I know that there’s been a small bit of how love and romance works in the Empire. I am just curious about two things.
First-is there an equivalency of Valentines Day in the Empire?
Second-how…interesting would the Eldrae take on Valentines Day on Earth be?
I can easily imagine that a Imperial equivalent to V-Day would be a day of the year when relationship groups ‘devolve’ into a game of good-spirited gift/service one-upmanship, raucous intimacy, or some combination thereof
The Feast of Love and Life, Súnarast 2 (at the start of spring).
It’s so… staid.
No decorations in the streets or feasts in the temples? No duels? No grand dances? No best friends acting as go-betweens and personally delivering hand-forged gifts? No scandalous liquors with erotically carved peach-pits? No hedge-labyrinths full of strategically arranged perfumed bowers? No exquisitely calligraphed origami birds carrying messages between lovers in the rosy light of dawn? No passionate balcony declarations against the sunset? No lightning? Not one single, solitary, aria?
Y’all are really saving all that passion for angry mobs and dominance posturing, ain’ch’a?
(If you can get through the major love-themed day of the year without being even a little operatic, you’re doing it all wrong.)
Which sounds, ironically, like they’d think high schoolers were the only ones actually getting it. Or at least at the school I went to, there were… well. There were attempts. Mostly things like handmade custom mix-tapes, paper flowers of varying qualities, friends recruited as go betweens, and I flattened one idiot who thought it was funny to publicly gift me a sparkly G-string thong.
Which may at least get approving the effort, even though the application needed serious work. And lamenting that these sort of things are seen as “childish” by Terran culture.
Somewhere a very cynical observer is pointing out that having built a culture in which all unironic expressions with emotional valence - outside the officially approved two minutes hates - are deemed “cringe”, it’s no bloody wonder some people can’t keep their TFR at or above replacement.
It’s like trying to breed Jedi!