#SPECIFICALLY class and race

[mostlyvoid-partiallyflowers]

The most recent episode of Interview with a Vampire let's us see Lestat's side of the story and see how it compares to Louis' accounting of their relationship. As a result, it reaffirms just how unreliable of a narrator Louis is, but it also further illuminates elements of his character that the director and writers have been playing with since the beginning of the show.

There's this part in the episode where Lestat turns to Louis and apologizes and it's framed with Lestat turned to Louis on one side and Claudia on his other side. They're the angel and devil on Louis' shoulders, but who is the angel and who is the devil? And as my friend said, Armand and Daniel are placed into that same dynamic with Louis later on. We are being asked to decide who to trust, who's telling the truth, who's the good guy, but the fact of unreliability robs us of that decision.

This whole story is about Louis, he's the protagonist, though not the narrator, and he is constantly being pulled in two directions, no matter when or where he is in his story. He's a mind split in two, divided by nature and circumstance. He's vampire and human, owner and owned, father and child, angel and devil. He's both telling the story and being told the story. His history is a story he tells himself, and as we've seen, sometimes that story is not whole.

Louis is the angel who saved Claudia from the fire but he's also the devil who sentenced her to an life of endless torment, the adult trapped in the body of a child. He's the angel who rescued Lestat from his grief and also the devil who abandoned him, who couldn't love him, could only kill and leave him.

He's pulled in two directions, internally and externally at all times and so it's no wonder that he feels the need to confess, first to the priest, then Daniel, and then Daniel again.

He's desperate to be heard, a Black man with power in Jim Crow America who's controlled by his position as someone with a seat at the table but one who will never be considered equal. He doesn't belong to the Black community or the white community, he can't. He acts as a go-between, a bridge, one who is pushed and pulled until he can't take it anymore. He's a fledgling child to an undead father, he's a young queer man discovering his sexual identity with an infinitely experienced partner. He's confessing because he wants to be absolved, that human part of him that was raised Catholic, that child who believed, he wants to be saved. He wants to be seen.

Louis wants to attain a forever life that is morally pure, but he can't. He's been soiled by sin, by "the devil," as he calls Lestat, and he can never be clean again. Deep down, I think he knows this, but he can't stop trying to repent. He tries to self-flagellate by staying with Lestat and then tries to repent by killing him, but can't actually follow through. He follows Claudia to Europe to try and assuage his guilt. He sets himself on fire, attempts to burn himself at the stake, to purify his body, rid himself of the dark gift.

Louis is a man endlessly trying to account for the pain he has caused and he ultimately fails, over and over again, because he can't get rid of what he is. A monster. He's an endlessly hungry monster. He's hungry for love, for respect, for power, for forgiveness, for death. He's a hole that can never be filled. He can never truly acquire any of those things because he will always be punishing himself for wanting and needing them in the first place. He will never truly believe he deserves them and as a result, can't accept them if they are ever offered. He can never be absolved for he has damned himself by accepting the dark gift and thus has tainted himself past the point of saving.

[obi-wann-cannoli]

Okay so I have no clue how intentional this was but it certainly feels intentional to have Crystal be a black girl, to have little Becky (the kidnapped girl) be a black girl and to have Lilith exact her vengeance on Esther (white settler colonial Esther) in the form of a black woman

[gamblegun]

The implicit or explicit r//dfem belief, that the only bigotry that Really exists is misogyny is a really odd one. Like, it's stupid to single out a single form of bigotry as the True One, but you're not even going to consider class? How do you think your clothes are made?

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

[BARBARIAN] Keep training. When the time comes, you'll drown this place in goblin blood.

[strixcattus]

if you wouldn’t mind, could you share the class system and magic workings of your stp dnd au?

There's a worldbuilding side to this and a game mechanics side to this. I'll start with the game mechanics, since that part's quicker.

I've made the general decision that the game the characters are playing is something that on the surface looks pretty much like D&D (same d20+ability score+skill system, for one, and pretty much all the terminology is the same), but if you poke into the mechanics of character creation it's not like D&D at all. Which is to say that classes in-game aren't quite the same as classes in D&D.

It's like college, you know? Eventually you have to declare your major (class), and you'll have to take a certain number of courses (skills) in the major (class), but that doesn't stop you from exploring courses outside of it (taking other classes' skills) as long as you can still meet the requirements for what you're trying to do.

(I imagine there are a few skills that are locked to specific classes, and others to specific patronages—a divine cleric and warlock both get to dip into a list associated with celestial magic, while their demonic counterparts have access to an assortment of more infernal abilities.)

This is how the party can have three bards who each have an entirely different relationship with magic. Contrarian is (ironically) the only one playing a normal bard, while Smitten has been almost exclusively taking non-magical bard skills, and Opportunist poured half his points into taking progressively higher ranks in a single non-bard skill.

(Most of the party is playing a single-class character. Skeptic and Broken are the primary exceptions, with neither of them having a class yet—Skeptic has a single, very expensive sorcerer skill and everything else isn't attached to a class [think extra proficiencies], while Broken has been using a level 0 character sheet the entire time, with his real sheet being held by the Narrator until the party reaches the point where all his level-locked skills become available.)

On to the worldbuilding/magic system side of things. I'll break this down by spellcasting class.

ARTIFICER: The line between artifice and wizardry is extremely blurred, and generally it's just a matter of identification, with casters on both sides being extremely uppity about their personal definitions. Generally speaking, artificers create magical effects primarily through mundane tinkering imbued with magic. They can't really take spell slots through their class, but they can create reusable magic items.

BARD: In this world, music is inherently magical, but there are some who put genuine effort into increasing the magical output of their music. Their magical repertoire is mainly limited to healing and support spells—even focused magical training can't summon fireballs by the power of music alone. There are a few bards who can manipulate other's actions or even take over their minds entirely, though...

CLERIC: Clerics can gain their magic either through actively being granted a higher status from the god they worship, or passively absorbing some of the powers of the Sleeping Gods through faith and luck. Either way, it's a pretty lax contract—their power is drawn from their god, so they'll lose them if they taper off in worship or start going against their god's morals, but all a deity ever really asks from a cleric is their faith.

DRUID: Druids draw their power from the interconnected network of living things called the Networked Wild, tapping into it momentarily to summon storms or communicate with plants. Their powers are, of course, stronger when there are a lot of living things nearby, but it's hard to cut them off from the Wild entirely. Druidic magic usually uses a one-way connection with the Wild—giving it a command to produce a spell—but some more powerful druids take the risk of opening their mind to the Wild entirely, gaining immense awareness with the danger of losing their individuality.

(Paladins and rangers exist in this system, but they don't have their own systems of magic. Paladins are essentially martial classes who tap into clerical magic, while rangers are martial classes who tap into druidic magic. They do have some class-specific skills, but most of what they can do comes from a combination of other classes.)

SORCERER: Sorcerers' magic is innate—less powerful, but more readily available and often more customizable. Some sorcerers can trace their magic back through their bloodline to a demonic, divine, or otherwise magical ancestor, but just as many gain their powers seemingly at random. Generally speaking, sorcerers have their potential from birth—it's not unheard of for someone to be struck by lightning and walk away with powers, but anything granted by an outside force with any measure of awareness will probably come with a clerical or warlock pact.

WARLOCK: Warlocks are similar to clerics, and can actually have any patron a cleric might (though they can also have patrons a cleric could never dream of). The difference lies in the terms of their agreement. While all a cleric's benefactor wishes for is some form of worship, a warlock is expected to provide some sort of service to their patron. For most, it does pay off in the benefits—innate abilities that don't drain from a finite pool of spellcasting energy.

WITCH: Witches deal in curses—similar to spells, but more permanent, sometimes more powerful, and more difficult to resist. The catch is that every curse has a condition that breaks it, usually tailored to the target—and the more powerful the curse, the easier it has to be to break. The condition generally falls into one of three categories: personal growth, giving up something of value, and a fetch quest. Witches can also control nature spirits, with each having their own specialty—local lakes or animal species, or even (if they're ambitious) a section of the Networked Wild.

WIZARD: The academics of the magical world, wizards gain their powers through study. They have the potential to be a jack-of-all trades (more so than any other single casting class) or to narrow in on a single field of magic and attain incredible magical abilities. There's some overlap with artificers, but generally wizards are considered to rely more on magical power than mechanical contraptions, and they have more ready access to spells.

(Making magical items, especially potions, is within the domain of both wizards and artificers, but the skills involved all technically belong to the Artificer class. Likewise, if an artificer wants to fill out their spellbook, they'll have to buy spells from another class's list—usually Wizard's.)

[envolvenuances]

as the masculine woman who wasn't allowed to use the girl's bathroom in school and to this day have straight women prefer to stand than sit next to me at the bus or question if it's "appropriate" to have me in school staff teaching teenagers. the only "gaslighting" in this is the pretense that it is either a new phenomena or increasing because of The Trans Question being divisive in current gringo politics. when it's classic lesbophobia that always existed and honestly if you ask me things have been improving. but then I do feel like transphobia itself is a restriction of homo/lesbophobia against the mostly visibly gender non conforming of us.

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[adamshallperish]

once you find out that chris mccandless was abused by his parents the majority of discourse over his actions kinda just fades into the background. like of course he had to do that. of course.

[stabknives]

V is obviously mirrorkin. In bg3 I think we only see changelings tho… but too bad because his ability to subsume a person's looks AND personality is half the reason he terrifies me. His class is easier, bards are right there in the game. He'd be multiclassing with barbarian, because he's as much of an expert entertainer as he is a physical menace.

B is a little more difficult. Don't think any of the bg3 races really fit him. He's probably some kind of fey race! A quickling or a pixie… quicklings are usually cruel tho and that's. Just not him lol he's such a softie. If he ends up as a pixie V will chop his wings off and wear them like earrings 👍 Anyway. B is a multiclass ranger/bard. They sing together. Cute! [I'm decapitated]

[mybreadsmybutters]

university friendslessness so chronic when the “do you want to come join our christain club on campus???” people approached me i unironically considered it for like 20 seconds

[fnibble]

cant believe i got myself addicted to wow again

[blujayonthewing]

the problem is my mom would probably be WAY more fun to play dnd with than my dad, actually, but the reason the fam campaign fell apart was that we could never get ahold of or schedule with my youngest brother, which would continue to be a problem if we tried starting a new one with my mom instead oTL

[agendratum]

they stole the orange wearing ladies with umbrellas from the red team??

[swordmaid]

the hardest trial a girl can go through is figuring out her oc's fashion style

[gaydryad]

accidentally getting a little too into my pedagogy class and starting to wonder if I should pivot and go into education (academic field)

[orangerosebush]

"Pick me" reads as a clumsy (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to articulate a kind of (gendered) class traitorship; although the way this term proliferated on social media was impotent and tedious in many ways, this does render the boom in usage at the very least worthy of investigation, imo