here’s a simple and unabashedly prurient question: where do you place the genitalia on a taur?
there are conventional answers to this question. in lewd works, centaurs often have their bits on their horse half, while lamias almost always them on the human half. arachne/driders can vary, though the deciding factor is probably whether it’s an oviposition thing or not
bugs, by which i mainly mean praying mantes, are pretty much our world’s actually existing taurs, and when anthropomorphizing them, this same question of “but where do you fuck them?” will come up.
it shouldn’t, if you ask me! but anthropomorphized arthropods are, as a rule, very anthropomorphized, so in practice the abdomen gets treated as essentially a fat tail rather than the seat of vitality it actually is.
so for anthro mantes, but also for anthro hymenopterans (bees, wasps, ants) and all sorts of other bugs tend to have their genderhood between their last pair of legs.
i hate this! one of my biggest pet peeves in lewd portrayals of arthropods.
though it’s far from the worst option. my more intense ire is reserved for the fence sitters, the ones who say “why not both?” and give their bugs an inexplicably doubled set of genitalia, one between the legs and one at the abdomen’s apex. this happens not uncommonly with furry taurs, too
and i’m very not a fan. it just strikes me as anatomical nonsense — why would an organism have two sets of genitalia? has that ever evolved in nature? it seems as unworkable as two mouths. (i care a lot about this sort of verisimilitude, though i know not everybody does. which is fine, but this is my blog.)
anyway, it goes without saying that any insects i would write would be antatomically correct, for all it’s never come up — is a very sexless work, after all
except… let’s talk about chrylurks.
i’ve written about them a lot lately, though i’ve not actually straightfowardly said what they are. put simply, they are actual taurs. specifically, they are half bug and half… also a bug! (the giveaway is it’s repeatedly mentioned they have more than three pairs of limbs.)
these two halves are basically fused into a chimera (a term which arguably refers to something very different in-setting — i haven’t decided yet). i should draw them one day, but i usually imagine them with a mantis-like silhouette.
so the head and thorax is the body of the first bug, and what would appear to be the abdomen is actually the fused thorax and abdomen with the second bug. the place where the two halves meet, where the abdomen of the first bug joins with the head of the second bug, is thus locus of the “lurking core”, a hugely significant body structure. (if you’ve read eragon, consider that one discarded name for this was the “heart of hearts”)
but i digress. can you see the relevance?
i have accidentally worldbuilt my way into the perfect justification for double-dicking. two abdomens means two genitalia, and it’s even positioned perfectly for the first set to be placed between the first pair of legs, right where the apparent “torso” of the bug ends.
of course i don’t like this, but now my only objection is irrationally personal. i don’t like it, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because it vaguely resembles the stuff people who’ve put less thought and care into it their designs do, even though it’s the opposite in this case.
but given the potential, it seems like it’d be a big missed opportunity to dismiss this and say oh no, the other pair of chrylurk genitalia is totally vestigial and isn’t even exposed. (i guess there’s something admittedly funny about genitalia you can’t even stimulate without first vivisecting the patient)
again i digress. i oversimplified something earlier — or rather, presented an outdated explanation. chrylurks aren’t taurs — they are outright colonial organisms!
the two halves of its main body are just two ramets of this colony — but chrylurks boast a whole swarm of tiny bugs that are genetically identical.
most important are the spiderlice, which are responsible for the weaving silk both magical and mundane (silk is so fine a material that it only makes sense to leave it to spider-sized weavers). but there’s also the shimmerbugs, essentially living torches the chrylurk can command to fly about. my favorite are the lavingslugs - you know how cats lick themselves clean? same principle, but for chrylurks it’s a caste of slugs like neotenous larvae that slither over their chitin and bathe them in disinfecting slime.
another digression. but i’ll give you one last mental image — you know how MLP’s changelings are full of holes? being inspired by them, chrylurks bear a similar aesthetic, except here the holes are there for the swarmlings to snugly rest inside their colonial body.
where do swarmlings come from, though? at present, chrylurk parascixion is an eternal metamorphosis — parasitoid larvae fuse together to make a chrysalis out of their host, but only some of the larvae actually become imago, the rest reside inside a sort of womb or internal hatchery, asexually reproducing more larvae to become the swarmlings, like stem cells in your own body.
and well. here’s the criterion. you have an internal chamber which must protect and nourish an immature organism, but also needs an opening for them to eventually emerge out in the world.
but i kind of revealed the answer when i called it a womb, didn’t i?
suffice it to say, it only makes sense that if you were designing chrylurks (and chrylurks were designed, diegetically) that you would repurpose the extra set of genitalia to become essentially the nest and spawning grounds of the swarm. (just like in hymenoptera, chrylurk workers are all sterile females)
this all, at least, gives me a bit more principled reason for rejecting the possibility of “double dick” chrylurks. you can’t fuck the thoracic invagination (for lack of a better term), because the swarmlings live there. it’s a lot of delicate and vulnerable and useful anatomy that has nothing to do with sex.
but that doesn’t fully satisfy me, and a part of me begins to wonder if it would make sense if, say, queens were capable of implanting new larvae into the invagination should a worker need replacements.
my thoughts still haven’t settled. that’s about all i have for today, though.