This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Insect Gender Benders: From YKTTW
Big Bad Nerd: I added a short paragraph as per Wabbit's suggestion. No idea if it will survive long, but we'll see. The Biblical aversion at the top of the examples list makes me wonder. Does anyone know whether that pronoun is feminine in the original Hebrew? Does anyone even know if Hebrew third-person pronouns have gender? It may only be an aversion in one particular English translation, out of dozens.
Wascally Wabbit: This article sounds like something the Straw Feminist would say, it needs to be cleaned up or balanced or something (and I'd hardly call a society where the males spend their time lazing around and fornicating while the females wait on them female-dominated ;)
sawblade: we should probably rewrite this to better explain why bees and stuff have such a sex "imbalance" in nature.
I tried, but I suck
Ezekiel: I thoroughly agree with Wascally Wabbit. Which sounds more male-dominant and which sounds more female-dominant: A society in which females do all the work and males literally only live to fuck, or a society in which males are all lowly workers and females are all royalty or close to it? Seems like this trope is taking the female-dominated insect society and turning it into something we would recognize as female-dominated; after all, Most Writers Are Human.
sawblade: Schlitzrssler, It would be kinda nice if you had posted in the discussion instead of just nuking my edits. Again, I meant gender in the behaviors sense, not in the American society being way too much of a wuss to say sex. I didn't put it back in to not fight, and also because I didn't like my word choice.
sawblade: Should we have specific aversions that are aliens? Being an alien seems to be a excellent cop out of all this.
Isn't that covered by Bee People? —Document N —-
- The Far Side: Gary Larson received many complaints after drawing a cartoon showing a male mosquito coming home saying "What a day! I must have spread malaria across half the country!" It's the female mosquito that sucks blood. His response: "Of course, it's perfectly acceptable that these creatures wear clothes, live in houses, speak English, etc."
- There's also the possibility that it was merely a female crossdresser.
On Sword of the Stars:
- Although, in a contradiction of its own lore, your Non-Entity General when playing as a Hiver is referred to as "Prince." By the lore, as the supreme leader of a Hive, or even the entire Hiver race, you should be a princess or the High Queen — a prince, at best, could hope for the equivalent of a "general" position. Can be Hand Waved by claiming that this refers to whichever of your underlings is responsible for the current task, who could well be a Prince trying to claim mating privileges, rather than the personal representation of the player.
- That is the case. For other species, it's similar — the Morrigi, for instance, refer to the Non-Entity General of the galaxy map (where a hiver player is referred to as "queen") as "Morro'Khan" (the spokesman/leader of the entire species), while it's "Zu'Khan" (the leader of one particular fleet) when moving fleets and in combat (when it's "prince" for a hiver player, since princes lead military fleets).
- Although, in a contradiction of its own lore, your Non-Entity General when playing as a Hiver is referred to as "Prince." By the lore, as the supreme leader of a Hive, or even the entire Hiver race, you should be a princess or the High Queen — a prince, at best, could hope for the equivalent of a "general" position. Can be Hand Waved by claiming that this refers to whichever of your underlings is responsible for the current task, who could well be a Prince trying to claim mating privileges, rather than the personal representation of the player.
Removed from the page by virtue of now being Natter, but I decided it was worth archiving as an interesting aside along the lines of The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.
