At 04:07 PM 7/18/99 -0600, Chris Davies wrote:

On Sun, 18 Jul 1999, Alan Harnum wrote:

Well, she still seemed quite pleased with him near the end of the first OVA
series.  For the queen of an empire, Deva is pretty bloody naive.

	The problem is, she's *not* the queen of an empire.  She's the queen
of a *hive*.  

Which she calls "The Omnipotent Bugrom Empire", if memory serves.  :)

Her subjects -- while I *like* the Bugrom, I like them a lot,

but let's not kid around here, they're bugs -- are probably biologically
programmed to obey her, as they have been programmed to obey all the queens
stretching back into history.

A plausible theory.  There have been instances in the OVAs which could be
used to argue otherwise, but the FFML isn't the place to debate the
existence or non-existence of Bugrom free will.  :)

  So she's never had to interact on a social

basis with someone with free will or a complicated, devious personality
before.

Quite likely true.

	(See Poul Anderson's "The High Crusade" for further speculations on
why, even without a technological advantage, humans might be able to take
alien empires on their own turf.)

Haven't read it, I'm afraid to say.  

	Anyway, I frankly suspect that this is *why* she's attracted to
Jinnai. He fascinates her, since he is something she has never encountered
before.  It's plausible that any human being who could speak her language
would have aroused the same interest.

Interesting interpretation.  Of course, since we can understand Deva's
speech in the OVAs (at least in the dub) and we can't understand, for the
most part, the speech of the Bugrom, it's quite possible that Deva can
speak our language.

Ciao,
-Alan Harnum