januar | earth, fire, wind, water, heart

A comment on an entry on my friends list about Eleven-Amy/Rory-River being a sedoretu (to which I say YES and, um, may already be working on fic of that nature ¬_¬ ) got me back to thinking about other fandoms that you could in incorporate this style of marriage. Avatar: The Last Airbender seems a perfect candidate, since the number four (four different nations) is already incorporated into canon. Only I've hit a snag.

To me, the perfect balance would be one from each nation: water, earth, fire and air. So let's take one character from each: Katara, Toph, Zuko, and Aang. So who is morning and who is evening? Since Zuko is a firebender who uses the sun and Katara is a waterbender who uses the moon, Zuko should be a morning and Katara should be an evening.

Of course, that philosophy is already messed up since within Avatar canon, nobody (which the exception of this group of kid who will change the world) marries outside of their own nation. So if your nation affected what moeity you were and four fire nation people were together... no. Just no.

But let's just say it turned out Zuko is a morning and Katara's an evening. That means Aang is an evening and Toph is a morning. That gives us the pairings Aang/Toph, Aang/Zuko, Katara/Toph, and Katara/Zuko. There's my next snag. Aang/Zuko and Katara/Toph work for me on an element level (air/fire and water/earth). But Aang/Toph (air/earth) and Katara/Zuko (water/fire)? The elements are complete opposites from each other. Ideally, air would be with fire and water, fire with earth and air, earth with water and fire, and water with air and earth. But that would put Zuko and Katara as the the same moeity again. See my problem?

Of course, I am completely over thinking this, especially when I re-look at what the marriages are called:
•Morning woman/Evening man (the "Morning marriage")
•Evening woman/Morning man (the "Evening marriage")
•Morning woman/Evening woman (the "Day marriage")
•Morning man/Evening man (the "Night marriage")

If Zuko was the morning man, his marriages would be Evening and Night anyway.

So you know what? I'm going to stop over thinking and go with this, which fits best with actual canon and also hits some of my favorite pairings. We take the canon pairings of Aang/Katara, Zuko/Mai, and Sokka/Suki. Katara and Sokka are obviously of the same moiety. We'll just say evening.

According to "Fisherman of the Inland Sea", sedoretu can include siblings of the original four, making more than four spouses. They are then known as aunts and uncles to the children of the original four, and they (the siblings) may or may not have sexual relations with the core marriage.

Using that, either Sokka or Katara are part of the core marriage. I'm going with Sokka, since I've developed a taste for Sokka/Zuko. That makes the core marriage Mai-Sokka/Suki-Zuko with Suki and Zuko being morning and Mai and Sokka being evening. By the sibling thing we add in evening-Katara and her counterpart morning-Aang (I think it can work like that). Somehow Toph needs to fit in there, either as morning or evening (because it wouldn't be complete without her), but I need to reread the stories to make sure I'm not completely f-ing this up.

Now that I have this out of my brain (at least for now), I can concentrate on figuring out how to work Eleven-Amy/Rory-River, especially with River being all complicated and such.