Slenderman Headcanons: "Love-Struck" Slenderbeings
Slenderbeings, at their core, are a solitary species. Their instincts incline them to apathy towards weaker creatures and hostility towards anything that can be regarded as a threat to themselves or their resources. And what but a slenderbeing is powerful enough to successfully kill, harm or out-compete another slenderbeing?
As a result, early encounters between slenderbeings overwhelmingly resulted in bloodshed.
Unfortunately, you can't sustain a species with a population that kill each other on sight.
So life found a way.
Slenderbeings have a term for this "way" that one could directly translate into english as " [he/she/they/I] fought the love into [you/me]" or more poetically as "finding love through battle" or more concisely as "love-struck". The term describes a phenomenon in the species where intense sexual attraction is developed during combat.
For some slenderbeings it is sudden and overwhelming; in one moment you're trying to rip out each other's throats and in the next you're fucking each other into the dirt. For others it is delayed and gradual; you're limping away from your battle to lick your wounds in peace, assuaging your ego by thinking of how you're going to retaliate, how your claws will feel rending through the other's skin, how their blood will look staining the pristine glow of their face, how effortlessly you'll move through the attacks the other makes with their long, elegant limbs, how it would feel to fuck each other into the dirt - huh. Where did that thought come from?
Of course, not every battle causes this phenomenon. There are numerous factors at play that determine if and when an individual reaches that point. Generally, however, the more intense and prolonged the battle, the more likely this attraction will form in a combatant.
While occasionally both slenderbeings involved in the fight may develop the attraction at roughly the same time, it is much more common for only one combatant to "have the love fought into them". In other species this one-sided attraction may precipitate attempts at non-consensual pairings. However, the intensity and length of battle needed to trigger the attraction is only truly possible between slenderbeings of similar strength. Therefore, the "love-struck" slenderbeing would not have the power necessary to force a coupling with the object of their affection. This is understood both intellectually and instinctually so very few ever attempt it, with the determined preferring to throw themselves wholeheartedly into courtship and the stubborn preferring to ignore the feelings until they (hopefully) go away.
Once the most prevalent reason slenderbeings engaged in mating behaviors, it slowly decreased in prevalence as various pressures made it beneficial for slenderbeings to go against their instincts and form societal structures of increasing complexity, doubly so once The Revolution creates a broader cryptid society that prides itself in harmony between and amongst its diverse populations.
Even so, the biological processes that make the phenomenon possible are still present in every slenderbeing alive today; ready and waiting to trigger.
