#but they're still going nuts saying the weirdest shit imaginable

[spiltcandycoatedpunkblood]

if Sakharine was real the first thing I'd want him to do is kill D*pp

[caparrucia]

would Zhongli lay eggs if he had offspring?

If you mean in general and you're into it? Fuck it, sure. Why not. He's a fictional character and he exists purely for your entertainment. And if you have fic recs about it, sure, go nuts and share. I survived the Homestuck fandom, I'm always of the "Yeah, sure, why not?" persuasion when it comes to characters doing unusual things for sex and reproduction.

Have fun!

If you mean specifically the Zhongli I'm writing in this fic, the answer is no for two reasons, one of which is hysterical and the other an indictment of how much of a theology nerd I still am. To wit:

Number one (the funny one): He's not a dragon, my dude. He's a furry. A scaley even, might be the right terminology, I think? Furry friends, correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, he made himself a dragon fursuit. Explicitly in the text. That's what the exuvia was. A very emotionally significant and symbolically charged dragon fursuit, but still a fursuit. He's not a dragon ascended into godhood, he's a god who showed himself in dragon form to humans. His true form is his humanoid form that matches the Statues of the Seven and the form he shows in, in most cutscenes about his past: black arms with geo veins in them and the most logic defying hoodie. The hoodie is actually the main reason I chose to make that his true form: he has a cutout for his fucking ponytail, if he had horns or any kind of interesting dragon features, you bet this dramatic moron would have designed the world's most impossible hood to both show them off and still work as a hood somehow.

Number two (the nerdy one): He's a god! Gods do not have the need to reproduce sexually at all, because they don't make more of themselves that way. (They can, however, make more of themselves, we've seen that, with Nahida and Focalors, but neither of those was sexual and neither of those was the same method.) It's an instinct they directly lack. That's not to say gods don't have sex or don't understand the concept of sex, or more egregiously that they don't understand the concept of romance and love. They do, to different degrees depending on the individual and their relationship with humans and other creatures who DO have sexual urges baked right into their cultures. I would put most of the Gods in Teyvat somewhere in the ace spectrum (except Venti, because it's Venti) but that's mostly a shorthand to explain that sex is not a thing that drives most of their relationships. It's also a fun excuse for them to get really freaky about sex, in general, because sex is completely divorced from reproduction, so if they're having sex at all, they're 100% doing it for fun. And if you've ever hung around the kink community, you'll know that's the environment that produces the weirdest fucking shit imaginable that ends up rewiring your brain in the process. It's great.

There's two kinds of gods in canon, and I've extrapolated from that both in this fic and the other fic that take place in the same shared verse. The first kind is gods who are born as gods, they did not ascend, they just... one day existed and they were the gods of the thing they are gods of. They are created from the faith and prayers of the people in the things they eventually become gods of. Zhongli is this type of god. Then, there's also gods who attained godhood: people and creatures who are not gods, who then, through their actions and the faith of people in them, turn into gods. Venti is the prime example.

I'm sure this distinction will at no point come back to bite anyone, ever, across the entire ficverse. /s

Like, if we're talking broad strokes, the main flaw with Zhongli is that he doesn't understand his own nature. Like the main driver for him, as a character, is that he's perpetually isolated from people. He's lonely. But he's always been the strongest god, the most powerful one, the one people treat with reverence and respect and therefore put massive walls and ritual and distance between him and them. He doesn't really have friends, besides Venti, because the people who know who he is venerate him to some degree (the Adepti, etc.) and the people who don't know who he is, he doesn't consider friends because it feels... fake, in a way. They're not friends with him, the real him, they're friends with the version of him they made up and isn't actually him.

The punchline is that every attempt Zhongli has made to close the gap between himself and others has instead widened it, up to and including changing the thing he's god of: he's the god of contracts, but that's not the thing he was born as, he was originally the god of the mountain: the largest one in Liyue, the one that loomed over everything and everyone worshiped at least a little. So when the loneliness gets to him and he comes down to the mountain to connect with people, he invents the concept of contracts to regulate their interactions, but that just means his powers just grow as people adopt the concept of contracts and their faith in him grows substantially. In the fic he's the one who illuminates the illuminated beasts: he takes what's essentially Guizhong's pet talking animal companions and raises them almost to godhood by giving up part of his power to them, turning them into Adepti. This was made in an attempt to create more of himself and simultaneously diminish himself back so they would all be equals. But it doesn't work, because the Adepti immediately turn around and worship him for it, swearing their power and their loyalty to him, which makes his power grow exponentially from that, so the companions he tried to make, the circle of friends he tried to build, turn instead into more worshipers that increase his power and treat him with respect and deference because they owe their existence to him. You can see how the Adepti - and the Yaksha - have really close bonds of friendship and affection with each other (and with Guizhong!) but when it comes to Zhongli, he's kept at arms length, mostly out of respect and reverence. He's always there as a figure of authority, a mediator, a leader, etc.

He's only ever met two people in the entirety of his life that have known he is a god, and moreover which god he is, and haven't worshiped him, even a little: Guizhong and Childe.

He hasn't, however, made that connection yet.

Expect it to hit him like a freight train when it does, it'll be fun.

I give you all that meandering ramble to say: Zhongli has issues with power structures and sex has never really existed outside that power structure for him. He's also still not understanding what kind of relationship Childe wants with him, and in his own dipshit moment, he just assumed it was sex: which is why they're not having sex right now. Childe is so offended at the idea that he refuses to engage, which means he's in a hell of his own making, because... I mean. LOOK at them. Zhongli hasn't been human long enough to fully appreciate the state of horny, but he will eventually be very, very confused because he's never been horny in his life. But let the man master the basics of hunger and sleep, before he gets on the advanced curriculum of "so you wanted to be a human and you fucked it up spectacularly."

In 100K-150K words, when they get their respective heads out of their respective asses about a fuckton of things and sex is actually a thing they're doing? Oh yeah. No. They're gonna get up to impressively kinky shit. It'll be fun.