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.
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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...)