Cruisinforabruising101 - 0-o

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Any tips on how to design reproductive/family life for long lived species? If they could live for 1000 years, family might be extremely complicated because of the possibility of siblings born 700 years apart, having great great etc... grandchilden before your sibling is born. Vocabulary? How about fertility age? Could 700 years could be considered too old to reproduce? How about dynamics on age differences between partners? Anything else? (No interspecies at this time)

Tex: What’s their perspective of time? Does their environment change more rapidly than they do? It would be a little different for an elf in Middle Earth than, say, a vampire in New York City.

Regardless of a species’ window of child-bearing years and years of childhood itself, how their own biology is perceived is influenced by their environment and experiences. Would someone of your species have children 700 years apart? Would that be a long time between children for them, or a typical span where it’s normal to have one child nearly every thousand years?

A human who has a child at 25 might not have a child at 45, even if they’re physically able to do so. I imagine a similar decision-making process might be involved no matter the species, particularly if your species is capable of doing anything about it - that does bring in another nod to enculturation. Is it even considered appropriate to have children 700 years apart? If so, what would be considered the social advantages?

Do they have a religion that prioritizes reproducing often and whenever possible? Do they not? What would be the rationalization behind either dictation?

What if your species, because it is long-lived, has names for children born at certain stages of life? Would that change family dynamics? If so, how so? What about how timing of birth affecting who they’re socially permitted to become romantically or sexually involved with? What would be the rationale behind those sorts of norms?

You’re a mimic. You were disguised as a chair in a dungeon when an adventurer decided to take you as loot. You’ve actually enjoyed your life ever since as furniture in a jolly tavern. So when some ruffians try to rob the now-elderly adventurer’s business, you finally reveal yourself.

Humans Are Weird

To be honest, I didn’t really intend to imply humans were the only weird aliens. It was more a case of “what do we do, what are we good for”? I wound up envisioning us as the rescue dogs of the universe because we’ve got a lot of the same traits that make dogs really valuable for that.

But, for instance, an ambush predator would be much less prone to sunk cost fallacies. A pursuit predator has to be persistent because it’s much worse to leave an animal half worn out to chase another one, even one that would have been easier to start with. Whereas a leopard will come out of hiding the instant it knows it’s been seen (to avoid the obvious pun) because there’s no point sinking energy into stalking something you’ve already lost the chance to pounce on.

A eusocial species would bond even more intensely than humans, but likely more highly confined to their own relatives let alone their own species.

We’d probably all be very strange to one another.

“The female Utahraptor doesn’t have a name for herself. Her brain doesn’t operate with words, not even with silent, unspoken syllables. It works with images, colorful bursts of memory that make up a dreamlike history the brain constantly updates. Every day new experiences and new associations from her senses rearrange the symbolic registry. In her own brain the raptor identifies herself with the symbols she learned as a chick: ‘me… raptor… red.’ We can call her Raptor Red, because that’s how she labels herself in her own mental imagery.”

— -Raptor Red, Robert T. Bakker

i keep trying to phrase a post as like a helpful tip for people who like worldbuilding but. i have to be honest with myself. it is not a helpful tip because no one asked for it. i just want to rant about kinship terminologies.

Another brilliant video.

I may save some of those cultural/society ideas he included as blueprints for some future stories I may write someday.

I’ll be honest, whenever a work of speculative fiction (fanmade or otherwise) goes out of its way to describe an intelligent species with bizarre and complicated reproductive biology, the first question that invariably pops into my head is: “How do these critters masturbate?”

Spirit: Stallion of The Cimarron & the Indian Boarding Schools/Residential Schools allegory