I mean depending on the edition of D&D.
Content Warning: I talk about the reproduction of aliens and monsters!
If you’re not familiar with what the Asari are, they’re a culture of blue aliens from the Mass Effect universe.They’re famously monogendered, which meant in the shocking days of 2007 meant that you could have a romance with one that would work if you were a dude or a lady. Now setting aside that aliens and humans fucking is an entire thing in science fiction with an elaborate history of how we might imagine people can interface and it’s an interesting assumption about what people can or can’t do to get smoochy. They’re basically just one of your Discount Space Lesbians, you know, a queer representation you can literally dehumanise.
Meanwhile Beholders are a classic piece of D&D Brand Product, which is essentially a floating gun platform that hates you, a magically made impossible entity that despises everything and lives in dungeons trying to stop you, the player, from getting cool stuff. Beholders are kind of hilarious nonsense that absolutely feels like it came into existence visual-design first, and they are ugly.
Don’t get me wrong I bet I could find a friend who low key has a fetish for Beholders.
Anyway, I’m talking about their reproductive systems but this talk is isolated to the new, general ‘now’ of 2022 Beholder lore. Because it’s kinda flexible – back in 3rd edition D&D, an attempt was made to make the Beholder work like an actual creature made of meat and not a floating hazard zone with a magical eye that turned off magical effects, and that beholder, they reproduced by growing a womb in the back of their mouth, which they then had to chew out of their own mouth and spit onto the ground before abandoning it in disgust at what they’d done. That seems reasonable to me in the context.
Setting aside that fifteen-year-old book idea that nobody seemed to adopt, in the current now is that both of these cultures operate on making a biological process that creates an offspring works through a form of psychic templating.
If you weren’t familiar, the way that the Asari reproduce works without actual biological compatibility. Oh sure, they do like, ‘sex things’, as represented by the best formed old-style 3d modelling touching one another, mushing up but also not deforming because that kind of dynamic is very challenging to animate cheaply. But the actual thing they do for reproducing is that they take a psychic image of their partner, and add that psychic image with themselves, then they imprint that on their own egg which starts to grow based on that. Like, they already exist and work by imprinting their psychic image on their children, when it’s just Asari and this just happens to mean that they can reproduce with anyone who isn’t an Asari without any kind of organic compatability, and also makes sure that what they reproduce is an Asari, you know, for ease of modelling.
The way Beholders reproduce is kind of the same thing: They have a dream, and that dream results in the formation of a beholder out of the dream stuff. Note that Beholders reproduce ‘asexually’ in that they do not have sex with one another, but that they form these dreams that let them create offspring through their experiences. Often, this is a result of two Beholders, interpreted as male and female by idiot humans watching them, having a huge angry fight, then one wanders off and dreams about it – essentially, templating the person they just had a big fight with as their child.
Anyway, point is that Beholders and Asari reproduce the same way, by having a really good idea of the person they’re thinking about, it’s just that Asari like you and Beholders hate you.
From this we can extrapolate that Beholders are a kind of Homestuck.