suck my claspers

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...."

Indeed.

Bateleur Eagle (Terathopius ecaudatus), GETTIN PUFFFY!!!, family Accipitridae, found in much of Sub-Saharan Africa

ENDANGERED.

photograph by Sarina Crous

Albert Beukhof

photographs by Ray Coombes 

 photograph by Johan Wandrag

The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.

The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don't tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.

I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.