thoughtfulAnd people wonder why the word "trilogy" has started making me laugh like a Batman villain who's just escaped from Arkham Asylum.
One of the things that's really fascinating about working at this sort of remove is that I have time to actually test my rules for functionality and long-term stability. To go with an example everyone's likely to be familiar with, look at Quidditch. Anyone who thinks about the rules for too long will realize that they have some pretty serious issues as written, but is that really the fault of J.K. Rowlings? No. She had no way of knowing that her weird little wizarding game would get the sort of scrutiny it did, and it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. (No, I don't expect to get her sort of readership. Not that I'd complain if I did...)
Right now, I'm stress-testing the fae marriage laws. At their most basic, they look a lot like mortal marriage laws: two people decide to get hitched, break out the champagne. And then they start to get complicated. For example, there aren't any social stigmas against group marriage (some fae races practice it as a matter of course, like the Centaurs and the Gremlins) or same-sex couples. Divorce when there are no children is literally a matter of going "I don't want to be married to you anymore" and posting an announcement at the hall of your local liege.
Divorce when there are children requires waiting for the children to reach adulthood, and then asking them to choose which family line they wish to belong to. Children of divorced parents can only inherit from one side of the family, because the other side must remain available to any potential future descendants (ah, immortality). (Kate points out that this probably leads to a lot of people assassinating their parents so as to inherit everything. Kate is very correct in this assertion.) This also means that the parents of a missing, elf-shot, or otherwise unavailable child must remain married until the child is either located or declared dead.
Marriage to a mortal (IE, "playing fairy bride/bridegroom") has no legal standing in Faerie (hence why changelings can't inherit), and thus doesn't interfere in any way with an actual pre-existing marriage, or prevent getting marriage. It's actually not uncommon for fae couples to fight, huff off, marry a mortal, and get back together twenty years later, having never legally been unfaithful.
World-building. It's not just for continental drift and evolutionary pressures anymore.
October 7 2009, 18:49:29 UTC 7 years ago
Fae A and Fae Z get married and have Child B. They then decide to get divorced. Child B decides to belong to Fae Z's family line. So child B will inherit from Fae Z.
Except Fae Z then marries Fae L and has Child X. Now there's a problem. Both Child B and Child X have the same inheritance.
And this would get even more complicated if there were multiple children and/or multiple divorces.
Thinking more about it, I could see them practicing some form of "nest egg" inheritance as opposed to death inheritance whereby the children receive some small inheritance with which to head out into the world (so to speak) once they become adults. Or, alternatively, wealth and property isn't seen in an individual sense at all, and is instead familial - so anyone of the bloodline has access to the accumulated wealth/property of the family.
Interesting...
October 7 2009, 19:01:54 UTC 7 years ago
As for the issue of multiple heirs/inheritances, from there, it tends to become a family-by-family thing. The eldest will normally, by default, inherit; if there are actually multiple siblings, some divisions will be made. Upon marriage, you can also elect to surrender your claim on your original family's inheritance, understanding that this may result in your having no family line at all, if the marriage ends badly.
Family A had three children. The eldest inherited her family's title and lands, but chose to give them to her younger sibling upon her marriage. The second-born inherited in place of the eldest. The last-born inherited some share of the family fortune, but later forfeited his claim on any further gains by joining the family of his wife. Should the marriage of either of the siblings who chose to leave the family end in divorce, it will be up to the remaining sibling whether or not to take them back in, but this will not restore their original inheritance or position.