#taking the ''golden retriever'' character archetype (as in someone exciteable and friendly)

[yardsards]

the carmilla webseries (particularly s3) makes some really interesting points about amatonormativity that i think are probably accidental but still fascinate me.

like there's this intended theme of like, being so devoted to one person that you put them above everyone else, and the harms that can cause. and that theme is primarily explored through laura and carmilla's relationship, especially as a foil to the dean and her beloved. but also with lafontaine and how they kinda subvert that.

(i could write essays analyzing this, tbh)

anyway. the show primarily explores the themes of putting one person above everyone else through the lens of romantic relationships, because that's just kind of the genre they're operating under. but that (again, probably unintentionally) brings up a theme of amatonormativity. because amatonormativity expects you to have one romantic partner and to put them above everyone else, to unquestionably value them more than any of your friends.

anyway, with that background out of the way, what i'm really thinking about currently is danny in s3

there's that scene early on in the season, when danny's all evil vampire mode. and laura says that her and carmilla are "just friends". and danny threatens laura in front of carmilla and is like "surely you wouldn't mind me hurting her/would be willing to let her die to keep the talisman, if you two really are just friends"

and like, while danny is correct in her observation that laura and carmilla's feelings about each kther are clearly not platonic, her logic is absolute garbage. me and the friend i was rewatching it with were both like "??? no i absolutely WOULD still mind if someone threatened my purely platonic friend like that, you'd be a pretty garbage friend to not care". like, danny's logic in that scene is peak amatonormative nonsense.

but then. at the end of the season. it's danny's *platonic* love for kirsch that ends up connecting her back to her humanity. it's kirsch that she finally breaks free of the dean's influence to protect. kirsch that she's willing to risk it all for.

it wasn't laura, the girl she had a crush on. it was kirsch, who she had a whole thing about in the previous season about how she explicitly did NOT have any romantic towards him and 100% solely saw him as a platonic friend. it was her "just a friend" who ultimately ended up meaning everything for her.

[varjopeura]

For the D&D Ask Meme - 4, 8, 13 and 34! (And I'm SO curious about the backstory-bomb referenced in your tags, so if I can make a bonus question be, 'what happened???' then also that!)

Hoo boy, this one took a while! Also this got super long so under the cut it goes:

4. Your current campaign.

Our current campaign is also my first! We’re playing on Tal'Dorei setting with a mostly homemade storyline (as far as I know? it occurs to me I’ve never really asked). We’re only six sessions in at this point, the party is still just a bunch of nobodies stumbling around figuring out this adventuring stuff and getting to know each other.

8. Your favorite fight/encounter.

I think my favourite fight so far was the time we got our asses handed to us pretty thoroughly by a bunch of ghosts. It was terrible and delightful and something about properly losing a fight made the whole world just seem so much more real and intense. Like we are just babies when it comes to adventuring, and going ghost-hunting into a crypt that’s widely known to be cursed and deathly dangerous might not be the best idea at that point in time. Especially if your magic users have already pretty much emptied out their spell slots before going in.

But, in we went anyway! We knew to expect ghosts since we had already slain a couple on our way there, and had comprised a Genius Plan to take out the rest of them one at a time. Except the plan didn’t really work, the ghosts didn’t come at us one at a time, and they were a lot stronger than the ones we had previously encountered.

We managed to barely scratch the ghosts (the horrendous things were resistant to everything we had), half of our party was too afraid to do anything useful, and Glimmer had to carry two of her unconscious teammates out of there before we managed to flee. It was a mess, and a very stressful situation, but hey, we survived! And it felt so good to be alive afterwards!

In retrospect, the five or six times our friendly NPC informant told us the ghost are absolutely going to kill us oh-so-very-dead might have been a hint from the DM…

13. Introduce your current party.

Let’s start with the easiest one, my tiefling cleric Glimmer! She is definitely the party mom and sort of their moral compass too, constantly worrying about the safety of the others. She worries about a lot of stuff, actually, and the fact that she knows very little of the world outside of her home temple doesn’t exactly help. Though she does believe in the goodness of people and has a tendency to blindly trust anyone who looks like they know what they’re doing. For such a soft and gentle person she has a surprisingly short temper when something rubs her the wrong way, and she gets all fiery and dramatic when she’s upset.

Then there’s our human fighter Gabriel, a young man of noble origin seeking for his share of honor and glory, mainly in the form of slaying various magnificent beasts and monsters. He is highly charismatic, VERY easy to love, has exactly zero impulse control and, to be quite honest, not a lot of brains to him either. So practically he’s an over-excited golden retriever with a sword and an ability to speak in a fancy way. A good boy.

The elven rogue Varis (fun fact: his name is the finnish word for crow) is a typical thief character, a penniless city boy that’s concerned about his own survival before anything else. And, like, I’m definitely not picking favorites here, but this one’s a GOOD boy that I love. A lot. A fountain of endless curiosity, he’s quaranteed to stick his nose in every single place it doesn’t belong to, and probably steal a little bit of something interesting on his way there. Somehow his personality also works as the glue that keeps the rest of the party together - it’s pretty hard to travel alone on your own path when this one gets all up in your personal space and wants to learn about alllll of your stuff.

The gnome ranger Nuna is pretty amiable for a person who has started several conversations with the phrase “I want to destroy the civilization”. From what I’ve gathered, she seems to be on some sort of personal crusade against all kinds of mechanical constructs and just has a pretty worrisome way of wording it. She does NOT enjoy crowded cities, though finding taverns full of ale seems to alleviate her stress a bit. I’m certain she’s got some daaaaark secrets too, I can’t wait until we find out a bit more about her story.

I’d probably call our elven wizard Volyris the other Sensible Adult in the party, if he wasn’t so horribly useless when it comes to keeping the chaotic ones in control. He just gets way too much joy out of wandering around behind Gabriel and Varis and observing all the dumb shit they manage to do. Clings to his secrets like his life depended on them, even after a couple of rounds of interrogation we have learned next to nothing about him. He just… wants to know more about stuff? For no apparent reason? Because that’s what wizards do?? I’m still not quite sure if he’s to be trusted.

34. Do you tend pick weapons/spells for being useful or for flavor?

Mostly I try to find some sort of balance between the two?Though tbh in Glimmer’s case, being a light domain cleric and a tiefling is already a combo packed with so much character flavor that I barely have to do anything to add to it :D Every single bit of Glimmer’s spells and abilities is infused with fire and light, and who knows if the flames she so easily channels originate from a divine source or from her infernal bloodline! She certainly doesn’t! (Also, I can’t wait until we reach level 5 and she learns to cast Darkness as a tief ability. Being able to both bring light around her and to take it away as she wishes is going to be such a fun twist to the basic light cleric archetype.)

—

And, for the bonus question, I miiiiight have exaggerated a little bit? Specifically on the “your entire past is a lie” part. Only a small part of her past turned out to be a lie, so that makes it completely fine, right? :DSo, basically, what I knew about Glim’s backstory was that she was abandoned to a temple’s doorstep as an infant, and that it was unclear who had left her there and why. Not knowing what else to do, the temple clerics took the child in and raised her as their own. (well that’s the relevant part, let’s leave the backstory at that because this post is already way too long)

But! In the last session the party went back to her home temple, met the old priestess who was the closest thing to a mother Glimmer ever had, and had a conversation with her. And it turns out she actually knows about Glimmer’s birth mom! She was just made to promise that she’d never reveal Glimmer’s origin to anyone, and up until this point she had kept the secret to herself. We were given a name (one that Glimmer recognized instantly; she used to be the high priestess of Glim’s home temple before she was born, and now apparently her mother too? Years ago, she had abruptly left her position as the high priestess, never coming back, and there was some sort of a scandal surrounding the event, but Glim couldn’t remember any details about it.)

So instead of a mystery, Glimmer’s origin is a well-kept secret, and according to her adoptive mother the person who knows the most about this secret lives right next door to them. As it was getting kind of late at night and barging into someone’s home asking questions about missing people in the middle of the night didn’t seem like the most polite thing to do, Glim decided to leave further questions to the next morning.

And did we reach the next morning during this session? Of course we didn’t! So now I’m full of questions and theories and have to sit on them for a few weeks because of our horrible Human Adult Schedules not lining up before the end of the month. (And while Glimmer was learning about her hidden past, our rogue was preparing to go on a heist. Alone. Without even telling about his plans to the rest of the party. And his target? The captain of the fucking town guard. Like dammit Varis, if I have to spend the next session busting you out of jail instead of trying to find my long lost mother I’m gonna kick your ass So Hard.)

((And like of course I should have expected something like this coming up with Glimmer’s backstory, ‘mysterious missing parents’ is like free plot food for the DM. Glim was just so busy worrying about literally everything else that it never even crossed my mind that we might hit some pieces of her backstory in her home town :D ))