Quote from: Nukiemorph on Jul 22, 2021, 12:32:35 AM
Why would an alien ever inherit a lack of traits that we've seen every alien have? Being so susceptible to inheriting shitty traits from a host seems counter to the whole concept of the alien.
I always figured it retained its strengths and inherited other strengths. Not inheriting the weaknesses is part of the perfection.
Strenghts is a double edged sword and from certain perspectives: one strenght can easily become ones weakness.
Let me explain my point of view of this:
Marvel set up following rules, they told this when they explained why the xenos now have snake like inner jaw that can move freely unlike before:
1: Xenomorphs takes traits from the host and keeps it and get more and more dna of the host for each generation, changing them each time.
As you mention predalien and you make it sound like canon, lets have a look.(Myself disagree on it being a queen, but rather a normal xeno that has predator dna and got one of their advantages):
If the predalien is a queen and if they take dna and never reset it: It should have human queen design elements to it due to its previous queen was a human empress. Plus now having predator dna so should be a mix of it and xeno dna but we only have it having predator designs, lack the two secondary arms that a human queen should have and has since chestburster stage so where is the human dna? It also lack much of the old xeno dna as it has no exoskeleton but softer predator skinn that even a 5,56mm assault rifle can pierce and injure, which it cant to human queens, so already here we have it taking dna that didnt make it better: weaker armour compared to normal queens. Also the predator dreadloks, is that an advantage?
And if it is a queen and can eggbarf: why even bother with eggsack when it can reproduce quicker by eggbarfing all hosts it can find, mobile and quicker, already here we have reason to think the queens spawned from this one will completely leave the eggsack stage.
And for the dna: its offspring dont share any predator look or dna but is completely normal human xenos, should also have predator dna if we go after marvels rules of them always keeping the old dna.
From real world genetics, we can look at breeding dogs as example: mixing different breeds of dogs to improve them is at best 50/50% chance, as its as likely the dog offsprings will have bad and good dna, some dog species completely gets ruined by it and its near impossible to revert it, dna isnt going to magically disappear hence the strict laws of mix breeding dogs.
Same is for xenos if there is no reset in the chain: yes it will adapt well and make new and exciting new xeno types but go wrong and you cant revert back.
Now to my example, can look at previous well known examples:
If we have a facehugger impregnate a space jockey, the new queen space jockey hybrid will be 10 times bigger than a normal queen and have a tronk from its mouth to its chest, as we saw in comics and games(infestation). So a queen that is 10 times bigger than normal with space jockey design, great and strong. But if we place said queen on their home planet, it is too big to hide in one of the caves and the smaller xeno predators on its homeplanet will easily take it down as they are too small for it to engage. Or if we place it ona human spaceship: its too big to fit in corridors or move and its much larger eggs and facehuggers I doubt will be able to fit a human skull.
Just for fun: if we let it somehow be successfull and it impregnates a elephant, and then hmm.....rhino:
We will end up with a queen that is 15 times larger than a normal queen, have the space jockey trunk and elephant horns and a rhino horn on its head and walking on all four with hoves, a much smaller crown due to rhino dna.
Its offsprings will also be a mix of these hybrids so then we humans could just simply get ona boat and stay out in the sea as they will drown as they cant swim due to not having arms and fingers etc anymore but hoves. on the ground they are mighty although easy to see due to their large size.
As they have hoves we could just simply use the hoves traps farmers use for cows: long bars with space between them, if a cow try to walk over, their hoves will get between and snap their bones, same would happen to a running xeno of this type.
As there is no way to go back to their previous design they will have to live with these strenghts and weaknesses, where as a big chap would been able to be better at all of these situations due to the original xeno design that works well in most situations.
Plus its design would be so damn ugly and long gone is the xeno design, like predalien it would have thick elephant/rhino skinn and hoves and tusks etc, so seeing a original queen design is something that cant ever happen again.
With marvels: they keep their dna and changes more and more into the host it came from, we will have xenomorphs be more like the thing creature than remaining pure xenomorph.
We saw in alienr esurrection how too much human dna changed them, gave them some advantages but also big weaknesses from the human dna. As marvel said: they take more and more dna from their host for each generation. IF I remember it right
anchorpointessays.com said they take around 10-15% dna. So if we allow enough time to pass they will change from the xeno design toa more humanoid design as they gain more and more human dna, hence marvels explanation whyw e see new kind of xenos in their comics, due to them having more dna than normal as they have breed for generations.
Its here I prefer they have a reset, either in the queen or her eggs have a reset: then they can easily adapt to any new world or situation, have predaliens or space jockey xenos etc and if a host gave bad hybrids its easily fixed and we wont risk the xenos changing forever to something else like the thing would do.And we get to keep our classic designs that no artist so far has managed to beat, wake me up when someone has designed a better monster design of the xeno drone or queen, it will be many years I reckon.
I dont see xenos magically can control what dna they take, as we saw in avpR and in resurrection and comics and games: they do take some strenghts from their host but they also get weaknesses from it. One cant eat the cake and have it as they say
Thats my issues with them taking on dna and keeping it and never reset it somewhere, sooner or later we will end up with xenos looking like something else and they can lose the acid for blood or egglaying advantages, David showed in covenant how previous versions didnt have acid and if one play around with dna enough it can be changed, hell we saw in aliens aftermath it didnt have acid anymore.
To be fair: I can see your point too: having the xenos being even better at adaptation and even the queens take dna and make its offspring have it too and keep the dna would make for new and exciting xeno types and deadlier ones, especielly if the xenos somehow can pick and chose from the dna they take(in real world you cant) but looking away from more serious down to earth genetics and follow what marvel comics do, then anything is possible.
And afterall this is a comic and its up to each fan to decide if they see these marvel comics as true alien lore or not.
About the hive mind thing: I dont see why a host get access to the hive mind, its not like the chestburster transform the host and make it to a xeno too, so to me that is just strange and no reason why the xenos would even want the hosts to get access to? Reminds me: a lot of people from colonial marine era said that hosts will get cancer/get sick of the process and die if you remove the chestburster so we have a conflict there.
In alien resurrection its explained why with the cloning process but the star of the marvel comics wasnt cloned, just had his chestburster removed prior to it killing him and the chestburster dont change the hosts dna at all, it takes from the host however, so to me this is just weird, but then again marvels take on xenos is something I disagree on most of the things they do.
Cant recall any host before that had the chestburster removed having access to a alien hive mind or feel its xeno, unless the host itself had xeno dna.
Else it was due to the queens or queen mother affected the hosts/humans to have dreams or visions and make them wanna join the xenos etc.