As someone who grew up with "I'm not going to praise you for doing what's expected of you; that's not being good, that's doing the bare minimum" I want to encourage you to celebrate every little thing you can. Everything that takes energy and effort should be appreciated and you're allowed to be happy about trying.
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idk i think what is interesting about astarion to me is the fact that you have a guy who started out an asshole (normal type) and then spent two hundred years in a very carefully and specifically crafted (by the writers of the game) Become A Terrible Person Or Die nexus. like it wasn’t just a Torment Nexus, he wasn’t just in hell, i feel like this is very important not to forget, he was in hell but it was specifically a hell designed to, over time, kill the empathy of anyone trapped in it, kill their brain’s ability to prioritize other peoples’ survival, to numb one’s conscience.
and then he gets yanked directly out of that nexus and despite that the fact that he spent, again, two hundred years in a situation that was sort of a rock tumbler for the human soul, there’s still a pebble left in there. and it’s a pebble that can be grown if placed in the right environment and provided with a support network.
so i think it becomes interesting because it really does i think force you to start thinking about the limits of free will even on as basic a level as the human personality. i think the fact that he becomes such a different character based on player choice, that his end morality is so hugely dependent on player choice, is uhhh. a big part of what the devs were going for probably.
it makes a lot of people really uncomfortable to acknowledge some bad people would be good people if literally nothing changed except they had a good support network and different circumstances. especially because it means the opposite is also true. which is even more uncomfortable.
you know that part in the beginning of fellowship of the ring where gandalf is talking about how gollum is ultimately only like that because of the ring and gandalf thinks his story is sad? astarion is kinda like if they sexualized gollum.
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I don't know how strictly accurate this is, but one of the things I find shocking about watching historical dramas is how many people there are around all the time---according to Madame de... (1953) a well-off French household in the Belle Epoque maintains a workforce of at least 3, and the glittering opera has staff just to open doors. According to Shogun (2024) you can expect a deep bench just to mind your household, and again, people who exist to open doors.
Could people....not open doors in the past? Were doors tricky, before the standardization of hinges? Because otherwise, the wealthy used to pay a whole bunch of people to do it for them in multiple contexts, and I find myself baffled.
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Incredible how many tasks you can get done by taking 2 short walks outside in a row. I will learn nothing from this.
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I'm loving how Zeff put Luffy's wanted poster underneath 'Employee of the Month'.
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Pangur fanart is always so fun to receive, but I do giggle sometimes at the yassification
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The best thing about the new stardew update is you can tell concerned ape got comfortable just being fucking weird. Which is understandable considering most indie devs have to be some level of insane
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My favorite piece of tumblr linguistics to ever come out of this site is “the horrors”. It’s delightfully evocative and also gives absolutely no information about what I’m talking about. “Sorry I can’t go out today I’m facing the horrors” am I talking about the encroaching dread and existential despair of our dystopian world? am I talking about the fact that I have to wash dishes? No one knows. It’s all horrors.
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What I do find low key funny is that in most shows/movies, when a character goes through their Traumatic Incident™️, they're almost always very tight lipped and secretive about what happened to them.
However if you speak to Edwin Payne for more than 20 minutes, not only will he tell you that he was in Hell, he'll give you a time scale and recommendations for restaurants there. He's leaving catty reviews on TripAdvisor. He's the Edwardian equivalent of a vlogger who had a bad time at a starbucks and has to make a 40+ minute call out video. Conceptually he should be Broody and Mysterious but he's fundamentally too much of a gay little bitch to keep shit to himself.
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