Look at the massive amounts of money thrown at it going as far back as the 1920’s – back when science-fiction wasn’t even called SF yet, back when we named micro-genres after their authors.
The idea that it ever wasn’t is a retroactive fantasy invented by marketers to sell you a sense of identity, you fool.
Its marketing 101.
What you’re actually talking about is maker/creator culture which historically was seen as “a geeky thing”:
The idea of inventing the geek moniker and selling this idea to you that it totally encompasses you, and that to be a maker/creator is inherently geeky is just marketing.
But it wasn’t until sometime in the early 19th century that, “the Scottish word geck, meaning ‘fool,’ changed to geek and began being used to describe a certain kind of carnival performer.
The entire point of it was “I feel like a side-show, who’s always second fiddle to someone who’s inferior”:
The character of Sideshow Bob in the Simpsons is a pre-70’s pre-Starwars “classical” geek, right down to his speaking and mannerisms.
People did always love it, they just didn’t always talk about it as if they did. Look at the classics which actually persist through the ages. They are all pretty “geeky” for their time, actually! What do you even think stage-performance culture is, like theatre-kids and muzzos? Hell even the hyper-technicality of jazz was seen as hella geeky shit in its day.
And yeah, you can also argue cultural-relativism:
That the people of today think the world has always been the way it is now right up until they get old enough to realize it isn’t – and then they get old enough again to realize that it was, actually, just not in the ways they thought.
So yes, what’s actually happening is just, “the past was always”, actually? The idea that it wasn’t and isn’t is actually the bullshit artifice of our era designed to sell you brand identity?
“The good old days” never existed!
The entire platform of nostalgia-marketing is about stealing your memories to replace them with fake ones so you can be tricked into buying shit you don’t need!
AND YES, THAT EVEN INCLUDES NEGATIVE MEMORIES!
REDUCTIONIST SOLIDARITY WITH A SIMPLE “US VS THEM” NARRITIVE IS THE VERY BACKBONE OF MARKETING!
The magnitude of how much something is remembered is defined by its conversation in the present. Most of the people who obsess over Garfield now for example, did not read Garfield! And you know what? THAT’S OK!
The positive memories are the ones which persisted, and as such they tend to be the ones which define the cultural memory of a thing!
Why? Because while human negativity bias means we tend in the short to medium term remember the negative stuff more powerful, positive memories are the ones which win out overall in the long term, because they’re the experiences humans are most likely to talk about when defining themselves.
Lucian’s “A true story” was science fiction of its day in 2nd century AD, literally dunking on travel-logs by writing an absurdist fantasy where men get swallowed by a 300km whale, travel to outer-space, and get feminized into trees by drinking wine.
And so I’m going to write on the end of this post as they did upon Lucian:
καὶ τὸ τέλος ψευδέστατον μετὰ τῆς ἀνυποστάτου ἐπαγγελίας
And
I’ll say it again:
There is no such thing as “a 7/8/9/1/20’s kid”!
Its marketing designed to appeal to your deepest fears:
That you experienced what you experienced alone,
and that nobody understands you.
Don’t let marketers manipulate you.
This is theft, and it is gaslighting.
THIS PERSON FELL FOR A TONY ZARET POST. LAUGH AT THEM.
I legitimately don’t understand all the hate for Senator Fatima Payman following her speech. I didn’t understand when Chloe Swarbrick was made fun of for the “OK Boomer” comment either.
Politicians try to win votes. They try to change attitudes and to do that, they need to get their message out there. Senator Payman did get her message out there, evidently, and it’s reached who she wanted it to reach. People may be laughing at her, but she’s making Australian youth aware of politics. She’s communicating through memes what would flounder and die in obscurity if communicated in formal terms, because who she’s trying to address aren’t going to respond to formal language.
She is doing Good Politics, and her becoming a meme is a result of that. It’s planned, it’s smart, and it is memorable.
I think people who are opposed to this method of expression are more caught up in everything being done a certain way than whether or not anything is being done at all.
Australian Senator Fatima Payman recently broke ranks with her party on the issue of Palestine, and was given the option to fall back in line, or quit.
There was a bill pitching that Australia should vote to recognise a Palestinian State. The Labor Party told their people to vote no. Fatima ignored this, voted yes, and then was told by the prime minister that she had two choices: toe the party line, or quit the party.
Today, she quit the Labor party. Here is part of her resignation speech:
It [the Labor Party] is a party I have proudly served.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.
It is a crisis that pierces the heart and soul, calling us to action with a sense of urgency and moral clarity. We have all seen the bloodied images of young children losing limbs, being amputated without anaesthetic, and starving as Israel continues its onslaught, live-streamed across the world.
As a representative of the diverse and vibrant communities of Western Australia, I am compelled to be their true voice. To be their true voice in this chamber, especially when the cries for justice and humanity echo so loudly.
Unlike my colleagues, I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of injustice. My family did not flee from a war-torn country to come here as refugees for me to remain silent when I see atrocities inflicted on innocent people.
Witnessing our government’s indifference to the greatest injustice of our times makes me question the direction the party is taking. I am torn, deeply torn.
On one hand, I have the immense support of the rank-and-file members, unionists, the lifelong party volunteers, who are calling on me to hang in there and to make change happen internally.
On the other hand, I am pressured to conform to Caucus solidarity and toe the party line.
I see no middle-ground, and my conscience leaves me no choice.
Our actions must align with our principles. When history looks back, it must see that we stood on the right side of humanity, even when it was difficult.
Sadly, I do not believe my principles align with those of the leadership of the Labor Party. With a heavy heart but a clear conscience, I announce my resignation from the Australian Labor Party. I have informed the Prime Minister that, effective immediately, I will sit on the crossbench to represent Western Australia.
When I told them that I would be praying and seeking guidance from God, that was in confidence and I did not expect that they would go around telling people, almost in a condescending, ridiculing why like, “Oh, look at this one. She’s praying to this almighty being.” It was something serious that I had to spend time reflecting, and everyone has their own ways of coming to a decision. I didn’t fully have an idea of how I decided to – I was on the Senate floor, making that decision. So for my colleagues to, I don’t know, make it seem like it’s very ridiculous that this person has to depend on a high being, like that’s personal to me … And plus we pray every single morning in the chamber, so to just single me out in a situation like this is poor form.
- Senator Fatima Payman.
I mean it’s islamophobia right? As she says, parliament literally prays for God’s guidance every single session. So if they’re going after Payman for saying (privately!) that she prayed for God’s guidance it’s pretty clear what’s up.
Guys it’s over I can’t describe people at all like I’m dating this girl and my family asked me to describe her and I’m like “uhhhh she’s cute and she’s half black and half Asian and she’s a foodie” and they’re like “well what else” and I just don’t know. I can’t describe my roommate either. “Uhhhhhhs gay and he likes the X men” is the best I can do for this super interesting cool guy. How do you guys describe people pls help
If you’ve committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he’s not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. …
YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.
Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional “detectives” who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.
If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say “I want a lawyer”.
Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician’s assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it’s likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.
YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.
Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.
Know your rights. Don’t let eccentric detectives put you away.
You order a package off Amazon. When the Amazon delivery guy shows up to your door, instead of giving you the package you bought, he beats the shit out of you. Then, when he sees that you are not dead yet, he calls all of the Amazon delivery people in the area and they all proceed to beat the shit out of you. Miraculously, you survive. Another miracle: a friend in your neighborhood caught the assault on video. After a month of recovery and extensive hospital bills that you have no idea what to do with, the video has gone viral. You read the comments below. “This is what happens to people who fuck with Amazon!!!” Someone says. “I’ve never been beaten up by Amazon employees, and I’ve been using them all my life!” Someone else comments. Later, you start to see articles popping up about your story. They all mention that when you were 17, your license was revoked for reckless driving. In a Facebook post on your mom’s feed, someone is going on a rant about how not all Amazon delivery guys are bad, and that if you look really close, the “bad” ones are just stressed out. Your name is trending on Twitter. Jeff Bezos films a response to your attack, denouncing the video of you getting beaten to within an inch of your life by his employees as becoming “a symbol of hate towards Amazon.” The people who attacked you still deliver packages around your neighborhood. You saw one of them just yesterday as you were watering your plants. You still can’t pay your hospital bills. Your phone dings- Twitter again. “Maybe if you didn’t order from Amazon,” someone pipes up, “this wouldn’t have happened!”
i feel like a big part of the “two nickels” joke that most people don’t appreciate (as it has sort of become lost in translation since becoming a meme) is the fact that we have absolutely zero knowledge of how doofenshmirtz was doomed by a puppet the first time. the original punchline was about making us think “how the hell has that happened to him before”
Toddlers are so pure. She doesn’t understand that we help her with certain things because she’s little. She thinks that everyone just helps each other like that. So she tries to blow on my food and cut it up for me and tries to help me put on my shoes.
i was giving little wagon rides to a baby around the backyard one day and all of a sudden she hops off and slaps the seat of the wagon telling me to get on because it was my turn and i was like no it’s ok im too heavy and she was like NO ITS UR TURN and kept tugging on my hand so i would sit down. eventually i got on and it was just a little 2 year old trying so hard to push me around on a wagon not understanding why it wouldn’t budge but still so determined to let me have my turn lol
I don’t think I’d realised how many casual compliments we pay to our toddler until she started casually complimenting us back, because experience has taught her that’s How Social Interaction Is Done, and there’s nothing quite like a very earnest three-year-old solemnly and sincerely informing you that you look wonderful and smell nice to make you feel really good about yourself
I tell her she’s my best girl. She tells me I’m her best auntie. Then we both feel good about the world!
Teach them kindness.
my little cousin is 3 and she stands there and goes “you’re doing it!” whenever i’m like, making food for us, or doing the laundry, or pushing her in a stroller up a hill. she is the most encouraging sweetheart.
“What is it that the child has to teach? The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not. And the child is right.” - Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
Hey btw, this goes for the Panera lemonade thing too. I’m already seeing articles with headlines like “Caffeinated lemonade turns out to contain caffeine”, which is a truly incredible level of spin, seeing as the issue is that Panera fucking killed people. Their products were so deceptively labeled that multiple people who were actively attempting to carefully monitor their caffeine intake still mistakenly drank a lemonade which had more caffeine in it than any energy drink on the market. Do not let a handful of carefully crafted PR one-liners about “underlying conditions” and “what did they think charged meant” turn the narrative on this into a wankfest of victim blamey bullshit. The facts of the case are utterly damning, and the money and effort that Panera is pouring into smearing the victims is as appalling as it is predictable.
You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.
Hey btw, this goes for the Panera lemonade thing too. I’m already seeing articles with headlines like “Caffeinated lemonade turns out to contain caffeine”, which is a truly incredible level of spin, seeing as the issue is that Panera fucking killed people. Their products were so deceptively labeled that multiple people who were actively attempting to carefully monitor their caffeine intake still mistakenly drank a lemonade which had more caffeine in it than any energy drink on the market. Do not let a handful of carefully crafted PR one-liners about “underlying conditions” and “what did they think charged meant” turn the narrative on this into a wankfest of victim blamey bullshit. The facts of the case are utterly damning, and the money and effort that Panera is pouring into smearing the victims is as appalling as it is predictable.
Wanted to practice color and light using this lil’ guy. Halfway through I decided to do season changes as well. If anyone is interested in seeing summer and winter I think I might just do it :)
My new favorite genre of picture is a very special thing that most animals (and humans!) do: face nuzzling as an act of greeting/comfort/intimacy. thank God that this is happening all over the world right now
My new favorite genre of picture is a very special thing that most animals (and humans!) do: face nuzzling as an act of greeting/comfort/intimacy. thank God that this is happening all over the world right now
like, at no point do you actually see the gasoline. you’ve just got to trust the system.
Id like to think cars actually dont need fuel anymore but energy companies wanted us to stay on their subscription service so they designed modern cars to only drive when you go to the station and pay to put the placebo pump into the “gas tank.”
You swipe your card, the pump makes a good few solid kerklunks, and everything suddenly works again.
i wonder what it looks like down there…
did you think they store hundreds of gallons of gas in each one of those dinky stations?
as someone who needs to fuel up this thing regularly:
can confirm that gasoline does, indeed, come out of those pump nozzles
because they’re not gentle about how much pressure they use to gush out the fuel, so it inevitably splashes a little all around the filler tube (even when I’m being so careful)
This is… the exact opposite of that dark souls gif
I don’t think it’s possible to adequately state how fucking ballsy and skilled this player is considering the EXTREMELY specific timing of that dodge and catching the spear attack WHILE TAUNTING BETWEEN EACH THROW
I’m wheezing
Big Dick Energy
I figured they were referring to this gif
Since they do the same pose and it really seems like the opposite outcome lol
This is… the exact opposite of that dark souls gif
I don’t think it’s possible to adequately state how fucking ballsy and skilled this player is considering the EXTREMELY specific timing of that dodge and catching the spear attack WHILE TAUNTING BETWEEN EACH THROW
I’m wheezing
Big Dick Energy
I figured they were referring to this gif
Since they do the same pose and it really seems like the opposite outcome lol
I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can’t provide.
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”.
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it’d be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
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.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
“Nicholas, we’ve arranged for you to marry Eric, in the neighboring kingdom.”
“But father, I’m not….”
“I’m well aware. I’ve just decided that you shouldn’t reproduce.”
I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can’t provide.
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”.
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it’d be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
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.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
“Nicholas, we’ve arranged for you to marry Eric, in the neighboring kingdom.”
“But father, I’m not….”
“I’m well aware. I’ve just decided that you shouldn’t reproduce.”
