kissandra-pentagasp - Tumblr blog

[kissandra-pentagasp]

I got sad because I realized that the only good relationship that Dark Urge and Gortash had was with each other.

Gortash got sold by his parents, was abused in hell, barely escaped, and then spent the rest of his life plotting and scheming and refusing to get close to anyone, ultimately even selling another child he took in to the same nightmarish life he'd once escaped from.

Dark Urge was forced to kill their foster family by Bhaal, and then went to a Bhaal temple, where they might've been worshipped, but I highly doubt that the murder cult weirdos really thought of them as a person, and not just an object of worship. It is awful lonely up on that bloody pedestal. Plus the way they beg Bhaal for forgiveness for liking Gortash makes me suspect that it's never happened before.

And then I hold my little heart in my hands and weep for the two of them.

Because I know gortash is a piece of shit who refuses to break the cycle of abuse. And I know the dark urge has murdered a shit ton of people and enjoyed it too.

But...but...your honor ...I still feel sympathy.

I still felt sadness in the house of hope, when that asshole admitted he used to beat Gortash black and blue for fun.

I still felt grief when I read dark urge's letter to their god for ADMIRING someone.

For caring about a person.

And then I found out that dark urge had been living a normal life until they killed their foster parents.

You can say that dark urge enjoyed it, but I just don't think that's the case.

Baldur's Gate 3 has some laughably evil villains but there is nuance. There is humanity in most of the characters, good, evil, and morally gray. Even big baddies. Ketheric Thorm notably has a rather sad backstory full of grief, loneliness, and love turned to madness, Gortash was broken as a child by parents who shattered his ability to care for anyone but himself, and even Orin, if you confront her about Sarevok's relationship to her mother, can even be seen as a tragic figure. Like what the fuck, her own mom tried to kill her as an offering to bhaal.

Maybe all bhaalspawn are laughably one dimensional villains with absolutely no human traits to them, but that's just fucked.

One of my favorite themes is how everyone is a slave to the gods, their playthings, their disposal tools.

Poor Ketheric Thorm said it best when he said that we're just copper pieces to be traded, that we might have beaten him, but the gods beat him first.

He's so right, man. Most if not all the companions are slaves to Gods and devils.

Dark Urge was a slave to Bhaal, just a means to an end, a sharpened blade pressed against the world's throat, and Gortash was the plaything of devils, traded away by parents who didn't care about him, a powerless little boy who'd grow up to be a tyrannical power hungry despot.

I choose to believe they recognized each other. They worked together initially because they had their own agendas, and were doing their usual song and dance of manipulating others, but the more time they spent together, the more they actually liked each other.

They were genuinely friends, or lovers, and it's sickening and it's driving me mad, and it's all so sad.

[kissandra-pentagasp]

My SI and Ashara

[kissandra-pentagasp]

oh no, I thought of something bittersweet :')

[kissandra-pentagasp]

so so much discussion of astarion revolves around literally nothing but his victimhood. him being mean is a trauma response we should excuse. so is him advocating for slavery. so is him clapping for child murder. so is every sin! because everyone on this website conflates victimhood with some innate moral purity. he is Just An Elvish Baby (wrong) who has No Autonomy (wrong!). watch them balk when you talk about cazador also being abused though

[kissandra-pentagasp]

seeing witchie in sunshine islands made me miss this game

[kissandra-pentagasp]

[kissandra-pentagasp]

you know that one god awful map that literally looks like a minecraft world? yeah that's what tamriel looks like

[kissandra-pentagasp]

Garrus: Besides, I know where you sleep. We'll wake you if anything comes up.

[kissandra-pentagasp]

“This reads like fanfiction (it feels like it was written by a preteen, and most of such things posted publicly are fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it has a focus on character and relationships, like the style of a lot of modern fanfic)” vs “This reads like fanfiction (it keeps referencing people and events with the assumption that the audience is already familiar with them, like how fanfic doesn’t need to rehash the source material)”

[kissandra-pentagasp]

Camp cooks :) decided to color this pic

[kissandra-pentagasp]

I love when people are like “I can’t believe you reblogged that despite their user name, icon, bio, and last twenty posts” bc to me my dash is the only part of this website and I’m not slowing down to look at urls you could all be the same person

[kissandra-pentagasp]

My one basic opinion is that nobody should ever have to live in poverty and boy oh boy does this make some motherfuckers real mad!

[kissandra-pentagasp]

I was minding my business digging into the art book when I got to Raphael's page. And just. Something didn't sit right with me. I don't know why, but it filled me with such dread and ick.

Something was just. Wrong.

AND THEN IT HIT ME.

I can not express how grateful I am to whichever dev at Larian un-Humperdincked him. Normally, in fandom, the sentiment is "we were robbed." But for the very first time, I feel we were spared.

[kissandra-pentagasp]

As Homo sapiens migrated into Eurasia more than 70,000 years ago, much of the continent was already inhabited by Neanderthals, hominins who shared an ancestor with us but had spent roughly half a million years diverging. We don't know much about their ensuing relationship, but it was probably contentious at times. While Neanderthals eventually disappeared 40,000 years ago, there are now 8 billion of us. During their Late Pleistocene overlap in Eurasia, however, we know the two hominin species sometimes interbred, since many humans today still have traces of Neanderthal DNA. And according to a new study, this relationship goes back even farther than we thought, with a long-forgotten earlier chapter re-emerging from clues in the Neanderthal genome. When modern humans reached Eurasia in the Late Pleistocene, the study suggests, Neanderthals living there already carried traces of our species' DNA, apparently from a much older, previously unknown run-in with an even more ancient lineage of anatomically modern humans. That would mean some Homo sapiens ventured into Eurasia more than 250,000 years ago, the study's authors report, long before the continent's earliest evidence of modern humans. For context, the fossil record indicates our species evolved in Africa only 300,000 years ago.

Continue Reading.

[kissandra-pentagasp]