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fictional_fans2020-04-13 10:31 pm
Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement
Which is best?
Accidental marriage - "we didn't know it was legally valid!" subtype
34 (34.0%)
Accidental marriage - "one night in Vegas" subtype
17 (17.0%)
Arranged marriage
46 (46.0%)
Aliens make them get married
19 (19.0%)
Boston marriage
29 (29.0%)
Confirmed bachelorhood
19 (19.0%)
Confirmed spinsterhood
28 (28.0%)
Elopement
17 (17.0%)
Fake marriage
44 (44.0%)
Forgot they were married
22 (22.0%)
Group marriage
38 (38.0%)
Long, happy marriage
55 (55.0%)
Ludicrously long engagement
21 (21.0%)
Ludicrously short engagement
14 (14.0%)
Marriage of convenience
47 (47.0%)
Marriage of inconvenience
31 (31.0%)
Married in all but name
46 (46.0%)
Platonic marriage
37 (37.0%)
Secret marriage
26 (26.0%)
Shotgun marriage
4 (4.0%)
You left off the most important one!
3 (3.0%)
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Anyway, I voted for a lot of them, but I have much love in my heart for actually accidental marriage where it's your own custom/tradition/culture. Like, it's one thing for us to go off to a different galaxy and then accidentally get married in that tradition, that's a cool thing! But I would not then return to Earth and consider myself actually married, unless we did that accident on purpose because for reasons we couldn't get married on Earth. But otherwise, it's a cool thing to have happened, but I would not consider it binding.
But for it to accidentally happen in your own way of getting married? Perfection.
And to Group Marriage, I submit the Line Marriage that I read in Heinlein, where a group marriage keeps adding members to it so it keeps going for ages, even after the original members of the marriage are dead.
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I think "we got married on an alien planet where it's only binding there" is leaning harder toward "aliens made us do it" than "didn't know it was legally binding". There is wiggle room there for "we thought it wasn't binding in our culture, but there was this treaty we didn't know about" and "then we ended up spending most of our time on planets where it was binding after all, oops". (SGA worked all of these out in detail...)
There is something special for the ones where there is nothing but dumbassery as an excuse, though! "We got married on set and it turned out it was real" or "we thought it was joke paperwork when we signed it!" or "turns out this magic ritual that we should have looked at more carefully had a side effect" or "what do you mean we both forgot to file for the annulment ten years ago".
I also like Line Marriage! Though it's hard to do effectively in most fandoms, just based on the spread of characters and relationships we tend to see in canon. (Except the dynastic ones. The Barrayaran Imperial House as a line marriage would be an astonishing and fascinating trainwreck.
And I guess in Star Wars you have the line that goes Yoda-Dooku-Qui-Gon-Obi-Wan-Anakin-Ahsoka, and then Anakin brings in Padme without proper consultation with the rest, and then Obi-Wan and Padme think the others are all dead so they take the kids and marry into the Organas, and then skip most of a generation and Obi-Wan and Yoda hand the legacy over to Luke and Leia, at which point I supposed it goes Luke-Han-Lando-Chewie-Leia-Poe-Finn-Rose-Rey-(Jannah?) (I am possibly super overinvested in that one tiny scene with Jannah and Lando.)
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I am fully in favor of Oops Treaty and also Oops We Ended Up Spending All Our Time On Planet Of The Marriages. But then I want to bring in, like, "okay but we need to work out how divorces and multiple marriages work into this since I was ALREADY married to my ex-team mate from SG1 in a gould ceremony in a society that doesn't allow for divorce, but this new planet thinks you can only be married to one person at a time, someone please deal with this paperwork for me, I'm off to Planet Of The Chocolate River, if you need to fake my death to the tokra I understand."
It is also, unfortunately, HORRIBLY EASY TO DO. *hides under the bed from the very idea* But, y'know, if I needed another way to do an Ezar/Aral crackfic, that's how to do it. (Since, unlike Heinlein, I refuse to believe that children of the marriage can marry back into it, it at least isn't Serg/Aral. It theoretically could be Piotr/Serg, which, nope.)
You had me at Obi-Wan and Padme take the kids and go off to Alderaan for wedding bliss.
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IK,R? Do you let grandkids marry back in, or does Gregor get well out in this 'verse, and thus leave Aral stuck marrying Ivan? :D
I have been low-key shipping Yoda/Padme/Anakin/Obi-wan since I watched the first Clone Wars series, so I am all for that one now.
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Of course now that I think about it, I guess I'd have to have Dorca's entire marriage die in the war, so Yuri gets to inherit and start over? ...The more I overcomplicate it, the less likely I am to ever write it, so that's excellent :D
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I mean at some point it stops working entirely, it only works around canon era because succession has been so messed up for so long.
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It's just, how is inheritance supposed to work? If the inheritance is just you keep marrying people, then there's no real concept of a crown prince ever, there's children of the marriage who go marry other people, they aren't heirs. Heirs are people who marry into the marriage. If the only way for children to inherit is to kill their parents's entire marriage, that sure is something. So Yuri wouldn't ever think he could inherit that, or maybe he's Yuri because he does go "well, murdering them all sounds worth it". But would it then be necessary for Yuri not to be married already? Because presumbly kids marry into other families and joins their inheritance line. I guess they could divorce or split off if someone wants to go inherit something else. But you'd eventually have a lot of people in marriages if they did have to marry all the kids into existing marriages for them to be able to inherit anything, so probably there's some gifts and stuff given to adult children? Marriages would accumulate a lot of stuff, so giving it to the kids is one way to do resource management.
This does explain Xav marrying a Betan, he's starting his own marriage stem. ;)
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I think you'd almost have to do that in any fic version unless you went wildly AU (though the Star Wars one still works surprisingly well.) Like, you could have Countships pass through line marriage (or make it a generally High Vor thing) but most other families just use genetic inheritance. That would leave the biokids of Counts in a weird position even for their society.
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Okay, bring it back to the Firsters and isolation and their fear of "mutants"... this can work with that. Because instead of heirs being whoever you're stuck with in the genetic relationship lottery, you get to pick your heir to marry them. So it's got the same pressure of population growth at the family level not necessarily being from births, it being from the people around you; if you want your family to increase, it's going to happen through marriage, not children. But you still want to have children, to marry others, and make your own marriage look good because you don't have muties either marrying in or being born. But your children are not necessarily that important for your own house.
Plus, what am I thinking, the Vor fight too many wars for me to be worried about the sizes of those marriages and the number of people who have to marry into existing power structures.
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Marriage alliances then become a lot more important, but since it's group marriage, differently important, since you don't have to pick just one other line to ally with. So your biokids are socially most important in terms of tying your line to other lines...
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Yep. And sibling relationships become even more of allying because instead of inheritance being a competition, inheritance can work for all of them if they all play it right.
But you know what? Maybe Barrayar's Barrayar. But it's Beta Colony that does line marriages, what with their economic tests to be able to have kids; marriages will accumulate resources as more people join, therefore, more ability to have kids. And then Cordelia shows up on Barrayar and wonders where the hell the rest of everyone's marriage is.
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You've got those monastic Confirmed Bachelors and you've got social credit "we want kids"- Lois was writing and publishing that early enough to "Well, here's what was happening Off Page."