Is the Borg Queen a villain?
Commander Shran
✭✭✭
in Ready Room
I was surprised to find the Borg Queen does not have the villain trait. What is your opinion of the Borg Queen, is she a villain, misunderstood or something else?
Is the Borg Queen a villain? 50 votes
Yes, one of the baddest villains around
66%
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33 votes
No, a misunderstood heroine
16%
![[SJ] Admiral Aki](https://us.v-cdn.net/6030345/uploads/userpics/674/nSWTN9C607S3C.jpg)
8 votes
Other
18%
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9 votes
1
Comments
To us, her motives are bad, but in reality she is the leader of her civilisation, trying to do the utmost to defend and enhance the Borg. For her assimilating non-Borg is helping them reach perfection, there is no malicious intent.
For the Borg, Captain Janeway is the Villain. she kicked off a civil war, and destroyed one of there transwarp hubs.
The same could be said about any of the sides in World War 2.
EDIT: (Except Italy. That was just buffoonery.)
That makes her a villain. The audience's perspective is the only one that matters.
#TheEmpireDidNothingWrong
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She is attempting to do good by the standards of her own people. When the Borg and the Federation fight, they go to war, head on. She generally does not infiltrate the Federation, only as a means of last resort.
On the other hand, a villain will normally be part of the same culture, breaking cultural norms, or infiltrating an enemy to break the law. A villain will often use subterfuge to break laws.
Adolf Hitler invading France in 1940 was not a villainous act, France declared ware on NAZI Germany in September 1939, the invasion was just an act of war. What made Hitler a villain was the way he fought and had assassinated his political opponents in the early 1930s, and then initiating the Holocaust.
The Borg Queen is Brutal and an Enemy, but she is not a villain.
1) This kind of moral relativism is exceedingly dangerous, as it can be used to justify virtually any action without reflection or consequence. “Dude, you just killed a lot of people.” “Yeah, but it’s part of my culture so you should be more accepting of it...while holding still, or this will hurt a lot more than it has to.” Being a villain or a hero is still subjective - the Queen may be acting in what she believes to be the best interest of the Collective but those actions involve the total destruction of individual identity or thought among every living being in the galaxy, thus making her a villain in the eyes of her would-be victims.
2) France declared war on Germany because Germany invaded Poland two days prior without cause (aside from some poorly-staged false-flag attacks). Hitler might have been a good boyfriend to Eva Braun and loved animals and didn’t declare war on France, but he is still wholly and eternally a villain except to a few fringe lunatics.
Well said.
Whatever she is in her own mind, she is a villian. At the VERY least, her actions are villainous actions. Perhaps she is ignorant and can be taught. I judge that as the only Borg with free will, she knows that what she is doing is evil.
7 of 9, for her part, explains that an individual who joins the collective has their memoriesadded to the collective and even if that drone is terminated those memories remain. So in a manner of speaking the person who existed before is given immortality by remaining in the collective.
The only situation where that individual does not survive is if they have the link to the collective severed, with (at least) 2 forks to be followed.
In fork 1, the individual or individuals get severed but retain some of the Borg abilities such as the ability to enforce a collective will on the others that have also been disconnected (UNITY, S3.17).
In this state a new collective is created and the results may well echo the early days of Borg assimilation where is either benign or positive. Little canon exists on this to make a meaningful interpretation.
In fork 2, known to be experienced by only 7 of 9, the person is often finding deep internal conflict and uneasyness about who they are. As demonstrated by the queen, this is the result of a multitude of factors. Several episodes of both Voyager and TNG explore this. Some would say that it is better to choose assimilation of oneself, Picard demonstrated this in First Contact, while rescuing Data. Normally though the Borg don't give assimilation as an option. This is because it is their only means of improvement, as shown in Scorpion. The Borg made the mistake of being overreliant. That means that the only route for them has become a dangerous one which risks causing multiple species to align against them.
Back to the main question:
IS THE BORG QUEEN A VILLAIN?
In the TNG episode that introduces the Borg, Q-who?, Troi explains that the mind of the collective is much like the mindset of bees, with a queen (admittedly introduced later as a logical extension to the idea of a hive) coordinator. It's explained by Riley Frazier inUnity) that no conflict exists within this mind, and by Troi (in Q-WHO?) that it is the minds of all of them, including the Queen herself.
I would argue that this does not indicate that a malicious intent exists, on the basis that a mistake in evolutionary terms occurred to which no return could be made to alter this. It is possible that it could be a temporal inversion similar to the one we see in Timeless where Harry Kim, 20 years after the disaster that cost the lives of all crew except he and Commander Chakotay uses a Borg temporal transponder to send a message through time to 7 of 9 in order to wipe clean the mistake of being unable to correct phase corrections in the high risk attempt to return to the Alpha Quadrant using Quantum Slipstream technology. But that is speculative.
So I would have to give some benefit because of the doubt.
She is an enemy of the Federation or a better description adversary or foe - but it is interesting to note that villain isn't tied to those words in an academic thesaurus this implies there is a distinction between the two.
Cruelty and deception is a villain's devotion, but the Borg's devotion is perfection and is explained numerous times in Trek canon - it's their actions/methodology which is flawed or villainous. But even in their flawed methodology their attempt is to add "biological and technological distinctiveness to their own" - so there is an attempt to preserve culture but again flawed because it doesn't allow for individuality and various other ideals, it is all or nothing.
On a side note the episode Unimatrix Zero raises the question as to whether individuality can exist in the Borg collective.
Hard to see the Borg Queen, the one Borg that exhibited moral agency, as anything but evil.
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In short one villainous action - were the powers that be right to do so, did it make the powers that be, villains or heroes or neither (category other), would it have been more villainous to let the war drag out longer causing more death destruction? DIscuss.
NB: For reference I consider the goal was peace.
That would be under the "Other" category.
There's lots of awesome comments here!
As humans we can certainly “vilify” her. But, I appreciate that the writers at DB are not so Federation-centric as to deem all opposition “villains.”
So what? We teamed up with Stallen in WWII, and he was a villian. He was just less a villain (debatable, I suppose, but it was the prevailing thought at the time) than the other guy. The fact that the villian is working for their own people's good or once did something not so villainous does not mean they are not a villain. The best arguement I've read here that she isn't a villain is because she is not going against her people's standards. I don't think it is good enough, but I understand the arguement.
In any case, she was a fantastic character. ...But that also does not mean she is not a villain.
Looks like it 🤔
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Hitler was evil, calculated evil. His actions cannot be minimized or justified.
Giving villian to every antagonist from an episode or movie is impractical... that would be half the characters in the game. So I would suggest that the trait ought to be limited to those characters who play the Villian role in a narrative within the trek universe: Dr. Noah, Queen Archania, Moriarty, the Clown, and maybe some reviled cultural figures like Pah Wraith Dukat and Lucien. Of course, that would exclude half the characters who have it right now, but at least it's an ethos.
Villains do evil for evil reasons. She does what she feels is best for her people. Without the ."one voice", the Borg would fall into anarchy.
Bad example. One side was indiscriminately murdering scapegoats, the other was trying to stop them.
This continues to be a bad example we had Russia on our side.