Monsterkind

What monsterkind actually are, stated in text for the first time in ch. 297, by Mira Doyle, in a cat cafe, to somebody who did not ask.

The correction she is tired of making

MRA: People assume, sometimes. When they see me. [...] That there's a connection. Between what I am and them. (indicating a cat)

MRA: They see the features and they assume we're simply animals who learned to walk upright, or animals with human intelligence layered on top. TLN: That's not right, though. MRA: No. It isn't remotely right, and it's genuinely tiring to correct.

What they are

MRA: Monsterkind are their own species entirely. We descended from animals, yes, in the same broad sense that humans descended from something considerably earlier and considerably less impressive than yourselves. But that descent happened a very long time ago, and what emerged from it was not animals who became clever. It was something separate, with its own history, its own cultures, its own languages that predate half the human provinces by centuries.

On appearance:

MRA: We kept the shapes we started with, mostly. Fur, feathers, scales, depending on the lineage. Bipedal, like you, because that turned out to be useful for the same reasons it was useful for humans. But this cat and I share about as much ancestry as you and it do, which is to say a great deal if you go back far enough and absolutely nothing that matters at any reasonable scale.

That is consistent with everything Acts 1 to 5 show. The saga's monsters include a wolf (Fenris), a golden retriever (Milo), Marcus's lupine howl and Sera's scaled voice in ch. 97, and a butterfly hybrid in Seraphine Wysteria.

Hybrids

TLN: And hybrids? MRA: Exactly what the word suggests. Mixed parentage. A monsterkind parent and a human one. TLN: Is that common? MRA: Considerably more common now than it was three centuries ago. Less common than either species pretends it is. Common enough that most people have met one, uncommon enough that most people still stare.

"Three centuries ago" is roughly when Valdrun fell, and a century after Acts 9 and 10. It is a loose figure in conversation, not a date.

Mira's own parentage:

MRA: My mother. Eskandar coastal lineage, closer to the avian side. My father's ordinary human stock from further inland.

What being a hybrid actually costs

The most precise thing anybody in the saga has said about prejudice.

MRA: hybrids don't fit neatly into either side. My mother's family looked at me and saw someone too human to properly belong. My father's family looked at me and saw something they had to be careful about explaining to visitors. Neither of them meant it unkindly. That's rather the part that stings. Nobody in my entire family has ever once been cruel to me about it, and it has still shaped absolutely everything about how I move through the world. TLN: Because it's not cruelty that does the damage. MRA: No. It's the careful. It's watching people be careful around you your entire life and understanding exactly what that carefulness means.

Against the earlier volumes

Ch. 238 said that by Arthur's era "the line between human and monster [was] blurred and rewoven so many times across so many marriages and migrations and quiet acts of coexistence that most people no longer thought of the distinction as a line at all, simply a fact of the world, unremarkable as weather".

Ch. 297 complicates that. The line is no longer a war, but it is still there, and people still stare. See ../systems/species-asymmetry.md and ../events/the-first-human-monster-war.md.

Open questions

• Whether monsterkind souls and abilities work the same way as human ones. Nothing in ch. 297 addresses it.
• What "Eskandar coastal lineage" is as a polity or a people.