Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-39332473-20190808194309/@comment-36170150-20190814172657

You know that asexual people aren't inherently sterile and impotent right? It is just a sexual orientation, the fact that people with different sexualities exist in TLS would indicate that sexual preference is not linked to the ratio of their lust and purity energies, otherwise each race would only have a single orientation. If you believe that sexual preference is entirely decided by biological nature then you could argue that sexual orientation could be an emergent trait from the complex interactions of the energies, but for that you'd have to assume that the social aspects of nurture don't play any role in a person's sexual preference. Even if that were the case in the TLS universe, an asexual human would still be a human according to Alonon's separation of the species since his definition is based solely on ratio.

Also I wouldn't generalize Grubbak's example to the entire TLS universe for 2 reasons:

a) Orcs are very likely to be an artificial race, so their eugenics could be completely different from the naturally occuring ones. Even if Balia found the "gay gene" in the orcs, I wouldn't say that's how it works for all other races.

b) Orcs don't have a proper "nurture" phase in their development, their personality is partially inherited from their progenitor and mixed with some random elements of the energy in their environment. Orcs were pretty much spawned as matured as they would get, because their bodies were very limited. We are changing that with our programs for orc breeding, by transfering current orc personalities into less limited bodies so they can develop further, but can an Orc's core personality be changed through education? Either way, this is a big difference and it should definitely affect how sexual orientation works for orcs in particular.

I don't think there's anything special about asexual people in the TLS universe, except that maybe they can be more miserable than anyone else since they don't appreciate something that is part of everything that exists in a fundamental level.

What I don't understand is why Alonon didn't go through with the Unpeople process? Vhala mentions that she doesn't regret it since it gave her peace that she never had before, presumably from suppressing sexual instincts she didn't enjoy.

Maybe Alonon's understanding of the universe is at such a deeper level that he was unsatisfied with the Unpeople transformation? Since everything needs a mix of lust and purity to exist, I imagine the Unpeople transformation doesn't strip all the lust energies, it just neutralizes them or most of their emergent effects. Then again Riala mentioned that Alonon apparently "solidified" his asexuality from being in the Tower, so maybe he's already like an unperson, just in a more sophisticated and potentially irreversible way.