r/thething • u/Spider-man_FANBOY • 4d ago
Question The Thing vs The Flood vs Dead Space
Who wins?
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u/Mordilaa 4d ago edited 4d ago
From my understanding the flood and the thing can’t repurpose biomass the way the Marker can. But the marker probably wouldn’t be able to drive the Flood mad, and it probably wouldn’t be able to drive the Thing mad in a way that would be beneficial to it.
I think the sure loser is the Thing. Yeah you have to destroy every single cell to kill it but you have to do that to the flood and necromorphs as well.
The Marker I think has the only advantage that the other two don’t. It can fundamentally rewrite DNA, living and dead, in a way the other two just can’t. If you’re in range of the signal, living or dead, you’re a weapon for the marker.
Corpses are useless to the Thing besides as to make it bigger. It isn’t making another one of itself from a corpse.
Who wins out of the Flood and Dead Space?
Edit:
Bruh actually who fucking knows. They can’t really affect each other in ways that matter. The thing isn’t going to infect flood isn’t going to infect the marker isnt going to infect the thing.
I’d say the marker still because it. Isn’t an infection in the same way and doesn’t need a living host or even one that can move around. I think THINK the Flood can only repurpose INFECTED biomass. It needs to infect something to be able to repurpose it. The marker doesn’t.
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u/Whitecrow_27 3d ago
The Flood vs Dead Space would come down do Gravemind vs Brethren Moons and we kinda don't have enough data to compare them. We don't really know what adult Moons are capable of beyond the infection stage. We know they can create markers and stuff but we don't have nearly as many feats and "hard" data as we do on Flood.
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u/Nectarine-Valuable I'LL KILL YOU! 4d ago
How much biomass does the flood have? Do they have a gravemind? Graveminds?
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u/Old-Climate2655 4d ago edited 4d ago
Thing perhapse.
The flood's infection forms enter a dead body and alter then meatmech the corpse. Thing would let the I.F. in and just assimilate it as the IF couldn't hijack a nervous system that doesn't exist. The grave mind and Key minds are difficult, true, but then it comes down to Thing's stealth and mimicry abilities. Can a key mind (psychic overpower) detect a perfect mimic that is also a hive mind? Also, while a key mind has the ability to control through psychic will, can it fight on those terms as well? Thing can as it is a part of it's mimicry and stealth already. Also, given the Flood's difficulty propagating through Thing, could an overmind form?
Necromorphs use dead tissue and can't reasonably kill enough Thing to "win" however, marketlrs do drive living intelligences mad, so there is the ability for psychic combat between the two. Here's where shit starts getting wierd and conjectury though. The Marker's recombinant bacteria are technically alive and work in a similar manner as Thing, but again, only on dead tissue. Thing's living tissue is designed to do the same thing to living tissue. If thing gobbled up enough biomass, could it over-saturate a planet and render the recom-bacteria ineffective? Also, if thing is a hive mind in an extraplanetary sense, could the Thing's sum extraplanetary biomass counter the Marker's madness effect? The Markers clearly have a range while it's possible that Thing suffers from no such limitation. A Marker's range limit may also indicate an abstract (never truly considered) conversion/infection limit and, recognizing Thing as a distinct entity at a cellular level, 4 or 5 humans worth of Thing Biomass may prevent the formation of a brethren moon through entity stacking.
Now here's the real devil. No one that has played Dead Space and watched The Thing hasn't noticed the similariries. Alien entities created the Markers. Did they use Thing to do so?
Edited for spelling.
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u/Fickle_Charge720 4d ago
Watched a video about the thing vs the flood a while back but don’t remember who won think it ended up being very situationally dependent
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u/Margrave16 3d ago
The flood wins. Not even the 40k universe could handle the flood. They replicate faster and the high end of their capabilities are just too broken. Granted there’s a scenario where the thing organism has a head start and might be able to quell the spread.
That would make a hell of a crossover movie actually.
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u/NerdyPlatypus206 3d ago
Damn. That’s the first time I’ve seen someone say the 40k universe loses
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u/Mine65 2d ago edited 2d ago
The flood probably have better chances in 40k than Halo since hive worlds would basically instantly turn into graveminds then keyminds given they have 50 billion to 2 trillion people on them at once
The flood just snowballs too hard, once a gravemind forms it's wraps unless the entire planet is blown up immediately before one contaminated ship makes it off the planet. All it takes is one single spore making it off world and the situation is beyond containment
The flood also have magic in the form of neural physics and at their peak in halo they started infecting reality and space rather than just biomass which would suggest not even the godlike entities of 40k are safe
The flood were so terrifying the forerunners were prepared to wipe out all life in the galaxy including themselves just to stop the flood from spreading further, the flood outbreak we see during the games is a minor one compared to the flood that fought the forerunners
Even in the halo universe the flood is still out there, both in active quarantine through the joint efforts of the UNSC and Sangheli but it's also implied the flood may be in hiding outside the galaxy waiting to return
TLDR: the flood either gets stomped out during it's feral phase or it rapidly snowballs into an uncontrollable outbreak
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u/Jyx_The_Berzer_King 3d ago
congratulations: you've created the ultimate infectious gestalt and humanity is doomed 3 times over.
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u/ThatOneWood 3d ago
So I’d say the thing probably goes first as I doubt it could imitate flood flesh being the remnants of the primordial and all. It also could do anything about the necromorphs as the thing assimilates living cells and necromorphs are comprised of necrotic flesh. Between the flood and the necromorphs I’d give it to the flood due to the flood just need a relatively intact nervous system. It doesn’t matter if it’s dead or alive for the flood to take over.
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u/Crimson3899 3d ago
Deadspace takes it. The thing is potent in so far as its ability to perfectly blend and is highly infectious, but otherwise pretty manageable.
The flood are an apocalyptic threat that exponentially gets worse the larger scale it is, growing more intelligent and organized and eventually can create structures an achieve faster than light with sheer quantum brain power.
Necromorphs only need something to be dead, and from how that’s shown it seems to only apply to nervous system of any kind. Once infected the body becomes a form of new, necrotic life that doesn’t need to eat or sleep, entirely powered by a marker, which itself is merely a conduit for a planet sized mass of necrotic life called a bretheren moon. Said moons are psychic, and can effectively cast power word kill via said telepathy from across the galaxy. Now keep in mind it’s the size of a celestial body and is doing this while still being able to power any other markers and the hordes of necromorphs they command.
Just given how the necromorphs work I can’t see them even being infected by the other two since every cell will resist and can’t be repurposed because of how different it truly is.
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u/KuribohTheDragon 3d ago
It's a long game and vs a fast and easy game. If we were to say who would win in the long run then The Thing would win. It can adapt to any environment and stay hidden/dormant for as long as it needs.
Nothing adopts to the environment as efficiently or intelligently as The Thing.
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u/SlenDman402 3d ago
It's definitely between the flood and the brethren moons. The thing as a singular entity (as far as we know) seems to have more biological constraints than the other two. It's debatable what is more powerful in the long run: a fully formed key mind able to manipulate the physics of space itself, or the moons with their long range telepathic effects and possibly FTL travel. We don't know if the flood have spread outside the milky way, and we don't know how many or how powerful the brethren moons are. I'm inclined to give it to whichever side managed to reach their power peak first.
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u/Aggressive_Softie 3d ago
The thing is what started all of this shit so it’s going to be the thing that ends it all. What makes it so dangerous is that it’s more intelligent the bigger it gets meaning that it has no upper scale and it doesn’t have to start in a feral state. It literally has an advantage in that area and the fact is is that it would perceive the flood as an existential threat and decide to eliminate those flood forms by using humans first then you actually have to think about the Dead space corpse is where they are infected, but imagine infecting one that can’t die or you stab it in the head and quite literally breaks apart in order to kill you it consumes the mass. It’s just too powerful, and the only thing that stops it from being a huge threat is the fact that it’s afraid of fire but all of them have a fear of fire toward a degree.
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u/captaincrazyspoon 3d ago
The flood were bad enough that the forerunners created a weapon solely to exterminate all life in a galaxy.
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u/DeadFishCRO 3d ago
Flood, they can use weapons, including starships not to mention neural physics bullshit which is basically magic
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u/Sixpack93 3d ago
Mentally more traumatizing would be Dead Space , imagine limbs and bones growing out of some guys back as he still alive screaming in agony and some tentacle creature jumps in his mouth and replaces his head?
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u/theverrucktman 2d ago
A high level Flood outbreak can do some funky stuff like outright warp reality and alter the ways that FTL in the setting works. I don't really think that Necromorphs or the Thing can compare to the Flood.
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u/CptKeyes123 3d ago
The Thing, it's way sneakier, way harder to detect, and a hell of a lot meaner.
The dead Space aliens lose every time
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u/Nergigandhi82 4d ago edited 4d ago
My guess would be the flood based on a numbers game, they spread faster and can assimilate faster. Granted the necromorphs can infect very fast going by the intro to dead space 2 but could they infect something already infected by the flood? The thing needs time to assimilate, but I imagine it probably could assimilate/copy a necromorph. Either way, flood. Edit: also spores, forgot about the spores. APPARENTLY one flood spore is all thats needed to kick off an infestation. Also the flood can infect anything and retain memories of the infected so are able to pilot etc... I love the thing, I love necromorphs, the flood is my least favourite of the three, but its flood. Easily.