A question for the centaur back-pocket, but what, if any, do your centaurs do when it comes to courting and romance? Do they have any particular traditions that stand apart from the mixed rider or non-centaur cultures?
always love a back pocket centaur question for when I inevitably wheel back around! So thank you! I don't have TOO much specific thoughts when it comes to courting centaurs, as the main two-ish cultures in my world generally have pretty loose courting rituals that vary primarily a lot by individual and culture. The Merchant culture in particular is pretty rangy and depending on location and social status it's going to look very different- higher echalons of city folk are most often poly while successful outlying settlements are matriarchal holdings with migratory bachelors, those lower on the totem poles are usually more human standard monogamous but larger groups are preferred so families are often heavily blended. Riders are more family and rider-pair oriented in regards to customs with romance and creation of children largely left to individual preferences and just fuel for the family spinners to gossip about while watching the goat-pull games. There's not so much many hard rules in the overarching cultures? The only one that probably WOULD have stricter rules around courting would likely be the mountain folks, who are a bit more conservative and structured in their daily lives and lovers of rituals- but they don't like to tell me of such private things, i need to get to know them better!
The one thing I do know across almost all centaur cultures is that courting always involves some measure of dancing!
In my mind dancing is a large part of centaur culture at large, with large syncronized dances being at the heart of most large celebrations, and those dances are a PERFECT place to show off to the hotties, establish new bonds, and generally connect with a crush!
and then synchronizing steps and movement is the base of centaur dancing, like dressage but with multiple horse bodies in a small area, so it's generally regarded as a way to get your body in synch with a partner along with your mind and heart!
It's not just for lovers, like us it's for self expression and connecting with other folks, and definitely some centaurs really like dancing and some hate it! But overall for my centaurs it's an important tentpole of all their cultures and a large part of that is it's role in connecting folks to both a partner and their community
