things I think about

[psocoptera]

Avengers: what does Thor make of Fury? Does he just assume he traded his eye for wisdom? Is Loki attacking SHIELD because he's displacing his issues with one-eyed authority figures? (Has anyone written fic about this?)

Do sedoretu make any sense in a world without moieties? In a proper sedoretu, can your same-moiety spouse be your sibling, or is that still icky? If the purpose of marriage is to create new alliances, essentially, it sort of seems like marrying your sibling would defeat the purpose, since you already have that relationship. But in fandom, trying to come up with possible sedoretu, it's very tempting to use sibling-pairs as a substitute for moiety, since it's got the right sort of connotations. (I have yet to come up with a sedoretu I really like in any fandom... ATLA has a large enough cast, I feel there ought to be a plausible one there somewhere, but there's always one of the legs that seems random and forced. I have a Huge plotbunny about Becca *imagining* a sedoretu between herself and Ali and Chloe and Trent, because you know she reads LeGuin, but that's meta.)

In a world with soulbonds, what happens if your soulmate turns out to be asexual, and you're not? I mean, I guess the idea of soulmates is supposed to be that they are your Perfect Match and once you see them you Just Can't Resist Each Other and so must Fuck Like Bunnies, but, I don't know, I'm intrigued by the idea of "soulmates" being people who just happen to have matching psychic signatures, or whatever, and this doesn't necessarily mean anything about them being *good* with each other, and certainly not in every possible way. (Er, except I want this ace/not!ace soulmates story to have a happy ending, so I guess the question is not "what happens" but rather "how do they work it out"...)

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

if your soulmate is asexual and you're not, you settle into asexual domesticity with them, and you have lots of casual sex with other people, and your soulmate is cool with it because they're your soulmate and they grok that that's something you need.

[irilyth]

Avengers: Hee.

LeGuin: I apparently haven't read enough LeGuin. :^p But based on TSOR, I agree that sedoretu doesn't make sense without moieties, or something similar. I guess you could approximate it with some other taboo, like siblings, but that seems different. (And I don't know anything about the alliances aspect.)

Soulmates: I don't necessarily think that Fuck Like Bunnies is a required trait for soulmates; I think you can be the perfect people for each other (in every possible way), and never have any sex at all. So I agree with Comma's suggestion about this: Perfect ace/not-ace soulmates would (both) be perfectly happy for the not-ace partner to do sexual things with other people, just like perfect soulmates who don't share some other particular interest. They're not twins, they're just perfect together. :^) And they can be perfect together while still liking different things, and doing different things with other people.

Ace relationships: Girls With Slingshots has been doing a sequence about this lately, in which an asexual lesbian character and her bi (and non-ace) girlfriend have been exploring the idea of outside fooling around. It first comes up in http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1363/ through http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1370/, and then picks up again in http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1384/ through http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1388/, and I think it's really well done.

Imperfect soulmates: There's some of this sort of thing in Elfquest, as I recall, in which Recognition doesn't particularly care about whether you like each other or not. But, my impression is that it is in fact always correct, and that the two people are actually perfect for each other, even if they don't know why and it takes them a while to come to terms with it. If you ditch the ace aspect, there's an obvious hook here, if the soulmateness is purely reproductive, and based on matching with someone who will produce the best offspring. Well, or maybe you don't ditch it, and the point is that the asexual partner isn't willing to produce offspring... I think it depends a little on which aspect of the typical Soulmate thing you're looking to fiddle with: The idea that the couple will work well as a couple, or the idea that they're sexually compatible, or the idea that they'll have perfect children, or what... Focusing on one of those things might be more coherent than flexing them all.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I feel like I ought to be commenting on the asexual thing, but I'm having trouble, because. . . I don't read the right sort of fanfic? I guess I'm having trouble seeing how "how do an asexual person and a sexual person who discover they're soulmates work out their relationship?" differs from "how do an asexual person and a sexual person who fall in love work out their relationship?" If you really just want answers to the latter question, I can point you to plenty of places on the internet where this is discussed, but I suspect that your question is dependent on the concept of soulmates in a way that I don't really understand ;-)

But. . . because other people have been answering the question with the poly answer, I feel that I am obligated to talk about the latter question anyway and point out that not all asexuals (and presumably not all sexual people in relationships with asexuals) feel comfortable with the idea of being poly, and that there are other choices that real people in such relationships make other than being poly. There are some sexual people who are perfectly content with choosing to be celibate, because sex isn't actually that important to them and monogamy is. There are some asexual people who are not actively repulsed by sex and can even find some enjoyment in the idea that they're pleasing their partner, such that they do in fact engage in sex with their sexual partner. Having a poly relationship is certainly one answer that people choose when they find themselves in this kind of relationship, but I wouldn't want you to get the mistaken impression that it's the only answer that people choose.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no, I think I explained this poorly, probably because it's the kind of thing I think about at 3 am when I'm up with Q and not at my most coherent. This one was inspired by having been browsing the soul bond tag at AO3, I think, and I've spent enough time at AVEN and the like to have some ideas about how people in the real world might work out their ace/sexual relationships (but thank you for listing some, for the comments section here!), I think the things that I was thinking a soul bond culture might introduce, that we don't have in reality, would be a) a sense of destiny and b) the removal of choice. If historically-promiscuous Tony finds out that "all along, he's been meant to be with" ace Steve, how does that change his view of his sexuality? Does Steve feel more worried than he would without the soulbond about not being able to give Tony everything he needs, since Tony didn't freely sign up for this, or less worried, because he knows that he's Tony's perfect match anyways? That sort of thing.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. I think the idea of "culture" is the key element here, because I was thinking of soulbonds more in terms of something unusual that happens to only some people rather than being an accepted and expected part of the cultural narrative of the world.

Is there fanfic that explores the more general issue? Frankly, a story about two people who learn that they're fated to be together, really don't get why at first for whatever reason, and have to spend the rest of the story figuring out how on Earth this is meant to work sounds somewhat more interesting to me in general than one about two people who learn that they're fated to be together and don't really struggle with the idea at all. Actually, the latter (although with precognition rather than soulbonding) is kind of what Malinda Lo's Huntress was like, which is one reason why it bored me a lot more than Ash did. It kind of felt like the only reason Taisin and Kaede fell in love was because Taisin knew that she would wind up in love with Kaede, although I did like the resolution of the romance plot.

[irilyth]

Elfquest certainly has this, in the form of something called "Recognition". I haven't read the whole EQ canon, but there are a variety of stories in there about different aspects of this, including (brief mentions of) people who Recognized someone they already knew and liked, people who are sweethearts but *haven't* Recognized each other (and the tension around that), and people who Recognize each other who don't like each other at all.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

(Moral of story: always just cite from the outset.) I was particularly thinking about this (http://archiveofourown.org/series/11026) alternate universe, in which there are soulbonds and also everyone is either dominant or submissive and so sex and romance are constructed rather differently than they are in our culture. I'm less interested in the BDSM aspect than in the "everyone has a soul mate" aspect.

I definitely agree that "really don't get why and have to figure it out" is more interesting than a lack of struggle. I still haven't read Huntress as I was lukewarm about Ash, although it's still on my list - that does sound sort of lacking in conflict though.