@horridrabbitcreature said: Ok now tell us how they breed. For educational purposes
Honestly and sincerely, I do not know how Bill's species breeds lmao.
It's a problem of aesthetics, to me. A shape in the style of Bill Cipher has a simple, clean, minimalist perimeter, with perhaps only a couple of arms and legs and (in their home dimension) an eyeball on one corner.
If you headcanon they have the traditional hole or pole anatomy like humans do, it mars their nice, simple perimeter. If you come up with some complicated way to hide the equipmentâsomething like a cloacaâthat still will probably be seen on their edge, which I don't like, and anyway I personally feel like "yeah they've got equipment (it's just perfectly hidden most of the time)" is a little goofy and the coward's way out.
You could incorporate it into their existing anatomyâmake up an alien way to stuff a reproductive system into their eyeballs, for instanceâbut I already do SO MUCH with their eye (it's for seeing AND it's their mouth hole AND they probably hear through there) that trying to find a way to shove in a reproductive system feels like too much, so I'm not doing that.* And they don't have much visible anatomical features OUTSIDE of eyes to work with.
(* "What do you mean you're not putting their genitalia in their eyes, you just wrote a whole chapter about Bill being into weird eye stuff?" The eye stuff is Bill's fetish, not a reflection of normal shapes' sexual behavior, and all Bill's shape buddies think he's a freak for it. Glad we clarified this.)
You could invent an entirely new alien reproductive method that gets around the issue, but unless how they reproduce becomes relevant to the fic I'm writing (doubtful), that's a HUGE superfluous avenue of worldbuilding that wouldn't contribute anything but pointless complicated info.
So I don't know how they breed because right now it just doesn't matter to the story I'm telling.
Here's what I do know about their reproduction:
It requires one line and one polygon (triangle, quadrangle, pentagon, etc). (This is not without purpose; I'm all for alien reproductive methods that don't involve pairing up, but in this case for "Bill keeps accidentally paralleling the human characters' experiences" reasons it was necessary to give him a crummy mom-and-dad like Pacifica, Gideon, and Stan+Ford.) Each kind of shape (lines included) is genetically a separate sex and socially considered a separate gender.
"each shape is a separate sex" actually only goes up so far. Shapes with a ridiculously high number of sides aren't naturally occurring and are the result of selectively breeding for extra sides, and often requires mutations or inbreeding. Creating a circle is like spending several centuries selectively breeding humans for polydactyly until you have a baby with thirty fingers. By Bill's time the practice of selectively breeding for sides was scientifically discredited and effectively dead.
Similarly, "each generation your angles/sides should increase" was proven to be rubbish. It's all sex chromosomes.
I've been toying with the idea of making lines a small proportion of the population rather than 50%, to reduce how much it feels like the species is a binary "50% female (lines) and 50% male of various flavors (polygons)"; but if there's so few lines then to maintain the population there might be some kind of "a line can have multiple spouses" rule; maybe a line can legally take one spouse of each shape but NOT, say, two triangles or something; but then that's verging on "to what end am I making this so complicated? What's the point? Does it have any impact on Bill's life?" so I might just chuck that idea. (A lot of my worldbuilding is driven by "Bill's species is extinct in the wild, so justify why exploring this matters?")
Similarly, I've considered maybe making the way the species experiences romantic feelings vary between sexesâlike, maybe usually only lines fall in love for some reason, or maybe if there's a town that's 10% line 10% square 10% miscellaneous and 70% triangle then newborn triangles are naturally inclined toward being ace/aro to rebalance the population numbers. Sorta inspired by like how frogs spontaneously change sexes if the pond's population is too unbalanced. The reason I'm considering this is because having Bill experience romantic feelings & falling in love at the same rate as allo humans (like, what, every few years? Constantly maybe?) is just ridiculous for a character who's a trillion years old; but if I'm gonna say "oh he only falls in love once a million years or whatever" I want a good reason that isn't just he hasn't met someone ~special~ enough; and I DON'T want the reason to be "he's ace and/or aro and could reasonably identify that way" because having Bill frigging Cipher grapple with that queer experience just does NOT excite me. Basicallyâas an ace/aro myself, I don't want it to be possible for ace/aro-ness to be one of the reasons Bill feels fundamentally Weird. Turns me off. So I'm toying with, maybe I could build his species in such a way that, for him, being aro-ish or ace-ish would be seen as normative & expected, rather than queer; so I could still have him only wanna date once every million years WITHOUT feeling like that's a part of his identity he needed to explore at some point. But idk futzing around with how his species experiences romance might be unnecessarily complicated when I could just, like, not point out that only dating once every million years is unusual, and most readers would just roll with it without question.
So, these are the thoughts I've had about how reproduction works in Bill's species.
Still have no idea how they fuck.
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