Tulip Invents Elves

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

Hey all. I wanted to get some ideas I have been having after reading Echopraxia by Peter Watts by a community that loves its psuedoscience-fantasy stuff. If you do not know, Mr Watts came up with an idea for how to explain vampires who were banished by the cross without invoking anything with the feeling of being a miracle. You can read a write up on the science-fiction of it all here https://blindsight.bib.bz/a-brief-primer-on-vampire-biology

My concept is to apply this to elves. What follows are some notes I wrote to explain the concept to friends. But in short: What if humans but more genders and better at reproduction? Also, there are some thoughts based on imagining what would happen if, like in Watts' works, human science were to revive this lost genetic cousin.

Imagine humans who shift around within a space of multiple sexual characteristic dimensions by huffing flower pollen.

Different flower in different sequences help the special reproductive and cultural process.

If you kill out 1 species of their flowers, you kill the whole race.

So of course now they hove drug routines and stuff. Actually, it is better in some ways.

But how to explain such a strange paradigm coming about from mundane causes?

The first would produce a progesterone analog such that it effects something like
birth control for women, the other valley has a flower that tends to make people 
experience vasodilation or maybe is just cocoa since that is easier to explain as 
"the fruit that goes well with sex".

This pattern of using plants to regulate the reproductive process can then be adapted
to by selection pressure; other flowers become associated with midwifery and breast
feeding and thus start to have effects on early infant development.

Having subjugated their own sex drives, the proto-elves also just have a lot more 
mental bandwidth to get weird about rituals and start basically creating distinct 
flower-valleys so they can perform feats of flower-gathering to impress one another
in a sort of extension for demonstrating hunting or crafting prowess they already had.

Do this for 10k years with an isolated psuedo-atlantis continent (oh, there was 
supposed to be one of those off India at some point. Sure, that is real in this 
fantasy. Elves were also darker skinned than Tolkein probably imagined I guess)
and you get a weird new species that is still theoretically able to interbreed with
humans but the viability rate is not great.

Thanks to anyone who is thinking about all of this. My mind is currently trying to turn over what the other types of flowers they could be biologically symbiotic with and what they might do. Maybe the onset of puberty is able to be triggered and moderated/intensified by a set of 3 or more plants that govern the general "get bigger, get deeper voice/hairy/engorge the phallus/clitorous, get wider hips and mammaries", but I worry I am making them too much about sexual characteristics then.

I would love to hear more ideas for how such a fantastical people could use the cultivation of their environment and their bodies in anyone else's imagination.

[Dragon_Fractal]

There are two things that this immediately reminds me of: singers and Ashyn. It reminds me of the singers in that they are able to change physical characteristics in a similar manner, it reminds me of Ashyn in a sense of 'customisable magic' and it reminds me of both with regards to the sort of symbiosis that you describe. I feel that a species such as this would have something of a separation between gender and sexual characteristics, seeing as they shift as somewhat frequently and to facilitate reproduction. (On this note, can you clarify 'more genders'?) I do quite like the element of deliberately cultivating the flower strains, and I think that there are some very interesting things which could be done with this beyond regulating bodily processes.