Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.
And- And death is intrinsically intertwined with ephemeral beauty. The intricate patterns of one's wings, their new but vibrant colors, their fan-like antenna and larger bodies. How death would be culturally linked to flight too. It kinda reminds me how many cultures link butterflies as psychopomps, carrying the soul or being manifestations of the soul fluttering into the afterlife.
And- and your offspring being the final pieces of your legacy, the last mark and trace left on the world. Family members waiting mournfully outside of one's cocoon, speaking to it like how a human holds the hand of a loved one in death. Two moth-people, post-metamorphasis, clinging to one another, their final moments now fatally intertwined to one another, knowing that fate has brought them together in death and recreation only. A sort of unspoken sacredity in their fleeting connection. Maybe society is set up so that certain moths can choose to die with one another. Or maybe there's a societal profound freedom in the winged ones taking flight and finding one another sporadically.
I... I think it would be fun too
