Brainstorming: why would they build a Maze
Jan. 9th, 2015 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkI got lovely things in my fandom stocking, among others Bab5 icons *points* and two lovely fics with Susan Ivanova, Crossing chasms in small jumps and The Mantle of the New.
I'm having one of those days where some small things went wrong and I'm feeling a bit unbalanced for no good reason. So to give myself the illusion of doing something, have part I of my attempt to make "The Maze Runner" make more sense.
Why build a Maze?
The Maze is huge and complicated. Building it must have been very expensive and a lot of work. So why?
They test the boys. What do they test?
It can't be intelligence, that wouldn't make much sense: it would only test it for a few of them at the most, and there are far easier ways of doing that. Similarly with 'dealing with stress situations', that alone could be tested in simpler ways.
It has to be about how they interact and work as a group. It's a sociological experiment.
Why would they test that? It's likely there's something special about the boys.
If we assume that there is a virus that makes people aggressive, maybe the boys aren't "immune", but the virus is dormant? And they're monitored to see if it really is or if it'll break out again, because that will decide the future of what they'll do with those with the virus dormant. It's pretty important because there are more and more people that applies to, so WCKD gets resources. The boys are placed in a stress situation to test under extreme conditions. Only one at a time because at first they weren't optimistic and didn't want to "waste" test subjects. It's monitored how they interact, organize, how aggressive they are, if there's brain deterioration. Only boys because they want to be able to control the population better; girls are the next step but they didn't get to that yet.
And why the Maze? For the Gladers it works to give them something to concentrate on, give them hope etc. (They probably weren't meant to find a way out, at least not at first.) But that wouldn't be enough to justify the effort, there needs to be a second reason.
That brings us to another big question: What are the Grievers? They were obviously created in some fashion. Why and by who?
Grievers were built to fight. Why do you build things to fight? For war. Let's assume the Grievers were created to fight a war. Maybe created "out of" people infected with the virus. For some reason, after much experimentation, the vaguely spider-scorpion shape worked best.
Why are they now in the Maze? Say the war is over, you don't need them anymore. But you might need them again one day! You can't exactly store them, and killing them would be a waste (especially because they're tricky to create, it often doesn't work.) So you need to contain them somehow. But they're pretty smart, you don't want all their energies set on breaking out, and you can only control them in a limited fashion. So: drop them in an area that is huge, sturdy, keeps them entertained, and you can study them at the same time. Train them, maybe. For the next war.
Griever poison: Usually in war they carry lethal poison, of course. But they don't want to kill the Gladers, so they just use the opportunity to see how the dormant virus reacts to various substances, new tries at a "cure" etc.
So the Maze combines two projects: containing and training the Grievers, and observing the virus carriers.
Does that make some kind of sense? I think it's more logical than what they said in the movie, but fortunately the way the background info was presented makes it very easy to say that most or all of it was lies. Thoughts welcome!
I'm still working on part II: What are the scientists doing (what about the brain scans?) What was Thomas' plan? Who sent up Teresa? How did the exit work? And then part III will be "other small stuff", like ladders.
I'm having one of those days where some small things went wrong and I'm feeling a bit unbalanced for no good reason. So to give myself the illusion of doing something, have part I of my attempt to make "The Maze Runner" make more sense.
Why build a Maze?
The Maze is huge and complicated. Building it must have been very expensive and a lot of work. So why?
They test the boys. What do they test?
It can't be intelligence, that wouldn't make much sense: it would only test it for a few of them at the most, and there are far easier ways of doing that. Similarly with 'dealing with stress situations', that alone could be tested in simpler ways.
It has to be about how they interact and work as a group. It's a sociological experiment.
Why would they test that? It's likely there's something special about the boys.
If we assume that there is a virus that makes people aggressive, maybe the boys aren't "immune", but the virus is dormant? And they're monitored to see if it really is or if it'll break out again, because that will decide the future of what they'll do with those with the virus dormant. It's pretty important because there are more and more people that applies to, so WCKD gets resources. The boys are placed in a stress situation to test under extreme conditions. Only one at a time because at first they weren't optimistic and didn't want to "waste" test subjects. It's monitored how they interact, organize, how aggressive they are, if there's brain deterioration. Only boys because they want to be able to control the population better; girls are the next step but they didn't get to that yet.
And why the Maze? For the Gladers it works to give them something to concentrate on, give them hope etc. (They probably weren't meant to find a way out, at least not at first.) But that wouldn't be enough to justify the effort, there needs to be a second reason.
That brings us to another big question: What are the Grievers? They were obviously created in some fashion. Why and by who?
Grievers were built to fight. Why do you build things to fight? For war. Let's assume the Grievers were created to fight a war. Maybe created "out of" people infected with the virus. For some reason, after much experimentation, the vaguely spider-scorpion shape worked best.
Why are they now in the Maze? Say the war is over, you don't need them anymore. But you might need them again one day! You can't exactly store them, and killing them would be a waste (especially because they're tricky to create, it often doesn't work.) So you need to contain them somehow. But they're pretty smart, you don't want all their energies set on breaking out, and you can only control them in a limited fashion. So: drop them in an area that is huge, sturdy, keeps them entertained, and you can study them at the same time. Train them, maybe. For the next war.
Griever poison: Usually in war they carry lethal poison, of course. But they don't want to kill the Gladers, so they just use the opportunity to see how the dormant virus reacts to various substances, new tries at a "cure" etc.
So the Maze combines two projects: containing and training the Grievers, and observing the virus carriers.
Does that make some kind of sense? I think it's more logical than what they said in the movie, but fortunately the way the background info was presented makes it very easy to say that most or all of it was lies. Thoughts welcome!
I'm still working on part II: What are the scientists doing (what about the brain scans?) What was Thomas' plan? Who sent up Teresa? How did the exit work? And then part III will be "other small stuff", like ladders.
