December Meme: Sedoretu worldbuilding

[melannen]

Augh these were supposed to be Short and Sweet and Not Take A Lot of Thinking and I spent almost five hours in meetings today and I am just going to post what I have:


So I posted most of my current favorite Sedoretu AUs here a couple weeks ago and kind of wasted my charge! I thought maybe I could expand for the worldbuilding on one of them, but other than the deep dive into Mayan anthropology to see if they had moiety I could steal Poe’s choice of terminology from*, I don’t really have much beyond what’s in the stories? I discover that when I’m playing with Sedoretu AU I tend not to do any really deep worldbuilding, I just declare the AU and then start figuring out who’s getting married. Which is an interesting thing to know about myself! (Especially given the amount of background worldbuilding research I’ve done into Sedoretu AU in a general way.)

*Maya did have moiety, at least some of them, at least some time periods, but best I can tell it was probably already kind of obsolete by the Classical period, and also the best version of the moiety names I found was “White people” and “Red people” which seemed like a bad idea all around.

I suspect that’s why - I’ve done too much background research, so my choices are either “minimal worldbuilding, just go with it” or “spend months thinking about kinship in ways nobody, not even modern social anthropogists, is really that interested in.”

So let’s spin the wheel of fandoms and see what comes up.

Oh look - it’s the Sagas of the Icelanders, which I think maybe three of the rest of you know anything about! But relevant because I want to read all the fic for these but not do the worldbuilding for it. :D Luckily for all of us, I just finally got my hands on a book that does 70s-style kinship analysis for Saga Age Iceland in the way that meshes with Le Guin’s training, so I have a little more of the worldbuilding than I did!

(My conclusion from reading that is that Saga Age Iceland had basically the same kinship system as the modern US - i.e., a mess and a mesh of several different systems overlaid on each other - so I don't have too think too hard about it.)

So let’s look at what’s involved in Sedoretu AU worldbuilding in a general sense. It’s kind of like A/B/O AU in that it’s a bunch of different AU aspects all combined together into one thing, and various authors pick and choose which ones to emphasize or ignore. Except where A/B/O is thrown together out of all the wildest bits of the Id Vortex for sex writers, Sedoretu is mostly about relationships instead - all sorts of relationships.

You have:

The four-person marriage, which requires:
1. Normative bisexuality
2. Normative polyamory
3. Explicit social recognition of platonic/metamour relationships on almost the same level as romantic/sexual ones
4. Pressure for a normative marriage/relationship, but one that’s very different from and more complicated than our norm.

1 and 2 there are things that I just… don’t really feel the need to do a lot of worldbuilding on? Like, if you wanted to do it right, redoing all of Western history with everybody’s poly, everybody’s bi would change a lot (although not maybe all that much in terms of sweeping events, because for a lot of powerful people that’s always been the unstated rule anyway.) And enough fanfic just rolls with everybody’s bi, everybody’s poly these days that it doesn’t even really feel like it needs an AU label anymore.

3 is super interesting! But as a worldbuilding thing, I don’t really know where to take it - I feel like “poly relationships with strong metamour relationships are the best” is something I want in pretty much the same way whether it’s sedoretu verse or not.

4 is definitely the thing I tend to lean into hardest when playing with this. It’s a way to look at our culture’s pressure for a single monogamous marriage based entirely on a single romantic love that is supposed to fill all relationship needs, by writing a world that would find that marriage style weird and creepy and dysfunctional (because it is).

So yeah, my default with playing with sedoretu AU in a new fandom is pretty much a) who should get married and b) why haven’t they. Which is why I seem to just end up with proposal scenes over and over. *shrug*

But then you've got moeity, which adds in:

5) a gender-adjacent system that complicates things beyond the m-f binary
6) fun new incest taboos
7) a social emphasis on relatedness

5 is fun but not, like, my favorite thing to play with here? Actually I'm okay with sedoretu AU that ignore moeity entirely. 6 is interesting because fandom likes it, partly because we always like new obstacles to pairings, but also because of the way it... allows for intense platonic relationships to stay intense. I've always wondered about the fact that fandom doesn't seem to have picked up on the fact that it also *removes* some incest taboos, though - sibling marriage is AOK as long as you keep your moieties in order, for the obvious example, but I don't think I've seen any stories (outside of maybe tFatF fandom) that touch on that at all.

7 is the one that I always sort of get hung up on, because it's... complicated and also subtle. But like, in RL societies that have moiety, the major way the moiety affects daily life is that it makes it easy to slot everybody you meet into a place in your family. In the simplest version, in fact, *everybody* gets put into the social/linguistic categories of either auntie/uncle/sibling/nibling or inlaw/lover based on what moiety they are relative to you. So you can walk into a village where you don't know anybody, but moiety is built into grammar so you immediately know everybody's grammar, and suddenly you have a village full of brothers and sisters and inlaws - you are never isolated away from close kin, because everybody who has moiety is close kin.

Obviously that's the super-simplified version - it is usually more complicated than that, and you would, of course, treat someone you were raised with differently from someone you'd never met who happened to share your moiety - but in terms of social obligations, and things like making sure you have a place to sleep and someone to spend the holidays with, it would still apply.

Now, this is really important in a world where people mostly live in very small population centers, and nearly everything is organized around kinship obligations, because in that kind of world, someone *without* kin is probably dead in the desert. So you make sure you can always find kin. But it also tends to be a world that is very concerned with relationships in general - like, it's pretty unlikely you will walk into a village where nobody knows you, because they've probably been gossiping about you for years based on mutual acquaintances. It also tends to be a much more communal society, where people work more in terms of groups than individuals. They also tend to be societies that aren't highly stratified in terms of class, because moiety tends to be equalizing - if the king is half the population's uncle and the other half's father-in-law, it's hard to sell him as somehow a higher sort of being than them.

Not always, but in general, the larger the population centers, the more complicated the economy, the more stratified the society, the more likely that an old moiety system will die out, or that it won't take hold.

So when I try to transpose moiety to a modern society, it's interesting to think about what it means for that society, underneath, that they've held on to the moiety system, that they still honor this idea of universal kinship as a fundamental organizing principle. I don't think I've ever done anything blatant with it, but I"d love to someday.

And then there's the actual canon world:
8) sheepherders and fisherman
9) in an isolated, hardscrabble colony where society consists mostly of individual, self-sufficient household
10) who have only recently started coming back into closer contact with the home society

I don't think I've ever read a crossover fanfic that actually sets the story on O.

But, you know, that's basically Saga Age Iceland there. (especially if you decide to align the Ekuman contact with the conversion to Christianity.)

SO BASICALLY the conclusion we have come to here is that if I did finally write one of the several Saga sedoretu AUs various people have occasionally talked about wanting, I would probably just go all-out and set them on O. Because then you'd get more or less the right feel, but you wouldn't have to actually do the history worldbuilding because alien planet! Hooray!

And I think that would be a super interesting way to explore the other aspects of the AU, too. Because the base setting is pretty close - and Saga Iceland had the isolation, difficult travel, limited gene pool, and also dependence on kinship networks - that is written into the Ki'O anthropologies as explaining the sedoretu system. And the Sagas are very very much concerned with family relationships, marriage, and kinship. But of course Saga Iceland don't have moiety, don't have four-person bisexual poly marriages, so recasting those stories on O I think would be a really cool way of looking slant at what the originals (in both canons) are saying about love and kinship and human societies.

Also you could make the Sagas have more m/m ships in them.

(And I do thinking recasting the conversion as the recontact with the Ekumen would also be super interesting...)

Comments

[slashmarks]

Thank you for writing this! I have just enough familarity with the Icelandic Sagas to find it interesting, although mainly through Niel's Saga which is. Interesting. To think of adapting to O.

I think the part where I get caught up doing any kind of major gender/relationship change to irl history is, so much of history in certain influential societies has on some level been about ideas about inheritance and corresponding ideas about the need to prevent women from committing adultery (siiigh) that changing that really breaks a lot that isn't obviously connected. Though, sedoratus still involve closed marriage? So it might honestly be less of a problem than, like, ABO universes where heats are the main mode of reproductive sex.

Also, what was the title of that book about Saga era kinship?

eta: twice for runaway line breaks, commenting from phone

[melannen]

Njal's saga is the one I want most! IMAGINE IF HALLGERDR AND BERGDORA WERE MARRIED THE WHOLE TIME.

The book on saga era kinship was Culture And History In Medieval Iceland: An Anthropological Analysis Of Structure And Change by Kirsten Hastrup, which my sister had out of the library for her dissertation and told me to read while I was there for Thanksgiving so I would stop trying to get her to explain ætts to me. I'm not sure I'd recommend it exactly - I took a lot of accidental vacation naps while reading it - but it is the first thing I have found that made me feel like I understand ætts!

Yeah, the extent to which our gender, kinship, and social structures are heavily shaped by both inheritance and the inability to prove paternity is really interesting! And something a lot of worldbuilding is really bad at. We've basically solved the "prove paternity" problem in RL, and that's led to an amount of social change around gender and family and sex that I think hasn't really even caught up with our own ideas about our society, but I would love to see more about what it means to a society when it's been a solved problem for centuries. And inheritance and culture is something fantasy writers in particular are bad at - I just found an old rant of mine about how pointless it is to have family structures shaped around inheritance in a society where everyone is functionally immortal (I'm talking about you, Tolkien!)

Sedoretu doesn't run into those two things as hard as some of the other gender AUs, though; it keeps the paternity/inheritance stuff pretty standard, just has them running down the two different moiety lines within one family. (I feel like sending it back into human history, you'd have to look at that a lot more closely, and also the way that it goes matrilineally would have a big effect just in terms of how dynastic things played out.)

[slashmarks]

Write it and the rest of us won't have to imagine it! /not self-serving at all

Thanks for the title! I recently stayed up past bedtime reading sixty pages of Ottoman era Anatolian lawsuits, so I will probably find it readable.

Hm. I would say that proving paternity, while the explicit concern usually brought up, isn't necessarily the actual origin/reason for society revolving around preventing infidelity (and certainly the existence of DNA testing hasn't made people who consider themselves monogamous stop caring about the concept, or stopped societies with deeply misogynistic political ideologies from punishing adultery in women harshly). Particularly the existence of sexist materilineal societies makes me think the real goal is controlling women's children - whoever their fathers are - and economic output, and chastity is just a very convenient means of excusing it.

And I'd attribute the changes in Western society more to the change of the economic systems involved plus the usual pendulum back and forth on misogyny in societies where it's a concern, than the existence of paternity testing. (In particular, how much does inheritance matter to the average person's life these days? A lot less than it does in places where everyone inherits the land they live off of.)

That said, I agree that fantasy writers tend to be really bad at inheritance and kinship and family structure in general, really.

If you're trying not to mess up history too badly you can probably posit sedoretu as compatible with the usual sexist-monogamous swing of history and political ideology, just adjusting chastity to within the appropriate sedoratu relationships and adjusting for homophobia as needed. There are a few places homophobia has been politically significant, but not too many where it has the kind of load bearing force of sexism and monogamy, I think.

[lannamichaels]

Now, this is really important in a world where people mostly live in very small population centers, and nearly everything is organized around kinship obligations, because in that kind of world, someone *without* kin is probably dead in the desert. So you make sure you can always find kin

This is really interesting to me in the context of Jewish Geography: aka, that game that Jews will automatically play with each other when meeting a new person to identify what other people they have in common. I have done it on instinct in hospital waiting rooms. I have, in fact, met my sister-in-law's former roommate, to the glee of every Spaceballs fan ever. But it comes from the same instinct: in a vast world, how do you forge and keep connections for safety (and, let's be honest, for gossip).



Also interesting from an A/B/O perspective: having people around whose job ISN'T to have babies means there's more resources to help out with the babies. So you'd have the O in the A/B/O, or the specific marriage within the sedoretu, but still have a couple other people around to provide childcare and otherwise help during a vulnerable time when the baby is screaming and everyone still needs to be fed, clothed, and housed.

[melannen]

My uncle once went to his brother's daughter's wedding and there discovered that the groom's cousin was his extranged son's ex-wife, and that is how he got to finally meet his grandkids. (But that's mostly because they were all still in the same town.)

But yeah, it's interesting in the context of communities that are large but disperse! The simple example is with communities that are just very low population density but iirc what they've found with Aboriginal groups in Australia is that, contrary to expectation, the moiety system actually spread further after the colonization, because the aboriginal communities got even more fractured and that shortcut to kinship became even more important than before.

I am so in favor of all relationship structures that maximize the number of people on call to help with the babies! I think I would be delighted to be a parent but only once the parent-to-baby ratio was 4:1 or higher.

[ellen_fremedon]

If I were designing a society I would want to have grown up in, maximizing the adult-to-baby ratio sounds like an amazing idea.

But if I were designing a society I would want to live in right now...the problem with sedoretus or with the 'bashes in Ada Palmer's books is that if you don't want to coparent a child even a little bit, you don't just have to find one childfree partner, you have to find three or more.

(Of course, if I had grown up in a sedoretu or a 'bash and had more adults in my life, I would probably have had less forced contact with other children, would hate and despise them less today, and might be willing to parent one with five or six other people.)

[melannen]

I think in Ki'O society, the obvious solution there is that you don't get married. (You can still pair off or whatever, but since kids exist entirely in the context of sedoretu and sedoretu largely in context of kids, "oh, we haven't found our four yet" as the indefinite answer seems like it would be a great excuse to keep people from asking about when kids.)

But really in any society set up like Ki'O, living an entirely kid-free life would be hard, because everybody who isn't deliberately isolating themself is living in households of extended families, which will probably include at least some kids, and some expectation of babysitting. But there's certainly provision in Ki'O society (and ancient Icelandic), for aunties/uncles to be part of a household without being full coparents - in theory at least you could even have a core sedoretu that was childfree but where some of the members had legitimate kids with other people in the household. (That is another aspect that fandom sedoretu AUs tend to ignore.)

(And those societies usually do a lot less warehousing of children in large groups and a lot more letting them run free with the sheep, so there's that.)

I don't know Ada Palmer though because the reviews I've read made me think I would just get mad at the worldbuilding if I tried. :P

[ellen_fremedon]

Oh, I'm sure that if I'd grown up in one of these societies I'd have much less residual anger at childhood as a concept and by extension at children, and probably wouldn't object to being around them some of the time, even if I didn't want primary responsibility for one.

And the worldbuilding in Ada Palmer is...a lot? Like, there's just A LOT of worldbuilding, and some of it is very plausible and some much less so, and some of it is really shiny and attractive and some much less so, and I think a lot of Palmer's point in writing is just to spark argument about which bits are the plausible and/or shiny ones. But there is a lot to argue with and about.

[luzula]

My main irritation with the Ada Palmer books is that they keep mixing up sexual dominance games (also rape) with the politics. That might be a draw for some readers, but I found it off-putting.

[lannamichaels]

Same. There's no way I could give birth or be the primary caregiver, but if there were 4 others, I could be the organizer/finance person/etc, and not the 2-am-feedings person.

[melannen]

I would even be the 2 am feedings person twice a week if we had a rota! Just not primary caregiver every day forever.

[beatrice_otter]

When my baby brother was a toddler, we were living in a household which consisted of:
My two parents, both of them in their mid/late 40s, both of whom love and are good with kids.
Me, then college-age (home for summers, did lots of babysitting)
Middle brother (then in his mid-teens, very responsible and good with kids)
My parents' friend (same age, okay with kids)
My parents' friend's son (mid-teens, middling responsible, okay with kids).

All of us pitched in with childcare at least some. This is a ratio of four adults and two teens to one toddler. And there were times it felt like he had us outnumbered and surrounded. Granted, he is autistic and had some special challenges there ... but dude, autism runs in the family, we're used to it.

In summary: HOLY CRAP is it important to get As Many People Around For Childcare as you can possibly get. One person is not enough. Two is not enough.

[melannen]

I see moms at work all the time who are trying to single-handedly deal with four kids under five, and you can tell they are doing this twenty-four-seven, and I can only think HOW and also WHY. It really points up some of the things that are wrong with how our culture organizes itself. 4-1 the other direction is much more doable. And I'd still probably be exhausted!

[alexseanchai]

ooooooh

[melannen]

There is so much to dig in to!

[dhampyresa]

if the king is half the population's uncle and the other half's father-in-law, it's hard to sell him as somehow a higher sort of being than them.
Makes sense.

Thank you for thispost, it's very interesting.

[melannen]

Kinship and social structure is really interesting! It has become super unfashionable in academic anthropology lately though, so I'm working from old books and Le Guin and people actually working on the ground trying to live with people.

[dhampyresa]

Do you have any recs on where to start looking into this? You make it sound really interesting.

[melannen]

I do! Australian_Aboriginal_Kinship_An_introductory_handbook_with_particular_emphasis_on_the_Western_Desert is a free PDF that was written by an anthropologist in collaboration with Aboriginal people as a guidebook for clueless White people who want to interact with their communities. It's mostly about the RL moiety systems in Australia, but it starts with a good general layperson's introduction to kinship systems and vocabulary in general.

[umadoshi]

I love when you post about this. I still haven't read the relevant Le Guin (although I've acquired some of it now), but it's fascinating stuff.

[melannen]

I strongly recommend Mountain Ways and Unchosen Love - they're both short and queer and read like very good fanfic. (I had some Issues with "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea", including that I hated the narrator, but it has some extra worldbuilding if you liked the others.)

[umadoshi]

Very belated reply, but I just made note of that. ^_^

[briar_pipe]

these were supposed to be Short and Sweet

Sorry, I had to chuckle at that one. :D

4. Pressure for a normative marriage/relationship, but one that’s very different from and more complicated than our norm.

I think it's really interesting that this is where Le Guin chose to lean in as well. At least two of her short stories with sedoretu talk about the pressure to get married in intense detail. One ends just before tragedy; the other one eventually sorts itself out.

I don't think I've seen any stories (outside of maybe tFatF fandom) that touch on that at all

Merlin fandom also does this, with Arthur and Morgana, post-reveal. But yes, it's a rare topic.

So when I try to transpose moiety to a modern society, it's interesting to think about what it means for that society, underneath, that they've held on to the moiety system, that they still honor this idea of universal kinship as a fundamental organizing principle.

This is fascinating! This may be why O is still majority agrarian (authorial intent-wise), but that's clearly changing after contact. I wonder what relations the Ekumen and scientific advancement do to that, and whether O keeps that system, as Winter appears to keep shiftgrethor but ease it somewhat.

But, you know, that's basically Saga Age Iceland there.

How would you handle the patronym system? (I can't believe that's my major stumbling block. You've addressed so many of the core issues already....)

[melannen]

Oh yeah! I think the Merlin sedoretu fic I've read was pre-reveal (because I kind of faded out of the fandom around that time) but that would work perfectly.

Le Guin really liked writing societies that had easy access to high technology but stayed agrarian and egalitarian by choice. I don't know how realistic that is, but it's a very nice dream.

I don't know that patronyms would even need to be changed much? The book I read was actually arguing that Iceland's system wasn't really as thoroughly patrilineal as it sometimes seemed - patriline was default, but there were always people who used matronyms and/or were primarily aligned with their mother's or wife's ætt without it being particularly remarkable - even Njal appears to be living in his wife's house, rather than the reverse, from what I can tell. So you could change to matronyms pretty easily, or it might even be cool to keep the patronyms, so you have your moiety from your mother and your patronym from your father.

[kore]

For your anecdata, this is a post I knew you were going to make, and looked forward to, and somehow utterly missed, and did not remember it until you just mentioned it in your post on audience engagement.

//FACEPALM

[melannen]

This post did all the things wrong from that other post. :D

But it's so easy to miss things now that my reading page is suddenly moving so fast!

[sheliak]

I think I've read one sedoretu crossover that was set on O, and translated the characters to that world. But yeah, most don't try.

I know just enough about the Icelandic sagas to find your ideas about saga sedoretus really interesting--but not enough to really say much about it! But if you do write fic or further meta, I'll be reading it.

And I'm trying to worldbuild sedoretus for my current obsession, the game Six Ages. (And it mostly is worldbuilding, because short of shipping the gods I don't have actual characters in mind. And if I get the gods into it I start wondering about their moieties, and that gets into the intersection of gender and moiety...)

(And the way moiety complicates gender does make it harder, because somewhere between this game and the next related one, there's a cultural shift from having multiple families in a clan that can intermarry with each other, to everyone in the clan being considered kin and therefore inappropriate marriage partners for each other. And having four-person marriages and moiety on top of gender would make that shift even more complicated...)

On the other hand, what you said about moiety and relatedness has gotten me thinking about sedoretu X-Men again. I usually get stuck iterating through possible marriages and very rarely coming up with something workable--their relationships are messy, getting four of them to the point of marriage is hard--but considering how that sense of relatedness could change people who're so often isolated from the world around them is really interesting to me.

(As is the coparenting vs avoidance-of-parenting angle--there's one character in particular who I think would be much more comfortable as an aunt attached to a sedoretu than as one of the partners.)

[redbird]

I came here via a post of liv's, and want to poke at the sedoretu/moiety stuff in Le Guin a little bit.

Thoughts: at least one of her stories about O has, explicitly, that a sedoretu isn't closed: one (or more) of the four spouses might have an acknowledged outside partner who was connected to the household. Which I think leaves room for non-bisexual people to be more connected to the kinship structure.

Thinking about Always Coming Home, where there are five Houses instead of two (and therefore more people who could legitimately be marriage/sexual partners): a stranger would have kin in every village, but not necessarily close kin. When Woman Coming Home walks back into the Na Valley and introduces herself at the Blue Clay heyimas as "I am Woman Coming Home, of this House," she, her daughter, and their non-Kesh companion are made welcome in that house. But it's a welcome like that to a second cousin you don't already know, not your sister coming back from college or the cousin you grew up next door to. But nobody challenges her identification as part of that House, even though the Kesh interact semi-regularly with other cultures, trading widely though on a small scale.

(Also relevant here, perhaps, is that in that book there are in-story reasons the Kesh and their neighbors are low-tech by our standards, a combination of "we don't like where that road leads" and that the resources aren't there anymore.)