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I'm pretty sure it's either implied or said planily that practitioners don't make the same vows. Also, there's the "EULA argument", as follows: if no one actually reads the EULA when agreeing to it, then no one is actually held to it.
I assume practitioners are selected for being slightly more able to keep the promises they made. But no doubt there are ones who got forsworn for cheating.
The universe appears to subscribe to the patriarchal model of the family where the patriarch rules and calls the shots and the children rebelling is his problem. That's traditional enough if you ask me.
It doesn't though! I would be fine with that, it would be totally consistent, but if the universe actually worked that way then it would punish people for stepping out of line. A man who treated his wife and children with respect would take a karmic hit for it. In my original comment I mentioned female breadwinners. I think if the universe actually were that patriarchal, then there would be a clear and obvious karmic hit for allowing your wife to enter the workplace.
That's if you assume the universe sees being an iron-fist patriarch as a duty and not a right of the head of the family. When it's the latter, the patriarch would just as well get extra good karma for allowing liberties to his charges.
As for "entering the workplace", honestly this seems such a petty issue in the face of the larger corpus of worldwide tradition.
Obviously this is all a matter of how you approach interpretation. You appear to be aiming to dismantle the Watsonian explanations, while I'm aiming to create them.
OK, I feel like this is just the first objection that sprang to mind for you, because it's quite easy to come up with counterarguments. If you really think the universe sees this iron-fist patriarch thing as the right of the man, then you would expect matriarchies to be karmically penalized quite heavily because the woman is ruling over the man. In fact the story has already included a couple of powerful matriarchal families so we can rule that out.
I don't really want to waste more time on this hypothetical. It's quite obvious the universe is not in fact patriarchal the way you suggest it is.
Yes there have always been some women in the workplace, so just replace that with "women in positions of power" or "women joining armies" if you wish to and my point still stands. Even the rare historical examples of the latter 2 should not exist in this setting, due to thousands of years of tradition from before civilization really existed at all.
Yes, this is what it comes down to. I mostly love the magic system, what bothers me is that it has turned into more and more of a vehicle for a very specific and common modern ideology, and as it has done so more and more inconsistencies have arisen in the text. I have no incentive to continue creating ever more ludicrous explanations for the inconsistencies when it's easier to just shrug and say that this is obviously just how the author wanted it and so that's how it is.
Pointing out the inconsistencies is the easiest way for me to gesture at my main point, which is "this author has built a setting explicitly to support his ideology." The inconsistencies make it much more egregious, because it means the author cares more about the ideology than about the setting, but even if it were perfectly consistent I would still take issue with it. This reminds me a bit of the complaints towards The Cold Equations. Even though that book was perfectly logically consistent, people complained that the story itself is engineered such that its conclusion is foreordained. I particularly like sci-fi editor John W Campbell's complaint:
Work too hard to contort your setting into supporting your ideology and I will get annoyed, whatever the ideology. This example is somewhat more sensitive to me though because the Pact/Pale setting has probably my favorite magic system, and I am watching it get eaten alive by banal, generic ideology in real time.
That works both ways, I'll get annoyed when someone works too hard to dismantle a setting based on their dislike of the ideology it's built with.
The premise and the conflict of the story is that it's hard to break pattern and stereotype - but not impossible. Indeed there wouldn't be much of a story if everyone had to go along with the weight of thousands of years of tradition.
Sure, but I'm not annoyed by the ideology itself, I'm annoyed by the damage it does to the setting. In particular I'm just tired of reading about the sex lives of 14 year olds in an otherwise fantastic book.
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