Talk:Melanie Bronson/@comment-31617425-20170408223452/@comment-35992812-20180626075528

Well, actually there are some very important distinctions between the living and dead when it comes to how the Many work all the way through the game.

First of all, Watts tells you: "They want you as a host. Do you understand? Get away." This is the first implication that the Many needs you alive if they want to do much with you. It may also be one reason that they don't just send every single infected crew member to immediately kill the player  - because they want to capture him alive.

SHODAN also forces you to remove the Many's control of the Sim Units because they are using them to run simulations on how they can infect corpses in the same way they can infect living people. Which, combined with the corpses everywhere, means they don't know how to do that yet and it's of great importance to them. SHODAN says something along the lines of: "The Many are attempting to find a way to turn the meat of your dead comrades into hunter-killer Hybrids. I will not allow that."

Prefontaine discovers and explains at the end of the game that the Many turn the majority of corpses into eggs for the worms and flies, but are incapable of using them for anything other than basic biomass or food.

All of the Many organisms first discovered on Tau Ceti V seem to be egg-based worms and presumably the flies too. They're all centred around infecting living organisms rather than using dead bodies for infection. We also see worms crawling out of dead bodies several times - but the bodies stay dead. This implies the worms can't infect them, but they use them for meat to stay alive until they can infect a living being.

Finally, Turnbull explicitly says in her log as she turns into a hybrid, they need a living host to actually do the whole hybrid life-cycle thing that is their main form of "evolving" and becoming more intelligent.

So they need a living host to go Hybrid --> Rumbler --> Psi-Reaver, which from Diego and Korenchkin's logs, seems to be their desired and most sophisticated life cycle. The only weapon they have without living hosts is the mind-control the worms can perform - so they're definitely weaker when only supplied with corpses.

Thus Bronson killing the people in the Mess Hall actually did throw a wrench in their plans, but sadly it seems that most of these crew members were actually uninfluenced/uninfected and so it also weakened the surviving humans further.

Since the mind control was almost impossible to detect (we hear Malick deliberately suppressing his unusual voice pattern when Bronson knocks on the door), Bronson actually did a pretty amazing job of fighting given the circumstances. Even though she did some regrettable things out of desperation.