Fridge / A Brother's Price

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• When they're traveling to Mayfair at the queens' invitation, Mother Elder tells Jerin that they're planning on splitting the family in such a way as to make Corelle the eldest of the younger kids. Jerin questions this decision and points out Summer is of similar age and could be their eldest instead, but Mother Elder dismisses this as Summer not being a strong enough leader and Corelle just needing to learn how to set the correct course.
  When you pay attention, Summer rarely speaks up compared to Jerin's other sisters, often just a sentence or a few words, usually said quietly or murmured. She's even introduced as opposing Corelle's viewpoint but unable to make her point firmly enough to make any difference. Meanwhile, although Corelle did start off the book with petty bickering with Jerin and running off to the Brindles', when Raven Tern and her soldiers show up at their door, Corelle is the one to take charge in going out to speak to them to convince them to wait for Queens Justice and avoid bloodshed. Later in Mayfair, Corelle not only remembered all of Kij's sister's bragging about their family history, she immediately figured out how to weaponize it to get Kij away from Jerin. Mother Eldest is correct; Corelle really is the natural leader for the younger half of the family.
• The scarcity of boys leading boys to become slaves, serfs, or chattel very much fits the theory that serfdom came as a product of labor shortage rather than labor surplus. The tactics used by Japanese corporations in The '80s to trap graduates of the most reputable universities fit well into that theory.

Fridge Logic

• A night with a man in a crib is ten crowns. A reasonable brother's price for someone like Jerin, minus the queens' favor, is two thousand. That one family was willing to spend a hundred crowns to get their sister ten nights in a crib in hopes of producing one baby (and by the way, shouldn't a world like this have a more developed sense of the rhythm method than that?). It's estimated that 60% of pregnancies in our world end in spontaneous miscarriage before the mother's even far enough along to know she's pregnant, so if most of one half of the survivors of that (the males) are also miscarried, that means that, if things go according to plan, they have a roughly 20% chance of seeing a baby as a result of this. So if this is standard practice, the average expenditure on a crib per baby produced is five hundred crowns. One fourth of Jerrin's expected brother's price, and he's presumably a hot commodity. (Taking the front page's description literally it's more like three hundred crowns per baby on average, but still.)
  • Presumably trying to get a baby off the cribs would normally be spread out over a while. Paying a small amount every now and then or spending a large amount in one go is different.
  • The cribs are the poor woman's option. Poverty has the tendency to be hard to get rid of exactly because you often only can afford the option that seems cheaper at first, but is actually more expensive in the long run. Also, a husband, too, can die before he fathers a child, so there is no guarantee, anyway. In addition, it's not only about buying the husband. Some families may be able to afford the buying, but not the supporting.
• Why the cribs? They are at a level of science that they should have figured out artificial insemination, which would lower the risk of catching an STD to zero for the men. Presumably some women prefer the traditional way, but if all they want is a baby, the artificial way of doing it should be more comfortable than a night with a man whose attractiveness is measured in terms of having all his own teeth and both eyes.
  • The technology shown in the book is 1850 at best, part of the story are experimental prototype cannons not made from bronze but from cast iron (15th century).
• I also have doubts about whether the hymen would even be considered in any way connected to female virginity in this world. Firstly, the women tend to be more active, and secondly, that connection only exists in our world because Victorians were desperate to find some way of quantifying virginity.
  • Actually concern for an intact hymen predates the Victorians by quite a bit and is a cross cultural phenomena and a major concern for women in some more 'traditional' Islamic countries.
    • Besides which, considering the very real risk of disease if as much as one sister has sex outside of marriage, it's not unlikely that the women in this world found something to at least make an educated guess as to whether or not that was happening.
    • They probably do not have any concept of female virginity other than the presence or lack of a hymen, respectively. Whether a woman is a virgin "morally" does not matter to them, however, they know that still having a hymen tends to get in the way of having fun on the wedding night if they intend to get pregnant. STDs are an entirely different topic, as a woman could have no hymen in the first place, or it could be broken by using a dildo, or whatever, and she could catch an STD from oral sex just as well.

Fridge Horror

• The fact that the youngest sisters are still children, maybe toddler age, when their elder sisters marry the shared husband. Jerin is decent, but if you consider the possibility that whatever disease made men so rare maybe didn't kill the gene for pedophilia if there is one, and certainly didn't make men unable to be violent, as proven by Keifer ... Queensland is full of men who are married to little girls, and have only their own conscience to prevent them from sexually abusing those "child brides". Presumably, what Keifer did to Trini is a somewhat common occurrence, as is the reaction of her eldest sister. Worse things happen in real life, of course, but still.
  • And then there is the fact that those little girls are expected to have sex with the man who maybe even changed their diapers. They seem to be allowed to abstain from sex, but as this is their only chance at sexual intimacy, they either get over the ickyness of it, or remain celibate.
    • In this world, seems like "OK, my husband helped raise me" wouldn't be seen as "icky", just as how things work. The "icky" factor really seems to be more based on our real-world Western culture than in the very different world of this book.
    • If a family is lucky enough to have multiple sons (or enough money to afford a second husband), they can split the family to mitigate this issue. Jerin's sisters do this—the older group marries Cullen, but the younger sisters will wait and trade one of Jerin's three brothers for a husband closer to themselves in age.
    • It may be possible to get around the icky factor, but as with Brother–Sister Incest, the revulsion against Parental Incest is biologically based. Harmful rare recessive genes have a much higher chance of doubling up. At least part of the reason Sigmund Freud was able to come up with his Oedipus Complex was that his mother wasn't involved much in rearing him.
    • Biological revulsion to Parental Incest is irrelevant because a shared husband is not the biological father of his wives, even the youngest ones. He simply may be involved in helping to raise them, as a member of the family. So it's much more about the potential social icky factor of dating someone who knew you when you were a baby.
    • Not irrelevant. He might not actually be the father, but he's in the position of the father in the viewpoint of the baby. That triggers the revulsion and Squick.
  • This works both way, really. Men are married off at 16, to fully grown women who are often in their late twenties to early thirties, because most sisterhoods have to save for a long time before they can afford a husband. Unlike their wives, the boys can't 'opt out' of servicing them in bed, and there is no talk of a sisterhood ever waiting for their husband to be more mature before bedding him. Even Eldest Whistler, at 28, is pregnant with 16-years-old-Cullen's child by the end of the book.
• It's rumored that the mothers of the Brindle family have been engaging in Parental Incest with their son to conceive their youngest children. Boys tend to be married off soon after the age of majority, sixteen, and he isn't married yet. How young would he have been when it started?
  • It's mentioned there's a twelve-year gap in babies in the Brindle family, and it's unlikely he reached fertility before that age, really. It's also only been a few years at most this has been happening, since he's presumably fifteen - not yet married, but old enough for courting.
    • So still like, a ten to eleven years old. And still Jerin holds this against him.
  • Worse is that he likely didn't have a choice in the matter, and yet gets demonised by the main characters for getting basically raped by his own family.

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