thinking about how caste and gender are regarded in obesk society. caste is widely considered much more important; obesk default to referring to each other by caste as opposed to gender, we've got terms like tirii and kivii instead of girlfriend or partner. receptors are a big part of obesk appearances and clearly labelled in signatures. caste stereotypes are very prevalent at least in akizet's worldview, whereas gender stereotypes are iirc entirely absent. but gender is independent of caste, and definitely seems to exist. all the obesk seem to know each other's pronouns by sight, or at least make a pretty good guess. they have terms like father and sister. obesk gender must be wild. wonder what they think of it? maybe there are non-rendered pronoun pins on every obesk qoubody. maybe it's partially a mindspike translation error. maybe the gender's just decided randomly by the translation based on human cultural norms
anyway also thinking about how caste stereotypes among obesk may mirror human gender stereotypes. how obesk are forced into or away from roles based on their castes (ekivik structural managers rarely being kiv; tir staying in coordination pods; akizet referring to surface-runner trainees as a "clutch of vel"). how attributes are bound to castes ("a paranoid kiv", "a vel's luck", "the eye of a jut"). even the hat on the merch store "tir love me fish fear me" outright parallels tir with women. atp if this isn't explored at least briefly in canon i'm gonna throw hands
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