#s.vaugarde

[beneathsilverstars]

vaugardian backhanded nicety of "I hope you change a lot before we meet again :)"

[beneathsilverstars]

We have got to get weirder about bonding... "Seems contradictory that a religion centered around change would still have marriage" — the Doylist explanation is that id5 didn't worry that much about it, but Watsonianly it's NOT marriage.

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.!

You're allowed to write bonding like it's marriage but with earrings, but you don't have to. And I think it would be really fun and interesting and true to the anti-colonialist pro-queer themes of the game if people mixed it up a little or a lot more. <3

[beneathsilverstars]

Y'know, it would make sense for Vaugarde to be weird about amnesia. What bigger Change is there??

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.

No wonder Siffrin traveled instead of just staying in hospitable Vaugarde... No wonder the King, despite his love of Vaugarde, could never get on board with the idolization of Change.

[beneathsilverstars]

imo defenders are the people who are on call and go out and about to help. they put out fires, do first aid, deescalate conflicts, fix fences, deliver food, clean public places, defend against outside threats (which is mostly sadnesses), search and rescue, do wellness checks and point people towards resources, etc.

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.

ofc in a city, jobs are a lot more specialized. you’ve got specific paramedics and groundskeepers and doctor’s offices and schools and such. so the defenders focus more on misc emergencies and fights, and while you can still tell them about other problems and they’ll keep an eye out for other problems, they mostly just know who to call to actually fix it. and then housemaidens focus more on counseling and body craft and social/hobby classes and community events, and otherwise are more likely to refer you out / coordinate other resources. or since a city would have several houses, each may have a speciality like a food pantry or a low-income clinic or somesuch.

[beneathsilverstars]

vaugardian rpf with the serial numbers filed off like “When the wizard Madeleine was chosen to save her world from The Tyrant, she didn’t expect to fall in love… But there may be more to this tragic ruler than meets the eye……. #romantasy #icanchangethem #dldr”

[beneathsilverstars]

vaugarde’s “i can fix him” trope must go wild. “jerk with a heart of gold” alongside. the change of it all. the lower they start the farther they get to climb 💗

[beneathsilverstars]

Vaugardian aunt/uncle who thinks you should Change in a more family honoring/monetarily productive way at the monthly gathering voice: I’m very happy for you, but I'm sure it’s time to make a change outside of the first circle, right?

Annoyed teenager mumbling under their breath: You change as much as a swing set

Asshole voice: that’s the issue with the newer generations, they all decided the moon was stagnant, and go around screaming their crab-driven Changes that are the same as putting thorns in a croissant!

ohhh "change outside the first circle" that's SO good

[beneathsilverstars]

Was explaining my thoughts about Vaugardian attitudes towards mental health and therapy as part of a different topic, but it got really long so dfjkghdf here it is as a whole post! Starting with some more general worldbuilding but hold on, we’ll get there.

Since Houses canonically contain libraries and infirmaries and provide things like education and transition care, I see them as a center of not just community but specifically community resources. If you have a problem or a question, you go to the local House, and if they can't solve it themself they'll point you in the direction of whoever can! Thus Housemaidens generally fill a role similar to social workers, and specific Housemaidens will have specialties like being a doctor, cook, teacher of a particular subject, etc. In larger cities, a lot of the more specific or labor-intensive resources would probably be outsourced to other charities/companies/organizations, or perhaps split into specialties by House, to better serve a dense population instead of trying to cram every resource into every neighborhood's House. But you would still go to any House first to find these other resources, so every House would maintain a focus on educating and advising. Combine this with the fact that religious leaders are often one of the first people that followers go to for personal guidance, and it makes sense that Housemaidens would provide all sorts of counseling, filling the role of everything from job coach to therapist.

If Housemaidens are the people providing all or at least most of the therapy in the country, then even if they're not trying to push religious doctrine, the Change belief is still going to be the source of the values and philosophies that their therapeutic models are based in. They can try to be nonpartisan and avoid mentioning Change in so many words, but it'll still be baked into the default assumptions of the local modalities in a self-perpetuating manner. If you want an entirely different approach, you're probably going to have find someone who specifically studied alternate modalities from other countries, any of which would have a much smaller market share than Change-based therapies.

So! Vaugardian therapy will focus on questions like "What Changes have been happening in your life lately, and how do you feel about them?" "What would you like to Change in your life?" "What can you Change about your thought processes and habits to address the things that trouble you?" and "Who do you want to be?" Which sound like just a particular way to word fairly common topics, but! These questions would be asked in pursuit of Change-y goals, as well.

The goal of irl mental healthcare as an industry is to make sure people can be productive. A common diagnostic question is "does this symptom interfere with your ability to work and otherwise get things done?" But Vaugardians are friendly and helpful to the point of approaching utopia, so I could see them being less concerned with this, because they're more willing to accept that some people can't work and some people need more support. In fact, in keeping with their distaste for carcinization, they might actively oppose the idea that there is any particular goal that people should be working towards. If there's one type of existence that is best for all people at all times, reaching it would mean there's no reason to ever Change again! So instead of any particular milestones, the goal is simply to set and strive towards goals that feel right to you.

I also think they'd be less likely to work off of a diagnostic model at all; you can't just say that someone inherently has depression. They may be depressed right now, but that can Change! The Change might require constant upkeep, but some Changes are like that, and it doesn't mean the Change is any less real. Instead, they'd probably be more focused on individual symptoms (and traits!), which might tend to come in certain clusters, but those clusters would be seen as trends rather than criteria. The Change modality would be less concerned with whether a state of being is disordered vs normal/healthy (and they'd be less likely to conflate "normal" and "healthy"), focusing instead on whether you're happy with where you're at, but also willing and able to Change as suits you.

So, "I feel apathetic all the time, I don't want to put effort into anything and I don't care about anything, I don't know who I am or who I want to be" would be an experience of depression symptoms that a Vaugardian therapist would prioritize helping you Change. But "I don't care about any of the things I used to care about, I think I want to quit my job and cut off all my friends so I can spend more time sleeping" would be... an idea a good therapist may recommend you spend some time exploring, to make sure that's what you really want and you're ready for the ramifications... but they wouldn't say, "No, that's a bad thing to want, we need to treat your depression so that you no longer want to do that." If you really do hate your job and your friends right now, stagnating in that because you feel like you ought to would be the worst case scenario! If pursuing this Change ends up making you feel unfulfilled and lonely and sick of sleeping all day, then, well, you can just Change again at that point, once you've decided that's what you want to do.

In an opposite example, a common criticism of irl therapy is that it provides bandaid solutions for structural issues. "I'm anxious about losing my job" might be addressed by mindfulness methods to lessen anxiety, which is better than nothing, but if you're genuinely in danger of losing your job and thus access to shelter and food, that's not something you can mindfulness away. Versus, in Change-based therapies, they would focus on discussing what you get out of that job and what about it makes you anxious. You might decide that you want to change careers to something that fits you better right now — which would be a lot easier to accomplish in Vaugarde than it would be irl, because of the resources provided by the Houses and general community. Or, you might decide that there's something about yourself that you want to change in order to better fit the job. So instead of working on the feeling of anxiety, you might work on building new skills, or building better relationships with your coworkers.

... I wrote this post thinking that Vaugardian therapy might use similar techniques to CBT (therapy), since CBT focuses on understanding the patterns of thought, behavior, and belief that lead to psychological issues, so that you can replace negative patterns with habits that serve you better. Sounds like making mental changes in order to change your feelings and actions! It would just be in favor of different goals than irl CBT under capitalism.

However. I did some more research, and it looks like Humanistic therapy is very similar to what I made up just now? According to this text, humanistic therapy "emphasizes growth and self-actualization rather than curing diseases or alleviating disorders." Psychological issues are "viewed as the result of inhibited ability to make authentic, meaningful, and self-directed choices about how to live," so it focuses on "helping people free themselves from disabling assumptions and attitudes so they can live fuller lives."

It's less of a set of techniques and more of a philosophy. According to this website, the key is empathy and "unconditional positive regard," which means the therapist "shows warmth, is receptive, and is nonjudgmental." They cultivate a casual, friendly atmosphere, instead of positioning themself as an authority figure. Client-centered therapy is a subtype that sounds like the most cliché sort of talk therapy; the therapist "listens, acknowledges, and paraphrases your concerns," giving you a space where you can be honest and accepted as yourself. Another subtype is gestalt therapy, which "focuses on the skills and techniques that allow you to be aware of your feelings and emotions," and encourages a focus on the present and self-responsibility.

So! That sounds about right! Vaugardian therapists aim to help you recognize your emotions and figure out who you are and who you want to be, through casual conversation and empathetic active listening, without judgement. They help you look at your skills, emotions, desires, and struggles, and guide you to consider the full breadth of options available to you, so you can decide what Changes will lead you to happiness and fulfillment. They especially try to avoid diagnosing, prescribing, or otherwise telling you who you must be or what you must need. They may provide suggestions — help you put something into words, or bring up options that professionals are more familiar with such as medication, or challenge you to re-examine your assumptions — but it's a collaborative brainstorming, and they want you to freely choose the option you think is best for you.