Bio-background: Humanity has two larities, sime & gen. Simes have tentacles, and need selyn every month of their adult life to live. Gens produce selyn, enough every month for one sime's need. Match made in heaven, right?
Well, um. Simes strip selyn via tentacles; if the gen doesn't resist, it should be fine. (There's individual speed & capacity issues, but they're rarely an issue, except in the extreme cases, which, of course, three-quarters of the books focus on.) If the gen resists--by, oh, being scared of the sensation of energy transfer--the sime's biology kicks into overdrive, and you wind up with a dead gen.
More complications: children are neither sime nor gen; changeover (to sime) or establishment (to gen) happens around puberty. (Is the actual start of puberty.) A child with 2 sime parents is 2/3 likely to be sime; you can do the math for other options.
The L/O/T relationships are transfer dependencies, strong physical addictions. The couple is fixated on each other for transfer, and for the M-F options, at least somewhat for sex (fertility ties to transfer for simes, and probably for gens who donate/give transfer regularly), but opposite-sex transfer partners--who can be in a lesser kind of dependency--would generally have opposite-sex romantic partners.
In the Distect--the "rebel alliance" of people trying to allow simes & gens to find their own transfer partners--there's a lot of experimental relationships. (Finding own transfer partners is dangerous; a frightened gen is a dead gen. A lot of Tecton--the main gov't--policies are built around protecting gens.)
Um. I'm talking a lot about biology and not about the relationships, hm? I think I need to ponder how to bring up some of the relationship bits; I'm not sure how well I could describe them without the biology. Or at least, without the specialized vocabulary. (You should read them! They are fun novels with vampiric-esque overtones and deep biological dependencies and bondmates and wacky post-apocalypse politics!)
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Bio-background: Humanity has two larities, sime & gen. Simes have tentacles, and need selyn every month of their adult life to live. Gens produce selyn, enough every month for one sime's need. Match made in heaven, right?
Well, um. Simes strip selyn via tentacles; if the gen doesn't resist, it should be fine. (There's individual speed & capacity issues, but they're rarely an issue, except in the extreme cases, which, of course, three-quarters of the books focus on.) If the gen resists--by, oh, being scared of the sensation of energy transfer--the sime's biology kicks into overdrive, and you wind up with a dead gen.
More complications: children are neither sime nor gen; changeover (to sime) or establishment (to gen) happens around puberty. (Is the actual start of puberty.) A child with 2 sime parents is 2/3 likely to be sime; you can do the math for other options.
The L/O/T relationships are transfer dependencies, strong physical addictions. The couple is fixated on each other for transfer, and for the M-F options, at least somewhat for sex (fertility ties to transfer for simes, and probably for gens who donate/give transfer regularly), but opposite-sex transfer partners--who can be in a lesser kind of dependency--would generally have opposite-sex romantic partners.
In the Distect--the "rebel alliance" of people trying to allow simes & gens to find their own transfer partners--there's a lot of experimental relationships. (Finding own transfer partners is dangerous; a frightened gen is a dead gen. A lot of Tecton--the main gov't--policies are built around protecting gens.)
Um. I'm talking a lot about biology and not about the relationships, hm? I think I need to ponder how to bring up some of the relationship bits; I'm not sure how well I could describe them without the biology. Or at least, without the specialized vocabulary. (You should read them! They are fun novels with vampiric-esque overtones and deep biological dependencies and bondmates and wacky post-apocalypse politics!)