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]

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...