villainous-queer-deactivated202 asked:
tinsnip answered:
So Into This At All Times, are as a worrying number of us. Do tell~~~!!!
Hey, I’d rather y’all be into alien sex than be like ‘they have sex just like humans :D’ tbh. Btw, I am bolding things that will help if you’re just skimming for a particular piece of information. I’m gonna go on for quite some time because you just poked a ‘Special Interest’ button. Strap in, kiddies, we’re about to get weird~~
(nota bene 1: this is assuming Cardassians have two sexes and two genders. Personally I hc that humans, with our five sexes and myriad genders, are the widest and most varied of the races, with Andorians not far(?) behind. Cardassians are also fascist iirc, and fascism generally locks whatever pattern in place is most reproductive bc ‘family values’)
What’s In A Name? Taxonomy
Now, crocodilians are Archosaurs, which is a group they share with birds. I decided that Cardassians are also archosaurs, so that means I can use bird traits as well as crocodilian ones to map out their courting rituals, sex, gender, nesting, and beauty standards.
You Want Blue? Beauty Standards and Sexual Display
So in canon we know the females have blue on them. This is really interesting to me, because reptilians (and, side note, we now know birds are reptiles. yep.) usually have this pattern:
male = pretty and courting
female = big and choosing
That is why male reptiles are the colourful little ones that dance around (’me me me me me!! pick me!! look how high i jump!’ - prairie grouse, birds of paradise), give gifts (’you like blue? i got you blue. you like pebble? i got you pebble.’ - blue bower bird and adélie penguin, respectively), and compete with other males (’look how tall i can be!! look how big and strong i am!’ - lizards and turkeys/capercaille/chickens, respectively), to prove their worth to the bigger, camouflaged, discerning females.
(A friend pointed out this may be why female Cardassians are considered better at science, where males are the warriors)
So why are females the colourful ones? Well, they may be using cosmetics, which may be symbolic of their social status in some way that can’t be noted normally (such as married/not married, or sexually mature/not mature); or else it might be a beauty standard.
Putting on makeup to redden/darken our lips and cheeks, and to redden/darken our eye area, mimics sexual arousal, and so the beauty standard of this sort of makeup arose from mimicking a sexual signal. That’s the kind of beauty standard I’m referring to, not the culture-bound ones like big tits (the west) or modesty (christianity) or suchlike.
So, if the Cardassian ladies are painting the blue on their faces, then why? Specifically, why is this attractive, and why are the female Cardassians trying to be attractive? I dislike the idea that a female archosaurs would display for the males, and blue is not a usual colour for flushing, unless you have blue blood. And you don’t have blue blood unless you live in a very very cold climate (see octopuses and horseshoe crabs), so we can rule out the ‘mimicry of flushing’ possibility.
That leaves blue as being, in a pre-society Cardassian, somehow a signal of something else. But what? Are the females looking more aggressive this way? Is it status display, like with a lammergeier bathing in red dust? Is it decoration and the blue is only ‘blue’ to us, but to their eyes, which can see ultra-violet, it glimmers and flashes? Is it something that only arose when Cardassian society went all fascist and militant, and the aggressive warrior males inverted the power structure and began to rule, and needed a way to make the females seem more decorative and objectified? Well, if pre-society Cardassians were originally like bower birds, and the males collected blue objects for the females to peruse, then marking the females with blue would be very symbolic.
This is assuming, of course, that females wear blue regardless of whether they’d be interacting with other races or not. We don’t see them unless they are (afaik), so we have to consider the possibility that the blue markings are actually there for other races, who can’t tell a female from a male Cardassian and need to be told in some ridiculously obvious way so they don’t misgender anybody.
Yet another possibility, is that our idea that the ‘female’ Cardassian is the one that lays the eggs is totally wrong, and the Universal Translator is interpreting ‘female’ in a flawed and human/mammalian-centric manner (’female ones are the smaller ones that raise the young’ will skew a lot of results!!; this is like ‘any featherless biped is a human’ and someone plucking a chicken and going ‘behold, a human!’), and the smaller, blue-marked Cardassians are in reality the male Cardassians. You can also do that if you like, lord knows I certainly have done something like that with the Ferengi and with Tolkien Orcs.
Like any good scientist, I’m not going to actually answer any of these as ‘this is definitely it’ because well, it could be any of these! So I’m just gonna move on to the mechanics of sex itself.
Egg or Squish? Incubation and Gestation
Eggs or live young? That’s a big question, and my fellow Cardassian xenobiologist, badmadwolf, suggested they were ovoviviparous, which means they birth live young by means of hatching the eggs within their bodies. This is a thing some snakes do. Obviously, archosaurs do not do this, but this is fiction, and we can reasonably reach over to Serpentes and borrow a few things and call that possible for an archosaur biped.
However, if you like egg-laying Cardassians, we can also say they lay eggs–with leathery shells–and hatch them–in incubator mounds (at least, pre-society Cardassians would; technology makes the need for a big mound of rotting vegetation unnecessary–but it wouldn’t get rid of the instinct to Pile Up All The Trash Really High a la australian brush turkeys or gators).
Either way, Cardassians don’t suckle their young, and are born ready to eat what the adults eat, with teeth and all.
(I am hand-waving the obvious tits on the Cardassians in the show as being a consequence of hiring human actresses and the limitations of a human being in charge of production.)
To Cloaca Or Not To Cloaca? Genitalia
Another question is the inevitable Do They Have A Cloaca? This is all down to personal preference. Some archosaurs have a very elaborate penis and vagina situation (ducks, famously), some have ‘vents’ (passerines), and some have a cloaca, and if they have a penis, the penis lives inside it, fully erect, ready to be pushed out during mating (really!). So the question is down to personal preference: Do You Want Garak/Dukat/Damar To Have A Cock, Punk? Well, Do You?
(My answer is always Yes, Bring On The Monster Peens)
However, regardless of what answer you choose, it’s likely they still have a cloaca–and, side note, do not pee. Or rather, there’s no separate liquid and solid waste, it’s all in the same packet as it were.
Hey, Sexy! Perfume, Purring, and Foreplay
Crocodilians have musk glands, and the male spreads his scent around to let the female know he’s dtf and in the area. This is a fun thing to have in combination with forked tongues/jacobson’s organs. I’m a big fan of scent being used sexually, but that’s me. Archosaurs don’t all do things with scent (though a lot more birds do than you might think!).
Cardassians, like a lot of crocodilians, may also have a ‘mating rumble’
that they do. It’s like a purr, but lower and specifically sexual, and
all gators do it to advertise they’re dtf. Crocodiles do this too, but
I’m American and I prefer my gators.
Another thing to remember is that Cardassians probably do a lot of foreplay/courtship before getting down to the bidniss. All archosaurs, crocodilians included, go through elaborate mating dances both to earn a mate and also afterwards, the mates dancing together for sometimes hours on end. Whether Cardassians are from monogamous or polygamous types of species is up to you, the spread of that is pretty mixed through the Archosaurs, from loons mating for life and singing together every night to crocodilians mating with several different partners and producing a clutch where each egg can have a different sire.
Please Think Of The Children! Family Structure and Chick-Rearing
You can take your pick of how chicks are raised too, from a single mating system, like hornbills who wall the female up in the nest and the male brings her and the babies food; or you can have gators, which communally raise their young in nursery pools; or pelicans, who have 2-3 chicks that compete and push weaker siblings out of the nest to die until there’s only one left (seabirds are brutal); or you can have brush turkeys, where the male makes the nest and the female lays her eggs in it then fucks off; or emus, where the dads raise the babies but will also look after literally any baby emus nearby (it’s hilarious why they do this). Archosaurs have such a huge range of chick-rearing behaviours that Cardassians could literally be anything.
Canon only tells us that family is ‘important’ and that families of several generations live together and work to raise their children. That could be artificial due to some societal pressure, however, much like agriculture changed how humans underwent courtship, mating, and child-rearing.
(nota bene 2: I am only in season two and haven’t got through/got access to all the printed stuff that may have this info, so I’m working off the information in s02e05 “Cardassians”, and what I could find on memory alpha)
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!!
fishyfishyfishtimes
