#the experience is different and you WILL have a good experience with bg3 bc its designed that way

[goldenwaves]

seeing people say playing baldurs gate 3 is better dnd than playing dnd ANNOYS me like idk if i can compare the two one is a tangible game created by hundreds of people and the other is an imaginary collaborative story you make with your friends

[howlsmovinglibrary]

Hello! I saw your response to the "5 things you could talk about for an hour" tag game, and I just wanted to say that I am in fact very interested in your perspective on how fandom/fanfic has impacted media literacy and the publishing industry, if you'd ever like to yap on Tumblr about it!

hmmm... other people have said it better than me in various different tumblr posts but I'm a yapper why not?

(under the cut to save a long post)

fandom/fanfic impacts on media literacy:

media is viewed through shipping goggles first and a critical lens second (both of them are allowed! i love my shipping goggles! but i also like having multiple tools of analysis in my arsenal!)

this also sometimes means that media devolves into relationships and 'fan service' moments, above plot or delivery of a good and satisfactory story (I'm not saying OFMD but I kind of am. I'm not saying BG3 additional content that has focused on popular characters and ships above incomplete and underwritten narratives... but I kind of am)

because fandom now also has a big purity culture kick back, and fandom has become mainstream, that means mainstream media also has a purity culture kick back (for instance, everyone performing scandalised and 'disgusted' reactions to Saltburn, when actually all that is is a... psychological thriller)

fandom/fanfic impacts on the publishing industry:

the Locked Tomb's popularisation of fic-ish writing, alongside the reylo fanfic boom (Ali Hazelwood serial numbers filed off -> romance pipeline) kind of coincided perfectly with the pandemic. as did the success of Travis Baldree's coffeeshop AU, Legends and Lattes. people wanted comfort media, but at the other end, publishing industry professionals were working from home and likely spread thin. I think this created a perfect storm for 'fast fiction' (like 'fast fashion') where basically a fanfic can be quickly changed into a book with minimal editing that doesn't matter anyway bc it provides a dopamine hit. None of this is inherently bad. I don't dislike fanfic-to-published-novel on principle. What I *hate*, is bad editing. Extremely high quality editing is what trad publishing has, in a way fic doesn't. Bc fic can be as long as you want it to be, and can linger, and can have fun - it's not designed for efficiency or quality control bc that's not the point. that being said... quality control can, in fact, improve a work's quality. but trad publishing doesn't have good editing anymore, bc the pandemic proved it didn't necessarily need it, and publishing companies love to not spend money on things, especially if it will make them a profit without that care or attention.

what i will also say, is there is a reason it's easy to file the serial numbers off. reylo fics are very far from canon, for a number of reasons. Legends and Lattes is a coffeeshop AU, without any character work. This doesn't mean they are bad. It just means they feed into a general trend of 'fic as tropes' - rather than 'fic as character study', for instance - which in turn means that romance in particular has also become 'romance as tropes' (or even 'romance as smut' which is another thing I have feelings about, bc bad editing + fiction as smut = really, really bad smut actually lads)

in general 'fiction as tropes' has then obviously been aided by tiktok as the primary marketing platform. rather than provide an explanation of your story, providing an explanation of its tropes encourages your book being read this way

another thing that has happened as a result of fic is 'queer rep' as being 'there is queer people in it' or 'there is queer romance in it'. again, not inherently a bad thing. i love a gay book. but gay and queer experiences exist on a spectrum. a book with queer MCs for the sake of having queer MCs may end up feeling tokenistic, if the writer has included queer rep for the sake of queer rep, or (and we need to admit this happens!) to be trendy!! to hit on the 'queer rep' zeitgeist!!! similarly, a queer book without any romance in it can still be queer, but gods forbid we have *that* conversation.

As I said, all of these things have been discussed in tumblr posts far better than mine. In terms of my personal experience - teaching undergraduate literature classes, this is what I've noticed:

because of fandom or social media with fandom lite edges, a lot of my students are very up-to-date on things such as intersectional feminism, gender performativity, compulsory heterosexuality, queer coding, etc. I don't need to define these terms, whereas they were defined when I was an undergrad.

however, the flipside of this is they often approach the texts I teach only with a contemporary mindset. The biggest example I have of this is Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre actually benefits from a contemporary mindset - after being heralded as feminist in the 1960s, intersectional criticisms in the 1980s/90s by postcolonial critics called out its racist treatment of Bertha Mason. BUT if I have to read another essay about Jane Eyre's relationship with Rochester being 'problematic', I will scream. Not bc I don't agree, but because criticisms of this novel need to also acknowledge that in the victorian era, such a blatant discussion of female sexual desire was radical for its time. That class and sexism was a big enough issue in the 19th century that for Jane to get to marry a man from the landed gentry on equal footing was a big deal at the time. It's fine if you decide Jane Eyre isn't feminist! but you need to prove that through multiple critical lenses and not just a jezebel-article style treatise. (for instance, one essay critiqued the male gaze in Jane Eyre... Jane Eyre was written by a woman looking very disrespectfully actually, and also... film hadn't been invented yet. while the male gaze existed in art, the normalising of female objectification, sexually, required film. also... the male gaze is a term that requires a man with eyes to be making that piece of art.)

the other biggest problem I have when teaching, is the 'queer character as queer representation' thing, and ESPECIALLY "good queer representation means morally good queer characters'. I teach Giovanni's Room. Anyone who has read Giovanni's Room, knows that the main character is both gay... and a bad person. That book isn't just talking about being gay, but about being closeted, trapped in compulsory heteronormativity, and also... 1950s racism. One of the biggest challenges for me as a teacher is to ask students "don't just tell me there's gay people in it, look at what those gay people are doing. is queerness portrayed positively or negatively? what aspects of the experience are being represented? do these aspects have value, especially when it is a queer artist making the art?"

(people also feel like they can't call a gay character mean or bad, because of the whole 'gay is inherently virtuous' part of fandom's mindset. spoilers: gay people can suck too. and are allowed to be portrayed as such in fiction, once you have a tool in your toolkit known as nuance).

anyway, aside from the fact it means i occasionally struggle to find good romance books bc I want not just well written sex but character development - which fanfic has! I'm not saying fanfic doesn't have it! but the fanfic that gets published sometimes doesn't, and certainly very rarely has both! - my teaching is absolutely where I see fandom's impact most clearly.

[capillaryspice]

Unpopular opinion rant incoming:

I did not enjoy Baldurs Gate 3

Before anything else I will admit I am biased, as strategy turn based games aren't something I'm usually into to begin with. I mostly ended up playing it because my partners and a friend are SUPER into the game and wanted to do a 4 player run. I do have 30 hours on a solo run I tried to get used to the game with, so I have a decent bit of experience with how it's supposed to run as a single player but I'm not judging companion stories or anything because I haven't completed them.

I do understand why people like BG3, and I don't wanna rain on anyone's parade for a very critically acclaimed game, but I do have some thoughts that I just need to get out of my head, so if you like the game and don't wanna hear me complain about it just scroll on ahead. If you do want to hear me complain, I'd love to hear if anyone else has had the same thoughts, because genuinely I've not really had anyone to talk to that hasn't been head-over-heels for it. (Actual thoughts under the cut)

-----------------

With that out of the way, for starters BG3 is a very impressive game. From a technical perspective, from a voice acting quality perspective, the sheer amount of tiny tiny details, etc... it is IMPRESSIVE. Too impressive, I'd almost have to say. Because, despite being impressed by it, I did not have FUN playing the game. For all its details it doesn't draw me in. For all the technical marvel, it's just too janky. It's all of the rules of DND and none of the immersion or fun

I would love to have had a functioning camera position that didn't give me whiplash whenever a new character in the combat of 20+ NPCs decides to do so much as shuffle to the left. It feels like pulling teeth when trying to select/interact with anything, god forbid a reaction happens while you're trying to attack and you just completely lose the action bc the interruption to movement pauses everything and screws u up. I'd love to be able to jump without going through two menu screens and a map to just hop over a gap(I'm never complaining about the Dark Souls jump being too complicated ever again). Also everything moves so slow, I would kill for a fucking Sprint button.

I would have liked anything approaching a streamlined combat system that didn't take a long ass time to set up a move that takes six seconds to play out, and then wait for ten minutes literally doing nothing while the rest of the NPCs in initiative whip the viewpoint around and get it stuck in walls and corpses so I can't even see what's happening while I can't do anything for the rest of the round

A lesser gripe, but just a bizarre choice to not do: Id like to hear the character voice I chose in character creation for cutscenes, instead of just background ambient lines. Like, if the last dragon age game (from 2014 mind you) can have a voiced main character with multiple voice options, this new game that has unique voice lines for every goddamn squirrel on the map and ALREADY PAID VOICE ACTORS TO VOICE THE MAIN CHARACTER TO BEGIN WITH can probably afford to do so. Hell, I'd like some background music that isn't just the tenth rendition of Down By The River in a different key. The bard music is all gorgeous, why couldn't they have reused some of those compositions as ambient music for different locations?

This is a MASSIVE game, and what they've put into it is definitely admirable, but like. Not in the ways that make a game breathable or immersive? The choices in where they've decided to dedicate the anal level of detail seems misguided from a just general player standpoint; There's some gorgeous settings in the game, but I was distracted every time by getting frustrated that I couldn't even get a more-than-vague look at any of the scenery I actually enjoyed because the camera is so limited in its angles. So I can't take a good look around what should be a beautiful temple that I'd love to see closer, but I can individually inspect every moldy apple and tax form on a random dinner table instead. It's a vast open world, but the character models have very clearly defined paths they have to stay within. The amount of unique NPCs is insane, but the mechanics themselves TREAT them as NPCs(i.e., resurrection rules), and they don't react to PCs unless ur doing Violence or Crimes (even og skyrim had NPCs have comments on if u weren't like wearing clothes, for instance). Every shelf and bag and nook and cranny are searchable, but that gets overwhelming very quickly as you have to choose between taking like an hour of real time to clear a cluttered area and possibly find something important but more likely just end up with a bajillion rotten carrots, or move on but have the anxiety of knowing you've possibly missed something vital. There's a million options you can take at any moment with any object or character, but there's rarely anything indicating what will be vital later for general world stuff. But then with the main plot (the Emperor, Raphael, the crèche) it felt very railroaded in the sense that TECHNICALLY you could try and choose between outcomes, but your choices don't actually matter because you die if you choose The Wrong Option (or end up in effectively death sentence combat) and will end up where they want you to go regardless.

BG3 isn't a game I want to spend time playing; it's not a world I can wander around and appreciate the beauty of and get lost in the soundtrack or the environments. The whole combat system is incredibly frustrating to manage, and just feels like Hurry Up And Wait. I'm not gonna knock the romance parts of the game, I've heard good things and haven't gotten far enough in any of em to have an educated opinion on, so really the only thing the game has to offer in spades OTHER than romance is replayability. Which normally I would say is a good thing, but for how long of a game it is and how non immersive the gameplay and world feel, it really just ends up being a game of fucking around and seeing how many things you can get an alternate dialogue for or create new stats around. Like, this is great for completionist folks who love collecting achievements and making the most busted crunchy math-based builds possible, but Baldurs Gate 3 to me just isn't a game I can sit down and have Fun(TM) relaxing and playing.

It's a game that I feel absolutely missed the forest for the trees.

So anyways, essay complete. I've only slept like 6 hours total in the last three days so a lot of this may or may not even make sense. But on so much sleep deprivation finishing this game and realizing I was just frustrated with it instead of actually feeling accomplished for having finished it, it was the final straw and I just needed to get the thoughts down somewhere

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk

[spicyraeman]

Well interacting with you makes my week too! **aggressive friendly fist bump**

I hope your holidays are going well 😁

Wolfheart is ending me. Can I pet that dawg? CAN I PET THAT DAWG? (https://vt.tiktok.com/ZGeN9U7kG/)

I love seeing the hairy SH art! PCOS / trans / wolf girlie, I stan all versions I see. We're not cowards here! The new band drawings are fire, still making my heartrate go jglcbxlw. And seeing the growth? Honestly it's magic to me, I think it's perfect then it becomes even more perfect and I'm just how?? How possible?

Veteran'zel, Baby'zel, Beam'zel, Horny'zel, Rat'zel, all I do is love'zel! The cheetah/dog doodle + wet rat'zel made me hiccup from laughter, we were blessed.

Buddy, Karlach's got her tail docked like the gith children, that's why! See, problem fixed **insert Flex Tape meme**

Also for Lae'zel's accent : yes, she would have such a harsh accent! As a foreign speaker, the pronunciation isn't always intuitive and is sometimes paradoxal. She probably never used some sounds, and it's hard to guess a lot of them. It's so inconsistent. I lack air in the middle of my sentences because of the tonal accentuations differences. Languages are crazy man. Lae'zel would have a stroke, struggling to say "library" with Gale correcting her.

I've been upgraded to bestie? Careful, I feel like the most specialest goblin in town now 😎

I also wanted to share with you my recent victory : I passed my exams with unexpectedly high grades! It's been 10 years since I succeeded in anything school related, I feel strangely proud and hopeful. I attribute this partly to the intense hyperfixation for BG3. I can come back to this fandom and get comfort when I feel burned out and in need of motivation. Thank you for being part of it and sharing your blorbos with us. Good soup for our cold starving souls. So yeah, you and your art matter even if you find it bleh sometimes and you doubt yourself.

I wanted to be brief but I'm incapable of shortening shit even if my life depended on it. Violently dumping my brain in your ask like I'm late on garbage collecting day. Sorry not sorry for the awkward emotional stuff. Take care of yourself, bestie ✌️

🫀🚑

Sry for answering these “backwards”, I just needed to get the conlang stuff out first before all my good braincells shut down lol

hope the holidays are going well on your end as well :]

To pet a werewolf truly is the dream isn’t it, wereshart is prob my fav hc for her it just fits so well. I've been trying really hard lately to figure out how to draw her recently bc despite the art disparity her and lae’zel are neck in neck at being my fav characters. Seeing the growth in the bass drawing really gave me that boost of confidence that I'm at least slightly getting there lol

I truly do love Lae’zel in every form, but wet rat’zel rotates in my mind more than it should, sadly its not a hc I could ever commit to considering I can’t even remember Karlach’s canon tail lmaoo I really should just hc that karlach got her tail docked at this point, that or I need to make a checklist for her so I can go through and make sure ive got all her bits when I draw her

Also Ive already posted my big rambling mess about Gith accents but yeah harsh accent lae'zel best lae'zel, it just makes sense

But yoooo big gratz on the exams! Def something to be proud of!! I can agree this fandom really is a huge motivator, I haven’t had this much drive to do anything I've been doing recently in years. Glad I could help provide a lil comfort spot full of blorbo soup for the soul lol

Dw about shortening shit as you’ve prob seen i’m prone to rambling and also every emotion I experience is awkward so that's just par for the course here.

Hope life treats you well till the next ask, peace ✌️

[honshew]

thoughts on bg3

overall, i had a lot of fun and would recommend to anyone interested! very ambitious game, and i'm amazed it exists tbh. there are so many really, really great aspects of it. however, i'm also glad to be done with it, bc i started to have less and less fun with it at the last part. which is an unfortunate place to have the worst part of the game. i really wish it wrapped up in a more satisfying way, because i became really attached to the characters and the incredibly detailed world. a shame it had to be rushed toward the end of development. it's incredible, though could have been more still.

i'm spending some time trying to figure out what i liked about the game, so this may or may not be updated as thoughts come to me. there will be spoilers all the way thru the end of the game so here's your spoiler warning

i think while people unfamiliar with dnd can play and still have a good time, it probably will feel overwhelming and there will likely be things you won't understand unless someone explains it to you. i can't even really call the tutorial a bad one as much as it's barely there. but i do know plenty of people with zero dnd experience still having fun and simply enjoying learning on the go!

on the other hand, being someone who plays dnd, once you figure out the interface it's a pretty smooth experience. there are some things that are a little different to accommodate how the game works (e.g. second-story work reduces your fall dmg rather than increasing your climbing speed, since the game doesn't really count climbing as distance), but those are pretty quick to learn. seems to me that the devs thought people who didn't play dnd wouldn't be all that intersted in bg3, but a ci'd be curious to see how many bg3 players will look for a dnd group to join from here.

act 1 was solid and was paced well. i really liked how many characters ended up showing up later in the game, as opposed to characters you save once and never see again. i think what was most fun was getting to know what i could get away with LOL not just an exploration of the world, but an exploration of the game itself. i have video of me talking to auntie ethel while my friends set up and set off a circle of flame barrels, so i got a front row seat of her being blown to smithereens.

act 2, also solid. i really enjoy quests that involve impacting a place in a really tangible way, like in okami, so the shadow-cursed lands were pretty cool. unfortunately, the game doesn't really show you this happening except a liiiiittle bit at the end, so it doesn't feel as good as it could. still, i liked exploring the area a lot. all of the mini-bosses of the area were unsettling, but we got past literally all of them via high charisma rolls. actually aside from the exploring, a lot of the fun was seeing how we could cheese boss fights, which carried into act 3

act 3 felt way more all over the place and buggy, which significantly lowered my enjoyment. ofc a game this massive will have issues, but i'm still sad that the last part of the game where everything crescendos is where i enjoyed the game the least. small things not working the way they're supposed to (e.g. certain npcs not running or climbing up a ladder when they are fleeing I'M TALKING TO YOU ZUMBO PUMBO AND FEATHERWEIGHT FALSON, astarion falling sleep to a spell even tho he's an elf during his end-of-quest fight). what sucks about things being so frustrating too was that the main quests had really great setups or concepts, but the execution was messy. still, we had a lot of fun messing with bosses. cazador couldn't do anything bc he was forced to dance while we killed him, orin was disintegrated, gortash turned to stone. kinda wild having a bard with 100% spell hit rate....!

i do wish we got to explore baldur's gate more. i totally get that would be a huge undertaking tho. i had a thought that maybe act 3 should've been its own game, but then i guess you couldn't call it baldur's gate 3 if you never get to baldur's gate. i didn't play the previous bg games, but i liked how they wove in the story from the previous installments and ttrpg modules without leaving newcomers to the series out of the loop too much.

i liked shadowheart's, astarion's, and wyll's quests a lot. the ansur part of wyll's was really cool. i adore trials to test character as a setup, especially ones administrated by some major figure. but also? fuck balduran for what he did to ansur and later to me. he's the city's hero, but he only really looks out for himself. which is cool for me as a viewer, not cool for the character i play as LOL

i have more thoughts but i will type them up here later maybe this has gotten long enoguh

[gxldencity]

Now I've only done the first romance scene with shadowheart and gale's (for science) but I can tell someone at larian has consumed a romance novel. THAT and the intimacy coordinator they got must be good at depicting these scenes bc I don't think I've ever seen a video game romance portrayed with such tenderness and intimacy. I always cringe at video game romance scenes bc they feel more like a reward for picking the correct dialogue option as opposed to a proper culmination of a romance plot. U can almost hear the studio in the background being like "woohoo you selected all dialogue options with a heart symbol next to it, now ur treated with a 5 min scene where two plastic dolls who don't appear like the want to fuck or even be in the same room, grind their pelvises at each other and make the fakest moaning sounds. But hey there's a tiddy!! Look at the tiddy and the ass!! Are you hard yet?"

Despite its raunchy reputation, Baldurs Gate 3 treats romance with the utmost care and respect. It's not horny for the sake of being horny, showing off tiddies and having that M rating. Like compared to other raunchy video games, bg3 is actually pretty tame. The difference is the characters regardless of gender are portrayed as being enthusiastic and open about having sex. Something that is u know realistic to a lot of ppl's experiences lol