probably I'm bugged too much by such worldbuilding questions

[ratcreature]

I'm still not reliably back online, because the eye issues are still ongoing... but since I can do screen reading right now, and just came across another story with the trope "soulmates reveal their names to each other in body writing", I just have to ask: Are there any of these stories that actually have any explanation for how that is supposed to work?

I mean, I love soulmate tropes, and I can put aside the general, inherent practical problems of just two people being fated to match each other and be compatible, but -- It's one thing to handwave a premise of "humans recognize their soulmate when they see them by some magical or biological impulse" but in these particular universes how did the name thing even start? The stories never seem to say whether these name marks just started to show up (by some magical? means presumably) once a group already had developed writing (and if so, do not all humans have them, but only literate societies?), or whether humans in these universes developed writing based on the odd marks that showed on their skin (and if so, do all societies have the same writing?).

Also if the marks precede the writing, how did humans even find out these symbols referred to their soulmates' names? If every human was born (or developed) a mark rather than both soulmates showing the same symbol or something, you'd think the natural assumption would be that this was their own mark/symbol.

Are there any stories that offer any explanation for the mechanism?

Comments

[liviapenn]

Yeah, the part that never really makes sense is that if people were born with their soulmate's name on them, the entire system of baby naming would be different, wouldn't it? If being connected to your soulmate actually offers concrete benefits, wouldn't people have started to name their children things like "John-March-6-1970-San-Francisco-Smith" so that their soulmate would know their birthday & place of birth? Only incredibly cruel parents would ever name their children just "John Smith".

Plus what if you had parents who tried to game the system? Suppose people find out that baby Prince Bucky's soulmate name is Natasha, and all the parents want their child to be his soulmate, right? So literally 80% of all babies born for the next 15 years get named Natasha (including boys!), and it screws up an entire generation's love life because anyone with Natasha on their wrist can't tell their soulmate Natashas from all the other Natashas.

But then you get into the weirdness of the fact that soulmates are often different ages... like, out of all those Natashas born AFTER Prince Bucky, some large amount of them must have soulmates several years older than they are, right? So even before Prince Bucky is born, there are dozens and hundreds of babies being born with 'Natasha' on their wrist and no one knows why that name is suddenly so popular. So there's these weird temporal implications too.

The other thing is that sexuality & romantic attraction & marriage & relationships in general would be conceptualized completely differently-- not just a world where basically everything is the same and follows the usual heterocentric assumptions about relationships & families, except randomly there's no homophobia.

[ratcreature]

WRT gaming the system, most seem to include a convention to hide the mark, and often it only appears at puberty. But yeah, you'd think unique names would be a lot more the norm. I mean I think the system of last names at least would have developed differently, so that duplicates would be less common, and people found more easily. Like even just a typical last name not being say "Baker" (because some ancestor was a baker) but "Baker of village such and such" would help a lot for people to track down their soulmate's family.