#latent-thoughts

[kingofattolia]

Okay. Give Sabine a lightsaber? Nice. I can dig it. Mandalorians have a long history of using (one particular) lightsaber to great effect regardless of Force sensitivity. Plus lightsabers are cool and I support characters being as cool as possible.

Give Sabine the FORCE suddenly in a moment of great need? When she's NEVER before even once exhibited Force sensitivity despite training with the Darksaber with Kanan and Ezra, in which situation NO ONE ever so much as suggested "hey Sabine, you might be Force sensitive"? Over 4 entire seasons of TV? When she's NEVER before even once exhibited Force sensitivity despite apparently training with Ahsoka for some time? No. That's coolness over continuity, and it's sloppy.

[meraki-yao]

Taylor's interview with Talter Magazine

Also idk if it's just my device but there might be an issue with the audio? You need to listen with earphones 😅

[catofoldstones]

“They’re making the dance about Alicent and Rhaenyra when it’s supposed to be between Aegon and Rhaenyra!!!!!” buddy, the source material is called the Princess and the Queen, and you won’t like who the princess or the queen is, but one point at a time

[ruthlesslistener]

girl help i'm thinking about Them(tm) again (pk/lurien/wl)

[tciddaemina]

the feral desire to write a SQQ pov svsss fic by with the skills narration style a la harry du bois

[guppybycharlybliss]

merry homestuck day. here's jade strider dirkways

[not-poignant]

@hellish-cleric replied to your post “I think it will come as no surprise to anyone that...”:

Yeah, everyone in my party, plus most of the players in my d&d group *hated* Astarion as soon as they met him. Meanwhile, I'm Team Ride or Die for Astarion. I'm a little confused at all the hate he gets.

​Oh actually I can answer at least some of this!

He's an obviously camp character who was in a gay relationship (a forced gay relationship but w/e) in an AAA game that is mostly going out to dudebros, and frankly the people who overwhelmingly hate him or kill him immediately the most are straight guys. (The biggest complaints for BG3 are not actually the bugs, but the LGBTQIA+ rep, including being able to have a nonbinary character, or trans character). Within that context, there was already latent Astarion hate in the community that was easy for everyone else to pick up on. So some of it is honestly straight up homophobia!

Then on top of that they gave him PTSD over being saved by someone who then tortured him for 200 years and enslaved him in exchange for that rescue, so he reacts badly every time you save someone, because he doesn't trust that.

And then on top of that he's a complete chaos gremlin. After all, he was tortured and forced to torture people for 200 years, and just about no one maintains much of an ethical backbone after that kind of treatment.

And I think the combo of 'so much of the (guy) community hates Astarion so there's already a background vibe that predisposes people to being suspicious of him' and 'he's camp which hooks into the homophobic folks who don't like that' AND 'he keeps disapproving of me when I do heroic things' (which is a lie, he doesn't always disapprove, and sometimes he actually approves, it depends a lot on context) just kind of turns a lot of folks off him.

He's the only character in the whole story who will actually take you aside privately and comfort you if you do a sexual thing with an NPC later in the game and choose dialogue options that say you were disgusted by doing the thing. He literally takes you aside and starts joking and then is like 'actually... I know what that's like, and I'm so so sorry you had to go through that.'

Dude's fun to meme, hilarious to meme, but he's also the only character who comforts you after you get sexually assaulted/harassed, and in an extremely genuine, 'no strings attached' way. I'm ride or die for that fucker, and I laugh at the folks that turfed him because a bunch of dudes laid a path they walked down.

Like don't get me wrong, some folks just hate him because of the way he looks, the constant disapproval if you're playing a Very Good Character is frustrating, or they have no use for a rogue (they hate loot or maybe they're playing a rogue themselves), or because he can be naff in a battle if you spec him badly / don't know how to spec him out, or for a lot of super understandable reasons! Like, if you never talk your way out of situations, hulk smash a lot in battles, and save people, you're going to get his disapproval AND he won't be as useful in those battles. If you don't sneak around picking off folks, and just go in and smash everyone, he's not as useful as Gale and Wyll who have good AoE, or Lae'zel and Karlach who have amazing 'Hulk Smash' abilities.

I'd avoid him too if I was playing a character who couldn't persuade/deceive/intimidate my way out of situations (which is the best and easiest way to earn his approval), and I might be like 'I don't like Astarion' because of it. He doesn't fit my playstyle! I can't stand Lae'zel for example, because I just don't vibe with 'killing the weak and no one is equal' as a political stance!

But some of it re: Astarion is literally 'a lot of folks are implicitly homophobic and he's easy to hate.'

Frankly I think Dorian (from Dragon Age: Inquisition) would have received a lot more of this too if he'd been more morally questionable as a character when you first meet him. But they made him a 'good' queer so he got more conditional acceptance (and even then, he still got a lot of hate initially!!!)

I am very fortunate that everyone I know personally absolutely love him, and I'm surrounded by a lot of Ride or Die Astarion fans in my personal circle/s both offline and irl and that makes me so incredibly happy.

[pencilofawesomeness]

Ever notice that Frosch wears a frog onesie that is based on the frogs that only live in Edolas? Because I just did.

Lmao I'll be honest, I completely forgot about that thing. I had to google it to even remember. I don't think it looks that alike?? Aside from being vaguely frog-shaped and pink. And making colored variants of animal patterns, real or not, is a common thing. Nevertheless it could be a fun easter egg XD

[atiedupmoth]

me toward anyone i interact with for .2 seconds: please be secretly in love with me. i probably wont reciprocate but please be secretly in love with me. what if my friend wants to fuck me in the chilis bathroom. i'm going to keep that chance in mind as we eat at this chili's.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

.

[personal and vaguely unnecessary whining underneath, just a bunch of undigisted and personal thoughts about my problems with Creation and Art that mostly just concern myself, but here they are anyway woooo!!!!]

feeling some kind of way about having to concede my artistic calling truly is in fanwork, but, yeah. all of my creative energy really tends towards fanwork, and like. not even the popular kind really, but the long, cerebral, pretentious kind of fanwork that is impossibly costly to produce yet comes with an inherently very limited audience at the end of the road. but every time I try to do something else, something "original", I get frustrated and I feel like I have nothing to say, or that what I have to say isn't really worth saying/that I'm only kind of doing this out of fear of being perceived as illegitimate rather than because of actual passion. I have original ideas, but I don't even really like most of them. it's weird, to have your inner creative fire being so intricately connected to something you will never have legal control over, something you can't really show off/take actual pride in, and something that is, by and large, decried as a waste of talent or time or proper artistic merit.

but yeah, it's the shape of my brain. it's what it is. I'm just not sure how to connect this reality to the rest of my creative/career frustrations. weird place to be, don't love that my brain chose to be like this honestly.

[sarcasticmudkip]

Hello octopathers I spent all of last night and this morning impulse crafting a Debuffer/BP Support Thief OC with imposter syndrome

[dabideku-tododeku-bakudeku-2023]

Dabi crying blood...odd isn't it? He claims he cannot cry anymore, but the thought of facing Endeavor, on seeing his Dad again, moves him to tears, but instead of the pure tears of the innocent, he can only cry blood. It seems to me that this scene shows that regardless of his torture, he CAN still feel pain. There might be regret there too, but he can't go back now; Todoroki Touya is dead, and Dabi is the only thing that exists now.

[veyette]

Global AU post

[heartofstanding]

One of the many things I love about writing Henry POV is how his subconscious is just... completely fucked in a way that manages surprises me. Case in point, he started imagining how Mary would react to what he considers to be the Hal's Face Hole Problem (that is, how people are going to judge Hal once they see his scar) and ended imagining she'd dump his arse over it:

Why do you need to manage Harry, he imagines Mary saying, her small body tucked against him, why must he be managed? You don’t understand, he would tell her, you don’t know what it’s like to rule a kingdom, to be seen and judged. You don’t know how men would see me – see him – once they know how his face (your face, he wears your face) has been marked out. It’s a stain, a blot – people will read him by its mark. We must prepare for that. Mary would bristle, pull away from him. She would take herself from his bed and go to Harry.

[variousqueerthings]

big fan of characters (and historical people who through process of storytelling have become more character than history) who become so mythologised in their narrative that they loop around in my head and can be read as neurodivergent in some way

[quibbs126]

Something I just thought of, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the Tropical Fruit Dragons we see have taken on Cookie form because the areas they inhabit/possibly the world has been getting weaker, and it now takes a lot energy to stay in their dragon forms, only using them sparingly and having to take on these smaller, weaker ones the rest of the time. Or at least that’s what I understand from Pitaya

My question is, we can assume the North and South Dragons from the Dark Cacao Kingdom Are in Dragon form Right now, yeah? I mean, technically nothing tells us one way or the other, but given The Sorrow of Dark Cacao Cookie shows them in dragon form, I have to assume they are (though I suppose it could simply be for visual cues but regardless). What then about the Dark Cacao Kingdom is keeping them so powerful that they can retain these forms?

Maybe I’m overthinking this, I mean I know Dragon’s Valley has dragons in it that keep their normal form, so perhaps it only affects those of a certain power, but also at the same time, these two dragons likely were at a similar power level to Pitaya, given that their fighting was destroying the land, as well as the significance of Dark Cacao stopping their fighting

There’s also the Red Velvet Dragon, but I’m pretty sure that’s a Cake creation, and thus those same rules don’t apply