#Maria || lo que viví lo estoy muriendo todavía

[historia-vitae-magistras]

What do you mean by fucked up relationship?

Mexame? I mean... I guess I mean how this:

When they were barely grown when Alfred was a child of the reformation and she was the golden colony who produced so much silver she destroyed half the world economy, they loved each other. The kind of love that comes as softly as the spring, that crept over them locked together between the sheets, if moonlight could be as warm as the hearth. The kind of love of true heart-holders and kiss-keepers. Two children of the enlightenment, young gods at the dawn of their world. The girl of the south, who sprang to life from the meat grinding meeting of worlds, who kissed a contradiction. The boy, bold until he's in love and feels like he might die because she looked at him but he might live because she loves him as much as he loves her. The girl with her heart and hands full of hope for the future formed from the possibilities she was born of. The boy who can only reconcile his love and his protestantism because that border, that demarcation must be marriage, because it is as close to what their kind can have as he can think of. The kind that survived in letters, endless letters. They created a republic of letters, the two of them, Alfred writing to her every step through his revolution and hers.

became this:

Love that died in expansion and intervention. The excising of her land for his gain. The sun rising on a new empire, manifesting its destiny across the world, at her expense. Denying he is his father, but walking in his father's footsteps. Her decades and decades of cycles of sorrow, half his doing. The violence, the oppression, the break-bones and heart-rendering of have and have not. The love of god that cannot love the saints. The sword and the sin, the blood and the betrayal. Violence he will not call wars, violence she can't call anything else. And yet, and yet. Exchange, her in him and he in her. Tex-mex and trade. People move and passion motivates. Loan words, love and laughter because on the beach, they aren't enough themselves but also are too much themselves when they laugh. Tequila, beer and birria tacos under a night sky under which, sometimes, they can be equal. He has power but oh, she has his heart. A girl in a red dress, a boy in the uniform of the new empire, swaying to music slowed as the rest of the dancefloor drains but they can't let go. Not just yet, because this time world war is the one he will never come back from, not when he'll hold the end of the world when its over. The rush of realizing it is her tongue, her accent, her world in his mouth when he speaks Spanish. The hand she sometimes lets dangle by her side, hoping he'll weave their fingers together the way he wants to weaves fates she forbids, this Icarus who ducked Huitzilopochtli. Marigolds by dawn on his side of the bed after the night when the boy she loved and the girl she was walked the earth with all the rest of the dead once a year.

That kind of fucked up.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

🎮 🎻 🚫 🍔 for my north american trio

🎮 VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER — what are three of your OC's favourite hobbies?

Mari - I've always had a very enlightenment-era baby intellectual bent to her. So, reading and participating in literary culture and criticism over time returned to Juana Inés de la Cruz. There's a mix of her old-school education and folk culture in her love and talent for art. She's got a real knack for beekeeping, too.

Alfred - Lives and dies by his love of math and engineering; he was getting twitchy with the lack of Calculus right before Isaac Newton got on that shit finally, so he became an eternal tinkerer. He loves a good drive and a sky-watching session.

Matt - Woodworking, gardening, hiking.

🎻 VIOLIN — does your oc play any instruments? What is their skill level (beginner/intermediate/advanced/virtuoso/etc)?

In childhood, Maria played the vihuela and baroque guitar and later picked up the bajo de uña and the resulting base guitar. I don't know why I associate her with a drumset, but I like that mental image for some reason, too. She's excellent on all of them.

Alfred is one of those types who skipped from hobby to hobby to hobby as a child and has picked up practically every instrument at some point or another. He played the fucking church organ sometimes, especially when he was feeling weird about religion.

Matt - He's pretty goddamn good on a fiddle, and he can hold a tune, but most of his music is meant for some type of work and the folk scenes are pretty disparate so it's kind of hard to nail down a specifically Canadian musical instrument that hasn't been by and large surpassed by the US.

🚫 PROHIBITED — does your oc drink/smoke? Do they do it regularly, or is it more on occasion or for special events?

Mari - She does mostly beer with some harder alcohol, I think. Not very high consumption; she strikes me as more of a social drinker on special occasions. She can party, but I think she has some pretty hard limits on anything more than the very mainstream.

Alfred - He flies between teetotaller and binge drinker, like that with most things. He can go years with just drinking, but my man likes his stimulants, alas. But the very functional kind. He can

Matt - He would rather not be sober in general.

🍔 HAMBURGER — is your oc good at cooking? are they good at baking? Which one do they prefer?

Mari is pretty good at both but doesn't do it as much as people might think. She's been a very urbanized society for a very long time and various kinds of communal cooking. She knows the best places for Pescado a la talla or who makes the best tlacoyos in the tianguis nearest her primary home but all over the place. I don't know if she'd prefer one or the other. A thought I had is that some of her best cooking exploits are for herself. She participates in a communal culture where cooking and baking are the realm of women in many ways, so being alone in the kitchen and experimenting with her own arroz con leche or barbacoa varieties is an almost self-care ritual she holds.

Alfred - Def more of a cook than a baker. He can bake when he wants to; it's just following the steps of a recipe, but he could be more motivated by domestic things for their own sake. He will cook and bake when people are over, and people are often surprised at the quality of what makes it onto the table. He can eat seven-layer salad and jello monstrosities at a Southern or Midwest table or pull out a Napa Valley salad and wine pairing much to the ire of the old world. Food is one of the few things his hyper-individualism has yet to completely destroy.

Matt - Surprisingly good baker and cook, but not really anything anyone would write home about. Except maybe bread, he bakes a lot of bread and has had a freakishly high consumption of it since the 18th century, so archeologists can tell the bones from the New Englanders who ate a lot more corn. Not exactly internationally renowned for anything except poutine and weed scones, though, rest in pieces. If you've ever eaten anything you thought was pretty good at the time but will never ever think about again, that's Matt in the kitchen, except when he busts out the rye bread but even then no one will really believe he made it.

Character Details Ask Game

[historia-vitae-magistras]

How much would you, based in your head canon, say is nurture as versus nature? I know you don't mean actual "blood relations" with family like Rat Dad and kids, but in general, how much of their relationships with each other is tied to the circumstances of how they were nurtured for as versus how they may be under other circumstances. That is, how much of their family is perception and choice?

Just for example, if Alfred had been raised by Antonio, would his relationship with Maria and Matthew be reversed? As in, would he be the younger sibling to Maria, while Matthew could be a friend but wasn't a sibling?

Oooh, good question. So in my mind, there are at least three major things for nations rather than two. Culture, geography, and privilege.

Privilege is the one that defines their relationship to a 'parent' most. Maria, for example, added so much to the Spanish economy that it collapsed the global economy. She's beautiful and intelligent, and Antonio, with his history as Hispania under Rome, used the word he knew from Lucius and set the precedent. That was a choice on the European part. And it was often a long period of that being unchallenged by those dubbed their offspring because of the respectability that could give.

But the second would be culture. The Anglosphere is a very weird concept. As adults, Zee and Jack have a strange time calling Matt or Alfred 'family,' but they and Matt usually don't outright deny it because they have yet to chuck the limey off the money and still look to Britain in some ways as the mother country. 100 year ago, Matt was extremely culturally British; calling him their elder brother was no problem. Alfred was never a part of their lives in childhood. But now Canada is largely French or Americanized and largely irrelevant in their affairs, and the word 'sibling' doesn't quite sit right, but they've perhaps yet to find a better word. Jack and Zee, however, would have a lot longer to go to break that definition between themselves, being both of British cultural background and geographically close. It's much the same in the Atlantic Archipelago. Rhys and Alasdair are both locked into Arthur with their borders in Britain. And they're locked into Brighid culturally due to their Celtic backgrounds.

So, geography often makes them close regardless of culture. Maria and Alfred will be in close proximity, regardless of their backgrounds. He and Maria shared much the same sense of closeness that he and Matt shared from the get-go, but they're translating nebulous dirt fuck feelings onto much more defined human concepts.

There are also the social mores of the time when these relationships were happening. In Matt's earliest days, there wasn't much English influence at all, and he's mostly a very mixed culture of French-Indigenous. So the cultural aspect of siblings isn't present yet. He's also male presenting. Alfred was trying to use human language to describe a relationship that is only partially human itself. When he was very little, the word others used was 'brother' and at that age it was the most appropriate. But when he was independent, he re-evaluated and wanted to find a word for his intense bond with his northern neighbor. But independent or not, he's taking into account what is acceptable, what is appropriate, and what feels right, and that hasn't changed much despite the revolution. The closest word he could find was the existing one. 'Brother.' Matt has always found it accurate enough to reciprocate, so their relationship remained familial, which was later reinforced by Canada's transformation into a largely Anglo culture and country.

Maria, presenting as female and coming to Alfred's point in life where he's a hormonal, self-righteous teenager, sent absolutely careening from any female attention, and Maria was no exception whatsoever. She was the best read and educated of any New World country then. She was in the throws of the enlightenment before Alfred was in many ways, and he was dumbstruck by her perspectives and knowledge at that age. There's this pull between them, the closeness of the future and their geography, and the best way in both their cultural contexts of the time to view and indulge that feeling was through a romantic and intellectual lens.

All that probably reads like a pretentious way of saying, 'Well, it depends,' but that's the thought process.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Hello! Do you have any Mexico headcanons to share. I know you have been asked about her relationships so I aim at things in general about her. You have made her kinda mysterious.

Disclaimer: I am a product of the top 2/3 of North America and I'm way less familiar with Mexico so I'm not going to hit quite so many history HCs but with how I have tried to flesh her out into a recognizable person. Sorry for the mystery, I'm just always nervous poking out of my wheelhouse.

-I see Mari or Maria as extremely intelligent and passionate but in two very different ways. One externally and one more privately. There is a confident well spoken woman who has in many ways mastered the art of communicating in a way that demands respect. Straight back and standing tall, a woman who appeared in a pantsuit at the League of Nations about 30 seconds after joining and promptly called out every facist in the place. And then there is this soft lovely part where when s she wakes up too a beautiful day and sees the plants on her windowsill have already begun to soak up the day, she tears up even if she can't articulate why.

-She thinks scorpion is a perfectly acceptable flavour.

- She hasn't been to mass without a hangover in 200 years.

-She's gorgeous. A long curtain of curls she most often wears over one shoulder. She's not tall but she's this balance between strength and elegance. I always picture a round face.

-Her joy is defiant sometimes, something stubborn and fierce in the way she copes. Something nurtured and purposeful about how she hopes.

-She's never in her goddamn life picked a fight where the odds here in her favour.

-She loves flowers. Embroidered, painted, maybe tattooed. Absolutely loves them. Marigolds and plumerias especially.

-She has a bright turquoise blue adobe house. The inside has at least one mural she painted herself in bold geometric shapes and gorgeous colours.

-She spices her fruit.

-She's kind of lonely sometimes, being a place where it seems like families stick together. She has lots of friends and family and neighbours but sometime she sits when she's grabbing lunch and kind of watches. They're her's, she's their's and that's enough.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

by keeping Alfred at bay it was more like preventing him from doing stupid stuff like making his own cult in the 70s, kicking out the hippies who formed a commune on his living room, nullify his Vietnam reenlistment, and make sure he doesn't die again from drinking Kool aid in a jungle in Guyana

Oh! Mostly, that's Matt's job. Keeping Alfred's marbles in his adamantium skull. Holding Clara Barton and a surgeon at rifle point, dragging Alfred's ass out of corpse piles in pretty much every American war ever, listening to him, helping him... Emotional support Canadian. Arthur is, after WW1 but especially WW2, often playing the dragon, the elder statesmen but with a lot less in the way of morality or idealism than his 'son' and 'heir' sometimes even as a kindness. But there's a lot of weird co-support there. Maria is much rarer, she and Alfred have a very fucked up relationship but he probably will listen to her half out of novelty and half because he's been half out of his mind in love with her in a very fucked up sort of way since they were teenagers.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Aight so we’ve heard what paternal feelings Arthur and Francis have re: their people, but I’m curious to hear your impressions of nations who don’t actually have kids of their own. Gilbert has Ludwig but they’re still very much brothers, not parent/child. Does that change the dynamic? What about, say, Mexico? She doesn’t have kids but family is massively important to her culture. Then you got ones who act like actual children more often than not—USA or Australia would be my first thought.

Idk this is a fascinating thought experiment I’m curious to hear more

!!! Hello you, I haven't seen you in an inbox in a while <3. So I've got a question in the box about this for the young Anglos going to focus on Gilbert, Ludwig and Maria.

Gilbert, before 1918 takes a rather heavy-handed approach to his citizens in many contexts. I have varied wildly with whether Ludwig calls him his brother or Papa throughout my time in this pit. But is it a very paternal relationship in general? Being raised in a militaristic order with the hierarchy of the church and then later becoming what's essentially an army that just happens to be attached to a state made him a man who tries very hard to be both strict and fair. The Prussian education system was the finest in the world for much of the 19th century, with the larger German-speaking world leading the way in medicine, education, chemistry and several other fields. He wants to see his people thrive. He has a certain callousness regarding the lives of men; war is, after all, the endless meatgrinder, and it is what he's best at. But with his women and children, that relationship also exists. Obedience, discipline and loyalty from them correspond to Gilbert's devotion, even-handedness and sense of duty in return.

Ludwig for much of his history in the structure of the Prussian-dominated German Empire, where Gilbert filled the role of pater familas, soldier and usually had the final say; Ludwig filled that more domestic, civilian counterpart. He was and still is very young. He loves trains, he loves cars, he wants all the engineering advancements and is keenly interested in them and their practical applications of improving the quality of life for his people. In addition, he has always been very awkward in artistic spaces (baby gay didn't know why the fuck he liked men's butts so much yet) but is still very interested in the artistic developments of his people. Especially musically. I've always thought of adult Ludwig as having a very pleasant baritone singing voice and a very clear crystalline one as a child. He goes to the film premieres, he goes to the ballet, and he subtly pushes for artistic funding if he feels he can help there.

Maria, in my view, doesn't view herself as much of a maternal figure in the lives of her people. As semi-magical, semi-immortal creatures, they have that slightly uncanny effect. In some nations, people are just comfortable handing their children over to be held. She's one of those. She'll hold babies a bit awkwardly, but she loves them. And due to what she is, people don't comment on her singleness or her lack of an immediate family in Mexico itself. She feels most herself amongst them and usually passes among them without any problem. On the Day of the Dead, she's just another daughter putting flowers on her mother's grave. When the population takes to the streets, she's another protestor in the streets. She speaks Nahuatl She shops and eats in the markets. She has Valencia and Navelina orange trees in her yard. She doesn't mind the local children plucking their share from the branches. She lives and works and loves amongst her people.

[historia-vitae-magistras]

Tags

By Character

Aditya || brimful of the wine of truth

Alfred || o beautiful for spacious skies

Alasdair || my heart's in the highlands

Arthur || stone set in the silver sea

Brighid || An Bearna Bhaoil

Egill || Fár bregður hinu betra ef hann veit hið verra.

Eirian || into the nightlands

Erzse || In raptures I embrace

Francois || temperee par des chansons

Gilbert || from this baltic cannonball

Jack || a land of summer skies

Jan || God made Earth the Dutch made Holland

Katya || бо лишало на серці сліди

Kiku || these flowing islands

Leon || A wider view fills Heaven's glass

Ludwig || in deinem Herzchen klein

Magnus || climb the roots of Yggdrasil

Matthew || my country is winter

Maria || lo que viví lo estoy muriendo todavía

Rhys || my word for heaven was not yours

Sigurd || D'er klent Sted som stokk fyre Hamaren

Tolys ||

Yong Soo ||

Zee || ahakoa he iti he pounamu

By Relationship - Platonic

Alasdair and Matt || is mig amharc le dicheall

Alfred and Matt || lonely boys with the longest borders

Alfred and Rhys || Yn fy mhen a’i lond o freuddwydion

Alfred and Zee || freedom and fairness

Arthur and the children || bilge rat and his bouncing baby bilge rats

Britannia and her children || they made a desert and called it peace

Jack and Brighid || bound for Botany Bay

Jack and Zee || pieces of me across the Tasman sea

Jack Zee and Matt || battered bonds once so strong

Matthew and François || Quelques arpents de pièges

By Relationship - Romantic

Alasdair and Francois || an auld and abiding love

Alfred and Ludwig || our shooting stars were supersonic

Alfred and Tolys || with the awe of love realized

Maria and Alfred || De ilusión también se vive.

Maria and Matt || Al mal tiempo buena cara

Arthur and Gabriel || leagues of sincere affection

Arthur and Francois || our most dear enemy

Brighid and Romano || each our unlikely other half

Katya and Matt || the soil of our souls

Jan and Kiku || my favourite hello and hardest goodbye

Jan and Matt || the bells of liberation echo into eternity

Gilbert and Erzse || heart of iron beat for me

Gilbert and Arthur || heart of iron and heart of oak

By Topic

working pages

the great windmill debacle of 1994

the great incineration of 2023

Alfred and the stars || the first golden retriever in space

fairybait || baby alfred being chunky and cursed

Matt and Ferality || 80% uninhabited 100% uninhibited

meatsack mechanics || the sociology and biology of nations

Art History and Aesthetics || our eyes across the ages

WW1 || half the planet having daddy issues in a trench

archives || sing o muse the voices of the dead

By Type

the ask box || probis pateo

queued posts || Between the devil and the deep queue sea

the shitpost pile || forgive me my shitty sense of humour

my writing || cacoethes scribendi

research || sauntering through the stacks

Ideas || i should write this someday

ask box games || chaos coming soon to an inbox near you

moaning || personal/business posts

Character Sheets || bodies and flesh of borders and fences