Stardew Valley: Nuptial bliss
Spoilers for Stardew Valley.
As the rainless winter ground on, I spent my time mining (down to level 95! There is so much gold) and doing relationship maintenance with Elliott. It’s great that he’s letting down the walls and showing me his true self, but…
Don’t you dare, Elliott. Cut your hair and I’ll divorce you.
A girl could do with a bit more mystery.
Then spring arrived, and with it… perfect, sunny weather.
Blow me, spring.
Finally, after days of diligent cauliflower-tending, a rainstorm arrived, and with it the nuptial pirate.
He wanted 5,000 coins for it, which is slightly appalling. When you’re new to the game, 5,000 coins is a lot. I had all of it and more, thanks to a winter spent pickling pumpkins, but it’s a substantial economic barrier. Do poor people not get to marry in Stardew Valley? What about all those people who work at Jojo-Mart? Both the workers I know are living in somebody else’s house. Jojo-Mart is not a quality employer. Are their employees stuck in limbo until they can land someone with enough cash to buy the pendant? Do poor people resort to mugging the pirate? Is that why he’s on that faraway beach? Has he considered lowering the price so people don’t mug him? I mean, you shouldn’t mug anyone ever, but when they have the power to prevent you from marrying, you get desperate. The bus out of town is broken and no one here seems to have a car. Going to the next town over where they don’t have this stupid pendant tradition isn’t an option.
Goddamned pirate. You’re not a love pirate. You’re an opportunistic extortionist. I hope the next guy who mugs you steals your stupid hat.
But I do have the money, so I pay the extortionist SOB. Then I hop on over to Elliott’s shack, where he’s still faffing with his hair and pondering what to do with his day. Sensing the pendant’s approach, the plot triggers this dialogue:
Super alluring.
I was going to make a snarky comment about pity ploys, and then it occurred to me that maybe Elliott is smarter than I thought. He knows about my stupid white knight syndrome, and he’s learned to play into it.
sniff He’s too good for me. He really is.
I pop the question. Er, the jewelry. I pop the jewelry.
Bliss.
Elliott gets all excited and promises to set the entire wedding up. My god. There’s no limit to how too-good this man is for me. He sets the date for three days from now, in true Austenian speed-courtship fashion. I drop in on him from time to time, and he burbles about how it’s going to be such an adventure, and the farm will be such a beautiful place to write. (And farm. Don’t forget, Elliott, the farm is a beautiful place to farm.) Three days later:
The wedding took place as soon as I woke up at 6:00. At 6:10, I found myself back in my house, married. Insta-wedding.
Elliott had been busy in those ten minutes. Not only had we gone to town, had a ceremony, celebrated, and walked back, but he’d built an addition onto my house in his own style and converted a corner of the back yard into his own personal reading patio. Damn. He is going to be a beast at chores.
I found my new life partner on his patio. This dialogue ensued:
I. What? No. No, you son of a bitch. We’ve been married for less than a morning. The cauliflower is bone dry. Get off your pampered ass, shake the rice out of your hair, and get to work.
Emily C. said you would do this. Emily C. hates puppies and rainbows and freedom and yesterday I heard that she kicked a kitten. You don’t want to prove Emily C. right, do you? Do you want to prove a kitten-kicker right? Why do you hate kittens, Elliott?
Elliott was unmoved. He’d already built an addition and furnished a patio today. As far as he was concerned, he’d earned his me time.
Son. of. a. Bitch.
So I went out, still trailing bits of wedding confetti, and watered all the crops myself. Tended to the cat. Checked the bat cave and the tapped trees and the beehive. Went into town and did the shopping. Said hi to the neighbors, none of whom acknowledged that they’d just eaten my wedding cake for breakfast that very morning. Stomped home. Put everything away. Elliott was already in bed. I poked him, and he turned to me and said:
He’s way too good for me.
The next morning he was in his library. He said:
No amount of terrible but heartfelt poetry can make up for that. WORK, YOU LAZY ASS.
Nnnnope.
…Damn, that’s cute.
That’s cuter. Elliott, my beloved! You sweet, sweet man. Okay, we have only one farm animal and that’s the cat, but the thought is what counts. That, and the thought that it’s time for me to invest in some more animals for you to feed.
Validation. Keep it coming.
I love you. I love you, I love you, you are the perfect man.
You are a paragon, you are a delight. And you watered ALL the crops. Either Emily C. was a lying liar, or I haven’t planted enough.
Elliott, you kinky little shit.
He makes coffee pretty regularly now. He hasn’t repeated the animal-feeding or crop-watering tricks yet, though we now have two chickens to feed. In terms of usefulness, he’s on the level of a Keurig. A very cute Keurig.
Meanwhile, after weeks of single-minded focus on the farm, I decided to start cultivating friendships around town.
In Stardew Valley forums, whenever anyone asks who’s the best husband, the standard answer is, “Whoever you want! It’s a matter of taste. But obviously, Shane.”
Shane is a surly alcoholic.
I do not want to marry a surly alcoholic.
No one else does, either.
Hypothesis: If you befriend Shane, he ceases to be a surly alcoholic.
What are Shane’s favorite gifts? Pizza, hot peppers, pepper poppers, and beer. I don’t have the flour to make pizza, or the recipe to make pepper poppers. My hot pepper supplies are running low. Ugh. Beer it is. But that will take a while to make, and in the meantime, I’ll find Shane in the bar and offer him… uh… what’s in my pockets?… a tortilla.
He’s okay with the tortilla.
Good. A first step. Yay. I hand tortillas out to everyone, because the bar is crowded and I have a muckload of tortillas, and then I head home.
That night Elliott confronts me. “I heard that you secretly gave a gift to Shane.”
Secretly? It was in the middle of the bar. In front of everyone.
Maybe. You’re running out of juice if the best you can do is wax poetic about my sweat. Step it up, my sweetly useless, jealous boy, or I might just start throwing tortillas at all the eligible men.
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“Goddamned pirate. You’re not a love pirate. You’re an opportunistic extortionist. I hope the next guy who mugs you steals your stupid hat.”
😂😂😂
Oh but don’t cut away all the ‘weeds’ – they’re grass that you’ll need for hay later when you have more farm animals. I made that mistake of cutting it all away in the first week, then when I finally got animals there was no grass left and I had to pay Pierre’s extortionate rates for grass starter. 😣
I am slandered! I’ve been far too sick this past week to kick any kittens.
Spring of year 2, and this is your first farming sim of this type… yeah, I’m guessing you haven’t been the planting fiend that I am in these games. Btw, grass? AMAZING STUFF you’ll want as much as you can get once you have livestock.
I just came over here again to get the link for your excellent set of articles on estranged parents’ forums, and I just wanted to say
a) Stardew Valley! I don’t know if it says more about the game’s evil genius or my own ability to get process addicted to pretty much anything but bloody hell, I racked up 100 hours in that game in a month. I neglect watering the plants in my actual garden to water my plants in Stardew Valley.
b) Your writing is so good and so on the nose (I’m in an online forum for adult children of abusive parents and we link to your site all the time), if you’re doing any new projects now I would love to know about that, not just the estranged family stuff, anything really. Did you go anywhere with the “CPS took my kids” stuff? The world seems particularly dominated by people who have trouble coming to terms with reality right now, it all feels very timely.
Hi hi hi! A very belated hi!
a) Yesssss, Stardew Valley. I stopped blogging about it because I was playing it so much that there was no way to squish everything into a post. I finished the Community Center and had squash spirit thingies living in my yard and harvesting my crops. Elliott and I had a kid, who was eerily maintenance-free. I divorced useless Elliott and married Harvey instead, which gave me a keen appreciation for Elliott. I laid plans to marry and divorce every eligible person in town. And then I drifted off.
Shortly after that I discovered My Time at Portia, which was so addicting that I strained my back muscles holding my arms in mouse-and-keyboard position, and had to lie down after sessions with a cold pack between my shoulderblades. Not a hot pad–those work on muscular tension, and I had gone way past that. A cold pack, which I bought specially because this had never been a problem before, because my back muscles were pulled and inflamed. That’s my endorsement: Play My Time at Portia, it’s so good that I hurt myself playing it.
b) Thank you! The Society for Creative Anachronism ate up my time, so I spend much of my writing time on medieval Armenian names and how 16th-century Turks heated their houses, but the “CPS took my kids” stuff is coming to a head. It’s tricky, not just because of privacy issues but because of intense selection bias (I watch videos that interest me; the more extreme cases are more interesting) and because of how the CPS protestor world intertwines with Pizzagate, Q, Christian persecution, sovereign citizens, and other conspiracy theories. (Speaking of timely…) It’s also tricky because there are legitimate CPS protestors, protesting the very real and life-destroying problems with CPS, and because even the crankiest of cranks have sometimes had legitimate problems with CPS on top of the problems they caused themselves. It’s going to take a lot of digesting.
There’s also a piece on the role of fantasy and self-image in extreme movements that’s been percolating for over a year. It helps to explain why people stick with ideas like flat earth and sovereign citizenry in the face of repeated failure.
But mostly there’s a lot of cooking experiments, embroidery, and glee over learning how to build a fire. Plus occasional fits of OTTOMAN GARB: YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. Gotta start finishing some of this stuff and pushing it live…
Thanks for your comments. It’s encouraging, knowing someone is out there looking forward to what I do next.
My Time At Portia is amazing!
Right now I’m looking forward to the remake of an old Harvest Moon game for the Switch. Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. I am so excited.
It’s great to hear from you again, and get an update on the Stardew Valley romance(s).
I just came across your reply! I went cold turkey on Stardew about a year ago, and then recently my kids started playing it, and I was like “hang on wait, you’re going to want to save that for the bundles” and they were like “what bundles” and that was me, back in it. I’m going to go and look up My Time At Portia now because I don’t know what is good for me.
I would love to hear any insights you have about the whole CPS/pizzagate/sovereign citizens thing. The whole world, or the bits that I know anyway, seems to have lost its mind in the last few years. It’s as if NPD went mainstream. I struggle to make much sense of it, other than to just sort of gasp in frustrated awe at the utter wrongheadedness of everything.
Shane has wabi-sabi, his flaws are endearing. But also yes, the more you befriend him, the less he comes off as an asshole and more like “aw he’s so depressed and pathetic I MUST SAVE HIM” mommy bird instincts kick in, you know how it is.
To be fair, the extortionist rates for the pendant are by no means unrealistic: it’s the equivalent of an engagement ring, and the diamond industry has been running a racket on those for decades. (Interestingly, millennials show that when an entire generation is so broke that they literally can’t afford to buy into the scam, rather than mugging anyone they collectively declare that the whole tradition is stupid anyway and no one is actually forcing them to go along with it — my sister has straight-up told her partner not to spend more than $500 on a ring if and when he proposes because carrying a thousand-dollar plus piece of jewelry around would give her too much anxiety — and then the old guard proceeds to whine about how millennials are killing the diamond industry because they hate America or something instead of admitting that the industry is collapsing under the accumulated weight of its own bullshit.)