Alternate Showers aren't hard
You might be thinking… how does my society deal with hygiene? Sometimes you’re just curious about the poop problem. Sometimes you are genuinely concerned of how they avoid spreading diseases. You of course didn’t make conventionally attractive characters for nothing, so you do want to see them butt naked.
Problem is, you are on a fantastical medieval society or older and showers haven’t been invented before the 1980s or something, so how the hell can you live with yourself knowing you just can’t have granulated water falling on Totally-Not-Chris-Evan’s hairless tits?
Well, chances are you are one of two kinds of people, the one that thought bathtubs the size of at least two sofas would be more realistic or you just went in a panic and just googled when showers were actually invented.
Let me tell you how water systems work where I live:
- Treated water is pumped to a tall tower and it stores there.
- Tall tower pushes piped water to all the lower houses.
- Lower houses break the pressure system by having their own somewhat towered water.
- Your towered water pushes piped water to everything in your house when you need it.
- You use 110 or 240 volts right above your head and directly connected to the water to warm it up and freak the shit out of some foreigners when they hear about it.
Now, obviously the society that can create 6 to 9 floors for buildings, cast fire with their hands and developed space Microsoft Teams with mirrors cannot imagine the technical complexity of pressured water, it is not like the Romans would have figured it out. But you can see how if you raise your suspension of disbelief a little bit more you have fairly independent systems to pump water two or three meters up even if it is manually.
Geographical problem
For my books, it is actually kind of fun to think how a trade-heavy but non-globalized world would deal with it when they have access to several types of magic as a trade.
The first time I thought about this kind of stuff I was around 14 and I wanted to think how the plumbing of a Venetian-like city would deal with piping fresh water and waste when they were on a salt water bay. The solution at the time was a bamboo that they would purposely put underwater and it would soak the salt until it eventually hardened.
It could last for years but it had to be replaced when it got too brittle. And by accident I had made a whole production pipeline of lumberjacks that only grew this bamboo, people specialized on installing and replacing, and my memory is a bit foggy but I’m pretty sure they used the bamboo pipe that soaked both poop and salt as a fertilizer/pesticide to plants adapted to handle that mixture of soil.
The Akaryuu living at that specific place had this culture, but the empire was huge, and while I never paid much attention to that region, I liked the idea of how they invented some kind of export for the big, land-based cities. Like purposely pre-soaking wood that wouldn’t get to that sweet spot naturally outside the bay.
Other countries? Not quite that sustainable because it would be expensive and they have to figure out on their own. Adália to me, for example, was a drainage problem due to the massive rains and floods, mostly; So for years on years was aqueducts go BRRRR whenever I pretended someone asked how it works.
Turns out I had more fun than I should when I actually thought about it.
Economical Problem
The logistics of having your favorite lady having her tits washed on a fantastical world is a thankless job. If you did your job well no one will notice it. Yet if you don’t want this effort to go to waste, you can always shower the reader with logistics relevant to a scene or a plot problem, or just economical status.
Like I said, Adália has a hard on for aqueducts. Their main purpose is farms, you make the river do the work of pumping itself with some gears, and the water goes further into the country for the farmers.
If a city is big enough, though, it will likely have its own pumping distribution system. Water can be treated, stored, and yes, a country that has a lot of rains in the summer and regular rain does store water, it is a whole “let’s not deal with siege again” trauma kind of thing.
Aqueducts themselves aren’t that expensive for them to make, they can control terrain and rocks after all, so the logistics is in how cheap a Lord wants to keep it running and charging for it.
Most nobles live in higher ground, so the goal of pumping the water is the main priority, the rest is a bonus. Adália actually deals with metals and is perfectly capable of hollowing logs, all that fancy stuff. So they do have internal plumbing similar to us, the only difference is the aqueduct is not pressured.
If you are rich enough you have your own mini aqueduct pathway above the street, and each house has the servant do a mini-canal miter lock; you know that V-shaped one Da Vinci invented? It is purely mechanical, only let water in when you need it.
If you are not rich, which I do relate so I tried to help them a bit, aqueducts have their own ponds every few blocks. You go grab water with a bucket and then you pump water yourself on the alley of your house’s water box. Having a metal pipe up there that you pull down with your own weight while you’re on the floor, is the usual solution, given to kids or servants (still high middle class here).
The metal plumbing should not be that expensive in this country, but expensive enough for thieves to try to steal it. Which is a whole other societal problem you can write about.
And for whoever is further on those cities, well, they pay for manual transport. You get a wagon with barrels of water, that does a daily walk and look for any flag on the pumps, and they either carry the water manually themselves, or they use their magic to “levitate water” to on the very least, the part where water should be pumped.
I like this part the most because not only it creates a social status for the city; of how many aqueducts and water carrying companies exist, how much people have a basic necessity for granted or how expensive it is, but also, it makes magic mundane.
In our plots of having heroes and villains casually use some magic that would put down a building, we draw a huge distinction of how this is rare and the best of the best, and we ignore that there should always be an in-between when magic should be rather common.
You don’t need to be a Formula 1 with a major in drifting to drive to work, you don’t need to be a hacker to open Excel, and you don’t need to be a full builder to know how an electrical screwdriver works. There is always a line where a problem is a mere necessity and that skill level is good enough. Magic is no exception.
You don’t even to need understand magic completely, you don’t when you flip a switch to light your house, even someone who knows what a transistor is won’t fully know how a processor works.
This is something I did appreciate in Frieren a lot, while we unfortunately don’t see any normal folk using folk magic, save for Fern as a child, it is very clearly there. It is also weird how Dragon Ball martial arts seems to have lost, ki manipulation in peace time, we still have people working for money and we still have very dangerous people with guns everywhere. You’d think it would be rare but not forgotten to the point some people think it is tricks.
But this is an article for another time. Anyway, this is how I make my hot characters wash their junk. I hope you enjoyed it.
PS: The Romans actually used a lot of lead plumbing, I didn’t know that until a few months ago. Apparently the reason why they didn’t get lead poisoning is because they lucked out their water was hard, and lead reacted with the calcium, making a layer of deposits that would prevent led and water entering in contact for too long.