#if you would like a Terrible Bulletpoint Essag of your very own hit me up

[stylishanachronism]

Classic Aedyran and/or Dyrwoodan love story archetypes (and which gods they do and/or REALLY REALLY DO NOT invoke or involve)?

This went extremely sideways and also has no internally consistent organization, but that’s why it’s a series of bullet points and not an essay.

So Aedyrans are pretty obviously into three things: duty, tragedy, and Drama. Like on the surface it’s all austere dutiful piousness but go like, an inch below that and the dramatics just start pouring out.

-I’m not saying Aloth isn’t like, legit anxious about the very real trouble he’s about to be or currently in, I’m just saying a solid chunk of that is rooted in a culture that takes ancestor worship to really weird places, among other things, and literally none of it is as big a problem as literally anybody is making it out to be.

—the appearance of not even wrongdoing but just.... not enough virtue signaling is *just as bad* as actual wrongdoing. (They blackmail that one kid with his mom’s probably-fictional indiscretions? To the point where it kills him even.) Like ‘I saw Goody Proctor vent’ is actually the name of the game here.(1)

That being said, and given soap operas have not been invented, we’ve probably got three major schools of art:

-high brow morality plays in which either our poor ill fated couple, torn apart by (unscrupulous relatives? That hussy down the street? A wild misunderstanding involving a stolen baby who was swapped for another stolen baby? Somebody’s being tempted away from true love here, to whatever end) fate, dutifully come back to each other and are deliriously respectably happy together, or fall into despair and die over their bad choices. Think extra-overwrought Victorian ‘modernists’(which I heartily don’t recommend.), crossed with the soapiest tellanovellas you can imagine (which if you’re into that style of drama, I do)

-fantasy Shakespeare, where all the dick jokes are so old nobody recognizes them any more, possibly with a moral stapled to the end

-eyebrow raising, too much for today’s delicate stomachs, fucking wild shit presented as ‘educational’, with worse shit underground(2), because the veneer is more important than the reality of the thing.

But the major tropes you’re going to see like.... overall, not just in theater, are probably more community based? Like, you fall in love with your neighbor’s kid, she falls in love with you, so you both go to your mothers and they’ll determine whether it’s a good match or not, you technically don’t really get a say in the matter.(3) There’s also probably a lot of superstition involved? Like, if the omens are bad you’re not getting married, but if they’re just okay you may have to wait six months.

-also there’s a lot of hideously complex contract work over who’s marrying into what, among other things.

—divorce isn’t an option! Better hope your relatives pick wisely!

—- more accurately divorce is even more hideously complex and expensive, so unless your spouse is actively trying to kill you it’s probably not worth it, and even then you’d probably have serious second thoughts.

In terms of like, the Ideal Romantic Partner (not necessarily romantic partner, but given you’ve got to be married if you want to(socially acceptably) have sex or have kids, because Aedyrans are wild), you’re probably looking at someone dutiful, who will put their own comfort second to keeping their word, cultured but not smug about it, efficient but thorough, graceful and always perfectly composed no matter what happens, soft spoken without being servile, and the whole package should come across as effortless.

We’re attempting to ignore all the work I’ve done re: shitty Protestants, so we’ve canonically got nobody actually in charge of marriage anywhere, so probably you’re praying to Woedica (to keep your contract) and Hylea (if you need this marriage to be fruitful), and maybe even Ondra (to ensure everybody remains faithful, because Aedyrans are Dramatic, and the fucking moon bedroom is a thing)

As for the Dyrwodans:

Less repression + more inversion ceremonies mean they’re way less dramatic in general, but obviously that means they’re still Really Dramatic, given they’re into swearing eternal feuds over literally nothing every other day. They place a much stronger importance on soul lineages than blood lineages, but whether you take that into consideration re: romance probably depends on what current feuds your family and/or community is currently embroiled in, and how serious they are. And if you have the cash/local cipher to get said lineage traced.

-Theater tropes are going to tend towards the comedic (think 27 dresses, or some other friendshippy romcom) and bawdy, and also fantasy Shakespeare, now with added dick jokes, because the existing ones are still too old to be recognizable, and probably some of the less overwrought Aedyran and Vailian plays, maybe. Also the whole theater plot, because that is a thing, even if they’ve had to bury it both deeper and shallower than Aedyr.

As a general thing, marriage is still mostly a practical thing, and while your families are definitely involved, they’ve generally got much less of a say in it. Outside of high society weddings, which are obviously more alliances than anything else, there’s generally not a contract so to speak; because children belong to their mothers, and nobody much cares where she got them unless she’s already married, when and if she does get married, it’s socially expected that her new spouse will join her household, and splitting up a household is so socially unacceptable murder is a neater, less fraught solution than divorce(4).

Your Ideal Romantic Partner (who probably is romantic, unless you need an extra pair of hands all the time that badly) is clever without being supercilious, with an easy disposition and a good sense of humor, willing to take life as it comes, but also to defend what they’ve got to their last breath, generous and community minded, but still independent enough not to need looking after, forthright but not unkind, and you should be able to tell how hard they work for whatever it is they want.

As for gods: pre everything, you’re probably looking to Abydon, to build your disparate members into a household, and Eothas, to make that household into a home. Post everything, it’s just Abydon, maybe Magran to ask that whatever trials you face make you stronger together. I don’t know, there isn’t a really good option there re: canon.

1: the Readcerans somehow take this even further but in an even weirder direction, this shit is wild, babes, but we’re not talking about them today

2: I’ve got a specific horrible irl example in mind but we’ll go with the theater quest in PoE, turned up to 11, because that lot hasn’t had nearly as much time to get established as Aedyran equivalents have.

3: congrats this is why Aloth is so hard to romance I guess. Nobody has approached his mother about him/he hasn’t asked his mother to approach anyone. Also I have extensive thoughts on the vagaries of social class re: marriage, so like, who exactly does the approaching is probably equally complex!

4: look I didn’t put that quest in there, what the fuck else am I intended to think? ....I mean Obsidian definitely definitely didn’t expect me to come up with polyamory gone wrong but like I’m not reaching when I say that’s the conclusion I came to. Hooray for weddings?

#thank you for meming me!!! #it’s shitty three am nonsense essay time yay #pillars of eternity #some of this is like... inspired but most of it is drivel #and all of it is uncited and unreferenced #also like look there’s a bunch of stuff I didn’t put in canon but I really don’t know what obsidian expected me to get out of it #except Not That #like I didn’t have it be a whole thing Aloth is Extremely Popular and Everyone Wants to Marry Him #and I didn’t have at least three separate characters go on about how Edér is The Ideal Romantic Partner #nor did I make him the romantic lead of both games no matter who you actually romanced #idk???? idk #please insert a solid helping of gender =/= sex in here is is Late I am Tired #and I talked about social roles already #if you’ve read The Importance of Being Ernest (which I recommend it’s hysterical) #I need you to know Wilde was poking fun at an extremely specific trope with the lost baby backstory #it’s in so many plays from the period #So Many #if they could shoehorn it in they did #goodnight I love you thanks for playing #if you would like a Terrible Bulletpoint Essag of your very own hit me up

[stylishanachronism]

Okay, but when will we talk about the Readcerans? 👀 (and maybe a certain book....?👀👀)

It’s Late, I’m Exhausted, I’ve thought of nothing else for two days, let’s go.

So I already talked about Readceras and marriage, elsewhere, much more coherently, and it took me a hot minute to realize you were talking about the hysterical Eothas/Waidwen porn, so let’s talk about theater and the Ideal Romantic Partner. And hysterical porn.

So we’ve got an extant canonical morality play (which, like, somebody read extant irl morality plays because it’s really well done), which means I’m not just spitballing this. (I mean I am but) Readcerans are weird Calvinists, which means everything is Extremely Dour All The Time, but probably in practice if you’re not right in front of the Dawn Council you’re spicing it up. Virtue and Charity get into a fistfight. The Dawnstars get stuck on a roof and can’t come down to talk about the penitent, and instead yell rude things whenever he messes up a line. Somebody throws a brick. Y’know, normal stuff.

Probably not a lot of secular plays? Definitely nothing borrowed from Aedyr. Pre-everything, you’ve definitely got acting troupes crossing the border, so on a broader scale there’s still probably a lot of similarity between Readceras and the Dyrwood’s theater scene post-everything.

Your Ideal Romantic Partner (not necessarily romantic, Good Readcerans Get Married, whether they want to or not, and the social shunning for noncompliance is brutal enough you’d better have a damn good reason not to, and even then you might be better off booking it out of town) is pious, dutiful, and a little somber, but with a brightly optimistic attitude, serious about everything they do and thorough about whatever duty they’re given, a good listener, strongly community minded, did I mention the piety?, ambitious without being grasping or cruel, and vigilant both within their home, for things that could be improved, and outside it, for threats or weaknesses to be strengthened.

Divorce is even more of a Thing That Does Not Happen, more for social reasons than expense, it would be deeply ugly not only for the adults but also any children that might be about, but on the other hand everybody’s having a Really Bad Time, so an early death wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Certainly no need to go to the lengths our canonical spousal murders go to.

Eothas is obviously Best God for everything, including marriage, but tbh you’re also probably invoking Waidwen himself, which must get pretty weird for anyone who knew him!

Speaking of, let’s talk about the porn. (I mean, let’s actually talk about the implications of the porn. Y’all can go read the book if you need context. Also yes I know the excerpt is not actually porn but that is definitely where the text is headed.)

There’s two major directions your inferences can go(1), both about equally likely, and they both lead to the same next step so in this context it doesn’t even matter. Either:

-Somebody Expensive with too much time on their hands, who tbh probably knew the dude, or at least knew someone who knew the dude, those last few doomed months, wrote a highly deviant(2) work and were lucky if the Hand Occult got to it before the rest of the Council did

Or

-Paper is cheap enough and labor light enough that somebody who never even met someone who met someone who knew Waidwen had enough time on their hands to write a highly deviant work, and required less luck for the Hand to get there before their neighbors did.

Either way, we’ve got a strong cultural push for literacy and more importantly, public libraries, and also a, well, grand is the wrong word but, tradition of extremely Romantic (as in the literary movement) novels, probably roughly as smutty as modern romance novels but with even purpler prose. And like, morals.(3) Actually, thinking about it, it points to novels even being a thing in the first place, because accessible widespread printing presses do not a literary tradition make!

Anyway.

I do sort of wonder what freaked Hand out so badly about it, as BoW makes it pretty clear it wasn’t actually possible, much less on the table, and since this is the first we hear about it we can presume the author was not caught by their neighbors (this does not preclude their murder), because it’s the sort of piece that, being so incredibly awful and deviant and nobody should ever read ever, everybody has to read it immediately. Which obviously the Hand did not want. (I have so many questions??? Why did the Hand give a shit? I mean, why did the Hand give a shit about a lot of things, really, someday I should like.... chart out what we’re told/shown them to have messed with and see if anything interesting turns up, but why blasphemous porn in particular?)

Anyways I really wish you could get your companions opinions on things because I would actually die to know what Xoti and Edér think about it, among other people.

1: technically three but ‘actually it’s au fanfic and Not Relevant to Eora as is’ is much less fun to consider, so we aren’t.

2: the porn is not the deviance, that’s the blasphemy

3: morals as in ‘good Readcerans get married’ and ‘good Readcerans embody the virtues of grace and charity’, maybe even emphasized with a nonsensical rhyming couplet at the end. This is not a judgement call about irl romance novels!

#pillars of eternity #thanks for memeing me!! #look I’m not saying everybody who knew and loved Xoti breathed a huge sigh of relief #when she and her highly visible deeply ugly crush tore off after the Watcher and/or Edér #but that is exactly what I’m saying she wasn’t being shunned just for the lantern thing #I think Waenglith brings it up obliquely? but yeah it’s a thing #also I really wish I were joking about the rhyming couplets but I am not #tbh if it wasn’t canon I would not have guessed how badly divorce was taken on Eora #like it’s definitely Obsidian not thinking it through but it’s a weird trend #ALSO I FORGOT HOW FUCKING INTO WAEL THE READCERANS ARE???? #I did not cite this but I did attempt to confirm a detail #and got fucking blindsided with that fact #*bangs fists on table* obsidian what’s Readceran literary canon look like inquiring minds want to know #fuck I didn’t talk about Adaryc #is Adaryc almost word perfect the Ideal Romantic Partner? yes yes he is #but he’s not enough of an optimist and he feels things too strongly in a way the Dawn council doesn’t like but can’t argue with #which is why it’s a toss up if he himself is married #if you would like a terrible bulletpoint essag of your very own hit me up