Do Reavers have a multi-generational society?

Question

I read that in the core worlds, the Reavers from Firefly/Serenity are legendary (campfire tales or something), so it sounds like they have been around for a long time.

They must get killed frequently and die from various other things like radiation and lack of medical care. I read that some humans might be converted if the the reavers detect some genetic difference and this process is no doubt unpleasant.

Is there any evidence that they also reproduce naturally, with offspring of two Reavers becoming Reavers themselves? Or perhaps they bring up children (not necessarily their own) who at least sometimes grow up to be Reavers or at least fake it? (Interesting story idea, Reavers who despite looking like the rest, want to escape to a normal place - maybe someone has written that already?)

We know that they can fly and maintain spacecraft so they are not mindless, so mating or childrearing seems plausible.

EDIT: Mine it turns out is sort of a dupe of a question about whether Reavers have babies and someone asserted that, No, they don't have little "ragebabies." But do not giant hornets, sort of like Reavers to bees and other species, not raise their own young and in fact raid to feed them. A story showing this paradoxical-seeming thing among the Reavers would be interesting: perhaps there is a caste of less-violent Reavers who take care of baby Reavers, member of this caste having to protect the babies from other Reavers and also protest themselves from random violence. At the same time, such young Reavers would grow up in an unbelievably violent environment (I believe hornet colonies are much more violent than bee colonies in terms of intra-colony violence. Wasps fight with each other to establish hierarchies that are remembered -- bees do not beyond expelling useless males, not really fights.) sort of like street urchins in Oliver Twist or something.

Answer 1

Neither the television show nor the official comic books contain content to confirm that Reavers have any social structure or level of society beyond the level of a pack animal, and the only reference to reavers mating that I'm aware of was in part 2 of the pilot where Zoe says the following:

“If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And, if we’re very, very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.”

While this may have been hyperbole, it fits with the general characterization of the franchise that the Reavers are single minded and animalistic, lacking the capabilities to consistently raise children in sufficient numbers to maintain a stable population.

A likely explanation is that the original colonists who became the Reavers was a multi-generational society, thus children or teenagers who became Reavers could be adult or middle aged Reavers if they survived long enough, and thus appear to be a multi-generation all threat (A generation is often considered to be 25 years).

Answer 2

They Do Not (depending on your definition of generational)

There are two types of legends/campfire stories. Things from the recent past in hard-to-confirm scenarios or out of the way places, (Think the Ghost of Kiev earlier this year during the first days/weeks of the Russo-Ukranian War) and things from long ago still rumored to be in out of the way places (like bigfoot).

Based on the timeline of the 'Verse Reavers clearly fall into the first category. (information from The Verse in Numbers published with the support of Quantum Mechanix and written by Geoffry Mandel.)

2506: Terraforming fails on Miranda and Reavers created.

2511: Unification War ends.

2517: Start of the events covered in the Firefly series.

Thus we're talking about 11ish years. Which is plenty of time to start the rumor mill in the Core Systems that "in out-of-the-way places scary things are happening what a great ghost story!" But given the lock the Alliance holds on information that's as far as it gets until Mal & Co broadcast the truth in the events of Serenity.

So the Reaver's aren't multi-generational in the sense that they've existed for more than a generation (generally considered 25 years). But there is a chance that teenagers/kids were among the portion of Miranda's population that were turned into Reavers and therefor you might consider a reaver band that contained them (or elderly people that became reavers) "multi-generational" in the sense that people from a wide range of ages are part of the band.