Fandom Snowflake Challenge 2024; Challenge #6

[anxious_songbird]

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. . Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

*Cracks Knuckles*

So, I’m going to be talking about 2 things, cause I have 2 prompt-table(s) coms for them. Because I adore them that much.

The two things are: the quadrant romance system from HOMESTUCK & the sedoretu marriage system from Planet O from some works by Ursula le Guin. The main reason I adore them: interesting romance possibilities. I’ll try to explain both the systems & why I love them;

In our society™, romance is a Big Deal. We have holidays & expected anniversaries based on milestones or just the relationships themselves. We have a legal institution based on the idea of making another person be intertwined with you (which is currently seen as romantic). We can, by media or the people around us, have very specific ideas of what these romances should be. Of course these can be not great at times; amatonormativity is a thing in our society and generally is against the norm to either be romantically alone semi-permanently or be with multiple people at the same time consensually.

The systems do little for the former, but do something funny with the latter. These systems, in their respective canons, are the norm for the people they’re from.


With the sedoretu; half of the population isn't supposed to date you via the moiety-system (in which dating somebody in the same moiety is seen as incestuous). Your moiety on Planet O is decided by what the moiety your birth-mother is (morning birth-mom means you’re a morning person). The sedoretu itself as a marriage has 4 people instead of 2: a man & woman from the morning moiety and a man & woman from the evening moiety typically. You, in this system, are expected to have a het & a gay relationship in the marriage and 1 het pairing that is taboo & more akin to a sibling you share romantic partners with. In this system you are not meant to be focused on one partner, since you’re married to other people as well. You are expected to care about both your romantically/sexually involved partners somewhat equally. Even the same moiety person, who you are expected to not be romantically/sexually with, you are expected to be close with them.

What I find so interesting about this is the cultural implications of this. How are family trees understood? Would there be social/cultural identifiers about what moiety you’re in as to avoid the sacrilege? What happens when you do fall in love with them? How do people try to find partners for a marriage? How socially acceptable is it to look for a 3rd/4rth? How do they handle how emotionally messy that will be? How long does it take and how hard is it expected to be? How are children raised & how is labor divided in such households? How is jealousy culturally expected to be handled (because obviously it’s still going to happen)?

I adore that these questions are a thing that come up in the system (some even in canon along other ones). The work “Mountain Ways” also tackles how messy these arrangements can be on their own with other cultural contexts. It’s a fun way to explore the idea of what it even means to be married, what does it mean to be whole?


With quadrants; you are expected to be in 4 different kinds of romance. There’s the flushed quadrant (called Matespritship) which is mostly just our understanding of romance. But then there’s the other positive emotion’s one: The pale quadrant in canon is described as “soulmates, but more platonic”, mostly in the sense that you don’t tend to kiss or anything similar to that in such a relationship. The pale quadrant is about mutual guardianship; helping each other be better while pacifying them. Moirallegiance (pale) was one of the first canon things I interacted with that was QPR-coded, and seeing how HS shaped a generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if people found out about real life QPRs or ended up in one because of HS.

And there’s the other 2 forms of romance, based on negative emotions instead of positive ones; There's pitch/caliginous romance (kismesissitude), which is the typical “foe yay” + “no one can defeat you but me”, it’s a arch-rivalry treated like a romantic & sexual relationship status of it’s own. And there’s gray romance (Auspisticism), which basically treats the mediator of a conflict between people (which could seriously hurt the people involved or their relationships) as a romantic relationship as important as the other 3.

And that’s (alongside the cultural implications of all 4 existing in the same society) why I love quadrants; it’s a system of romance that treats more than one kind of relationship as important. It’s even seen as important to have multiple relationships, all seen as romantic, which are different from each other in goals, feelings & outlooks. It asks us, in a way, to accept that we are a messy people with messy emotions


Both systems show a diffrent way of looking at romance, asking us to view, if only a little while, relationships trough a new lense. Of course; not all important relationships can or should be romantic, but sometimes romance can be bogged down by the expectations of how it should be in our societies. Romance is a very messy thing, and these systems acknowlegde how messy they can be. And that why I adore/love them.

(pssh, if you're a creative intressted and/or curious about these, or know somebody who might, maybe check out 40sedoretu and/or 100quadrantedships. It's primarily about prompt-filling, but meta + other things related is welcome :3)

Comments

Re: Try this ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

*bow, flourish* Happy to be of service.

I just love infrastructure in general. I love worldbuilding -- continents, ecosystems, constructed languages. I love figuring out what that setting would do to people or other lifeforms living there.

I've discovered that when you lay out how things are constructed, it becomes very easy to see other options, and then, to play around with those options in different designs.

Homestuck is a very structural fandom. The trolls have four romances, and each quadrant has its own rules, and they are divided into pairs based on different criteria. The trolls have 12 (standard) colors of blood, each with its own tendencies and cultural expectations; and there are clusters based on rank or abilities within those 12.

If you look at A Conflagration of Dragons, that is all hand-built. (You don't have to read the poems for this part, I've posted some of my notes.) No humans, no standard-fantasy-races except for the dragons and even those are constructed with logical patterns. I literally sat down with an elemental system and made lists of traits associated with each element, then assigned each race 2 elements and some traits based om those. I figured out how certain major features, like wings and horns, are passed down. There are notes on which races have close or casual alliances, and which don't like each other. There are notes on certain well-known things about relationships, like how Hachi babies are quiet and Madhusudana babies are demanding; so a Madhusudana usually can't raise a Hachi baby at all, and a Madhusudana baby will run a Hachi foster parent into the ground. Laying things out like that not only let me avoid prior patterns to create something new, it gave me lots of story hooks. And that's my idea of fun. I look at story or character elements as a set of Legos, and I want to dump out the box and mess them around.