as much as I love "crack treated seriously" takes...

[ratcreature]

...that just can't work for the "soulmate identified by first words on skin" thing. A Tumblr post came across my dash where somebody wondered why people in those worlds wouldn't just have settled on a custom of unique greeting phrases, and some reblogs wonder about maybe unique naming customs and saying those, then some ask "but what about sign language" etc.

And sure, logical questions all, but seriously considering how cultures might have coped with some (cosmic? divine?) power manifesting writing to identify a soulmate for humans then just can't ignore that most cultures through most of human history have been oral cultures, and writing only arose independently very few times, with some disputes which were really independent or maybe got the idea from the Sumerians after all. So you have afaik Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt (maybe inspired by Sumer, maybe not), Ancient China, Ancient India (could be either independent or the idea diffused), Mesoamerica and Peru, and maybe the people on the Easter Islands. So presumably for those people the soulmate writing showed up as they developed writing in their own cultures and they developed their ideas and customs about it more or less organically from there.

But for everybody else the soulmate mark would just be part of some colonialist trauma from when they first encountered writing humans, that then later got incorporated, maybe? And it would have probably have made racism even worse. Like maybe it's not so bad in the present day if your people were somewhere writing spread by trade or it was long ago (like Roman roads or such), but for a lot of people it would be far more recent. Would people at some point have the writing of their invaders appear on the skin of their children?? And in a language or rendering that wasn't their own? And the people with writing would inevitably think that when their marks showed up on the skin of the subjugated people was divine proof of their cultures superiority, making colonialism even more of a horror than it is in actual history.

Like, in that crack treated seriously AU many indigenous people would probably still loathe that they now have these sentences on their skin, where for tens of thousands of years their cultures were doing just fine, then some assholes with writing arrived from elsewhere, and now they get born with their colonizers scripts on them.

If you want to worldbuild that crack premise more into how cultures would be different with it, there is no way to just do naming or weird greetings without either becoming very heavy and complicated very fast or being inadvertently much more dodgy than just ignoring any likely cultural impact of soulmate sentences on skin entirely.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I would like to see some world-building on that concept, though - do people from non-writing cultures have symbols or pictures or art? Though for all I know there are soulmate fics that go into this, it's not a concept I'm into personally (unless it's very, very subverted) so I don't tend to go looking for it!

[ratcreature]

I love the soulmate trope (subverted or earnest) and read a ton, but I have never seen this addressed. There are some where everyone has matching birthmarks or such, but then those are universal.

With the writing ones sometimes different scripts appear, but they never seem to tackle the non-universal nature of writing. Or how the thing arose in the first place. I think I read one where it was a fairly recent change or such, that suddenly sentences appeared and people started to make sense of them, but mostly they just exist.

[ratcreature]

Also it just occurred to me that government mandated switches in scripts would feel even more intrusive in that kind of AU, like say you were in Turkey in the first half of the 20th century and you always used that Ottoman script derived from Arabic writing, and then some reformer comes along switching your language writing system over to a Latin alphabet...

Also often these marks seem to be rendered in your soulmate's handwriting, so probably developing legible penmanship would be prized, otherwise your soulmate wouldn't even know what the first words they have to look out for even were...

[schneefink]

This is probably one reason why some soulmate AUs as a premise say that the whole "thing" only started happening a few decades ago. That comes with its own problems, but at least fewer historical ones.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I've seen it being recent as option, or the origins are just elided, which is fine with me. But if you really do want cultural world building and cultural adaption to the trope as many commenters in that Tumblr thread seem to think would be less jarring, you just can't stop with some quirky naming or greeting custom, because then the erasure of for example colonialism becomes imo jarringly awful, and I'm not a particularly sensitive reader.

[krait]

Ehhhhh, I could kinda see getting around it with cultures developing writing much earlier. After all, if you've got a Cosmic/Divine Soulmate-Appointing Power in charge of matching up humans, that power/entity could jumpstart the invention of writing by making it show up on people, right? Each culture that made the leap from 'hey, this bunch of squiggles clearly has to do with this person' would develop and refine the symbols according to their oral cultural framework, which in turn would affect the soulmate names/greetings; over time, different languages and writing systems would develop. Maybe the very earliest soulmate marks were images of faces, which gradually became more abstract as art and representational thought developed?

...Now I kinda want a soulmate!AU where the Chinese discovery-of-writing myth is based on the Emperor seeing the markings on his soulmate's arm instead of on a qilin.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, you could do that. Though you then still have to reimagine colonization, if every culture has developed writing, did so much earlier, and for a different reason than in reality.

And if you assume that every culture developing writing for spiritual reasons rather than some needing accounting tokens that spread had relatively little impact on world history, it still would have made language suppression and replacement worse. Like a decade or two before an invasion foreign scripts started to show up on some of your babies like a bad omen and then things got worse from there.

ETA: also I now wonder how these marks would even work for non-urban societies where most people marry people they've known their whole lives and only a small proportion would marry outsiders whom they met through trade or whatever. What would the marks show then? Or would they have historically shown up only on a few people who then married exogamously, but if you happily married your second cousin from two farms over whom you knew since birth you wouldn't get words?