What the HECK is the Chiva about and what does that mean for Yautja?
and other lore questions that are more nuanced than "because i said so"
This was originally a response to someone genuinely asking this question, and they received it well, buti figured instead of redirecting yall to that initial post and perhaps annoying them, I ought to get off my ass and make a separate post about this topic, which alot of new fans seem to be confused about!
DISCLAIMER: Its perfectly okay NOT to know any of this! It's also perfectly okay to disregarding ALL of this! The Chiva, blooding-rituals, and ranking system have been ambiguous for YEARS, and there is NO OFFICAL LORE (as of the day of this post) that is definitive nor should there be anyone claiming to "know everything there is about the yautja" because if that were true, they would know this shit? it's all made up and the points dont matter.
this fandom has worked the same way for years, and worldbuilding yautja society is what YOU wanna make of it, loves~
HAVING SAID THAT:
heacanon, canon, and speculation below:
so, somewhere along the line, we as a fandom had decided that Yautja as a collective don't view age - such as birthdays or their literal physical age - in the same way as humans do. This seemed like a pretty logical thing, considering that canonically, Yautja can live up to thousands of years.
so! in tandem with this - we were also gifted with the concept of: unbloods, youngbloods, blooded, elites, elders, and ancients!
these are ranks/titles given to Yautja in a specific era of their lives - according to what little canon we had at the time. These labels are, in a way, meant to circumvent the concept of age. Because otherwise, we'd all be having to figure out a ratio between a Yautja's actual age (which could be hundreds or thousands) and our human concept of aging.
now some people still do this! and that's fine and fun, for the most part, but it is headcanon. not everyone is going to agree that 100-200 years is 20 in human years or 35-40 etc (as an example, for instance) so it's a bit of messy fanon that hasn't really worked long term and causes arguements
now, with the ranks and titles this becomes a bit more streamlined, or it was supposed to make it streamlined. Because there are actual human societies that don't celebrate birthdays in this day and age, they're very small pockets of human civilization but they do exist, and the thing about having ranks/titles over physical ages is that....it becomes sort of muddied but bare with me!
for instance! we can say that a youngling is a literal Yautja child, some canons include the concept of sucklings for baby Yautja. how old they actually are? who knows, we're not really privy to that info as of yet but it's fun to speculate!
THEN we get to unbloods, youngbloods, and blooded
now, there's a bit of an argument between the concept of an unblood vs a youngblood depending on who is arguing what in their inboxes - you could, reasonably, say that an unblood is a "teenager" because the concept in and of itself implies that they ARENT "blooded" yet aka they haven't successfully killed their first prey or become blooded ("bloodied w their prey" if it helps you to view it symbolically)
therefore, if we choose to view unbloods as teens - we would have to accept the fact that this encompasses a large area of maturity and age-range, that again, isn't one to one with our own. I like the highschool method - these Yautja could be anywhere from freshmen to seniors, but they are all around the same learning age, lumped in one rank/title
some people disagree with this concept, and that's fine, bc none of this IS canon, and say that youngbloods are the teens. which also breeds this confusion because, from what i've seen, it relies mostly on what you think a Chiva is.
we know, through novelization and the avp movie (which, respectfully, is what producers considers "more canon" which....sigh sucks sometimes but it is what it is) that a Chiva IS "a right of passage" and a trial for Yautja to officially go into adulthood. THAT's why it's such a dangerous trial, usually performed in a team.
now, an unblooded completing a Chiva and becoming a youngblood seems like a fairly reasonable transitional line. it implies that an unblood, having completed years of training/study sucessfully proved what they learned and is now a young-adult, aka a youngblood and is given full integration and rights of the average clan.
I, personally, don't like conscripting humans equivalents to ranks, but it would most literally be graduating and entering the workforce in the most traditional sense. you are an adult.
.....but not everyone agrees with this.
some people think that the Youngblood title is like getting a drivers license or entering college which....could be a way to look at it, but it relies heavily on seeing the Yautja as having a longer adolescence, in a way, and again, It makes the Chiva seem...redundant which im going to explain
Because if the Chiva is THE trial, i would and usually do argue that THAT is the mark of their adulthood.
the confusion and fighting begin, i think and have seen, when we start to arguing if being a youngblood comes before or after the Chiva, and if it's after and their STILL "teenagers" what on earth then, is the official adulthood moment if it's not a Chiva? I don't have the answer to this interpretation, maybe someone else does, but this is where this POV loses me, personally so idk
if the Youngblood rank comes after that, but they still have to do a bunch of things to become Blooded....what exactly marks adulthood to Yautja society? Experience, obviously, but i think it makes more sense to ascribe the Chiva as the test of experience. It's literally been presented that way to the fandom for years, so idk.
we DO, at least, agree that once a Yautja is of a "blooded" rank they are adults. we just dont tend to agree WHEN that happens, which....eh. discourse.
Again, i'm of the camp that an unblood doing their chiva and comes out a youngblood is, in all intents and purposes, a reasonable "adulting" moment, and the "teen" age aspect of that is whatever you want it to be i guess.
me? i think an unblooded just starting out is, reasonably, still a young shit who needs to be knocked around by their elders. on the other hand, an unblooded who is quite literally up all night on the eve of their chiva? and they succeed in it? that's a grown up. you dont HAVE to agree, but it's an interpretation some of us have.
even people who don't particularly like me, and consider Scar and his brothers, for instance, as youngbloods, seem to lean towards this.
and again! this IS a ranking system. in the event a Yautja DOESNT succeed their chiva, does that make them forever "underage"? or just rankless? i think that's a more fun concept to explore that gets drowned out by this age discourse but that's neither here nor there.
an elite is someone much older, but not near an elder status yet, and by then you get alot less discourse and argumentation
NONE of this is mean to convince you of anything, bc it IS something that's entirely up to you! but it is a tenuous concept that has been argued about in this fandom for years, and depending on which "camp" you reside in, you get different people arguing different things and why they think what they think.
this could ALL be redundant once Dan's "official" canon launches in november, but as fandom often does, you might even see people utterly rejecting it or fully embracing it, and whatever that means in the future, is something entirely for us to worry about later
(Por Guardería Rural de la Serranía) – Esta foto fue realizada por una fotógrafo del PERIODICO FINANCIAL TIMES. En una de las entrevistas que nos realizaron a petición del padre Don Javier y de algunos vecinos de nuestro pueblo (CHIVA). Pues al parecer se quieren volver a entrevistar con nosotros con motivo de la fatídica fecha que se acerca dentro de unos días. Estas caras representan claramente…
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