I would love to see what the effects of having large groups of clones running around would be on the local pathogens. What if a virus mutated to particularly target a specific genetic "Individual?" How would the culture interpret the resulting strange and specific deaths? As always, amazing work!
Maybe the other clone "sisterhoods" would see it as a curse or something. Imagine it like that >Jennifer does something wrong, like stealing, killing, and generally being a bad person in the eyes of the Itlu people >Jennifer randomly gets very sick due to a pathogen she randomly caught >The pathogen only actively targets specific "sisterhoods" but it can spread through any Itlu commoner >Jennifer's bloodline gets gradually smaller due to the pathogen only killing off her sisters >Eventually, Jennifer's bloodline is gone. Her peers infer that happened not because of the pathogens, but because of her vile doings, therefore calling a curse upon her whole sisterhood >If somehow a pathogen can stagnate and then die, maybe they could infer that it only happened because Jennifer's bloodline somehow got absolution for Jennifer's wrongdoings. Hell, maybe even the Queens could concede "blessings" to sisterhoods that supposedly would free them of said curse So many interesting things can be done with the cultural implications of disease!
the swapping of daughters seems to be a partial solution to this problem, by spreading the clones across the land, with many other people in between, they are less susceptible to such diseases. It could even be justified as the reason why this practice originated in the first place
Must be strange for outsiders to look at such a homogenous population (granted the outside world consists of hunter-gatherers and people on the opposite side of the world, but still).
Ratchet4647 I don’t think concubines are a thing they have, and it was said that they’re pretty equal in the whole gender thing, so I don’t think that’s a thing that’d happen.
Could an aristocratic woman cheating the system by birthing a clone feasibly mold their daughter to look different? Like things applied while the child clone sleeps, similar to the boards and bands some real-life cultures use to modify skull shape while a young one's skull is still fusing.
It would be possible if they managed to capture one or more of the queens to ensure their continued reproduction, since all they need to do to reproduce is touch a queen.
@Ptaku93 Or, if the rebels don't particularly care about human rights, the queens would be caged, fed, and have a constant stream of 'peasants' touching them in passing. If all the peasants are touching the queens and able to reproduce semi-naturally, they would all technically be considered aristocracy under the current system. This would continue until they reached the maximum population where either the river basin can't support their numbers anymore, or there are too many people trying to visit the queens daily to possibly get to everyone within their lifetime (assuming that people are visiting on a 24/7 basis, with a constant line out the door). Assuming the second is what occurs, then a 'new aristocracy' would arise, but it would more likely be the middle and upper classes who gain access to the queen's while, for the beginning at least, there would be only a small percentage of the lower class who reproduces clones, assuming that this process doesn't take so long that they forget the method to make fertility tokens and fail to rediscover it, in which case the population count would stagnate. On a slightly related note, it'd be interesting if when somebody takes a piece of the queen's DNA away from the main body, would the fertility boon still persist? (I know they wouldn't do this, because the aristocratic families wish to maintain power, but bear with me) If rebels, or people in general, were trying to spread fertility, would they have totems in the centre of each village, with a piece of a queen's DNA somehow attached that the villagers could gain fertility from? How long would the boon last in the extracted skin cells/etc? The same amount of time as it would normally last in a fertility token? What would qualify as enough DNA for the god beneath the river-basin's powers to identify that piece as part of a queen?
Is the child-swapping done to further the supportive network, or so you can tell your children apart? Or a bit of both perhaps? (It would potentially also lessen disease outbreaks to a certain degree. They'd be more wide-spread probably, but would prevent a single region from losing ALL their peasants. I also just thought "But wouldn't the Peasant population trend towards a single sorority? But then I realised that new genetic lines get infused into the Peasant population by aristocrats who become peasants. One more question though: Do/have the queens ever come into contact with peasants, accidentally giving them fertility? (Even if that wouldn't result in a child, since I presume that men don't have a tendency of mating with peasant women... (Although I can imagine that the zero risk of pregnancy could be appealing to some men? >.>)
Re: last paragraph: It could happen by accident. Over a time span of 2000 years, it must have happened at least a bunch of times. But as you guessed, it's not likely to amount to much. Men already have a whole bunch of wives, so I don't know how much willingness they'd have to add even more women to the mix, though I guess getting in on with a peasant would be a relief from dealing with endless family politics...
Thanks for the insight =D. Has there ever been a child that came from a river basin and river valley set of parents you think? (Even if they didn't enter any type of formal union)
You mean a hunter-gatherer and someone from the river basin? Possibly, but it would only work between a river basin man and a hunter-gatherer woman. Or an aristocratic woman and a hunter-gatherer man, I guess, but the river basin people don't have the most flattering outlook on their wild neighbours to the east, so I think an aristocratic woman would be worried that a child coming from such a union would come out as half-animal.
You know, I came back to this, and gosh darnit there's a splendid high society drama plot to be had in that. Imagine an aristocratic woman, family on the brink of collapse, who goes out and steals a peasant woman's baby, replacing it with her own clone. The child would look nothing like her, keeping up the facade.
This video was very interesting! It also brings up a question; does this give the peasants freedom of movement across the basin? Do they have to get permission from their respective aristocrats?
This was inspiring. The thin line between the lower aristocracy and the peasants seems ripe for writing a story of dramatic intrigue based on the insecurities from such a competitive system. I love it!
Problem is that their entire livelihoods would be destroyed if the balance of power was disturbed by an uprising. Can’t really rebel against an aristocracy that has absolute final decision if you are able to have children or not.
Could we maybe hear more about the “waiting list”? Depending on the population, a small meeting with one of the 12 queens shouldn’t be too impossible for the lesser noblewomen. Is there a ritual, conversation expected, that drags out the audiences, etc.? If it’s somewhat easy for poorer nobles to go extinct, then I don’t think there’d be some huge ceremony where each noblewomen is made fertile by the queens, for instance. :)
There is no ritual, but there is conversation expected. The trouble comes in women visiting the queens for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's reproduction, and more to do with whatever political dramas are happening at the moment. Then there's the fact that the queens have to devote some of their time to making those fertilising-tokens, and still be left with some time to idle around, since they won't stand for being all overworked. One of these days, I'll have to put together the average daily schedule of an average queen, because those fertility-giving tokens put a hard limit on how many peasants could possibly exist, which has bigger ramifications.
Worldbuilding Notes Maybe the tokens could be made of some by-product/offshoot or something from the flowers in the maonasteries, that way maybe they're more easily produced and then there won't be a hard limit to the population? Maybe the Queen's would only have to touch the tokens to activate them. What would happen if a new flower were to grow outside of the 21 established monasteries? Would a new monastery be constructed around it?
I love how in this world things have been decided by reproduction, instead of violence and creed and fear, like it does in ours. It is trully a world built on love! Haha! Still, i am extremely curious to see what, if any, forms of martial arts or military would crop up in the river basin, and why.
@@baboon_92 that doesn't dismiss the possibility of a martial art forming from other functions of society like segregation. Still, i do believe it would be hard for a community composed of mostly sisters to ever fight each other in any serious form, but the arisyocratic families work pretty much like they do in our world with the addition of the worship of the queens. The first of this aristocratic families to master serious military and martial power could sequester the royalty and become an absolute power in the river basin. As ugly as that sounds, we have precedence for this stuff, like in sengoku jidai.
@@veemie8148 i feel that while spies is a given, a natural extension of curiosity andmistrust, assassinations are another matter. It is hard to say if anyone in the river basin has taken a human life, much less make a profession out of it.
Hi Ewa, a question for you. If an aristocratic family loses their status do the men also become peasants? How would they go about interacting with society? Thank you :)
I forget, is the river basin culture set up in the same world as the island culture from earlier videos, or have the islanders since been revised out of existence/into something unrecognizable compared to those videos?
@@WorldbuildingNotes I was reminded of them, because the egg-stealing ritual you described in one of the videos for them seems like it could be extraordinarily useful for a struggling noblewoman to maintain appearances.
Two desperate aristocratic women from different families both conspire to use the tokens and get pregnant together, then switch the children after they are born. That way nobody knows there was cloning, and they skip the waiting list and seem high status to their peers. Feasible?
You know I was just thinking while watching this: I wonder if there’s some sort of Cinderella type story in this society that involves a peasant girl either using an inherited fortune or some sort of magical help to masquerade as an aristocratic woman and marry a prince and become a truly aristocratic woman that way
2 questions 1- What happens to the non fertility giving daughters of Kings and Queens? Because they'd be technically part of the royal family but they can't do the fertility producing thing, therefore not a queen(?) 2-is there a way for another aristocratic family to appear? Or is the number of families always slowly falling?
1. They become nuns. The monasteries are powerful and wealthy institutions, so this is not as bad of a deal as it might sound. Royal nuns are always funnelled towards positions of authority pretty quickly. 2. Big families split.
Could you make a story where an aristocratic woman's husband is infertile but doesn't know he is, and the woman "cheats" on him with herself, giving birth to a girl like a peasant would, and this girl, even though actually born a peasant, grows up with everyone except for her mother believing her to be an aristocratic woman, and when time comes, the queen grants her the gift of fertility, making her a peasant girl, born to an aristocratic woman, turned into an aristocratic woman herself?
I had an idea with the baby swapping. If you dont want the child to look exactly like you. Use the token on a peasant that looks closest to the dad. And take that child as yours. Risky as well. Yes. But it might be a last resort.
How does the concept of nature and nurture apply in your world? Even if the child of a peasant woman has exactly the same DNA as her mother she might develop significantly different just because of her upbringing, she might be a lot short/taller have a different looking face depending on the circumstances and habits the child develops
A lot of how your face looks is due to your upbringing and habits. If you always breathe with your mouth open as a child, etc. it changes how your facial structure settles. There is a whole field of study about it called orthotropics, and there are places you can take your child to where they can correct their oral posture and within a few years they'll look drastically different.
This video makes me want to ask so many questions! Have there been big scandals of fraud where a peasant woman tried or even succeeded in touching one of the queens through deception or other means? Do aristocratic women who can't reach the queens and are afraid they won't be able to have children ever secretly exchange clone-children with one another to secure their positions? What of paying a peasant woman to have a daughter they can then secretly adopt as theirs? If it's impossible to socially climb to aristocracy, but all too easy to be thrust out of it, is the aristocracy shrinking over the generations? Love this concept!
Yet they have no choice but to farm their whole lives for a living and are subject to ruin and poverty at any time if they are simply unlucky and dont have a large enough/reachable network of siblings to fall back on.
You have to remember that the huge threat for an aristocratic woman is becoming a peasant. So, no, they're not worse off even by a little, they just try very hard not to become a peasant, which a peasant hasn't even the option to do.
Can you make video on the river basin's military? How would your kingdom defend itself when the society is built in this way? Is the army composed entirely of women because men are scarce and needed for reproduction, or are all the aristocratic men forced into the army to defend the or is the army mixed?
Yeah Apparently there are civil war kinda according to a reply on another comment, but I don't think they would need one, unless they want to murder the hunter gatherer people
Does the cloning work like asexual reproduction in real life where occasionally there are mutations/copying errors which allow for more genetic diversity among the peasants? This would mean that as time goes on and mutations accumulate the various peasant families would diverge into more and more distantly related and varied looking groups. Given enough time they may find it impossible to breed with men even when touched by a queen.
The cloning is 100% magical and makes no errors, so no. I know, it's kinda boring, but it wouldn't really work if it were not magical in any case, human beings can't reproduce asexually.
Would aristocratic women maybe even dye their daughters' hair and use different methods to change what they look like to avoid people getting suspicious of the resemblance?
As always, your work is reeeeeally amazing. But sometimes I think that if you had versions of your videos in Russian. That's because my English is not really good. I'm not really good at understanding live speech in English.
My videos all have English captions, so turning them on might help! Also, I think it would be really cool to do a video in Russian someday, but my English-speaking audience is bound to complain. And the Russian viewers would complain about all my dumb grammar mistakes.
surely with so many expendable clone women, the men arrent as much expected to serve in the military, perhaps exclusively fulfilling the "elite warrior with the most expensive equipment" niche, much like knights?
Would it be possible for aristocratic women to get around the fact that their clone daughter looks like them, and getting found out, by switching daughters with another family, like the peasants? How, if an aristocratic family has no children, they could just grab a child from the local peasantry, giving that family some benefits for a while. Or, if the idea of bringing A peasant into the fold is too much to bear, they could get another aristocratic family’s daughter, and be in their debt, or even, if there is another family that is also in danger of loosing their status, they could swap children.
Interesting that you say that. Consider for a moment all of the reasons people say that women have gotten the short end of the stick throughout history. Now, I would point out that the vast, vast majority of that now applies to the men of the basin. Except the men still also get to die for glory and whatnot, because men are always expendable.
Nuada the silver hand I Agree entirely except for the last sentence. In this society, men are a small portion of the population, meaning that scarcity and the fact they're essential for aristocratic way of life may make the aristocracy not see them as expendable.
Do these clones have genetic memories of their mother up to the time of their birth? If they do it'll be tough for the child to not say things only their mother should know from years before the child was even born.
@@WorldbuildingNotes sure, but not "get murdered at 40 or everyone and everything dies " /"you gotta meet this particular group of people and have a child rn or your family will become a bunch of peasants" stressful
3:42 so maybe, women who are part of the aristocratic families but have to bear children the peasant way would alter their and their daughter's appearance so that they don't look alike and people don't get suspicious? From this, a cultural feature of face painting, tattoos, changing hair styles, hair coloring and masks could arise...
There may exist some dude who's family (or the family of their wifes) became peasants but then they'd likely be moved to some other family, instead of just getting moved to work in the fields and stuff
From other videos, i'd assume that if a mans biological family (where his mother is) becomes peasants, he would just stay with his new family (wives) and if his new family becomes peasants, he would just return to his biological family.
I supposed new aristocratic families would be created with the daughters of queens who do not get the magic passed to them? or if they do not become aristocrats what do they do? and what do sons of queens do? I supposed they would be infertile because of the magic of their mothers or do queens just not have any sons?
