things I think about
May. 16th, 2012 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraAvengers: 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"...)
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"...)
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Date: 2012-05-17 04:00 pm (UTC)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.