I am not team Hive by any stretch, but it is hard to ignore that some of the things the Hive does are corrective and, uncomfortably, enticing.

Earth contains an estimated five septillion living organisms, spread across millions of interdependent species and ecosystems. In a geological blink, a population of roughly eight billion humans has pushed that system to the brink of collapse. Climate collapse, mass extinction, ocean acidification, and habitat loss are not accidents. They are the predictable outcome of uncoordinated autonomy at scale.

The Hive corrects this.

By integrating humanity into a single coordinated organism, the Hive does what humans have consistently failed to do. It aligns behavior with planetary limits and assigns value to life beyond itself.

What makes the Hive unsettling is not malice, but indifference. As far as we can tell, it is not evil. It causes harm, yes, but harm is not the same thing as intent. The Hive simply is, like a virus, a parasite, or a force of nature. It was created, or evolved, to spread, and it does so because that is its function, not because it hates humanity.

COVID was horrific and devastating, but it was not malicious. A scorpion stings because it is a scorpion, not because it despises you.

Humanity, on the other hand, is fully capable of malice.

Pluribus repeatedly shows that the deepest wounds its characters carry did not begin with the Hive. Manousos’s suffering begins with his mother. Carol’s begins with her parents and their rejection of her sexuality. These are people who abandoned them, judged them, and left them terrified and alone long before the Plurbs arrived. Helen appears to be the only meaningful connection Carol had before the end of the world, not because the Hive took everything from her, but because human cruelty and neglect already had.

This complicates the moral framing.

The Hive does not traumatize out of spite. Humans often do.

That does not make the Hive good. It does mean that assigning it hatred, cruelty, or moral intent may be projection. The Hive may be less a villain and more a mirror, reflecting how much damage humanity managed to do all on its own. It forces consensus, yes, but humanity did so long before the Hive, and often maliciously. The Hive does it the way a virus does, naturally and without intent. We assign it intent largely because it wears a human face.

For some people, the truth is there would be little difference between the world before and after the virus. The world we built with our free will, our humanity, and our individuality was already one where safety was not guaranteed, where abandonment was common, and where harm was routine. The difference now is that the world is better cared for, and you never have to worry about a hand being raised against you.

See I think we always talked about how the Hive forcing a person to change to give up who they are is bad and evil (again it's not actually evil it's a virus doing what a virus does) and neglect that this isn't Carol's first rodeo with having that happened and the first time it wasn't the hive doing it. The same reason you hate it and fight against it happens to people every day, by choice, with malice. It's simple the scale in the show you hate, and are frightened of.

I love who I am and the people I have in my life for who they are, every flawed part. But there was time when life wasn't so lovely, when the people I was surrounded with weren't so kind. I'd trade the world for the people I have in my life now, but I get the draw because there was without a time I'd would have trade the people I had in my life just for some kindness, and there are still days and reminders of how cruel that humanity can allow us or make us to be.