some thoughts on Narnian sedoretus

[edenfalling]

I'm copypasting this from Tumblr, because I want to have it on a more permanent and searchable site:

In reference to ellen_fremedon's Sedoretu Fic Fest (which is currently open for signups on AO3, and you should totally leave and claim some prompts!), madamehardy asked: If you don't want to offer Homestuck (offer Homestuck offer Homestuck) the Pevensies could easily be a different moiety from Jill and Eustace, or from Aravis and whatsisface.

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I think if I were doing a Narnian sedoretu, the obvious method would be to have Cor, Aravis, and Corin searching for a fourth person to complete their square. This is already an unconventional marriage since Cor and Corin are, of course, both male (and obviously share a moiety, being twins), but I am all in favor of complicating these things when I can. And I think it would be an interesting political statement for the twins to say, implicitly, "The heir WILL be ethnically half-Calormene and you're not getting any other options from Corin BECAUSE REASONS."

If the Pevensies were doing sedoretu marriages, the standard thing would be for one of the boys and one of the girls to be the (pick a moiety) half of a marriage, and for the other boy and girl to do the same thing in a second square. The question is which boy and girl you'd pair up. Divvying it Peter-and-Susan and Edmund-and-Lucy by age makes a lot of sense, but that would result in a wildly different plot to HHB, so perhaps Peter and Lucy are currently staying unmarried because reasons, leaving Susan and Edmund to play the diplomatic marriage alliance game. Which presumably means HHB must involve one of Rabadash's siblings or half-siblings as a potential fourth member of the proposed sedoretu, and ooooh, the things I could do with that as a base premise… *cackles evilly*

I think possibly the most evil and intriguing thing to do to Jill and Eustace would be to slot them into a square with Rilian and the Lady of the Green Kirtle. (I think probably with the kids sharing a moiety because True Companions and the Lady and prince sharing a moiety because of the mockery of courtly love thing they have going on while he's brainwashed. Also because I am totally in favor of people being intensely attracted to the Lady and desperately wishing they weren't, because if we're going to the creepybadwrong place, let's go full throttle, yeah?) And we either go for a bad ending where they do get caught and brainwashed in Underland, or perhaps we just age them up a few years and have several days of awkward oh-no-they're-hot camping and skeevy touching where you can’t quite verbalize why the touches are skeevy on the way to Harfang or something.

Super cracky badwrong edition: Aslan and Jadis form a sedoretu with Frank and Helen. No, I have no idea how that would work. It's probably some kind of metaphorical power play on the non-mortal members' part, maybe an alternative to the Tree of Protection. (No point conquering Narnia if you're already married to its king and queen, right? WRONG. And if Jadis can't rule Narnia on her own, she will damn well make sure Narnia rules the rest of the world. Bloodily.) Frank and Helen would really like a divorce, please... except how do you go about divorcing god and the devil?

Comments

[gramarye1971]

Frank and Helen would really like a divorce, please... except how do you go about divorcing god and the devil?

I have no idea how to write this fic, but if I did I would absolutely title it "The Great Divorce" for a pure C.S. Lewis meta-injoke.

[edenfalling]

Ahahahaha, that's brilliant. :D

[alexseanchai]

*cackling*

[branchandroot]

Aslan and Jadis and Helen and Frank would be /brilliant/, in all the most alarmingly theo-political ways.

[edenfalling]

I doubt I could write that story (the chief problem being that I'd want to visit Frank and Helen and Jadis from their own POVs, which would seem to demand Aslan's POV for balance and I know I can't write that), but I dearly wish I could read it, because the more I think about the idea, the more train-crash, house-fire fascinating it gets.

[heliopausa]

Alternatively, what sedoretu has already been, and broken? What really lay behind the rift between Miraz and Caspian? (Who probably had different mothers - as indicated by the marked difference in their names.)

[edenfalling]

Ooh. So, Caspian IX and Miraz as the children of the previous royal sedoretu (and of opposite moieties and probably not blood-related except in the general way that most high nobility have connections every few generations), with Prunaprismia and Caspian's tragically unnamed wife (...I think I have called her Zarabel Passarid in previous meta?) as the other half of the square. And then it all goes to hell in a handbasket, but leaves Caspian X in an even more tangled family situation because now Miraz and Prunaprismia are his parents rather than his uncle and aunt, and their eventual child will be his sibling rather than his cousin, and probably get roped into being a member of an arranged royal sedoretu... so Miraz might do better not killing Caspian at all but just shifting which branch of the royal family has precedence to inherit the throne.

Or maybe it's always a tetrarchy rather than a monarchy? Who knows! Anyway, you're right that there are all kinds of fascinating possibilities in that scenario. :D

[heliopausa]

:)
(The possibility that I had in mind was that Miraz and Caspian IX, being of different mothers and differing moieties, were the two male partners in a sedoretu, and that someone - but who? - broke the line of prohibited relationship, and the felt sacrilege brought things crashing down.)

[edenfalling]

Oooh...