#041 Marriage is Complicated

There’s a phenomenon I learned about in my sociology and anthropology classes at school. If you ask people to tell you about their cultural norms, and then compare it to the observed actions, the two do not always line up. The values that a culture holds to be important in theory are not always the ones that are applied in reality. An example would be that someone in American culture may tell you one thing about relations before marriage, someone else may tell you another, and the reality may fall somewhere in between the two opinions.

That being said… Kets may not have a full grasp on the reality of the Sacred Fruit. I suspect he is at least exaggerating how rare it is to find one of the trees. I’m fairly certain Na-Rune-Tok Mair’alyn’s holy council would cultivate seeds and plant these trees to make sure they don’t die out.

While it is true that a marriage ceremony is customarily performed only after the couple finds a fruit, I also suspect that the fruit itself need not always be presented, depending on the standards of the high priest of any particular village. This happy couple is likely parading around their fruit because of their respective families’ personal views on such things; it’s important to them to keep with tradition and the spirits. Other couples, however, with families who are not as spiritual, may possibly return from their quest and tell the holy council, “Yep, tooootally found a fruit. And we ate it. Right away. It felt like the spirits wanted us to. Yep. It was like… super sweet and stuff.” In Ilk-tay in particular, this would not at all be questioned and marriage would be granted. In Lisk-tay, however, (where Kets and Sister live,) I suspect the fruit must always be presented first.

These are the kinds of things we think about, but we know aren’t really needed for the story and would just bog down the comic if we tried to explore all of these subtleties of the culture. It is fun to know them for personal info, and helpful for the writing process, though.