@elemtilas I'm not going to get into a discussion about the things that happen in our society around this. I would agree that the people in the society I describe in my question are acting monstrously. I'm just looking for information on what the victims would look like and if they might suffer from developmental delays.

@Kilisi That is the point of this part of the story, that people can do awful things in the name of law or tradition or because they did the math wrong. It's neither nice nor portrayed as nice. We talk about such things to ensure that they are neither started nor repeated in our own society.

No people can't do such things, or they would have already. This sort of behaviour is what is done to subjugated enemies, it's not viable to build a strong or long lasting society around sterilising your own little girls, torturing them etc. the nuclear family bonds would prevent it pretty fast. It would soon implode and your bird gender would be made into chicken soup

@Kilisi Actually, I agree with you, given the information provided in this post. However, there is also the factor of reliable reincarnation in this society, so most of these women get to have another go at life, hopefully in a better body. The point of the story is that reincarnation seems good at first blush, but is actually really bad, because of the compromises that get made and the awful traditions that get propagated by people who remember them and (because of a drug) enjoyed them.

@Kilisi However, the gas chambers in WWII Germany also prove you wrong. People have done unimaginably awful things because of indoctrination and orders.

@kilisi Female genital mutilation is very close to what is being described, maybe even more gross, and unfortunately, it is still practiced today in some places. In societies where they do that, it is done to every girl. I don't think you want to hear more, but here's Wikipedia link anyway: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation

This question is worldbuilding for a mature-adult story, with some very unpleasant events in it. It's neither for kids nor for those who prefer happy endings.

@JaniMiettinen yeah I know about it and the societal reasons for it, as well as Nazis and others sterilising minority groups or 'sub-humans' but this is very different., I'm Polynesian, my own people burned whole tribes alive and made subjugated people cook & serve up their children at feasts. Infanticide itself is well documented in almost all old societies. But this goes beyond what is remotely viable

@Kilisi The lilim reproduce to provide all population growth. They are afraid of becoming extinct because women can reproduce faster, but don't bear lilim, however this is a fallacy proved by the existence of another society that doesn't do any of these awful things. Reincarnation propagates the tradition undiluted, and a drug makes mistreatment pleasant for the victims where it would otherwise be unpleasant. In this society, females outnumber males by 2:1, half of them being women, the other half lilim. Removing women restores gender balance. I also never said there wasn't opposition.

The issue you have in your setting is that the society/kingdom/whatever that does NOT do that WILL very quickly outnumber those that do it. And in warfare numbers are very important. So they would conquer those that practice this distasteful tradition. Female genital mutilation cannot be compared to this (nor can sterilization of males), as it doesn't drastically decrease birth rates.

@Negdo I think it is the opposite if lilim are less fertile than women. Especially so if they are not living in abundance. The less there are lilim, the faster the population can grow because more resources are available for women who are more fertile. Lilim has to provide some significant advantage in warfare to turn this around.

@Negdo @JaniMiettinen Now that we're in chat, I'll add that there was a generations-long war between the revilers, so called because they revile women, and the nurturers, who value all people. The revilers invented reincarnation anchors so that their replacement troops would be experienced at an early age. Imagine 16-year-olds with the experience of 30-40 year old veterans in a muscle-powered weapon scenario. The nurturers lost that war because of that advantage.

Additionally, in times of war, the revilers did allow women to reproduce, to boost the numbers of male troops. They literally expected - and even forced - every fertile woman to remain pregnant as much of the time as possible. However, once the war was over, the women were surplus to requirements.

In Ruquelis' 'modern' times, there are treaties between Ruquelian nations about the allowable population of women, and breaching those treaties is seen as preparation for war, much the same as stationing large numbers of troops near the border of another country.

This question lead to two bans on my RPG discord server. Some folks were trying to use this.... concept to try to create their very own "300 year old lolis" as wives. I understand that this is by no means the intention of the OP, but geez - what a hard concept to deal with!

Monty Wild: don't write this story. Seriously. There are enough horrors (past and present) visited upon girls and women in the real world, without dreaming up new ones and basing a whole narrative on them. Objectification of women doesn't just mean sexually—making them objects of widespread abuse as a plot hook is just as harmful.

Aside from the ethics, the situation could be made statistically/numerically stable without sterilizing the women if lilim are disproportionately likely to bear lilim children. For example, if the outcomes for liilm birth are 50% lilim, 25% male, 25% female, they would "only" need to be twice as fecund as women in order to preserve a 1:1:1 gender ratio from one generation to the next.

@GregMartin There is nothing that can, even in principle, be written into fictional literature that inherently harms anyone simply by virtue of having been written. Harm comes from action and beliefs, not fiction. People do not become hateful, nor inclined to deny the humanity of other actual persons, because of reading fantasy. If anything, they read fantasy to indulge taboo thoughts.