#WordWeavers 2502.18 — How is familial love thought of in your world? What is the ideal and the reality?
This question begs for a long ethnology paper, because there are ideals and then there is reality. The reader will enter the world thinking one thing and leave understanding another. Love and family have a gazillion conflicting meanings, so for love let's go with emotional bonds. For family it's the following relationships only.
- Vertical: Multigenerational between mothers and children.
- Horizontal: Between siblings.
- Diagonal: Between an uncle (sometimes an aunt) and nieces and nephews.
If you detected something missing, you're correct. Since an uncle usually raises his sister's children, that bond is typically strongest, followed by sibling bonds, finally maternal.
In the current WIP, one MC (a responsible boy) has an uncle who flaked out on him and disappeared, an always angry workaholic mother, and sisters that detest him because at the age of 10, thanks to the flaky uncle and uncaring mother, the MC ends up raising his sisters. (Is this a Cinder-fella trope?)
The female MC's mother is a refugee and has no family, and is absent working to support them. This MC is a latch key kid who's most often raised by the books she reads, and sometimes by non-related "uncles" who associate with her mother.
Way too much to unpack here, true.
Keep in mind that Western culture's concept of the nuclear family collided with the age of single parenthood and blended families, and we deal with it. They do, too. Fortunately, the two MC's find each other. That, of course, is neither vertical, horizontal, nor diagonal. It's both familial in how they view it, and romantic in how they treat it. In their culture, that's a disaster—but not to them.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
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