Oddworld Headcanon 3/?: Mudokon Drones
@freaknova shared this great screenshot from Lorne Lanning's twitter and it got me wondering about mudkokon drones! Yeah it was three years ago but I'm always late to everything. Idk.
Right away, the language choice here is interesting. Drones "GET" to live very different lifestyles, that is to say, their lifestyle is actively tolerated by the industrialists rather than something they need to fight for. And for whatever reason, a worker becoming a drone is a bad thing, at least from the industrialist perspective. So, why can't a factory owner just put drones to work with everyone else? What makes them so special? I think there's a few possibilities.
I'll rank them from what I find least likely to most likely- and it's all just speculation of course for my own amusement. Here we go:
1.Drones are aggressive, especially towards other drones. The right to mate is awarded only to the strongest drone. I ranked this one at the top because I believe it's the least likely. Mudokons are a very social and collaborative species. Just for this reason I find it hard to believe drones would have to fight each other to breed. I think it would be too distracting and unproductive in a village hierarchy to have workers turn into drones and start fighting each other. Plus, I can't imagine any mudokons getting into a fight to impress their queen- not only does it sound dangerous, but I don't think their resident queen would be into it. I think queens want their villages to be peaceful.
2. Drones breed and then die. We see this in bees [& a ton of other species.] A drone bee's only purpose is to mate with the queen one time, then get out of the way. Even if they don't get to mate, their lifespans are incredibly short, and they quickly die. If mudokon drones are similar, driven by a horniness so extreme it kills them, this would obviously be a huge problem for factory owners trying to use them for labor. [Funny though!] That being said, I don't think this is likely. There’s a lot of logistical problems that come with this concept.
3. Drones are beautiful, but physically frail. In this scenario, the biological toll of turning from a worker to a drone is so great, their bodies neglect everything else. After all, if the drones only purpose is to breed with the queen, then they don't need to be capable of physical labor or defense- they just need to make sperm and look good. We see this in nature all the time! The diminutive and beautiful male putting on a show for a much larger, more utilitarian-built female. You don't need a large body to produce sperm, but you DO need a large body to produce lots of eggs.
Heck, there's even a ton of animals out there where the female breeds with the male one time- like the drone bees- then stores sperm to produce several clutches of offspring. This isn't just an insect thing, vertebrates do it too. Perhaps having stunning display feathers and coloration comes at the cost of being weak and easily injured- but it ultimately doesn't matter so long as they breed with a queen just once. As for "getting to live very different lifestyles"- the phrasing does not wholly indicate something positive. It could be that because drones have something ordinary mudokons lack, such as big ornate feathers or some other interesting flashy thing that the rest of society would find novel, they are able to work in more domestic fields requiring less physical labor, if only because they look pretty. Though IMO, it would be a reach.
4. Drones are nomadic wanderers who seek out villages far from home, perhaps breeding with multiple queens in their lifetime. In this scenario, a worker CAN become a drone at any time, regardless of whether any non-related queens are present. However, the physical changes that come with it also trigger a psychological urge to travel far, far, FAR away. In order to produce healthy offspring, drones are inclined to seek queens far outside the range of their birth families. They cannot resist this urge. Because of this, they have a reputation for being the ultimate wanderers, and are also quite flaky and noncommitted as a result.
Other mudokons view them in a negative light less because they're horny prettyboys, and more because they're unreliable. A drone could find a nice village with an unrelated queen, start settling in, then suddenly decide to pack up and leave- he's done his job- never mind any friends or responsibilities he gained at his new village. Or even worse, your brother could start showing signs of Droneing Out, and if that happens, you know he'll leave one day, and you'll never see him again. Thus, in mudokon society, it could be the workers discouraging each other from becoming drones. Industrialists would discourage this as well because it’s obviously annoying to deal with. Imagine a bunch of your workers see a drawing of boobs by accident and now they're covered in feathers and keep trying to make a run for it all the time. It would be a pain in the ass!
5. The Magog Cartel has a monopoly on drones. The Labor Eggs contract stipulates that each drone belongs to the Cartel. Assuming drones are extremely rare, but still common enough to be a known phenomena, factory owners would not want their workers turning into drones, because the Cartel legally can take ownership of them & they would not be reimbursed for the loss. They would have to buy a new worker out of pocket. What does the Cartel do with these drones? Don’t they only have Sam- wouldn’t any drones from the factories be her sons? HMMM! That’s an interesting question isn’t it? It may suggest they know where their next queen will come from, and it will not be Sam’s daughter. Or maybe they're aware of a rival group with their own mudokon queen, and are destroying potential competition.
6. Drones have “special rights”, because the only drones allowed to live in the Cartel's territories are NOT Sam’s children. If every worker mudokon we’ve seen was a child of Sam, it stands to reason that fertile male mudokons of unrelated bloodlines would be extremely valued. These males may spend their days in luxury with the only cost being regular sperm donations. They might not even get to meet Sam! However, if one of Sam’s children becomes a drone, he ceases to be useful [for one of the reasons already mentioned] and is killed, because at the moment, there are no other mudokon queens owned by the Magog Cartel in need of genetic donors. Some of the other points may be true- they may be weak, they may be flaky- but these are more secondary elements. When we do finally see some drones, I imagine they will probably all be decorated and flashy and radically different from one another- different skin colors and patterns, each one feathered like a different bird of paradise - all visually distinct from the Sam bloodline. I think they'll also be really bored.
Anyway, that's all I have for now. I could keep speculating because theres SO MUCH that can be done with mudokon society structure & I need to burn dinner.
