#ooc: thanks again to Alicorn for canonicity okness checking

[imperialtrellis]

Please rattle off more interesting caste cases!

Anonymous said to imperialtrellis: Can you rattle off interesting caste cases from other countries too please, I want to hear them

{context}

somehow I knew this was going to happen.

(Preemptive note for anyone who’s about to come complaining about things being so rare it shouldn’t be countable: there are 13 billion people on our planet. Something with a one in a million chance has reasonably happened 13 thousand times just among people alive right now).

Alright,

Caste shenanigans: babies

So an actually comparatively common one is, anytime in a patrilineal country when someone who does the ‘two hookups with new people every day’ in spring thing gets pregnant and decides they want to keep the baby and go for an aftermarket credit and not only doesn’t know who the father actually is but doesn’t even know how to contact a good bit of the potentials so they can’t even do a test.

Obviously there’s an incentive around for the mother to just say it was the caste with the currently cheapest aftermarket credit (since the ordering of those doesn’t actually always track with the ordering of auction prices this can sometimes vary) (and some incentive to say something else if they want a kid of a particular caste for some reason and have figured out how to afford it). And then places divide between being fine with this vs going matrilineal for these cases. (There was a rather elaborate proposal at some point about genetic testing and trying to figure out the father’s caste that way, but it ran into a) medical issues and b) first you then have to figure all your standards out, and then no doubt someone’s going to try to take it to court…)

There’s one place where three part marriages are common enough and if it’s two husbands it’s considered really insulting to try and figure out who the ‘real’ father is. They’re matrilineal, but it means in a most mixed case you can have a kid having two parents of castes they’re not actually in one of whom they’re not genetically related to. And in a two-and-one case you can have a kid who’s similar to say a half yellow in terms of being raised even though they’re in fact all green.

There was the case in Voa where a couple who came in on tourist visas decided to try to have a kid while there and weren’t caught until they had the kid (no I have no idea how or why they thought this was going to work…). And their country was patrilineal so there was a bit of a debate (that was also all tangled up in the legal issues and who was supposed to deal with what and all).

There’s the completely bizarre case that’s I guess kind of the opposite of mine where the couple decided they were going to have a kid on a boat in international waters and, uh, just live there, and then that went about as well as you’d expect but somehow not in a way where anyone died and their countries also had different caste inheritance rules and it was a mess all around. (And someone wrote this op-ed about how if only one of them was from Tapa haha and then a bunch of people jumped on him and there was an extra mess too.)

If anyone’s familiar with intersexuality, ‘caste matches parent’ countries can have that come up, and there’s been stuff around changes caused by the fact that advances in medicine means there’s information we can tell now that we couldn’t longer ago.

Of course there’s always blues from whatever is -lineal in their countries who want to do the ‘side family’ thing anyway and try to arrange for their partners to pretend the other parent was whatever caste they want to buy a credit for. For obvious reason this tends to men, but there’s a non zero number of women who tried or succeeded at the ‘I’m going to take a long spring vacation at my isolated vacation home and oh look one of the staff has had a baby what happy news’ thing, and now a non zero number of women who try to finagle things with surrogacy.

(I’m actually pretty sure this one’s underreported - it’s in some ways even easier than the usual because you can arrange with a couple and then no one needs to make up excuses about where the missing parent is, the pregnant person does get to end the pregnancy with a baby to take care of, and the couple can often get a chunk of money toward their own baby a future year and can usually count on some amount of nice stuff for the kid down the line. And as long as the doctor’s discrete and there’s no really obvious blue hair incidents, it’s pretty unlikely anyone’s finding out.)

(Ever since I found out that Met officially does matrilineality by womb I’ve been very curious about this kind of thing going down there because it looks like you could get it done and not even have to do anything illegal or quasi-legal, though I haven’t gotten around to actually looking into it.)

Also people usually talk about this one with credits, but while it’s hard to get numbers you definitely have cases in permissions countries with blues who can grant kids to other castes but not themselves who, um, utilize this solution to that.

Oh, and while the stereotype about this is blues greens do sometimes do it too, especially in the places where greens are permissions too and other castes are credits.

Caste shenanigans: not babies

So with kids while as demonstrated things are not as straightforward as they might often be presented, in the end usually some decision gets made and the kid has a caste to be raised as and all that. This remains of a lot of interest to caste freedom type people re the arbitrary vs natural categories discussion, but it does often enough have that ultimate conclusion for those involved.

And - of course, sometimes it doesn’t.

Cases like Afen Kisantami where there’s no legal claim but it’s put through anyway are - I’m not going to say it never happens, I’m guessing there’ve been other cases where someone had the right combo of aptitude and influence to get it to stick, but there’s certainly not many, at least in recent history.

Cases like Afen’s kids where someone really wants something and decides to try to leverage having some claim come up a bit more.

For the side families case this is fairly rare with blues, which I think is generally because the blues have been doing this a while and have the organization to block things off, though there’s been a few cases where an only heir ends up dead or unable to have more kids and suddenly look a lovely grandchild materializes. Greens seem to have a slightly higher rate of trying to claim the kid later on, usually when ‘green has since ended up with more money’ and ‘kid is displaying aptitude the green parent is interested in’ intersect. Since greens generally have less ability to make inconvenient admissions to fraud go away, this is usually guys playing the ‘there was that night of passion right when she was trying to get pregnant and I just recently ran into her again and thought the kid’s eyes looked just like mine!’ card.

For the ‘yeah I’m not going to be able to round up everyone I slept with’ case there’s a few versions - kid grows up and has some trait that makes it in retrospect clearer who dad was, mom actually knew all along but wanted the cheaper credit and she plays the ‘I saw him and recognized his eyes’ card, someone or other actually runs into each other and recognizes eyes… If everyone around is fine with kid’s caste this will usually be left to lie; if someone isn’t you get stuff.

And of course intercaste cheating accusations are always… fun, but if the cheating comes up not right away and the -lineal’s in the right direction that’s also a thing.

(In as much as you can observe trends on such fairly small numbers, how these things then end up seems to mostly hinge on the judge of whatever court stuff goes up before, or else on the amount of either influence or indifference one has to avoid the judge route.)