Skolas’s pack + Variks and Aksor.
@schniggles and i were speculating on physical conformation standards being a thing in the houses since we’ve made them all heinous eugenicists.
Wolves have a pretty decent diversity by virtue of being the biggest of the six houses (headcanon, as is most everything in this post) and probably assimilated a lot of smaller houses over the course of the eliksni’s travel from their home system to Sol. even just within Skolas’s pack there’s evidence of it, scattered between Wolves standardization.
House Wolves prefers high contrast between skin and plating with skin being lighter vs plating. rounded horns, head plate with pronounced brow ridges, square chin, narrow mandibles. body shaping is dependent on what the house needs, but they do like medium muscular builds with slight emphasis on leg strength.
Peekis stands out in the pack as being near perfect to Wolves conformation standards, and thus extremely beautiful and desirable - at least until he blew up half his fleet taking down Irxis and was docked and expelled from the pack for the sheer idiocy of it.
(Skolas is, hilariously, pretty darn far from Wolves physical conformation standards. he, Pirsis, and Beltrik are genetic remnants from an offshoot of House of Stone.)
Variks and Aksor are both examples of Kings conformations standards. dark skin vs light plating with relatively low contrast, broad head plating with slightly up-turned horns and sharp chins. Aksor is slightly closer to preferred Kings standard with the broader jawline. they prefer lean and very even muscle distribution. Kings is a smaller house and pretty strict about sticking to the standards, so a lot of the eliksni in that house look very similar.
Kings also does post-hatch culling, unlike the other houses. fun!
House Judgement doesn’t have conformation standards since their population is fed by tithes from the four other houses. they have intelligence + temperament assessments, but that’s usually done on the side of the tithing house. hatchlings are usually selected at about 6+ months age.
(this practice is a little uh. dead. the judgement scribes and their proximity to kells made a lot of them collateral in Saint’s crusade. the houses had also been abandoning the practice of taking on scribes, especially after the breakdown in house relations post the failure in retaking the Great Machine.
then after that, Variks was only one left. :c)
some day i’ll get around to figuring out Winter and Devils. Devils probably has a pretty decent range in physical variability because they’re also a big house, but they might stick to standards more strictly than Wolves. Winters might not really emphasize physical conformity much but they’re a smaller house and probably look relatively similar by virtue of genetic bottle-necking.
(house of exile has non conformation standards by virtue of being the house that people run to to get away from horrific eugenics. among other things.)