Saturday, October 4, 2008

Tora Olafsdotter: Most Inbred Person in the DCU?

This is me, failing at blogging. I've actually essayed the heck out of some interesting stuff lately, and absolutely forgot that I resolved to post all that non-story stuff here. For anyone who missed it, I did this past week's workshop over at the superhero_muses LJ community on my favorite topic: Writing Guy Gardner. (Includes history lesson and very subjective thoughts on how to write Guy.)

Anyway, I've been toying with some tales of Guy and Tora's future brats children, and because I was forced to consider the whole idea of, you know, them reproducing, the thought occurred to me:

Tora is probably seriously inbred.

Think about it. Her people have been cut off from the rest of the world for centuries at least, and they forbid mingling with outsiders -- and even if they were more open to mingling, it's not like there are a whole lot of people who are going to brave the Arctic Circle to visit them anyway.

Plus, she's royalty. Look at how inbred the royalty of Europe managed to become, and that was with several families in different countries intermarrying. Tora's people have a seriously limited gene pool to begin with, and I'm sure the royalty doesn't just marry any old commoner! They probably marry into other noble families, most of whom are cousins of theirs, anyway. And they've been doing this for... well, for ages. (Though perhaps it's not as bad if they have a slightly more tribal mentality and marry to the strongest warriors or something? It's hard to say.)

As to whether this would have any effect on her fertility or on the children themselves, well, maybe or maybe not. Though that certainly would be an interesting topic. It seems like whenever something genetic comes up in the comics, it's always some awesome mutation of some sort, but never anything even remotely realistic -- particularly not something that most of us "normal" people deal with later in life. It's never "Gee, mom, I inherited your ice powers, and I'm also diabetic and at high risk for heart disease. Thanks."

Dear Ice People: Guy Gardner is peeing in your gene pool.

And you should thank him.

2 comments:

SallyP said...

Oh God yes, Tora has to be inbred, and no wonder Queen Olaf likes Guy so much...fresh blood! Gardner genes can overcome anything!

Duskdog said...

It's all part of Queen Olaf's secret plan to revitalize her population of creepy white-haired, blue-eyed people.

Okay, they're not really creepy, but I do think it would be unsettling to look at a big crowd of them at once, if only because here in America we're so used to seeing such a big range of skin, hair, and eye colors. And white hair on young people is unusual.