TalenLee

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I'm Talen! I make videos and articles and games and graphic designs and guides and messes and encouragement. Chances are you can find anything I do on my blog. I like it when you comment on my things, so please do!


Humans understand marriage to be a legal codification of a culturally acceptable monogamous structure where two people choose to cohabitate, pool resources, and that this is a perpetual state. It's usually of opposite genders but not always and it's usually inclusive of having children, but not always. Depending on where in the world you do it, kids being from married families is seen as a sign the kid has more stability and is less likely to be antisocial or criminal.

Orcs on the other hand, have no such common social arrangement, with the closest they have being a thing that some researchers refer to as a 'child loan.' Some orcs decide they want some kids, so they ask their own support network, usually but not always parents, if they can be, for a period - usually seven-ish years? - excluded from typical community obligations for providing. It's a commitment to create a space for the kid to grow up in, and usually only asked for a first or only child. After the duration of time, the deal is over - the parents don't even necessarily assume they'll be together at that point and the community obligations return. There's no interest on this, per se, but it's often framed as a 'loan' in language because a lot of orc language is debt-biased.

Basically, there's a period where any time you're given the choice between staying out to gather more resources than you need or chop more wood than you can to benefit communal stockpiles, orcs believe, if you're under this deal, you should absolutely the fuck not be chopping wood or fishing, you should be back home, enriching the life of your child and supporting your partners in the situation.

This is also where the stereotypes of orcs coming from 'broken homes' because a lot of orcs' parents, after the kid is roughly at a point where they can start contributing to the home, discuss if they want the current arrangement to be ongoing, and decide to change it, meaning less time with one parent or the other.

Now understand that from an orc's perspective, this is a pretty reasonable thing. Orcs are very used to the idea of impermanent things, life and property and so on. The human sees a horrifying constant attempt to emulate human marriage which always ends in failure and raises a child who is, well, an orc, and is seen as fulfilling a cycle of violence. The Orc sees human marriage and asks 'why do you send a letter to the government to tell them who you're fucking? that's fucking weird.'


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