[ id: two photos captioned “"We are more alike than we are unalike.” - Maya Angelou"
the first is a photo of an indigenous amazonian man from an uncontacted tribe shooting at a camera drone with a bow and arrow. the second is a photo of an australian couple throwing beer bottles at a camera drone as it flies over their yard.
/ end id ]
I would, as an Australian, be offended by our representation in this photo if there were any inaccuracies to be seen.
it’s always wild to me how many people use social media exactly like the fake users they make up in tech demos do. just commenting on chipotle’s post about a new type of steak like “😍 can’t wait to try it!” and reacting to articles on mass death events with “😥”
not to be overly rude but i think that in order to be a proponent of these types of theories you need to exist in such a compacted online bubble that you’ve completely forgotten that the world’s leagues of aunts, odd brother in laws, and dimwitted general managers are extremely capable of owning and using computers
turning feminism from a radical social movement with the capacity to create real change into a fun quirky fandom that you can buy merch for at urban outfitters is one of the worst crimes of late stage capitalism/21st century western individualism. the current state of feminism is damning evidence that there’s no way to kill an activist movement more effectively than commodifying it.
I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can’t provide.
I know for a lot of people that’s irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.
So, I’ve been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it’d be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.
Like, “Oh, God, I don’t want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry”, or, “I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it’d make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?”, or “Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let’s just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble”.
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it’d be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can’t afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it’s been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe’s ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.
In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.
You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they’re married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family’s wealth.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
