When I was a kid in school, I had a drawing teacher who used to discourage us from "growing a drawing" which was to say, starting a drawing without measuring and plotting the composition out on the page. If you were doing a portrait, for instance, and just starting off with a very detailed nose at the center of the page then working the rest of the face around it, you were growing a drawing. In writing this story, I am essentially growing a culture. I don't know too much about Iyves until I write about these characters and their lives. Their world is not informing me about them so much as they are informing me about their world. It's a dangerous business but hey, it's just a sim story.
I say that growing a culture is dangerous because without a strong framework, you can end up with a distorted finished product. Continuity is key. Anyway, this is already a lot of set-up for a brief point. Because I am growing a culture, there are certain aspects of it that I have begun fleshing out in the story without knowing for sure how they fit in. Homosexuality is one of those aspects. I have little clue how these people view same sex relationships. How do female same sex couples function (or not function) in such a patriarchal society? Is homosexuality taboo? If not, it is always accepted or is it only accepted under certain rules and caveats? I won't know the answers to these questions until I brush up against them.
In The Slip-Ups, we got our first glimpse of Nova and Aythis, which provided a couple (however subtle) insights. The first is that a sexual relationship between a married woman and another woman is probably adultery. That may sound obvious to you and me in the real world, but it might not be obvious in Iyves depending on how much stock the culture places in same sex relationships. What if Nadda found Aythis in the wardrobe? It might not have ended so well for Nova and Aythis, but it sure would have been informative for me. Whether he was angry, how angry he was, whether he was amused or disgusted or what-have-you would have told me something about how his culture approaches homosexuality. Nadda in that situation might not be the best indicator though because regardless of Aythis's gender, her station might have played into his reaction too. There was another small "tell" in this scene-- Nadda thought that Nova was hiding a man in the house. In my mind, he would have never in his wildest dreams imagined that Nova's lover was another woman. I don't 100% know why yet, but I'm going with it. Later on, (I think Chapter 01:08 in my drafts) we discover what lead Nadda to think that Nova had a lover at all. His reason does seem to largely indicate "man", but it does not totally exclude the possibility of a woman. Other than that, Nova may be attracted to men. Nova may be attracted to Nadda at times for all I know. They do have separate bedrooms but my sense is that that's common in Iyves for wealthier married couples. With these few details, my image remains pretty incomplete.
Then there's Pietry Korain. That's a young him and Pirrun pictured up above, by the way. We know so far that Pietry is (and has been for many years) in love with Pirrun. The two of them have a complicated history, pieces of which are revealed as the story continues. It is a history that is somewhat known in certain circles, so we will have the benefit of getting the reactions of people who have their suspicions about Pietry's sexuality. But of course, those might not be suspicions at all. It might not be a secret. If Pietry is open about his sexual orientation, does that mean that homosexuality is not taboo or that anything goes when you're as powerful as Pietry is? The only thing that I know for sure thus far is that there is no provision for same sex marriage. So if same sex couples are socially accepted then ownership, taxation and other legalities must be a nebulous gray area. And if same sex couples are not accepted, then why the heck not?
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