Every time I have to return to the Leveilleur estate to do custom deliveries for Ameliance I leave gnashing my teeth over the subject of wealth and class politics in Sharlayan. The game is pretty uninterested in exploring it but it's so in your face with the centrality of the Leveilleur family. Like this is a culture where taking the time and effort to make food taste good is considered extravagant and inefficient, meanwhile the Leveilleurs live in a mansion with a massive entrance hall almost entirely devoid of furniture, surrounded by miles of empty brick patio.
Compare this to like, the Fortemps Manor entrance hall, which is colorful and richly furnished. It's a display of wealth and status for sure! It's also a space where you can not only welcome guests but sit down with them by the fire. It's full of warmth and color. It has windows! In a city of cold gray stone, Fortemps Manor displays luxury through comfort.
The Leveilleur estate is nothing like that, yet it's also a display of wealth and status in its own way. Rather a display of wealth through comfort, it is a display of wealth through space that is kept to be used for absolutely nothing. There's barely a stick of furniture in that massive hall with its vaulted gold-adorned ceilings and sterile flower vases taller than you are. It's a place that's meant to be seen but not enjoyed in comfort. You are not meant to be comfortable here. The stone patio that encircles the estate is almost worse. There's a row of perfectly manicured trees out front and one tiny, lonely flower box on one side, and other than that it's just bare expanses of paving-stones.
Perhaps the deeper interior of the Leveilleur estate is more comfortably furnished... but we never see that. In Fortemps Manor I feel like I can easily extrapolate what the Warrior of Light's guest room might look like from the decor of the front hall. In the Leveilleur estate I'm left guessing. Our guest room in the Baldesion Annex is more interestingly furnished than anything we see in the Leveilleur estate.
The luxury of Ishgard's high houses is grotesque in contrast with the Brume and the desperate poverty of the lower classes. The luxury of House Leveilleur I find grotesque in a different way, because they are clearly sitting on a massive amount of wealth and yet nothing about their home even looks comfortable to live in, so what is it even for? We know that Sharlayan is a society that purports to value the pursuit and safeguarding of knowledge above all else. Fourchenault is supposedly a diehard believer in the principles of his country. Yet nothing we see in his home reflects those values. Where are the bookshelves? The glass cases showing off rare and valuable tomes and artifacts? The botanical gardens and greenhouses? If Sharlayan culture does not discourage generational wealth hoarding (which it clearly doesn't, even if it doesn't have a formal aristocracy), then shouldn't that wealth at least be displayed in a manner befitting the culture's values? But it isn't. It's just... empty, unused space.
We could certainly point to this as a failure of environmental design, or corners cut to avoid having to instance the entrance hall. I don't dismiss that as a possibility. But it's also grimly compelling to me to analyze it as a deliberate choice (whether or not it was). It might be said that Sharlayan values the appearance of austerity and efficiency, more than the actual thing. One of the richest and most powerful families in Old Sharlayan can sit on a massive amount of generational wealth and live in a mansion with more rooms than they could possibly use... so long as they do so sitting in uncomfortable chairs in underfurnished rooms, and don't season their food.
Some nice angst in these trying times? Anyway, Bee and G'raha are not married - that's the fiction. But you are all invited for when they do ;) #wolgrahaweek2026
