#buuut since its been over 10 days since my last post. I kinda have to post *something* at the very least

[nomadic-star]

yayyy more watchdog oc shenanigans

bert belongs to @joeyprotozoa

freddy and teddy belong to @ariel-s-awesome / @watchdogfanclub

+ bonus angst comic feat. Larry and Norman

[ckret2]

And I got so into writing out that Worst Case Scenario last night I forgot to mention my second misgiving with the whole damn prompt, which AS IT HAPPENS covers some headcanons I've been meaning to bring up AND is relevant to a prompt coming up in my list that I am gonna write, so I'm gonna devote a post to this:

The very scenario "x character gets upset over y character CHEATING!!!" is based on the presumption that, like... the characters give a shit.

In the case of Rodorah, it assumes that two giant animals, one of which is an alien, both:

1) are familiar with the concept of monogamy as humans understand it

2) believe in and adhere to the concept of monogamy as humans understand it

3) consider dating or banging anyone outside their relationship a breach of trust in regards to said monogamy

4) would have the exact same emotional reaction as a human to said breach of trust

Which is a lot of assumption to put on a dinosaur and a dragon. And also anyone who dates Ghidorah is automatically in a polyamorous relationship so monogamy is kinda out the window right from the get go, you know?

So I'm gonna dig into why all those assumptions are unnecessary to assume. Half based on canon and half covering fic headcanons.

Gonna go out on a limb and assume that we don't know anything worth discussing about the mating habits of pteranodons; but Monsterverse Rodan's also got a lot of bird in him, so let's go with that. Lots of birds are socially monogamous, but not sexually monogamous. What that means is that once two birds are committed to each other—went down to bird city hall and signed their bird marriage license, exchanged tiny bird rings, whatever birds do—they've committed to sharing a nest and splitting egg-guarding and child-rearing duties in that nest. They HAVEN'T committed to only screwing each other. Depending on the species, 10% to 33% of the eggs in the nest could have a different genetic father than the male bird in that couple. (And some even have a different genetic mother, which boggles my mind. Like did she fly all the way over to someone else's nest just to lay the egg like "I don't wanna deal with this one thanks" and they're like "that's fine have a nice day"? I'm sure that's not how it works but the thought amuses me.)

Operating by that definition, Rodan's image of "totally committed and faithful" would be "there's only one person whom I split daily chores with, and I can have kids with anyone."

(Some bird species are both sexually and socially monogamous... but then, some bird species also are only committed to one partner for one breeding season, then break up and commit to a new partner next year. There's variation, is the point—and more than that, "you can't logically assume that a species like this is going to be sexually/socially monogamous for life the way humans idealize" is the bigger point.)

The fact that Rodan's species, like all titan species, seems to be in a perpetual state of "less than two dozen deaths away from total extinction" would actually select against sexual monogamy, because a species that goes "I'm not having kids with anyone except my one true love. Who died a century ago," is gonna go extinct a lot faster than a species that goes "boy won't my one true love be excited when she hears about the prime real estate me and Ms. Krakatoa found to lay our eggs in."

And I've established in prior headcanons that because parents might die long before their kids are born and because volcanoes act as natural fortresses/incubators for eggs, Rodan's species doesn't share nests, doesn't need to protect or incubate eggs, and doesn't rear their young—so what would social monogamy even entail for them? It doesn't need to entail much of anything, if they even subscribe to it at all.

Ghidorah's species is alien so there's no need to try to compare them to their "nearest related species on Earth" because they aren't related to any species on Earth. But, if we're gonna use Earth species as a framework off of which to base their headcanons anyway: dorats/Ghidorahs, when taken all together, are like 50% snake, 30% cat, and 20% bat.

Snakes are the least monogamous bunch of animals you could ask for. During mating season, males and females both have multiple partners, females can lay eggs from multiple fathers in one clutch, and most species don't even bother incubating their eggs. (In the few that do, the mother does that without a partner.)

Domestic cats are into gang bangs. When a female cat is in heat, she will yowl to attract as many male cats in the area as possible. When a male cat wants some, he'll yowl in hopes a female cat in heat will zip over. They'll mate with multiple cats in a row, loitering around watching while they wait for their turn. They'll mate with whoever shows up. They'll mate with their own relatives. Cats don't care. Cats are gross. Get your cats fixed.

Most bats will have multiple partners. Some bats are polygamous—one or two dudes with a collection of multiple female partners. In both of these cases, males don't help rear the young. A few bats are monogamous and share parenting duties—but these are the minority.

So Ghidorah's most closely related species are three counts of "I don't care who you screw, I don't care who I screw, once a year there's like a month where anyone could screw anyone else at any time and nobody is safe. I'll screw you and then I'll screw a space chicken cyborg and then I'll screw myself, watch, I'm flexible."

One hopes they're a bit more selective than that, but those are the nearest Earth analogues we're starting with as our basis for their species.

Based just on that, between Ghidorah and Rodan, if one of them is gonna be fussed about the other having additional partners—sexual, romantic, or otherwise—odds are it ain't gonna be Ghidorah. Ghidorah's gonna be the clueless alien trying to figure out what weird Earth etiquette rule he broke while Rodan's upset—assuming Rodan cares either.

So beyond Earth animals: what's been established about dorats so far is that they live in big groups with multiple aeries. The basic dorat social unit is a flock (30-200 adults), not a nest (1-2 adults). Since they communally share nests, eggs from multiple parents will end up in the same pile, and so it's likely no one gives a damn about who's had kids with who. (And—although I haven't gotten into dorat reproduction yet—eggs are laid immediately after mating, so it's impossible to have dubious paternity in a dorat mating—which IRL, aside from "doubling the amount of parents looking after these kids," is one of the driving factors of monogamy in the wild.)

The Xilien military HAS witnessed aggression based on sexual jealousy between adolescent dorats, enough so that they think it's a threat to their experiments. The Xilien military is locking up dorats in cages and experimentally fusing them together. The Xilien military is not observing dorats in their natural habitat. The actual dorat breeder is absolutely horrified to hear of dorats behaving like that, because it's a sign of extreme stress and trauma. Viciously competing for mates and chasing off other potential sexual partners, therefore, is abnormal for dorats.

Using Ghidorah as they are now as an example of what dorats are like is dicey, since they've lived such a strange life and so much of their psychology is shaped by trauma—buuut, it's evident from them that dorats can feel romantic love, but we don't know what function it would've had among normal dorats. Maybe it's supposed to be a temporary thing that fades after a mating season, maybe it's supposed to encourage a few members of one flock to latch on to members of another flock and move as a means to discourage stagnation in the genetic pool of a single flock, maybe its primary purpose has nothing to do with driving reproduction but rather is supposed to strengthen social bonds between members of this naturally empathic species...

So the presence of romantic feelings doesn't inherently correlate with monogamy, or a desire for monogamy, or sexual/romantic exclusivity, or sexual/romantic jealousy...

So add all that together and what do you get. Of the two of them, Rodan is more likely to have a natural and/or cultural inclination toward any sort of monogamy than Ghidorah is, and even at that it's most likely to be romantic monogamy than sexual monogamy. Ghidorah's the one more likely to assume against exclusivity from the outside. However: to the original premise, if Ghidorah DID find out Rodan had taken another sexual partner (and let's be frank, it would be sexual because nobody in this fandom is writing a damn thing about infidelity plots that don't eventually fall back on "o noez Rodan screwed someone he shouldn't have," even when romance IS involved it boils down to sex, and yeah it's always Rodan—)

That parenthetical went on a bit of a tangent. Anyway if Ghidorah found out Rodan had taken another sexual partner, there'd be three possible reactions:

1) The LEAST likely: as in the potential scenario yesterday written on the "okay, let's assume that cheating is a thing for them" assumption: an apocalypse with a potential side of murder/suicide. In order for something like that to happen, Ghidorah's experiences on Earth would have to have pushed them into full Despite All My Rage I Am Still Just A Dorat In A Cage mode. Their baseline mental state is at about 45% on the "stressed caged dorat" meter. Right now they're hovering around 30% and gradually dropping. Being an enslaved war machine kept them at a steady 75%. They'd need to be at like 90% before they started flipping their shit over romantic jealousy. To get them to that level of stress, they'd need to be getting constantly harassed by Godzilla and human military units, psychically bombarded by Mothra, and on top of that probably getting gaslit to hell and back by Rodan re: their relationship status so they couldn't be confident of where they stood with him—and that leads into the other factor that's necessary for this scenario to happen. Rodan would need to 1) insist to Ghidorah that he's the only one Rodan's got any sort of sexual/romantic involvement with, and 2) convince him that the stability and continued existence of their relationship is predicated upon Rodan being interested in only Ghidorah. They'd need to be specifically convinced of these things first in order to feel lied to/betrayed if Rodan had a relationship of any kind with someone else, because they wouldn't naturally assume either of them.

Since we've got no evidence Rodan is a raging abusive asshole who would go out of his way to convince an ignorant alien that their happiness is dependent upon Rodan being exclusive and then go off and not be exclusive, this scenario isn't happening.

2) Actually likely scenario, bad outcome: Rodan comes home and Ghidorah asks where he's been all day and he goes, oh yeah, he found another member of his species today, they're gonna try to make eggs, it's great—because to Rodan that's no big deal, that's normal, he's got absolutely no reason not to tell his mate that he's banging another bird. Ghidorah gets nervous solely because they DON'T know what's normal here. They don't know whether monogamy or polyamory is the norm for Earth in general or Rodan in particular. Are they still a thing or is this Rodan's way of saying the relationship's run its course and he's moved on? Was he always planning to move on once someone of his own species became available? Was he expecting Ghidorah to expect that? Because they did expect that, they've always feared they were just a temporary substitute for a more desirable partner, they just didn't know if they were supposed to expect that. At which point they go "oh" and Rodan goes "'oh' what?" and they go "so is that it then?" and he goes "is what it?" and they actually communicate for thirty seconds and everything's fine. So hey the bad outcome isn't even bad. It probably just takes them a month to have that conversation while Ghidorah invents mental worst case scenarios.

3) Actually likely scenario, good outcome: Rodan comes home and Ghidorah asks where he's been all day and he goes, oh yeah, he found another member of his species today, they're gonna try to make eggs— And Ghidorah goes EXCUSE US if they're in a relationship with him and he's in a relationship with her then that means they and he and she are all part of the same flock and they are DEEPLY offended that he hasn't brought her by to meet them yet, come on, go get her, they need to know what she looks like so they don't accidentally get in a fight with her if they see her in Rodan's territory. Also they need to know where her volcano is so they can get their scent all over it.