questbedhead:
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!
#story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 