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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".

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.

"But father, I'm not...."

day 205 Forretress

Ostracion bicaudalis, the Spotted Trunkfish!!!

ACE ATTORNEY CHARACTERS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE INVOLVED IN GEOPOLITICS

YEARS of videogames yet NO NARRATIVE USE found for MOOD MATRIX

Wanted to build stakes in a story arc? we had a tool for that. it was called: "CHARACTER WRITING"

"The dark age of the law is now. It wasn't the dark age of the law before" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

LOOK what Capcom have been demanding your respect for all this time, with the money and fanbase WE provided for them:

(This is REAL ace attorney 5+6 made by REAL capcom devs)

Possibly the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me occurred today. So I’m in a creative writing class at university right now and we had to print out twenty-five copies of our first, one page assignment to distribute to the class. I had to print mine at the computer lab as I don’t have a printer, but here are the three crucial facts that made this the worst mistake of my life.

1. Sometimes, when you log into Google on Chrome, it activates all of your extensions, even ones you’ve deactivated.

2. In high school, my friends and I got really into Ponify (a words replacing chrome extension) and switched the preferences so we could read political articles and have congress get into a “rousing snow ball fight” and the like.

3. Ponify reverted to its original My Little Pony lingo when opened on a new computer’s chrome.

So when I distributed my twenty-five copies of this I noticed the word “everypony”, my heart seized up and dropped into my stomach, and with my imminent death approaching, I began furiously correcting all twenty-five of them. My teacher, confusedly, agreed to let me correct them as I was too infuriated and ashamed to say my mistake aloud. 

I just realized, however, that the line “as she watched the binding fall away in her hand” was changed to “as she watched the binding fall away in her hoof”. 

And I just had to send this email: