Worldbuilding: Growth and Reproduction
I’ve found a couple interesting worldbuilding notes about mammals in Safe Haven, shown here:
Straight from the (spindle)horse’s mouth, so to speak.
1. Mammals are born anthropomorphic, but lose these traits as they grow and develop into run-of-the-mill intelligent animals (except some are probably larger than usual, being approximately human-sized)
2. Most animals of different species can’t reproduce, so an interspecies couple would have to adopt if they want children.
Idk if these rules are old and didn’t apply in the end, though. They might be, because Vanexa’s parents are anthros, as is Jack’s mom. And an adult version of Damian is still an anthro, even when his mom arguably isn’t.
When it comes to the second rule, it’s mostly consistent. Except, perhaps, for the fact that there’s a sketch of what Zill and Kayla’s kids would look like.
I’m not sure if the second one was also done by Viv, but it shows mostly the same details and more clearly, so I’m including it.
And honestly, it seems like they would be the least likely to be able to have kids, out of all the characters in romantic relationships. Except for probably Addison with anyone, since he’s a lab experiment and is pretty fucked up, biologically.
It’s also possible that this is just a non-canon drawing, or they happen to be one of the exceptions, or it works differently for mythological beings (which Zill is).
Now that I think about it, if hybrids are this rare, how common are hybrids with relations to more than two species? No wonder everyone thinks Zill looks strange.
Anyway, the worldbuilding for my rewrite is slightly different.
In this version, some animals are anthros and some just have higher intelligence. The latter kind are usually the same size as most animals of their kind, but they may be slightly larger than average. No animal will start as one of these things and become the other.
Setting reproductive rules doesn’t really matter here since this story isn’t going to cover a long enough time span for it to become relevant. It just so happens that some characters are adopted by their parents and that’s just a part of some people’s lives.
If I had to make a judgment about it, I’d say that it’s more common than described, maybe 50/50 or so. And more things affect the population than just who’s capable of having children. Heck, if you want a society where the birth rate doesn’t get out of hand, just say that women there have reproductive freedom.
