Back in 2017, I was thinking about severely imbalanced gender ratios, and how that would affect a culture and a world. Given I’ll process things via story, I wrote two little snippets to work out how that would succeed and how it’d fail, then abandoned them and moved on.

Eight years later, back in November, I was in an argument on the internet. Okay, I’ve been in this conversation for, um, ten years? More? I forget. It is a friendly sort of rolling argument, the kind where there are no hard feelings and more catching up on how people are doing than remembering what we were talking about five days ago. But the argument wandered via tangents (and more than a few memes) into how reverse harem would actually work out if you played it straight, as a lasting multi-generational problem. One friend took the position that it’d actually end in polygyny, with men hoarding the very scarce women via multiple wives.

I took the position that it’d end in polyandry, as the examples tossed on the virtual table are all from old cultures gone severely awry after starting with a lopsided female-skewed birth ratio… where culture is still trying to enforce its old patterns and values even after setting up the skew the exact opposite way from its baseline. If a culture was truly adapted to this as normal, then it’d be a very different culture.

As we kicked it around, I could see that we were starting to talk past each other –  so I decided to toss out an example of how I could see it working, to see if he’d understand my point, if not necessarily agree with it. (After all, if you’re not on the same page in an argument, you lose all the iron-sharpens-iron interaction and the challenge of defending your position. That’s no fun!)

So I pulled up the old snippet, frowned at it, and went “this isn’t half-bad, but I would alter as such, for the conditions we’re talking about, and have to present this challenge up front, and modify…” and ended up rewriting it significantly, in order to toss it up as a reply. Fortunately, internet arguing with a handful of friends on a text channel means that you can take hours to come back with a reply, unlike real life. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really make the full argument in less than 5,000 words, but I could at least give it in broad swatches as worldbuilding behind the story…

…That was November. By December, it had gotten moved to its own channel, titled “Thread Drift from (Channel)”.

In April, 89,066 words later, I finally finished the happy ever after, after wandering through how it’d skew the society, how you’d have the strain of space pirates raiding for women and yet the inevitable attraction to normal spacers as the exotic not-from-here men, and the resultant “stealing our women” anti-spacer mentality, the inevitable mission creep of a population-monitoring bureaucracy into a severe threat to its people, and the way that cats are not only going to make it out to space and every planet, but if you name a stray, it’s yours. There Are Rules.

On the upside, once it was done, I was able to read my way back into the Combined Ops WIP I was trying to write, um, 3 years ago, and I found where it got broken, fixed that, and am now getting a tiny bit of headway on it.

But on the downside, I lost almost 5 months of my life to an argument on the internet. On the upside, it entertained a few friends, and I got to make a couple jokes about the history of otters in art.

On the gripping hand, this means I finally emerged from my epic tangent clutching “The End” in hand, looked around, and proclaimed, “And that’s why I think this point in the argument you’ve all completely forgotten about is valid!” to get… five laughing emojis.

Eh, you can’t win ’em all.

And a few days later, when the epic rolling argument turned to the death penalty, I took a deep breath, thought about it… and then typed:

I refuse to get into this argument. Because we’ve seen how long my thread drift goes.

Back to the WIP!