melannen | more sedoretu

more sedoretu

So instead of an FMK review this week you get more talking about sedoretu (not the moiety post yet, that's coming. Probably.)

The opinions on the poll about bookmarking were interestingly split - pretty consistently 2-1 in favor of bookmarking, but the anti-bookmarking people seem to feel more strongly about it. I guess the only solution is for more people to start adding stuff to that collection so mine don't stand out as much!

I also finally read Another Story, or, a Fisherman of the Inland Sea, which is the first and longest of Le Guin's O stories. Or possibly I had already read it and then blocked it out. I am... not sure how I feel about it? It is definitely the most SF-based of them, with quantum physics and interplanetary travel and so on (and probably the most useful for people who want to think about sedoretu in the context of a much larger and more cosmopolitan society than we see in either "Mountain Ways" or "Unchosen Love".)

But. I like both "Mountain Ways" and "Unchosen Love" a lot better. The actual plot of the story seems to be "Hideo gets to have his cake and eat it too." Which is to say, he get to go off and see the galaxy and go to college and take part in universe-changing research and have a prsetigious career, and he also gets to go back in time and marry his childhood sweetheart while she's still young and pretty and inexperienced enough to love him and quietly raise a family with her on the farm. And meanwhile, the version of her that got to grow into herself without him and make her own life as something other than the mother of his kids is erased from existence and he never seems to even think he maybe should mourn that older version of her who was lost forever. Because the version of her that didn't marry him is better off erased from existence anyway, right?

blehhhhhh

It's an interesting metaphor for gender roles re: family and careers and dudes who never have to grow up and get over it, but unfortunately I don't think Le Guin realized that was what she was doing. (It actually reminds me a little bit of a practice run at Ged/Tenar in Tehanu except that Tenar knows that she can go and be the White Lady whenever she wants to and it's all her choice to be something else, and also they both know they will neither of them be able to want normal again even after Ged comes back. Whereas in the final timeline Hideo's love does not get to make any choices for herself and never even finds out that she had an alternate life where she was happy and fulfilled without Hideo.)

Anyway, I still really really like the worldbuilding!

I have managed to narrow it down to ten prompts in the Sedoretu fest that I probably *could* write. (As opposed to the ones I most want to see written, which includes many that I am definitely not the person to write.) They all have pros and cons, which I shall now ramble about here:

The city is like a woman... and another woman who happens to also be a vampire... and a man by Anonymous
Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Samuel Vimes, Havelock Vetinari, Sybil Ramkin, Lady Margolotta
They do it For The City (and also Uberwald) XD
- I was going to prompt this myself but then someone got in first
- I already have a first line in my head
- writing Ankh-Morpork fic is super fun
- I have absolutely no understanding of Margolotta whatsoever
- I would probably have to finally read Snuff

epilogue-compliant by AlexSeanchai (EllieMurasaki)
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter Draco Malfoy Ginny Weasley Astoria Greengrass
yes, I am ruining any possibility of Scorpius/Albus Severus here :P but come on you know this would be a fantastic sedoretu. for instance: what do Ginny and Astoria have in common?
- "What do Ginny and Astoria have in common" very important question
- Sedoretu solves the epilogue
- Would have to re-read last HP book, also finally read Cursed Child, to answer question.
- Okay but I would want the fic to be all about how Slytherins are all about germane marriages and Weasleys and Muggles are NOT but OP does not seem to want germane marriages to be a thing at all?

Gísla saga Súrssonar by Anonymous
Fandom: Íslendingasögur | Sagas of Icelanders
Gísla is already about the competing demands of different kinship ties: the sibling bonds, marriages, extramarital and premarital loves, bonds between in-laws, and blood-brotherhood. Talk about a canon where sedoretus fit REALLY WELL and make things EVEN MORE FUCKED UP--I would love to see any exploration of how adding sedoretu marriage and moiety kinship changes any of these relationships.
- Iceland!
- Canon is short and already on my to-read asap pile!
- Could do it as Ki'O setting and not obsess more than I want to about Iceland!
- Get the impression OP has way more feelings about kinship in sagas than me
- Have not actually read canon yet, only people talking about canon
- Cannot remember saga genealogies five minutes after reading them

actual Ki'O fic by Anonymous
Fandom: LE GUIN Ursula K. - Works
Fic for any of the canon Ki'O stories, not a crossover.
- Could write fix-it for Another Story
- Would be penance for all those people who look in the Le Guin tags and only find crossovers
- Do not actually know broader Hainish physics well enough to figure out how to make it work
- Nobody actually cares about Ki'O

My Friends Are Dead and Gone and that is Suddenly a Major Logistical Hurdle by Anonymous
Fandom: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Marius Pontmercy Cosette Fauchelevent
So, in a sedoretu-verse, I think Les Mis is exactly the same right up until the last act, when Marius and Cosette can't get married because NEITHER OF THEM KNOWS ANYONE WHO ISN'T DEAD or has the slightest idea how to make friends. And now I REALLY want the story of Jean Valjean, Most Socially Awkward Dad Ever, having to suddenly learn how to people in his sixties so he can find suitable partners for his awkward daughter and her awkward fiance.
- ADORABLE, Valjean not dead
- But actually who is left? Even Theodule is the wrong moiety iirc. Would either have to make up OCs or have it be about Valjean using his Batman powers to pull all the not-actually-dead-because-reasons Amis out of hiding, which would also be adorable but also much longer

We have come to sleep with you by Anonymous
Fandom: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Marius Pontmercy Cosette Fauchelevent Courfeyrac (Les Misérables)
Courfeyrac wants to marry Marius. Marius wants to marry Cosette. Cosette won't marry either of them until there's a proper fourth.
- First scene already written, posted to tumblr
- would like to write more of it
- Not sure if kosher to finish fic already started elsewhere?
- Forgot what happens next (okay what happens next is Eponine and Courfeyrac circle each other extremely carefully for a couple days, and then everybody dies. Not sure how I was planning to write that, though.)

pink by Anonymous
Fandom: Nimona (Webcomic)
Ballister Blackheart Ambrosius Goldenloin Meredith Blitzmeyer Nimona
Knights don't get married, villians even less, so Ballister never expected to, even after the end. Then Meredith started dating a mysterious young woman - who turned out to have pink hair - and things got weird, fast.
- We all love Gay Dads AU so it's kinda weird
- Okay but pretend you never heard of gay dads AU, remember that Nimona is very old and capable of making her own choices, and think about Nimona/Goldenloin trying to do an Evening marriage to make Ballister happy

Rey/Finn/Poe/? by such_heights
Fandom: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Poe Dameron Finn (Star Wars) Rey (Star Wars)
Poe's grown up used to four-person marriages. Rey and Finn know nothing about moiety and don't really get why being a triad makes Poe twitchy sometimes.
- Am writing it in my head as we speak
- Can probably still get away (for now) with treating IV-VII as an isolated canon and ignoring all the paracanon
- Possibly OP did not want a story about how they obviously already have a fourth and it's BB8 and then the rest of the fic devolves into Artoo and Threepio as the Galaxy's Worst In-Laws
- With occasional digressions into Yavin IV aka Classic Maya kinship structures and/or Droid Rights activism and/or astromech linguistics

Ivan/By/Rish/Tej by Anonymous
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Ivan Vorpatril Tej Arqua Vorpatril Rish (Vorkosigan Saga) Byerly Vorrutyer
So I want pretty much ALL the Vorkosigan sedoretus. For this one, I would love to see lots of wacky espionage hijinks.
- I could fill out this notfic
- finally someone else ships Rish/Tej poly, I want to encourage them
- Would have to re-read CVA at minimum
- Still not sure if previously published stuff is ok

the trials of alys vorpatril by Anonymous
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Alys Vorpatril Aral Vorkosigan Padma Vorpatril Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan
Alys is determined that her marriage will not be the sort of disaster that gets endlessly circulated as a warning and a scandal, even if Padma insists for reasons surpassing understanding that it really ought to include Aral Vorkosigan, whose first marriage was both of those things. And then the events of Cordelia's Honor play out.
- I ship it. A lot.
- I know that part of canon well enough I probably wouldn't have to re-read much
- Am not sure Cordelia's Honor would actually be that different? TBH am more interested in how they arranged the thing in the first place and how Simon got married in later
- And if I did the Simon version I would also have to do the "who are Laisa and Gregor going to marry" prompt since Alys' sedoretu rebuilding is predicated on that

...this is weirdly stressful compared to a prompt meme community where I can just blather on in comments without committing to anything until somebody else either writes the thing or I know exactly what I am doing

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I find myself extremely interested in Classic Maya kinship structure.

If you find a good source on it, please let me know! In my wild google trip yestereve looking for Poe's moiety it seemed to mostly be a lot of wild extrapolation by white people based on archaeological floorplans and king lists. (I did manage to find someone who was complaining about how they were all ignoring *modern* Maya kinship structures, but then he didn't manage to explain those coherently either.) I basically got as far as Sedoretu AU!Poe is a Sun person who is looking for Moon partners (although the Sun/Moon moieties were probably not Ki'O style exogamous? If they even existed at all?)

Edited 2017-06-21 00:22 (UTC)

I want to reeeeeeaaaad allllll of theeeeese.

So I am NO HELP deciding.

Sooo doooo IIIIII but I cannot physically write them all, I will be lucky to manage to write 1000 words of one of them.

OP doesn't know what germane marriage is, so. Might go google find out when brain has quit with the not braining?

(am excite you are looking at one my prompts!)

Oh, it's from original Le Guin canon, but not mentioned in the short quote that's on all the fics - your siblings from the other het pair in your parents' sedoretu are "germane" siblings. Some parts of O are okay with you marrying one of them, some parts of O are really not okay with you marrying one of them.

So Albus Severus/Scorpius might or might not be allowed depending on which set of rules they were working from. And we all know how good Potters and Weasleys (and Malfoys) are at dealing with rules.

OH GOTCHA

yeah I haven't read those LeGuin stories in...some time...and it honestly didn't occur to me that the sort of incest taboo that rules out stepsiblings marrying might not necessarily be in play

Yeah, it's interesting that as the AU tropes have developed in fandom, people seem to be going for "same-moiety different-gender full siblings can marry since there will be no sex so it doesn't count, but opposite-moiety siblings marrying would be incest and weird" which is exactly the opposite of how the Ki'O stories do it - I had actually forgotten the taboo on full siblings as marriage partners in the same sedoretu* until I started my re-read.

*although Ki'O culture does also allow for "my weird uncle who sleeps with my dad sometimes" as part of the family structure, which fandom has mostly been ignoring completely

Except there's a brother and sister who marry in Another Story, after he gets caught in the fold/time-travels/has a do-over of his life so ???

Oh, huh! I missed that he ended up married to his moiety sister as well as his germane sister?? And yet that's the same story that says outright "Brothers and sisters and first cousins may not marry, but germanes may." Either she lost track of her own worldbuilding, or she only meant morning/evening/day/night marraiges that were already prohibited by moeity there. (She seems to keep switching whether the entire sedoretu is considered a marriage or whether it is a group of four marriages and the moiety-sibs aren't considered married, even just within the one story.)

If I'm trying to wrest consistency out of that sentence maybe the meaning is a brother can't marry a brother or a sister a sister because they'd be same-moiety.

But really worldbuilding lost trackness is the easier to conclude.

I just realized.

I can edit prompts.

(And apparently I didn't sign this one? meh. fixt.)

(Sorry to jump in) Germanes are the opposite-moiety children of a sedoretu, and are raised together but unrelated. So if Elizabeth Bennet is the Morning daughter of Mr Bennet and dead Morning wife, and Jane Bennet is the Evening daughter of Mrs Bennet and dead Morning husband, they are germanes and have no bio parents in common. They can legally marry each other as well as Evening husband Darcy and Morning husband Bingley.

:) gotcha

Yeah, I probably should have specified how new a story needs to be to count as new. I think stories started or notficced elsewhere should be fine, as long they weren't substantially finished.

I mean, it's not like there are huge numbers of other people have vast back catalogues of sedoretu fics they attempted to write and then got distracted, so it probably wasn't the most important thing to put in the rules! Those are both stories that have been "if onlies" for me for awhile, though.

okay, fuck, I think I manage to eat my own comment somehow, but anyway, as the prompter of #1 and #6, I am totally cool with various changes to the prompts or various settings! am A+++ on board with continuing something already started (although obviously am not a mod). I also admit to not having the greatest grasp on Margolotta, although I'm suddenly really into the whole idea of exploring how a long-distance sedoretu works. Vetinari and Magolotta already play Discworld Chess by clacks, why not a relationship? ;)

(and feel free to ignore Snuff if you'd like. I recently reread it and was kind of disappointed; I'd liked it a lot more the first time around. I didn't dislike it, but IDK how well it held up in parts)

If I wrote it, it would probably be an outsider POV thing about how nobody actually believes the First Sedoretu of Ankh-Morpork even *has* an Evening wife, but it's not like they're going to call the Patrician a liar to his face...

oooooooh :D

I remember "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" fondly, but I was also something like twelve when I read it for the first time. What I remember is basically the worldbuilding and a kind of dreamlike feeling, rather than the gender and relationship awkwardness. I'd definitely read fixit fic for it, though!

The other ones I think I found a few years after that. I disliked "Unchosen Love" for reasons I can't clearly remember—I should probably reread it at some point; either I'll like it better or I'll figure out what bothered me in the first place. I definitely thought "Mountain Ways" was the best of the lot, in both character and worldbuilding terms.

I always forget about the taboo on siblings in the same sedoretu, although I remembered the aunt/uncle thing.

... I need to finish my prompts and post them already. (I know which fandoms and characters I want to prompt, and I've got some of the scenarios written already, it's just that I got stuck on titles.)

Unchosen Love definitely stressed me out more than Another Story - I guess I didn't think Hideo had his cake and ate it too, so much as realized that one of his cakes was just a terrible idea. He had so much admiration for the oldest version of Sidi - you know how our stupid culture is towards older women, I'm used to "everything's ruined now that you're FORTY like a MONSTER", not "she was so accomplished and satisfied in her own life that I felt like garbage that I'd missed it all". But like, it is true that he seemed very in love with the oldest version of Sidi, so maybe he should just have been with her, as the uncle-joined-onto-the-marriage that sedoretus allow. I guess either way he'd already time-traveled away from that possibility, just he'd gone forward and couldn't get back because of the time mismatch with FTL travel?

Unchosen Love is definitely stressful; it's, as the title suggests, about people who are in love in ways they don't particularly enjoy being in love, that kind of violent consuming love that I'm not sure I even think of as love and would be so easy to tip over into abusive, or at least toxic. But it solves the problem by saying, hey, sedoretu, you can have some more rational ships to balance it out and let you be two-to-one against the more dominant personalities when needed! Mountain Ways is definitely the best of the three, though.

Whereas Another Story is just so much the "middle-aged academic dude realizes his life is empty, marries much younger woman therefore preventing her from ever even considering a life that is not all about him" plot that I am SO SICK OF, just with time travel and sedoretu for spice.

He did like Older Sidi a lot! But I got the impression he was also super depressed that she was not pining over him the way he had been pining over her and totally failed to deal with the fact that she moved on with her life. And then after he erases that happier-than-he-ever-was Sidi he very carefully *never told* her younger self that she had ever existed and idk it just felt super gross. Like. If instead of saying, "I have come back and realize I still love you, my life was lonely and empty without you," he had said, "I have come back and I met older you who was happy without me and I realized I had never been that happy in my life," it would have been so much better, you know? But you get the impression he is never actually emotionally mature enough to even realize that, and Sidi deserved better.

I do like the atmosphere and stuff in it, I just really don't like the plot of "male academic realizes that what he needs in life is younger woman to do his emotional labor for him so he never has to learn how, finds younger woman, younger woman gets stuck with him for the rest of her life."

That sounds more like the way I saw it, way back when. But oddly enough, the relationship that stuck with me was between Hideo and his mother—the part of the story I remember best is a conversation they have, the one where he's explaining his work to her and she's weirded out by the idea of FTL, because the time dilation effect is so much a part of her life, and how she sees the universe. I don't remember much of the actual sedoretu at all, which does seem ironic in retrospect...

I guess I ought to reread this story too, and see what I think of everyone else now! It's been too long since I made it over to the library anyway.

She was GREAT. I guess also, like, she made a different choice than her son did and then her son was like "nope, my mother was correct, I am going to go home and farm". I like that the ki'O, like the Hainish themselves, really don't need to fuck around with their society. The idea of that kind of multi-generational stability existing without throwing some social group/gender under the bus is so attractive.

Oh and also it's an important story for sedoretu mechanics because you can get adopted into a different moiety if you were born without one - it's just rare and no one wants to do it. It occurs to me that this is the mark of a culture with good health care and a stable, low-violence society, people are not vexed about "what happens if no one knows who your mother was and she dies"?

The mechanics for being monosexually straight or gay, or forming a sedoretu with three people of one gender, in Mountain Ways are also so useful as canon. It seems more like the Balkan sworn virgins than anything - your culture needs you to fulfill a certain role, so you step up and grow a ponytail to show that you're a man. But the extreme casualness with which gender is treated in that story is heartening. Like, meh, change your shirt to a different kind of shirt, it's probably fine. As long as there's one reproductively viable couple in the quadruple or you can adopt no one's going to get super upset.

SEE I really loved his mom, but then in the ending there was this weird bit about how her son going to another planet made her get sick and waste away without him, but now that he's back she won't get sick because a mom needs her son nearby (but apparently her daughters don't matter)????

Basically I loved a lot of things about this story and then the ending made it clear that he thought the universe was 100% about him, including his mom's health crises that happened when he was four light-years away, and all his female relatives were backing him up on that, and I just had a NOPE NOPE NOPE reaction.

Now I'm wondering if I reread it if I'd feel the same way. A friend pointed out to me that I tend to blithely erase sexist things as I read - if a woman's backstory makes no sense besides that she's The Girl, I imagine that she has a good one and keep going; if men are stupidly central to everyone's feelings, I just invent other feelings for everyone else to have and then read like they're there. It's a nice impulse! Sometimes a little blinding, though, and even that can't help Heinlein.

Do you have feelings about germane marriages? I'm trying to figure out if I should include one (a failed one) in this story or not. I think if my readers actually were _from_ O, it would be an interesting character beat, but on the other hand if my characters are from Earth it just looks like Wincest, basically.

Apparently that taboo isn't followed even in the Le Guin stories, so I think we can continue to ignore it with impunity.

Titles aren't important for prompts! I wouldn't stress out too much - a lot of people are just using fandom names or 'ships in the title.

Well, I guess that's why I forgot it!

I think I will probably go that route with the titles, then.

My thoughts:

The city is like a woman... and another woman who happens to also be a vampire... and a man by Anonymous
Fandom: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
--Sounds fun, but not if you can't get a handle on Lady M. And a sedoretu fic where the author obviously really GETS three of the four, but not the fourth ... seems to me to be more problematic than a gen fic featuring four characters, only three of whom the author really understands. I don't know why, but that's how it seems to me. I would LOVE to read it, and if you think you could get a handle on Lady M, it would be an awesome fic. But.

epilogue-compliant by AlexSeanchai (EllieMurasaki)
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
--why would you have to read Cursed Child? I mean, like, isn't there A Thing where a lot of fanfic writers just ignore it? The prompter doesn't say anything about it. (Also, you can tell I've never read any of the Le Guin stories, but the fandom osmosis and sedoretu stories I've read haven't had "germane marriages" is it possible the prompter just doesn't know what they are?)

My Friends Are Dead and Gone and that is Suddenly a Major Logistical Hurdle by Anonymous
Fandom: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
--either the OCs or the Valjean-as-Batman would be awesome, and you could make either work really well.

Rey/Finn/Poe/? by such_heights
--OH, WOW, THAT IS AWESOME. I was thinking "well, it would be a fellow pilot, like Jessica Pava, right, or an OC former stormtrooper in the mode of one of those "some stormtroopers take Finn as an example" stories." And then I saw the droid stuff and went OH HECK YEAH, THAT IS OBVIOUSLY THE WAY IT IS. And I would LOVE either the Droid Rights stuff or the Yavin kinship stuff, or both, it would be SO AWESOME.

Ivan/By/Rish/Tej by Anonymous
--Oh, yeah, that would be perfect! They really are a poly something. Or should be.

the trials of alys vorpatril by Anonymous
--Oooh. Squee, that is WONDERFUL Especially your stuff later with Simon, but that ... doesn't really fit the prompt.

In closing: all of these are wonderful, I will be excited for any of them!

It's not that I can't do Lady M at all, it's just she appears so much less in canon and tbh I was pretty invested in "Havelock isn't into women" by the time she showed up so I never really warmed to her. But I would enjoy Lady M/Sybil and Lady M with Vimes trying to awkwardly not be awful to her, though. And all the canon stories focus on some of the four over the others, so in a short story I think it would be fine if she was less present, at least in person.

I probably could ignore Cursed Child but without it Astoria is 100% an OC and I don't think *I* would be interested in the version of that prompt where Astoria is 100% an OC, even if I completely ignored Cursed Child plotwise. :/

...and Valjean is basically Batman is canon so you know if anyone could find rebels in hiding it would be him, but again with not really fitting the prompt if they're not actually all dead.

Intellectually I want to root for one of the Vorkosigan fics but emotionally I want My Friends Are Dead and Gone and that is Suddenly a Major Logistical Hurdle just because I like the title.

That is an *excellent* title it's true.

1) I care about ki'O INTENSELY. SO MUCH. I would read approximately infinity words about peak agrarian lifestyles on ki'O.

2) Though also I would be there for droids rights fic

... I'm really interested in the Parks and Rec one, though writing comedy is so hard! But I would want it SET on O, in fact, because the peak agrarian, settled/ancient civilization is the context where sedoretu make the most sense to me. And small town hijinks/drama are exactly what Le Guin is usually lacking, she's very soft and serious, and a society where so much drama must need to be sublimated in order to keep things stable is RIPE for petty town council shenanigans.

Also, you're right, there are like eight prompts that I'd be interested in except I'm not sure that "they invoke the uncle rule and then it's fine" is a satisfying fill.

"They invoke the uncle rule and it's fine" will always be satisfying to ME. :P

Sedoretu works so well with sitcoms, though! I really wanted to do a sitcom one except they always have way to much canon for me to juggle for long. (I was really tempted to prompt The Honeymooners/Flintsones/Jetsons or I Love Lucy you don't even know.) And ooh, from what I know of Parks & Rec it would be really interesting to transplant it to O, just in terms of like, how you think about community space and governance.

None of the Austen prompts are my Austen sedoretu ships! But mine are generally appalling, so I guess I'll just keep working on them for my own satisfaction. (P&P Sedoretu-Style has so much more conflict! It is FULL of conflict, wow. And basically writes itself if you assume that "intimate friend" = "lovers hunting up another couple to form a square")

I will say that it's not tempting to set Austen sedoretu AUs on O because that is basically just canonical Life on O.

Right? Climax technology is so great I want all the stories about it. (And it would work well with a Sidi fixit since that is basically what she does.)

...There really needs to be a ton of droids rights fic in SW fandom but the thing is you kind of have to pretend it's not a thing or you break the entire universe? Poe marrying BB8 is probably the best way I have come up yet to do it without going super dark and super complicated, though!

you kind of have to pretend it's not a thing or you break the entire universe
Yes exactly, it's frustrating. I would love to read #8 though :)

Possibly OP did not want a story about how they obviously already have a fourth and it's BB8 and then the rest of the fic devolves into Artoo and Threepio as the Galaxy's Worst In-Laws

With occasional digressions into Yavin IV aka Classic Maya kinship structures and/or Droid Rights activism and/or astromech linguistics

I don't know about OP but that sounds great to me!

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