#vaugarde

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.!

The saviors of vaugarde featuring the only picture of siffrin not crying I’ve drawn so far (all other non crying siffrin pictures started with happy tears or freaked out tears, I swear)

odile and Bonnie are way harder for me to draw so I fear I must be team beauty

(oh. &. Do Not come at me If You Dont Agree With My worldbuilding! I'm a Very anxious Person i Couldn't Handle criticism <3)

(yes I Know the Irl countries they're Based on. Vaugarde Is Fantasy France, Ka bue Is Japan, Poteria Is Fantasy Italy...The Forgotten Country Is Guadalope, so i Tried Getting the cultures Right While still Making My Own spin on It!)

WARNING. THIS POST IS LIKE...VERY FUCKING LONG. SERIOUSLY ITS L O N G. READ ONLY IF YOU'VE GOT THE TIME!!! (Yes It Has Isat Spoilers Too Btw)

specifically in vaugarde.

firstly with dormont housing multiple shops and mirabelle mentioning dating *companies* and expensive earrings. market economy, possible capitalism. SAD!

then "defenders" existing as either a profession or volunteer position (i assume profession due to it being referred to as a "job" and the fact that you have to take "defender exams". speaking of which vaugarde seems to place a lot of emphasis on education which checks out culturally but it's probably politically important too so jot that down) and 'protecting [their] neighborhood, [their] city" from robberies at worst, with them usually helping with civil issues like rescuing cats from trees or helping old men with bags. is isabeau an ex cop or an ex social worker? is it both? perhaps defenders are citizens militias?

and the king targeting a house of change rather than any other particular form of government. is mirabelle a simultaneous college student and bureaucrat? or are Houses of change simply instances of government that provide education/food/body craft/healthcare to all, with "housemaiden" being a catch-all term for those who reside in them? furthermore, under the assumption that Houses DO constitute Vaugarde's government (again assuming that there is a government and they're not... like... ancaps with defenders existing as privatized policing institutions), are head housemaidens something like representatives or legislative bodies in a confederation? do you vote for head housemaidens, or are they simply chosen? promoted? in which case, by whom?

and then there's the way the king talks about monarchist ideals in the context of vaugardian society, which is of course NOT a monarchy.

*in vaugarde*? was vaugarde at one point a monarchy before possibly undergoing a revolution? "against the will of the people" -- perhaps this is a hint at a general *distaste* for monarchism among vaugardians... is that part of its cultural reverence towards Change?

WHAT IS THE HIERARCHY UNDER WHICH VAUGARDE EXISTS IN ORDER FOR THERE TO BE STORIES ABOUT "LORDS" GUARDING "CASTLES"?! since vaugarde is not a monarchy, is the status of a lord residing in a castle purely economic? is lord josephandre a lackey of capital?! is the cursing of chateau castle Defender propaganda?!!?! or-- or-- maybe the cursing of chateau castle is some kind of historical piece! it's long running, so maybe it contains cultural relics of a bygone era (possibly monarchist in nature)??!!?

also, notice how during his friendquest, isabeau points out that jouvente has "more than one house" as a way of emphasizing how big it is:

sure, it could just be that bigger cities need more resources and public service, but still.... it tells you something about House jurisdictions. maybe about representatives.

and the way mirabelle describes euphrasie:

the head housemaiden of *dormont*. the town, not the house. this all but confirms that towns/cities are ruled individually by their own House(s, in the case of larger cities)!

while not *all* vaugardians follow the Change belief, it seems pretty likely that the country itself is ruled by it.... boy, they sure are lucky that the House of Change is so welcome and opening to everyone regardless of belief! (though it's implied proselytizing might be encouraged for its members when siffrin tells mirabelle he might want to go on a pilgrimage.)

so TL;DR, in MY AMATEUR OPINION,

vaugarde is a confederation of theocratic city-states with a social-market economy and no central governing body.

I've also made a flag of Sahaet, as I don't think the borders allow me to fully show it off.

i recently wrote a fic (i will link it at the end if anyone wants to read it) in which Isa told Sif a fairytale at some point. it's like 1000 words of this 4000 word fic and it's actually a work of art and i'm so proud of it. in this fable section, i only named one character (the Siffrin-stand-in who i named Banquo) and everyone else renamed nameless (so the Mirabelle-stand-in was just "the Housemaiden", the Odile-stand-in was "the scientist" because i didn't feel like researcher, etc)

and i've decided i headcanon this as just. a Vaugardian thing. except for the main character of a fable, all characters have vague titles. because Vaugarde values change, right. it's their whole religion and stuff. so my thought process is not naming characters allows them to change more between each rendition of the story. if a character has a name, people are more likely to have them act consistently, and there'll be more pressure to have the character say the same thing all the time. so the characters don't have consistent names. just roles.

Back to talk about siffrin. Blame that one person who tagged their reblog with 'Please talk more', and 'I am obsessed with this take' this is entirely your fault and there WILL be catastrophic outcomes of your tags.

Same disclaimer as last time I'm not a psychiatrist any terms i use are my own take yadayada that stuff but also a lot of the stuff i explain is probably very obvious- i say it to get towards a point not because i think people don't know how trauma works on a person.

As i said i believe post canon sif would suffer from PTSD in the years to come, viewing events as Before or After the loops. you can read that moderate sized rant. I want to talk about ANOTHER thing that lives in my brain. The forgotten island. Specifically, how it relates to the King's fear of forgetting and Siffrin's fear of being forgotten. (though I'll probably talk mostly on siffrin.) This isn't a new concept I'm sure like 20 other tmblr users have made more indepth analysis I'm just ranting about this because blehhh :ppp

We have no real age range for the king. No idea how old he is now, how old he was when the island disappeared and exactly how large of a portion of his life he has missing. Theres also no timespan (i dont think) for when the island disappeared, but the fanon answer seems to be about 10-15ish years ago in fanon so lets go with that. I think its reasonable to expect he's at least around mid twenties at the absolute youngest, so he would be missing 15ish years at LEAST. He could be missing 20,30, we have no idea. Imagine living so blindingly long, having your education built up, maybe even a wife and children just for it to all vanish. Its not even like you lose everything. You lose even the memory of everything. Its like seeing an actor in a show and you can't quite work out where you remember them from. You know theres something there. But you'll never remember.

Vaugarde treats him with kindness and respect, opening their doors to anyone, and the king feels at home for the first time since he lost the island. The island was his entire life, his entire home, and he's not gonna let this country get forgotten too.

It might seem like an extreme measure to freeze an entire country in time, and it is, but put yourself in his shoes. All those people you loved and cared about, you can't remember even the shade of their hair let alone what the sound of their voice was or how they woke you in the morning. You feel traces of them in the flowers you saw on the side of the road, but you can't quite remember why they feel so familiar. They just remind you of something, someone. Your heart is met with constant remainders of who you've lost, let alone tackling the fact he likely knew NOBODY in vaugarde, and was completely isolated. No matter how loving a place is, you can still feel so alone. So he doesn't wanna go through it all again. He does the only thing he knows how. He wishes, and the universe gives him the means to grant his wish. Its extreme. But his trauma ridden brain is so warped by the fear of forgetting that it feels like its better than doing nothing. So the king freezes it all in time.