Given this, I’ve decided to bet on the positive side and brought myself to create a second corner of discussion to open the road to anyone who wants to do the same.
To anyone who has no idea what this is all about or simply wants to know the rules of these kind of threads refer to this post: Intro and Rules .
Like before, the mods have naturally total leave to alter said rules if they deem it necessary (I tried to consider most of the points I thought important but you never know if something new may pop up).
I warn everyone there are several images in this topic for purpose of comparison, so sorry for the inconvenience…
With this premise out of the way and without further ado allow me to introduce you to today’s Theory Corner
TL;DR The thorian creepers might in fact be Prothean clones from the previous Thorian cycle, the reason for their feral zombie-like looks being due to the 50000 years that have passed causing those “drones” to partially rot away, or causing the samples of DNA the Thorian uses for cloning to be partially corrupted/decayed.
Long theory explanation
Of Thorians and Protheans (with a little help from the Collectors)…
And why we may have in fact met “Protheans” without noticing while fighting the thorian creepers, as crazy at this may sound.
Like always, let’s start with a few “facts”:
- The Thorian appears to have a cyclical life in a manner similar to the Reapers. Like Shiala said “thousands of years of slumber followed by a few frantic centuries of activity”.
- The last cycle appears to have ended (with the Thorian assimilating all of its slaves into those pods) roughly at the same time as the Reaper arrival or a short time before that. As, if it had happened long before, the other Protheans would have noticed an entire colony vanishing of the grid (and a world spanning one at that) when everyone there “became part” of the Thorian. With communications cut due to the Reapers isolating the clusters instead it would make sense for them not to notice.
The cycle can’t have happened later in the Reaper invasion as it would have been difficult to retain its slaves and assimilate them with the Reapers harvesting everything around it, this also would leave the reason for Feros (more or less) intact status unexplained.
- The previous point is further supported by the fact Feros’ Prothean colony is still, like I said, more or less intact: we know the reapers cancel every trace of their passage when they go back to dark space, that includes destroying the settlements of the harvested populations (which makes sense if the harvesting requires them to land like they appear to be doing on Earth in ME3). The reason for this apparent slip is probably due to the fact by the time the Reapers arrived there the whole world was already deserted, every being there already consumed into the Thorian pods, so there was no need to land to harvest anything, nor to hide proof of their landing… The Reapers probably just moved on…
- The Thorian proved his ability to perfectly clone a creature he has into his stasis/digestion pods, he can do this apparently without limit. It does so with Shiala, so it stand to reason it should have been able to clone Protheans too.
- The Thorian appears to be capable of accessing the minds of the creatures he infects with its spores (it’s how he knows when to punish its thralls, also it’s mentioned, by either the VI or Baynham I can’t remember, that every thought is scanned), he appears to be capable of doing the same to the creatures into its pods and he apparently can pour this knowledge into the clones (he was capable of passing Shiala’s knowledge of biotics and her memories to the Shiala clone, it’s also how Shiala says the Thorian assimilated the Chiper).
- The Thorian says, through the clone, Shiala was its first taste of flesh in the long cycle. If we consider its “tasting flesh” meaning “assimilating in the pods”, that means it still hadn’t absorbed any of the colonist in Zhu’s Hope by the time Saren arrived; immediately afterwards Saren ordered his Geth to kill the Thorian, so it stands to reason the Thorian wouldn’t have had time to assimilate other colonists while fending off the Geth. Furthermore, if it had assimilated them, they would have popped out of the pods like Shiala when it died.
- Given the above point, the Creepers are obviously not human clones, and one of your companions states clearly no amount of infection could have caused a human to mutate like that so that shouldn’t be the ultimate destiny of the infected colonists either.
This is further demonstrated by their bleeding greenish fluid (Lymph? Chlorophyll?) similarly to the thorian nodes (implying they are plants like him), by Exogeni ability to recreate them (unless you depict them as so ruthless as to purposefully infect colonist to turn them) and by the fact that by ME2 - two years after the original infection - the colonists, while suffering from side effects, are clearly all normal (no decayed plant zombies or anything); while the first infection happened in early 2183 with the Creepers appearing later the same year.
- The Thorian states the Geth started killing “the flesh that would have tended the next cycle”, referring obviously to the colonists. This implies the Thorian uses them as drones to take care of it when it goes into slumber, the creepers appear to do the very same thing.
- The visions from the beacons contain several depictions of the Protheans fleeing or dying, and also one depicting them turning into Collectors. This visions are not completely clear but they officially depict Protheans nonetheless.
- While extensively modified, the Collectors have still a DNA that can be compared to the Protheans to the point of EDI noticing they are basically the same species, so even if they are no longer Protheans it’s possible for the Collectors to have maintained a few vestigial similarities.
Given all this, I may now speculate further regarding the topic at hand…
The Thorian is an ancient life form, whose life length is nigh impossible to even evaluate; its uniqueness is also due to it being a sentient plant, something we never saw in universe before or after. We all being animals (aliens included), it stand to reason its way of thinking would drop directly into Orange and Blue Morality, if you know what I mean…
Still, being sentient, it’s most likely aware of its greatest weakness: its cyclical life.
*The following is my speculation of how this cycle works*
Just like the Reapers, the Thorian spends thousands of years in total hibernation only waking up for a few centuries, unlike the Reapers however it is totally incapable of moving and is thus incapable of finding a suitable place to hide during its slumber.
If something discovers it while it sleeps, it will find itself in an extremely dangerous position, furthermore it is incapable of tending to its needs while hibernated (as a plant it probably has few need it can’t satisfy itself but still…). So it stands to reason it would surround itself with a cloud of parasitic spores (the VI said it itself, the emanation of spores is an act of self preservation not aggression): these spore’s function is probably twofold, it ensures everyone who discovers the Thorian while asleep would be enthralled and also the disturbance in the cloud would warn the thing that someone has come to the planet.
This disturbance would wake the Thorian up, notifying it that the time for a new cycle has begun. It would then begin to wake up and be completely active in some time (though how much “some” is in the mind of a thousand years old plant it’s disputable, consider that even normally the life cycles of a plant are usually quite slow, think for instance of the time it takes a plant to lose/grow back its leaves when the season changes).
It is safe to assume that, since the Thorian is a diffused creature that covers up almost all of Feros with its tendrils, it’s probably possible for it to create enough spores to engulf the planet eventually; the reason this has not already happened when we arrive on Feros is very probably due to the Thorian having “just” woken up (the first infections happened accidently while a few colonists started exploring the Lair of the Thorian below the place that would become Zhu’s Hope in the same year the events of ME1 unfold).
Another reason to believe the Thorian can, in fact, emanate spores from every part of its “body” when completely awake is that the node that has infected the colonists and appears to be the only source of the spores in ME1 is near the top of a Prothean sky scraper… Since the Thorian was there well before the Protheans, it stands to reason that part must have grown later and the one emanating the enslaving spores that infected the Protheans was elsewhere.
Anyway, as the Thorian wakes up, more and more spores would be created and an increasingly high number of inhabitants of Feros would become thralls, these thralls would then tend to the Thorian providing things the Thorian can’t obtain itself, essentially working as drones.
After a certain amount of time, an unspecified something would happen signaling the Thorian that it’s time to fall back to slumber (I will not go into depth with this since it’s not important), however there’s a problem, the Thorian can hibernate to conserve energy, but its slaves most likely can’t…
Letting them die would essentially leave the Thorian main nodes unattended and that would most likely be problematic: if something happens that requires attention there would be nothing the sentient plant could do (at least in a timely fashion), also it’s not clear if the creature can control its slaves while asleep.
So what the Thorian would need are drones that are essentially independent from mundane organic needs: the best would be having a servant without a will of its own, an extension of its master, capable of hibernating like it as to avoid problems in the long years of waiting for the new cycle to spring, but also retaining most of the abilities of the original thrall, as to be of actual use if needed. And that’s exactly where the creepers come in.
When time for sleep nears the Thorian would recall its thralls and force them into the pods, it will then create clones to tend to its nodes (maybe the nodes would even generate them themselves), these creeper will alternate periods of slumber to periods of activity tending the Thorian and would immediately wake up if the node they protect is ever threatened (we see this in game, attacking a node causes the creepers to wake up, but destroying it causes them to die immediately, meaning there’s some sort of link between them; maybe they used to be pods and contain the genetic memory of the creature that used to be trapped inside, like a giant database). Finally the Thorian would once again surround itself with a cloud of spores and go into hibernation.
However one would ask, if the Thorian can create these clones without limit, why would it even need new thralls? It’s my opinion that’s due to the fact the clones decay over time: it could be due to the time spent hibernated, a natural decay of the stored DNA or a side effect of extensive and constant cloning, but the creepers would probably reach a point where they’ll become useless (much like an overused tool, to use a word that describes how the Thorian sees us, ends up breaking after being used to much), so the Thorian would eventually need a new and fresh batch, and that’s provided as the new cycle begins.
So who was the new cycle this time? The humans of Zhu’s Hope. And what batch of tools were they making up for? The overused previous cycle, that is… the Protheans!
But here comes the question: after all this long winded explanation based on speculations, what proof do you have regarding the Protheans being this supposed old batch (and thus being the creepers)?
Little in the matter of actual statements, but (possibly) a lot in the form of visual proofs, and here we go…Continues in next post…
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