* RedHerring: In the second book, it's established that plastic is poisonous to the Oankali. You'd think this would lead to it being used in some sort of resistance, but it's never brought up again.
** That's because Akin was easily able to eject it from his system without letting it harm him: if even a toddler was able to easily rid himself of it, fully matured Oankali would have no trouble with it at all. Butler was probably just trying to toss in an environmental message.
* ScrewYouElves: The Oankali are ''very'' certain of themselves and extremely frustrating to argue with, which makes it something of a relief when they're proved wrong, even if that being wrong has horrible consequences, and more of a relief when they at last agree to let a small amount of humanity survive untouched to find their own fates.
* SexualHarassmentAndRapeTropes: The Oankali are essentially raping humanity[[hottip:+:they even use the "your mouth said no, but your body said yes" rationale, which may or may not hold water considering their whole ''thing'' is reading body language, pheremones, and other physiological things like humans would read a book]], so this goes through a few of them:

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10th Jun '12 5:29:51 AM SeptimusHeap

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YMMV sinkhole

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24th Apr '12 12:01:23 PM Narsil

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Slight correction—the "human contradiction" is intelligence + hierarchy

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