This is a long post and I could go on even further but i figured it was best to just quote from the beginning of the thread. ive come to post in a personal style with headings to separate sections ... Im not trying to make my posts stand out from others, i just find it easier to read. i plan to move much of this to a personal website where the headings will be actual HTML anchors, as well.
This is a very interesting thread, as you said, but it's been so buried that I didnt see it until now. I will answer the questions you asked at the very beginning:
Khemehekis wrote: ↑03 Sep 2015 06:41
Does your conworld have same-sex marriage, polygamy, child marriage, interspecies marriage, necrophiliac marriage, etc.?
Introduction:
Human societies on planet Teppala are essentially conservative from a modern Earth standpoint. The hyperfeminists up above are not fighting an entrenched male power structure .... they're living in an absolutely stable society, shaped by women's biological advantages over men, and in the case of the Moonshines, have been living with the same laws and customs for more than 3,000 years.
Gay marriage:
But because of their anatomical and behavioral differences, as well as happenstance cultural traits, societies such as these are not much like modern western conservatives either. No major society views homosexuality as a problem ... at worst it is seen as irresponsible to not raise a biological child, but even this is a minority position. Among the Moonshines, it is well understood that men often prefer sexual contact with other men, and women with other women, largely because of the stress associated with heterosexual marriage, but also in part because they can see eye to eye better with each other than with an opposite sex partner.
Polygamy:
Polygamy customs vary a lot from place to place, and show little correlation with humans' anatomical differences. The Moonshines have an essentially egalitarian view of polygamy, allowing men and women to behave interchangeably in a plural marriage, and despite the low social status of men in their society, it is more common to see two women sharing the same man than the other way around. Partly this is because women outnumber men in Moonshine society due to better survival rates, and partly this is because some men prefer to live, even at the edge of survival, with another man rather than spend their time serving a woman.
Child marriage:
A few hypermilitaristic societies draft children into the army from the age of five, or even from birth, but in such societies the concept of marriage has little meaning to a young child as there is no guarantee of surviving to adulthood for children of either sex.
I have not created any societies specifically with arranged marriage, and I suspect I will never use it except possibly in the very extreme societies up above where the military controls every aspect of everyone's life. And these societies never last long.
Other marriage:
I've done this in the past when I was blurring the lines between mythology and reality, but now I write in a
euhemeristic style and leave mythology to in-world writings which are cleanly separated from my own writing.
This leads me to "self-marriage", if I can call it that, which is one of the three ways by which female angels in Teppalan religions can reproduce. They can marry a male angel, a female angel, or bring forth a child from their own womb. There's a small chance I might decide to at least imitate that in the euhemeristic writing as well, saying that female priests can choose to raise a child on their own, though I haven't put much thought into the degree to which believers would understand the situation as analogous to the angels' (the priest really did impregnate herself) as opposed to seeing the woman as an ordinary human woman living in the manner of the angels as a reflection of the power and beauty of the supreme god Malamṅ.
Is interracial or intercaste marriage banned?
In a few cases, yes. Most such examples that I have of this, however, are instances where a strong outside power controls two subjects populations and forbids them to marry each other because they want to keep the subjugated peoples distinct enough that they would be reluctant to unite against the third power. There are some examples of ruling classes forbidding their own people from marrying their slaves, but more commonly such marriages are allowed because the offspring must also remain slaves.
In general there are no mixed-race categories on planet Teppala, at least during the time period I write most about ... if a Crystal marries a Star, the children must be either Crystals or Stars, not something in between.