#it’s the religious trauma isn’t it?

[morallygaywarden]

Can we talk about the romancing Leliana in Dragon Age Origins to romancing Shadowheart in Baldur’s Gate 3 pipeline?

[z-1-wolfe]

happy pride :3 i offer religious trauma

[tav-marcio-leles]

Ohhh, I'm rereading Mystra's entry in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide... and this detail:

This means Gale was punished for trying to restore and preserve what he thought was a lost piece of Mystra's magic. Gale being Mystra's ex-lover put aside. He as her follower, she his goddess, was punished for attempting to do the one foundational rule of her faith.

I'm seething and so sad at the same time.

Edit: I used the word punish loosely, as in, toxic/abusive people will take any small mistake or action and twist it into something they can take advantage of. This post was also largely from the stand point of a toxic deity rather than a toxic partner, but both takes are valid here. Especially with the, “you didn’t stay compliant so now I’m giving you the silent treatment” part of it—from a god and a partner perspective.

[venomosityt]

Petition for people to make wolfwood sillier and more of a weirdo please and thank you!!

[maceofpentacles]

this is going to be a controversial take and i don’t know who needs to hear this, but just because you have religious trauma doesn’t mean you have the right to go and demonize everyone from that particular religion.

your trauma is yours and yours alone. you don’t have to “make it everyone’s problem” like how some of y’all put it. trauma is something you try to work through and eventually Get Over. not hold onto for the rest of your days as an excuse to be bitter towards an entire group of people.

sure you can criticize the institution that wronged you but lumping every single person of x faith or y faith together and then proceeding to bash them, shit on them, or overall just be a nasty person towards them is not right.

[spooky-dice]

btw everything going on with kristen and cassandra is good and in-character you just don’t know her like i do lol

[latenightsleeper]

Sinner is the Wolf

The God I pray too does not exist, I know but still I call out. I need someone bigger, older, wiser and better to cry out too but the ones who would answer fall silent, so I call out to a paper doll made in their absence - Tank

[zaacataac]

Percy Reed really has one of the worst cases of homeschooled pastor’s kid syndrome I’ve seen since I looked in the mirror

[rain-raindr0ps]

Eva and the snake 🐍

[grimxark]

I keep thinking about the fact Nyon’s destruction is one of the main reasons Optimus got the Matrix and consequently why Metroplex woke up. i think about it being possibly a major religious central. The Acroplex possibly being a temple dedicated to religion and study. something that should have been and possibly was considered a safe haven and a sanctuary being turned into a symbol of death and despair. A last resort for the desperate.

[againstthegrainphoto]

You ever stand over your father’s grave in tears and have your mom try to use him to make you believe in her fairy tales??

Truly think we’ve hit a new low.

Unfuckingbelievable.🥺

[anomanxious]

can we talk about the weird Christian undertones of keeper of the lost cities for a sec?? I feel like I should make a whole post once I re read but I can’t be the only one that’s noticed this right

like some of the weird prolife sentiments? that really can’t be interpreted any other way right??? The super idealized gender roles and values of elves? Elvin purity culture straight up?? the role of like a creator that crated you for a purpose and a plan??

also I feel like in particular kotlc is extremely popular with certain religious groups?? like this is the only fandom anyone has tried to evangelize me in??

And I mean it’s inevitable that any western media has some sort of Christian undertones, Christianity has ingrained itself into our culture (to the point where I don’t think people realize all the weird side effects of this particularly on how we as a society view everything around us ANYWHO)

I don’t want to offend anyone, but it just makes me feel super weird lol. I’m catholic and have a stupid amount of religious education (love the Dominicans) so I probably should shut up. :’) this is like partially satire idek it’s just something I’ve noticed. I don’t think it’s a thing with just Ya fantasy either, this is the only series I’ve thought this about.

[atsadi-shenanigans]

Oomph. I’m getting very close to writing the scene that I started Feeding Alligators for. Astarion inviting Tav (Eleanor) for sex so he can secure protection, but Eleanor, in a brand new world and fully dependent on this group, is demisexual. And her entire experience with sex (outside of massive religious trauma/shame) is “had a friend then they wanted sex but I didn’t so they ghosted me” is now faced with THAT dilemna. And neither of the two realize what the other is asking of them, and the consequences of their choices.

😬

We’re uh, we’re gonna get angsty.

[itcanbesour]

James griffin HC except it’s based off of him being Arab , sorry in advance for any spelling or grammar errors LMAO

James isn’t all that connected to his culture as he’s like people to believe. Whenever he has people ask him questions about his culture he simply just freezes up. Because what is he supposed to say? Explain to them that his parents never took the time to properly teach him Arabic or literally anything else? That the reason his Arabic is so broken and misunderstood is because he was unable to learn it by himself without the help and support from his family?

He already feels so disconnected from it. It tears at him constantly, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t proud being Arab because of course he is. James just wishes he could say he’s proud of being Arab because speaking Arabic helped bring him closer to the people he loves. (He will continuously watch as his cousins, family and ‘friends’ make fun of him for being so disconnected.) (that major disconnection will soon tear him away from them entirely.)

Of course as he gets older he slowly starts to educate himself on the history, the dances, food, music, anything that he can get his mind on. However, it’s just not the same as growing up learning about it and getting to experience it. Going to the small local Arabic festivals he had in his hometown isn’t the same, and honestly it never has been. He may not be able to speak Arabic so well but that doesn’t mean he didn’t understand every insulting word spilling from his mother’s mouth about him and how he isn’t knowledgeable like his older brother. ((His older brother is an OC I made for James named Sebastian/Seb,, spoiler alert he d//es))

And then he comes out. He tells his parent(s) that he’s queer and everything gets progressively worse. Lines of gossip runs through his family and suddenly almost every one of his cousins, auntys, and uncles know that he’s queer. Being born into a religious Arab family has its consequences, and unfortunately James faced every single one of them. It didn’t matter that he tried to save his family when the war struck, they didn’t want anything to do with him.

However, his older brother never left him. His older brother supported him to his very demise. That night when James discovered what had become of Sebastian was probably the first time in almost 10+ years where he prayed to what ever deity was out there to take mercy on his older brother.

I don’t head canon James has religious but id like to believe there are times where he is truly desperate for some clarity? // side note I have to many familial hc’s for James that I don’t have any set in stone. I’ve been creating them since 2020 so you can just imagine the immense amount of angst hc for his parents. What I can say for sure is that he’s never had a good relationship with his mother, and never will

Anyway!! :D

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

This is well-trodden ground by this point, but man is Good Omens cathartic for former evangelicals (hi, it’s me, a former evangelical).

One facet I personally love: heaven is also trying to end the world. Because for me, that’s not just a fun hypothetical. I’m not just imagining how the world would be different if the Bible was real. Heaven is actually, literally trying to end the world IRL.

Ok, let me give some context to that statement. Right now, there are multiple mainstream denominations of Christianity that are low-key or high-key trying to bring about the end times. They don’t usually talk about this around non-Christians or more progressive Christians because it’s, um, let’s call it “mildly offputting”. But behind closed doors, here’s some of the stuff that gets discussed in “heaven”:

Constantly sending missionaries to places they’re not wanted. There are biblical prophecies that say the word of God will reach every nation and people before the world ends. So that’s why missionaries keep throwing themselves at the Sentinel Islands, for example. This constant proselytization ranges from obnoxious to violent (ex: residential schools), but I regret to inform you that it’s the mildest entry on the “trying to speed up the end times” scale.

Geopolitical shit-stirring, especially in the Middle East. There are also prophecies about which nations are supposed to be controlling which pieces of land when the end times start. These do not match where the borders are currently. Evangelicals really want to “fix” those borders, and work very hard to gain the political power to make that happen. We are now getting into the territory of “trying to fulfill end-times prophecies makes it more likely for the world to end in real life,” because it’s actively inflaming conflict.

General apathy about life on earth. If God’s going to end the world, the humans can’t do it by accident, right? Also, what happens on earth is barely a footnote anyway. To evangelicals, the vast, vast majority of our eternal lives will be spent in Heaven or Hell. Our time on earth just decides which eternity we go to. So fears of climate change (or really any strong attempt to reduce suffering “on earth”, e.g. ending poverty) are viewed with suspicion. If someone is so worried about what happens on/to earth, they must not be a Christian… where else is their judgment clouded?

But ok, you might ask, “even if they don’t care about what happens to the world, why are they trying to speed up the end times????”

The best explanation I can give you is that the evangelicals’ god is extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily shitty, and they sort of know that last part.

If you had asked me when I was an evangelical, I would of course have said that God was loving and benevolent. I even believed that internally.

But that’s also the way you would describe a dictator, if you lived under them. And this is an all-powerful, all-knowing dictator who can see even the contents of your own mind. Who has the power to punish you and everyone you know for eternity. Who might be as merciful as the progressive Christians believe, but you really can’t count on that when the stakes are so high. Besides, when you read the entire Bible — not just the popular bits — it doesn’t really paint a picture of a merciful god.

So you call God loving, even internally, and you do the things God wants to happen, even if you’re setting up the end of the world.

You try to save as many people as you can, smuggle as many people into Heaven as you can. Even if it makes life miserable “on earth”, even if it risks all life “on earth”, because “earthly” lives are temporary anyway, and you’d never forgive yourself if any of them got thrown into Hell.

You sometimes lose hours of sleep feverishly praying for God to soften the hearts of your nonbeliever friends.

You live under an evil, inescapable, lovecraftian deity who demands to be described as good instead, insists that it will all make sense in the end.

You know all this subconsciously, that God is a monster. But this is the world you’re stuck with, not the world you want it to be. So this analysis never, ever bubbles up into conscious thought… except when you’re imagining what nonbelievers think your god is like.

You’ve been doing that a lot lately, more and more. After all, you have to understand their point of view in order to reach them!

You would never actually agree with them, of course. It’s not safe. It’s not true.

But you can imagine what it would be like if you did.

This is the best you can do.

[astral-catastrophe]

One thing I’ve never experienced as someone raised religious is rapture anxiety. So many people stressed over the rapture and what would happen. But I am an anxiety filled person, and I never stressed about not being taken during the rapture. Even at young ages it was common for me to be thinking of my “escape plans” be the plan from a room, situation, conversation, confrontation, and even the damn rapture. Even as a young kid I was filled with so much spite that I thought I could escape the rapture