I really fucking love sedoretu fic, but I don’t see a lot of it. Part of it’s probably that it inherently involves poly-shipping and that’s not something everyone likes to write, part of it’s probably that it’s hard for all the characters to fit in neatly to the ship, but part of it is probably that not a lot of people know what a sedoretu is, so I am remedying that.
So: what in the frick frack is a sedoretu?
A sedoretu is the marriage structure from the Planet O in stories by Ursula Le Guin. On O, everyone is assumed to be polyamorous and bisexual by default.
When you are born, you have your gender and class and so on, but you also have your moiety. Your moiety is either Morning or Evening. Your birth-mother’s moiety is your moiety – all children of Morning mothers are Morning, and all children of Evening mothers are Evening. Youcannot have sexwith someone of your own moiety. It’s like incest.
To illustrate this, I’ve sorted Steve, Peggy, Pepper, and Tony into moieties. Note: characters can be any moiety you want them to be, mine just happened to sort with blondes in Morning and brunettes in Evening.
There are four separate marriages:
The Morning woman and the Evening man (the “Morning marriage") The Evening woman and the Morning man (the “Evening marriage”) The Morning woman and the Evening woman (the “Day marriage”) The Morning man and the Evening man (the “Night marriage”)
So when you get married in a sedoretu, you’re expected to have sex with one man and one woman, and be best buds with the third person.
Now that you know the rules, you can fuck with them. For example:
Ursula Le Guin’s own short story, “Mountain Ways,” has a marriage with three women and one man. The man is straight, and one of the women is a lesbian dressing as a man, because two Day marriages and no Night marriage is unheard of.
Good Men, Fall to Dusk by @apfelgranate has multiple scenarios, including ones where Steve and Bucky are of the same moiety but love each other anyway and have to deal with the fallout.
Recommended reading:
Ursula Le Guin’s short stories set on O, like “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,” “Mountain Ways,” and “Unchosen Love"
