And That It Would Be A Secretive Thing - Tumblr Posts

Being a pretty small blog I pay a lot of attention to the tags people put on reblogs of my art since I'm usually only sifting through like 5-10 of them. This caught my eye and I may as well throw a bit of explanation in here for @sleeping-cliche for this post :)

I've been playing off and on with this species for a REALLY long time and the mortuary infanticide / birth defects page was from 2021 or something? I don't think mortuary infanticide is a real term lol (it sounds kind of redundant) I think I meant something more like ritualized filial cannibalism. A lot of animals consume their young especially if they are weak/runts, because the nutrients from eating the baby is actually worth more and is less of a burden than caring for that baby.

Anyways, with this species at some point I had this idea going where their reproductive organs are housed in those fatty sacs protecting their neck, and they were birthed out of the mouth in eggs??? Something like that. I don't know if that was fully scrapped at this point or not but the filial cannibalism would be done with newborns with severe birth defects or stillborns and it would be sort of a way to return the child to where they came from. Sort of.

In every sense it would appear as though they would return to the womb, but of course would actually be eaten by the birthing parent because true "unbirthing" isn't physically possible. Not a joyous occasion by any means, it would be a very quiet and secretive, perhaps almost shameful act viewed only by the other biological parents and maybe religious leaders or something like that.

Their "crest" or fat sacs would probably be scarified or tattooed after a miscarriage/stillborn/severely defective birth. I think some real world cultures have similar practices of body modifications to mark loss though I don't recall exactly which ones do that.