tentacledicks

If you're reading this and some of it sounds eerily familiar, it's probably because you saw this back when I was first hashing out the worldbuilding for this; some of it's going to be cribbed directly from those notes, while the rest is a firming and cleaning up of it.

With that in mind:

One of the primary conceits in any a/b/o setting is generally a) that there is some overarching reason for this triadic split and b) that this has societal impacts that may or may not be compounded by sexism and homophobia-lite. The reason can be [trainwreck biology noises] or [literally magic for no reason] and for me, personally, 'it's magic so shut up about it' meshes far better than trying to work out the biological mechanisms of buttbabies. Especially when those buttbabies are not actually justifiable from an evolutionary standpoint, and a Western model of gender absolutely isn't justifiable with several thousands of years of weight behind a triadic notion of reproduction and sexual behavior.

(And you may have noticed, I really do not like the 'secondary gender' wording of most a/b/o. We'll get into that later.)

So, all that in mind, why do the rank dynamics of alpha-beta-omega exist in SotL? It's magic, fuck you is why.

But it's also a little more complicated than that.
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Or, to be slightly less confrontational, "Ubisoft in writing a reclusive but family-focused man who almost exclusively has close male relationships and views women as sources of emotional support (but not necessarily romantic support) has unintentionally recreated some of the Confirmed Bachelor stereotypes and I've got fucking proof to back up my claims"* but, y'know, less pithy.

Anyways.

The first time I played through the game, I thought 'wow Aiden is a dick.' The second time I played through the game, I thought 'wow Aiden is a dick why am I still replaying this.' The third time I played through the game, I thought 'is there a reason why Damien and Aiden's final confrontation is like the dramatic Betrayed By My Ex scenes in a lot of action movies when Clara's final scene wasn't?'
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