Chapter 121: Lore chapter: Anthroprological overview of the Hedan culture.

Author's note

So, special bonus, 2 chapters in one day. Well, I figured it was sorta cheating to count something somebody else wrote as a chapter, so here is a follow-up. Something I actually wrote. A lore chapter further expanding on the Hedan and the particulars of how I'm planning on handling this.

Anthropological overview of the nomadic tribes of the Hedan.

The Hedan warriors are a collection of nomadic tribes. Over the centuries, their tribes have grown and split, but they all regard themselves as the Hedan as they are brought together by a single ideal. The Hedan warriors all share one thing in common, all Hedan tribes idolize the fey as they have discovered that the human capability to become fey in their next lives, and all Hedan tribes dedicate themselves to strengthening their bodies and spirits in order to ensure they possess the ability to be as strong as they can be in their next life.

As a result of the Hedan’s obsession with strength and becoming fey in their afterlife, powerful war-chiefs from the Hedan tribes have come to make up 20% of the war committee of Fairy Queen Oren’s court. As a result, the diplomacy committee has become highly aware of the Hedan tribes, and are in frequent communication with them. This communication allows all of the Hedan tribes to remain unified with one another and prevents them from degrading into tribal warfare.

Great fairies born from the Hedan are also given a special privilege within the fey court. Although their personalities cause them to prefer being members of the war committee, they are also all regarded as members of the diplomacy committee and are frequently called on to return to their own former tribes in order to better diplomatic ties. Although the Human Hedan riders are not regarded as the Fairy Queen’s subordinates, these diplomatic ties have caused them to further deepen their obsession with becoming members of the fey races and all of them regard becoming great fairies serving in the fairy queen’s war committee to be their highest objective in life. To a Hedan warrior, this life is only training for the next in which they serve their true purpose.

There are some competing theories as to the reason, but the Hedan culture highly values women, and women are almost always the ones to hold positions of power within the Hedan tribes. The tribes are lead by a woman called the Matron who holds all the power in the tribe. If one were to ask a changeling for whom it is their entire life’s role to observe human societies, they would most likely say this is because the Hedan women are actually somewhat more likely to be reborn as great fairies and preserve their memories than the men. This is due to the fact that the women of the Hedan tend to remain at home and focus on magecraft as a path to power while the men train as physical combatants and are on the front lines when it comes to fighting demons and other threats, which often results in earlier deaths for the Hedan men with the most potential to gain the necessary strength to achieve this level.

Other competing theories include that they view women as naturally fit to lead due to the fey being ruled by a queen, and that the men are too occupied with training their physical bodies to lead effectively. Whichever theory is valid though, the result is the same. Women hold most of the leadership positions in the Hedan tribes, with the only leadership positions available to the men being the command of a combat expedition. However, there is one other important position a Hedan man can occupy.

When dealing with people from outside the tribe, a Hedan man, normally the brother or oldest son of the tribes Matron, will serve as the Matron’s intermediary. The Hedan consider humans outside the tribes to be far too rude toward women, and thus men from outside the tribe are not allowed to encounter a Hedan woman. Hedan men as well are often uncomfortable seeing men outside the tribes in positions of power and the manner in which women outside the Hedan tribes are treated.

Families among the Hedan also all revolve around the woman. Women will choose men who they think are powerful, and in order for no woman to be denied a chance with the most desirable men in the tribe they will not hold him in any way accountable for the child produced from their union. All children born in the Hedan tribes are raised by their mothers, their aunts, and their uncles. As such, all children born to a single woman remain together. When a woman’s first male grandchild is sought as a partner for a woman from another family, this is when she obtains her right to separate from her mother and become the matriarch of her own family. When this occurs, she will often leave the tribe and seek other families to band together with her to form their own tribe. She will usually not leave immediately after her grandson has been selected, it is only the right of passage that gives her the right to begin seeking other families to form a tribe with. She does not actually leave the tribe until all families to make the new tribe have become arranged.

A Hedan tribe is composed of multiple families that have joined together. This is mostly to allow their daughters to seek acceptable males. There is no specific taboo among the Hedan against procreation with a male cousin, but it is not something that most of the women would prefer. As such, in order to raise the availability of men, multiple families will travel together. The family that is chosen to lead is the family that has the largest number of men who are considered desirable by the other families. It is viewed that such a woman must have the strongest ability to discern good men as partners, as well as the greatest ability to raise strong men as sons and grandsons. These are considered signs she would also make the best leader for the tribe. This places a strong emphasis on families to promote their men as well, and powerful sons and grandsons are considered the greatest wealth a Hedan woman can have as they are her ticket to power within the Hedan tribes.

Hedan tribes being nomadic by nature often bring tents which they arrange in clusters, each cluster being the domiciles of a different family. It is usually the case that one tent is dedicated to all males of the family who are over the age of majority. This is normally the largest tent, arranged like a barracks. A cluster of smaller tents are dedicated to each woman and her daughters, as well as her minor sons. All members of this family live together in the same tent, arranged more like a typical household seen in other cultures. Finally, there is the Matriarch’s tent. This tent is the smallest, but it is also the only tent that is the living space of only one person. As such, despite being smaller than the other tents, the woman who lives in this tent actually has more living space than those who live in any of the other tents in the cluster. The Matriarch is the mother, grandmother, or great grandmother to every single member of the family in the family cluster, and the leader of this family unit.

After reaching the age of majority, the men of the Hedan live effectively in a different world from the women. They still regard it as their job to serve the needs of the women, and it is all of their desire to be noticed and called upon by one of the women of the other families as this is seen as a recognition of their prowess, strength, and achievements in training and battle. It is usually the case that this will not happen until a man is around the age of 20 to 25, but being selected by a woman when he is at a younger age is considered to be a great honor. Producing a strong next generation is considered one of the duties of a Hedan man, but he is still within his rights to turn down a woman’s invitation. To some extent, turning down a woman can raise a man’s prestige even higher as it could show he is also selective, especially if the woman who called on him is young or weaker in her cultivation, or who has some kind of negative reputation. However, turning down a woman who is of impeccable reputation and close to his age, close to his power or higher in cultivation, or turning down too many women in a row can instead loose him prestige among his peers.

When it comes to raising children, all children regardless of gender start off being trained in the ways of a warrior up until around age 14. At this age, a girl will have her coming of age recognition, at which point she will begin learning the way of a mage. These younger years though are considered important as it allows a girl to become familiar with the male ways of play and gives them some common shared experiences that will help them to get along with them later in life when she is ready to begin seeking a mate. At the same time, it also serves to strengthen her body during the period where it is growing the most, toughening her bones and muscles during this crucial formative growth phase. This gives a Hedan mage physical ability far beyond the capacity of most other mages in human societies, as she can manage herself in physical combat better than any except for a dedicated trained warrior.

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There is, of course, one other distinguishing feature about the Hedan that make their tribes unique. One which you cannot avoid mentioning while discussing the Hedan. All Hedan warriors, regardless of gender, possess a bloodline magic for wild empathy, allowing them to calm and tame wild beasts that would normally be considered untamable. This often has them called the Hedan Riders by outsiders as they are almost never seen by outsiders without their mounts. There is a belief commonly held among the Hedan that this ability of theirs comes from fey blood that the tribes have running through their veins, which supposedly came from several generations before the first of the Hedan riders lead the first tribe. Whether or not this belief is valid or not is uncertain though as even the fairy queen and her elder members of the court who would have been alive at the time had not paid much attention to human affairs to the extent that would allow them to have any knowledge on the truth or falsehood of this claim.

Most Hedan tame normal beasts, but some of the Hedan have tamed beast chimera, a class of unintelligent demon that uses arcane energy to splice together beasts in a similar way to how the weaker fey sometimes splice together human and beast souls. There are even some particularly renowned Hedan tribes that exclusively tame nothing but beast chimera. Of the chimera tamed by the Hedan, the griffin is the most commonly seen.

There is another peculiarity of the Hedan that is also worth note. This is the Hedan’s impeccable sense of direction. Rather than being the result of any form of magic or special ability, it seems to be a result of the language and communication customs of the Hedan themselves. Among the Hedan, if you are greeted by one of their members you will often be asked the question “where are you going?” instead of the “how are you doing?” more common in other cultures. This question is simply regarded as a greeting among their people, but it is also a test imposed by their entire culture to keep their members constantly conscious of direction and distance from one point to another. This is exemplified in the expected response to this “where are you going?” question. If you are addressed in this manner, the name of your destination is not an acceptable response. The response you are expected to give is to include the exact compass direction you to your destination, as well as the distance between your current location and that destination. This results in all Hedan being constantly aware of distance and direction to an extent that their minds can process these thoughts as naturally as walking.

Extended Authors note and mention of IRL anthropological references used for the Hedan culture.

To everyone who read up to this point in regards to the Hedan, thank you very much for showing such interest in my badly written anthropology paper on this fictional culture. (If there are any field anthropologists in the readership, I would gladly accept assistance in re-writing this work should you be interested in cleaning this up and making it look more presentable.)

The Hedan are one of the many groups among the human territories that were fleshed out in the commission I got for the subject, and of all of them the Hedan were actually one of my favorites due to all I would be able to do with them. Dealing with a tribal people is just something that gave me so much opportunity to explore and include things I have learned about between my introductory anthropology class I was forced to take in college as well as several programs I heard on NPR about anthropology research among various African tribes and some of the startling abilities that were found among these people who had very different cultures from our own western culture.

If you have followed along with this series so far, you may have already noticed that I have a bit of a thing toward really crafting cultures. Well, the Hedan were my first chance to actually include things I learned about from real cultures found on Earth instead of having to just make up 100% of it from thinking about how one thing would influence another. Of course, the final paragraph about the Hedan’s sense of direction and how it was influenced by their language and cultural greeting of “where are you going?” was one thing I ripped directly from a real African tribe here on Earth. It was simply one of the more interesting things I had heard.

You see in some web noves with game-like mechanics that occasionally the main character will have something like a mini-map in a HUD display they will have on their vision, and a little cursor that shows their current location. Well, the anthropologist who studied this culture that had the “where are you going?” greeting and the exact cardinal direction and distance being the expected response described her experiences studying this culture, and said that after dealing with them for so long and trying to compensate for the cultural expectation of always knowing these things, her brain eventually wound up generating an imaginary version of something very much like one of these game-like mini-maps in her head. She then described the experience of going back to one of the tribal people she was studying and describing her experience. The response she got was something along the lines of “of course? How else would you do it?” Indicating that, unexposed to any part of Western culture, all of these tribal people had developed something like this mini-map inside their own heads as their way of compensating for the demands that their cultural greeting placed on them, and it gave them all an absolutely outstanding sense of direction.

When I heard about this, it was just something so interesting I simply had to include it as a capability of the Hedan riders as they seemed like exactly the sort of people who would need that ability.

Another significant thing I took from my anthropology class to include in the Hedan culture is the matriarchal society, including the lack of marriage customs and instead keeping the family together so the uncles can raise the children, taking up the role that the child’s father would in Western societies. The exact causality and view on the matter likely differs a little with the Hedan compared to IRL tribal societies out of Malaysia, which is exactly the place I stole the concept of the matralinial family structure from, but it really is something I wanted to include the first time I put in a true matriarchy into this world as the family structures are something I rarely see considered when others try to throw a matriarchy into their fictional world.

I actually stole the matriarchal structure of the Hedan from 2 different Earth matriarchies. The first one was this Malaysian tribe, which was actually not a matriarchy by power structure. It only had matralinial family lines, but the tribe was lead by men. I only took the way in which this tribe handled families while still including men. The second Earth matriarchy I based this on was a coal mining town in South America where the men simply had to leave town so often for such long periods of the day that men practically did not exist in the town, and so they developed a matriarchal town government out of necessity just to keep things moving in town. So, I managed the two cultures together in order to come up with something that simply felt more natural and how a matriarchal culture under these conditions would be more likely to actually develop.

Now, for anyone who wants a peek in at my creative process, this whole experience writing up material for the Hedan is almost a perfect microcosm of exactly what I have been doing for the rest of the series as a whole.

At the time of writing the side story, the lore of the Hedan was around 60% IRL based, 20% fantasy additions to fit this world, and 20% fitting the commissioned write-up from xshedevilx. Now, as of this anthropological write-up, I have managed to muscle the IRL basis down to 20% with around 40% being derivatives and conclusions drawn from all 3 of the other parts on how it would all logically fit together cohesively, making this very much it’s own thing now despite all the inspirations pulled from other sources. In other words, they are now very much a part of this world’s tapestry.

It is interesting to note that these lore chapters are very important for me as well, maybe even more so than what the reading audience gets from it. For you, it is interesting to know this stuff. But, for me, this is my process of taking these loose threads of inspiration I get from the IRL stuff I base my writing on and pulling derivatives that can help weave it all into a cohesive piece that fits into the world the story takes place in. For me, these chapters are extremely important, and I also share them with you because I think it will be an interesting read as well.

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