I feel like I’m writing an Abbot & Costello routine. Indeed, Thoos, they’re not talking about you, they’re talking about Thoos.
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Turning to Picknar, Porpa said, “Alright, let’s start methodically with the rest of you. Where is our child?” Picknar said, “We all hitched off Earth together, but we’d only just met. Despite that, I believe this is Thoos. I’m a Tith named Picknar, actually.” Gesturing towards Thoos, Heakie said, “This torturer? Thoos would never stoop so low as to torture someone to get information out of them, even if Thoos is a good-for-nothing fool.” Thoos said, “Hey!” Porpa said to Thoos, “What are you complaining about? It’s not like it’s you we’re talking about.” Knox said, “Don’t ask me. Recently I didn’t even believe aliens existed. now… I’d believe anything.” Heakie said to Spizz, “Spizz.” Spizz punched Knox in the stomach, and then Picknar in the stomach. Spizz then went to Rodrigo and said, “And what does the other one have to say?” Rodrigo said, “I like the side tables, but do they really go with the carpet?” Spizz punched him in the stomach. Looking around, Porpa said, “A decent point. When we’re done here, Spizz, call in the decorator.”
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Won’t they be surprised when their daughter [?] shows up on another planet going by an earth name?
“You are our daughter not like these gold diggers over here.”
“ hey! That’s my body! I want it back, healthy”
“Okay, beat this one up, too.”
I like the circularity of “You can’t be our child, because you obviously tortured our child to get information out of them and our child would never do that.”
They still haven’t mentioned Festus Loomp.
I keep hearing echoes of Augustus Gloop in this name.
This is what happens when you hitchhike with people you don’t know.
When are they going to question the cat?
I questioned my cat earlier. She said ‘feed me’…..
Pretty low-grade ‘torture,’ if you ask me. Also unproductive. Not that the Starslicks care, truth be told.
Are you people so bored that this is all you can think of to do? You BORIN’ me, man.
Start with simple and see how they react. It’s an entirely different species. The best way to torture a human is probably not the same as the best way to torture a tith.
“Gay Eye for the non-binary space yak” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
We don’t actually know if they’re “non-binary.” All we know for sure is that their language doesn’t use gendered pronouns, and that any sexual dimorphism they have is minimal enough to be concealed by their hair. But we haven’t seen enough tith-on-tith interactions to get a feel for what the categories might be.
But they referred to Thoos as “son” rather than “child”, so unless that was a translation error that vaguely implies that they have at least two sexes. The parents being a pair and not some other number hints that it’s probably not more than two… But it’s only a hint. The one four-sexed species I’m aware of here on Earth still mates in pairs, pair selection is just more complicated. They definitely don’t seem to be asexual. They might be hermaphrodites.
Linguistically, gendered pronouns is related to information density. Basically it’s a way to embed more, relevant information into the same number of tokens. So if their dimorphism is small enough that knowing which sex someone is isn’t generally relevant then there wouldn’t be an incentive to keep the extra complexity. And from a xenobiology point of view, there are a lot of possible arrangements that would result in little or no intrusion of what minimal, sex-linked characteristics they might have into everyday life.