Parasites, symbiotes, and SG1
Apr. 6th, 2019 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI watched Venom and then read https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/79396.html Rydra Wong's Walked Right Out Of The Machinery, and so now I have Thoughts about parasites and symbiotes and civilisation. Not on the whole new thoughts, but I thought I'd write them down again anyway, since I keep going silent around here.
Stargate set up the goa'uld to be very alien and very limited, in their unbonded forms. The Tok'ra were living with the same biology, but made different moral choices about what to do with it. The Venom parasite has different constraints, not least that it eats its hosts. And then there's Jadzia Dax, treated very differently than all of the above, since the Dax symbiote doesn't stay a seperate voice in the host, an old being taking over a new life, they just conjoin completely, becoming together an entirely new being, or so the legal argument went.
We don't know much about the reproductive biology of Trill symbionts, or at least I don't. I hear there's stuff in the comics about Venom and his lot, but I don't know it. And that's a bit frustrating because you can go from the goa'uld's biological constraints to explaining their whole society. ... no I don't know how much the writers intended, and I haven't watched canon recently, but still, thoughts can happen.
Goa'uld started out in pools on the world they evolved in, and could survive their pretty happily, except for natural predation. The Unas are big scaled humanoids, and they eat goa'uld, but they're also the first hosts. Which seems fair, honestly, if something tries to eat you, however you stop it seems like self defence. Also makes sense of that thing where the main wiggly body of a goa'uld could be removed surgically without removing the goa'uld's controlling intelligence - if they have to get past snapping teeth to get to the soft back of the throat and from there to the central nervous system, they probably left chunks of themselves behind a few times.
And then they had a body.
The snake form doesn't seem to have much going for it. No manipulators, limited senses, a neat sense for electrical impulses and chemistry but not much for the long range stuff. Fine for floating around in a liquid, probably not great for being an advanced intelligence. But one of the more interesting possibilities is that the snakes themselves aren't intelligent, exactly, they simply have memory. They're a hard drive that plugs into a brain they can use to process all the new data. That would explain why they couldn't enslave lower beings and be monkeys. If they want to be people, they have to suborn a nervous system capable of it.
In a body they have so many advantages. They can start changing the world they live in. And the world the other swimmer snakes live in too.
We only meet the goa'uld after they have started routinely using human hosts. Humans must be such an upgrade in safety terms. Sure they lack natural armour, but that means a symbiote can get in without getting ate. That's worth a lot. And we may or may not be smarter than the neighbours, but we're certainly smart enough to be going on with, with an interesting set of senses and manipulators. Luxury real estate.
But not all humans are compatible hosts with all symbiotes. We see a symbiote reject many hosts in a row. It might be an aesthetic choice, but it's a snake at the time, it seems unlikely to have the same standards. Hathor mentions having a pharoah provide DNA helps her change her offspring to be compatible with their hosts, code of life to avoid rejection (poor Daniel). Wiki reckons goa'uld larvae that mature in teh wild have only a 50% chance of successfully taking a host. Doesn't have a little reference number for episode though so I don't have context for the number. Probably that includes the effects of natural predation and not just rejection. The solution was to create Jaffa, incubators of almost the same kind of life as they will later take as hosts, a safe environment that can help them choose a host from multiple possibilities. It's an intricate system that seems designed to maximise the chances of their offspring, though the tendency to use Jaffa in wars is a counterproductive force in a big way.
It also seems evil. Because they're being bastards to humans on all fronts, using them.
Parasites take without giving back, and symbiotes have a mutually beneficial relationship, to oversimplify a definition from memory. Goa'uld seem to be far to the take take take side. Except biologically they give their hosts and incubators a far longer life than they'd have without them. There's just a horrible trade off in free will. And the Tok'ra are dedicated to reforming that, taking only willing hosts.
But the Tok'ra all have the same Queen, are siblings, and are dying out. Their way of life hasn't worked, and the system lords has, for a long time, since the system lords progeny spread out among the stars and multiply. But the Jaffa rebellion ends all that. If they remove their symbiotes they kill an entire generation, and if they systematically hunt down the system lords and their queens? No more goa'uld. Genocide. Bad ending.
It seems like a triumph of freedom for the oppressed humans though. Kicking out the evil overlords.
Humans and goa'uld have very different survival strategies on the most basic level. Humans have one child at a time and devote significant time and energy to raising them. Goa'uld have many, hundreds or possibly even thousands, certainly a bath full at a single breeding. They couldn't devote the same time and energy to an individual, even if the snake symbiotes are individuals at that stage in the same way. Goa'uld also have genetic memory so it's possible all those snakes are printer copies of the Queen, to some extent. We don't even know if it takes more than one symbiote to make more of them, at any stage. Hathor was alone, we don't know if she'd done the necessary already or if a queen can just... do that. Reproduce parthenogenetically but with massive control over the biology of the offspring, giving or witholding memories, changing how they'll react to potential host species.
Humans wrap their idea of Good around the ideas of loving and caring for individuals. The way we raise our children is supposed to be Good. We car about each other as individuals, and give each other time. This passes on the memes and supports the genes through their vulnerable early stage.
But if goa'uld do that, if they choose one or ten out of their offspring to raise specifically, they're neglecting hundreds more. So their idea of Good is probably different. How do you increase the changes of survival of hundreds of children, all of whom potentially know everything you know already and don't need your storytelling or teaching? You improve their physical environment. For all of them.
The whole thing with priests to protect specially designed water, jaffa to carry one goa'uld each, and hosts carefully selected (with the incompatible ones killed so they won't pass the problem to the next generation), it all improves the pool that every symbiote lives in.
But with a level of individual care and attention that seems more likely learned from humans.
And if the System Lords are in their first hosts, learning from humans is new. Ra took a human for a host, and others followed, right? And Ra was alive up until the first film. So whatever System Lords learned from humans, it was these individuals who learned it. We're seeing the results of first contact with an entirely new ethical and emotional system.
But it's not just being passed on by stories, it's being passed by direct experience. Goa'uld move into a new host and experience their biochemistry directly. They might say nothing of the host survives, but the host is the system they swim in, and it gives them entirely new sensory data. Who cares if their Queen is beautiful? Someone who picked up a monkey sense of beauty, is who. New, and different.
And potentially Evil by the standards of a pond symbiote. System Lords promote themselves and compete against each other, in a way that kills off each other's children. They even eat symbiotes. Maybe the symbiotes did that in the pond, but on this kind of scale?
If a symbiotes idea of good is to raise maximum numbers of offspring by making the environment good, the number of abandoned or wrecked planets as system lords war against each other is probably evil by local standards.
Sure it's likely they had competition in the pond. But isn't it fun to imagine they picked up attachment when they took human hosts?
Goa'uld have this incredibly complex civilisation going on where they pretend to be gods.
Which isn't the sort of thought you expect from a pond dweller, honestly. A lot of iterations of civilisation go by before you come up with 'hey, lets promise a great afterlife and enslave everyone by making them worship us'.
But humans have managed it before.
Maybe we're pissed at the snakes for moving in on a con they picked up from their hosts?
Consider the Ancients and Ori were playing this game long before the gates connected the goa'uld world to the wider galaxy. Both present versions of the afterlife and a way you have to behave to get there. Goa'uld wouldn't be making it up from whole cloth. Hosts would already believe it.
The moral problem is the goa'uld are duplicitous. They don't even have the Ori excuse where by the time they 'ascend' they believe their version. They just tell everyone a thing as a way to control them.
Goa'uld suppress their hosts, dominate them utterly, by will and by force. They build their society the same way.
Tok'ra choose a different way, where they only join willing hosts (in theory) and trade off with them for time in control and setting the priorities (ideally). Tok'ra are by human standards much more moral than goa'uld, acting in a Good way, ish. But what have they got by symbiote standards? They offer their host a better deal, but that's a one to one attachment. Tok'ra can't find sufficient hosts to maintain their numbers, are an aging population born of a single queen, and have never attracted another queen. Their way never worked, and it ended the possibilities of their Queen and their lines. It's pretty much symbiote evil.
And it shouldn't have been. But they were very, very, bad at cooperation, probably because they were new at it.
Tok'ra formed a cooperative relationship with their hosts... and that was it. As far as we know each individual symbiote related only to their own host, and made friends with other symbiotes, not so much other symbiotes hosts. (Yes I'm being influenced by the fanfic I just read, maybe there were relationship nets we didn't see or I don't remember.) They weren't great at being allies with the Tau'ri. Kept information from them, very standoffish. Which is to some degree fair, they weren't exactly getting what they were promised either. But Jacob&Selmak had to struggle to maintain a relationship with his family, or to pursue his previous priorities. If they were Tok'ra priorities, sure, cool, but beyond that?
If the Tok'ra had been good at making friends they should have had hosts lining up. Imagine the fight over who would have Great Great Grandma's symbiote, if she was a wise elder to an ever expanding clan. If her children before bonding remained her first priority after, if she was a repository of knowledge for them, if she could guide them and support them. A symbiote would mean a long life, good teaching, and a better protected family, and isn't that all the good stuff from a human point of view? Hosts wouldn't be a problem, if hosts communities were getting enough out of it.
But the Tok'ra defined themselves by what they were against, by fighting Ra, and they stayed in tight knit relationships only with their own symbiont siblings, in order to fight a war. They went looking for soldiers for that war, warm bodies to give the whole rest of their lives over to a singular purpose, and fight.
When humans go recruiting humans, sometimes they do it by having heavily armed men go 'right, you're in the army now', but that doesn't work very well, because eventually you have a whole lot of heavily armed men with a grudge. Romans recruited and kept recruiting, because it was a pathway to being a citizen. Fight now, have huge benefits for yourself and your family later. Fight for a limited length of time, then get an education and go take the skills back to the living of life. Fight to protect civilisation and then build one.
If Tok'ra had been demonstrating the civilisation building part, they'd have ended up with a very different relationship to potential recruits. But they didn't seem to like people much, didn't offer them much except a cause, and had a lot of trouble recruiting. Go figure.
A healthier model could look like the Trill. Trill train hard to get in line to get a chance at a symbiont. And I don't think they get half the benefits a goa'uld host would. No super strength or super healing. Do they live longer? I don't know. But they do get remembered, and get that memory passed on with the symbiont. Of course then the next person becomes a whole new person once they're joined, so the person that is remembered isn't precisely the person that applied for joining. But they bring in a lot of influences. A musician stays a musician. A scientist stays a scientist. And their former selves are part of them, but parts they can have a conversation with. Whole different framework.
The rule against reassociation makes it difficult to form the kind of standoffish group the Tok'ra had. If they joined can only be friends for a single lifetime, the symbiotes can't stay relating primarily to the other symbiotes rather than the hosts. They can't get stuck seeing symbiotes as more significant than hosts, if they can't spend much time with them in the long term.
But that seems a bit unhealthy in the other direction? Trill civilisation has these joined people as part of it, but there isn't a set of culture that is basically symbiont. The hosts set the priorities. Which I don't recall bothering me when I watched DS9, but, the joining was so complete it seemed reasonable, like the new person was made of all the parts of the before people, so whatever they decide together will serve the priorities of all the parts. Still, makes me wonder now.
The species that included Venom were living as parasites, killing hosts whenever they wanted, basically just eating people without getting to know them. There's no healthy about that. Hosts wouldn't give them anything back except nutrients, so why use intelligent hosts? They're being evil, really, when they have options to be elsewise. But only by what we were shown in the movie. And Venom seemed really eager to get to know a person once he found the right one. So who knows. But the host-symbiote balance that Eddie and Venom strike still involves a lot of predation on others of Eddie's species, so, you know, that's a problem. Eddie has shifted his priorities a lot, towards Venom's needs. Even though Venom has moved to protecting Eddie too, there are problems for both species right there.
... bonded goa'uld ate individuals of one of their species. not healthy neither...
The thing is, Stargate wrote goa'uld as profoundly limited, biologically speaking. Impaired, compared to humans. Limited senses, no fine manipulators, possibly even limited capacity for thought. They are utterly dependent on their hosts for most functions.
And then Stargate presented them as evil because of this.
... on a disability level, this bothers me. Oh look, these people need a lot more than most people, and then they go get it. Evil!
I mean, the way they got it was, in fact, evil, and not efficient, and fell apart and didn't work well for them. But the solution wasn't 'find a way to meet the needs of everyone involved', it was 'find a way to meet the needs of people like us, and kill the rest'.
Which, you know, is a problem.
There must be a way to set up a society that meets the needs of the symbiotes and yet maintains as much free will as possible all around. I mean, once a junior symbiote is in a jaffa, they have no control over how the jaffa uses the great gifts of good health they get out of the arrangement. So the mature goa'uld try and control the jaffa, but the ways they do it are a Problem. But so are the solutions the Jaffa come to? Like, especially when tretonin involved grinding up goa'uld, that's... also pretty evil. But you can imagine a society where the symbiotes are kept around to go in jaffa pouches, and then just discarded into ponds. Not meeting the needs of the symbionts at all. That would be a problem in the other direction.
The relationship is imbalanced, but other imbalanced relationships could exist, built on the same biology. The solution isn't to sever the relationship, it's to imagine a healthy one.
Trill aren't close enough biologically to be a good model, and the joined Trill... I was going to say they have one, joined, new set of priorities, but Jadzia having to deal with the disparate parts of herself was a recurring plot, so it's not that simple. Still, it's not two voices seen as distinct entities and having to ration the time they biologically must spend together.
Goa'uld are a problem because they take a host and then the host works for them 24/7. They can't possibly get a reward personally, because as a person they stop existing. Their families aren't getting rewarded either, as far as we see. Hosts are just being screwed over.
Tok'ra are trying to improve, but their offer is, what? Work for us in highly dangerous situations for the rest of your life, get... some personal time sometimes?
I mean what division of labour would be fair? Tok'ra symbiotes keep you alive far beyond your unbonded span, would it be fair to give the host a human lifetime, and take the rest? Since the rest is the product of symbiote labour. Or is it simply that they are two beings so they should split their lives 50/50, time wise? And you can't be two places at once, and you might bring the war home with you, so, you know, problem. Priorities become locked in and dedicated once you've pissed off a powerful enemy. How do you resolve that, if say the host wants to change their mind?
Can the host change their mind?
What would be a fair arrangement, for two minds in a single body?
Answer that, preferably with an array of choices, and you've got a solution to the raised problem, rather than just a Biologically Evil Species.
True symbiosis, instead of parasites.
It's frustrating when the story doesn't want the same answers.
Just a more efficient war.
Of course another answer is what Baal did, to create more bodies that didn't have their own minds. Cloning technology opened up a whole new vista of possibilities for his species. Not that it got used that way. But imagine it as an end to the biological basis of the war, because every goa'uld can have a compatible host, printed up to order, never having had a mind in it to displace.
... it's a little like replacing horses with cars. Sorry, rude to hosts. But instead of having to decide between domination and cooperation, one has an empty technology instead, and it's domination without the guilt.
But the symbionts don't get as much out of it. See the Trill for a model. Goa'uld aren't choosing their hosts for their brains, or to be specific for the contents of their brains, since they suppress the hosts entirely. But that isn't the most advantageous relationship between species they could have. Any symbiont that can make a relationship with a well educated host gets the advantage of all those years of training without personally having to put the hours in. Instead of risking mistakes and turning out to be bad at things, they can acquire an entire lifetime of expertise wholesale. We mostly see that possibility in SF in cyberpunk, downloads and partial memories and so forth, but here it's squishier. And the Trill have so few symbionts to go around that they can be reserved for only the very best offerings. And that in turn preserves what that culture considers the very best minds, giving them length of days in memory that their original body could not provide alone, but giving them also tremendous breadth of experience and expertise to draw on. The benefits to society are potentially immense.
The Tok'ra should be getting that exact kind of benefit. But because of the wars, and because of the uneducated state of the civilisations they're starting out in, they pretty much aren't. If their hosts are all ignorant when they meet them, they're going to end up with a poor opinion of what hosts could be bringing to them. But I don't see why they aren't educating classes full of potential volunteers. You'd get all those innovative minds focused together, and then some of them could get a symbiont to bring a whole lot more data to the table.
Maybe they were, and we either never saw it or I don't remember.
Whether the symbiote needs the body or the mind of the host changes a lot about how they'd structure their society.
It's the difference between getting an exoskeleton and getting a friend, or teacher, or student.
The Tok'ra made a start, but they weren't great at it, and didn't take the symbiosis idea far enough. Individual, still not cultural. They could have magnified their ideas through far larger groups, but they were too constrained by secrecy to avoid being wiped out in that war.
... I feel like if they'd just bought a bunch of slaves and set up an experimental world somewhere they'd have done much better in the long run.
See the stories I'd tell, starting from the same biology, wouldn't so much be about the nukes and the shooting. That's the Problem. The solution is a lot about learning to be good neighbours, which means everyone getting their needs met. How they understand those needs is part of that. And they'd come up with a lot of different answers.
System Lords set up their jaffa and their multi world empires as places to grow oh so many symbiotes, and so attracted strong Queens who filled their ponds. That was working for the symbiotes, but not the jaffa or hosts, so in the end it all went boom. But they were trying to do Good for their own species. They just failed to form a long term stable multi species alliance.
... I mean it worked for thousands of years, but, that's stories for you.
Tok'ra did better by their hosts, so their own personal host did not want to kill them. But they had nothing to offer Queens or new symbiotes. They failed to demonstrate the advantages of the new way, and instead aged and dwindled. By trying to do Good by human standards, they failed to be Good by the standards of their own species.
Baal made a whole lot of hosts, which would work out well for him, but he also just copied himself into them, skipping the whole Queen phase. Nobody varied the thoughts of the new beings. So when he went down for screwing up, they all did. Unsuccessful. But with useful parts.
There should theoretically be a way that the two species can survive and work together. The toxic to humans influence of the system lords needs to be fixed, but so does that toxic to goa'uld actions of the tok'ra, who provided their own people with no future.
I honestly don't see why it was so difficult to find human hosts just like Jacob, who had the need for the healing. I mean it's a whole huge loss of autonomy, but it's living.
And it seems like an SF way to explore living with support after significant disability, only instead of a support team you're tied to a single person, forever. Which is not optimal for either party.
But new technology was suggesting new answers, just... not in a way that worked in time.
I haven't watched most of the source texts for this for a really long time. Rewatch long overdue. So I'm sure I'm missing or misrememering a bunch of stuff.
But I had a thought to take for a walk, about parasites and symbiotes and the societies you'd need to build to make those lives work for everyone in them.
They'd need to work out a balance of priorities so both species had freedom to pursue personal projects and could improve the conditions for their own species and their own children.
The human ideal of attachment to a small group or an individual presents a model for a healthy relationship between symbiont and host.
But potentially the goa'uld greater good of improving the environment for the support of all future generations could present a model to improve how humans manage their worlds too. I mean, if you wanted to write them that way. They'd changed their whole way of life and engineered civilisations to support a far lower infant mortality rate for future generations and spread from one world to many. That was all good stuff.
It was just unfortunate that by making it more comfortable for the individual goa'uld parasite they'd cut themselves off from the data source that could let them understand how to make the whole thing work for everyone.
It would be way more interesting to write about sorting out that civilisation and working through the rebuilding than it is to write just blowing it up. Blowing it up is the same every time, figuring out how to mesh very different sets of needs is different.
I should write stories some time.
Stargate set up the goa'uld to be very alien and very limited, in their unbonded forms. The Tok'ra were living with the same biology, but made different moral choices about what to do with it. The Venom parasite has different constraints, not least that it eats its hosts. And then there's Jadzia Dax, treated very differently than all of the above, since the Dax symbiote doesn't stay a seperate voice in the host, an old being taking over a new life, they just conjoin completely, becoming together an entirely new being, or so the legal argument went.
We don't know much about the reproductive biology of Trill symbionts, or at least I don't. I hear there's stuff in the comics about Venom and his lot, but I don't know it. And that's a bit frustrating because you can go from the goa'uld's biological constraints to explaining their whole society. ... no I don't know how much the writers intended, and I haven't watched canon recently, but still, thoughts can happen.
Goa'uld started out in pools on the world they evolved in, and could survive their pretty happily, except for natural predation. The Unas are big scaled humanoids, and they eat goa'uld, but they're also the first hosts. Which seems fair, honestly, if something tries to eat you, however you stop it seems like self defence. Also makes sense of that thing where the main wiggly body of a goa'uld could be removed surgically without removing the goa'uld's controlling intelligence - if they have to get past snapping teeth to get to the soft back of the throat and from there to the central nervous system, they probably left chunks of themselves behind a few times.
And then they had a body.
The snake form doesn't seem to have much going for it. No manipulators, limited senses, a neat sense for electrical impulses and chemistry but not much for the long range stuff. Fine for floating around in a liquid, probably not great for being an advanced intelligence. But one of the more interesting possibilities is that the snakes themselves aren't intelligent, exactly, they simply have memory. They're a hard drive that plugs into a brain they can use to process all the new data. That would explain why they couldn't enslave lower beings and be monkeys. If they want to be people, they have to suborn a nervous system capable of it.
In a body they have so many advantages. They can start changing the world they live in. And the world the other swimmer snakes live in too.
We only meet the goa'uld after they have started routinely using human hosts. Humans must be such an upgrade in safety terms. Sure they lack natural armour, but that means a symbiote can get in without getting ate. That's worth a lot. And we may or may not be smarter than the neighbours, but we're certainly smart enough to be going on with, with an interesting set of senses and manipulators. Luxury real estate.
But not all humans are compatible hosts with all symbiotes. We see a symbiote reject many hosts in a row. It might be an aesthetic choice, but it's a snake at the time, it seems unlikely to have the same standards. Hathor mentions having a pharoah provide DNA helps her change her offspring to be compatible with their hosts, code of life to avoid rejection (poor Daniel). Wiki reckons goa'uld larvae that mature in teh wild have only a 50% chance of successfully taking a host. Doesn't have a little reference number for episode though so I don't have context for the number. Probably that includes the effects of natural predation and not just rejection. The solution was to create Jaffa, incubators of almost the same kind of life as they will later take as hosts, a safe environment that can help them choose a host from multiple possibilities. It's an intricate system that seems designed to maximise the chances of their offspring, though the tendency to use Jaffa in wars is a counterproductive force in a big way.
It also seems evil. Because they're being bastards to humans on all fronts, using them.
Parasites take without giving back, and symbiotes have a mutually beneficial relationship, to oversimplify a definition from memory. Goa'uld seem to be far to the take take take side. Except biologically they give their hosts and incubators a far longer life than they'd have without them. There's just a horrible trade off in free will. And the Tok'ra are dedicated to reforming that, taking only willing hosts.
But the Tok'ra all have the same Queen, are siblings, and are dying out. Their way of life hasn't worked, and the system lords has, for a long time, since the system lords progeny spread out among the stars and multiply. But the Jaffa rebellion ends all that. If they remove their symbiotes they kill an entire generation, and if they systematically hunt down the system lords and their queens? No more goa'uld. Genocide. Bad ending.
It seems like a triumph of freedom for the oppressed humans though. Kicking out the evil overlords.
Humans and goa'uld have very different survival strategies on the most basic level. Humans have one child at a time and devote significant time and energy to raising them. Goa'uld have many, hundreds or possibly even thousands, certainly a bath full at a single breeding. They couldn't devote the same time and energy to an individual, even if the snake symbiotes are individuals at that stage in the same way. Goa'uld also have genetic memory so it's possible all those snakes are printer copies of the Queen, to some extent. We don't even know if it takes more than one symbiote to make more of them, at any stage. Hathor was alone, we don't know if she'd done the necessary already or if a queen can just... do that. Reproduce parthenogenetically but with massive control over the biology of the offspring, giving or witholding memories, changing how they'll react to potential host species.
Humans wrap their idea of Good around the ideas of loving and caring for individuals. The way we raise our children is supposed to be Good. We car about each other as individuals, and give each other time. This passes on the memes and supports the genes through their vulnerable early stage.
But if goa'uld do that, if they choose one or ten out of their offspring to raise specifically, they're neglecting hundreds more. So their idea of Good is probably different. How do you increase the changes of survival of hundreds of children, all of whom potentially know everything you know already and don't need your storytelling or teaching? You improve their physical environment. For all of them.
The whole thing with priests to protect specially designed water, jaffa to carry one goa'uld each, and hosts carefully selected (with the incompatible ones killed so they won't pass the problem to the next generation), it all improves the pool that every symbiote lives in.
But with a level of individual care and attention that seems more likely learned from humans.
And if the System Lords are in their first hosts, learning from humans is new. Ra took a human for a host, and others followed, right? And Ra was alive up until the first film. So whatever System Lords learned from humans, it was these individuals who learned it. We're seeing the results of first contact with an entirely new ethical and emotional system.
But it's not just being passed on by stories, it's being passed by direct experience. Goa'uld move into a new host and experience their biochemistry directly. They might say nothing of the host survives, but the host is the system they swim in, and it gives them entirely new sensory data. Who cares if their Queen is beautiful? Someone who picked up a monkey sense of beauty, is who. New, and different.
And potentially Evil by the standards of a pond symbiote. System Lords promote themselves and compete against each other, in a way that kills off each other's children. They even eat symbiotes. Maybe the symbiotes did that in the pond, but on this kind of scale?
If a symbiotes idea of good is to raise maximum numbers of offspring by making the environment good, the number of abandoned or wrecked planets as system lords war against each other is probably evil by local standards.
Sure it's likely they had competition in the pond. But isn't it fun to imagine they picked up attachment when they took human hosts?
Goa'uld have this incredibly complex civilisation going on where they pretend to be gods.
Which isn't the sort of thought you expect from a pond dweller, honestly. A lot of iterations of civilisation go by before you come up with 'hey, lets promise a great afterlife and enslave everyone by making them worship us'.
But humans have managed it before.
Maybe we're pissed at the snakes for moving in on a con they picked up from their hosts?
Consider the Ancients and Ori were playing this game long before the gates connected the goa'uld world to the wider galaxy. Both present versions of the afterlife and a way you have to behave to get there. Goa'uld wouldn't be making it up from whole cloth. Hosts would already believe it.
The moral problem is the goa'uld are duplicitous. They don't even have the Ori excuse where by the time they 'ascend' they believe their version. They just tell everyone a thing as a way to control them.
Goa'uld suppress their hosts, dominate them utterly, by will and by force. They build their society the same way.
Tok'ra choose a different way, where they only join willing hosts (in theory) and trade off with them for time in control and setting the priorities (ideally). Tok'ra are by human standards much more moral than goa'uld, acting in a Good way, ish. But what have they got by symbiote standards? They offer their host a better deal, but that's a one to one attachment. Tok'ra can't find sufficient hosts to maintain their numbers, are an aging population born of a single queen, and have never attracted another queen. Their way never worked, and it ended the possibilities of their Queen and their lines. It's pretty much symbiote evil.
And it shouldn't have been. But they were very, very, bad at cooperation, probably because they were new at it.
Tok'ra formed a cooperative relationship with their hosts... and that was it. As far as we know each individual symbiote related only to their own host, and made friends with other symbiotes, not so much other symbiotes hosts. (Yes I'm being influenced by the fanfic I just read, maybe there were relationship nets we didn't see or I don't remember.) They weren't great at being allies with the Tau'ri. Kept information from them, very standoffish. Which is to some degree fair, they weren't exactly getting what they were promised either. But Jacob&Selmak had to struggle to maintain a relationship with his family, or to pursue his previous priorities. If they were Tok'ra priorities, sure, cool, but beyond that?
If the Tok'ra had been good at making friends they should have had hosts lining up. Imagine the fight over who would have Great Great Grandma's symbiote, if she was a wise elder to an ever expanding clan. If her children before bonding remained her first priority after, if she was a repository of knowledge for them, if she could guide them and support them. A symbiote would mean a long life, good teaching, and a better protected family, and isn't that all the good stuff from a human point of view? Hosts wouldn't be a problem, if hosts communities were getting enough out of it.
But the Tok'ra defined themselves by what they were against, by fighting Ra, and they stayed in tight knit relationships only with their own symbiont siblings, in order to fight a war. They went looking for soldiers for that war, warm bodies to give the whole rest of their lives over to a singular purpose, and fight.
When humans go recruiting humans, sometimes they do it by having heavily armed men go 'right, you're in the army now', but that doesn't work very well, because eventually you have a whole lot of heavily armed men with a grudge. Romans recruited and kept recruiting, because it was a pathway to being a citizen. Fight now, have huge benefits for yourself and your family later. Fight for a limited length of time, then get an education and go take the skills back to the living of life. Fight to protect civilisation and then build one.
If Tok'ra had been demonstrating the civilisation building part, they'd have ended up with a very different relationship to potential recruits. But they didn't seem to like people much, didn't offer them much except a cause, and had a lot of trouble recruiting. Go figure.
A healthier model could look like the Trill. Trill train hard to get in line to get a chance at a symbiont. And I don't think they get half the benefits a goa'uld host would. No super strength or super healing. Do they live longer? I don't know. But they do get remembered, and get that memory passed on with the symbiont. Of course then the next person becomes a whole new person once they're joined, so the person that is remembered isn't precisely the person that applied for joining. But they bring in a lot of influences. A musician stays a musician. A scientist stays a scientist. And their former selves are part of them, but parts they can have a conversation with. Whole different framework.
The rule against reassociation makes it difficult to form the kind of standoffish group the Tok'ra had. If they joined can only be friends for a single lifetime, the symbiotes can't stay relating primarily to the other symbiotes rather than the hosts. They can't get stuck seeing symbiotes as more significant than hosts, if they can't spend much time with them in the long term.
But that seems a bit unhealthy in the other direction? Trill civilisation has these joined people as part of it, but there isn't a set of culture that is basically symbiont. The hosts set the priorities. Which I don't recall bothering me when I watched DS9, but, the joining was so complete it seemed reasonable, like the new person was made of all the parts of the before people, so whatever they decide together will serve the priorities of all the parts. Still, makes me wonder now.
The species that included Venom were living as parasites, killing hosts whenever they wanted, basically just eating people without getting to know them. There's no healthy about that. Hosts wouldn't give them anything back except nutrients, so why use intelligent hosts? They're being evil, really, when they have options to be elsewise. But only by what we were shown in the movie. And Venom seemed really eager to get to know a person once he found the right one. So who knows. But the host-symbiote balance that Eddie and Venom strike still involves a lot of predation on others of Eddie's species, so, you know, that's a problem. Eddie has shifted his priorities a lot, towards Venom's needs. Even though Venom has moved to protecting Eddie too, there are problems for both species right there.
... bonded goa'uld ate individuals of one of their species. not healthy neither...
The thing is, Stargate wrote goa'uld as profoundly limited, biologically speaking. Impaired, compared to humans. Limited senses, no fine manipulators, possibly even limited capacity for thought. They are utterly dependent on their hosts for most functions.
And then Stargate presented them as evil because of this.
... on a disability level, this bothers me. Oh look, these people need a lot more than most people, and then they go get it. Evil!
I mean, the way they got it was, in fact, evil, and not efficient, and fell apart and didn't work well for them. But the solution wasn't 'find a way to meet the needs of everyone involved', it was 'find a way to meet the needs of people like us, and kill the rest'.
Which, you know, is a problem.
There must be a way to set up a society that meets the needs of the symbiotes and yet maintains as much free will as possible all around. I mean, once a junior symbiote is in a jaffa, they have no control over how the jaffa uses the great gifts of good health they get out of the arrangement. So the mature goa'uld try and control the jaffa, but the ways they do it are a Problem. But so are the solutions the Jaffa come to? Like, especially when tretonin involved grinding up goa'uld, that's... also pretty evil. But you can imagine a society where the symbiotes are kept around to go in jaffa pouches, and then just discarded into ponds. Not meeting the needs of the symbionts at all. That would be a problem in the other direction.
The relationship is imbalanced, but other imbalanced relationships could exist, built on the same biology. The solution isn't to sever the relationship, it's to imagine a healthy one.
Trill aren't close enough biologically to be a good model, and the joined Trill... I was going to say they have one, joined, new set of priorities, but Jadzia having to deal with the disparate parts of herself was a recurring plot, so it's not that simple. Still, it's not two voices seen as distinct entities and having to ration the time they biologically must spend together.
Goa'uld are a problem because they take a host and then the host works for them 24/7. They can't possibly get a reward personally, because as a person they stop existing. Their families aren't getting rewarded either, as far as we see. Hosts are just being screwed over.
Tok'ra are trying to improve, but their offer is, what? Work for us in highly dangerous situations for the rest of your life, get... some personal time sometimes?
I mean what division of labour would be fair? Tok'ra symbiotes keep you alive far beyond your unbonded span, would it be fair to give the host a human lifetime, and take the rest? Since the rest is the product of symbiote labour. Or is it simply that they are two beings so they should split their lives 50/50, time wise? And you can't be two places at once, and you might bring the war home with you, so, you know, problem. Priorities become locked in and dedicated once you've pissed off a powerful enemy. How do you resolve that, if say the host wants to change their mind?
Can the host change their mind?
What would be a fair arrangement, for two minds in a single body?
Answer that, preferably with an array of choices, and you've got a solution to the raised problem, rather than just a Biologically Evil Species.
True symbiosis, instead of parasites.
It's frustrating when the story doesn't want the same answers.
Just a more efficient war.
Of course another answer is what Baal did, to create more bodies that didn't have their own minds. Cloning technology opened up a whole new vista of possibilities for his species. Not that it got used that way. But imagine it as an end to the biological basis of the war, because every goa'uld can have a compatible host, printed up to order, never having had a mind in it to displace.
... it's a little like replacing horses with cars. Sorry, rude to hosts. But instead of having to decide between domination and cooperation, one has an empty technology instead, and it's domination without the guilt.
But the symbionts don't get as much out of it. See the Trill for a model. Goa'uld aren't choosing their hosts for their brains, or to be specific for the contents of their brains, since they suppress the hosts entirely. But that isn't the most advantageous relationship between species they could have. Any symbiont that can make a relationship with a well educated host gets the advantage of all those years of training without personally having to put the hours in. Instead of risking mistakes and turning out to be bad at things, they can acquire an entire lifetime of expertise wholesale. We mostly see that possibility in SF in cyberpunk, downloads and partial memories and so forth, but here it's squishier. And the Trill have so few symbionts to go around that they can be reserved for only the very best offerings. And that in turn preserves what that culture considers the very best minds, giving them length of days in memory that their original body could not provide alone, but giving them also tremendous breadth of experience and expertise to draw on. The benefits to society are potentially immense.
The Tok'ra should be getting that exact kind of benefit. But because of the wars, and because of the uneducated state of the civilisations they're starting out in, they pretty much aren't. If their hosts are all ignorant when they meet them, they're going to end up with a poor opinion of what hosts could be bringing to them. But I don't see why they aren't educating classes full of potential volunteers. You'd get all those innovative minds focused together, and then some of them could get a symbiont to bring a whole lot more data to the table.
Maybe they were, and we either never saw it or I don't remember.
Whether the symbiote needs the body or the mind of the host changes a lot about how they'd structure their society.
It's the difference between getting an exoskeleton and getting a friend, or teacher, or student.
The Tok'ra made a start, but they weren't great at it, and didn't take the symbiosis idea far enough. Individual, still not cultural. They could have magnified their ideas through far larger groups, but they were too constrained by secrecy to avoid being wiped out in that war.
... I feel like if they'd just bought a bunch of slaves and set up an experimental world somewhere they'd have done much better in the long run.
See the stories I'd tell, starting from the same biology, wouldn't so much be about the nukes and the shooting. That's the Problem. The solution is a lot about learning to be good neighbours, which means everyone getting their needs met. How they understand those needs is part of that. And they'd come up with a lot of different answers.
System Lords set up their jaffa and their multi world empires as places to grow oh so many symbiotes, and so attracted strong Queens who filled their ponds. That was working for the symbiotes, but not the jaffa or hosts, so in the end it all went boom. But they were trying to do Good for their own species. They just failed to form a long term stable multi species alliance.
... I mean it worked for thousands of years, but, that's stories for you.
Tok'ra did better by their hosts, so their own personal host did not want to kill them. But they had nothing to offer Queens or new symbiotes. They failed to demonstrate the advantages of the new way, and instead aged and dwindled. By trying to do Good by human standards, they failed to be Good by the standards of their own species.
Baal made a whole lot of hosts, which would work out well for him, but he also just copied himself into them, skipping the whole Queen phase. Nobody varied the thoughts of the new beings. So when he went down for screwing up, they all did. Unsuccessful. But with useful parts.
There should theoretically be a way that the two species can survive and work together. The toxic to humans influence of the system lords needs to be fixed, but so does that toxic to goa'uld actions of the tok'ra, who provided their own people with no future.
I honestly don't see why it was so difficult to find human hosts just like Jacob, who had the need for the healing. I mean it's a whole huge loss of autonomy, but it's living.
And it seems like an SF way to explore living with support after significant disability, only instead of a support team you're tied to a single person, forever. Which is not optimal for either party.
But new technology was suggesting new answers, just... not in a way that worked in time.
I haven't watched most of the source texts for this for a really long time. Rewatch long overdue. So I'm sure I'm missing or misrememering a bunch of stuff.
But I had a thought to take for a walk, about parasites and symbiotes and the societies you'd need to build to make those lives work for everyone in them.
They'd need to work out a balance of priorities so both species had freedom to pursue personal projects and could improve the conditions for their own species and their own children.
The human ideal of attachment to a small group or an individual presents a model for a healthy relationship between symbiont and host.
But potentially the goa'uld greater good of improving the environment for the support of all future generations could present a model to improve how humans manage their worlds too. I mean, if you wanted to write them that way. They'd changed their whole way of life and engineered civilisations to support a far lower infant mortality rate for future generations and spread from one world to many. That was all good stuff.
It was just unfortunate that by making it more comfortable for the individual goa'uld parasite they'd cut themselves off from the data source that could let them understand how to make the whole thing work for everyone.
It would be way more interesting to write about sorting out that civilisation and working through the rebuilding than it is to write just blowing it up. Blowing it up is the same every time, figuring out how to mesh very different sets of needs is different.
I should write stories some time.