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How about a story of a Ymgarl Genestealer's attempts to rejoin the Hive Mind? It's individualistic enough for a story to be told, yet alien enough to give us an interesting take on the Tyranids.

The more you try to explain things that cannot be explained, the more epic the results of your failure.


The best zombie movies are the ones that don't try to explain the zombies. Same with time travel. Why is Back to the Future successful? 88mph, Delorean, 1.21 Gigawatts. That's all you need to know. There's no science to it, you just enjoy.

The second you delve into the "Why" of the Tyranids, they become 1000 times less cool, lol. Just accept that there is no reasonable conscious equivalent to us, and enjoy the skittering and slavering

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
The more you try to explain things that cannot be explained, the more epic the results of your failure.


The best zombie movies are the ones that don't try to explain the zombies. Same with time travel. Why is Back to the Future successful? 88mph, Delorean, 1.21 Gigawatts. That's all you need to know. There's no science to it, you just enjoy.

The second you delve into the "Why" of the Tyranids, they become 1000 times less cool, lol. Just accept that there is no reasonable conscious equivalent to us, and enjoy the skittering and slavering

Exactly, this is part of why I enjoyed the movie Looper, they deliberately avoid trying explain time travel, it's happening, accept it.

Same with tyranids, even if you could find some venue where you could explain the emotions and thoughts behind a tyranid mind, though I think you'd have to go on a much large scale, at the very least from the perspective of a whole Hive fleet, rather than a single tyranid, you're not going to have drama or intrigue, a tyranid is not going to argue with another tyranid, they're not going to stab each other in the back. So even if you could build a whole book despite this, would you want to try and do it, how scary or fun are tyranids then? How are they the great devouring machine when you can think, all this hive fleet actually wants is to be free of the hive mind's control? Or it turns out the tyranids are fleeing something else?

I think the most you could do is use a human, or humanoid being drawn into the tyranids; a powerful psyker being driven crazy by the shadow in the warp, atleast then you could show the perspective of the hive mind because it is scaling it's mind down to human level rather than us trying to think like it.

There was a thread where someone posted a short text written from Tyranid perspective, it was great imo.