i've been picking at concepts for a for-fun worldbuilding project and i'm gonna copy-paste the orc concepts i came up w earlier today because i wanna infodump
orcs are typically associated w boar and while i do like that i had another thought after watching a zoologist react to a honey badger fighting w a bunch of leopards. mustelids. specifically wolverines. wolverines are solitary animals HOWEVER. there’s evidence that after mating a father (while not otherwise cohabitating w his mates; he has plural in a single season) will return to the nest to take the kids out and teach them how to hunt and stuff. i think something like that would be a really cool idea to build a society around. and since a lot of the worldbuilding i've been writing for this is kinda out of the box doing something Different w orcs would be fun too.
could also be a fun way to differentiate sexuality and romantic activity from reproductive activity. maybe orcs of this world have a homonormative society where the women usually form polycules that live together and rear their kids w each other and the men are nomadic and are typically either aromantic and/or asexual or they form relationships w other men they might travel as a pair with, and they have a few different groups of women they might be fathers for over the course of their lives. they’ll return to those women to help raise their kids in the summers.
it’s not like, Taboo for heterosexual couples to stay w each other or travel together but it will raise eyebrows, because it’s not common.
i also like the thought that when a young boy starts to hit late adolescence their father will show up and take them w him so they live a few years at his side before striking out on their own. depending on when different sons were born you might see an adult orcish man of 50ish (relatively, because i like the thought of them being long-lived) traveling w a gaggle of six 16-21yos. depending on when the other kids were born and time of year you might see this same orcish man with his gaggle of six 16-21yo sons as well as seven 5-15yo daughters.
COULD HONESTLY ALSO WORK THIS STUFF INTO HOW WARGS CAME TO BE PARTNERED W ORCS IN THE FIRST PLACE… since an orc man might be on his own for 3/4ths of the year having a hunting companion that doubles as a mount would be insanely beneficial.
that being said this would make orcs a primarily matriarchal people which is fun. can't exactly be patriarchal if the patriarchs are like. not around except in the summer.
honestly if i don’t use these concepts for orcs im using them somewhere else i like them the more i think about em
had another thought in the shower about wolverine-inspired orcs so i’ll post it here too. leaning into the mustelid inspiration.
it’s a common misconception that orcs are overly aggressive and warlike as a people. the actual truth of the matter is that in their culture the way to deal with a perceived threat is to be more trouble than you’re worth. if you escape the clutches of a predator and then turn your back on them you have allowed yourself to be weakened and you’re giving them an opening to snap you up again. if you fight back with every single ounce of ferocity in your body, they’ll decide it’s too much effort to try and take you down. orc culture teaches to always make the threat against you back down before you ever do.
chewing on these guys again. orc women usually live in smaller settlements no larger than a village, though obvs some orcs live in towns and cities of mixed ancestries. bonded groups of women typically consist of 3-5 individuals, and the same man acts as the father of the children for all of them. from an evolutionary standpoint it's biologically advantageous that their men are nomadic and solitary for most of the year; since the ratio of women to men is higher, their men father a lot of children (each woman in a bonded grouping, across multiple groups in multiple settlements), and going very far away from their place of birth means they're less likely to father children w orcs they're genetically closer to. this is probably something that was instinctive for proto-orcs that became ingrained in their culture as they entered their equivalent of the human stone age, if i wanna go at it from an evolutionary biology standpoint. maybe biologically they're just more likely to have female children for whatever reason and this was the reproductive strategy they formed around that.
i wanna work trans and nonbinary identities into their culture as well i'm just not sure how i wanna slot it in. but i think it would be something seen as highly beneficial??? i am just not sure in what way. i may need to work more on how their societies tend to operate in other ways to puzzle it out.
i just like the idea of orcs being an extremely queer culture, but in a different way from how the fae-derived goblinoid and elven ancestries are. those groups don't even have a concept of gender At All until being influenced by outside ancestries, after which they adopt some of the concepts. for elves it's more of like…….. a fashion thing than anything else.
