The Duality of Mantes

> Every mantis has fluff on her antennae and spikes on her arms. You > don't know her until you've seen both. A heartlands mantis has two personas, known classically as their fluff and their spikes. Or, as arthropods with a long history of relations with mantiskind would put it, the mask and the monster. Traditionally, entomologists characterize mantes as having a hunting mood, focused and liminal, and a dancing mood, social and self-conscious. One finds the behavior of a diamantis in the dancing mood quite familiar --- it is, after all, what most interact with, the public-facing persona. In the hunting mood, however, a diamantis becomes a creature animated by singular motivations, near-mute and paradoxically aloof and alert. When a diamantis describes the experience, the words chosen are invariably those of flow and clarity. When hunting, a diamantis may effortlessly slide into a kind of hyperfocus on tasks which catch their interest, doggedly keeping at it until reaching some sort of conclusion. Should this hunt yield a prize --- if only wholly by analogy, such as an artistic creation or a solved puzzle --- the hunter will be overcome with by a kind of overflowing pride, urging them to show off the fruit of their work. Thus, they are driven to seek out other diamantes for accolades, and they transform from hunter to dancer. In the dancing mood, a diamantis becomes themselves again, and they are able to look upon other diamantes and feel kinship, recognizing them as more than objects to be analyzed with regard to their hunt. For all its virtues, the hunting mood is, after all, not without tradeoffs. It's only when back in the dancing mood that a diamantis regains a sense of empathy, social modeling, indeed even a sense of self entirely. (All, arguably, impediments for the singular focus of the hunt.) The greatest virtue of the dancing mood is the capacity for abstract thought. When hunting, diamantes report that it feels as though conscious understanding retreats away, the boundaries of the world falling down, until all they experience is a stream of immediate sensory experience, to which they marshal only intuitive reactions. At an extreme, some diamantes will return to the dancing mood as if awakening from a fugue state. They have no memory of what their hunt had entailed. (Indeed, this is the folk etymology for why it's called the dancing mood. Not for the analogy that talking is like dancing, but for the ritual of reenactment: traditionally, a dancer may express their hunt through a kind of dance to relive and remember their hunt --- though such lyrical dance is, to many, primitive and embarrassing.) As you can imagine, talking to a hunting diamantes so often results in, if not silence outright, then blunt and brusque responses. They struggle with the abstractions of language, unable to express their clarity of thought in words, and likewise struggle with the complexities of etiquette, unable and uncaring to be proper. This has a ramification: the anxiety of what one might do without inhibition and consideration is enough to keep a diamantis in the dancing mood --- trying to hunt around another diamantes, especially ones you don't know well, is embarrassing, inducing a kind of performance anxiety. Conversely, a willingness to hunt with another diamantis is intimate, a sign of trust. What defines the dancing mood, and distinguishes mantes from other noubugs, is ephemerality. It's fleeting, just like the hunting mood, but lasts shorter still. Dancing is a brief exercise; rare is the mantis with any patience for talking. It's a species-wide expectation that socialization is draining, that everyone needs time in private to recharge. Indeed, long sustained social interaction is, if anything, felt as threat to a diamantis. You wouldn't be dancing for this long, one might think unconsciously, so the other only conclusion to draw is that you aren't dancing --- you're hunting. Hunting me. It's not a misplaced worry. Diamantes can hunt many things, and the hunting mood's difficulties with abstraction and social interaction are matters of skill and it being ill-suited to task --- not impossibility. A diamantes who hunts other diamantes as they dance is dangerous, a defector who wouldn't have qualms exploiting others. For this reason, interaction among mantes tends to grow ritualized, convoluted in ways that trip up hunting mantes or yank them out of the mood. This may be the very reason why social interaction is so draining for mantes. When a mantis is drained, they retreat to hobbies. Every diamantis has a ravin, some activity they've latched onto as a hunting trigger, something engaging that draws them trance-like into the mood whenever they need the release of striving and seizing a new prize. You can see how this forms a loop, a cycle mantes continuously live through. Hunt for a prize and feel pride, show off the prize in dance and feel drained, retreat to the comfort of another hunt. When it comes to hobbies, an odd consequence of their duality is that diamantes have much sharper divide between action and drama in their media than other bugs. Thinking about exciting action or special problem-solving pulls a diamantis into the hunting mood. A hunter won't really care for subtle story telling; they just want to crunch of skills proven and winners decided. Meanwhile, while a dancer will enjoy very involved and fluffy storytelling, they won't tend to enjoy complex rules or involved action as much. Anything that wants to incorporate both must space them far apart, or emphasize only one, or suffer being less popular and accessible to diamantes. This raises an question: if what a diamantis wants is so contingent on their mood, how do other diamantes identify which state another is currently in? The first place to look is the labrum, the upper 'lip' that falls over a diamantis's mandibles. When it is raised, exposing the mandibles, the diamantis is very likely to be hunting. Another place to look is the antennae. If the hairs have stood up just enough to give the antennae a more 'floofed out' look, that diamantis is likely dancing, especially if the antennae are bent into curves or loose spirals. Gently curled antennae are a cue for a relaxed state, while straightened antennae are serious, attentive, on edge. (Note that when the antennae stand up fully, making the antennae look as big as they can, that often means surprise and agitation.) A third place to look is the raptorials. A diamantis exposes their foreleg spines when hunting, and it is very rare for a diamantis to open their forelegs when dancing; doing so is taken as threat signal. Diamantes themselves can often read each others' mood state with a look in the eye; but this is largely based on nonvisual sensory cues (facets dilate and the dewdrop pupil-lenses change shape; but one component is a very minor, innate feat of nouprojection). Finally, the last general clue as to a mantid's state is their scent. Dancing mantes emit a particular pheromone, often sweet, floral or otherwise inviting (though varying greatly depending on the bug), while hunting mantes (for obvious reasons) have no characteristic scent, and emit far fewer pheromones. Obviously, the bimodality of hunting and dancing do not account for the wide variety of diamantis emotions and mindsets, or even explain most of it. But any treatment of diamantis emotions must remain very aware of the divide, because what may be one emotion in other bugs can manifest very differently between the two moods. Consider the very simple, 'primal' emotions of anger and aggression. When a dancing mantis is threatened, challenged, or agitated, the result is termed the push or pull response. You might imagine this as a relative of classic fight or flight. For a mantis, this is a complex mixture, with elements of anger, fear and disgust. When faced with something infuriating, frightening, or noxious, a mantis can either push it back, or pull themselves away from it. A diamantis giving the push response poses in threat display, hissing, unfurling their antennae big and straight, and angling their forelegs so the bright contrasting patterns on their the inner side show. If they have wings, their wings unfurl and reveal the eyespots. In sum, they look intimidating. When a pushing mantis is particularly incensed, they may attack --- said "attack" being punching or pushing with the tarsi, without using the arm-spines. Even in the grip of this cousin of rage, a dancing mantis isn't trying to kill, and their natural weapons remain sheathed. Contrast this with a hunting mantid's response. A hunting mantid faced with a threat tightens into danger stillness. It's the look of a diamantis posed in patient ambush, a spring coiled tight. A diamantis can leap twice their body length and unerringly close their raptorial vise around their target; a diamantis gone danger-still is unknown seconds away from doing this. Ultimately, the push response is a way of asserting dominance, and there's little dominance to be had over a corpse. When a diamantis feels truly threatened and they really wants to harm, their antennae fold up tight and protected, and stand waiting as silent and unmoving as death for the chance to chance to strike and kill. Or consider sadness and despair, what many diamantis cultures consider merely an impotent subtype of rage. A despairing diamantis in the dancing mood might cry and whine, seek comfort and guidance from others of its kind. The closest a hunting mantis feels to this can only be seen as a species of frustration or confusion, and the hunter seeks only private rumination, turning the problem over in their head. Attempts to help a hunter in such a state might be met with aggression, a lashing out; almost certainly, they won't be appreciated. Indeed, many languages have particular words for such a state, particularly when such a state persists for a spell. Mos