Question: Choosing Moeities

[anxious_songbird]

Not much is actually said about moeities in Ursula's works outside of the marriage aspects, despite the text saying it has to do with ancient religious reasons. How do you decide on what moeity a character is in?

Do you just go by gut instinct or go with what aesthetically makes sense? Do you create your own worldbuilding around it or are you lax with it? Are there in your headcanons markers of what moeity someone is in and if so what are they?

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Not much is actually said about moeities in Ursula's works outside of the marriage aspects, despite the text saying it has to do with ancient religious reasons. How do you decide on what moeity a character is in? <<

Well, I know enough about anthropology to offer a few observances from that...

* Same-moiety relationships are platonic and opposite-moiety relationships can be romantic/sexual. Membership is typically passed down from parents; if matrilineal you share your birthmother's moeity, if patrilineal you share your birthfather's moeity. That means if you know what one character's moiety is, you can extrapolate other characters around them.

* With fanfic, people often start with a relationship in mind. So you have to consider that in the structure, who falls into which moeity, and who they can or can't have sex with. Again, once you've pinned down one person's moiety that can affect others. I saw one Avengers sedoretu where the author had to consider two different generations of characters (Howard Stark's generation and Tony Stark's generation) and how that would influence who could be together.

* Some cultures don't define moiety or clan by birth, but rather by traits. I've seen one fictional (but very plausible) example where it was time of birth -- all the daylight births were one group, and the rest were divided by constellations at night. Some tribes would go by the totem a person connected with in their adulthood ceremony. And so on.

* Working with the morning/evening set, one approach would be to look up symbolism for each time of day and then try to match that to characters. For example:

Morning
East
Light
Early bird
Beginning
Optimistic/Idealistic
Logic
Work
Air/Fire
Extrovert
Pastels
Light academia
Cottagecore/Naturecore
Fairycore

Evening
West
Dark
Night owl
Ending
Pessimistic/Practical
Intuition
Rest
Earth/Water
Introvert
Deep colors
Dark academia
Urbancore/Grunge
Goblincore

And of course, if you're looking at a culture, it's going to have stereotypes about each moeity much as we do with religions, neighborhoods, personality types, etc. These will sometimes be fairly accurate and other times wrong. In a society with very rigid lines, where moeity determines things like profession in addition to sex partners, some folks might even feel "trans-moeity." (That's why some cultures use traits to sort people, as it largely prevents that problem.)

>> Do you just go by gut instinct or go with what aesthetically makes sense? Do you create your own worldbuilding around it or are you lax with it? Are there in your headcanons markers of what moeity someone is in and if so what are they? <<

The one sedoretu I set up was basically me looking at a picture of four people and imagining how they'd fit together, based on things like body language and dress mode.

If I was worldbuilding with it, or any similar structure of relationships, then I'd look at why such a structure would exist, what it's for, and try to build that in detail. People don't do things for no reason. The reasons may be cultural or practical, often particular to circumstance.

So it might be that two small tribes decided to join, and the one that came from the east became Morning while the one from the west became Evening, and they set up marriages to mix the genes. Origin stories are generally a good bet.

It might be that the society feels a need for children to have four parents in case of losses. That means you'll see a lot of broken sedoretus and sets of 2-3 people looking to fill gaps with a new person, which is a very different type of story than is typical for sedoretu fanfic.

Re: Thoughts

[anxious_songbird]

Thank you for this wonderful description of possiblities! It is good to remember that moeities would effect all of society, and your advice keeps that in mind ^_^

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Thank you for this wonderful description of possiblities! <<

I'm happy I could help.

>> It is good to remember that moeities would effect all of society, and your advice keeps that in mind ^_^

It's the anthropology -- I like studying how different societies do things. Humans have a ton of different marriage variations, and most of those have to do with handling specific challenges (e.g. a society with a gender imbalance) or quirky cultural beliefs (there's one where they believe the father contributes to a baby all through gestation, so a mother may take an extra husband for extra support). Then too, I like looking at how one change will affect the rest of society, hence why I do more with superpowers than fight club. So with sedoretu in a society, I would expect to see certain things customarily done with your own moiety and other things done with the opposite moeity. Each would have its own traditions. A lot of things would be divided either into sets of two or sets of four, but you wouldn't see three very often. And so on.

Re: Thoughts

[wallwalker]

This is a really good post! I really do like the last paragraph and would enjoy seeing more sedoretu fanfic about filling in gaps, too.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> This is a really good post! <<

Thank you. I have toyed with the idea of fleshing it out more for marchmetamatterschallenge if I have time, because correspondences are really interesting and useful in sedoretu.

>> I really do like the last paragraph and would enjoy seeing more sedoretu fanfic about filling in gaps, too.<<

I think it has a lot of potential. It highlights some of the big differences between sedoretu and couples. In a couple, if one person leaves, that's half the group gone; in a sedoretu, it's only a quarter. So for instance, the hit to family ties for children or income for household is much less likely to collapse the whole system. Similarly, finding a new partner for a single person is straightforward, since they only have to match one person's tastes and sex/gender needs; but in a sedoretu, the new person has to be a specific sex/gender and moiety AND be a good match for three people.

You can ask me to write sedoretu during any relevant prompt call. Grab something the from the table on this comm if you like. Currently open is the crowdfunding Creative Jam on "knowledge" and up next will be the March 5 Poetry Fishbowl on "brands / products / services we wish existed."