alli snow

justmarried exchange is currently in the nomination phase, and I have been having trouble because they allow you to sign up with ten fandoms but you only can nominate seven. And my favorite marriage trope is the sedoretu, which is a specific type of poly marriage invented by Ursula K. LeGuin, and requires four people. Which means that I need to have foursomes nominated! (Although I can just go with a pairing and say "I love sedoretus, if you want to write this pairing as a sedoretu you can choose who to have be the other pair in the sedoretu.")

Anyway, the reason I have not nominated is that I am waiting to see what else got nominated to help me whittle down what I want to nominate, and I just checked the nominations and I think that tielan has nominated! (Thank you!) Because the BSG foursome I was going to nominate (Lee/Kara/Sam/Dee) has been nominated, and so has the Steve/Maria/Bucky/Natasha foursome in MCU fandom, and both are foursomes I have written as sedoretus for tielan before. Which means that not only is there someone interested in the same characters, there's someone who's probably going to sign up who is interested in sedoretus, specifically. That is really exciting to me! And it does free up some nomination slots.

Here are some nominations I am planning:

TGE: Maia/Csethiro/Csevet/Vedero (there are a bunch of TGE ships already nominated but they are all suuuuuuuper rare)

DS9: Sisko ships, Worf/Jadzia, Miles/Keiko/Kira/Bashir

TOS: Spock/Uhura and some foursomes (although someone on the Yuletide discord may be nominating sedoretus in this fandom, which would mean I don't have to nominate them and could free up a slot)

B5: John/Delenn, John/Delenn/Lennier, Delenn/Neroon, John/Delenn/Lennier/? (I don't know who I'd put with those three to complete the sedoretu--Anna, maybe? a Minbari OC?)

Peter Wimsey, sedoretu with Parker and Mary? Or Bunter? (Although I can't think of who would be the fourth in a sedoretu with Bunter, so I may just leave that as a poly threesome.

Rivers of London--I think just Peter/Beverly here, because I can't think of any sedoretus and ever since we learned that Nightingale was ace (in the novella Masquerades of Spring) that has completely killed any desire to ship him, for me. RoL is the only one on the list that's iffy, because much as I love it I'm not sure how much I'm into RoL + marriage tropes.

That's six, and with BSG taken care of I can look at some of my other fandoms for the seventh slot. Here are some options:

SW Legends, Han/Leia/Luke/Mara, Han/Leia/Lando, Lando/Luke/Mara. Han/Leia/Lando most properly belongs in SW OT, but that would mean using a second Star Wars nomination slot.

TNG: nobody's nominated this yet, and I can't think of any sedoretus, but I would probably do something like Picard/Guinan (my TNG rare pair OTP), Picard/Ro, Riker/Ro, Troi/Worf, and Data/Geordi

Random Harvest. Look, this movie is just so tropey and melodramatic it would be amazing to pile even more tropes into it.

 

I just read a fic where a character in the Regency period is reflecting on how she'd never imagined she'd be able to have a full-time nursemaid.

Me: Girl, you are and have always been wealthy and you live in an age where labor is CHEAP.

And by "cheap" I mean "so cheap that servants had servants." (Upper level servants in large houses would often have lower-level servants assigned to them as a perk of the job.) So cheap that the gap between "people who were servants" and "people who had servants" was very narrow, and often crossed over the course of a person's lifetime. It was fairly common for working class/poor girls to work as maids for a few years saving up money before they got married, and if they married a reasonably prosperous farmer they would probably be able to afford to hire a maid themselves in good years. (Not "maid" as in "a personal servant to wait on you hand and food," this is "maid" as in "someone to do the nastier/harder bits of cooking and cleaning.")

By 1795, the price of wages for a day laborer was pegged to the price of bread. A gallon loaf weighed 8lbs 11oz, and was theoretically enough to feed a person for a week. Laborers were supposed to make at least three times the cost of a gallon loaf per week, so that if a gallon loaf cost 1 shilling they should be paid at least 3 shillings per week. That is peanuts. For comparison: A pair of wool stockings in the Regency era cost about 2 shillings 6 pence. In other words, a day laborer was paid only a little more per week than the cost of a good pair of socks. Silk stockings--the kind you would wear to a ball--were 12 shillings, or four times the weekly wages of a day laborer.

Combine this with how labor-intensive even the most basic tasks were, and it meant that anybody who could afford servants had them, and anybody above the poverty line could afford them.

Over the course of the 19th Century, the cost of wages relative to the cost of other things rose dramatically, so people had fewer servants and fewer people could afford to have servants. And still, Agatha Christie remembered that when she was young "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car." She did not grow up wealthy, she grew up middle class. Even in 1900, your average middle-class person in England could not imagine being too poor to afford servants.

This changed radically over the course of the 20th Century; now a middle class person might have a cleaner who comes in once a week, but they definitely will not be able to afford a full-time servant. You have to be wealthy to afford that. So we assume that servants are a mark of huge wealth even in historical periods, when they just ... weren't. This is not helped by the fact that novels set in period times (whether written then or later) rarely mention the servants, so you can read, say, an Austen novel and not have any clue what sort of servants they have. But unless you have researched the issue, it's best to assume they have more servants than you think they had.