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The Andorian sexes

Therin of Andor said:
KingDaniel said:
that clearly wasn't the case in the Ent TV series.
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Huh? When "The Andorian Incident" aired, I thought they did a wonderful job of showing Tholos as a more androgynous male counterpart to Shran. Tholos seemed to leer sexually at the Enterprise males as he did at T'Pol.

When Shran and Tholos were still working together in "Shadows of P'Jem", I was starting to think that when females inevitably turned up, in later episodes, that we might be led to a group of four actually being established. Then along came Tarah in "Cease Fire" - and she towered over Shran. She was quite different in physique and personality to Talas ("Proving Ground").

As far as I'm concerned, there's no "clearly" about it. And for the ENT novels to have totally ignored the work on the Andorian world-building done by the DS9 Relaunch would have caused plenty of complaint by ST readers.
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That's a really interesting analysis, Therin. If Shran has since been labeled a thaan, I guess Tholos may be a chan, and the DS9 relaunch did suggest, if I remember correctly, that chans are more androgynous in appearance than thaans. I assume Tarah is zhen, which are said to be the tallest, I think, and whose traditional cultural trait is "strength", and Talas shen. I think you make a really good case for the ENT depictions to slot into DS9-relaunch with ease. :)
 
Deranged Nasat said:
I assume Tarah is zhen, which are said to be the tallest, I think, and whose traditional cultural trait is "strength", and Talas shen.
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Isn't it the other way around? I thought it was the shen who were supposed to be the tough, mannish type, and the zhen the more 'girly' (for lack of a better word) of the two.
 
Mr. Laser Beam said:
Deranged Nasat said:
I assume Tarah is zhen, which are said to be the tallest, I think, and whose traditional cultural trait is "strength", and Talas shen.
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Isn't it the other way around? I thought it was the shen who were supposed to be the tough, mannish type, and the zhen the more 'girly' (for lack of a better word) of the two.
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Zhen do have the traditionally feminine role of primary caregiver for the children, but they also have the cultural trait of "strength", whereas shen have "blood" (whatever the cultural connotations of "blood" are). Perhaps Andorian culture defines strength more in terms of child-rearing than fighting, despite being a warrior race? Standing up for the children, educating them, enduring childbirth- maybe these are considered the height of strength among Andorians, requiring the "strongest" personalities? Without wanting to stereotype, zhens did indeed always seem to me to come across "stronger" than shens, and usually thaans and chans too. :)
 
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If it helps clear up the debate, Thriss was a zhen and Pava from Titan and SA is a shen.
 
Sorry to regress the flow here, but this is interesting and I'll admit I didn't read the book. The thaan, chan, and shen all have penises or its' analogy. The zhen has the womb. Do the three have sex with the zhen in a certain sequence? Or do two have sex with the shen, to create a zygote, the shen then in turn has sex with the zhen?
 
T'Girl said:
Do the three have sex with the zhen in a certain sequence? Or do two have sex with the shen, to create a zygote, the shen then in turn has sex with the zhen?
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It's been deliberately left vague. ;) Andorians do not usually discuss it with outworlders.
 
Okay, then which exactly was Kirk making out with in StarTrek XI?
Or was that a orion?
 
Curiously enough, it was titled "Pirates of Orion". ;)

Back then, it was far from clear that the Orion species would be green in color. All we knew was that their legendary "animal women" or "slave women" were green. Quite possibly, the green color could have been typical of a species enslaved by the Orions - or of a population group enslaved by the rest of the Orions and tattooed green to denote their servile status...

ENT was the first show to demonstrate that Orion males are also green, and that the "animal woman" females are the standard females of the species, not a separate social group. That is, as per the ENT episode "Bound", every Orion woman appears to be an "animal" or a "slave", even though neither the social setup nor the biology of this relationship is quite that "skin deep".

Timo Saloniemi
 
The Star Trek Concordance describes Devna from "The Time Trap" as golden-skinned, but she's actually sort of a pale green. I was going to say she looked gold in a couple of shots, but then I looked at my laptop's LCD monitor from a different angle and she got greener. I can't trust the colors on this thing. Anyway, she's definitely the lightest-skinned Orion woman we've seen.
 
It might be interesting if the colors on the Orions were indeed artificial - tattooed on to reflect the status of the individual. Not on a social hierarchy, obviously, since slaves and slavers share colors in ENT. But it could well be that there are clans of Orions that identify themselves and their possessions by sharing a skin hue.

Of course, the color variations may be quite natural. But having ethnic or geographical identity be expressed by skin color is a bit boring and unimaginative for a scifi show...

Timo Saloniemi
 
Timo said:
it could well be that there are clans of Orions that identify themselves and their possessions by sharing a skin hue.i
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The FASA RPG "Orion" gaming manuals suggested that Orions had a wide range of skin tones depending on exposure to natural light. The shipbound Orions of TAS had simply been shipbound for a long time.

Christopher said:
The Star Trek Concordance describes Devna from "The Time Trap" as golden-skinned, but she's actually sort of a pale green. I was going to say she looked gold in a couple of shots, but then I looked at my laptop's LCD monitor from a different angle and she got greener. I can't trust the colors on this thing. Anyway, she's definitely the lightest-skinned Orion woman we've seen.
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She was the exact colour of a TOS command shirt: actually green, but often photographs gold. :vulcan:
 
Timo said:
Of course, the color variations may be quite natural. But having ethnic or geographical identity be expressed by skin color is a bit boring and unimaginative for a scifi show...
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Trek in particular had very few instances in TOS or TNG where there was ANY cultural diversity whatsoever: "Let That be your Last Battlefield" and "The Omega Glory" are the only two I can think of from TOS that had cultural diversity.
 
Hey, this is a good one for Therin.

Anyone read "The Old Ways"? Did anyone else immediately think of Ortees Sharad as a chan? The reason being - they showed a number of other "male" Andorians (Trajun, Shaa, Kovan) who were all quite a bit more stocky and "masculine". Whereas Ortees was more lithe and wiry, and more the "brain".
 
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