I like bloodweave. Okay. But I DON'T like the version of them in fanfic where Astarion is a dick and Gale is like. Whining and pleading for him to be emotionally vulnerable (or just. Nice to him) prior to the relationship being established. Because that is just not accurate. Gale needs the player to express interest in him during his weave-teaching scene before he even considers hitting on them properly. Gale is entirely resigned to his fate and needs someone else to pull him away from it. Gale only starts being sweet and romantic and devoted after you accept his love confession and give him hope for the future. Gale says fuck all and then slinks away to cry privately if you break up with him.
Like he isn't chasing after people lmao. He isn't dropping to his knees and crying about anything much less this dickhead he met a week ago. He is overwhelmingly passive about literally everything personal to him up to and including his own death (provided there are no casualties/there is a good reason) until after the player expresses that they care about him. Astarion is not doing that in any of these fics.
Like Gale is friendly and a dork and doesn't wanna get murdered but he fully has a suicide plan. He thought the artefacts would help him survive but he didn't believe he'd ever truly live again. If Gale confessed and Astarion said/did like one (1) mean thing afterward Gale's romance is closed off forever. He's wandering into the forest to cry. He's killing himself immediately. His fragile ego and self worth can't take it. You have to understand that when we joke about him being pathetic it's not bc he's like. Sopping wet and chasing people down and begging for a scrap of attention. It's because he craves affection but would literally rather die than ask or even hope for it until someone else forces that hope back into his serotonin-deficient tadpole brain.
435 notes
·
View notes
ah yes, my favorite media. a grand story about the horror and tragedy of war set featuring a massive space war that was a rebellion against an oppressive colonial empire hellbent on conquest (which also experiments on its subjects), a main cast of mostly female characters, a key romance between two women, and a clone army of female super soldiers.
my favorite character in this story is a woman named rose. though not physically present in the text, her absence echoes throughout the narrative in a way that makes those closest to her do great and terrible things. she comprises one half of the key romance (of which the other half is deeply devoted to her even after she is gone). she has done some deeply awful things in her past, but that doesn't stop me excusing her shitty actions <3
wait, am i talking about steven universe or once upon a time in space?
(meme redraw lol)
84 notes
·
View notes
Eleventh Doctor Chronicles: Sins of the Flesh is really good. Really really good. Experience with certain attitudes can be so isolating, surrounded by people who won’t bother to understand the impact of growing up in that environment (because the world's so progressive now, right), and so — I'm so glad it exists. I also liked the discussion in the interview commentary about how being a monster and doing monstrous things are not mutually exclusive. Like most things, homophobia is pervasive because it is structural. Religious fervor is not inherently bad — “your god is love,” Valarie says to Lily — but as soon as hellfire is brandished around, it's used routinely to empower monstrous things, in a way that becomes unsafe to debate. Especially for young & dependent people who can't escape it.
Conditional love. Moral panics. Purity culture. Self-hate. Mob mentality. This audio. It's timely.
I appreciated what they said in the interviews about not only about the research, but the four rounds of sensitivity readings. I wish the TV show had that level of care sometimes…
4 notes
·
View notes