If "classic" Trek had introduced the Borg...

If one wants an in-story explanation for the discrepancies between what "Q Who" asserted and how the Borg were later portrayed, it could simply be that the main source of information about the Borg in "Q Who" was Q himself, a notorious liar.

 

The drone behavior in "Q Who" also showed a distinct lack of interest in anything except the tech, too, though.

 

^Which could, I suppose, be reconciled given that the Borg had already assimilated humans -- the Hansen family -- and thus weren't particularly curious about them. But the Enterprise's technology was more advanced than the Raven's.

 

And this continues to be true of later Drones, despite our heroes learning that the Collective does interest itself in lifeforms and cultures.

It's simply a rare case of realism: when encountering a radically alien species, our heroes initially got most of the facts about them wrong. Humans could have been much older news to the Collective than the Hanson debacle, really, considering their low species number... Klingons, likewise.

Regarding assimilation and dilution of ideas: the Borg may originally have been quite serious about welcoming the distinctiveness of newly assimilated individuals and cultures. It's simply that this doctrine is doomed to fail when the Collective grows in size, and the Borg may not have taken that into account. Or then they simply saw that there was no way to take that into account, shrugged (it's one of the most impressive sights in this galaxy, really, sixteen trillion humanoids lifting their shoulders in unison!) and continued along the path set by their forefathers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

You're thinking of Erin Hansen. Irene Hansen was Seven's aunt, and she was never assimilated.


I recall the Borg wanting to add a species' biological and technological distinctiveness to their own, but nothing about their culture.

It's like a real-world country welcoming immigrants (biology) and their intellectual know-how and "stuff" (technology), but saying "Forget about your former culture, you'll have to adapt to ours."

 

Uhh, "Irene" is how "Erin" is spelled in the dialect of Gamma Farigula VIII! Yeah, that's the ticket! :blush:

Good analogy. In fact, that process is actually called assimilation. (Which literally means "making the same.")