Worldbuild Differently: Unthink Family
This week I want to talk a bit about one thing I see in both fantasy and scifi worldbuilding: Certain things about our world that we live in right now are assumed to be natural, and hence just adapted in the fantasy world. With just one tiny problem: They are not natural, and there were more than enough societies historically that avoided those pitfalls.
What is a family? What do you imagine, when I say "family"?
Does your first idea include father, mother, two kids and a white picket fence? Even though you are kinda queer and do not even aim for something like that? Yeah, see. Because we got pretty much brainwashed into assuming this was what family looked like. Father, mother, two kids. Heteronormative, mononormative, one generation.
And here is the issue: This is not how humans have evolved to live. And the absolute insanity is, that the modern world might be even less viable for this model, and yet is the one that is enforcing this idea.
Because this model is so normalized, we will constantly see it show up in fantasy and scifi settings, even though it is as ridiculous for the world to be like that. Why would people in the scifi setting live like that? Why would people in a medieval world life like that - even though they historically did rarely do it like this?
See, historically there are usually two models of familiar living:
The multigenerational household
The multigenerational household is what was probably most common in Europe during historical times. No matter whether you go back to ancient times or medieval times. Usually a lot of families would actually live with grandparents, aunt/uncle, their kids, the parents, and the parents' kids as well. It was usually a lot more sensible given that this way there was always someone around to take care of kids that were too young to be alone and too young to help working with either the job, or on the fields.
The alternate version of this, that a variety of indigenous cultures also had. Instead of having a very certain family unit, some also had the concept of a village as a family. Meaning: Kids were raised by everyone in a villaige/group together. It does not matter who are the blood parents, everyone is there for those kids, and everyone is responsible for them. In some cultures this had even been so far formalized that a lot more than two people are considered the mother and father of any given child.
This modern idea of father, mother, two children and the white picket fence? Yeah, that was something that was created in the 1950s. Really. It is not even a hudnred years old.
The idea for the small nuclear family was developed for capitalism. Because they assumed that the nuclear family would be better consumers, they pushed for it. See, when the parents to no longer live with the grandparents, we have already parted one household into two. So both of those households need to buy a house, need to buy a lot of appliances, and so on. More stuff sold. More stuff consumed. Yay, capitalism. (Please note how sarcastic and bitter I am sounding.)
And... Honestly, here on the end of this big I am just thinking to myself: I am begging you. Please, please, unless you write a capitalist scifi world, don't do a father-mother-children family model. It does not work. It is not sustainable. It is not what humans have evolved to do. And in a pseudo historical setting it is simply just bad worldbuilding, that does make no sense whatsoever.
You will notice that I am not gonna do examples here, because... Honestly, I am struggling to think of many books that do not use the nuclear family as the standard model in their worldbuilding.
And I am sorry. Even if you do not wanna do polyamory... The nuclear family is a toxic construct of modern western capitalism, and it is destroying families and people everywhere. Stop propagating it in your books, just because you have swallowed to cool-aid too much.
If you take anything from this week of worldbuilding advice, it is really this: Don't worldbuild around a model of family, that is hurting people, after being invented to sell more stuff to people in the US.
