User blog comment:Lordofmonsterisland/Covenant Females/@comment-5536-20101027232424

I agree that the Lekgolo are likely hermaphroditic. In Ascension, I imagine them having gender roles and characteristics that the hives voluntarily take up despite a lack of sexual dimorphism, based on the similar depiction in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, but there is no reason to think Lekgolo are anything like this in canon.

I wouldn't say the Huragok have any sex. They're asexual. That's different from having one sex. There are some species alive today that are comprised entirely of females--that's one sex. Huragok have no sex.

Now, Unggoy are matriarchal, so I imagine their females are physically intimidating. I imagine this to be similar to the Yautja of the Predator franchise. All the nasty aliens we see in the Predator movies are male Yautja, and they are nothing compared to their females. The Youtja males can get seriously injured during mating, as their females are larger and stronger. The Unggoy are much tamer than Youtja, but I imagine a similar situation where the males fight to impress larger females and are a bit lower in the hierarchy.

The Jiralhanae are pretty gorilla-like, so I just kind of imagine they're like gorillas mating-wise too. Jiralhanae have large codpieces, which implies there's something worth protecting, so I just assume they've got large vulnerable testicles like gorillas. Scientists used to think gorillas rape human women. The thought was just something like "they're huge muscular, masculine humanoid animals, so why wouldn't they want to get their big hands on a beautiful woman?" That formed the basis for King Kong, and the gorilla-rapes-woman dynamic is still used even if we know better about zoology. I think that shows up in Tartarus' threatening of Miranda.

I figure that Bungie intentionally censors themselves. M-rated or not, they know kids are going to be a big market, so they have to keep to subject matter the parents will tolerate. So, I figure implication in the games can be taken to an extreme in fanfiction. Tartarus carries a subtle implication of rape based on cultural context, so in my fanfiction the Jiralhanae explicitly rape everyone. They rape their subordinates the way our primates do; they rape enemy women; they rape enemy men. It's to satisfy their lusts and it's to express dominance. They're "brutes", so I have them like prison rapists and war criminals.

As for the Sangheili, I have no clue. Halo Legends anthropomorphized them for our benefit. You can do as you will with them and have it as plausible as anything. I just get the impression that they're oppressively patriarchal, so there needs to be some sexual dimorphism that privileges the males. This doesn't have to be obvious from our perspective.