Seeker blood-relations

[Quillfiend]

Heyo, so this is a bit of an awkward question, but if Seeker tribes have one, sometimes two nunhs, wouldn't that lead to a lot of the Seekers within the tribe being half-siblings? When a nunh gets succeeded, aren't most of the new nunh's female compatriots his half-sisters, leading to a whole lot of inbreeding...?

[Impstatus]

Im on mobile so weird grammar incoming.

Also Im just nothing exceptional with lore, so just opinions here.

 

Always comprehended that maybe some incest was natural byproduct of such system as the catpeople have in place.

 

Quote from ffwiki: At any time in their lives, a tia can challenge the tribe nunh to battle. If the tia is victorious, he takes the nunh's place as tribe breeding male (until he is challenged and defeated), and the nunh becomes a tia once again (if he survives the ordeal). 

 

The same system however seems to me to encourage potentially pretty regularly happening shifting of nunh/s. Also nothing seems to me to stop tia from tribe A traveling to tribe B and kicking the local nunh's butt, moving the genes around that way.

 

Quote from ffwiki: Depending on its size, a tribe may have multiple nunh (a ratio of one nunh per ten to fifty females is average).

Quote from ffwiki: There is only one other way a tia can become a nunh, and that is to leave his tribe, and start his own. This, requires several females to accomplish, and most female Seekers of the Sun are rarely impressed by a male who cannot defeat a nunh.

Quote from ffwiki: These tribes tend to die out due to the aforementioned lack of women.

 

Those three quotes leave me thinking that daring tias trying to get their own tribes going is not hyper rare, which means that there is also some females at any time willing to join such smaller tribes, though in insufficient numbers to guarantee the longevity of the new tribe, usually. On the other hand it still seems like rarely that sort of tribes formed by tia will do just fine. As in, not an impossibility.

Edited January 30, 2021 by Impstatus

[Faye]

The in game lore doesn't really provide much solid information on this. Apart from some tribes having multiple Nunhs, I think it makes sense female Seekers would kind of swap tribes as they see fit. Though far from official lore, I think RP-wise it's plausible to believe that each tribe has different sects (considering we, of course, have RPers playing Seekers from the same tribe who may have never met each other, come from totally different locations, with different tribal dynamics) and for procreation purposes the Seekers in the same tribe could move between the different sects and find matches there. People are more than understandably icked with incest being the likelihood, so I think work-arounds are pretty openly accepted.

[Mermaid]

Realistically? Yes, there would be a decent amount of inbreeding. This is something a lot of people realize and do their best to pretend they don't. There are multiple outs and ways to keep the gene pool a bit more mixed up some of which posters above me have mentioned.

 

1. There can be multiple nunhs.

2. Females breeding only with nunhs is not a set in stone law. They can and in rare cases do choose to breed with a tia. They just normally don't as breeding with strong males is preferred.

3. Nunhs do change and likely frequently. This can, much like lions, simply be a son kicking his dad out of the position though.

[Quillfiend]

Yeah, we discussed it with my partner yesterday and he pointed out that animal societies that work like this always have some natural mechanic to prevent too much inbreeding, like with male lions typically leaving the original pride. I figure this can apply to tias as well, though official lore sources make it sound more like tias remain with their original tribe as hunters. Either way, thank you all for your input!

[Valence]

I honestly feel the lore team didn't think this out totally through at times. Take the M tribe in Stormblood, the Nunh has been nunh for decades now. He's the only nunh, the other one is long gone. How do his female offspring mate? With him? 

 

If you want to stay sane, as said above you'll have to find some workarounds..