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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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As one example, how about marriage? Marriage is literally a vow, generally to love and protect your spouse, but I haven't heard of a single practitioner getting forsworn due to a divorce. So maybe practitioners don't make the same vows? It raises all sorts of questions because you really would expect marriage to be just as if not more significant than a familiar. People should get forsworn for cheating on each other all the time.

This is actually a low-key important part of the story, though I think there's only 1-2 explicit conversations about it. Practitioner couples write up elaborate contracts, complete with punishment provisions and escape clauses, and then swear to follow the contract. They're taught from a young age to never make a promise to anyone else, especially in the heat of love/affection, and then their marriage traditions bend over backwards to ward off the possibility of foreswearing. And this has a bunch of downstream effects on practitioner culture, when every marriage is calculating and transactional and all human relationships are missing a core element of good faith and comradery.

not penalizing parents for mistreating their children

By what standards? I'd say historically, "child abuse" was common and often understood as being necessary.

or children for rebelling against their parents.

This seems really uncommon and difficult. It's quite possible that precedent and karma does factor in here.

There's no way that a magic system that wants people to fit into clearly defined roles would like people being genderfluid or polyamorous.

I actually liked how this was handled with Zed. It took considerable care and effort to essentially submit a "change of identity form" to the spirits.

By what standards?

Well, Helen's family springs to mind, they must fail any reasonable standard.

I agree with your point on marriage, but the point is that even emphasizing it to that degree seems a bit off to me. The universe itself should enforce marriage as its own Ritual, like a familiar ritual, aside from any explicit promises you make as part of it. Marriage is more than a contract and you shouldn't be able to simply define it differently using a few written words and expect the universe to comply, any more than you can just define a Demesnes to remove the part where you have to face challengers.

As far as Zed, it was handled as well as it could be, given that the universe is sympathetic. My issue is with the universe being sympathetic at all. I get that Wildbow doesn't want to write a story where the laws of reality are transphobic (though I'd argue that's all semi-realistic stories lol) and he's doing a good job given that constraint, but it does still produce inconsistencies.

The universe itself should enforce marriage as its own Ritual, like a familiar ritual, aside from any explicit promises you make as part of it.

Why? It's primarily Innocent business. Whatever connotations it had before Solomon, it's been thoroughly mundane'd since. It doesn't have to be "like a Familiar ritual" any more than buying a house as a practitioner "has to be like a Demesnes ritual".

Sure, it doesn't have to actually be a Ritual ritual, the point is that it should have quite a lot more weight to it than even something like buying a house, and the terms should not be so easily negotiable.

It does have more weight than buying a house, as for the ease of negotiation, that's a matter of opinion. Even actual Familiar rituals have wiggle room. You can even stretch them enough to have Familiar-Implements, Familiar-Demesnes and the rest of the permutations. If that's allowed, I see no reason why practitioners have to go along with Christian marriage vows word-for-word.

Well, Helen's family springs to mind, they must fail any reasonable standard.

I don't know that the standard is reasonable by modern sensibilities. Helen was given a dangerous opportunity for incredible power, and the whole schtick of it was that it had to be hidden from the spirits. The Graubard's might be a better example, but even then, they're "fixing" and "improving" their children.

How about that old crone from Pact? She was literally stealing her daughter's lifespan over and over again.

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