#salarians

Yeah, yeah, it's a writing issue. That's boring though. I want something fun that also makes sense.

I think the best way to approach it is by looking at the asari through the eyes of other species; namely, through the eyes of the salarians.

The salarians were the first living sentient species the asari came in contact with after they expanded out into the galaxy. For sixty years, it was just asari and "prothean" remnants scattered across different parts of space. For a species that lives for a thousand years or more, sixty years doesn't sound like much, but sixty years is still sixty years. No matter how long you live, you still experience time at a rate of one second per second. The asari would have been settling in quite well as the sentient race.

Things changed when the salarians showed up. There would have been major internal debates within both species' cultures on how to handle the situation. Wait-and-see attitudes don't work here: you need to figure out your politics now. First get your pantomimes and pidgins going, then work from there on building a common language to talk to each other. The asari would also be feeling threatened, as their cultural place in the galaxy is being contested by the presence of the salarians alone.

But the asari were fortunate: the first species they interacted with is largely matriarchal. Male salarians may not completely defer to the rare female dalatrasses in their society, but they do hold them with some reverence. Finding a species where every member can bear children (the "female" of live-bearing species)? You can easily imagine the male salarians giving asari some culturally-ingrained respect. Asari negotiators would pick up on that diplomatic advantage very quickly, and take advantage of it.

Sure, the salarians keep using their equivalent of she/her, and they define sex and life stages a little funny, but it's working for now. No sense in interrupting when you're coming out on top. The asari get to negotiate with an advantage, and all they have to suffer is a little bit of frustrating language.

As time went on and each new species came onto the scene, that translation quirk became locked in. Most species are sexually dimorphic, with specific male and female sexes. Languages changed, and so the asari became all-female instead.

Sure, it's frustrating for them. Aethyta gets a little miffed at your anthropocentric ass, Aria mocks the term "patriarch" by granting it onto a beaten foe, and every male of every species is walking about fetishizing your people, but who's going to go back to basics and fix the language now?

But like…most of the time quarians who are in the late stages of dementia or probably humanely euthanized. Turians rarely get to that stage due to war, battles, and petty arguments. Batarians typically do not get to live taht long and if they do it’s not unusual for them to be socially shunned. And for volus…yeah i think it’s a pretty normal part of their life actually.

To salarians though, where memory is picture perfect, their brain process things so quickly, and their society revolves around the use of your brain, imagine how terrifying that must sound. You start to forget people you’ve met. You act extremely erratically and begin to lose yourself. Your processing becomes slower and suddenly you’re useless to your people. In the salarian life span, the signs of dementia are fast and deadly. They come at a young age. It doesn’t matter what or who you were before it, now you’re seen as not only a genetic anomaly but someone not worth keeping.

Interestingly I think the response to dementia is much more grim. Their mourning you before you’re even dead, and for a time you know that.

Links back in my pinned page, details under the cut

Good question ! I think the relevant problem with humans is that we have a few unique biological problems (e.g. the usual obstetric problem of making the big baby head pass through the narrow pelvis) but which we must always balanced with human cultures (e.g. from what I understand, humans (especially girls) getting children before they had finished growing was extremely rare, even among the elite which had an incentive to do so and get married earlier, because people understood that having a baby too early was harmful and potentially deadly). So we need to distinguish the ability to procreate, biological maturity (no further biological development) and legal adulthood. Added to that is probably : does the culture have a concept of childhood, and what does it include ? Patriarch recalls that the pre-genophage krogan were encouraged to kill (each other) from the first second, and Okeer laments that krogan children post-genophage are coddled, so "murder" and "risk" were part of the krogan concept of childhood pre-genophage in a way they just aren't post-genophage.

I headcanon that krogan get their puberty (i.e. Grunt in ME2) around 6 (Earth) years old, which also officially makes them legal adults. However, it would take a few more years for him to lose his "baby" look and look like any other adult male krogan, so some growth remains. Overall, the evolutionary history of krogan leads me to expect they'd be independent (intellectually and physically) very fast, like you think ; the word we're looking for is "precocial offspring".

As for asari (see my recent onslaught of posts), I think Maidens can meld, but they won't be able to have children until they're Matrons, so that's the opposite of what you describe for us.

Salarians I don't know ; I usually halve biological adulthood hallmarks for humans, so I imagine reproductive ability would occur before the 10-year birthday, perhaps as low as 6 years old for a female's first reproduction — but if you headcanon external reproduction for salarians + childcare being done by males, I guess it's not that horrific.

Turians, no idea, but I expect they are biologically mature by 15 (Earth) years old, since that's when they get taken to boot camp. Interestingly, formal adulthood only seems to occur after they complete boot camp, become citizens and ascend to the third tier of merit, seemingly a year after they got into boot camp. So I suspect turians develop faster than humans and go into boot camp as full biological adults, but I think babies before boot camp (e.g. before they're legal adults) or even before the end of their stint of mandatory duty (at 30 years old) are unthinkable.