I love the comic and the worldbuilding blog, I think you're doing amazing work! My question: are "monsters" a coherent biological category (species/genus/etc) who share some common ancestor, or is it more of a grab-bag category that someone imposed on a bunch of unrelated species (and who created that category)? Are reifa considered monsters? What worlds/places have monsters native to them? I think we've seen mixed species people who are human/spirit and human/monster--what about spirit/monster?
It’s a grab-bag category with no bearing on biology whatsoever! The actual definition changes depending on who’s using it, but in general, in the comic and with the characters we see most often, it’s used to refer to anyone who isn’t a spirit or a human.
The term is used because, in the most generalized way possible, monsters are sort of separated from humans and spirits through circumstance--like spirits have their own society and problems and etc, and so do humans, and then you have these myriad other species that, while they certainly have their own communities and frictions between them, also bleed together quite a lot. It’s a collective term.
Technically reifa would be considered monsters just by definition alone, but they did also have their own society and issues that didn’t overlap with other species so very much--so like, back when they were their own entity around the time of the war, you probably wouldn’t refer to them with the collective term ‘monster’ but now that they (if they’re still around at all) wouldn’t be any more than a few individuals that would exist in communities that would have to overlap with many other species, maybe you would? It’s less a question of biology and more a sociological thing.
By this definition, Aetheri’s the only world we see in the comic that doesn’t have monsters native to it. Unless you count the thyft, which technically you could, but you probably wouldn’t.
We haven’t seen too many mixed species spirits yet because they don’t seem to reproduce outside of their species very easily, for whatever reason. Also, in Aetheri, it’s hard enough to be mixed species in general--being part spirit is especially hard, because of all that friction between species going on.


















