On the Orville, are the moclans just extremely sexually repressed rather than naturally homosexual

Cafe Society
1

Originally they were presented as a society where females were rare and heterosexuality was rare.

But looking at bortis’s life

His child was born a female
His mate was born a female
One of his ex-boyfriends was heterosexual
All of which should be extremely rare. But in Bortis’s own life thats at least 3 things that should be extremely rare. They said a female is only born once every 75 years. I wonder if that is common in moclan society, where pretty much everyone knows someone who is heterosexual, or born a female, etc. but nobody talks about it.

So is Moclan society one where heterosexuality and being born female is actually fairly common, but the society is so repressed that they lie to themselves and each other about it?

Is it supposed to be like modern society 100 years ago where gay people were everywhere, but we just pretended it wasn’t happening?

2

I’m not sure it’s at all appropriate to give the Moclans labels like “male” and “female”. Frankly, I think the show missed a great opportunity to mock gender conventions by having the reveal be that humans only call (most) Moclans “male” because the Moclans they encountered had some very superficial resemblances to human males, and the Moclans just played along out of politeness. Their undesirable gender (which they call “female”, just following the human convention that if it’s not male, it must be female) should have very clearly not borne any similarity to human females, and the one example we’ve seen should not have been played by a female actress.

3

You’re asking too much of a guy who’s really only good at writing dumb jokes.

4

Clearly, Seth and the other writers, found The Outcast episode of ST:NG to be ham-fisted and unsatisfying, of whatever premise it wanted to have. Most people would agree. I guess, the plan is to run the same premise into the ground on The Orville, to let us all know gender dichotomy is too complex for simple explanations.

For me, I just watch Moclan sexuality as “Oh, this again …”:rolleyes:

Kay, see, in real-life Earth, we define females as living thing that makes large, non-moving genetic contributor, and males as making smaller, moving, genetic contributor. If the gametes don’t move, or are the same size, we call them + / -. Bortas lays eggs. Bortas is female, by our definition.

OK, some Moclans are born with some congenital problem that makes the standard mating process incompatible. They corrected that, in Klyden’s case, and in Toba’s case. The writers all felt like calling that “born female” but it might as well have been the same as Bender on Futurama losing his antenna. Its important to him for reasons he can’t be bothered to explain, but not functional, as gender, just for signal reception/jamming. So I guess we all laugh, in spite of ourselves, or are horrified, because. Seriously, when the professor clips off Benders antenna, and hammers breasts into Bender’s frame, were we supposed to be horrified? And were we?

Furthermore, their behavior clearly conforms to stereotypical Earth gender roles. Klyden is frustrated, and turning to musical theater, overeating and housekeeping nitpicking, like a 50’s human housewife. He’s male, but was it because he was born female?

Bortas behaves like a stereotypical Earth male, he’s cold and distant, lax in housekeeping, revels in porn. And he’s a strict disciplinarian to Toba (“Eat your food, or you will die.” No kidding Toba, you grew to young childhood in the off-season, you better keep eating to maintain that metabolic level.) They made a big deal about Bortas mediating while hatching Toba. Ok, maybe they don’t do stereotypical human mother attachment. But what was the mediation? “Toba, I will kick you ass if you mouth off one more time.” I guess Borats is the dad who can truly say, “I bought you into this world, and I can take you out.” Was Bortas just mulling over angry sayings while sitting there naked on the egg?

Heck, the first joke they make, is that they’re all male, and no one should complain about the toilet seat. When that is exactly what Klyden complains about Bortas, leaving his clothes around, right before he tries to divorce him, knife to the chest method.

Seriously, with Ed and Kelly, on-again off again, I really want to see some happiness here. Klyden and Bortas’s first date was holodeck wargaming, they should reconnect over that. There, does that make them male? 'Cause girls don’t online game? Is that what we want to say? Did Gamergate teach us nothing?

5

I suppose arguably the Moclans display stereotypical male gender (at least as depicted in westernized human cultures) but not biologically male sex.

6

Another thing they didn’t think through. If Bortas is female and Kylden is male what exactly is the Moclan writer they encounter? If Moclan culture is so survival oriented the discrimination you see would would have made more sense if the writer had no gender. What use is someone who contributes nothing to the Moclan population? Similarly the Moclan engineer, by being attracted to non Moclans would have been guilty of not contributing to the Moclan population.

7

sounds like someone had the idea "what if all male species could have kids " and then equated it on a lbgt spectrum … where some are “butch” some are more fem ……

8

This is the weird thing about Orville; every thread seems to feature several people with some kind of grudge against Mackf. And the most ridiculous online reviewers (who give the show 10% or less) also mention him prominently.

Even if I thought family guy was that bad, what’s the problem judging Orville on its own merits?

9

The arbitrariness of the Moclan culture annoys me as it betrays lazy writing. I’d’ve been okay if the engineer character had committed suicide but suddenly THAT’S the worst sin in Moclan culture, even more so than liking females? It’s like some of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics stories with the arbitrary and unbreakable character rules, only dumb.

10

The moclans seem to be a rip off of the klingons. They are a physically strong warrior culture. But I guess to spice things up, they made them homosexual (something that warriors would probably consider weak). Also the Klingons were pro suicide.

I guess the moclans are a mix of Klingons and religious extremists. Its actually an interesting culture.

11

But in this case, the taboo against suicide is not explained or justified in any way, we’re just told out of the blue “Yeah, suicide? That’s like really really really bad; the worst, even,” just for the purposes of this one episode. It’s just the introduction of an arbitrary constraint.

Well, plus the episode is trying to suggest that there’s some kind of universal “female” sexual configuration that is compatible with some kind of universal “male” sexual configuration, hence the engineer (whose name I forget) might be attracted to any female of any species. That’s not even true of all the species on Earth but maybe like Star Trek (generally), there an assumption that each inhabited planet will produce one dominant space-faring species that will be roughly humanoid in configuration and sexually dimorphic in very specific ways. Even the ones that aren’t humanoid will still conform in some ways, hence the “male”-voiced gelatinous character finds human females attractive. Why only females? I dunno, audience comfort or something.

12

We haven’t been given a backstory on the Moclan sex thing but, really, it’s not important. It just serves as a vehicle to explore some interesting stories.

IMHO, the two episodes dealing with the Moclan single-sex thing are two of the series’ best episodes. Both left the viewer with a “well, that didn’t turn out the cool, tidy way I wanted” feeling. MacFarlane and company present a difficult situation where Moclan culture doesn’t line up with the liberal, progressive culture he’s written into the human-dominated Union, and he provides no easy solutions for you. It’s good TV.

One can fanwank any number of plausible reasons for why the Moclans are the way they are but it would add nothing to the story.

13

I would like for the human biologists and linguists to figure this out.

14

Perhaps having females tends to be an inherited condition. It is among humans.

15

I might be out in left (heh) field here, but I actually think it’s an attempt to shine a light on today’s liberal/conservative divide by showing the clash of (by our standards) highly liberal human society and an *extremely *conservative alien society with a lot of cultural baggage about tradition and its importance w.r.t. survival on a hostile planet, and the role of conformity within that.

From the Mochlan perspective, tradition and conformity are THE most important virtues- they’re what allowed them to survive and thrive on their harsh planet. That’s why they “fix” Toba and Klyden, and why Locar’s suicide was decried- not because it was sad, but because it was selfish.

And the Union crew has to struggle with this, because they’ve been brought up in a more tolerant, liberal culture, and they struggle with just deciding that the Mochlans are flat-out wrong, as that would also be intolerant.

At least that’s how I interpreted it.

16

I’m judging Orville on its own merits. The four episodes of season one I watched before I gave up on it were bad jokes and super obvious SciFi-tropes combined with such hamfisted social commentary I couldn’t figure if they were trying to parody “SciFi with a moral” or were just very bad at it.

It’s not that it’s completely unwatchable or that I fault people for enjoying it, but it is also quite obviously written on the principle of cramming in anything Seth thinks is cool. And although the genre isn’t known for iron clad plots and rock solid science, Orville is particularly bad, and trying to make sense of it is a fools errand, unless you make sense of it by answering “I expect Seth that it sounded cool”, to every question about inconsistencies.

17

Reminds me of an X-Rated Star Trek parody I saw awhile back where some guy was enjoying Odo’s sexual exploits but was embarrassed about it. Somehow I doubt we’ll ever see a TV show that explores situations like this though.

18

“And then I expanded the front of my left pseudopod, while simultaneously expanding the back of my right one…”

19

I gotta admit, I’d like to see a science fiction episode where the alien species has some weird ritual or practice that superficially appears to be an exaggerated version of some human prejudice, but then it turns out there is a very very good reason for the aliens to practice what they do as revealed in the third act when the allegedly oppressed race or gender or whatever turns out to be barely controllable savages or something who are not remotely interested in being “liberated” by humans or anyone else.

20

I half think that’s what we’re getting with the Mochlans already; their society seems to value collective virtues a whole lot more than the rest of the Union. For example, Locar’s suicide was explained as being so terrible by Bortas, not because it was unfortunate, or because there was always another option, but because it was fundamentally selfish- he had talents that he could have used to better Mochlas, and he squandered them for his own selfish purposes. Same thing with conformity- the iconoclasts and nonconformists are seen as threats because they disrupt the unity that at least according to their internal mythology, kept them alive and thriving in the face of their harsh world.

I think maybe the writers could do well by the Mochlans to give us an episode to show us just HOW horrible and arduous the Mochlan history and experience was, and maybe WHY this stuff is so important to them. Assuming that is, that it’s not just a political ideology imposed on everyone by a bunch of assholes.