Fantasy Species and Mental Transitions

[Ban]

I was thinking a bit about how odd it really is that humans have a phase marked not only by physical changes, but more interestingly mental changes. During our teenage years our brain rewires itself to such a degree that children, who are in a regular healthy environment characterised by seeking approval from their parents, transform slowly, and not often very gracefully, into rebellious people who wish to separate themselves from the parents they only a little while ago adored. If all goes well the brains of most humans going through the dreadful process level out after a while

I haven't personally done anything with this idea yet, but I think there's room for interesting worldbuilding here. Perhaps a fantasy species has periods of transition to prepare them for different professional roles. When they're young they're fiercely loyal as well as emotionally simple to make them well-suited to physical labour, then when they grow older they transition to become more empathic and insightful which allows them to take on a care-taking/organizing role in the species' society, before a final transition breeds an independent streak in them, allowing them to leave their society to set up their own kinship/family structure elsewhere.

So, have you ever come up with interesting worldbuilding spins in this department? If not, what's your mind conjuring up after thinking a bit about it?

 

[Queshire]

Hmm.... The closest I have to that currently would probably be the process that Golems undergo when becoming self aware, but that's more like being born than golem puberty.

Part of me likes the idea of using this to have goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, trolls, etc be different life stages of the same species, but.... uh, if I go that route a goblin probably wouldn't turn into a hobgoblin until they're like 30 or something in order to avoid the whole killing kids implication that'd come with it otherwise.

 

[skip.knox]

Didn't Le Guin do something along those lines? Left Hand of Darkness? I can't remember; too many years ago.

 

[Ban]

Never read Le Guin. Someone who has will probably be able to confirm or deny.

As for the Goblin/Hobgoblin/Orc/Etcetera life phases, that sounds like a fun thing to play around with. Could even make them akin to bees and have the food they eat lead to different possible phases, the same way a queen bee is fed special honey.

 

[pmmg]

I think this shows in my own writing, because all of the characters are in some stage of life, and older/wiser ones have been through more of them than the younger ones. But to show the true effect of this, the tale would have to span multiple stages of a characters life, or have them move through time to show different stages.

With some fantasy races, long lived races would either go through these stages so fast, as to not be a significant portion of their life, or so slow that it would be hard to notice the change in them. A race like Orcs, I suspect, when these are depicted as being born and not created, would go through those phases as well, but given their violent/evil nature, it probably does not come up much, the orcs are all bad and probably want to do bad things.

With any race, if I was to show them at different ages, I suspect this would come out. An older Elf would be wiser than a younger one, that would tend to be the pattern.

Though, I have never staged a story with this as a major theme.

 

[Orc Knight]

The goblin/hobgoblin thing was done in the Iron Teeth series, though never made to the orc. Though it was theorized quite often in the replies. And they became hobs by getting better food and being well fed, then digging a hole and transforming physically and mentally. Usually into a vicious teenager.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Didn't Le Guin do something along those lines? Left Hand of Darkness? I can't remember; too many years ago.

In Left Hand of Darkness, they change their sex periodically. They do not have gender, and biological sex is fluid.

 

[skip.knox]

Yep. But I thought there were some emotional, psychological changes that corresponded with the gender change. But it might have been something else enitrely!

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Yep. But I thought there were some emotional, psychological changes that corresponded with the gender change. But it might have been something else enitrely!

There may have been. It's decades since I've read it.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

And on the initial premise of this thread: humans are actually quite static compared with some species. Frogs, toads, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, etc. transform into completely different beings through their stages of life. Humans remain the same, physically. Sure, we grow bigger, we develop new abilities (crawling, walking, talking) and then we mature physically and we go through psychological changes, and then we age and go through other changes, but our basic form always stays the same.

It would really be a fantasy world if it had people in it that changed as much as a tadpole does when it becomes a frog.