(no subject)

[toujours_nigel]

 avani008 asked for Kunti and Yuyutsu, and while I was meant to do that yesterday, yesterday was Very Bad Indeed. Today is still Not Good but it's a bit better, so.

I think Yuyutsu is fascinating as the third generation of the Excluded-from-Succession of the Hastinapur princes, and also as the opposite of the more famous of them in his generation: Vasusena.
Of course, unlike in the previous generations and due to their laborious planning, Yuyutsu's generation has any number of acknowledged princes (well, 105 to be precise) and he doesn't get as much centrality as either his uncle or great-uncle. But he also therefore gets to do his own thing and run away to his cousins when his conscience demands it. Privately I also think he might have been informing on his half-brothers for a while before then.

But in conjunction with Kunti he's important *because* he's such a nice foil to Vasusena. It's interesting that Kunti doesn't meet him till after Pandu's death... or, no she can't, can she, Yuyutsu's the same age as Yudhishtira, at most. So.
The thing is, there are any number of ways to have legitimate children in the Mahabharata, and very few to have illegitimate ones. Both parties in a marriage just need to acknowledge a child to make it a child *of* the marriage, whether or not born into it: either party has a child before marriage, either party has a child during it with another partner with spousal consent, either party has a child after the marriage with consent of either their spouse or the spouse's family, and of course both parties have a child together. Yuyutsu is the second, as are the Pandavas; Dhritarashtra and co are the third; the Kauravas are the fourth. Karna, acknowledged, would have been the first; interestingly, so would Vyasa.
I strongly believe that Kunti abandons Vasusena because she's traumatised by the rape and terrified of Kuntibhoja's reaction. We don't know, iirc, how pre- or non-marital kids are dealt with in Kuntipuri; nor can I remember instances among the Yadavas at large. But they abound in Hastinapur, and while Vidura's example she must have known of, I gotta wonder whether seeing Yuyutsu living his life would have made Pritha relent and tell Pandu about her eldest son, or whether--when she saw him as an adolescent after her return to Hastinapur--she was glad nobody had another way to taunt or undermine the Pandavas.