Practicum 203: Mainkinruru Holiday
Greetings and Supercrescent! … which is a strangely fitting for today, so hi everyone! We are about to get into the holiday season, and today, we’re doing a bit of a practicum on one of my lesser-known species and a holiday of theirs! The Mainkinruru, which is pronounced close to Mine-kin-ru-ru. And that is plural, singular is Mainkinru.
(Anne:) And she’ll be joined by the ever-wondrous Lady Verbosa this evening! Why, that’s me! I’ll light a candle in honor of the spirit of sisterhood in thanks.
(Vivian:) For once in one of my practicums! Which will be a delight, as always.
The Mainkinruru
First of all, who are the Mainkinruru? They are a fungimal species, a fungus-animal hybrid class of organism. They are technologically advanced, have space travel, and are considered a Concert species, meaning they are REALLY powerful in known space. They are a duarchy, with a royal family and a spiritual leader as the two main leaders of their star nation.
The Mainkinruru are a spiritual people, very spiritual, who believe in millions, if not billions or even trillions, of different spirits for all kinds of things, from the mundane spirits of lighting a candle to those that guard over the bathroom, to enormous ones that guide in running their nation. The Mainkinruru consult with the spirits in many ways at all times to see what to do.
But the big thing with them that makes them have friction with others in the Concert is that they are not the only humanoid species on their homeworld. Namely, they have the Thylinini (singular: Thylini). They are, however, not as advanced; think of them like early Homini members. They can do fire, sew, and some early stuff, but they never developed any further. The Mainkinruru act like custodians to the Thylinini, taking care of them, helping with medicine. and much else.
There is, however, a rather hefty price the Thylinini must pay, and the Mainkinruru cannot stop demanding it. The Mainkinruru cannot reproduce on their own; a Mainkinruru couple cannot together make a child, even if they have the right biology to reproduce. They literally need to infect a Thylini with their spores, and this spore infection then takes over the Thylini body and reshapes it into a Mainkinru body and mind, and it becomes part of the Mainkinru species.
As you can imagine, a lot of the Concert have moral qualms with this, given the intellectual and technological difference between the two species. And I am not going to sugarcoat this in any way; this is very morally questionable at the best of times and worst of times quite repugnant, but when has that ever prevented interesting worldbuilding?
(Anne:) Yeah, some of the best worldbuilding involves some atrocities, and in writing this, you have to be careful to never portray it in a positive light.
(Vivian:) Which is why I have the Concert of Stars reacting negatively to it, and why I am explicitly saying it here. So, while we observe the spirit of the holidays, we will keep this tone light and happy, for two reasons: It is the holidays and we don’t want it to be depressive, and also because this is done from the perspective of the Mainkinruru, who do not see themselves as evil and genuinely care about the Thylinini. However, as readers, please be aware that Anne and I are fully aware of the moral issues surrounding their reproduction.
The Holiday: The Curation
For the holiday to make some sense, we need a bit of a history lesson. I like giving all my species a big unification event that pulls them all together into one people of the planet. And to make a long story short, the Mainkinruru faced an existential threat in the form of the Thylinini getting sick. And I mean massively sick, where they were dying a lot. And with what I said above, that means it is not a long time before the Mainkinruru goes extinct if the Thylinini goes extinct. And this was when they had like the equivalent of 1980s tech, so it was a big deal. After lots of work, they managed to find a cure and save the Thylinini, and with it, themselves. Side note: the treatment of Thylinini became dramatically better after this catastrophe was averted.
(Anne:) Praise be the spirits of the thylinini! We shall sing of them forever! …At this point in history, the thylinini were seen to have spirits worthy of being recognized by the Mainkinruru.
(Vivian:) Yeah, believe it or not, they are centralised enough that they have recognition of specific branches of spirits… and that list never shrinks.
So with something like that, it inevitably became a holiday of celebration called “The Curation,” where they celebrate the curing of the Thylinini. In my holiday post, I wrote that holidays can come in four general flavours: religious, national, cultural, and seasonal. And with it, a holiday can be more than one. And in this case, because of the deep spirituality of the Mainkinruru, I would place this holiday in really three of those: religious, national, and cultural.
Modern Celebrations
In modern times, the Curation is a celebration with the family. I am a big sucker for the Christmas celebrations I remember as a child, so having it leak into celebrations is something I often let happen. But one thing to keep in mind with this is that for a Mainkinru, you have two families to deal with.
The Mainkinru family, which is the one they grew up with, dealt with everything. This is the “normal” family. I put quotations around it because what is normal? Heck if I know, but it is the one humans would naturally think of as family. But then we have the Thylini family. There was a Thylini, often a very young one, that became the Mainkinruru that they are today, and that Thylini had a family of their own. Anne is going to go into the tie in the next section while I continue on a bit in this section on how the Mainkinru family celebrate.
For the Mainkinru family, now just family for this section, the celebrations are together at someone's place, often the oldest members of the family. They don’t have a preference in the lineage, so it is neither patriarchal nor matriarchal there. Whoever is the oldest is where you go, and that means the family gatherings are HUGE. You can see cousins twice removed during these visits and celebrations.
It is also a time when they don’t strain the power grid a lot for light, at least. Why? Because there are candles, lots and lots of candles. They light lots of candles in the house to pay respect to all different kinds of spirits. Because with any celebration, you have to thank some spirits for the happy journey, or at least hopefully the happy journey.
As with any holiday, there is food, and everyone helps with making the food. And you can bet that people brought table top stoves because if there are several dozen to a hundred people, great grandpa Dzenro’s kitchen isn’t going to cut it. Except the kids, the kids are rascals and out and playing about and enjoying their brief existence as careless and responsibility-less entities.
Despite being Christmas-inspired, this holiday does not actually have an exchange of gifts between Mainkinruru. What it does have, on the other hand, is that they each buy a present for the tribe or family of Thylinini from whence their body originated, and some families turn that into a bit of a contest. Who gave their Thylini family the best gift? Maybe Anne knows…
The Journey Home
(Anne:) Clearly I give the best gifts! Wait, I’m not a Mainkinru… Well, let’s look at them and not my amazing gift-giving skills.
To fully understand why this holiday is meaningful and why family is so heavily involved, it helps to know the full history of the unification event, at least the more personal side of things. One of the most retold stories is that of a Thylini parent whose child was dying of the plague traveling through dangerous terrain to seek Mainkintru help, showing the close connection between them and also the desperation the Thylini parent felt for their dying child. Family sacrifices are thus honored at the Curation.
You also have to know a little of how the cure was found: a Thyliniologist named Athnatta lived among the Thylini, gaining the trust and entering their world, and heard of a tribe that was managing to delay the effects of the plague. She went there, with Thylini with her to vouch for her, and the leader showed her a plant used to slow the decay of the plague. She took it back and from it, with help from numerous scientists, created the cure to the plague. Her ability to form trust with the Thylini and view them as family is also honored at the Curation.
One of the big events of the Curation is the Journey Home, which is something all Mainkinruru are expected to do at least once in their lifetime or the spirits will spurn them upon death. As a result, many young Mainkinruru make this journey, and those who live offworld have to plan for years to get things to work out. So what is this journey? Why, they have to go to the tribe from whence they came! It’s a way of honoring their ancestors, or their Thylini ancestors at least, and it’s a way of showing respect for the species whose sacrifice made them who they are. And it’s a way of continuing their family into another species.
(Vivian:) That journey is long and such a hard thing that many Mainkinruru are told, because there are romantication of everything including this, is that the Thylini family will not know who you are unless you do this regularly and even then, due to communication issues and cognitive differences, they may never understand that the connection is toward the child they gave up all those years ago. As far as many Thylinini can tell, it is just their benefactor’s giving them lots of pleasant gifts and a visitor coming by.
(Anne:) You don’t want to get attacked by the Thylini you’re coming to celebrate with! So those from more remote tribes face more scrutiny than the ones who are used to celebrating with Mainkinruru, whatever those crazy Mainkinruru are up to.
(Vivian:) There are different levels there and in some Thylini tribes, you are not allowed to visit without a guide.
Mutations
People mutate if they drink green glowing liquids, and, like those foolish enough to drink that sweet glowing liquid, so do holidays. They mutate and change. So, how has this holiday changed?
Initially, the journey home was not a thing. It took well over a century before people started making the journey. This is because back then, the holiday started as a simple global anniversary, and it was not yet family-focused. Think of it like a holiday that the state declares, but most people don’t actually care about and kind of go, “Oh yeah, that exists.”
So initially it was just an anniversary celebration, and Athnatta, while recognised globally, faded from the spotlight the same way a Nobel prize winner shines at the announcement and then fades from public memory even while remaining hugely influential in their respective fields. Great in the moment, but mostly forgotten in the public eye. Though as the anniversaries went on, people started celebrating it because the public programs worked, and people became more and more aware of how dire the situation had been and the monumental effort it took to save them.
It still remained a public holiday for decades, and during this time, it also shifted. It transitioned from a public celebration to more private affairs with family. After all, this celebrated event is the reason they can still have families together. Without it… the new ones would not have been born!
And as they gathered with these realizations, they began telling the tales of Athnatta and her journey with the Thylinini, and along with those stories, they also developed a greater curiosity about Thylini in general, beyond just what they learned in school, which was necessary for having children. Eventually, people started going, “Hey, I want to visit where my Thylini came from,” and then actually went there… and the rest is as they say, history.
(Anne:) This is not to say that there weren’t Mainkinru who made this journey prior to this shift, but it was rare and looked on as borderline scandalous to want to associate with one’s Thylini roots. The shift in the holiday correlated with a movement for greater Thylini rights, and pro-rights activists encourage greater curiosity as a way to shift public opinion - and the holiday itself.
Summa Summarum
(Vivian:) And that is the Mainkinru holiday of Curation. It is tied with a morally abhorrent/questionable reproduction yet a strange reverence and gratitude toward the species that they have to do it with. Did we do it well? Tell us in the comments.
(Anne:) And happy holidays! Light a candle for the spirit of your choice, and may they bless you greatly!
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