queen, thought along similar lines that a random individual, or perhaps the first once it grows to a certain age, follows the logic that the front feeding teeth are lost, and the animal molts in such a way the tongue becomes larger to become the second head in its rapid growth spurt of molting. Perhaps its growth is what forces out the front pair of teeth, The regular head in the molting process in this case, becomes the crown. And it may seem a bit silly, but as it grows its larger head, it grows a second proboscis/tongue/mouth. Who knows maybe this process keeps going the larger a hive grows; the larger the queen has to grow to support its bulbous ovipositor/eggsack. If we are to assume the Queen is similar to a termite, and the Queen found in Aliens is young, who knows how large the queen would need to be in order to grow to support that much activity. A regular termite queen's body tends to be several times larger than a regular termite, far larger in proportion to the Queen we saw in Aliens to the regular bestiary we see around the Queen.
Now you could be thinking "oh come on, that's an asspull", but I've always thought about it from the perspective of the design of the Queen itself. You sort of notice in the film (especially its introduction), but the "crown" serves both, well whatever it serves, but as a cowl for the head similar to how the "tongue" is protected by the cowl of the head of any regular run of the mill alien. You also notice, obviously, the "tongue" scales with the size of the Queen.
You can especially see what I mean in behind the scenes pictures, and videos of maqquette and the like.
If the Queen indeed molts, why is it a cowl. And how does that cowl grow at all? The obvious answer to me is that the jaw is just that, a jaw. It doesn't serve much more of purpose than any mandible. There are plenty of examples of arthropods in nature that have different sized mandibles between the sex; a male spider and a female spider. That doesn't mean the spider's mandibles are its head, nor, the jaws of the Alien its real head. Just its jaws. To me the cowl is the leftover of the first pair of jaws once, like all arthropods that molt, gets forced out to make way for the larger molt. It all gets forced forward until it hardly resembles jaws at all, and as I previously said; who knows, maybe this molting process keeps going the larger the size required for the organism itself. Regular examples of this organism don't go through this dramatic metamorphosis, with perhaps the exception of the loss of the cowl and the partial solidification of the front of the head/jaw through age. Maybe the origin of the "jaw" can trace back to the ovipositor of the Facehugger, maybe the ovipositor of the facehugger leads to the eggsac. Who knows, we're dealing with an Alien. It's probably both. You'll notice the lifecycle always involves a mechanism shooting something out of the main organism. Hello victim, meet egg, victim meet facehugger. Hello victim, meet chestburster. Hello victims, meet Alien, hello even more victims, meet hive. Hello even more victims, meet Queen, meet eggs again, meet facehugger. All of it seems to trace back anatomically to a jack in the box method of getting shit done.
To me the jaw serves the same purpose as mandibles serves in terrestrial arthropods, and can at any point be molted or changed. You can even notice the hands of the queen, they aren't the hands of any regular example of the organism, significant molting went on to the point its obvious that unlike regular exoskeleton animals, the queen is very exoskeleton. It has no tendons, it even has holes where regular tendons should be. The infrastructure of the hands as they are in vertebrates don't exist; they're simply too skinny to raise a hand of that size. However, going back to arthropods, usually pressurized fluid can raise or lift limbs. Especially in spiders, the pressure inside can raise a limb, and considering the structure of the queen, digits. Maybe a kind of muscles are involved, but the Queen doesn't need much muscle considering its purpose. It seems to be emaciated. Going back to the lifecycle tying together, even the Queen's hands seem to regress back to a facehugger like appearance. Who knows what's going on anatomically with these things, but clearly however fleshy the facehugger is, it uses the same method of locomotion as most arachnids. The hands of the queen are even smaller/more emaciated than that.
