We're finally getting info on sburb titles!

[farla]

I am so conflicted. This is so interesting, and yet as one of the people that got invested in this because I wanted the find out the game rules, I suspect we're never going to actually get a coherent ruleset, just individual descriptions. And I can't imagine the boy/girl title thing leading anywhere good. (At least it won't matter for my fic if "knight" ends up boys only.)

(Also in unrelated news the links are still gone over on FFN, but at least it doesn't edit away text links. But it's not like they have much in the way of functionality as it is, so removing any is really irritating.)

Comments

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

At least it won't matter for my fic if "knight" ends up boys only.

Why not? :O

(I kind of doubt it will. If anything, I'm guessing it's one of the usually-male-but-some-exceptions ones, and that the truly exclusive ones are those where it's right there in the name, like Prince and Maid. Though I'm still not happy about that, for obvious reasons.)

[farla.livejournal.com]

I'm still undecided if they're actually a single-gender species, but no matter what, gender isn't a thing, and I figure the game can push against the cultural setup just like it can push players to change who they are, but it can't introduce an element that's just absent. There's no mythic resonance to play off of.

I'm trying to reserve judgement until we see the titles, but, well, prince and maid, I think if you set up gendered titles you're going to run into issues with them not being particularly balanced. I remember the speculation was that page and maid were similar, and, well, a page can grow up and a maid...can't.

Come to think of it, Eridan's title is weird since all the kids are automatically princes or princesses.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's so cool! Plenty of reptilian species on Earth have parthenogenetic abilities, and at least one kind of whip-tailed lizard is all-female, so that would work well! ...but then, I'm sure you knew that already.

I felt better about the Maid title when I learned that St. Joan was called "the Maid". Maybe not intended, but it's something to work with.

[farla.livejournal.com]

They are definitely parthenogenic. Their stories say is they're all descended from a single individual after a lot of bad stuff nearly wiped them out, and they're definitely from a very, very small group of founders. So sort of like us, but even more so and also if we were giant lizards.

But I want them to still be exchanging genes because otherwise they'd stop being closely related over time, plus lineage isn't a big thing so it'd be too easy to have one clone line end up too prolific. I just can't settle on if they have temperature-dependent sexes or if they're hermaphroditic. They might all be hybrids of two cell masses if that could work with eggs...

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Well, if all else fails you can have handwave-y not-quite-eggs that it DOES work with! It doesn't seem too hard to imagine, and in any case it makes more sense than troll reproduction.

There's also the Left Hand of Darkness option where during mating season one half of each pair takes on male sexual characteristics because pheromones, and it's such a complicated process as to be effectively random which one it is and can be a different partner each time.

[farla.livejournal.com]

There's not much that makes less sense than troll reproduction. But they need to be pretty egglike so they can be buried in sand and then cracked open like real eggs. I might use the hybrid thing anyway though, it'd help keep their genepool more stable if the individuals are a mix of two sets of cells and the DNA only gets combined in the offspring's eventual sex cells. Maybe something weird happened where they used to lay large clutches and instead the various embryos started fusing into one mass. Since we still have no idea why some animals hybridize a lot, it'll take a while for anything I say to turn out wrong.

I was considering having them switch genders, but it seems like it'd be really hard to avoid some stereotypes arising from it. I haven't read the book but I heard in Left Hand of Darkness they were deliberately engineered to try to do an endrun around sexism.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Well they can be less egg-like at the early stages and then become proper eggs? Like, as gametes, I mean. And oh, by hybrids you mean like chimeras?

That wasn't in the book I read, but it might have been in the sequel.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Oh. Yeah, I'm just worried about how it'd interact with getting onto the yolk and forming the egg and stuff. I just remember that you can't gene splice with birds because there's obvious problems once it's in the shell and something was preventing them from getting the cell-egg before that point.

Yeah, chimeras! There's some evidence it can make for more robust creatures, and of course our DNA is based around the idea that if you have two sets of a gene there's a chance at least one functions. It might help preserve genetic variety since they'd be able to have more than one set, provided the sex cells know not to build themselves out of only one group. And it'd be an interesting speciation event to separate them from the regular crocs. Fewer, bigger eggs but hopefully healthier resulting offspring, greater investment in smaller clutches...

[wintersheir]

I was toying with the idea of all the titles applying to either gender-- a female character being Prince class (and some fan classes-- Duke, King, Lord, etc.), male character being the Witch class, but now that you mention it I'm having trouble seeing a male character as the Maid class. I'm imagining, say, Karkat in a little maid outfit and wait stop

I think Knight would be fine to assign to a female character.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Karkat would make a great maid. He'd just have to swap his aspect for rage.

But yeah, the gendered titles don't seem like they'd be perfectly equivalent - it doesn't seem quite right to say a Mage of Space have the exact same power set as Jade's Witch of Space stuff (plus, Mage isn't a necessarily male title...headaches), and even obvious pairs like prince/princess have slightly different connotations. If the role has to do with what males/females are usually like, then it should just stop off at a role being usually all one or the other, but any gender could still qualify.

Actually, wait, titles can't be two syllables. There can't be a princess title at all. And I can't think of any female gendered one syllable equivalent to prince. So either everyone gets access or else entire sets of qualities get locked off based on gender.

[wintersheir]

YESSSSSSSS MAID OF RAGE

I wondered about Mage/Witch as well, but mage isn't usually gendered and witch can be applied to a male person (Lord of the Rings, the Witch-King of Whatevermar). Page/Maid feels the most like a male/female pair for the same class.

That's what really tripped me up about Prince, I couldn't find a feminine equivalent at all-- but I've seen it once to use "princes" as the plural for that rank, when you were talking about male and female people in a group. I wouldn't mind seeing a female Prince, since I like that kind of defying gender/weird gender stuff, but it's more important to other people I guess.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, witch-king is far too badass to lose, and god knows Tolkien knew his English.

The more I think about it, the more I fear the answer is just going to be that it's an arbitrary reference to videogames that have certain job classes only available to one gender or another. Which is even more unsatisfying here than there given it's supposed to be generated off a real person's personality - insomuch as the players count as "real", I guess, but the idea the game picks their personalities so there'd never be a female person who fits the prince title isn't good.

Or maybe this is all going to be an elaborate fakeout and the gendered titles will be completely random and it'll turn out only girls can be seers while maid is one of the rare titles with a perfect fifty/fifty distribution.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

I'd totally missed the fact titles are all one syllable, probably because I'm really bad at parsing syllables. That makes things more difficult, because many of the gender-swapped equivalents I can think of to canon or common fan titles are two syllables. Like in my mind, mage is completely gender neutral, but you can do either a witch/wizard gender dichotomy or call everyone by either title. Or Prince/Princess or Duke/Duchess. Oh well, I can see very few classes I would make exclusive, and even then I could see exceptions for personality (aka Utena) because it sounds more like a trends thing than a rules thing.

[ember-reignited.livejournal.com]

Utena

Okay, good, I'm not the only one whose brain immediately went there.