Re: Bestiarum Vocabulum Hentayus
Biology taxonomy 101: Where Your Creature Places in the Grand Scheme of Things.
Organisms are classified in biology in this manner, in descending order of generalness:
Life (most general)
Domain
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
Subspecies (least general, most specific)
There are three domains, Bacteria, Eukarya and Archaea.
Archaea is mainly made up of organisms that are fairly unimportant in regards to Hentology; they don’t become complex organisms and don’t really seem to do much other than increase greenhouse gasses and aid in digestion for some species. It’s highly unlikely that many hentai creatures will have anything to do with the Archaea domain.
Bacteria will very likely only be important if you want to make a hentai-pathogen using bacteria. Almost all hentai creatures ought to end up in:
Eukarya, which contains almost all living beings and will very likely be the domain for all creatures you create.
Special mention must go to (biological) viruses, which don’t fit into any category.
Eukarya splits into seven kingdoms; animals, plants, fungi, and four other ones that don’t seem to get past cellular stage, the only one worth talking about is Amoebozoa, which contains a phylum called Mycetozoa, whose members are semi-intelligent slime moulds, likely a good phylum for some of the hentai slime creatures.
The phylums and orders and such of any species you write up you will have to determine for yourself, or give to someone else or me to place for you, because I’m not going to list every class, order and family on the planet.
How to give a scientific name to your species:
A binomial (scientific name) is a two-term name that is used for a particular species. The name is always put in italics, and if italics are unavailable (for instance if it is being written instead of typed) it should be underlined. The scientific name is always in New Latin. The first word of any scientific name is the Genus of the species, for instance the
Homo of
Homo sapiens; this word is always given a capital letter. The second word is the species’ name; this can be anything so long as it is unique within its genus (so that there can’t be two species with the same name). In the previous example this would be
sapiens. The second word is never given a capital letter and is always in lower case.
Our taxonomically-oriented discipline (means we only look at one section of beings, in this case hentai ones) is called
Hentology. It identifies and classifies species, and studies the structures and mechanisms specific to each group. Unlike almost all other taxonomic disciplines, Hentology is not limited to one Kingdom, or Class, or Order or even Domain, as it is defined by having one of many various biological traits, as opposed to a common ancestry. Our articles focus mainly on:
1. The physiology of hentai creatures, i.e. anatomy, and occasionally embryology (this is where you put anything relating to what it can and can’t eat, where its brain is, how it breathes, as well as any biological special abilities, including its growth cycle, i.e. how it develops from an embryo into a full adult of its species)
2. The ecology of hentai creatures, i.e. their relation to their environment, which includes their interactions with other members of their species and members of other species (this is where you put its usual diet, its common predators and prey, if it acts in a group or alone/how it acts in its group, how it uses camouflage, its life cycle and position in its ecosystem, ect. ect.)
3. Their taxonomical ranking, which groups different species via common descent and regional associations (that thing I was writing about earlier, the Families and Domains and such)
4. Zoography, also known as descriptive zoology, the applied science of describing animals and their habitats (This means that we talk about how the information we have learned about the creature can be useful to civilisation. i.e., Saying how the creature can be used for the betterment of your species, or how the flaw (which it cost you your body and dignity to find) can be used to cull the horrible plague sweeping your civilisation. (Then we add your article and ignore your pleas for help… gotta keep the ecosystem un-interfered with!
))
Fun facts you learn while looking through Wikipedia’s biology articles (might be bullshit though, I didn’t bother to check any references):
The mass of bacteria in and on your body is ten times greater than the mass of the rest of your body.
A slime mould was hooked up to a robot and put in a room. Any light that hit the sensors on the bot caused a corresponding light to turn on over the slime mould. The slime mould began trying to move away from the light, which other sensors picked up and moved the leg corresponding to the point the slime mould was trying to move away from. It then proceeded to move the robot to the darkest point in the room.
Edit: *looks up* Whoa, damn! I've been ninja'd! I respond to this out of order (sorry if it's confusing).
Aaaand... I think it would be really neat if the encyclopedia contained the 'fappable' writing with the more professional looking entry, perhaps as an example?
Indeed, indeed! I had been thinking about this, and wondering how to put ‘we need both stats and hentai articles’ in a less crappy manner, and you did it for me!
Then a lengthier entry about it? :x That may be too much, I dunno.
It depends entirely on the level of detail the writer or writers is willing to go into about the creature. I imagine it will be somewhat like real life biology; we'll have large entries on the common garden-variety critters, the really rare critters, and the really weird critters, but very little on the ones that fall in-between these parts, the uncommon and not-all-that-strange creatures.
I found these two bestiaries [links] Which just had a blurb of writing, so I suppose that's good enough. XD
This bestiary, for all that it is a bestiary in name, does not have much to do with the classic bestiaries, which were mainly used to promote Christianity and not convey facts. It is somewhat more in line with either a zoological entry about a species, or a lot more in line with a monster entry in a video game's bestiary. Designed to convey facts and information that actually has something to do with the creature in question, but also giving fanciful knowledge and skimming over the more boring bits. (Fanciful knowledge: stuff that wouldn't get mentioned in a real zoological report, like refractory period length, number of rapes/suspected rapes per year, something like that. Boring bits: how the creature places in its evolutionary tree in relation to other animals, how this other species will now need to be reclassified into something else because of X, yadda, yadda, yadda...)
I just like to put on a science-hat when thinking about distance of relations between creatures.
Then, would you agree to being officially recruited as Bestiarum Vocabulum Hentayus' first taxonomical positioner? (i.e. person who sorts the critters into different species, genus’s, domains ect.)
So sex-bots are a no-no? XD
Warning: This part gets long, and I may seem to be going off on a tangent for a while. I'll tie it back to the point eventually.
There's no debating that they're hentai enough, it's just that the article's supposed to be about hentai biology, which machines don't fit into. Hell, it was a stretch to let minerals in, and it was still only 'cause classical bestiaries had them.
I'm still rather up in the air as to the final purpose of this bestiary, though. Is it a government report on the status of the multiverse's h-critters? Is it a scientific study to try and find more uses for these creatures? Is it an attempt from a section of the scientific community to preform true, professional documentation on these little documented life forms?
...Is it a tour guide, Gimmicky Advertising Brochure, pet owner's guide?
And further more... Who the hell is writing it?
I've thought for awhile and decided that this, below, is the back story I prefer the most:
The book is being created by a small group of the scientific community of a fairly advanced universe-travelling species. Their civilisation has significant disparity in development levels; some planets are thriving technological metropolises, others are at industrial revolution level, and others still are medieval or even stone age.
For this and various other reasons, there is a significant lack of information about many of the various species in any of the universes they've been in. This group wishes to ramify this by creating a database of all the hentai creatures in existence, with professional research and documentation done on each creature.
However, being a small section of the community as they are, they simply don't have the money, or for that matter, manpower to create it. In order to get enough money, the group takes up a contract with several different organizations; the government gives them a small grant to see if there are any practical uses for the creatures, they get benefits from travel agencies through adding reviews of the eocsystems of planets and places they visit, and have even taken up advertising deals with several companies selling sex products that believed they might be able to find a new biological 'toy'.
With their funds secured, the group realised that with their manpower it would take till the end of several universes just to finish one galaxy. Thusly, the group begins an advertising campaign, spreading pamphlets all around the multiverse, to the cities, to the farms, to the other scientists, to the bounty hunters, even to those really under-developed primitive planets. All they have to do is contact the group and send them their hentai findings to get their name in the book.
With the flow of information on the hentai creatures steadily coming in, the group gets to work on sorting it into proper articles.
Notes:
(Origionally the backstory ment you would need to add a good or bad 'spin' to the articles. You don't need to do that anymore.)
The contract with the government means their articles must include an evaluation of the creature's uses.
Their contract with the travel agencies means the occasional ecosystem review will have to be done, to fill the group's end of the bargain.
The deal with the sex product companies means they will occasionally do articles for the company's biological products, as well as writing up articles for their mechanical products. (Something the group is fuming about having to do, as they feel it is the main thing jeopardising the integrity of their Bestiary.) It also means that they need to provide a detailed encounter for each creature, so that the companies can evaluate whether the creature may be useful to them.
This is one back story that doesn't just make reasonable sense, it also allows everything we could want to be added to the book - pictures, lemons, and of course, purely mechanical creatures.
If anyone thinks this ought to loose some, not necessarily all, of the role-playing civilisation stuff, speak up now. Same for anyone with a better suggestion, cause I realise that this adds some elements that people likely won’t like/put up with. (Although hopefully that's not so significant now.)
