#the ask and the answer

[mysterycitrus]

Some of the responses to your dick social media post are so… like I can buy that he might have social media accounts on like twt/ig for himself but they’re so dead. Their main purpose is to have grabbed his name to prevent an impersonation issue. At most he occasionally posts about whatever the latest WE charity effort is but I think even that’s a stretch given how much he refused to publicly associate himself w Bruce in NW96; an argument could be made that it’d be impossible to do that now given the Internet but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I could also see him having a NW twitter for similar reasons but again, v dead. It’s exclusively (extremely rare) PSAs, but nothing abt specific people or groups or anything that could encourage outside interference on a case or anything. No pics of him, all extremely impersonal. Definitely no thirst traps or regular funny posts or anything, because Jesus Christ he’d never do that.

people reading that post apparently:

[puppiiiowo]

More Camp Camp Chaos Walking au doobles and a comic 😎😎😎😎🤓🤓🤓🤓😫 im gonna blend them up

[mossizi]

Goji and Shimo interacting?

[the-knights-who-say-book]

i finally started reading murderbot and i am hooked. do you know where i can find the short stories?

yep! Compulsory, the prequel short, is on Wired Magazine

and Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, which takes place after Exit Strategy, is on Tor.com

enjoy!

[odessa-castle]

Thank you again for the absolute glory that has been NLTS Part 1. I have enjoyed every word immensely so far, and can't wait to see more of it when you pick it up again. In the interim, if you're still accepting ficlet prompts for this verse, I will surprise absolutely nobody by saying that I would love to see more of Astarion having a bad time, if it so moves you.

Consider me so moved!

This is safe for work, technically, but the vibes are unpleasant. Content warnings for references to offscreen torture, and for Cazador being, well, himself. This is set sometime shortly after the end of Part One.

~~~

Cazador trails a claw down each knob of Astarion’s spine. It’s a worse feeling, somehow, than the pliers. “My foolish child,” he says. “What am I to do with you, if you will not learn?”

Answering is a trap. Not answering is a trap. If Astarion still had his fingernails, he’d dig them into his palms; as it is, clenching his fists only sends raw bolts of pain shooting up his arms, and he bites his lip to keep from crying out. It doesn’t matter, really. This is going to go the same way that it’s gone the last – however many times. Astarion’s lost track of how often Cazador’s gone through this cycle of compelling answers out of him, punishing Astarion when the answer displeases, and then, once Astarion’s screamed enough to satisfy him, returning to the same damned questions as before.

If Cazador wants a different answer, he should let Astarion bloody lie about it for once, but then Astarion wouldn’t be bringing all these punishments on himself, now, would he?

Cazador seizes Astarion by the hair, yanks his chin up from the table, forces Astarion to look into the red depths of his eyes. “I ask you again,” he says. “Do you still love Wyll Ravengard?”

The command hooks itself in his chest, drags the answer out of Astarion’s unwilling throat. It isn’t fair that Cazador gets to hear this, over and over, when Astarion never got the chance to tell Wyll –

“Yes,” he says. He can’t look away. He swallows, braces himself as best he can for Cazador’s next eruption of fury. (He can never brace himself enough, even after all these years.)

A cold smirk curls on Cazador’s lips, this time. “Perhaps we should go about this lesson a different way,” he says. “I cannot help but think back to the last time you fancied yourself in love. It was during our first decade together, was it not?”

No. Not the tomb. Not again – “Please, Master,” he begs, “please don’t make me go back there, please, I’ll be good, I promise, I swear I’ll obey –”

“Your promises are as empty as your head,” Cazador snaps. “But you misunderstand me. I was thinking not of the tomb, but of that darling boy of yours. You were dreadfully fond of him, I recall.”

He – yes. He had been. He remembers fragments: warm, callused hands; a dark mop of curls; the softened consonants of southern Faerun. His trade had something to do with travel, didn’t it? A sailor, perhaps, or a merchant, or a caravan guard? 

“What was his name, again?” Cazador’s eyes glitter with malice. He gives Astarion’s curls another wrench. “Surely you remember, don’t you? You gave up so much for him, after all. He must have been important to you. You must have cherished him, in your way.”

Astarion furrows his brow, runs through the ruined corridors of his memory for any sign, any signal. He would have known the boy’s name. He must have known the boy’s name. 

“Perhaps there is some pity left for you in me yet, boy,” Cazador says, in a tone that indicates anything but. “Tell me that man’s name, and I shall allow you to return to the dormitories for the night.”

Astarion swallows, his throat working soundlessly. There must be more he remembers. He forces himself to cast his mind back. His name began with a P, didn’t it? Or a V, maybe. Was it a T? And he had freckles across his nose. Astarion can’t recall their color, or the exact tone of his skin, but he kissed those freckles, and the boy laughed. Or does that memory belong to another man, another year?

“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? Say it.”

“Yes, Master,” Astarion whispers. “I’ve forgotten.”

At last, Cazador releases his grip on Astarion’s hair. Astarion presses his cheek to the table, stares at a bloodstain on the walls.

“Oh, my child,” Cazador says. He strokes the curve of Astarion’s cheek with his thumb. “We are eternal, you and I. For creatures such as we, who know true permanence, these fancies cannot last. That boy from centuries ago is dust now, forgotten to all who knew him – including you. And so, too, shall Wyll Ravengard fade, until he is but the shadow of a thought.”

Astarion wants to deny it, wants to shake his head, wants to slap Cazador’s hand away. But with the weight of time bearing on him like this, it’s impossible to move.

“How fortunate, then, that you shall never fade,” Cazador says. “And neither will I. Now, then. Shall we begin again?”

[themelodyofspring]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

July 16, 2023 - Cool Colors

[spimmed]

to all my chaos walking fans here is stuff i drew but never posted while i was gone hi👋👋sorry for abandoning my bffs

The video is the funniest thing ive ever made sorry (it suppsed to be ben and 1017 btw)

[sunflowernoob]

My most recent chaos walking art^_^ !!!

[oopshidaisyy]

Tell us about your Steddyhands proxy war fic!

it’s only really a germ of an idea at this point, but it goes like this: post s2e7, stede and izzy go home from the bar together. izzy’s a bit Weird About Ed while it happens, but stede shrugs it off: of course izzy is Weird About Ed. stede is, too.

but then ed comes back. stede expects him to be angry about stede’s tryst with izzy, but ed’s—something other than angry. he says stede can keep seeing izzy, if he wants. so now stede’s sleeping with both of them. and it’s great! he loves ed, and he loves going to bed with izzy, and for a few days it seems like everything’s coming up stede.

unfortunately, it turns out, ed is Weird About Izzy

ed and izzy, in all this, are still on tentative ground with each other. they’re talking to each other, but barely. it doesn’t help that they keep running into each other going in and out of the captain’s quarters because of stede’s bad scheduling.

but in bed, ed and izzy will not fucking shut up about each other. at first stede is 100% on board with it—he’s attracted to them both, and it’s hot. but as time goes on it starts to feel like ed and izzy are using stede as an outlet for their own, edizzy brand of sexual tension (“fuck me like i’m him”, “show me what he does for you” etc.) they’re also blatantly competing with each other: stede fast is running out of non-bitten skin on his neck, and his libido is actually struggling to keep up with the whole arrangement.

he’s at once blindingly horny about the whole thing but also increasingly aware that ed and izzy are Weird About Each Other. so at a certain point stede invents steddyhands. and you can guess where it goes from there 😉

[jinjuomo]

Art trade for @puppiiiowo!

[knightofthenewrepublic]

Just finished the Chaos Walking series recently. Was anyone else really scared Mayor Prentiss was going to turn out to be Todd's biological father. Because there were times I thought they were gonna go there.

[mysterycitrus]

why does jason use the elephant to represent himself? i assumed it was to represent dick until i think you mentioned somewhere that it was him as robin, which i was kind of confused about. is it because he was fulfilling dick's old role as robin? or a callback to his original origin? i reread wolf king and got really curious

the elephant is for dick — jason constructed the altar in remembrance of himself as robin by honouring those he thinks grieved his passing. u are remembered by the people who knew u, and all that, so the reasons for the altar are less linear and more nebulous;

although jason can’t quite vocalise the significance of the elephant, even in his own head —

i thought how everyone subconsciously associating dick with elephants to the point of emotionally spiralling was fun. then in turn, jason gives the elephant to a freshly seventeen year old dick grayson, a sign of mourning for a boy who no longer exists. etc etc.

the altar was originally gonna stick to just the people at the funeral (babs and jim, particularly) but then it broadened a little to include more people jason knew in his first life. there were some people i cut for simplicities sake (nocturna and rena as examples) but yeah. bruce is excluded for obvious reasons. it also means that when dick gives jason a bluejay figurine in return, it’s literal a call and answer.

like, a small token representing dick’s own grief. and jason, in return, cannot bare to look at it for long

[puppiiiowo]

Hello Chaos Walkign fans. I have a lot of grub to deliber

[mossizi]

Shin is not beating the baby allegations (*^^*)♡

They'll never beat the baby allegations.

[the-knights-who-say-book]

I blame you. I read the first two Scholomance books in days, and just spent 3.5 hours devouring the Thief. I lost this afternoon and I Blame You.

lost: 1 afternoon

gained: 1 thiefy boi

it's a really good deal imo 😌

also, i'm so excited you read Scholomance, those books fuck, and — you read the first two? meaning you've paused on book 2's cliffhanger? you're so strong. or suffering so much, depending

i love Golden Enclaves soooooo much, it's really the book that makes you go "OH that's what this trilogy is about." the realizations Naomi Novik sets you up for... it's so well done. the worldbuilding shaping the plot is so perfect

Scholomance is really one of those books where the world matters. it can't take place in some other fantasy or urban fantasy world, it's this one and I love that

Queen's Thief and Scholomance are such top tier series and I'm so excited for you

[odessa-castle]

NLTS might just be one of my favorite fics of all time. The characterizations, the banter, the tension - it's all 10/10 (and I loooove all the little nods to Shakespeare).

Your Cazador is truly menacing and has such a looming presence for a character who doesn't appear much on the page. You mentioned in an earlier ask that you deliberately built Cazador and Astarion's dynamic on the emotional language of intimate partner violence (which I think is so heartbreakingly accurate). If you feel comfortable, could you talk a little more about that choice, why you made it, and/or how it shaped your writing?

Beyond excited for part two!!

Thank you so much! NLTS has come to mean a lot to me, and I'm glad this story means something to other people, too.

As far as Cazador and Astarion's dynamic and IPV goes, I think I did mention in the tags that I had a lot to say on the subject, and I do, but I'm going to put it under a cut for fairly obvious reasons. Read on at your discretion.

So! Vampires. You can do a lot of things with vampires, and with the sire-childe relationship in particular. I'm not going to do a whole scholarly review here or anything, but suffice to say that it is inherently, to some degree, a relationship based on power and control, and the transgressive nature -- the blurring of boundaries between parent and lover, the interplay between sex and death, etc. -- is part of the horror and part of the appeal. Also, biting is sex, and the issues of consent arising from the former are extrapolated onto the latter. Again, there's a lot of room to play with metaphor here, depending on the story you want to tell, but if it's not kinda fucked up, then why even bother?

Astarion and Cazador's relationship is likewise one where a number of different lenses can come into play, depending on what you're interested in exploring. I do think one of the draws of Astarion's story is the way that it takes certain conventions that pop up around vampires and strips the layer of metaphor away -- Astarion's sexual abuse is explicitly a part of his story in a way that I (and many others) didn't expect to see presented so frankly. And I knew I wanted to do some of that metaphor-stripping myself when I wrote this.

The fantasy/supernatural elements let you really go to some extremes when you're writing about Astarion's abuse, and Cazador is awful enough that almost any horror you can come up with is something he'd plausibly do to Astarion. And there are some evil geniuses in this fandom. The things I've seen people do with torture and body horror, with mind control, with sheer sexual depravity -- chef's kiss. I love you guys. I don't think that's where my strengths as a writer necessarily lie, though, and it wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of either theme or tone for this story. I wanted both Wyll's and Astarion's loneliness and low self-worth to be grounded in something really emotionally recognizable, in part so they could recognize these things in each other, and I wanted to show off the...quieter moments of their trauma, almost. The critical voices they've internalized; their self-censoring and self-deprecation; the things they've normalized that really shouldn't be normal, actually.

I'm not going to get too deep into the nature of my interest in IPV. Suffice to say that I have both personal and professional experience in that area, and that like all artists, I bring pieces of myself into the things I create. What I can say is that I don't think I've ever encountered an IPV survivor who didn't experience some form of emotional abuse as part of that power and control relationship, and that a lot of survivors have talked about how that can be the hardest thing to recover from, because it gets so deep inside your head. It warps the way you view yourself; it distorts the way you see the world. You carry your abuser's voice with you, whether or not they're there. And it's not easy to make it go away. It's not easy to make the emotional conditioning go away, to disentangle the survival mechanisms you've had to develop once you no longer actually need them to survive. These things hold true with, like, basically every form of ongoing abuse, they're not necessarily unique to IPV, but they're a big part of IPV nonetheless. (And they're certainly things we see from a lot of the companions in-game, Astarion very much included. Gotta love how his immediate response to you initiating the breakup conversation is "did I do something wrong?")

I do know that discussions of the exact nature of Cazador's abuse of Astarion can get, uh, fraught. I do think Cazador's sexual objectification and possessiveness of Astarion are, well, text, and Cazador certainly uses other people as proxies to enact sexual violence on Astarion. I didn't include, and don't plan to include, any outright sexual contact between them on-page because I think the point comes across clearly enough without it (and because jesus, enough stuff happens on-page in NLTS, there needs to be a balance if I don't want to turn the story into one giant downer). For me, the crux of their dynamic lies in one of Astarion's first descriptions of Cazador: a man obsessed with power -- not political power, but power over people.

Cazador might think of himself as rational and in control of his own actions and passions -- a lot of abusers will tell you that they're just being logical, you're the one bringing your emotions into everything -- but in reality, he is obsessed with his control over Astarion. When he feels like that control is being threatened, he sees it as a direct assault on his own self-image and power and masculinity, and he takes it out on Astarion to convince them both that Astarion still belongs to Cazador. I don't think Cazador wants Astarion's love, necessarily; I don't think he knows what love actually is, anymore. I think he wants Astarion's true submission -- and he's never going to get that, because Astarion obeys him out of fear, not trust, and trust is what submission actually requires. (As is choice, which is also a thing that Cazador does not and will not give Astarion.) Basically, the closer Wyll and Astarion get, the more Cazador gets caught up in these dominance games, and those are ultimately him pissing on a lamppost rather than him accomplishing anything.

And I do write him as fixated on Astarion to a degree that he isn't with the other spawn. He doesn't really care about Dalyria taking Branwyn as a lover, for example, because whether rightly or wrongly, he doesn't perceive that as a threat to his control over her (or as a threat to his own self-image); he could tell her to stop, and she would, without him needing to compel her obedience. But Cazador doesn't feel as secure of his ownership over Astarion, for good reason, and that plus his sexual obsession makes him act Totally Normal about all this.

In NLTS, Cazador is, generally, not reacting to what Wyll and/or Astarion are actually doing. He's reacting to perceived threats to his ego, whether or not those threats have any basis in reality. Cazador breaks Astarion's rib because he wants to break Astarion's rib. It's not even sensible as a punishment, but it makes Cazador feel powerful, and it makes Astarion feel worthless. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he makes Wyll's gift to Astarion all about himself instead because it's a way of soothing his ego, and because, at that point, he's still thinking of Wyll as an easily-controlled dupe. Things change once Wyll duels Lord Andoril -- Cazador's proxy and mouthpiece -- over Astarion, and wins. It doesn't matter what Astarion did or didn't do. It matters that, to Cazador, someone publicly challenged his ownership of Astarion and got away with it, and Wyll is the kind of threat that (at this point) Cazador can't simply have killed and be done with it. The fallout for Cazador's business prospects isn't great, sure, but it's also not really what he cares about most. But really, the thing most getting in the way of Cazador's political ambitions in this story is...Cazador himself. Even if he'd tell you otherwise, because Cazador's not exactly self-aware.

This is also the point where Cazador being low-key annoyed that Wyll wants Astarion for something other than his body turns into Cazador becoming Big Mad about that fact, because Cazador cannot handle the idea of Wyll laying claim to some part of Astarion that he himself doesn't have access to. (Yes, this is a really fucked-up way for him to frame the fact that Wyll, you know, sees and values Astarion as a person. But well, Astarion is not and never has been a person to Cazador.) On some level, Cazador isn't wrong about this, either -- Wyll genuinely is a threat to his control over Astarion. But because Cazador is a petty, jealous little tyrant of a man who doesn't understand love, he catalogues this threat as Astarion offering his submission to another man. Astarion having his own autonomous wants and desires is, obviously, not something that crosses his mind. When Wyll is exiled, Cazador fully gives himself over to his inner green-eyed monster, and abandons all pretense of self-control or calculation. Cazador forcing Astarion to enjoy -- or well, take physical pleasure in -- his own rape is, among other things, Cazador trying to brute-force Astarion's submission.

The thing about power and control relationships is that the abuser never really feels secure in them. Nothing is ever good enough; everything can become a new ego threat. Cazador is alone, and he's miserable, and really, he's made himself that way.

One commenter really hit the nail on the head in Chapter 14: I was like "oh now wyll won't be a useful political tool," as if Cazador was some kind of evil political mastermind, rather than an evil horrible monster. There is, indeed, an evil political mastermind in NLTS -- but it's Enver Gortash, not Cazador Szarr. Gortash does more in half a chapter than Cazador does in basically the entire fic. In NLTS, Cazador is not a monster because he's a powerful and terrifying supernatural being -- although he is also that. He's a monster because he's a jealous tyrant who can't see past the tip of his own nose. And honestly, I think that makes for a scarier villain.