[Darius]

It's only as canon as The GRID, Point and VirtualPath.

[Doko]

but it even has its own description!

[General Battuta]

Yes, but the description is not the name.

[Doko]

I guess I'll contribute a bit beyond extracting stuff from the mission file

("Where do the Shivans come from? Who made them?"

("incursion event and worldline intersect logged at present minus 5 x 10 ^ 9 years"

Pretty simple, but too vague to tell if this is a date for when the dawn war happened, when GD was unleashed or simply as a means to control the races living at the time to make sure diversity was preserved.

("panreal exostosis and enmeshment IMMEDIATE across volumes and layers$semicolon perimeter HOT$semicolon contextualization PARTIAL"

The vishnans refer to the 13th battlegroup as returning to their home layer, so im going to asume that layers = paralel universe. Volume could refer to the physical universe itself.

Perimeter hot? as in this universe just recently (in astronomical terms) appeard and its very hot and chaotic or most likely they appeared in the middle of a warzone basically.

Contextualization partial.. not sure on this one beyond maybe assesing the races currently alive or in conflict, the state of the universe itself, its galaxies, jump node configuration etc.

("totipotent threat response agency prioritized, goal hierarchy heuristic partial slave$semicolon cognition HARDENED"

This one is what i based my above argument of being dropped in a warzone on.
Threat response is prioritized, why do this if there is no threat? although it is arguable this is in the very nature of the shivans as some sort of default setting.
Goal hierarchy herustic partial slave, really unsure what the hell this means, mostly because all we really know about the shivans is they are predators and at some point (supposedly later than when they first interescted our reality) they started utilizing the terminal protocol as a sort rulebook. So what was their purpose before that? under the description of predator they would have wiped out the entire universe, and maybe that is exactly what they did. Still I'm not sure on it.
cognition HARDENED: I guess this could imply that they went in some sort of mode that increases their combat readiness over what is later on described as a basal state. Or maybe the opposite, keeping things simple and clear to deal with what we normally accept GD as... some sort of cognition virus that makes you go mad and contemplate the odds of seeing a large amount of armless and legless corpses on a hangar deck.

("The Shivans are eternal. They were not made. They were calculated."

I think this basically means the shivans didn't "enter" our universe from a subspace node or some sort of gate. They simply appeared as a calculated response to something by the greater organism, reality itself.
If the vishnan are said to utilize the universe to perform calculation why could reality itself not be a living thing that has the same perspective we do of our our own cells and immune system.


---
I'll continue at some point I guess

[redsniper]

I suppose "goal hierarchy heuristic partial slave" could refer to them taking orders from the Vishnans or Brahmans, but only partially of course.

[Sarevok]

To bring in a new viewpoint

now let's work against this from another angle - instead of trying to directly interpret the lines as they are given - because some of them are probably adaptations - considering everything said to be literally true will need a mess of an explanation to describe it. so to see these lines from another perspective

Even when I played Freespace 2 retail in my infancy I saw the link between the hindu god shiva and "the shivans" so from this I started thinking about the shivans to be an astral "will of shiva" - when AoA introduces the vishnans to the mix it may seem as the storyline is going with this assertion.

now if you'd read about the hindu trinity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimurti) you can also understand some lines in the techbase (vasudan mysticism) about the broken trinity - which probably occurred when the brahmans design died. now since these three gods were supposed to exist in balance, the creator preserver and destroyer. with the creator gone from this trinity (possibly replaced by the GD) the vishnans and shivans struggle to uphold their role and at the same time not rid the universe of life.

immagine if the case would be that new life siezed to spring when the brahmans design died the preservers role would get conflicting with the shivan. if the shivans cull because an entity has failed the specifications they will continue to rid the universe of intelligent life until their fear of one race controlling the galaxy would happen again. the vishnan on the other hand wouldn't let shiva deem entities as failed as it would counter any diversity. one race gone without a new crated to take its place.

this is what I believe is the shivan/vishnan struggle at its heart. trying to find a new balance for the universe without a brahman creator.

I think the phrase broken trinity is the centerpiece of their conflict. I think SHiva being eternal want to continue with the protocols established where the vishnan wants to create a supplement for the brahman. the brahman was after all a god creator. I believe the vishnans envision humanity and the vasudans as potential seeds to repair this trinity

still. I'm not nearly beread enough to make everything here fit into this, but I can't come up with anything in BP that would be in direct conflict.

[Phantom Hoover]

I'm not even convinced the Vishnans are a structural dual to the Shivans in the first place. My personal favourite theory is that they're basically the result of civilisations evolving with the selection pressure imposed by the Shivans, which have merged and integrated themselves into the Summed Psyche and are now actively working to bring younger civilisations into their collective.

[Raptor831]

The Vishnan/Shivan dynamic is really interesting to me. In WiH the Vishnans are not put in a very good light compared to AoA. Something deeper than Vishnans = angels / Shivans = demons is going on. Personally, I think they're both playing us (well, the characters). This story reminds me a lot of Babylon 5...

[SpardaSon21]

Now get the hell out of our universe(s)?

[Molybdenum]

I'm not even convinced the Vishnans are a structural dual to the Shivans in the first place. My personal favourite theory is that they're basically the result of civilisations evolving with the selection pressure imposed by the Shivans, which have merged and integrated themselves into the Summed Psyche and are now actively working to bring younger civilisations into their collective.

I too think this might be the case. Consider that maybe a species preservation by the Vishnans and destruction by the Shivans are not mutually exlusive outcomes. Perhaps when the Shivans "cull" a spacefaring civilization part of it is integrated into the Vishnans nagari collective and thus "preserved". This would be what usually happens and the Vishnans current plan for humanity.

[##UnknownPlayer##]

I'm not even convinced the Vishnans are a structural dual to the Shivans in the first place. My personal favourite theory is that they're basically the result of civilisations evolving with the selection pressure imposed by the Shivans, which have merged and integrated themselves into the Summed Psyche and are now actively working to bring younger civilisations into their collective.

I too think this might be the case. Consider that maybe a species preservation by the Vishnans and destruction by the Shivans are not mutually exlusive outcomes. Perhaps when the Shivans "cull" a spacefaring civilization part of it is integrated into the Vishnans nagari collective and thus "preserved". This would be what usually happens and the Vishnans current plan for humanity.

Which still isn't really good for us. Who are they to make decisions for billions of sentiments, when they themselves judge us for doing the same with each other (i.e. destroying species which engage in destructive conflicts)?

The punchline certainly seems like it would be far better for everyone if we could get rid of both those forces. To that end the question is: wouldn't unleashing the Great Darkness into the Shivan's psyche be a good final solution to them, if we could avoid being consumed by it ourselves.

Of course within that context, something in AoA comes to mind: then the Vishnan capital ship shows up and says "a great darkness is coming" we see a Sathanas jump in and waste it. But it doesn't seem like it - necessarily - had to be a Shiven-controlled Sathanas.