Pedalism

The pedality of a being, also referred to as their posture or form, determines how a character or object is able to stabilize themselves and move around, with pedalism being the overall study or implementation of a pedality. While pedalism in mainstream culture mainly distinguishes between bipedalism and quadrupedalism in respect to humans and other animals, the term is broadened in Aaden's projects to refer to all postures and is decoupled from the appendages of a being. Most commonly described are monopedal, bipedal, and quadrupedal, but higher and more specific terms are also used.

Motility and stability

Pedalism is split into two separate statistics: motility and stability.

Motile pedalism focuses on how something moves around via its drivers: any object or force which is able to move the object, is directly controllable by the object and or uncontrollable by other objects, and is a part of the object. The actual properties of the driver, like its construction, origin, or influence, are not important, allowing physical constructs like legs, wheels, or thrusters to be a driver alongside supernatural abilities like flying or teleportation. This also means that contact points are ignored when considering motility, and instead each part must be able to work independently—two wheels on an axle count as one driver rather than two.

Stable pedalism tracks how something is able to remain within a specific context (explained below), whether or not deliberately, via its anchors: any object or force which works to hold or lengthen the time spent in a certain motion. Anchors follow the same restraints as drivers, with drivers usually serving a dual purpose as an anchor. A similar analysis of constitution is also used for anchors; if an anchor has multiple possible stabilizing forces, and one or more of them can be unused without losing the current context, they're considered to be a single anchor.

Degrees of pedality, excluding antipedalism (0), bipedalism (2), and quadrupedalism (4), use IUPAC affixes. Typically, N-pedal refers to both motility and stability being of the same degree, but for specificity, the prose X-motile Y-stable (as in bimotile tristable) can be used instead.

Context

The context of a pedalism refers to the scenario of which it is being employed. Two contexts are distinct if the structure or usage of an object's drivers or anchors must change to accommodate for stability, or if the conditions for entering or exiting a context differs. As a minimal example: walking on a flat surface, flying in the air, and swimming underwater can all be considered different contexts if an object (like a bird) must employ different pedalities for each context (i.e hopping, flapping, diving) and has unique ways to enter or exit the context (i.e ceasing movement, landing, or floating upwards).

Polypedality (unofficial alternatives include multipedality, quantipedality, and pluripedality) uses context to determine if an object is able to employ multiple pedalities to achieve the same context; cats, for example, can walk on flat ground with all four legs, or with only their hind legs. Due to a misunderstanding, this term was originally called "ambipedality".

Special pedalities

Antipedality (or nullpedality) refers to when an object has no possible drivers or anchors. A perfect sphere is antistable as it has no anchors; given any context, it is unable to counteract any forces which causes it to enter or exit a given context.

Acontextuality is a special case in which an object has no contexts to discern from. Liquid is acontextual as it has no states other than flowing.