Hi, Bell Fen! - Luminous Hyaena

Anonymous asked:

The point is that credits exist for a reason. The sad story of the green flautist and the purple usher isn't a life destroyed, it's just life. As you say, we need planets to fix sad stories like that, not special treatment for mixed caste couples.

If they were both purple they wouldn’t have this problem, right?  If they were both green they’d have a problem but it couldn’t even theoretically be solved by getting them a cheaper child, you can’t have two greens bringing up a purple child.  But it’s normal for mixed-caste couples to have kids who are only one of their castes, this happens all the time, this is why we bother specifying that it’s matrilineal instead of just going “you’re the same caste as your parents, who are of course the same”, right?

These people could reasonably raise a purple baby because one of the moms would be a purple.  The baby could even be half-purple if they find a purple guy to help out; they wouldn’t have this problem in Anitam.  If there’s a problem you could solve by letting people decide to pretend they’re in Anitam *without* finding a matching Anitami couple, competing with a billion other people to be their swap partners, living in Anitam for a year, and hoping your swap partners are willing to trade back (or stay put, depending on how you like Anitam), that seems like an obvious win.  It’s not special treatment for mixed caste couples because this is not a problem that would exist if they were both purple or that they could solve this way if they were both green.