Worldbuilding Through the Womb: Rethinking Inheritance in Fantasy
Anthropological Worldbuilding 101, Part 2
Mothers, Uncles & Magical Heirs: Rethinking Fantasy Families
In traditional fantasy, lineage is a straight line: king begets prince, who must prove himself to inherit a sword, a kingdom, or a family heirloom. If there’s a mother, she’s noble or nurturing, and often dead. If there’s a family, it’s a neat nuclear one. And if there's magic, it’s passed down from father to son, as if mystic bloodlines were no different from titles.
But family, real, human (or inhuman) family, has always been more complicated, more layered, and much more fascinating than that.
Let’s look beyond the father-son axis. Let’s talk about mothers and uncles, cousins and clans, bonded kin and beasts. Let’s explore the overlooked systems: matrilineal magic, avuncular authority, clan-based obligation, chosen kinship, and non-human familial ties.
The Matrilineal Line: Power Through the Mother’s Blood
Matrilineal descent, where lineage is traced through the mother, has existed across the globe, from the Minangkabau of Indonesia to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. And yet, it’s rare in fantasy fiction, where male succession still dominates magical inheritance and royal legitimacy.
But what if power moved through the mother’s line?
Imagine a world where a daughter’s connection to her grandmother is what awakens latent magic. Where it’s not the father’s sword that grants her right to rule, but her mother’s loom, ring, ledger, or sigil. A world where aunts and grandmothers are power brokers, and men marry into power rather than pass it on.
This opens narrative doors: political intrigue among maternal uncles (as in some matrilineal societies, where uncles act as legal fathers), magical secrets buried in a mother’s garden, or guardianship passed from sister to sister in times of upheaval.
We don't see nearly enough fantasy stories where the maternal line is the only line that matters—where magic comes through the womb, not the warhorse.
Uncles, Aunties, and Avuncular Power
In many societies, particularly matrilineal ones, the mother’s brother (not the father) is the child’s most influential male relative. The avunculate bond, the relationship between uncle and nephew, carries social weight, inheritance rights, and moral obligations. Fantasy often forgets this, unless the uncle is a villain.
But what if he’s not? What if he’s the linchpin?
A wise uncle could serve as the magical mentor, land steward, or intermediary in family politics. Perhaps it’s the uncle who guards the family grimoire, the auntie who interprets omens, the cousins who must share a magical burden. Fantasy worlds with strong avuncular structures create fascinating complications for inheritance, loyalty, and power.
Western fantasy leans heavily on individualistic narratives: the chosen one, the lone heir, the reluctant hero. But many real-world cultures understand identity through clans, lineages, and collective reputation.
In a clan-based fantasy world, magic might not be a personal gift—it might be a clan resource. Perhaps each clan holds part of an ancient spell, and only by marrying across clans can the full magic be unlocked. Perhaps exile from one’s clan severs magical ability altogether, or the spirit guardians tied to your lineage refuse to aid you if you dishonor your kin.
Clans add political complexity, emotional stakes, and tension between personal desire and communal obligation. They also offer space for more complex family dynamics—cross-generational feuds, sibling alliances, inter-clan marriages, magical alliances made or broken not by love…but by lineage.
Chosen Families and Kinship Beyond Blood
In the Harry Potter series, the Weasleys become Harry’s true family—not by blood, but by care, consistency, and shared resistance. From the beginning, Molly treats Harry with a maternal kindness, offering him comfort and care. She even knits him a sweater in the first book, demonstrating her concern for his well-being. Throughout the series, Molly provides Harry with emotional support, particularly when he is feeling lost and overwhelmed. This is the power of chosen family in fantasy: it offers belonging where there was none, protection where there was harm, and love without legal claim or magical inheritance.
But we can take this further. What if chosen family wasn’t just emotionally real, but magically real, politically real, structurally real in our fantasy worlds? Most magic systems privilege bloodlines…the heir to the throne, the child of the prophecy, the one with “royal blood.” But what if the strongest magic came from emotional bonds?
Spells that could only be cast by a bonded triad who’ve sworn sisterhood through shared survival, or a protective ward that forms spontaneously between two found siblings when one is in danger.
This creates powerful story opportunities…bonds that can’t be faked or forced. Family that isn’t granted by birth but earned through mutual care, survival, and belief. It also opens the door for queer, trans, and neurodivergent characters, often exiled from birth families, to form magical lineages of their own.
In many cultures, especially among Indigenous, queer, or diasporic communities, rituals of chosen family already exist. Godparenting, name-giving, sworn siblingship, queer family dinners. Fantasy worlds could build formal systems around this. Imagine a ceremonial binding of “shield siblings,” who swear to guard each other in life and death. Legal structures where a household can be formed by mutual vow rather than marriage or biology. Magical contracts where your found family gains access to your magical estate or spirit allies.
Chosen families often operate outside the law—beloved, but not recognized. What could that tension look like in a fantasy setting?
A foundling child raised by a dragon might be accepted by the mountain folk, but not by the royal court. A healer and their apprentice, bound by love and shared trauma, might be denied land or magical inheritance because they lack “true kinship.” These tensions create deep story stakes. Will society recognize their bond? Will they fight to change the rules—or subvert them? Can love be made legal in a world that only values lineage?
It also introduces worldbuilding questions: What are the consequences of an unrecognized family? Are there underground networks or traditions that help found families assert their rights?
Emotional Architecture of Found Family
Chosen family isn’t just a happy ending; it’s often a response to trauma. Characters form new families because their birth families were absent, abusive, or gone. In fantasy, this is often brushed aside, but the psychological reality is more complex.
Found family can sometimes come with
Fierce loyalty (sometimes to the point of unhealthy self-sacrifice)
Anxiety about abandonment
New definitions of home and safety
Conflicting obligations between birth and chosen family
This can deepen character arcs. Maybe a protagonist must choose between their bloodline duties and their found sibling. Perhaps the “villain” is someone who wasn’t chosen and resents the bond they were never offered. A magical system could recognize chosen bonds as valid or even more potent than blood ties. Imagine a world where bloodline magic falters, but a forged bond between battle companions fuels the enchantment.
Such a system would challenge fantasy’s obsession with dynasties. It would allow orphans, exiles, and queer characters to form their own lines of power. It would shift the emotional resonance of family magic away from fate, toward choice.
In the end, chosen family is a profound worldbuilding tool, not just a theme or subplot, but a mechanism for understanding how a culture works. Who gets to belong? Who gets protected? What is sacred? What is remembered? Because sometimes, the truest heir isn’t the one born into a line, but the one invited to sit at the table.
Non-Human Kinship: Spirits, Creatures, and Sentient Landscapes
Most fantasy readers are familiar with magical animals—griffins, familiars, unicorns—and many fantasy protagonists ride or befriend such creatures. But rarely are these beings treated as kin in the truest sense: not tools, pets, or guides, but siblings, cousins, or elders.
Real-world mythologies are filled with examples of non-human kinship: wolves who adopt human babies, rivers addressed as mothers, and ancestral spirits living in stones. These aren’t metaphors—they reflect a worldview in which humans exist within a network of reciprocal relationships, not a hierarchy of dominance.
Fantasy often brushes against animal familiars, forest spirits, or magical beasts. But rarely does it explore kinship with the non-human as family.
What if a character’s lineage included spirits or deities, not worshipped from afar, but acknowledged as family? Imagine a culture where a child is born with markings that signal their descent from a mountain spirit, and is therefore accountable to that spirit’s needs: to keep the land clean, to maintain rituals, to avoid mining or desecration.
This kind of spiritual kinship reshapes the family tree into a sacred ecology—and adds both burden and blessing to the magical heir. They don’t just inherit power; they inherit relationships.
Which opens questions of responsibility and reciprocity. What rites bind you to your wolf-kin siblings? What does inheritance mean when your godparent is a literal God? (And where do I sign up for that!?)
In some ecosystems, species survive only through cooperation, like bees and flowers, or fungi and tree roots. What if fantasy cultures understood this and formalized magical bonding pacts that mirrored natural systems? Kinship beyond the human could redefine how we see family obligations. It challenges anthropocentrism and invites the ecological, the animistic, and the mythic into a relationship with our characters.
Consider a culture where magical beasts can adopt humans. A bear spirit chooses a newborn to raise as its cub. A dryad who has lost her grove takes in a child and teaches her the language of leaves. An ancient golem that once protected a city now watches over a lone orphan, passing down not blood, but memory. This is kinship as choice, but not in the human-centric way we usually see it. Here, the non-human being is the chooser, the elder, the protector. Imagine the implications…ceremonies of adoption written in root and stone. Inheritance of magical items not by surname, but by non-human rituals.
Fantasy often splits creatures into good vs. evil: dragons are wise or hoarders, fae are tricksters or tyrants. But real family isn’t that simple. What if a character’s brother is a river serpent who occasionally eats travelers? What if their grandmother was turned into a harpy and now lives on the cliffs, watching, waiting, ashamed of what she’s become?
Non-human kinship doesn’t have to be utopian. It can be conflicted, sorrowful, bound by taboo, or trauma. This opens up emotionally potent stories: choosing to help a monster-kin escape its curse, or deciding to sever a tie that no longer serves.
Non-human kinship shouldn’t be a novelty or a footnote. It can be the central logic of your fantasy world. It can govern diplomacy, law, ecology, and magic. It shifts the narrative from possession to participation, from inheritance to entanglement.
The question isn’t just: Who is your family? But rather: What else counts as kin? And what do you owe them?
In a genre where dragons often speak, forests watch, and rivers remember, the answer should never be “only humans.”
Rethinking the “Heir”
The word “heir” in fantasy is too often shorthand for a linear, male, property-based narrative. But inheritance can be collective, symbolic, ecological, or spiritual. If we loosen our grip on the European aristocratic model of inheritance, we begin to imagine new relationships to legacy, power, and responsibility. We begin to ask deeper questions. Who gets to belong? Who gets to lead? Who does the magic choose, and why?
Fantasy can do more than repeat royal bloodlines. It can mirror the staggering diversity of kinship found in our own world—and beyond it.
Let us imagine aunties who bestow blessings, cousin-alliances that shape kingdoms, river-grandparents whispering secrets, and magical inheritances passed through milk lines, not bloodlines. Let us craft stories where the “family curse” is broken not by a prince’s quest, but by a chosen daughter’s refusal to follow her father’s path. Fantasy is, after all, the genre best equipped to show us that there are other ways to belong.
We just have to imagine them.
Will you be writing any of these? Also, I explored an alternate political system/inheritance in my current serial “Obsidian and Flame”. The position is “elected” but is often from one family, and this time three half-siblings are in the running to become “The Esteemed”. They are half-siblings because the current Esteemed (a woman) offered her Consort (a man) to father children for other politically powerful families. I haven’t written that story yet. It’s sitting in the background of this one.
This is a fantastic read. Thank you for not only reinforcing some of my own thoughts, but giving me more.