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me-and-my-hyperfixations · 9 months

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A while back, Neil Newbon confirmed on one of his streams that Astarion is Pansexual.

So this is why it bothers me seeing fandom say things like "Astarion just feels like a gay man!" and "I just can't picture Astarion with a woman" because like... Astarion is still a queer man. It's been outright confirmed by his voice actor. And his queerness and his attraction to men isn't diminished by the fact that he can also be romanced by female characters. Repeat after me: Pansexuality is an lgbt identity in it's own right and not just gay person lite.™

And I think an important aspect to Astarion's sexuality is the fact that the writers made his relationship with both men and women part of his backstory. It's a stark contrast to Dragon Age 2 back in 2011 where Ander's past relationship with Karl was completely omitted from his dialogue if he was romance by a female Hawke. The unfortunate implications here being that bioware didn't think their female player base would still wanna romance Anders if he had past relationship with men. That to make Anders palatable to a straight-girl audience, all traces of his bisexuality had to be erased.

Astarion's Pansexuality doesn't change depending of the player's gender. The language he uses for his past lovers is gender neutral, he'll still mention relationships with men regardless of who you are playing as.

There is no "Playersexual" about it. Astarion is Pansexual. And that matters.

Edit: I was just looking over the notes of this post after having it muted for months and it really reaffirmed my decision to mute it. Some of you are posting bad takes like you're in a bad take contest. Hope you recover from the trauma of having to acknowledge bisexuals and pansexuals. - Love my bisexual ass ❤️

#baldurs gate 3 #Bg3 #Astarion #neil newbon #tw queerphobia #Tw panphobia #Pansexual

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lilunebriumplays · 10 months

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Soooo, those Mindflayer eyes...

While I’ve been playing BG3 on and off since early access released, I’ve never really dove that deep into it until a few days ago, so I’m so sorry if this is already a heavily discussed topic in fandom! But one thing that’s always stuck out to me are the Mindflayers, specifically how they’re always described as having pale, milky eyes throughout the majority of DnD history;

[...] Their eyes, sheltered by brow ridges, were uniformly pale and devoid of pupils in addition to being bloated and featureless, similar to those of blind cave fish.

Yet Larian seems to have made a point of giving them actual humanoid eyes, complete with iris and pupils. Not only that, they feature it heavily on promotional artwork. Like compare the eyes of the game’s Mindflayer -

- with what up until recently has been the canon Mindflayer -

It’s a very clear and striking difference, almost complete polar opposite in that they went from bland and non-descript to piercing and radiant.

Now I kind of shrugged it off and was happy to just note it down as artistic liberty, until I started a new playthrough yesterday and realised there’s someone else in the game who has the same eyes as our Cthulhuian friends.

That someone is Raphael:

What’s more, after losing myself in the Larian forums for a bit, I stumbled upon this post from user Ulla G in a thread about the Absolute;

They describe how in earlier patches, whenever they got to the first dream scene where you can hear Daisy’s voice going “Where are you?” as you go to bed, they continuously got a glitch where they saw a wing tip hovering over their Tav, which they then linked to Raphael when they saw his true form in his introduction scene.

There’s also continuous references throughout the game itself that the tadpole inside your head seems to be altered, which made me almost feel the ! appear above my head when I got the “charmed in more ways than one”-line from Raphael when you choose to introduce yourself to him in camp -

Plus, there’s something odd going on with Daisy and the tadpole.

I always thought they were one and the same, but whenever Daisy seems to be getting close to getting Tav to give in to their seduction, there’s always a vivid recoil coming from somewhere inside, as well as a murderous lust for blood and barely suppressed violence in later scenes which is aimed directly at Daisy themselves.

Could it be that Daisy is not the manifestation of the tadpole, but instead represents an outside force that’s instead responsible for altering it?

Tinfoil Hat Time™

Are the Mindflayers we see in-game charmed? Are they under the influence of someone else?

There’s a common theme running throughout at least Early Access of people bearing loyalty to or at least doing the bidding of either a person or a force that’s in reality actually manipulating them - Lae’zel and Vlaakith, Astarion and Cazador, Wyll and Mizora, Shadowheart and the Sharr worshippers, the Druids and Kagha, the Goblins and the Absolute. Are the Mindflayers victims of this too?

The Absolute seems to be tied to The Three somehow, and considering Edowin and his siblings have clear instructions to find and kill any survivors of the Mindflayer crash, they don’t seem to be in cahoots.

The fact the Mindflayer ship was immediately attacked by devils when it came to Avernus seems to speak against Devil influence, despite the potential link to Raphael’s eyes and his seeming knowledge of what’s actually happening. Unless Raphael is also working for an outside force. Or unless he isn’t tied to the traditional Devils at all.

In the tutorial phase on the ship, if you manage to keep the Mindflayer alive while killing the devil Commander and all the other devilkin at the helm, you get a sweet sword the Mindflayer turns against you and says you’re no longer needed before he attempts to kill you, even though you still bear the tadpole. Does this mean the altered tadpole and Tav&Co’s untransformed state are completely separate from what the Mindflayers were originally intending to do? (Why kill Tav and the other tadpole-bearers in the first place, when they could be useful Thralls?)

Where does the Githyanki artefact fit into this?

How does the conflict between Sharr and Selûne play into it all?

Is there a connection to the constant references to Netheril?

To the Weave, to the attempt on Mystra’s life and seat, orchestrated by Sharr 109 years ago? (potential interesting tidbit; if a devil dies outside of Baator, it takes them 99 years to regenerate)

I don’t even know where I’m going with all this, I just needed to blurt all my thoughts into words somewhere and get some facts straight, I guess. I haven’t been this excited to figure out a story in a while. I am so intrigued by every little snippet Larian throws our way, and I am so so so so so stoked for August 3rd to see how this will all play out~

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #larian studios #mindflayer #bg3 raphael #bg3 spoilers #baldur's gate 3 spoilers

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sincerelystesichorus · 3 months

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pinned post!!

(just completely recreating this bad boy hi)

Hi y'all! You can call me Cubi or Q or QB (he/him). I'm 21, very gay, very obsessed with vampires and herakles and writing. This blog is 18+ but I am ace-flux and often sex-averse so that's mostly for my own comfort and also for The Horrors™ that may be here as a traumatized man writing about traumatized people lmao. Minors will be blocked <3

I'm a long-time hobbyist writer, both in prose and poetry, and you can find the majority of my writing on my ao3: foolish_incubus ! This blog was originally made primarily as a companion account for it, but I've since branched out and gotten not normaller. I am a queer trans man, and when I'm not writing gay romance, I'm usually writing serious things around that experience or something similar.

Things you can expect to find here: me shitposting about my current fandom fixations, me ranting or making character anaylses, my writing, me being gay, me being autistic, BG3, Helluva Boss, me being a psychology and classics student and very gay roman empire and greek mythology type of guy

Highlights & Common Tags:

My Bloodbear fic and Astarion character analysis: We Can Be Heroes. #sswcbh is my main tag for anything pertaining to my fic!

Helluva Meme Dumps

Character & Scene Analyses

Callix Nimblecatcher! He is my gnome durge and son, and a supporting role in WCBH.

BG3 memes & That Post.

#classics for anything pertaining to... classics. This is where you can witness me usually not being normal about Herakles or Geryon or general Greek/Roman mythology. My blog name is sincerelystesichorus for a reason! More on Stesichorus.

#QB for all my general posts

#QBwrites for my writing

#QBshitposts for general shitposts.

You're gonna see a lot of Astarion Ancunin & Halsin Silverborough, Fizzarolli & Asmodeus & my OCs if following

I am ask and mutual friendly and do not bite (though I sometimes have a flat tone but that's what tone indicators or my key smashes are for sdfkdsk.) If you're still reading, hiii and welcome!

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margridarnauds · 5 months

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1. 6. and 12. please!

Thank you!

What’s something new that you tried in a fic this year? How did it turn out and would you do it again?

I touched on it a little here, but I feel like I really leant more into the surreal. Which kind of naturally works with my writing style and my influences and is definitely something I'm wanting to pursue. I was actually influenced a lot by what I've seen you do when it comes to fanfic, as well as by what I've seen the Chinese fandom, as a whole do, where you have these character studies where the style is deliberately rich and a little-bit offputting as a way of exploring the darker edges of a character or characters. While I don't think the horror of The Midnight Mass ever landed like I wanted it to, it marked a point of experimentation that I've never gotten to do, and I'm definitely interested in doing more things in that style.

6. What ship(s) captured your heart?

As far as NEW ships, Benvolio/Escalus from RetJ was definitely unexpected. I'm in and out of RetJ as a fandom -- I wouldn't say I'm actively involved, but I keep an eye on it, especially as a mod for the French musicals Tumblr, which made it even more unexpected. I feel like I could still do a lot more with them, even though I've put most of my plans on hold in favor of the TRUE darkhorse candidate, Raphael/Tav from Baldur's Gate 3. Which, on one hand, it isn't AS much of a darkhorse, since Raphael is ridiculously my type (I mean, my taste in fictional men is already rancid enough that a devil seemed like the natural conclusion), but was still unexpected because I truly came in expecting to romance Astarion. I have about 12k words of fic written across 4-5 WIPs, so it's safe to say that we're really only getting off the ground.

12. What fic was the most difficult to write? Did you finish it?

As I touched on in my other answer, this year was the sort of year where EVERY fic was difficult to write, because of the sheer number of responsibilities that I had tacked on. I had a massive test that would decide whether I stayed in my program (I passed), my first paper published, several back to back conference presentations, a month spent abroad in Ireland (my beloved) sharpening up my language skills, hosting and organizing events, teaching, and my participation in several different projects and organizations. It was a LOT, and it left very little time to be a human being in-between.

But...I would say that writing fanfic for BG3 and RetJ, in general, is very much a struggle for me. Because I know the 18th century relatively well, or at least well enough to conjure up an image of the 18th century. And if I don't know, I can do research. When I was doing work for an AFO fic (not published....yet), I could look up the memoirs of the people involved and take from them as much or as little as I wanted (since it was AFO, I opted for "as little").

But for the Toho RetJ, you're having to more or less create a dystopian society based on staging hints we get from the musical, and so I was constantly having to drop in details from hypotheticals. Like "What would the world look like in a century or two if a nuclear bomb went off tomorrow?" "How would we rebuild? What are some ways the world would be the same and what are some of the ways it would be different?" These are things that people are asking, but we really don't KNOW. And so in many ways, I'm having to build Post-Apocalypse Verona from the ground up while also trying to drop in cultural details -- this isn't American Post-Apocalypse Verona, this is *Italian* Post-Apocalypse Verona. Things like Venice sinking into the sea *have* to have some kind of impact on how people are sourcing food, for instance, or conducting trade. And since Escalus is The Prince��, I can't even wave some of it off, because these are things he is very intensely interested in and involved in.

BG3 is almost the reverse, where you are contending with forty years of lore, spread out across player handbooks, multiple series of novels, comics, trading cards, etc. etc. almost all of which some people care very, very intensely about while the rest homebrew it and toss it out. There's a lot of material that either isn't explored *at all* or is under-explained, but there's a LOT that's been explored in 40 years, and it's always a matter of seeing what I CAN bend or even break and what I can't. And, unfortunately, the two areas of the lore that I got most intensely attached to are (1) the Drow and (2) the Devils, aka two areas that have a lot of complex lore around them, so I'm reading multiple books from multiple editions to see what I can make stick. (On the record, I'm tossing out a solid 70-80% of the lore around Drow because it was very clearly written by nerd men who hate women.) My goal is always to try to bend the lore around the fic in a way that still honors the fact that people are fundamentally people and behave fundamentally like people.

For the Toho RetJ, I finished two fics for it -- I have snippets of more written, but I did finish the two fics I really wanted to make. For BG3...God knows when I'll have the lore wrangled enough for it.

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glitterdustcyclops · 1 month

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Get to Know You

tagged by @syn0vial thank you friend~

Last song: Let You Break My Heart Again - Laufey in the car on the way to work, because my mom specifically requested it. i've gotten her into Laufey and it's very cute. i'm going to make her a cafe vibes playlist on spotify later.

Currently watching: Game Changer mostly, interspersed with the new series of Taskmaster (which i'm excited is actually being posted to youtube as it airs). apparently i'm in my gameshow era lmao

Three ships: i've kinda been off fandom for a bit but the last ones i was most into were Astarion/Tav, Halsin/Astarion, and Steddyhands (😥)

Favorite color: iridescence, or for an actual color, mint green (and pink)

Currently consuming: just finished my morning peppermint tea. i was listening to the new episode of maintenance phase but i stopped. and soon, i will be having pizza for lunch.

First ship: embarrassingly, Snarry. i know.

Birthplace: Colorado

Current location: Utah :(

Relationship status: as always, waiting to have a meet cute with a hot dom(me) billionaire outside a charming café

Last movie: Rebel Without a Cause actually, cuz i was watching a youtube discussing the queer subtext lmao

Currently working on: my last Project™ was organizing my stickers, and tomorrow it will be putting together my new d&d lego which i'm incredibly excited about

as always, if you're interested in doing this consider yourself tagged, and tag me in your post because i am nosy!!!

#about the chocolate #i will fill out every instance of this tag meme because i fuckin love talking about myself

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