#s.worldbuilding

So… they must be a form of wish craft, right? Perhaps a "believing in something makes it a little more true" style of magic, accomplished via the same sorts of time-space-and-thought nudges the Universe uses to realign other contradictions. When Siffrin's expecting the Opaque Glasses to be on Odile's face, they can't be in the candle-making room; and when Siffrin is actively thinking of Odile as someone who is aggressively perceptive, her attacks turn out stronger.

Some other things to keep in mind include the trope of the mysterious lost island with ancient Indigenous magics. While on one hand it's not great to say the islanders think their magic is better off gone, on the other hand it's not great to exotify them as a strange ancient people with mystical wisdom and innate closeness to nature. They're just people, with their own unique strengths and flaws and specialties.

And in that vein, you should look at the balance of the strengths and flaws with which you characterize each country. If you lean into Vaugarde as an egalitarian trans-friendly utopia, but focus on more flaws for the island or Ka Bue, you're positioning fantasy Guadeloupe and Japan as socially regressive compared to the perfect civilization of fantasy France. Not good! If this whole world is a progressive fantasy, let the whole world be that fantasy. If you want to explore the tension created by oppressive social norms, short-sighted leaders, or just the way that no one philosophy can work for every single person, let Vaugarde hold just as much of that tension.

And wrapping back around to the topic of characterizing Indigenous people as uniquely, mystically close to nature in contrast to civilized white people, we also need to consider the way that white people often compare people of color to animals to justify their treatment of them, especially Black people to justify slavery. Fandom loves its poor little meowmeows and feral stray faves and giving characters cat ears and bird wings and the ability to purr for no reason, and there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that in a general sense. But when it's always the white love interest "domesticating" the Black character, that's not a good trend! When it's always the Indigenous-coded people from the ancient lost island who have animal traits, compared to the fully human characters from fantasy France, that's not good either! So you need to be mindful of the balance of which characters you do this with, and the exact language and scenarios you use when doing it.

This list is far from complete; it's just a quick overview of a few things that I've tried to keep in mind or seen other people bring up. It's up to you to continue taking steps to educate yourself and think through the ramifications of what you make! Active anti-racism is a never-ending journey, and every step of it is important.

So what do we know it is?

Isabeau says people who bond "spend a very long time together." So it's a long-term commitment. But "very long" is relative — in a change-focused culture, I could see 10 or 5 or even 3 years being considered a very long time to stick to one choice. And "spend time together" doesn't necesarily mean living together. It implies a consistency, not a constantcy. "Whatever you do together now, you're gonna keep doing it for a while" could mean cohabiting, but it could also mean weekly coffee dates or running a small business together.

Mirabelle says about her dating profiles that she's "choosing someone [she] could spend the rest of [her] life with." So bonds have the potential to be a life-long thing. But we can read that "could" to mean not just "I may or may not bond with this someone" but also "the bond may or may not be life long." Life-long bonds could be a somewhat common possibility without being the default ideal goal. Sort of like buying a house — it might work out great to stay there for the rest of your life, but you also might evolve in a direction where it no longer suits your needs, or you might have always meant it to be temporary. So just because bonding can be til-death-do-us-part doesn't mean that an earlier end would be culturally considered a failure, a tragedy, or a weakening of the relationship.

In act 6, someone says about the earrings couple that they "obviously immediately booked it to their bedroom." This implies to us that sex is expected — but when you take away our cultural lens of marriage, all it actually means is that it's expected for newly-bonded partners to spend some private time together. It could be a time that's used for any special bonding activity they choose. Or there might be a specific thing that partners do after exchanging the earrings as part of the bonding process, making this quote the equivalent of marriage's "they obviously booked it to the courthouse."

When Bonnie asks what people do when they love each other very much, it makes the bonding convo awkward for a moment, which Isabeau quickly moves the conversation past by saying "... Many things happen." Again, this implies to us that the answer was "sex," but we can choose to interpret it other ways. Maybe sex is one of the options, so oops can't list all the most popular options in front of Bonnie. Or maybe some other aspect of dating/bonding is considered inappropriate for children, which is a list that can vary a ton by culture. Or maybe an aspect is inappropriate to talk about in general, perhaps because there's a specific time/place where you're supposed to learn about / discuss it, or because it's considered personal to each set of partners.

Mirabelle says, "I have to date, I have to love someone in a romantic way, I have to... Do things with them... I have to bond with them I have to sleep with them I have to have children with them I have to love them in this very specific way." This implies that romance, sex, bonding, and having kids are all lumped together. However, this is a topic that Mirabelle obviously has very strong anxieties about, and anxiety is great at exaggerating and assuming worst case scenarios. She might be doing the equivalent of saying "I have to get a job and put up with a shitty boss and customers will yell at me and I'll barely make a living wage," — which yes, are all things that can happen, and can happen together, and do happen fairly often, but that doesn't mean it's culturally expected for them to be inextricable and inevitable.

Romance, sex, and having kids might simply be some of the more commonly chosen options, in which case it still makes sense for Mirabelle to feel pressure as a Housemaiden to try allllllll the options. Or it could be expected that everyone does all of those things at some point, but maybe not within the same bond. Or it could be expected for these things to happen with other people in addition to your bonded partner(s), perhaps just more casually or less consistently.

And there could very well be other equally common options — or universal expectations — that Mirabelle left out because they don't feel like a big deal to her. Like, she didn't list "exchange earrings with them" in her venting even though that's the bit that we know is universal, because she finds that personally unobjectionable. (While she does end up expressing discomfort with her earrings when she realizes they're associated with bonding expectations, that means she's only realizing it just then, and her issue with them is their association with the real issues.) What else might she have not listed?

[edit: Also, just to be extra clear, I don’t mean that Mirabelle is like making up the pressure. I mean that the stuff she focused on isn’t necessarily all that there is to know, and particularly that just because the stuff she told us sounds similar to irl marriage doesn’t mean the rest of bonding is similar to irl marriage too.]

Coming back to my original point, Mirabelle says that "romantic love is one of the biggest ways to Change! It's supposed to change you, to bring you new experiences". This isn't just possible to read as different from marriage, it's directly contradictory. Yes, in real life people say that relationships change you, but marriage is often considered the end of those changes, to the point that ball-and-chain jokes are a cliché. Whatever we say our values are, in practice, modern western culture loves stabilizing people into units that produce children and effective workers. But in a culture that has "YEARLY FESTIVALS around showing yourself as a new person" — if our headcanons assume that Vaugarde's love of change is more than lip service, it's something that truly drives the culture — then why would they expect "one of the biggest ways to Change" to only happen once (or with multiple people at around the same time), then stabilize and stay that way forever and never happen again?

I'm not going to go into my headcanons because this post is long enough and I don't care as much what people think about them. I just really want to encourage people to put some more thought into their own! Maybe all bonds are hoped to be for life, and you can't get bonded again unless the first bond breaks up, and all bonded partners are expected to have romance and sex and babies. But maybe not! And there are so many other topics of cultural expectation around relationships that this post brushed past or didn't even touch on because the game didn't either: cohabitation, open vs closed relationships, shared finances, changing last names, who raises the children, ceremonies/rituals around the earring exchange, whether the government is involved, what level of priority a bonded partner should take compared to careers and hobbies and friendships, etc.!

And I realized that actually... I do headcanon that star-headed figures are part of the island's mythology, along the lines of angels. So. There would be artwork of them out there. Quite a bit of it on the island, but surely some could be found in other countries as well, suddenly lacking context. Perhaps anyone who had learned about the Universe and its star children would get a bit of a headache looking at them, and/or a rewind-forget, but anyone who didn't know enough to even make that connection would be fine and could enjoy them as a pretty, almost-abstract oddity.

Siffrin, trying to find some normalcy post-canon. Going to antique stores with Odile. Finding a worn child's toy tucked away in a back corner, and its lightless body is embroidered with careful patterns of dots, and its head is darkless and pointed with beads for wide eyes.

In a country with a lazy god who usually requires their followers to do all the work themselves, a mysterious case of amnesia could be taken as a rare act of divine intervention.

People might sometimes try to use craft to induce amnesia, among other mental Changes. Whether or not it's common to succeed, someone might not get a lot of sympathy when struggling with the consequences of a condition that people commonly wish to inflict on themselves. Silly to regret something you probably chose to do, or even just to resent something so many people would be jealous of.

Or maybe amnesia is the opposite of Change — erasing all the ways you've Changed so far, restarting from a blank slate instead of growing and learning from your experiences. Maybe its role in stories is the last resort redemption for a villain whose stagnation is so severe that the only way to Change them is by wiping all that away.

and then housemaidens are the people that you go to for help, generally by schedule or appointment. they counsel and do therapy, perform general checkups and specialized surgery, teach, run lending libraries (some books but also tools and clothes and such), prepare community meals, organize community events, etc.