Genderplay AU: Droneverse/"Queen Bee"

[lea_hazel]

In brief: a droneverse or queen bee AU is an alternate universe in which the majority of people are sterile, and only a small minority are fertile. Borrowing from bee terminology, a queen has fertile ova and a drone has fertile sperm, while sterile people are called workers. The demographics are roughly one queen and 3-4 drones per 200 population, but this aspect is open to tweaking, according to the story's needs.

Most everything except the basics is open to interpretation or alteration. In my version of the droneverse, queens and drones form the aristocracy, while the workers are commoners, though the worker population is subject to internal social stratification. Queens practice polyandry and keep up with the demands of maintaining the population by using artificial uteruses. This version of the droneverse is otherwise human, having suffered a cataclysmic decline in fertility centuries prior to the present timeline. It also has elements of a Dom/sub AU.

It is up to you whether you want to make the DV society human, alien, shapeshifter, etc. You can make them a minority among (an)other species. You can make it part of their natural physiology, or the result of a plague/curse/alien technology/what have you. The social status of drones and queens is likewise open to interpretation. I use them as aristocracy, but they're just as likely to be subjugated as valuable commodities. I recommend having different cultures interpret the situation differently, but again, this is optional.

Gender and sexuality elements: while it seems obvious to make queens female and drones male, a society where > 90% of the population is sterile can have any configuration of gender norms you could imagine. Changing terminology to avoid referring to gestating men as "queens" is completely possible. You're not bound to a completely matriarchal or even matrilineal structure. I chose to apply different sexual norms to workers and to drones/queens because it was convenient to the type of story I wanted to tell. For example, I use the term maenad to describe the idea that relationships between queens are taboo in a way that a relationship between a queen and a female worker wouldn't be, a worldbuilding element that you may wish to play with.

Optional elements of the droneverse:

• Polyandry


• Queens as literal rulers


• Harem politics


• Queen/drone soul bonds


• Heat or other omegaverse-like elements


• Worker sexual anarchy


• Taboos on alternate sexualities


• Post-post-apocalypse


• Dom/sub social structure

I welcome comments and questions. I made this AU for myself and haven't shared it very much, so I haven't gotten much outside feedback about aspects that I haven't thought through, or haven't occurred to me. If any of my prompts or terminology are unclear, I will edit to clarify them.

Comments

Droneverse-specific prompts

[lea_hazel]

If you want to generate a card, here are some DV-specific prompts that I brainstormed, formatted for the card generator's preferred input:

Artificial uterus,
Bee symbolism,
Birth control,
Class struggle,
Culture shock,
Demographics,
Depopulation,
Diplomatic marriage contracts,
Drone/drone relationship,
Fertility as a commodity,
Fertility as a public resource,
Geneology,
Gentle domination,
Half-siblings,
Harem politics,
Heat suppression,
Internal hive politics,
Maenads,
Midwives and obstetricians,
Multiple births,
Multiplicity of sexual orientations,
Omega-like drones,
Polyandry,
Post-menopausal queens,
Queen-drone marking,
Queen-drone soul-bond,
Selecting a new queen,
Significant puberty,
Social expectation of chastity,
Spiritual responses to declining birth-rates,
Sterility as a divine curse,
Sterility plague post-apocalypse,
The new elite,
Worker sexual anarchy

Re: Droneverse-specific prompts

[lea_hazel]

Example card:

Artificial uterus	Significant puberty	Depopulation
Demographics	Gentle domination	Harem politics
Multiple births	Bee symbolism	Queen-drone soul-bond

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

One point of flexibility is the statistics. If you have a species that can naturally or technologically reproduce at high levels per individual, then you can have a really huge gap. If reproduction is more limited, the gap will be smaller.

Frex, Honey bee colonies consist of a single queen, hundreds of male drones and 20,000 to 80,000 female worker bees. Queens have only one mating flight, but typically mate with several drones at that time.

Conversely, many animals use a "harem" structure where one male services many females, over and over. That can be anywhere from the ~2 dozen of a horse herd to the several hundred of a walrus herd.

One fun example in fiction is A Brother's Price, where the population is about 90% female.

I have a similar ration in Daughters of the Apocalypse.

From much farther back, I actually wrote about an insectoid species coming into sapience and thus starting to break away from the rigid caste system: Queen Choufa and the Rebel Drones.


Another point of flexibility is the caste structure. The more rigid it is, the more likely that fighting it becomes a plot point. The more flexible it is, though, the easier it is to play with diverse expressions across different characters.

A caste that's made up, like in India, is very different from one that's finely hardwired, like in social insects. In between you have things like naked mole-rats where if the queen dies, a worker female becomes a queen. This version is extremely useful in fiction because 1) a death is an effective form of tension, and 2) contextual fertility development is a way to avoid overpopulation, so it's well established and a plausible post-apocalyptic scenario. Some other species have not only contextual fertility but even contextual sex changes.

Re: Thoughts

[lea_hazel]

That's partly why I listed demographics as a prompt in my comment above. It covers not just the ratio of workers to queens, but the number of births per year, fluctuation in population size, etc. Somewhere in my notes, I have all the numbers I crunched for how to achieve a replacement rate of reproduction. It's easier the more inhuman, or technologically advanced, or *both* your population is. Easiest if they lay eggs, for example, but the idea with the artificial uteruses is to use technological pressure to replicate that effect with IVF. The only story I have up at the moment doesn't touch much on the demographics, though.

Contextual fertility is another good one. You could even use an analog of royal jelly, and have it be a part of a ritualistic selection of the new (emerging) queen. That's ripe for both political play and pageantry. Whereas in my story, not knowing until puberty whether you will be fertile or not has given rise to a cottage industry of charlatans promising to predict the future with superstition or pseudo-science. I will touch on that if I ever get around to writing the school story.