Can't have one without the other

[melannen]

I was walking into synecdochic's open stitch'n'bitch this afternoon, and lindentreeisle was describing to me how awesome it was to get to fire a Russian knockoff Walther PPK, and the person who arrived right after was describing getting whipped at the fetish fair yesterday. If that doesn't sum up why all my friends are fans, I dunno what would. :D

On the way home from Baltimore I was listening to The Adventures of Archie Andrews on the radio, and it occurred to me that Betty and Veronica and Archie and Reggie are totally a sedoretu. I think Betty and Reggie are the Evening marriage and Archie and Veronica are the Morning marriage, because the other way make much better friends than lovers, but I realize some people will disagree violently on that one. (I think most people will agree they make a better sedoretu than a foursome, though.)

Also sedoretu: the Honeymooners and their descendants, and Lucy and Ricky and Ethel and Frank. (Really, there was a whole stretch in the mid-20th-century when American culture was promoting the sedoretu as the ideal, wasn't there?)

So apparently the poly marriages thing appeals to people who are not me. :D Here is a list of other books, etc., that were mentioned so far on that thread (not all of them involve poly marriage, but they're all worlds that normalize something other than monogamous het.)


The Sime~Gen series by Lorrah and Lichtenberg : Humanity is divided into two types called "sime" and "gen"; sime and gen can be in mutually dependent relationships with each other, and "orhuen", "lortuen", and "torluen" are terms for particular combinations of sime/gen relationships with heterosexual relationships.

Vigilant and Hunted by James Alan Gardner: Vigilant has group marriages; Hunted has five-way families requiring persons of different castes

The "Worlds" series by Joe Haldeman and Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury: "Worlds" has families as corporations, including poly marriages. Courtship Rite has "group marriages with very weird courting rituals".

Xenogenesis by Octavia Butler: five-way marriages with two human and three nohumans of five different genders.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ: possibly some plural marriage.

The Stone Prince & others by Fiona Patton: everyone in the class has a same-sex "companion".

Star Trek Andorians and Denobulans: Andorians have four genders & four-way marriages (usually); Denobulans have three spouses and relationships with spouse's spouses through a network. (Are these really the only non-heteronormatizing cultures in ST?)

Liaden by Lee and Miller: Short-term contract marriages + a line and clan system

White Wing by Gordon Kendall: Seven-way mixed-gender group marriages.

Stardance by Spider and Jean Robinson: Group and poly marriages

Neanderthal Parallax by Robert Sawyer: Sexes are segregated most of the time; each person has an opposite-sex spouse and a same-sex partner.

And here are some other things that have resulted from my post, which are awesome. (You guys, if putting up random wishes on my journal keeps having this kind of result, I'm going to wind up requesting glitter pens and a new laptop soon, seeifidon't.)

erinptah posted about Sedoretu in her fandoms (Including Hellsing, Sailor Moon, Fake News RPS, and others.)

scrollgirl posted about line marriages and Stargate

sapote posted some excerpts from How I Met Your Morning Mother, in which Lily, Ted, and Marshall need a fourth for their Sedoretu.

sapote also posted Buffy of the Ki'O, in which Buffy, Giles, Willow, and Xander have to get married to save the world (and Giles/Xander actually works.)

recessional wrote Eleven/Rory/Amy/River sedoretu comment fic (fwiw, I am suddenly interested in that Team Tardis for the first time when Eleven and Amy are guaranteed platonic but Eleven and Rory aren't.)

And finally, blades_of_grass translated it into Russian!


...Also, somehow, some Troll Romance AU ended up on the Dresden Files kinkmeme. (I swear to you that I was in no way responsible for that prompt being posted.)

****

In completely unrelated news, I broke 50,000 words of new fanfic for the year sometime last week! I rewarded myself by putting it all into a spreadsheet so I could run some statistics. Because that's just how I roll. Also, I just figured out for tax purposes how to do formulas with conditionals and booleans in OpenOffice and I am kind of going mad with power (although I still can't get sumproduct to work right with booleans, bah.)


I've worked on 19 separate stories. 18 of them were Dresden Files stories, and I have written in 11 different fandoms. (This can, of course, be reconciled by the fact that 10 of them were crossovers, and 3 of them were "maybe/I don't know" crossovers. And I still don't qualify for remix in DF.) 12 of them were posted on the DF kinkmeme, and 11 of those twelve were anonymous. A different 12 of them are finished.

I have written 50655 words, 50255 in DF fic. 42269 words have been posted publically on the internet (35753 of those to the DF kinkmeme.) 29724 are finished fic; 12545 are in WIPS that have been publically posted as WIPs. 39923 words are in crossovers or "maybe" crossovers. 45395 are in stories that I consider to be close enough to 'real' stories that I would consider them worthy to be reposted to AO3, but 35084 were publically posted anonymously.

In terms of shipping, 2545 words were gen fic. 12888 were het or slash. 35222 were "other" or "not sure". Which is pretty much the proportions I expected. (Also, only 3372 words of the slash have actually been posted, as opposed to 2391 of the gen and 32822 of the "other/not sure".)

The mean words per fic is 2666. The average words per posted fic is 2817 though the average words per AO3-worthy fic is 3492. The average words per unposted fic is 2096; per finished fic is 2990; per WIP is 2477; and per posted WIP is 4181. The median words per fic is 1897 and the mode is 1618.

Why, yes, it has been too long since I've done any real math or programming, whydoyouask?

Comments

[scribbled_lore]

I saw recessional's comment fic and the resulting discussion but I totally don't know what "sedoretu" is. Since you're the second person on my reading list to mention it in detail I was wondering if you could explain? Pretty please?

[melannen]

Check my previous post. :D

[jmtorres]

Re other non-heteronormative cultures in Star Trek--um, there are others, but most of them are not quite... represented well? The J'naii (one of whom Riker possibly hooked up with) are a single gender/non-gendered species that finds the whole concept of gender offensive and has criminalized gendered sexual activity.

Vissians have a third sex that is required for procreation, but members of the third sex are treated as sort of subhuman and passed around between het couples and are not allowed to have, you know, lives or jobs outside of facilitating other people's baby-making.

Apparently the Tholians are hermaphroditic, though it is news to me. There's a few others listed here--apparently Bolians might have co-spouses? But yeah.

[urania_calliope]

Oh God, I want to do some ficcing exploring these ideas SO BADLY right now!

[melannen]

\o/

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, right, the J'naii - that was the episode were they tried to use transgender as a metaphor for homosexuality, hooray!

It looks like the Tholian bit comes from Enterprise, which explains why I don't know it either.

And I don't even know what I think about the Vissian episode. O.o Oh, Terk.

...the rest of that list seems to be just throw-away lines where the story never went into any detail? Hmm. And Memory Beta doesn't seem to have a covnenient list like that.

[jmtorres]

I've watched all of Enterprise! I actually liked it. As a trashy holonovel. But um, yeah. I guess I didn't absorb everything?

[w_thit]

As I was reading this, I remembered a throw away line about how a Bolian (latest in a line of serial killed victims) having a wife and co-husband back home (I think there might have been kids, but I'm not sure). So yeah, there's that.

[lady_ganesh]

I would actually consider the Xenogenesis series to have five members of three different genders (male, female, oolani)-- the families are pretty heteronormative in a lot of ways.

[harpijka]

Will you post your anonymous DF stories somewhere under your name?
If not, would it be possible to get a list of them? I really, really like your writing style! And as I'm reading all the three rounds of the kinkmeme simultaneously, I'm rather lost in this incredible quantity of fanfiction...

[melannen]

I will probably repost them, or at least the ones I'm willing to admit to, to my AO3 account eventually, but I like to let an anon meme stay anon for awhile. (If all the good writers deanon, then many people stop reading the actual anon posts. Which leaves writers who are honestly unknown and not spectacularly good in the lurch. Since I'm halfway between the two I really enjoy the anonymity.) So I'll probably wait until the meme's slowed down - if it does - and then deanon.

[melannen]

hrm, yeah, it seem like a lot of the stories that were mentioned ended up being pretty heteronormative anyway. :/ (Which is why my list was so short - I only listed the ones that I felt weren't, in some fundamental way.)

[lady_ganesh]

Yeah. I think you'd find the books really interesting, because there's a real tension between the 'different' third-gender stuff and the limitations of what she can envision. (Plus they're very good.)