u/jakobsestate

streamers can have opinions about the story all they please but they shouldn't be allowed to say this shit where the devs can hear, like congratulations you're gonna make them alienate the other half of their fanbase at 1000x the speed they're doing now

Content warning: nerdy biology-speak, mild to moderate BL4 spoilers, intersex conditions, human sex/gender and all that messy stuff. Please don't be a clown in the comments or I'll block you.

...is no fault of their own. It's the fault of Gearbox and their love for not elaborating on anything ever.

See, only women can be sirens. The problem is that for all the stupid right-wing memes about what is a woman, "woman" (and "man" for that matter) is in fact an arbitrary human-constructed designation for a whole bunch of different traits both biological and social (chromosomes, external and internal anatomy, brain structure, hormonal balance, clothing, mannerisms, I can go on and on and on). Much like "fish", if you use a very strict or specific definition of that designation, you end up either excluding a lot of stuff which, intuitively and/or scientifically, should be included and/or you end up with a whole assload of messy implications.

And there is no fucking way that ethereal space magic spirits (there is no official name for the "entities" that give sirens their powers, but they are clearly at least separate beings considering they can be transferred between hosts or even imprisoned in a specific location) from another dimension where time isn't real would give a shit about something so incredibly human and subjective.

So a question immediately arises: what exactly does the siren power attach to?

Hormones are right out. Those can change drastically over the course of a person's life, even without any sort of outside intervention (hello, menopause), and siren powers clearly can't detach from the host before death. Same goes for external or internal anatomy. Social aspects like gender roles would likely be entirely irrelevant to, again, a space magic spirit from another dimension.

As a result of the above, two theories have emerged (at least on "my" side of the fandom):

1. It goes by chromosomes. XX only, XY (and presumably XYY, XXY, X0 and all the other chromosomal variants) is right out. This excludes trans women, as well as phenotypical women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, campomelic dysplasia, Turner or Swyer Syndrome, but includes trans men and phenotypical men with XX testicular DSD. It's also entirely unclear how this could possibly work with a chimeric XX/XY person or someone using a Quick-Change to transition (canonically, they rewrite your entire genome when used).
2. It goes by gender identity. This includes trans women but excludes trans men. However, this one arguably runs into issues even faster than the chromosome proposal, since there's so many gender identities that don't neatly fit "woman" or "man": nonbinary (outside of the binary entirely), bigender (both woman and man at the same time), demigirl (woman, but only partially), genderfluid (gender identity is in constant shift). And don't get me started on eggs (trans people who haven't realized it yet).

And it is those theories that bring me back to the Calypso twins, because hoo boy.

Canonically, they are conjoined twins. Conjoined twins are always identical twins, i.e. they have the same DNA, because they're made when a fertilized egg splits in half and grows from there. It's therefore impossible for them to have different sex chromosomes unless the zygote they split from was an XXY (Kinefelter syndrome), which is extremely rare and results in both twins being intersex in some way, with one of the few known cases having both of them be infertile and show mosaicism in their cells which, like I've said above, raises questions.

Therefore, one of them has to be transgender. The problem is that

1. we have no reasons to suspect either of them to be cis or trans outside of this siren bullshit,
2. depending on the choice of which twin is trans, we will be following one of the two big theories, and as I said above, both have their issues,
3. BL3 is not exactly shy about its trans characters. If the Calypsos were genuinely meant to be trans, then we would be told about it.

"But Nikolai!" I hear you say. "They're conjoined because Tyreen leeched Troy in the womb, they're not identical!"

Well, if that is true, then that brings us its own richly controversial and messed up question: if a siren power can inhabit an unborn fetus, where do we draw the line? Could a blastocyst be a siren? A freshly fertilized zygote (Siren farm full of trillions of XX fertilized human zygotes anyone? the law of big numbers' on our side!)? After all, it's got XX chromosomes (and presumably this is the theory people that say stuff like this subscribe to). Could a siren power attach itself to an XX embryo that's slated to be miscarried anyways due to a fatal mutation?

And of course this doesn't resolve the core question at all, merely avoids it for the Calypso twins specifically!

"But Nikolai, it's magic!" I hear you say. "Why should you care?"

Because I want to. Because I care about the lore of this series and it's actually kinda fun to dissect it like this, even if the answers are nowhere to be found.

Anyways, rant over. I hope whoever thought up that "Steele was a sleeper siren" thing always has their pillow warm on both sides.

• We know that Sirens draw their power from the Phase
• We know that Eridium is reactive with phase energy and that Sirens can interact with Eridian technology
• Thus, the Eridians knew the Phase existed
• The Phase exists outside of time, being inside allows you to see every timeline at once, every outcome of every decision
• However, you can only see these outcomes, not travel to them (within the Phase that is)
• We know that the Guardians left behind by the Eridians were assigned some sort of specific course of events to enforce at any cost
• There's at least one Guardian whose entire schtick was showing the "future", most likely by means of the Phase, to people in order to make them do what it wanted them to do
• In conclusion, it's extremely probable if not near-certain, that the Eridians saw an outcome in the Phase that they liked and proceeded to enforce it on all of existence in an authoritarian manner (i.e. the Course the Seer talks about) instead of, idk, allowing humanity to choose their own destiny, and that is evil regardless of how you cut it
• The War will most likely be over the Eridians' and Guardians' right to perpetuate this chronology enforcement bullshit

get your husband new prosthetics NOW they're rusty and worn down as shit

if we see hammerlock again and he's not rockin those fancy ass jakobs brand prostheses i will be so fucking mad

they're all lame and boring and overdone!!!!

give me a pen cultivator. a cookpot cultivator. wrench cultivator. musical instrument cultivator. math cultivator. recursive fractal cultivator. quantum physics cultivator. i can go on

i love the mod conceptually but the actual uses of the namesake aura are extremely fucking limited. i lowkirkenuinely want to make an addon for it that gives it more uses but i kinda dont know what sorts of uses that wouldnt just be copying botania or w/e. so i ask you. if youve played natures aura. what do you wish you could do using aura