Oh but if I went 'round sayin' I was Emperor, just because some mechanistic bint lobbed a phaser at me, they'd put me away.

This is what actually made the Borg terrifying.

There was nobody to talk to or negotiate with. There was no mind to change. There wasn't even a leader to assassinate in hopes to alter policy.

They were less of an enemy and more of an immutable force, like gravity or magnetism.

The movie implied that she was simply an avatar for the Collective

She says that. And then she dies and the Borg are defeated.

On the other hand, on VOY, she says the same, and then proceeds to create a Fascist organization clearly against the goals of the drones. But at least when she dies, the Collective creates a new queen.

About Section 31, my understanding is that it was once official. And then it was disbanded with prejudice, but the high powers don't really want it gone, so S31 has authority even on DS9 and LWD times.

Section 31. I’m one of those few people who actually wants more S31 stuff, but only if it’s done correctly.

Way too many followups treat it like Starfleet’s CIA (Starfleet Intelligence already exists…) instead of a conspiracy that consists of individuals acting out of various degrees of ideological resolve, and to varying amounts. I imagine most people who are “in” S31 are more like Bashir. They are called upon to look the other way, or do something without being told much about it. Otherwise they have day jobs. I’m sure various Starfleet command level officers are in on some aspect of S31, but that doesn’t make their ships full time S31 ships. Only a very few people further the S31 cause full time, and they are totally off the books. S31 is supposed to be a shady group that parasitically uses Starfleet assets.

I idea of Section 31 black badges is so preposterously mind blowing.

Polyamory?

The beast with a billion backs!

Hum... Are you talking about Janeway here? Because in TNG her crush is on Data.

Nope, but that would have been a much better take.

In First Contact, Picard has flashbacks and mentions that the Queen was there the entire time while he was Locutus. Gross retcon.

Hugh and the individual Borg led by Lore were just a small subset, maybe a single cube. I can't remember if that was stated directly in Descent or not, but it was implied to be a relatively small group affected.

I like this theory until Picard says he remembers the Queen in First Contact.

Oh, what a giveaway! Did'j'hear that, did'j'hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see 'er repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?!

i was genuinely confused when i learned about the borg queen, it makes no fucking sense on any level and feels like something that was edited in post

I agree with your take.

I was never a Trekkie, but my gf has been since she was a kid, so she's been sharing the setting with me.

I really, really liked the borg threat, but the Queen cheapens it for me significantly. Not so much that she exists, but that she's literally the Nexus of the whole thing.

My suspicion/prediction was that the borg would be undone by some sort of biotechnical exploit, likely either some sort of "virus" that would be assimilated and spread through the system, nullifying/destroying them or their abilities...or some kind of trojan horse, similar to the virus but something that would take federation and romulan cooperation to build something that was very desirable to the collective but with a built in vulnerability that would leave them open to a specific attack (maybe something like capturing a Borg and altering them in a way that used the Borg "learning" against them, by countering the advantages of things they assimilate and then learning at the same pace as the Borg, but in learning how to halt their progress)...or maybe some sort of star trek version of a DDOS where they were able to somehow overwhelm the Borg with things to assimilate, but that were "dumb machinery"...with a huge glut of these assimilations of mundane subjects, maybe it'd have the effect of reducing the average of the collective, making it more beatable. Basically adding lots of dead weight to "bring down the curve".

Or, of course, there was always the possibility of time warp or Q related nonsense, but IMHO that would have been even worse than what we got with the Queen. As popular as Q is, I never liked that addition to the setting.

The queen is a single point of failure

This is actually not true. The Borg have multiple queens

Interestingly enough. Queen bees do not actually control most hive activity. Individual workers and gatherers communicate through dance and pheromone signals and the hive literally votes on what it will do. For example a scout will find a new flower patch and tell the rest of the hive and the hive will vote on how many more bees to send.

It would have been far more interesting for the collective to have a queen but for part of the plot to be the humans misunderstanding her purpose to the collective, kill her, and then have the collective be just fine and produce a new queen.

Then it would literally be bees

Wow… a Quadra. I remember wanting one of those!