Let me guess. Rise of the Kildar?

I still think this is the best commentary on that series. Even John Ringo knows it's male-fantasy BS, but popular demand is weird.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"At least everyone can get Amazon deliveries again. As their slogan says, “Amazon.com — The only website now. Where did the rest of them go? Do not ask. Do not ask.”

I think the main problem is that the increase in complexity (for the characters themselves, let alone the person who has to manage describing what they're doing) isn't linear. Dealing with three characters in a relationship isn't twice as hard as two, it's more like nine times as hard. With four it'd be sixteen. Gods help you if you ever have to go past that, it probably turns into a logarithmic progression at that point. In Zeta Cygni, polygamy is legal, but any combination of more than four people has to go before a review board before adding anybody else to make sure everybody involved can actually deal with that action.*

--G.
* That second part is probably a joke. I hope it is, anyway.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

The main problem if you're actually trying to treat the subject with the respect it deserves, anyway. If you view a harem of hard-bodied exotic women as a kind of reward you give a male character just for being awesome, or as a way to titillate your audience, it suddenly gets so much easier! :)

>That second part is probably a joke. I hope it is, anyway.

If I were to put my overthinking cap on, I would imagine that rather than a formal review board, social services keeps a very close eye on any polygamous arrangement that goes above four and seems to have a very, very lopsided gender ratio, in order to keep a lid on religious whackjobs or to let the IPO know that they think they've got a sentient trafficking organization on their hands.

(I think literally every CSI series, as well as NCIS, did some kind of 'using marriage laws to facilitate human trafficking' episode. Probably all of the Law and Orders, too. A bit too dark for CSI: New Avalon, tho.)

-Merc
Keep Rat
"I’m still not completely sold on there being more than one mountain. It’s possible that the mountain apologists built a single mountain in order to prove their skewed world view."

... it comes off? :)

>I would imagine that rather
>than a formal review board, social services keeps a very close eye on
>any polygamous arrangement that goes above four and seems to have a
>very, very lopsided gender ratio, in order to keep a lid on religious
>whackjobs or to let the IPO know that they think they've got a
>sentient trafficking organization on their hands.

You're probably right about that part, though.

Mind you, there are almost certainly species for which that kind of thing is the norm, but they tend to be sort of more... eusocial than anything else. For lifeforms with more numerically limited reproductive biology, one expects it's a very delicate politico-legal balancing act between keeping people from getting hurt and not screwing with the lives they want. Politico-legal systems are not historically, um, gifted in this regard? But since that's exactly the sort of thing I don't want to spend a lot of time on, I prefer to believe that the Republic of Zeta Cygni's gotten pretty good at it. For one thing, the legal machinery of the republic is capable of doing a lot more reasoned, measured case-by-case consideration of such matters than real life's logistically obligatory lowest-common-denominator approach.

The "review board" thing is a common Avalonian joke, though. I thought of it here because it's probably going to get made in one of the conversations in TbS3.

--G.
"Oh, so, we're still in the clear, then."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

Considering that some of them probably have wealth beyond reason, I could see a Wedge Rat going through elaborate shell games of creative accountancy to increase his or her taxable income one year, either something needs funding, or just as a joke.

Peter Eng
--
"Zoner, I just noticed you paid cr 232,323.23 in taxes last year."

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

Yah, seriously.

I was actually in a polyamorous relationship for a while, and the thing that makes this even worse is, in real life nice tidy trios and foursomes are quite rare. What tends to happen is chains. Alice is dating Bob and Betsy, each of whom is dating two or three other people, and each of those people is dating a few more people, and so on; there are probably some loops back in there, but it's not unlikely that Alice hasn't even met all of the people at more than two removes from her -- but they can all potentially screw up her plans for the week.

It is very like the old joke about how green soldiers talk strategy but old soldiers talk logistics.

On the other hand, situations where not everybody is necessarily into everybody else probably both complicate and simplify matters to a certain extent. 'Cause it's true, I've known people who were into that sort of thing, and their networks tended to be a bit more distributed. (A woman whose husband's girlfriend is not also her girlfriend, but from whom that other branch is not a secret; and such-like.)

We haven't really seen that happen in any of the really prominent plural relationships in the Symphonies so far, that I can recall off the top of my head (with the obvious and special exemption of Azalynn). They tend to be reasonably closed units, like "conventional" relationships with an extra person in them. This is not as a result of any particular conscious agenda on my part, I should note, but it does seem to be how such matters have unfolded for me thus far.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

In real life I suspect the prevalence of long chains is tied to the lack of general social acceptance for polyfidelity, which pushes the people who are into that sort of thing into a subculture. So you, say, meet someone on an online dating site who is into that, decide to give it a try, they introduce you to their friends, and now you are socializing with lots of people who are also into that. (This is approximately what happened to me.) If it were considered more normal, it might be more likely to be something that Alice and Bob and Carol decide to do just the three of them.

Didn't think you were; to be honest, probably wouldn't have cared if you had. :)

>(Except
>that the Juri/Miki/Kaitlyn thing kinda came out of left field for me,
>but I haven't seen most of RGU so I don't have a solid sense of Juri
>in particular. It didn't seem out of character, just
>unexpected, if that makes sense?)

Well, it was unexpected to them, too, but there is actually a semi-canonical basis for it. There are several illustrations in the official RGU artworks showing Juri being uncharacteristically affectionate with Miki, including at least one where she's outright vamping him and he's sort of going "... help? I think?" It was that one that more or less inspired the schnapps scene. :)

>In real life I suspect the prevalence of long chains is tied to the
>lack of general social acceptance for polyfidelity, which pushes the
>people who are into that sort of thing into a subculture.

True, and... well, I'm not sure if it's not something people in UF's 25th century have to deal with as much, or if it's just not something the central Symphony characters give much of a damn about. Probably some ratio of both. We're much more likely to see non-closed structures (as it were) because of a lack of fully mutual inclination, and possibly because of circumstances that militate against fully meshed lifepaths, than because of social anxieties.

Come to think of it, there is an example of that sort of thing in the later Symphonies: Liza Shustal's male and female lovers, while friendly, have no particular interest in each other, and don't live anywhere near each other, so Liza's generally going to be either with one of them or the other, rarely both at once (and never intimately).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Back when I lived, ate, and slept Utena fandom, the standing joke there was that Miki was ALMOST a girl anyway, so that made it okay for Juri. :)

... in hindsight, that's rather demeaning to both of them, but it was considered a funny thing to say at the time. And Miki's voice actress is just that... a voice actress.

>>In real life I suspect the prevalence of long chains is tied to the
>>lack of general social acceptance for polyfidelity, which pushes the
>>people who are into that sort of thing into a subculture.
>
>True, and... well, I'm not sure if it's not something people in UF's
>25th century have to deal with as much, or if it's just not something
>the central Symphony characters give much of a damn about.

They have to deal with it in at least some places on Earth. I think? I seem to recall Kaitlyn telling someone else at one point that while same-sex marriages were allowed in Zeta Cygni, they weren't allowed in the United States part of the EA at least. If the state isn't even okay with your parts not matching up, there probably isn't widespread societal acceptance of polyfidelity either.

The Doylist explanation, of course, is that twelve years ago the production team had no clue about how the Culture Wars were going to play out in the near future, let alone after four hundred years. The Watsonian explanation probably involves one of the numerous times that UF-America had an ugly, repressive authoritarian episode, resulting in rollbacks of rights.

(Sometimes when I go back through the parts of UF and the Featured Documents that deal explicitly with history and politics, mostly Redneck's stuff, I am left with the distinct impression that everyone SANE bailed out of Earth and headed for the colonies the second it was viable, leaving the homeworld to stew in it's own crazy juice and periodically immolate itself.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

"Step 1: Write down the names of everyone you know. Step 2: Rearrange the letters. Step 3: This will reveal a great secret of time."

In the vein of this, I submit without comment.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"The government makes no secret that they can control the weather, and earthquakes, and monitor thoughts and activities. That’s the stuff a big government is supposed to do! Obviously, you have never read the Constitution!"

>Was Corwin adopted into the water tribe? I seem to remember reading
>that somewhere, but I advance in years and my memory isn't my strong
>suit anymore.

Not formally, but his was a fairly familiar presence around Senna and parts of Nanisivik (the Southern Water Tribe capital city) as a boy; before the Great Interruption he was usually there for a week or two (not contiguous) per year, long enough and often enough that Korra's neighbors got to know him. That's where he knows Karana from (as seen in the changing room scene in Past Is Prologue).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I had to go through the posts again to figure out where I was coming from. I find it ungracious of others when they find fault in people, or characters as this case might be, who are genuinely trying to fit another culture into their life. I really enjoy that Corwin takes cultures and entwines them with his own to create something new.

I understand that if a person takes from another culture, just taking the good stuff, but not the actual work behind it, that it's a horrible thing to do. When one learns, grows and start to love another culture it's a wonderful thing that should be praised.