synkar’s notes:
0: why do oankali not just have the dinso/akjai/thoat divide for humans too? its literally perfect symmetry then and they avoid the greatest asymmetry. ok not from their pov, they dont have art and only see reproduction as destiny as central to everything so of course thats their tenant principle, they are fully against the death drive and only see life drive. but the point is, if they kept up that divide (if the author wrote it in that way) would that actually prevent them from trading?
because by leaving other alien species to develop seperately, they dont make full use of their characteristics and never actually are able to homogenize everything, but instead make a single fully schizophrenic creature that may not necessarily be superior to everything - assuming that the akjai is essentially seen as superior precisely because its the only creature that hasnt been mutated, meaning its seen as a human white person or a default zero mode of being in the long future where they colonize everything?
in a certain sense theyd risk producing more cosmic traders, which would de-universalize their trading standpoint, but this already assumes there arent other trading creatures elsewhere in the world, meaning, is it even universizable to begin with? on another hand, it could also mean that, if they didnt do this to humans and kept the original species, it could be influenced by the oankali mythos to a) become traders themselves or b) resisting becoming traders but keep mutating themselves, which actually only gives future resources to oankali., so in a certain sense, its actually a conflict between a) and b) for them, but they dont seem to act this way, so have they not considered it, or have they calculated it as too risky?
however, theres no clearly theological through-line here on whether the risk of inspiring other species to trade if they allow that species toa lso have dinsos is risky to begin with, already cosmically irrelevant or simply unsure of the circumstances and therefore unworthy of consideration? or, the earlier hypothesis of them just being homogenous fascists. creating a human dinso actually doesnt make reproduction more confusing for them, because the whole point of oankali is to merge and expand their transformative potential by banking on existing evolutionary-genomic creativity, not by reversing it by pressuring it into becoming a "base oankali"
but very much by removing anything essentializing about oankali other than a) base logic of hivemindism b) base logic of reproductive (but not genetic) homogeneity c) base mechanistic convergence logics. even if somehow the human dinsos decided to themselves become oankali-type species, the thing about that is that they may not even decide to be as consensually unethical (the oankali are probabilistic utilitarians but theyre still "grabby" the same way people are, just in the opposite end - towards balance and harmony instead of annihilation) which means they may not "face" oanakali tradeship monarchies to begin with, it may just cause asymmetrical reproductive-trading patterns. the point of this is that, theres a way to envision oankali themselves as both a) non hierarchical homogenizers b) non homogenizing hierarchically-oriented species c) convergent-forced co-evolution itself as both non homogenizing and non hierarchical.
alternatively, oankali literally could be philosophically horizontal and not actually care about future rivals or future transformative trading possibilities, literally just digesting the whole world into a single double-homogeneity between their own gene and that same gene mutated with everything else simply for the fuck of their principles. but if their reasoning capabilities and intelligence is in a certain way higher than humans this could suggest otherwise, however them not having art and rarely conflict is suggestive of a certain pathological limit here. however they use advanced reason, so they must have considered this possibility, especially since humans wouldve had intellectual influence on them, not even speaking of the thousands of other species they could be doing this to, who would be inspired to think of these alternatives as one of their first encounters with them?
also maybe they themselves dont surpress the death drive as much as they dont want it to proliferate to the point where it threatens their own trade systems, or maybe they actually have a victimizer-vindicator logic, once a species like a human reaches the point of almost complete self destruction, only then do they not allow that heterogeneity to exist, essentially ridding the world of only those species that refuse the very point of progress, or that are thought to resist it in such a way that makes no sense for the total logic of reproduction, which is the total logic of everything we know itself - meaning they only resist the point-limit of negativity, not its entire existence, at least in other species if not themselves.
the thing is, they do care about heterogenity in species right? like the human oankali isnt going to ever reach the point of an akjai in the distant future, like their species isnt attempting a full akjaization obviously since they carry the akjai away from humans, thats the whole point of this slow mutation situation, the existing akjai are already "perfect" to them in a relative way. every new species interaction is an oankali-alien hybrid, and thats where this problem ends, as far as i know.
the oankali are schizophrenic because they permit total heterogenity within other species-forms as long as they accept reproductive truth as a base, which is insured by the 50% oankali genetic mutation, and as long as they themselves preserve the ability to keep organizing this split. its possible that oankali exist so that they can threaten their rival, an anti-oankali that forces itself into species but instead of enabling reproductive multiplicity selectively (living eugenics like oankali) theyre a living death-virus, replicating themselves as dead copies of themselves that explicitly serve to push species into self-deletion. the oankali could exist as a latent reaction to this system, multiplying themselves forward so they can assure a) that all constructs evade this species in contact-points by being maximally opposed to its logic of annihilation b) making sure that all species already prone to self-annihilating tendencies have their stakes reduced, reducing the total probability of this exponent self-reproducing vastly out of order.
advanced cosmological theory: what if oankali themselves are the first species-being to ever exist in the entire universe, and proliferate themselves precisely because their divine origin isnt just reproductively-intense but motivationally-potent? all asteroid drops of life-creating materials are derived and fragmented forms of oankali genetics, that have dispersed and grown mutative-cancerous logics to varying degrees. the oankali isnt just travelling to prevent species from annihilation, but quite literally patches them up, partially fixes them to the very base drive of all life itself.
the rival thanatos species is the most proliferating on the other side, it has coexisted with itself in its annihilatory tendencies to the most perfect extent yet, it has been consistent in its logic, most brutal in its methods but most survivable out of its rival mutative neighbours, which is why its carrier logic is most viral, the same way the oankali has had the most time to virally spread their own logic, theyve existed longest and have therefore had most time to not only realize but treat the problem, also adding on top of their destiny logic the very idea that they are the progenitors, therefore nautrally most honored to carry this task?
they may even feel the need to entirely annihilate species similar to oankali (those that have accidentally carried reproductive-destiny-trader logics themselves) precisely because they want to preserve a specific type of essential and originary destiny-logic, not just any heterogenous immunity whatsoever? actually, they don't kill off oankali-type creatures far away, only in clusters where they spawn close to or inside of oankali territory. its not worth it for them from a utilitarian pov to do this.
but, the thing about this is that, certain non-original oankali mutative alien convergence species, especially near the peripheries or newly conquered zones, do develop some forms of ideologies and other alien behaviors humans cant even speculate on, precisely becuase of the way the oankali interacts with that alien's cultural spheres - as butler notes, they do show initiation into art/music etc unlike the akjai) and essentially what happens is they do eliminate oankali-type species, although akjai themselves never do this, since oankali-congenitors do have ideologies, meaning the inconsistency remains, and they come back to concepts of divinity. the ratio of a split between self-repression self-hatred when in comparison to akjai however itself is far lower, but also present, depending on the host alien.