I’m so fucking proud of you. 

I think we’ve all been dealing with pouch Narns like, ‘okay, seahorses are a thing.  I can dig, I can dig’, but it does present an issue like you’re saying - just what made “one parent hangs onto fertilized egg for a while, and then we pass it back to another parent” a “Yes, good” in the eyes of evolution?  It’s a weak spot that seems really risky in it’s lack of self-containment. 

I mean, labor division kind of seems almost plausible as a thing? Narn just seem so robust, so even though I really want to say that maybe it’s just too taxing for one Narn to be pregnant for a while and then also have to divert body resources to feeding a child, it doesn’t really make a whole bunch of sense.  

  On a mildly related note, I like this kind of idea that because of this set up, Narn would see the burden placed on Humans and other species who carry babies and feed them with the same body to be pretty extraordinary, like, ‘You mean you carry it the whole time, and then it’s also YOU who feeds it?  What has your partner done?’  They could see this as just a ridiculous level of personal resources taken from one body, when, in their set up, half that amount could be taken from two.  

it could literally be like, they ALL have pouches, but i get the feeling the show was going for the seahorse thing.

i keep reading your description at the end there with serial pregnancies and exposure to hormones and I just keep thinking there’s like an unending chain or something in that case, like someone always has to be pregnant or something?? which sort of puts more chips in the ‘they probably live in groups’ pile

There is so much stuff here.    Congrats on coming down this rabbit hole with literally no investment in the subject matter, wow.

The literal problem is that these aliens were written by Humans. In the 90s.