#managed it near me

[iknowwhereyousnoozeatnight]

happy birthday to him <3

[ilonacho]

ALL! Grown Up!

[tragedry]

the sbg kids, but instead of them getting trapped into the phantom dimension they get trapped into a corn maze.

[miusato]

May I offer you two Shinjiham paintings in this trying times???

[wanderingswampbeast]

Long Post: Why I Don’t Like The Drow

I’ve been ranting about this to a friend on discord (a lot of points I make will come from him) but I’ve finally figured out what my issue with the drow is outside of inherently evil groups being dumb.

The drow are boring. Drow lore is less of a dive into a unique culture and more of a list of fucked up things they do. Like, I cannot name a single interesting aspect of typical drow society that does not directly involve murder, sexism, or slavery, or Lolth. And even then, most of those things are written about in an incredibly bland fashion with them.

The Drow don’t really have much depth to them, and are just kind of evil for evil’s sake (or “because Lolth said so”). They do slavery, but the only real purpose of doing slavery for them is “because Lolth said so”. It isn’t for cheap labor, it’s to be more evil. They betray each other purely because that’s what evil people do. They’re misandrist, not for any real societal reason, but because Lolth hates men. There’s none of what would make slavery an interesting topic or story element, no justification for why they should be allowed to commit one of the worst injustices possible, no real economic reason for it. They just do it because Lolth says they should, and from a writing perspective it hammers home the fact that they’re evil. They aren’t evil because they enslave and murder, they enslave and murder because they’re evil, if that makes any sense.

Them being written as comically evil as they are also hurts them from a worldbuilding perspective. They’re so reliant on slaves for menial labor that the lower class of their society struggle to get jobs. Drow culture so obsessed with betrayal and dumbass house wars that even when actively under attack from the outside they sabotage each other. They’re so decadent that their buildings are held up with magic and semi regularly collapse when a spell fails. To put it bluntly, drow society feels like one that should have collapsed in a few centuries, which, funnily enough, is way longer than D&D elves live.

Their culture being so monolithic also makes writing anything about them difficult. Every drow antagonist is going to have near identical motivations, methods, and ideologies as every other drow antagonist. Every drow protagonist is going to ultimately feel very similar to Drizzt, because leaving their fucked up society to become a do-gooder is such a common backstory element that they added a whole extra god just for doing that. In fact, you can divide 90% of drow characters from any official materials into these categories:

Manservant

Ambitious male, usually a wizard (5 bucks says he has long hair and a widow’s peak)

Dommy Mommy Warcrime Woman

Drizzt Do’Urden or one of his many duplicates

Self-loathing and/or resentful Drider

And finally, their existence almost purely to be humanoid enemies you can fight at nearly any levels is just kind of lazy. This is a problem that I have with the “evil races” of a lot of fantasy but having a group that’s evil by birth just feels like an excuse to not have to write actual motivations for your antagonists. It’s the difference between “go attack this camp of soldiers because they’re part of the SkullMurder army and their general wants to use our land to build a dread fortress” vs “go attack this camp of soldiers specifically because they’re drow/goblins/orcs/the dreaded peepee-poopoo folk”. Using stuff like this just feels like an excuse to not have to write an actual antagonist since it comes pre-written in the group’s lore. This has the side effect of whenever such a group is the antagonist of the plot, the players or audience know near exactly what to expect. The orc is here to conquer, the goblin is here to steal, and the drow is here to enslave or do some dark ritual.

I’ve legitimately heard people say “well if XYZ can’t be inherently evil anymore, who will we use as bad guys?” It’s very simple: whoever the fuck we want. Write an evil queen, or a scheming wizard, or an underground slave trade network. For God’s sake, anyone can be evil, you don’t need to tie that to a specific ethnic group and write it as “they’re just like that”. Write an actual character for your antagonist.

[floatiecrow]

my honest reaction to getting a gun to beat up TOWW:

[darkeyedreamer14]

So, recently, I found an old thermos of mine

The thermos in question

And when I saw it, the first thing that came to my mind was that it would be perfect for commander Fox, so I drew it

The thermos was drawn entirely from memory, so it doesn't fully resemble the original, but that's just a minor detail

[vikvampir3]

Tfw when I realize I’ve known this whole time my dazai and general bsd hyperfixation was self destructive and I kinda don’t care

[amygdalae]

i wanna use my graphics tablet but i used the stylus to nudge a bat into a plastic cup the other night and im thinking maybe i should sanitize it somehow

[kbysh-kds]

sleep tight.

[fruitless-vain]

Today was scary

[starjunkyard]

"Im not even sure anymore if we get to choose who our friends are" There is a part of me that resents you for making me a worse person than i want to be but i am inexplicably uncontrollably drawn to you. You make me a worse person which is the last thing i want yet i want you in every way. If i could leave i would. Maybe i can but i dont want to. I have fun with you. You challenge me and you captivate me and you push me and pull and run circles around me and it makes me feel like a younger man. For the price of being a worse person i get to feel truly, wholly alive. You are the blood that runs through my veins; vital, inseparable. I was reborn when i met you and you are the womb that haunts me. You are the one person on planet earth who knows me. I wish i could leave, move on and be the man im supposed to be but my heart is tied to yours in a gordian knot. There is a part of my soul that rests in yours, magnetic. For as long as i love you i cannot be better than i am. But maybe thats something i can learn to live with. Gregory House-- I think you're worth it.

[baldurs-gate-official]

Thinking about how Astarion insisted on staying up to keep watch in the beginning of the game

Yeah, it could be because he needs to go hunt at night without anyone noticing, or because he's keeping an eye out for Cazador/his minions. But... It could also be because he's scared of sleeping/trancing in general?

He's got severe C-PTSD. I have that too. And one of the things I experience from it is a fear of falling asleep.

Sleeping is vulnerability. You're completely defenseless. It's terrifying to fall asleep when you're used to danger! And some abusers will purposefully do things to you when you sleep. I wouldn't put it past Cazador to have done something like that.

It's especially terrifying when you're sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, or as out and open as a forest. With strangers.

Add in the elvish reverie (if we assume Astarion still experiences it as he would if he were alive at his current age)... and he might even be reliving horrible memories every time he tries to rest.

(If you're unfamiliar with elvish trancing/dreaming, I made a post about it and some ways it might affect Astarion as a vampire spawn a while ago)

One of the reasons I think this could be the case is actually the other spawn, specifically what I noticed when we first meet Dalyria and Petras. At first I thought Astarion's eye bags were just a product of being undead. But... Petras, the very human looking spawn, doesn't have that. Dalyria is an elf as well, and like Astarion, she's got some of that tired sleep-deprived purple under and around her eyes.

So all this considered... I think it's very possible that Astarion has a fear of sleeping too. Or at the very least, trouble resting. Him and the other elvish spawn.

It also makes me wonder if he sleeps any better later on in the game. By Act 3 he probably feels more comfortable with you and the group. Sleeping near familiar people (especially people you're very comfortable with, but that's very dependant on your own choices in your game), and having established night time routines can make sleeping feel a little safer.

Plus by that point he's made many new memories he can visit in his reverie. Maybe instead of remembering the terrible things, sometimes he dreams of sun bathing, the first time he bit you or that bear, or any other happy memory he's created since being tadpoled.

Maybe for the first time in centuries, sleeping isn't such a terrible prospect.

[rewritingcanon]

guess whos doing their uni assignment on the cursed child

[project-sekai-facts]

I miss your analysis essay 💔💔

i'm working on another one but it's kinda long so might be a while (definitely before the end of summer though dw). Sorry I haven't done anything since the Akito one, school was kicking my ass for a few months and rn I'm prioritising some stuff for my personal blog. It's nearly done though, so I can work on essay stuff for this account again soon!

[mirroredmasquerader]

This thing that I spent much too long on