Height

The Bep don't reproduce sexually, despite being humans as far as anyone can tell; they don't carry out kids, those just kind of ... show up. Now, where does this leave us when it comes to typical hereditary traits like, say, height?

Height specifically seems to be governed by consensus — a child growing up in a community full of short people is likely to turn out with roughly the same stature as everyone else, and likewise a child among tall people tends to end up lanky. It's unclear how long the period of influence is, and of course there are outliers, but the general tendency tends to follow whatever is going on with the community around a given person while they're growing.

In larger communities, there seems to be a sort of organic average that emerges from the accumulated randomness of many many people. In smaller communities, however, height tendencies can easily proliferate, and possibly even propagate if luck has it so. As such, there are a significant number of more isolated settlements, villages, &c. where one extreme dominates; if a Bep person is very very small, or as it were, Quite Large, you can be reasonably confident they grew up in a small group of similarly sized people, probably in the middle of nowhere.

This also leads to a societal role of average nudging existing; troupes of people with similarly extreme measurements might form and wander around in search of new homes, and children from areas of particular sizes might be sent off temporarily to seek fortune growing tall or staying short somewhere with a more desirable height average. The motivations for this type of behaviour vary greatly, and are not always conscious; the desire to move may be rooted in entirely different paradigms, like wealth or wellbeing, or combinations of conscious and unconscious factors like wanting a certain stature for convenience in a profession.

"Ah, the tall people over there have money. Go live with them." "The hilltop people are small and round, go there to be fed well too." "We could use some height for this building project..." "We need miners that can fit into this tiny cave."

This page was originally a snippet, here.