This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Robert: A 1:1 gender ratio is only expected for certain types of biology in certain environments, including virtually all familiar animals. If, say, the species can change gender during its life, different logic applies, and there's no obvious reason why intelligent species shouldn't do that.
Seth: We dont have a 1:1 anymore do we? I think i read somewhere women outnumber men.
Ununnilium: Very slightly, among the living, due to longer female lifespans; though, actually, slightly more men are born, due to the fact that Y-chromosome sperm are a teeny bit lighter and faster.
BT The P: Some animals in the real world undergo parthenogenesis, a process by which a female can self-fertilize her own eggs, and produce offspring without mating; amongst vertebrates, it's found in the reptile kingdom almost exclusively. Komodo dragons and whiptail lizards have exhibited this ability.
As a side note, should eusocial (reproduction in the style of ants or bees, with a single productive female in a colony) sapients go on this page? Are there enough examples to warrant a page of its own?
Dark Sasami: I took out a bit about reptiles a while ago, because the way it was phrased ("rarely found past the reptile stage") betrayed a staggeringly fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, as if reptiles were a standard phase in development of higher life forms that leads inevitably to humans and then to those guys with big brains and tiny arms from the future. But then I realized that the issue really isn't "can this happen in real life" but "why do authors do this and what purpose does it serve?" So I glossed over it instead of correcting it.
Licky Lindsay: Does this apply to races where two sexes are implied to exist, but we only ever see one of them on-screen? Like how, as far as I know, the only place female Wookiees are seen is in the non-canon Star Wars Christmas Special. Similarly, we only ever saw male Klingons in Star Trek TOS.
Ununnilium: Yep; see, for instance, the Final Fantasy XI example.
osh: I think the gimmick of eusocial races should merit it's own page. Also, human population is pretty much 1:1 for the purposes of population dynamics, it's just a really big number on both sides.
Roland: Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Belgariad example isn't really entirely correct- while Dryads in it are all female the simple existence of the Borune line kinda implies they must be able to have male children.
Qit el-Remel: The Wraeththu entry is incorrect. They did not turn young men into Wraeththu via sex (which would be fatal for the human). The catalyst was blood transfusion; the sexual act only stabilized it. (I'm so ashamed of myself for knowing this junk...)
Nerdorama: I'd have to get my books out of storage, but I believe Roland is correct about the Belgariad example. As I recall, it was of the "daughters are Dryads, sons are humans" variety. Short, pretty, ill-tempered humans, but humans no less.
Travis Wells: Licky Lindsay: I hate to be an ubergeek, but there was a female klingon in TOS
Peteman: I have a theory on how the Doctor found out: the nanoprobes that Voyager pioneered that allowed Species 8472 to be assimilated allowed the Borg to find out this tidbit of information. From the information they were able to scavenge from the de-assimilated 7 of 9, they were able to find this out. As for why the Doctor included this information to HER of all people is a bit of Fridge Logic, but considering that she quickly pointed out she knew all this, we can chalk it up to the Doctor's overzealous if well meaning attempt not having sufficient thought put into it.
Eric DVH: I went to edit the page and, what do you know, most of the internal links were misformatted! Instead of the proper way (SomeArticle, {{Article}}), they were formatted like external links ([[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.SomeArticle Some Article]]). While I corrected them, I wonder why this happened.
Eric DVH: (later) Oh, The Great Crash. A regex filter for that would be pretty simple.
Taper W: Changed the Dahl bit after confirming that "barghest" is the spelling in the book, though "barguest" is a legal alternate spelling.
BT The P: Natter trim from the Highlander section, which I de-thread-moded.
- Wasn't Duncan supposed to have died of plague?
- Duncan was fatally wounded in battle. There is occasional confusion over whether Amanda died of plague, but cause of death was actually a head injury.
- Wasn't Duncan supposed to have died of plague?
Dentaku: I changed the Blue Drop example, since it went into ... uhm ... really unnecessary detail which I doubt is even canon.
Crisis: On the Legend of Zelda example, I seem to recall a male thief in Hyrule Castle Town (the guy running around with a sack on his back) claiming that his mother was a Gerudo. Considering the thief is Hylian and that Gerudo allegedly often enter Hyrule Castle Town "looking for boyfriends," I think the Gerudo aren't so much a One-Gender Race biologically as jingoistically. By that I mean they are really picky on what exactly constitutes a Gerudo, and only rarely does one give birth to a proper male. They probably oust the occasional female on the same grounds.
fleb: Not sure if this is what you meant, but I assumed that they're parthenogenic and the one male has to be born that way, not the with-a-Hylian way.
fleb: Cut a bunch of natter down, about the fish species and Greek Mythology mostly. Pasted here.
Sijo: Why does this article feature an image of a male and female Nidoran? That's obviously not a one-gender race. A Viera from Final Fantasy would probably be a better example.
Morgan Wick: If it's in the examples as anything but an out-and-out exception or aversion, maybe aversion, it counts. </semi-sarcasm>
Ethereal Mutation: Here's another natterfest to be looked over and fixed before re-implementation.
- A similar example exists for games taking place in Ivalice (among them, Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, with the creatively dressed Viera.
- Final Fantasy XII tries to justify this by saying the male Viera are extremely reclusive
- Rumor and misdirection. It says this nowhere in the game. It says viera in general are reclusive. It completely skirts the male viera question.
- FFXII seems to imply that viera are forest spirits, incarnated by the forest itself, and not subject to biological reproduction. But that's not the only thing FFXII and FFTA/FFTA2 disagree over, despite theoretically sharing a universe.
- Like a lot of minor details in the Final Fantasy worlds, this information is All There In The ''Ultimania''. Male Viera live in completely separate villages from the females and the two groups only have contact when required to according to the FFXII one.
- On the other hand, no Bangaa is evidently female, and female Bangaa are never referred to, and nobody seems to think they're all male. Much the same can be said for the Nu Mou or Moogles or Seeq. Viera are the only race where the issues of gender are addressed at all. All depicted and playable Viera are female, and, according to the canon, male Viera Stay in the Kitchen.
- However, we do see humes falling in love with vieras and taking them as mates, and in the sequel, Revenant Wings, an aegyl mates with a viera to create a species of fair-skinned "feol viera". It doesn't explain how all the subsequent generations of viera got created though.
- One of Ba'Gamnans gang is referred to as female.
- Actually, there ARE female Seeq. They're the ones with their chests covered, in bra-ish fashion.
- In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, there is a bangaa who claims to be female, but is treated as male for purposes of the law against harming the opposite sex.
- A Viera Green Mage named Syrenead had mentioned her father before. Maybe there are viera guys after all... (or maybe he's just a hume)
- For that matter, the Garif all appear to be male, with no mention whatsoever of any female Garif.
- And the only members of Cid's race seen are Cid himself and the auction house guy.
- Cue one more game from Ivalice, Final Fantasy Tactics A 2, with the winged dragon-like all-female race the [1] Gria. Unlike Viera, they're explicitly identified as only-female.
- Even all Humes are referred to with masculine pronouns in class descriptions... even though there are a few playable female humes. Oh, and the fact that since humes are humans, we know there are female humes, anyway. The only playable female Hume in the original FFTA, Ritz, had Viera classes, which only complicated matters.
- While the pronouns may have been male, the sprites seemed to have been made androgynous enough that the player could decide for themselves whether their Hume characters were male or female.
- However in the sequel, Adelle and Frimelda aswell as the unplayable villain Illua are female Humes with Hume jobs, while Penelo is inexplicably counts as Viera. There are also several female humes that only appear in cutscenes or run the shop/aerodrome.
- Penelo counting as a Viera is like killing two birds with one stone, it basically gives her access to the Viera only classes while registering her as female at the same time. Then there are the no Viera laws in some missions....
- Nu Mou are very gender-neutral in appearance. Where that puts them, however...
- Just because they don't have any human secondary sexual characteristics does not mean that they don't have them at all, or they could lack sexual dimorphism.
- FFTA 2 has the luck-stick dealers, where it's specifically stated that the Nu Mou that sells them is male, and the Nu Mou that takes them is female.
- Just because they don't have any human secondary sexual characteristics does not mean that they don't have them at all, or they could lack sexual dimorphism
- Final Fantasy XII tries to justify this by saying the male Viera are extremely reclusive
Kamino Neko: Removed because...it's really incorrect:
- Male Harpies are called Furies and female satyrs are usually called fauns (though satyrs are called fauns in Roman mythology).
The Furies are every bit as female as the Harpies, and female Satyrs are addressed just above where this used to be.
Alchemyprime Anyone know the name of that Alan Moore story mentioned here?
WookMuff is there a three race equivalent of this? The Newcomers in Alien Nation have males and females as well as some form of fertilizing third gender that appears to be smaller males.
Doktor von Eurotrash: Re the dryads in The Belgariad and how they reproduce: it's actually explained straight up by one of the characters that they seduce male travellers in the forest in order to get pregnant. I put this in the example.
Sylvia Sybil: There were two Otherworld examples, one near the beginning of Literature and one near the end. I removed the second example, although I did add a bit from it to the first. Also, the second example is wrong about both witches/sorcerers and werewolves. Savannah's birth shows that witches and sorcerers can reproduce with each other, and new revelations about witches' magic hint that the two schools may be more similar than they think, with the centuries old feud keeping the two genders apart instead of actual racial differences. As far as werewolves, it's explicitly stated that Elena's daughter smells like a premature werewolf, and will change at puberty.
Depending on where the canon goes with this, we may have to remove or heavily modify both versions in the future. Basically, the author started the series with two different examples of this trope, and over time she's subverting them both down to two gender races.
Deleted: The Otherworld books by Kelley Armstrong contain several one gender races. Witches are all female, while Sorcerers are all male. These are explicitly stated not to be male and female version of the same race. Hereditary Werewolves are also all male, a single bitten (turned) female werewolf exists. Each race reporduces with a garden variety human of the appropriate sex. Children of Witches and Sorcerers will always be the supernatural parent's race and have the appropriate gender. Werewolves can have male or female children, though only male children become werewolves at least so far in canon.
