#“you know; for convenience's sake; functionally mine in this specific scenario”

[invinciblerodent]

I know it's not really a popular interpretation that's gonna win me a bunch of brownie points (from what I've seen many seem to like him more as a tortured romantic or a "crouching grouch, hidden softie"), but I personally am growing to really like characterizing Astarion as a... a weird, selfish, jealous little chaos gremlin that, while he of course has his reasons, is just kind of a crappy person, even when he's in love.

Like I can fully see him as someone who, as time passes between the first proposition and the commitment scene (and you're still not throwing yourself at his feet, blubbering and sobbing about how much you love him????? the audacity??????), starts to get annoyed at you every time you talk to someone a bit too long for his liking. Like I have a veritable plethora of shots of the amazing stankfaces and unimpressed scowls he makes over my girl's shoulder (I know it's probably because he's the second in the party lineup, but in-fiction it's still funny), and some of the stills I grabbed from his comment on fixing -and hugging- Karlach are... actually kind of incredible.

Like, if I presented to you with this screenshot:

and told you this is one of the faces he makes when he says "So, the untouchable Karlach is untouchable no more"? You'd probably assume that he's furious about it for some reason.

And there is a part of me kind of thinks he is, at least in a way, furious, because it takes him a few frames to compose himself, and put his pleasant smile back on:

-which is something I saw him do before. Making a very obviously blank/angry/sad face, taking a moment, and putting on a charming face right away. It's not new, really.

These three shots above were taken over the course of like 2 seconds, tops. It's a very subtle, "blink and you miss it" type of thing, but that's.... honestly all I need to think that Karlach suddenly being an actual option to you (in his weird, at this point in time very "physicality first" POV) is pissing him the fuck off. Like you doing that for her, collecting and lugging scrap metal around, and seeking out Dammon, means that you care for Karlach in some way. Which, then, makes her an opponent in his vying to be the sole recipient of your attention, and he won't suffer even an unknowing adversary. (And in my case, the object of his slowly blooming affections even hugged Karlach! Like right in front of his face!! What arrogance!!!!!! That's just rude, frankly!!!!!!)

I totally can imagine him being the type of person who, before starting a relationship, would use his lack of a need for rest to snoop through your belongings.

As someone who would casually violate your (and others') privacy in little ways, while holding his own sacred.

As someone who'd spy on your interactions with all the other companions from a crack in his tent's opening, and grip his bedroll in anger watching you dance with Wyll ("don't kiss him, don't kiss him, please don't kiss him, if you kiss him I'm fucked"), or steal your journal and get actually mad at you and be unreasonably acerbic to you the next day if it's in a language he doesn't understand.

This kind of also extends to me kind of imagining him as a boyfriend who, once he gets a bit more comfortable with physical affection, will just casually step up to you, and drape an arm around your waist or shoulders while you're talking to someone, to signal almost a sort of ownership. Someone who will make goading faces at anyone who dares look at you too long, or pull you against him in a brazen display if he catches someone checking you out. Like he'd piss on your leg to mark his territory if he could, but he'll settle for leaving a very obvious, crusted over bite mark on your neck if he must.

And yeah, that would get very annoying to any real person, but like I said about Gale before.... I think your character has got to be at least slightly not normal about them, just to match how profoundly not normal they are about you.

... Anyway, do carry on, I just like this edgy dumbass, I like him being both edgy and a dumbass, and him trying to slowly be better about this whole "~~relationship~~" thing is making my little heart happy

(yes, there's the Halsin thing. I have thoughts. But I won't kick the hornet's nest lol.)

[shrikeseams]

I don’t understand this idea that Finwë is forcing Miriel into staying dead forever because he wants to get with Indis - the text makes it very clear that he tries for years to get Miriel to come back, and she consistently makes insists that she’ll never return. Why should Finwë stay alone forever for the sake of someone who never opens on coming back? The story even says that she doesn’t even consider coming back to life until until he dies himself. I don’t see how Finwë, and especially Indis, did anything wrong.

It's late and I'm tipsy, so this may not be my best effort, but here goes, and if you want clarification/further response you'll have to reply or reblog:

TL;DR: I have no issue with Finwe's remarriage. My issue is that his remarriage was conducted in such a way (by both finwe and the Valar) that a) functionally left Miriel facing all of the long-term consequences while Finwe got just what he wanted, and b) was conducted in unseemly haste for a species that is LITERALLY IMMORTAL. THERE IS NO REASON FOR FINWE TO BE IN A RUSH. HE HAS THE ENTIRE LIFETIME OF ARDA. And also, c) Finwe ultimately proves faithless to Indis as well, which (to me) suggests that this is a finwe problem. If he had just gotten a divorce and severed his fate from miriel's, I... would still not have a high opinion of him. But I wouldn't want to beat him with a 2x4, y'know? The real issue here is that true divorce is a positive social good, but that in its absence Finwe and the valar chose a course of action that only benefited one party.

TLDR-er: Just because miriel wasn't healed when it was convenient to finwe does not give him the right to steal her right to reimbody if and when she does heal. Even the act of asking is, to me, unforgivable. I don't think he was obliged to stay marrived to her, but what he actually did was to functionally ask her to die for his comfort. (Indis's only wrongdoing was bad taste in men. 😔)

TLDRest: I actually think it's worse to ask somebody to die/stay dead for eternity than it is to ask someone not to have a wife and more children! I kinda thing finwe should have looked into adoption and maybe joined a bowling league! The absence of his wife is not, in fact, Doom him to be Forever Alone!

TLDREST FOR REAL THIS TIME: Miriel's right to live (and therefore to eventually reimbody) supercedes finwe's right to remarry for any reason. And his willingness to compromise that makes me doubt his moral character.

Firstly, let's acknowledge my personal bias. Every time I think of miriel, I am thinking of her as if she were one of my friends. That is by basis for looking at the miriel-finwe-indis relationship: how would, personally, view finwe if he were the spouse of a friend? If you can't at least partway accept that premise then I do not expect that this will be convincing.

and because I know this approach isn't universal, my baseline reading is that miriel is suicidally depressed, in a situation where even a completed suicide does not release her from the pressures of her husband, society, and religion.

Now. Let's shift the circumstances a little, to a more real-world version. Let's say that Miriel just has extreme postpartum depression, and she's gone to a facility for inpatient treatment of her own choice. And then, because she isn't any better and still needs that extra support, she stays in that facility for years.

What would you think of a husband who repeatedly pressured her to leave inpatient care? What would you think of a husband who pressured his wife to leave medical care specifically because he wants more kids (the thing that put her into care in the first place)? Would you think well of him for using his political power♧ to functionally get a legal exemption for bigamy, under the condition that his first wife can't ever leave inpatient care (even if she heals)?

Now, take whatever emotional reaction you had to that scenario (which could be different from mine!) And bring it back to Arda.

And when you do that, please remember that 1) elves are immortal and literally have the option to wait for a spouse until the end of the world if they so choose. But ,y understanding is that the longest Finwe ever waited to remarry in a draft was Feanor's early adulthood. So you have a literal immortal who can't give his wife a few millenia of grace to heal. and also--

2) Finwe and miriel lived in a society where that was, in fact, the expectation. That was the deal they made when they married. That was the choice. Even if they married in Aman with expectation of eternal paradise, they both made the journey, and had lived in the real world, and presumably had at least some cultural scripts for the death of a spouse.

And keep in mind what finwe's remarriage isn't: it's not a divorce. It leaves miriel bound to death and finwe free to remarry. The only benefit to miriel was that everybody stopped pestering her to be healed already.*

With all that in mind--are you comfortable with finwe's choice? If Finwe were a friend of yours, would you think he had done well by his first wife? Did he honor his vows to her? Did he act in justice?

And does that answer change when he later abandons indis of his own free will?

♧ do you think finwe's petition would have gone anywhere but the garbage bin if he (and indis) weren't royal? Because I don't.

*i think this is technically a tangential thought but: is it ethical to ask a suicidally depressed personal, who literally already killed herself, to stay dead forever for someone else's benefit? Because to me, if she were healed enough to answer that question with a clear mind, then the situation itself becomes irrelevant. This is only relevant if you read miriel as depressed/ill in some way, I suppose, but there's an inherent catch-22 there that I feel like the valar and finwe handled in an intrinsically unethical way.

[zyxyz-xyzzy]

some assorted ramblings from discord chat

somehow the talk of games like Sonic and the Black Knight got me thinking about self-insert fanfic, maybe due to the similar levels of goofiness this thing keeps happening where I'll start in on a really long self-insert fic, and it'll be just good enough to keep me interested for a while, and then it pulls some really dumb twist that makes me regret spending time on it

I think the thing about self-inserts with me is they can kinda be a form of canon-divergence AU if you squint ("ok how does adding this new character and their extracanonical knowledge change the course of the plot?"), which as I've prob said here before is an endlessly fascinating genre to me

also they can very easily carry over to idle daydreaming in the sense of "hmm, how would I do if I were in this situation, how would that go down"

(or more accurately maladaptive daydreaming!zyx uses an alternate version of me that is more of a functional human being, for the sake of plot convenience—like, still just as much of a nerd and bad at social as the real me but capable of living on my own/having more basic life skills as well as not having some of the really nasty internet shit internalized so I'm not a complete wreck)

I mean, it's a fun enough thought experiment

also said daydreaming shit is Literally Never seeing the light of day or even being discussed in specifics with other people so that's a bit different from self-insert fic published on the internet in that regard

though the upside to that is not bringing it outside my own head means there's no set "canon", so the stories/scenarios are continually morphing and evolving as I come up with new ideas and tweak existing ones

also once again going to take the opportunity to reminder/shameless plug that I can link my fic rec list here whenever if wanted—I Sifted Through the Sea of Fic So You Don't Have To

(seriously though, I amaze myself sometimes thinking about the amount of time and effort I've put into that thing)

(over 15 million words of fic very neatly sorted and labeled, all done pretty much manually)

the funny thing is the idea of polishing up and publicizing the list didn't start until later when I had realized just how big it had gotten, initially I just made it as a way to be able to easily find my favorite fics in case I ever wanted to reread them, and then the combination of lots of free time + fast reading speed + being very dedicated to and having fun making those sort of large organizational Projects led to it ballooning to epic proportions

thinking about it I guess it's not surprising that site of mine I linked is primarily functioning as a gfaqs topic archive in addition to hosting the rec list, the way it purges old topics on certain boards has always bugged me preservation of knowledge/information and all that

yeah it can be fun to see someone else's reactions to a game the gfaqs playthrough topics are really the same sort of thing as a tumblr liveblogging of a game/show, just without the screenshots

expanding a bit more on the preservation thing, it's like, obv for big projects like the playthrough topics that's something that had significant time and effort put into it and should stay available for future readers, but even archiving the more mundane and inane topics of a forum can have value, as a sort of snapshot into the internet culture of that time and place to make a maybe pretentious comparison it's like how when reading about history I get upset by when things with historical/cultural value get lost or destroyed, and how there are whole ancient civilizations we know nothing or almost nothing about--I guess I just put a lot of innate value in being able to say "this is what it was like, this is how these people thought and acted and lived their daily lives"

yeah, and it's fun to see stuff like that one thousand-year-old parchment of a kid doodling on his homework, or the sumerian tablets complaining about a merchant selling low-quality copper--it really humanizes the history, I guess you could say that people are people in any era

also only very tangentially related but I've been going to the local graveyard for pokemon go raids sometimes lately and have realized that I find it weirdly fascinating to go around reading graves like, finding the earliest birthdates, people with particularly long or short lives, people with unusual names, the different styles of gravestones... maybe a bit of an irreverent thing to be interested in lol

while I'm doing these long random musings, here's one more--I think one thing that makes fanfiction as a genre (for lack of a better term) interesting to me is the sheer openendedness of it (prob not the right word? but idk), from both a literary and content standpoint like, you don't have to stick to a particular length or writing style/format, you don't have to concede to the demands of a publisher or what will "sell well", as long as you have an internet connection and the imagination to put words to a page you can put just about anything out there and people will read it so you can see some real interesting experimental/unusual writing as well as things underrepresented in mainstream works like more minority representation etc. and ofc I know these things aren't exclusive to fic, it's just a really nice example of it that not a lot of people think about that way