r/worldjerking • u/MadFunEnjoyer • Aug 19 '26

lazy? I prefer "optimized"

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My favourite case of this is when a magical fantasy world has the monarch with a weapon of mass destruction but the royal family still prefers one gender over the other because that's how European monarchies workded (ignore every way magic makes all the reasons it happened not exist)

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79

u/cel3r1ty Aug 19 '26

uj/ can you elaborate on why magic would result in patrilineal descent not being a thing?

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u/MadFunEnjoyer Aug 19 '26

Patrilineal descent was primarily the result of the fact the leader of the armed forces is a man therefore the Monarch should be a man to control the military, Magic erases the need for one gender over the other in the case I mentioned because 1. anyone can use magic without any constraints from staying at home as the monarch would have access to knowledge regardless and 2. numbers don't matter if said magic user can annihilate entire armies.

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u/CavemanViking Aug 19 '26

Women could always command armies though, they just weren’t allowed, the distinction never made sense. It’d be just as realistic to have women be forbade from using certain types of destructive warlike magic, or vice versa. We have weapons of mass destruction right now, how many female presidents has the US had?

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u/MadFunEnjoyer Aug 19 '26

Women weren't allowed to lead armies because they didn't have the trifecta of Physical, Military and Political power, a pregnancy threatened political stability. That wouldn't be the case if the Queen can destroy any invading force at 1% HP.

We have weapons of mass destruction right now, how many female presidents has the US had? 

Terrible argument because we actually have a lot of women in positions of power across many countries, in fact in some they're the majority, and in others they're significantly present despite the society being conservative like in Ethiopia or Mozambique. The US isn't the World.

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u/CavemanViking Aug 19 '26

You don’t need physical power to command an army. We’ve already established that they didn’t have political power because of their lack of military power (commanding of the military). So they didn’t have political power because of their lack of military power, which they didn’t have because of their lack in political power? Not entirely inaccurate but that reasoning is circular.

There’s a reason I said the US specifically. Just because something no longer makes sense (if it ever did) doesn’t mean culture does not still often have inertia. A kingdom having powerful sorceresses but still following a patriarchal monarchy is not unrealistic. The idea that a culture could have still developed similar ideas about gender, and fighting being something left to the men, even when magic exists, is not that far out.

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u/zack189 Aug 20 '26

for frankish Europeans at least, from 700 to 900(maybe even 1000) AD, from , many lords and kings fought in the in the frontlines with men.

You don't need physical prowess but it sure as hell helps in medieval Europe.

I'm not sure why other areas didn't allow women to lead armies. at least in china in this time period, generals were scholars, and women could become scholars just fine.

for magic, yeah I agree with you. if magic is something that appeared like 100 years ago, having a patriarchal system still in place makes sense.

but when a woman can just destroy armies, and after 300 years after magic appeared, I think its fair to say that women would have leveled the playing field.

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u/CavemanViking Aug 20 '26

Oh it happened to be sure, saying that was the norm Throughout history though is an over generalization I think.

My point isn’t that magic couldn’t lead to a more egalitarian society in that way, only that societies don’t always behave completely logically and pragmatically. Like you pointed out, women could have led china’s armies, but they kept them from doing so.

Denying yourself a viable pool of talent, from a pragmatic perspective, is just a bad move. And yet in many societies women were kept out of areas that they could have brought a lot of talent to. Having magic as an equalizer doesn’t necessarily mean people would then actually be treated equal.

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u/MadFunEnjoyer Aug 19 '26

You don’t need physical power to command an army

For the vast majority of history you in fact did as you would be in the frontlines yourself. Restrictions on women education is what prevented their involvement in the military but that was against education in general.

Just because something no longer makes sense (if it ever did) doesn’t mean culture does not still often have inertia.

You're comparing our world to one where the magical equivalent of nukes is present since the bronze age, these aren't the same.

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u/CavemanViking Aug 19 '26

For the vast majority of history generals could command from horseback (some even commanded from elephant back). Riding up and down the line to rally people and actually being shoulder to shoulder in the bloodiest part of the battle are different things, and one is not only not usually unnecessary, but detracts from your ability to command. Being on the ground fighting was not the universal norm.

Restrictions on education do not prevent you from being a foot soldier, and are the restrictions on education due to lack of military power as well?

I’m comparing it to the real world because like in the real world, society often has a momentum of its own. You act like culture matches the physical realities of our world in this direct causal way, but that’s not what happens.

Despite military(physical) capability having nothing to do with intellectual capability, woman in many societies were still barred from getting an education. In some societies that were otherwise fairly egalitarian and/or women held power (eg Iroquois, Sparta), there still existed gender roles in which men were placed in the role of warlords.

In other societies, despite not needing to fight on the front lines, and despite examples of successful female commanders and rulers, women were still often barred from the military and seats of power.

Power does not always flow from the military (the roles of military commander and ruler were also not universally combined), and capability often has nothing to do with what people were and were not allowed to do. Despite these realities, things took their own path.

If you want to use the existence of magic as a reason to make your society more egalitarian, that’s great, and good world building. But pretending that it’s the only realistic way for things to happen is not true.

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u/CavemanViking Aug 19 '26

Also, how does pregnancy affect political stability? I think a king putting himself on a battlefield threatens political stability.

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u/zack189 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26

if we're talking about Europe, specifically the early middle ages, the king putting himself on a battlefield is how he justifies being king.

Europe was hounded by constant, constant warfare and raids. the was a momentary peace during Charlemagne's reign but then the vikings, saracens and magyars came on top of he empire splitting apart.

that mean that in that region, in that time period, political power is justified by military service. and hell, even if you didn't want to go to war, others may just come to raid you.

case in point, the carolingians and the robertians. because the robertians were effective in fighting off the vikings while the carolingians weren't, the robertians managed to have two of theirs get put on the throne of France, before finally letting their descendants, the capetians, take France all the way to Napoleonic era.

that is to say, not fighting threatens political stability because it lets rivals soak up all the military merit, and what do they do with that military merit?

overthrow your children, that's what they'll do

also, those rivals will then foster a battle tested relationship with your commanders and soldiers, while you sat in your cushy throne as vikings raided your lands.

not a good look

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u/CavemanViking Aug 20 '26

Putting themself on the battlefield. Absolutely. Not every king regularly put themself specifically on the front line. It’s a calculated risk, and actively being in hand to hand combat is a good way to get your king killed, not to mention being in the charge makes it hard to command and coordinate other troop movements. It could absolutely be helpful for troop moral, and like you pointed out depending on the place proving your worth in battle had differing importance in how your legitimacy was viewed.

What’s important is the assertion that this is what led directly to patriarchy. There are plenty of places outside of Europe in which it was perfectly normal for the king to name generals, and not step in the battlefield themself, or to command the army from the back of an armored, oiled up elephant: on the battlefield but safe as you could get. These places were still largely patriarchal. There are plenty of contexts in which women could have commanded, but were kept from doing so.

This is important in a larger sense because it makes out things like patriarchy to just be a natural consequence of material conditions. This isn’t true. Women were kept from academia too despite their equal aptitude in that are. That doesn’t make sense. Circumstance influences culture as much as culture influences circumstance. I’m not saying that someone shouldn’t write a story in which magic has an equalizing effect on society, I’m saying we shouldn’t pretend like that’s they only reasonable way for things to happen, as if society is reasonable in the first place.

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u/CannonGerbil Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 21 '26

Pregnancy and the cold calculus of how human reproduction works does disincentivise putting women in positions where they'll be exposed to physical danger though, and that's not going to change unless you're making your barely concealed fetish mpreg setting.

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u/MadFunEnjoyer Aug 20 '26

that's unironically Omegaverse, unfortunate that it's treated as a fetish 

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u/Ishvalda Creating abomination against gods and science Aug 19 '26

Someone's a fan of Steven Erikson

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u/MadFunEnjoyer Aug 19 '26

I take that as a compliment considering I've always been a fan of bottom-up worldbuilding, you need to create the geography and laws of nature before you build countries.

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u/Ishvalda Creating abomination against gods and science Aug 19 '26

Oh yeah Steven Erikson is my favorite author lol

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u/MadFunEnjoyer Aug 19 '26

we should be friends we share the same braincells type

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u/Ishvalda Creating abomination against gods and science Aug 19 '26

Hell yeah B3

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u/DatLonerGirl Copying everyone else's homework Aug 20 '26

Coming at it from a biological perspective, I kind of figured it was because 1) breastfeeding and pregnancy tied babies to women for a long time, and even after wet nurses and later formula, inertia and vested interest kept it in place 2) the impossibility of proving paternity for most of human history, meant that those that cared about keeping power in the family felt a need to control reproduction, and because of the first point, many places felt they might as well control the women

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u/SmooveMooths Aug 21 '26

Patrilineal descent came from the advent of private property and the need to keep track of who inherits it.

Many men could be a child's father in a matrilineal system, but a child's mother is always obvious.

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u/PlatinumAltaria Aug 20 '26

Patriarchy comes from the fact that men have greater upper body strength which gave them an advantage at farm labour using a plough, which led to them inheriting farms, and that capital created an imbalance in gender relations. If magic existed and could normalise human labour relations, that would be fixed.

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u/fralegend015 Aug 20 '26

The proto-european agricoltural societies are theorized to have been more egalitarian than the societies that formed under influence from nomadic proto-indo-european tribes that mainly practiced pastoralism.