Anup

Writing for Anup

When writing for anup, refer to the pinned species sheet. For everything else, please keep the following facts in mind.

Touching with paws

• The anup reflexively avoid using their hands (paws) to touch other living beings. This taboo is cultural, not instinctual, and in a strict sense only applies to touching, using their spans for proxies. However, many anup will expand this to not gesturing with empty paws at all.
• Touching anything other than living beings is perfectly fine (but feel free to have some anup feel squeamish about this, too).
• Anup can touch with their hands while in private (or in public if they're kinky), and the gesture is seen as intimate all on its own.
• There is no social penalty for touching another anup by accident or on purpose so long as the touch is brief and infrequent, but it will likely make other anup uncomfortable. If it is too frequent, the anup may end up being shunned and they are pressured into undergoing a ritual cleansing to atone.
• The taboo against touch arose from a devastating plague several hundred years ago, but most anup don't take this as the Real Reason for the taboo. Anup have a tendency to follow tradition just because it's tradition, even if it's highly inconvenient.
• That said, anup are not a monolith. There are pockets of more progressive anup who are much less restrictive about touching with their paws, though they will likely still come across as very reserved to other species.

Sexuality

• While anup are stereotyped as ascetic, they are actually not. Anup rituals may involve sexual elements (with or without hand-touching). Anup have few issues with sleeping with others or getting romantically involved outside of their pairbonding. One's mate could still take interest/concern in another's partners but rarely for reasons of jealousy.
• The reason for the stereotype is because anup do not talk about this sort of thing openly, and sex of this nature is almost entirely restricted to one-on-one pairings.

Total Awe

• Anup derive a kind of fascination from taking in sights of grandeur. This fascination is instinctual.
• The effect of this fascination is similar to a crush. The anup may find themselves preoccupied with the thought, forget to eat, feel embarrassed about the kinds of things they find awe-striking, etc. The act of actually taking in the sight is experienced as calming, energizing, and/or captivating. When an anup gets used to a sight of grandeur (such as the view of the city they live in) they will get less preoccupied but still derive great comfort from it.

Religion

• The krakun took over as the center of the anup religion centuries ago. In practice, this doesn't mean much in terms of the religion's rituals. Krakun are treated as gods; cults following specific krakun have their own ideas and practices around them which the krakun may or may not deliberately cultivate. But krakun rarely bother with micromanaging the details of anup's day-to-day activities--they are only really concerned with receiving tribute.
• Anup rituals involve mysteries, drug use, sex, blood sacrifice, and so on. Despite anup proclivity toward tradition, these rituals are not always set in stone and are frequently adjusted by the priests or the community depending on their needs.
• Cosmology: life is one of a series of lives in sequence, one from which anup have come and the next into which (good) anup will ascend. Most anup do not consider non-anup to be included in this incarnation cycle--all other species (even gods) are merely a feature of this world.

Military

• The anup military is considered one of the most fearsome in the galaxy. However, this does not necessarily carry over into the effectiveness of slave forces.
• The anup military itself is considered to be in alliance with the krakun. Other species assume, much like their own predicaments, this means that the krakun control the military directly and pretend it's an alliance, but in practice this is actually what happens. The anup military's independence from krakun command is in a large portion what keeps them effective and allows them a lot of leverage over the krakun. The fact that krakun are gods is not a point of intimidation for admirals and generals.
• Because of their discipline and willingness to (mostly) cooperate with krakun, anup slaves can be sold at a high premium (hundreds of golds) and due to the cost, most are pressed into military service/security forces under direct krakun authority. However, anup slaves are significantly less effective than free anup. After all, the ones who were delivered into slavery tend to be the less disciplined in general.