

By my understanding, the chimera ant "sexs" are as follows:

  * A Queen can eat any animal (plants seem to be excluded) and produce children without mating.
  * A King can mate in order to produce a Queen.
  * All others are generally non-reproductive. If the Queen or King another ant is loyal to dies, however, they can go off to mate as the King does to produce a Queen.

A generally non-reproductive ant can have a traditionally male or female
identy and appearance but this can likely be due to the food source. The
original Queen does not have human female characteristics (as opposed to human
male) besides those one would consider maternal.

Is there anything to indicate that the female appearing chimera ants any
different from this pattern? The wiki does not know. The only female besides
the queen to "reproduce" was Zazan who used a non-tradition means of
reproduction which seems at least partially to be her Nen ability as opposed
to something the other "female" ants could do.

I remember one other ant saying she was going to run off and become a queen
but I don't think any details were given. The male appearing ones greatly out
number the females but this seems consistent with the show as a whole.


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hunter-x-hunter
Are the female appearing ants female?


No, I think you got all the details in your post. From the information
provided, as you say, the non-Queen females seem purely based on the fact that
the humans they are derived from were female.

As to the one that said she was going to run off, if I remember correctly, it
was more establishing a colony and asserting herself as the most dominant ant
without any mention of reproduction.


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“Sex” and “gender” bear disparate meanings but many people accidentally
conflate these words. In the technical distinction, “sex” is a neutral word
referring solely to physiology including differences in brain chemistry and
hormones, whereas “gender” refers to cultural constructions/assumptions about
what personality traits best suit (or are innately connected to) a particular
biological anatomy. The female Ants all seem to identify as female, meaning
their gender is female, regardless of 1) whether or not they can reproduce and
2) whether or not they have any interest in reproduction of any sort. It is
not clear whether or not they subscribe to a belief in gender essentialism
and, even if they did, whether their brand of gender essentialism would
include reproduction as the main, or even as a main, component of what
"female" means to them.

The Queen and the other feminine Ants were all given female _seiyuu_ (voice
actors) and they speak in feminine Japanese. The Queen especially speaks in a
very motherly, or perhaps, grandmotherly, fashion.

Hina (formerly known as Hirin) has a nen ability to remove curses that gives
her the [appearance of being
pregnant](http://hunterxhunter.wikia.com/wiki/Hina). She does not comment on
this visual appearance in regard to human pregnancy, but only to complain
about her figure.

(As an aside, the feminine Ants do seem to roughly align with modern Western
gender norms for females, but Japanese gender norms have historically differed
significantly from Western ones. For example, the 11th century Heian era ideal
man was a master of concocting perfume, wearing make-up, and penning love
poetry, and in the present day you can often see young straight men styling
each others’ hair in public, wearing numerous plushie Disney key chains
dangling from their man purses, and dressed in pink and lavender — none of
these practices are non-masculine in contemporary Japanese culture — whereas
the culture does maintain extremely strict gender norms, copious self-
segregation by gender, and rampant sexism.)

The fact that a Chimera Ant is female is not dependent on the prior human
and/or animal who was/were eaten by the Queen also having been female. Many of
them are an amalgamation from a number of humans/animals who were killed,
which were likely a mix of males and females. The main illustration of this is
Kite, who was a human male, was killed and apparently at least some part of
him was eaten by the Queen (though much of his body was not eaten in order for
Pitou to make her puppet), then was birthed prematurely as [a female
Ant](http://hunterxhunter.wikia.com/wiki/Kite_\(Chimera_Ant\)), and insisted
that her name was Kite from a young age. The characters specifically mention
that the Ant Kite is a girl. Her appearance came from a random female villager
killed by Koala, meaning it is likely that that girl's entire body was eaten
by the Queen, but the resulting Ant retains the memories of Kite instead, even
though only a small portion of Kite's body was eaten.


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