I’m doing Rox separately because they do things slightly differently (and I didn’t want to make the canvas too crowded by doing them both in one lol), and then Sundyne after that because they do things very differently.
The different ways they tend to emote is yet another factor that reinforces their bioessentialist view of the divide between Dorest and Rox and between Drecu and Sundyne. Dorest emoting is considered more subdued, with less mouth movement, quieter vocalizations, and less body movement to accompany their facial/antenna expression (seemingly fitting with their ‘ submissive’ station where they aren’t supposed to speak out much or draw attention to their own emotions/anything besides their role/value). It is also often pointed out that their pheremone signals trend towards ‘help/caution/fear’ rather than aggression when faced with stress, which is seen as reinforcing the Rox’s role in leading and protecting them. It’s unclear whether their expressions are “natural” or more culturally influenced since not a lot of Dorest live outside of this structure.
That being said, these are pretty dramatic examples of expressions, a lot of the time they don’t move the antennae at all. For all Cerest, emotional scale colorations are involuntary and can affect how they ‘speak’, similar to how it’s hard to talk when crying (fun fact, though, the scales intentionally used in language to show tone are the same ones that are uncontrollably triggered by the same emotion, so for example the mouth and cheek scales are often involved for angry speech). Humans can only really see the scale expressions when they’re using their lightest and darkest pigments ( white and dark blue) and when those are very concentrated. There’s a lot of other colors and patterns going on that they can see much more clearly, shown generally shown I n those lil diagrams next to each expression.
