RatCreature (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratcreature) wrote2019-12-08 10:52 am
ratcreature) wrote2019-12-08 10:52 am
as much as I love "crack treated seriously" takes...
...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.
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.