It's an interesting thought. It comes up occasionally in some of the fandoms I hang out in (like District 9, and Transformers) where you have characters and/or species which are either asexual (Transformers) or hermaphroditic (D9).
For instance there's a lot of D9 fic that gets labelled slash because it's Wikus/Christopher (because well, it's fandom and they'll pair up everybody) and every once in awhile someone points out that it's not technically slash since Christopher isn't technically a he since Prawns are hermaphrodites (and technically, depending on what point the fic takes place, so is WikusThere are even pregnant Prawn!Wikus stories (whether the "father" or I guess I should say "other parent" is Christopher, another Prawn, or self-fertilization) and they are normally labelled mpreg even though, again, Prawn!Wikus is BOTH male AND female at this point
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Hrmm, I'd forgotten D9 - mostly, I think, because I found the movie perfect as-is and never really got into the fandom. The Prawns obviously care deeply for their young, and form social bonds with one another, but beyond that we have no idea how their society works. While most species capable of sexual reproduction will use it preferentially (the evolutionary advantage of this being obvious) even if they are also capable of asexual reproduction, so I would guess that Prawns probably do mate with one another . . but whether mating itself produces a social bond, or whether the social bonds are based on something else entirely, we have no idea (given they clustered their eggs together, personally I'd bet on a familial bond of fellow-raisers-of-young, which might or might not include fellow-genetic-contributer-to-your-young
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What I meant as far as the Prawns was, although I‘m sure they prefer sexual reproduction for genetic diversity reasons, was that there was no reason to assume that there is a _physical_ pairing between the adults. For all we know one partner lays an egg, steps back, and then the other partner walks up and fertilizes it. Sexual reproduction - but with no physical contact between the adults. Yet all the fics I‘ve seen assume not only that there is sexual intercourse but that it‘s very _human_ style sexual intercourse
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For instance there's a lot of D9 fic that gets labelled slash because it's Wikus/Christopher (because well, it's fandom and they'll pair up everybody) and every once in awhile someone points out that it's not technically slash since Christopher isn't technically a he since Prawns are hermaphrodites (and technically, depending on what point the fic takes place, so is WikusThere are even pregnant Prawn!Wikus stories (whether the "father" or I guess I should say "other parent" is Christopher, another Prawn, or self-fertilization) and they are normally labelled mpreg even though, again, Prawn!Wikus is BOTH male AND female at this point ( ... )
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