#xoid

My two dragon OCs

Featured : Iveren / Xoid

Working on the worldbuilding for No More Tears, and I’m starting to write up the building blocks for what queerness/“otherness” would look like in a world where the human body is as malleable as it is—of course, following the main premise of NMT: “Every machine is alive, and every living thing is treated like a machine.”

One of the first things I came across was the idea that a world would be prepared for people to look like literally anything. I've imagined characters that are basically hermit crabs, characters that are conical spiral shells with a mass of tentacles and are still considered fully human, characters who look like Power Rangers villains (Scorpius story coming at some point), etc. I think all of this fits in the world of NMT, because the body is so malleable in so many different ways that the shape a person wants to take should barely matter.

But I kind of do want it to matter. After all: yes, the human body is modular, but being xenoid--or "xoid," as the shortening goes--should still feel distinctly queer to be.

And I realized: in a world where anyone could be anything, how do you build infrastructure? And because institutions like Hermes Unltd. and the Dept. of Machinery benefit from having some modicum of mostly invisible control over the general populace, how do you build infrastructure in a way that limits bodily autonomy--in a world where bodily autonomy is a given?

The answer is super easy. Make it inaccessible!

I don't have to plan out the operations of a world that accepts all--literally all--body types!! The real world doesn't do that now, with real people!! I'm saved!!!! [tone tag: sarcasm]

So, I've decided: the world is only built for bipedal humanoids that breathe air--a combination of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, with a couple spare extras in other places (this, of course, means that most of Ultimus must be plant-esque or at least chlorophyll-based, unlike the optimal mammalian metropolis I was hoping for, but oh well).

That means that most shaping people do--getting spliced, getting implants, etc.--is gonna fall within that very small spectrum. In the Living Cosmopolis, gender is like EMR--with a visible spectrum and a whole bunch of shit outside that.

Sure, you can have chitinous skin. You can have hourglass eyes. You can even have (small) wings or fins or webbed hands/feet if you want.

But having more than two legs? Being something like a minotaur or a centaur, or dead-god forbid, literally anything aquatic? Good luck, buddy. At least with the stuff the Environmental Commission builds. If you want to be "off-noid," or a format separated from what the general population wants you to be, the "default" parts of Ultimus aren't going to be built for you.

This encourages conformity without explicit discrimination. The explanation for it is so simple: "We can't accommodate you. It's not practical for the work we do to go out of our way for this stuff--especially because formats like those are 'optional' and 'unnecessary.'"

This fits with what I want. Body horror, societal horror; exclusion in a world where options are by default endless.