Continuing on from the previous, the next few tirades are going to be about differing roles in what might loosely be called family life.
There are a number of factors among the takmin species that, in certain respects, causes family structure to be less flexible than it is in human societies:
- Females are the primary holders of land and immovable property. Though this is partly due to genuine differences in behavior between the sexes, it is also reinforced by cultural or legal frameworks that either assume that males have no reason to independently own property, or actively discourage them from doing so.
- Females are the primary accumulators of wealth. Unmarried males tend to move around a lot, which limits their ability to carry unneeded goods, and safe places to store them are usually in the possession of females, who would require payment to look after them. (It occurs to me, though, that the rudiments of banking on Avishraa would probably begin with this.) Married males' resources usually get pooled with those of their wives in any case.
- Descent is almost universally traced within the female line. The mobility of males means that many people are only distantly familiar with, or never meet, their paternal relatives, whose biological kinship is in doubt in any case, whereas their relatives in the female line are more certainly kin and much more likely to be known to them. Likewise, a female cannot be certain that her son's children are actually related to her and may very well never meet them, but her daughter's descendants are a different matter. As a result, kinship, and most usually inheritance, are reckoned through the maternal line.
- Females tend to stay in one place. Females prefer to set down roots; they will migrate when in search of a new territory to call their own, but once this is accomplished are not often willing to abandon it - usually under duress, or if another valuable territory becomes available. The few exceptions are those who have the mental flexibility to psychologically identify with a situation rather than a place; this is an easier achievement on board a large, habitable vehicle such as a ship, but can also take place when traveling in a group with a relatively stable membership.
- Females are not often willing to share territory. This is a complicated subject with many particularities; witness the “shared marriage” phenomenon mentioned in the previous tirade. In the context of the family, however, what this means is that, as daughters get older, relations between each other, and between them and their mother, tend to become more strained, as all of them are in a territory they consider “theirs” and those approaching adulthood are less tolerant of sharing it. Most cultures have some mechanism for acceptably “encouraging” daughters to leave their mother's household at a certain age.
With all this in mind, we'll start with what happens when young people first leave their families and start to make their own way in the world.
Females
Females usually try to avoid permanent relationships until they are established, or expect to shortly become established, in a permanent location (or sufficiently stable life situation). In terms of land, this does not necessarily mean literal ownership - many takma families are serfs or tenants - so much as that the female has a defined area that she lives in, that she feels is her home and she belongs in, and that she is not likely to be dislodged from (especially by the legal owner).
The yearning for a territory of one's own tends to emerge between two-and-a-half and three cycles of age: early or mid-adolescence. Being most familiar with and comfortable in the one in which she was raised, a young female may feel inclined to challenge her mother's authority there, as well as any sisters who are of an age to be doing the same thing. This also applies to situations that take the same role in the subconscious; the character Ilirith was taken from her literal family in early childhood, but was raised under the aegis of the Matriarch of Alvraan, who effectively became her adoptive mother.
Prosperous families are able to defuse this situation by giving the daughter a sufficiently large amount of personal space and authority to satisfy them; the very wealthy may have enough land to simply carve off a piece and give it to the daughter, but more usual is to make the girl a tenant on the property, or else to give her her own large personal space and a specific role in the management of her mother's affairs. (This is essentially the solution the Matriarch used for Ilirith, who was kept quite content with her own space and a vital role protecting the Matriarch's interests.)
Most households, however, do not have the land, the wealth, or the internal complexity to offer this kind of solution, at least not to an extent to satisfy a daughter. (A wealthy mother may also have reasons of her own not to offer it, especially if she finds her daughter's presence threatening enough.) In these instances, in order to preserve domestic harmony, the daughter must be encouraged to leave. This is usually only a smoothing of what must happen in any case; while daughters of nobles and rulers might try to actually usurp their mothers, private individuals usually have neither the conscious intention nor any kind of social sanction for doing so. It's not necessarily that mother and daughter don't love each other, merely that they can't remain under the same roof and remain cordial.
How easy it is to convince a daughter to leave depends on several factors. It becomes easier if the daughter is younger, since her territorial instincts have not yet fully developed, but there is a trade-off, since the younger a female is when she leaves home, the less prepared she is likely to be. It also becomes easier if there is known to be territory available - perhaps a landlord or noble has a plot available, or a relative may have died without a direct heir and left their land to the mother to give to her daughter, or there may even be a frontier area nearby with land free for the taking.
Since there is almost always a cost to becoming independent, many mothers will also smooth the process by providing their departing daughter with a gift of resources with which to start her new life; depending on her likely circumstances, this may be simply food for her journey, a fee or due to be paid to a landlord, or some showy object or adornment intended to attract the interest of males.
In many cases, society itself may provide a path for young females to follow. Adult females are larger and stronger than males, are responsive to hierarchies, and - especially at that stage of their lives - are eager for status and reward, either in territory or in wealth that might help them gain it. Military service of one form or another is therefore a relatively common occupation for young females, whether in a formal army, a mercenary company, or a violent bandit organization. In units that remain together over long periods, a female may even feel at home enough to permanently attach herself to it.
A female without a particular destination in mind, or else one that is relatively far away, is likely to take up traveling with a party that is going in a direction she is willing to go. Some cultures have a practice of sending all a community's daughters of a certain age off at the same time, so that they can travel together. While this usually presents no insurmountable problems for relatively short journeys, over longer stretches of time the arrangement works best with close-knit communities whose families are already well-acquainted and new personal frictions can be kept to a minimum. Groups of females who are relatively unfamiliar with their traveling companions not only feel displaced in each others' presence, but can suffer from tensions related to sorting of status, and divide into mutually hostile cliques.
If a male band (see below) with a sufficiently good reputation is passing through the area, a young female may instead travel with them, usually in exchange for being a working member of the band during the journey. Both parties often find this a relatively pleasing arrangement. The female has traveling companions who do not threaten her status, who have seen things and been places beyond her experience, and some of whom may well catch her eye - and, if the reverse is true, may lead to coaxing gifts. For their part, the males may find the female's presence materially useful - her strength might allow her to lift or pull things that might otherwise be awkward - but are also often quite happy to have a relatively exclusive opportunity to lavish attention on her for a while.
Actual sex happens less often than one might think; traveling in a group for safety limits the opportunities for privacy. But it is not unusual, once the female leaves the group and settles in her new home, for one or more of her traveling companions to leave with her.
Males
Like females, males often leave home between two-and-a-half and three cycles of age, but the circumstances are quite different.
Young males rarely have to be encouraged to leave their parents' households, for several reasons. The first is that, unlike his sisters, a young male has no great instinct to compete for his mother's territory. A son may certainly start to chafe at remaining under his mother's roof, and this can lead to tensions, but in general he can be expected to be less confrontational than a daughter. The second is that, around this age, many males start feeling a compulsion to leave and see the world in any case, and it can actually be hard to keep them in place. (Many families, particularly on farms, find it economically advantageous for their sons to stay longer than they might like; they are, after all, a source of labor where labor is badly needed. In these cases, parents will often make it worth a son's while to stay, paying him wages that he can save for when he does eventually leave.)
The instinct to roam is not universal among males. For many, it is not necessary to travel far away, feeling it sufficient, if the opportunity is there, to marry a local girl or become a servant of a nearby noble. But many males are indeed hit by this wanderlust, and choose to depart the area entirely. Since traveling alone is often difficult and dangerous, they usually join male packs, called bands.
In those cultures that permit one to be a father to a female's children without living with her, young males will often join a band to which one of their fathers belongs; this may come after being allowed to travel with them temporarily on previous occasions. This is most usual with bands that revisit the same locations frequently, and offers one of the few opportunities for a male to have a relationship with what, in terms of identification if not biology, is his paternal family; bands of this type tend to be comprised of one or more families' worth of brothers, fathers, and grandfathers.
More frequently, however, bands are less cohesive in origin. Some may start out as a group of males leaving their community at the same time, but over time these turn into the more common band consisting of a mix of different backgrounds and ages. Which band a young male joins may depend on many factors: if, and how, he relates to its members, what reputation they have, what their habits are, and what their occupation is.
Most bands have some specialized occupation or mix thereof, only rarely devoting themselves to living entirely off the land. The movements of bands across the landscape lend themselves particularly well to certain ways of making a living, some less savory than others: hunting, trapping, herding, tinkering, acting and entertainment, trade, courier service, military or mercenary service, or banditry.
Membership in a band, for a young male, serves the psychological purpose of giving him a sense of belonging, taking on the roles of any fathers and brothers he may have left behind, as well as the practical purpose of learning skills and trades from his bandmates. It also, however, serves the biological purpose of putting its members into contact with a wide variety of females, and of giving them an opportunity to gather the resources to court them. It should therefore probably not be surprising that the arrival of a male band at a settlement often involves liaisons of one form or another.
Since each band has its own reputation, occupation, and group “culture”, what specific kind of reception one gets depends on which band it is. That said, there is nearly always a certain amount of suspicion toward them, particularly from those in power; it is neither economically or politically feasible to control them in more than a basic manner, and many of them, on stopping in a settlement, cause a certain amount of disturbance - getting in fights, getting drunk and disorderly, petty theft. In earthly terms, the impression they leave is somewhere between that of sailors on shore leave and gypsies, and the fact that some bands are perfectly well-behaved doesn't keep them from getting tarred with the same brush.
Some males find themselves particularly suited to life with their band - or at least a band, since it isn't unknown for them to leave one and join another - and remain in it for as long as they're capable of traveling, becoming the nucleus of the band and its leaders or advisers. Some bands have had an existence and identity extending back generations. But most males only travel with a band until they find a place they want to settle, or someone they want to settle with - or just get tired of moving around.