“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, spoken of classically as their fluff and their spikes. Or, as arthropod cultures with a long history of nasty relations with mantidkind would put it, the mask and the monster.
Traditionally, entomologists characterize mantids as having a hunting mood, focused and liminal, and a dancing mood, social and self-conscious. One finds the behavior of a diamantid in the dancing mood quite familiar — it is, after all, what most interact with, the public-facing persona.
In the hunting mood, however, a diamantid becomes a creature animated by singular motivations, near-mute and paradoxically aloof and alert. When a diamantid describes the experience, the words chosen are invariably those of flow and clarity. When hunting, a diamantid 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 diamantids for accolades, and they transform from hunter to dancer.
In the dancing mood, a diamantid becomes themselves again, and they are able to look upon other diamantids 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 back in the dancing mood that a diamantid 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, diamantids 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 diamantids 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 diamantids 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 language, 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 diamantid in the dancing mood — trying to hunt around another diamantids, especially ones you don’t know well, is embarrassing, inducing a kind of performance anxiety. Conversely, a willingness to hunt with another diamantid is intimate, a sign of trust.
What defines the dancing mood, and distinguishes mantids 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 diamantid. 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. Diamantids 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 diamantids who hunts other diamantids as they dance is dangerous, a defector who wouldn’t have qualms exploiting others.
For this reason, interaction among mantids tends to grow ritualized, convoluted in ways that trip up hunting mantids or yank them out of the mood. This may be the very reason why social interaction is so draining for mantids.
When a mantis is drained, they retreat to hobbies. Every diamantid has 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 mantids 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 diamantids have much sharper divide between action and drama in their media than other bugs. Thinking about exciting action or special problem-solving pulls a diamantid 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 diamantids.)
This raises an question: if what a diamantid wants is so contingent on their mood, how do other diamantids identify which state another is currently in?
The first place to look is the labrum, the upper ‘lip’ that falls over a diamantid’s mandibles. When it is raised, exposing the mandibles, the diamantid 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 diamantid 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 fulling, making the antennae look as big as they can, that often means surprise and agitation.)
A third place to look is the raptorials. A diamantid exposes their foreleg spines when hunting, and it is very rare for a diamantid to open their forelegs when dancing; doing so is taken as threat signal.
Diamantids themselves can often read each others’ mood state with a look in the eye; but this is largely based on nonvisual sensory cues (widely believed to be a very minor, innate feat of nouprojection).
Finally, the last general clue as to a mantid’s state is their scent. Dancing mantids emit a particular pheromone, often sweet, floral or otherwise inviting (thoughvarying greatly depending on the bug), while hunting mantids (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 diamantid emotions and mindsets, or even explain most of it. But any treatment of diamantid 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 diamantid 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 diamantid posed in patience ambush, a spring coiled tight. A diamantid can leap twice their body length and unerringly close their raptorial vise around their target; a diamantid 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 diamantid 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 diamantid cultures consider merely an impotent subtype of rage. A despairing diamantid 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. Most often it’s translated as blocked, (as of “feeling blocked”), or hunter’s block.
It comes about when a diamantid attempts a hunt and meets only with failure, or if they present their hunt’s prize and are criticized, rather than receiving the honor they expect. Contemplative, the hunter repeatedly cycles through what if scenarios, models out alternate paths, trying to diagnose and understand what went wrong, and how they can avoid it happening again. Some entomologists argue this is merely ordinary frustration, anxious rumination or even depression as seen in other bugs, but diamantid cultures invariably distinguish it with a special word. Notably, the mindset is productive, and bears the hunting mood’s characteristic selflessness; hunter’s block is not self-flagellation, not berating oneself over mistakes; the focus is on the situation rather than the self. (This is not to say that mantids aren’t capable of moping around, they are; but that is the domain of the dancing mood.)
There are other emotions even more specific to mantids, becoming difficult to fully translate.
One is solitude hunger, or more literally, the need to hunt alone. This comes about, not merely out of the kind of exhaustion that might have one say, “I need some time to myself”. No, solitude hunger is really a cousin of envy, or inspiration, or insecurity. (You begin to see how these things are difficult to translate). The hunger is often specifically the result of seeing another diamantis show off an impressive prize from their hunt, engendering a need to prove yourself, more securely establish your abilities.
Another is cannibal shame. More literally, this is the sorrow of being unable to eat your problem. Poetically, this shame is the hunting mood at war with the dancing mood. It’s feeling that might be expressed as if the hunter says, “I could just kill them right now and be done with it” except I can’t, says the dancer, that would be unacceptable, against the norms. It’s the acute frustration of there being an almost-correct solution right in front of you that doesn’t quite work. It’s dilemmas and paradoxes, it’s walking down the wrong path and realizing you must turn around. It’s self-control and maturity.
It goes some ways to explaining the one of the stranger idiomatic remarks, one non-diamantids invariably have trouble parsing. A diamantid will say, “I could just kill you right now,” and it’s said as though out of endearment, treated as cute greeting or farewell to give someone you know well.
Despite their oddness, these are some of the easier emotions to explain. To continue any further, we must digress to discuss a very central feature of diamantid psychology. It’s the very thing a diamantid hopes to obtain when presenting their prizes to others.
That is to say, a diamantid seeks valor. This is a core emotional need of a diamantid, not unlike how roaches needed affection to be emotionally healthy. To receive valor is to have your accomplishments recognized, to have the prize of your hunt honored. The eagerness a diamantid feels upon shifting from hunting to dancing is an expectation for valor, a thirst for attention and appreciation. Importantly, valor is not the same thing as love or affection; it’s respect. Much of the time, most diamantids would rather get distantly admiration than get a hug.
When a diamantid fails to receive valor, they may feel unsung. Note that feeling unsung is distinct from hunter’s block; to be blocked is to have messed up, to have done something wrong and sit on the cusp of understanding why or how to fix it. To be unsung is to have done everything right, still not receive the appreciation you deserve. You’re blocked when the problem is you; you’re unsung when the problem must be them. How a mantis copes with this varies, although a archetypal response is heightening aggression, or increased attention-seeking behavior.
Should a diamantid go unsung for terribly long, two things may happen. The first is that they may become a gloryworm: a bug that recklessly escalates the stakes or scope of their hunts in the hopes of finally getting appropriate recognition. Gloryworming will get a diamantid killed, sooner or later, and this makes it fodder for parables in two ways. Both as a warning to be humble, to check your ego lest it drive you beyond where you skills can take you; and also as a warning to be grateful to others, to not be stingy with compliments lest you drive others to go dangerously far for recognition.
But gloryworming is just one way a diamantid might respond to going unsung. Others may instead go spidery. A diamantid starved of valor may just give up. They retreat, and even in the dancing mood they become rather still; not moving or emoting much. They might stick to patient ambush hunting or trapping, instead of running headlong more glorious hunts and chases. At an extreme, they may stop being drawn into the dancing mood much at all, remaining mute and standoffish. Some entomologists diagnose this as a kind of depression, but there are nuances.
Before we conclude our discussion of valor, it’s worth taking a moment to discuss it’s flexible nature. As you might expect, what constitutes valor shifts and mutates with the culture. You might expect many of them to believe abstract or frivolous pursuits aren’t true hunting, and afford them less valor. Matriarchal cultures might assume valor is something only formels care about, and treat male diamantids as if they, by turns, don’t deserve valor or wouldn’t appreciate it if they did. To some, valor is shared, and you bring honor to your associates with your hunts (or your mates; indeed, this might be viewed as they only way a tiercel can attain valor: through marrying an honorable formel). Some valor may even be inherited. With certain competitions, it’s thought that you give valor even to your opponents; you must give only worthy opponents the honor of challenging you. Against a foe sufficiently overwhelming, you may achieve valor even by losing to them.
Roughly as crucial to diamantid psychology is the concept of marking. Even linguistically, it’s tricky to explain this one. In a way, this is the inverse of valor. Or rather, its precursor. A hunter follows their mark; a diamantid with a mark is one with an elusive prey to track, a goal they strive in pursuit of. Affectwise, marking is a mix of anger and infatuation and hunger, stirred together into a excitement that, at feverish purity, could drives a mantis relentlessly after their mark at the expense of all else. A diamantid who feels it that strongly — especially when it’s maladaptive — they are said to be marking bad. A mantis who’s found their lifelong calling, their white whale to hunt, is said to be on their last mark. A lazy mantis, or one hopping between different hobbies, is of course “markless,” a very shameful thing.
There is, to be clear, a crucial difference between gloryworming and marking. Part of it is purely down to whether you mean to insult them or not, but by connotation, gloryworming is less focused. It lacks the purity and intrinsic drive; being a gloryworm is closer to being markless than to marking bad.
Again, there’s also a socially constructed aspect to marks; though they hunt, a spidery diamantid doesn’t have marks. So, whether something is a mark is partly down to how others perceive it. If others are anxious to see you achieve it, if the pursuit has externally validatation, then you are marking. Part of what it means to be marking is that bugs see you marking — or, to sum all this concisely, you can only be marking if you will get valor out of it.
Sometimes, your mark is a person. This is the notion of having an intimfeind, a relationship that can’t be understood without a concept of valor; two mantids may have little or no affection for each other — they may be explicitly enemies — but through continuous adversarial competition, they fulfill each other’s need for valor.
As they say:
A roach can only be happy if they have friends. A mantis can only be happy if they have enemies.
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