[ SECRET POST #4695 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4695 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #672.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: What was never explained to your satisfaction?

[(Anonymous)]

I know it's normally supposed to be fluffy romance and all, but I have so many questions about various soulmate scenarios and fics so rarely answer any of them. Like the one where people can't see colors until they meet their soulmate -- how do you teach kids the names of colors if the majority of any given class can't see them? Are clothes made mostly of black and white fabric or are they really garish so those who can't see colors can still make out differences? What about traffic lights, how do those work? Is all TV in black and white? What about paintings?

Or the ones where people have their soulmate's name tattooed on them. Surely there's some kind of online database where people can match with their soulmates, right? Or like Soulmate Facebook, you can't tell me in the internet age that people would just be wandering around hoping to stumble on someone with the right name rather than just doing a google search. If it's just first names, then do people give their kids progressively weirder names trying to find one that's unique so their soulmate can find them? Would smushing together first names and surnames become popular? I can't be the only one who wonders these things.

Re: What was never explained to your satisfaction?

[(Anonymous)]

And they always forget aromantics. Like no soulmate would mean no tattoo, but how would the color thing work?

Re: What was never explained to your satisfaction?

[(Anonymous)]

I've seen a lot of friendship soulmates, it isn't always romantic.

If this makes any sense?

[(Anonymous)]

Well there is a rare condition where the eye can't see colour. I remember a dude talking about having it on Jeopardy. He didn't really go into it, but he did mention that he waited until he black and white TV broke until he got a coloured one. He had his friends help with what he wore on the show since he couldn't tell himself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatopsia

I imagine it would work similarly in those soulmate AU's. Also you can think of it through the ways they worked around black and white television. There were specialists who colour coded the backdrops and outfits so they wouldn't blend into each other. Once colour became more common they had to work it colour on the big screen while still maintaining visibility for people at home who mostly didn't have access to coloured TV. This ended up with gaudy outfits with bright bold colours.
I assume there would be a system where they would sell sets of 'matching' outfits given most people can't see colour. People could decide on if they liked them judging them on the different tones. Designers would have special assistants who could see colour to determine what looks nice or not. (but then again taste is subjective)
Traffic lights generally have the same top=go, middle light=warning, and bottom light=stop. Though given most of the world can't see colour there would be symbols associated with the different signs.

Most of the time the soulmates want to meet naturally, so they characters they write about don't use sites or searches like that? I think I've seen it be reference before, but nothing came out of it.

Re: What was never explained to your satisfaction?

[(Anonymous)]

No, I thought about this, too.

Randall Munroe has done some worldbuilding math here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/

I don't really care about worldbuilding if it's a short fic, more about the meet cute and associated hijinks, but for stories that try to go "deeper", the soulmate concept tends not to work very well as a device. If you already know a person is your soulmate, all the tension that usually drives a romance is void. ("Do I love her? Does she love me back? Does she love someone else? Is she the right person for me? Can we work it out?"). I find a lot of authors tend to try and shoehorn those standard obstacles in anyway, and it's usually weak. But if you do some proper world building, new, original challenges to our heroes' happiness appear very quickly, and that makes a solid base for a story. One of the first soul mate fics I read, long before I knew it was a thing (and I think written before it became ubiquitous) did just that, and it had enough of an impact on me that I still remember the story more than ten years after reading it.