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December Meme: Sedoretu worldbuilding
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...)
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...)
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