The Book of Esther, ants, flute music, etc.

[cahn]

(Or: December 2019: the month D would say to me before bed, "What were you doing tonight, giant ants or Fritzmas?")

Traditionally I make a post here on the media I consumed for Yuletide and have a more conventional reveal post elsewhere. This year I have a more conventional reveal post as usual, and in addition because all the (two other) people who are interested are here, I also have a collaboration-detail post for Frederician RPF here :)

I don't have a lot to say about canon this year, as I said most of it in the fic, I think. I did learn some things related to Bible/Tanakh/Book of Esther and my feelings thereof, ants, and flutes. A small sampler of weird things I learned tangentially (none of this actually made it directly into any final drafts):

-Apparently I have some dreadful mixed feelings about Mordecai (which were flagged in beta, lol). (Especially the bit where Esther goes "so, I might die!" which I feel is a totally legit emotional response, and then Mordecai comes down on her. Which, I mean, I understand his viewpoint too, but I guess my sympathy is with Esther :P :) ) Though I am working through those feelings :)

-Male ants are haploid (one set of chromosomes) and female ants are diploid (two sets of chromosomes). Male ants are basically walking sperm! One of the very weird things about this is that male ants can't directly have genetic sons (the haploid contribution comes solely from the mother), but they can have genetic grandsons -- they can combine their genetic information with a diploid female to make a diploid daughter, and that diploid daughter can pass some of the male's genetic information down to a son. (How weird is that?!)

-According to a general who (wikipedia says) apparently was not very reliable, the Persians won a major battle with Egypt by carrying cats, which the Egyptians regarded as sacred, and the Egyptians didn't shoot because they were afraid of hurting the cats.

-There's this guy who pours molten aluminum inside ant nests and sells them as sculptures

-Jan Dismas Zelenka, whom I have never heard of before, was a Czech Baroque composer who wrote some really cool stuff, like the secular oratorio Sub olea pacis et palma virtutis (youtube link)

Comments

[selenak]

Let me just say that the reveal you were working on an Esther based Story casts your bewilderement that anyone would name their kid Ahasverus into a new light. :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

I was thinking the same thing!

[cahn]

Hee -- yes, exactly! Here I am spending all my evenings immersed in a canon where Ahasuerus is, if not the most villainous of villains, very much not the hero, and then my fave adorkable diarist turns out to be named after him?? :)

[luzula]

Re: walking sperm, have you read the Tiptree story A Momentary Taste of Being? : )

[cahn]

Hee, yes I have! I didn't think of it when writing that line, but... yeah, lol. I love that story!

[sophia_sol]

I don't think I knew until this post that you are also raspberryhunter! I'm delighted to discover that you wrote one of my favourite yuletide fics this year, not to mention having written lots of other fics I love in the past.

[cahn]

:D I'm so delighted by this :D

[mildred_of_midgard]

"What were you doing tonight, giant ants or Fritzmas?"

That's hilarious. Tell D I enjoy the little glimpses of his sense of humor I get.

The ant chromosome gem is amazing. When it comes to distinguishing males from females via chromosomal differences, if you can name it, some species has probably done it. It's really fascinating.

I'm afraid I can't read your Tanakh fic at this time, but it sounds like producing it must have been a heck of an experience. I can see why it was a struggle and the Fredersdorf fic was light and easy in comparison! (I can also see why your creative juices were used up, although to be fair, you did do a good job of taking my coat idea and running with it, as well as weaving the music and relationship developments together.) :D

[cahn]

Ahahaha D was very pleased by this :)

Do you know of other chromosomal weirdnesses in other species? I would love to know! This is the kind of thing I don't know anything about but it is very weird and cool, I had assumed that all sexual-reproducing species were like humans but clearly not!

Hee, yeah, the Fredersdorf fic was definitely my "light and easy" fic, lol. I think it helped that because of betaing your fic I had a lot of Opinions about Fritz and Fredersdorf and their characters :)

[zdenka]

Ooh, I know a thing! In humans, the sex-linked chromosomes are (usually) two of the same for females (XX) and two different for males (XY). But in birds and some other animals, males have two of the same (ZZ) and females have two different (ZW), and it's the ovum rather than the sperm that determines the sex of the offspring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system

[cahn]

Whoa. That's amazing and I had no idea, thank you for that! :D

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm going to be brief and not explain mechanisms, because I need to get back to gossipy sensationalism, but this should give you an idea of the diversity:

Fruit flies: ratio of X chromosomes to autosomes. "Whenever the ratio of X’s to A’s was 1.0 or greater, the fly was female, and whenever it was 0.5 or less, the fly was male. Flies with an X:A ratio between 0.5 and 1.0 developed characteristics of both sexes."

Birds, butterflies, and some reptiles: as zdenka describes.

Honeybees: diploid embryos develop from fertilized eggs and become female; haploid embryos develop from unfertilized eggs and become male.

Wasps: similar, but you can get sterile diploid males.

Some fish: females XY, males YY.

Some reptiles: it depends not on chromosomes but on the temperature at which the egg was kept.

Clown fish: start out as male. The largest and most dominant male becomes female when its reproducing time. (That's right: Marlin wants to find Nemo so Marlin can have a sex change and Nemo can fertilize his [her] eggs.)

Okay, away from giant ants and back to (post-)Fritzmas!

[cahn]

Wow! This is really cool and I'm really surprised I didn't find this out at some point in biology. (I had one decent intro high school class, one class on genetics where something like this really should have been mentioned but we spent a large part of the class making videos of paramecia instead because the teacher had just gotten cool video equipment (...now that I type that out, it sounds even more wtf than I thought at the time), and one college class which I remember fondly as quite informative but which was mostly physiology and so makes more sense that this kind of thing wasn't mentioned.) Or my own reading, although to be fair pop!bio, not to mention academic!bio, hasn't been a large part of it.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I skipped biology altogether in school, but I got super into genetics a while back, worked my way through a textbook and got an online certificate from Stanford (not as impressive as it sounds and studied some bioinformatics, hoping to see if I might want a job in same. Would love to go back to it at some point.

No guarantees on the accuracy of Wikipedia, as per usual, but it'll give you an idea of the diversity of possibilities.

The quoted bit above, I forgot to mention, is from Principles of Genetics, Snustad & Simmons.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I had assumed that all sexual-reproducing species were like humans but clearly not!

I kind of suspect this is related to something a former biologist once told me. Some aspects of biology are forgiving, some are not. If you look at the shape of human eyeballs, they're all pretty much the same, because if you mess with it too much, you lose functionality. If you look at the shape of human cartilage folds in the ear, you get more significant differences, because as long as there are some folds directing sound waves toward the earhole, the exact configuration doesn't matter as much. (The idea, I believe, is to get enough differences that our brain can learn to map the differences to distances.)

Sex differences strike me as the latter. You need some kind of difference between sexes, large enough that they can play complementary roles in reproduction, small enough that they're still members of the same species. There are many ways to get differences of that scope where both parties are still fertile. Therefore, you should expect to see different ways of doing it evolve.

I'm making this up, but it's reasoning backwards from things we know are true to principles I've learned.

Hee, yeah, the Fredersdorf fic was definitely my "light and easy" fic, lol. I think it helped that because of betaing your fic I had a lot of Opinions about Fritz and Fredersdorf and their characters :)

:D It also helped that we got some chatting going on with selenak!

[zdenka]

That's cool about ants, I didn't know that!

I'd never heard of Zelenka either, but the piece you linked was lovely.

Heh, I also think this is an understandable response on Esther's part, but I view Mordechai and that particular exchange more sympathetically than you do, I guess. I thought your Mordecai was fine in the final version, though, and that's more important than whether you personally like him . . .

[cahn]

Isn't it a cool piece? :D

Yeah, I can see rationally that he is totally right! One of those weird emotional responses, I think :) And I think one of the nice things about writing fic is that I always end up liking everyone more afterwards :)

[zdenka]

And I think one of the nice things about writing fic is that I always end up liking everyone more afterwards :)

Hee. I can write fic about or from the POV of characters I dislike and still think they're terrible, but I find when I write from the POV of someone who does like those characters, that it winds up making me more sympathetic to them.

[cahn]

Hee, yes, now that you mention it, that's definitely true for me too hi there Filippo, I love you but you're still terrible!