SF/Fantasy Movie/Show ID

October 13, 2019 12:48 AM

Posted for a family member: I'm going crazy trying to remember what show or movie I saw a certain plot thread in. Probably fantasy or SF or pseudo-historical, involving an exotic, backward culture with a superstition that twin births were a form of defect in which a single person was born with two bodies, so that a pair of identical twins was raised as a single individual, and natives had a taboo against acknowledging that there was more than one person present, got confused when outsiders asked for the second twin's name, etc.

I think a male lead somehow got stuck in an arranged betrothal with a pair of twins from this culture and was very uncomfortable with the second twin always hovering passively, and he or others encouraged the twins to assert separate identities and hijinks ensued. I think it was a fairly wholesome production, or at least the male lead was a wholesome sort, so the hanky-panky potential of the situation was not exploited.

posted by anonymous to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

I'm pretty sure a pair of twins like that appears in one of Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" books.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 5:50 AM on October 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

China Mieville's Embassytown is set in an exotic culture where the Ambassadors are pairs of clones each raised as a single person. It's a faux pas for an outsider to treat an Ambassador as separate people. If I remember right, the female lead has an affair with an Ambassador, and gets fed up as one half of the Ambassador starts to lose interest in the affair (which is itself a faux pas, since the two parts aren't supposed to diverge like that).
posted by moonmilk at 6:49 AM on October 13, 2019

Is it this?
posted by windykites at 7:17 AM on October 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

I think the OP is looking for a movie or TV show, not a book or story.
posted by gideonfrog at 7:33 AM on October 13, 2019 [2 favorites]