#bg3ficreviews

[bg3ficreviews]

The Loving Master series - #BG3 FanFic Review

Review by Apollo (@apollo-stories)

Good timezone my friends, I am happy to present another constellation in the bright sky of fanfiction: The Loving Master series by calqmity on AO3. (You can find the author on Tumblr at @calqmity and on Twitter.)

A note from the BG3 Fic Reviews team: As always, mind the tags, and for this wonderfully dark work in particular, as it includes numerous controversial and dark themes. These include NSFW; dead dove; necrophilia; non-con elements; and abusive relationships; among others. Our review is continued below the fold due to the heavy nature of the content in this particular series.

Virtual photography by @xandirge.

The series is comprised of three separate works exploring the dark desires of our favourite bloodsucker Ascended Astarion. It starts with The Doll Collector, a fantastic title in and of itself with no small amount of sinister foreshadowing. 

In this story there is a constant and ominous theme of dehumanisation as well as an exploration of Astarion’s relationship with death. The author details Ascended Astarion’s recently devised methods of collecting his new vampire spawn cohort, as well as the addiction he develops in controlling their lifeless bodies. (Reminder: mind the tags!)

Astarion is obsessively controlling, and takes great delight in stripping any sort of independence or autonomy from his spawn that they may have once enjoyed in their former lives. It is a dark work, and there is no healing to be found here. This is an excellently constructed examination of Ascended Astarion’s dark mind and how he fulfills his most toxic needs as his spawn become his latest possessions to play with at his leisure.

The Unbearable Pressure, the author's second work in the series, is no different to its predecessor in its exploration of Ascended Astarion's growing darkness and cruelty. This work focuses more on on his relationship with his most disobedient spawn, Blaze, and his efforts to break her and ensure her obedience. 

The theme of dehumanisation and dollification gets more pronounced the further we read. Astarion wants to control every single part of his spawn. And even despite the obvious sadism of his actions, Astarion genuinely believes he is doing his spawn a kindess, and grapples to understand why his spawn are not more grateful for his 'assistance' and what he considers his dedicated 'care'. The author has expressed Astarion's delusion of benevolence well, as our narrator is wonderfully unreliable.

Haunted By Your Touch, Aching For Your Love is our third and final work in the series, and quite possibly my favourite of the three! (I would call it a crowd pleaser, but that requires that the crowd in question likes breaking characters down and making them suffer oh so deliciously.)

The cycle of abuse and the affection for one’s captor can be difficult to write in fiction. There is a common mistake of stepping back from the scene and becoming more clinical in order to convey why the cycle is happening and why it continues, and, in so doing, create a disconnect between the reader and the characters. This work sees that tripping point coming from miles away and does cartwheels over it. 

We are deep in Astarion’s mind and psyche in this work as his delusions and twisted perspective have completely erased any distinction between reality and his wicked desires. It is left to the keen eye of the reader to pick up on the subtle hints and evidence of his delusions, which are expertly described by the author via the reactions of the other characters that suffer Astarion's whims and mistreatment.

The Loving Master, as a whole, is a wonderful exploration into dark themes and abusive relationships. Astarion’s character is portrayed consistently through the entire series using beautiful metaphors that I could hear Astarion himself repeating in his own voice. And beyond our lead antagonist, the author's original characters are well-written and developed, becoming well-established personalities in their own right. Each one has their own clear motivations and responds to Astarion differently, adding to the depth of the overall narrative with every line. These stories are also structurally sound, as you can look forward to a healthy mix of short and long paragraphs and sentence structures that makes the story easy to read and easy to enjoy.

Mind the tags on AO3, as The Loving Master does not shy away from NSFW elements and very heavy themes. 

Enjoy your dove, but be aware. It is very, very dead.

---

We have included a snippet of The Doll Collector below for your enjoyment, as well as the author's tags as they are currently listed on AO3 for this particular work. Please remember to support the author by leaving kudos and comments on their work on AO3. 🫶

The Doll Collector

"One more bite, is all it would take."

And now his beautifully pliant Lydia laid underneath him, fully submitted to his one desire: for her to become his. Her jet black hair framed her round, delicate face. Through her long, black eyelashes, her dark purple eyes stared up at him, wide and vulnerable. The indigo moonlight skin that bruised wonderfully under the force of his fingers was soft and warm to the touch.

"Be gentle," her quiet voice trembled.

There was nothing gentle about forging an undead monster out of an innocent, precious soul—his perfectly obedient, beautiful little monster, yet a monster nonetheless—but he could pretend, for just a moment.

He brought her wrist up to his mouth, laying a feather light kiss on top of the flesh, eating the garnish before digging into the main course. He cradled it in his hands before sinking his teeth in. Her quick yelp from the sudden pain sent a raging, hot inferno through his abdomen, encouraged by the red delicacy on his tastebuds.

Eventually he forced himself to pull away, letting the bloodied, shaking hand fall from his grasp. He leaned forward, placing his hands on either side of her head, trapping his prey.

"You have given me everything...thank you." His words came out breathy and in between sighs of pleasure. The taste of her blood lingered on his lips, but it wasn't enough. He needed every last drop. While the ritual had rid him of the hunger caused by his supernatural curse, it had been replaced with a new hunger: to take, to take, and to take, from everyone around him. He wanted it all.

She look terrified out of her mind about what was about to happen, her eyes glancing at the liquid ruby dripping down his chin. In this moment, she looked like a porcelain doll. Her plump lips and flushed cheeks had a warm glow cast on them from the candle light in the tavern room. But when his fangs pierced her neck, she did not crack—only screamed. It was like biting into the plumpest, ripest fruit in the orchard, and her cries of pain were the beautiful notes of the birds' song high above in the sky.

[glitterdruid24]

@bg3ficreviews

Sending again! So sorry about the lack of link.

[bg3ficreviews]

Send us your BG3 fanfics to review!

(FIC SUBMISSIONS CLOSED)*

BUT APPLICATIONS FOR REVIEWERS OPEN!**

Hi everyone, and welcome to BG3FicReviews! We're a group of writers and fanfic authors who have decided to come together to write reviews of Baldur's Gate 3 fan fiction. We aim to support fanfic authors in our community by sharing the works we love (and what we love most about them) with the BG3 community. **We have recently published draft fic review guidelines and we're ready to start taking on more reviewers! Please send us an ask & tell us more about yourself! Please also send us your email address and/or Discord details so that we can reach out to you! We're very excited for the future! 🙌 If you would like us to review your fanfic, please send us an ask with a link to your work and a short description, and we will add your work to our review queue. Works that are in our current queue to review will be placed in the BG3FicReviews queue collection on AO3. Works we have already reviewed can be found in this AO3 collection here.

*We've temporarily closed submissions to catch up with all our current fics in the queue to review! Thank you to everyone who submitted their work to us. We're honoured that you would allow us to read and review your work! (Current queue: +-68 works 👀)

Thank you for your support and please keep creating and sharing your incredible work!

If you want to meet the team of BG3FicReviews, check out our post here!

Below the fold are our fic submission guidelines, our FAQs, and a master list of all our reviews we have posted!

Last updated: 14 July 2024.

FIC SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

When you submit your fic, please be sure to include the following:

A link to your work & the pseud/handle you publish under (regardless of platform)

The title of your work

Any tags we should be aware of

A brief summary

Any social media you would like to be tagged in the review when we publish it (please include a link to your profile)

If you have commissioned artwork for your fic, please feel free to let us know! We would be happy to post it with the review of your work

You can submit your fic to us through our asks here. Please note that we won't respond to your ask (unless we need further information) and we will just add it to our queue and will get to reviewing it as soon as we can. Please don't worry when you don't get a response to your ask from us! You'll know all is well as soon as you spot your work in the review collection, which you can check here.

FAQs

We are currently compiling an FAQs master post based on questions from the community! This will be updated as we go, so if you have any questions that don't appear in the FAQs post, please send us an ask! We've gone into some detail about our goals for BG3FicReviews in this post.

REVIEW MASTER LIST

Please find our AO3 collection of works we have already reviewed here. The Wilted Dreams of Baldur's Gate series (Review published 3 April 2024)

A seven-part collection examining Astarion and Tav’s relationship across the game and post-canon. There’s something for everyone in this series with some fluffy slice of life here, a little angst there, and a generous portion of smut.

Thunder Reforged: Rolan x Dammon works (Review published 27 March 2024)

What's hotter than a tiefling wizard with a knack for a well-timed thunderwave? Said tiefling wizard having a rendezvous with his tiefling blacksmith paramour, of course.

The Loving Master series (Review published 18 March 2024)

A series based on the worst possible version of Ascended Astarion as he masters the art of creating his own vampire spawn cohort and inflicts pain and anguish on them in what he has deluded himself into believing is 'kindness'. Tags include: NSFW; dead dove; sexual trauma.

Too Many Burdens to Bear (Review re-published 15 March 2024)

A story based on the once Archdruid of the Emerald Grove Halsin Silverbough and his lover and partner Kiaran, the author's durge OC. Tags include: NSFW; sexual trauma.

[bg3ficreviews]

BG3 Fic Review Guidelines - let us know what you think!

Hi everyone, We've finally settled on some fic review guidelines we'd like to implement here, but we would like to share them with the community and get your feedback. It's important to us that we support our fellow writers in a collaborative space. The best way to do that is to hear your thoughts and incorporate them into our plans and strategies. Once we have finalised our review guidelines, we plan to open up our doors to bring more reviewers on board and really get going properly. We may do this either by creating a Discord server for the team or simply allowing reviewers to submit their work to the blog directly. Regardless, our fanfic community is important to us and we want to do our best to help build a supportive, inspiring and creative environment. But! without further ado, here are the BG3 Fic Review Guidelines as they currently are, listed below the fold. Please feel free to reply on this post, send us an ask, or email me (Aivu) directly should you have any comments or questions. My email address is aivuthedragon[at]gmail[dot]com.

Happy writing!

Aivu 🐉💜 BG3 Fic Reviews, Editor

The BG3FicReviews review guidelines (WIP)

Please note these guidelines are a work in progress, and we may update them as we go depending on questions that arise in the community and among our team members. That said, the goals behind the BG3FicReviews blog will remain largely unchanged, and represent our underlying philosophy as a team. We’ll start there.

What are the goals of the BG3FicReviews blog and its team?

At the moment, we have four main overarching goals: 

Help foster a kind and supportive community for fanfic writers in the BG3 fandom that helps to uplift them/us and their/our work; 

Provide a useful resource for fanfic writers (in the BG3 fandom and more generally);  

Provide a helpful guide for fanfic readers on some of the best, most interesting and most innovative BG3 fanfic currently being published; and

Create a safe space for writers to explore topics of various kinds while also supporting proactive and inclusive tagging.

With these four goals in mind, our objective is not and will never be to unduly criticise an author or write negative reviews. Fanfic authors write for free and because they love to write and share their words with the world. We don’t believe in stifling that passion with negativity. We want to uplift writers and support them to continue doing what they love. 

Review submission guidelines

Here we have some broad questions to help guide a reviewer when reading a given work, as well as what could be included in a review. These are the kinds of questions I (Aivu) ask myself when I write my reviews. 

What are some of the dominant themes of this work?

What is unique about this work? Has a trope been approached in a fresh, innovative way? Or perhaps it’s a very good example of a well-used trope?

Feel free to be creative in your review - just as authors develop their own voice in their writing, you are free to build and develop yours. (Just please keep in mind the four goals of the BG3FicReviews blog when you do.)

Did you have any ‘aha!’ or ‘wow!’ moments when reading this fic? (Note: please be mindful of spoilers, and try to explain such moments in a way that doesn’t spoil the work for potential readers.)

How did you feel while and after reading this work? Did it evoke any particular feelings for you?

Please include a brief list of the most important tags when submitting your review - it will help our readers skip over a review of a fic that might not be to their particular tastes (which is absolutely fine).

Please be aware that we do reserve the right to edit reviews to be in line with our standards and the formatting we use for the blog, but we will provide feedback as much as we can and discuss any revisions with the author of a given review.

What are our future plans for the BG3FicReview blog?

In order to provide more hands-on support to writers, we are currently considering starting a strictly opt-in beta reading programme for fanfic authors. We don’t have a big enough team for this at the moment, but the idea would be that authors submit their work to be beta-read and can ask for help in particular areas of their writing (or their writing generally) to help them feel more confident in their work and with sharing it. Our team is too small at the moment to manage something like this, but as a long-term goal it’s something really important to us.

We are also considering opening a writing and fic review focused Discord, but that really depends on how much interest there is in such a space as there are many excellent BG3-focused writing Discords out there already. We are always open to suggestions from the fanfiction writer (and reader) community about what kind of support and tools could be helpful and useful. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to send us an ask or an email and let us know!

[bg3ficreviews]

Quick update!

Hello everyone,

We just wanted to give a quick update since we've been a bit quiet! We are working through the fics that have been submitted and adding them to our queue as we get more, but since we only have two reviewers on the team atm we're struggling a bit to keep up. We are currently putting together some review guidelines that should set out our goals and intentions, and once that's done we plan to put out feelers in the writing community to get more reviewers on board. Hopefully once that's done we'll be able to catch up with all the incredible submissions we have already gotten and are still getting. There are currently only five 'permanent' members of the team (two reviewers, one mod, and two virtual photographers), so it's a bit slow-going at the moment, but we hope to get things sorted and streamlined asap!

Also, since Tumblr forces people to send asks through their main instead of the side (BG3 brainrot focused) blog, please do let us know in the asks which blog you would prefer us to tag in your review, as well as any other socmed you would like tagged. (If you have already submitted your work a while ago, you can still send an ask through to let us know and we will make sure we tag the accounts when we post the review of your work. 🫶 )

Thank you so much for your support and for your patience!

Much love,

Aivu

[bg3ficreviews]

If you have any questions, please feel free to send us an ask!

Good morning everyone, We are absolutely delighted to see the number of fics submitted to us to read and review, and absolutely thrilled that so many share our excitement about promoting and sharing BG3 fanfic works. Ultimately our goal, as fellow fanfic authors ourselves, is to share our love for fanfiction (particularly those set in the BG3 universe) and help foster a mutual sense of community and care. We have received a few asks that have asked us for more specifics about what we hope to do and how, and we would like to encourage fanfic authors to send through more questions like that (which you can do here). We are open to engaging with our community, and would like to be able to respond to any queries and concerns that others may share. We want to give as detailed and helpful a response as we possibly can. As fellow fanfic writers, we've seen for ourselves how difficult it can be as a fanfic author (and fanwork creator generally) to have safe, supportive spaces for our work. That is our ultimate goal. We want to uplift fanfic writers and boost our mutual love of creation through positive engagement and support. As we grow, we hope to one day build more hands-on communities of support to assist writers in learning more about the art of writing and how to improve their work, but this would be on a strictly opt-in basis if authors feel they would like to work together to improve their work. The intention is not and will never be to judge others' work per se, only to strengthen the community in a positive way and uplift fellow writers. As such, please, feel free to send us asks if you have any questions about what we hope to do and how. We are thinking of putting together a mega asks response post or FAQ post of sorts to answer those asks, and your input is incredibly valuable to us. It will take us some time to compile that, as we want to be an inclusive as we possibly can. Thank you for sharing your passion and enthusiasm for this project with us, and we will do our best to answer your questions to the best of our ability. Be well and keep writing, The BG3 Fic Reviews team

[bg3ficreviews]

Do fics have to be finished to be reviewed?

Hello!

No, we welcome any and all fics, whether they be one-shots or multichapter; completed or ongoing! And for longer multichapter works, we hope to read up to and including the most recently published chapter. Of course, this means reviews of multichapter works take longer than others, but they are no less important to us than reviewing any other work.

Honestly, we're voracious readers suffering from late stage BG3 brain rot. Any and all BG3 fanfic is most welcome in our inbox. Just be sure to give us a brief summary of your work as well as the link, and we'll add you to our queue as soon as possible!

Thank you for the ask, and happy writing!

💜 the team at BG3 Fic Reviews

[bg3ficreviews]

Aaaaaaand we're back!

Hi everyone, We're back after a temporary hiatus because of real-life things, but we're raring to go and we will soon be looking to add more reviewers to our roster, whether they be once-off submissions from reviewers or more long-term positions on our team! We hope to finalise our review guidelines this week, and will share them with the community for some input. We're just trying to figure out the best way to do that, but we'll keep you posted.

We've got a lot of reviews to catch up on so we're going to focus on that and on sorting out our review guidelines and other admin, but as always if you have any questions, please feel free to send an ask!

If you've submitted your fic to us, keep an eye out for a bookmark from the 'BG3FanFicReviews' account on AO3! You can see the fics we have in our queue by checking out the collection here.

Much love,

Aivu 🐉💜 @aivuthedragon Editor/Mod/Reviewer BG3 Fic Reviews

[bg3ficreviews]

FAQs about BG3 Fic Reviews

Hello and welcome to BG3 Fic Reviews! We believe in ongoing and continuing engagement with the BG3 writing community, and as such as would like to encourage fellow authors to submit asks through our asks channel/portal should they have any questions pertaining to what we do and how we do it. This post serves as a master list (of sorts) of our responses to some of the questions we have received, and will be updated as and when we can.

If you have any questions that have not been answered by us previously, please feel free to send through an ask and we will respond (or include the answer here with an update) as soon as possible.

Last updated: 18 March 2024

Question: What kind of BG3 fics do you review?

We review any and all BG3 fan fiction. This includes NSFW, controversial/heavy topics, AUs, post-canon, etc. We do not have any limitations/restrictions on the kinds of fan fiction that is submitted to us, as long as it can fairly be classified as falling within the "Baldur's Gate" fandom and franchise.

Question: Does the fic have to be hosted/posted on AO3?

AO3 is easiest for us to use at present, but we don't want to exclude any writer simply because they haven't been granted an account with AO3 yet. This would adversely affect new writers especially due to the sometimes long waiting list for an AO3 invite, and we don't want to discourage anyone by limiting reviews to AO3 alone. So, regardless of where your work is hosted, please feel free to send it to us. We are currently working on improving our work pipeline to ensure we can include work from other platforms, for instance by including 'external work' in our review queue collection on AO3.

Question: Do fics have to be completed to be submitted to the team and/or be reviewed?

No. We happily accept in-progress works as part of our review queue. As BG3 fic authors ourselves, we understand that writing longer form works can sometimes take a considerable amount of time, especially as real-life responsibilities and realities come into play, and as inspiration ebbs and flows. We value all work equally, whether they be one-shots or in-progress long form works.

Question: What is your stance on controversial topics and tagging?

We are resolutely pro-fiction and believe in the freedom that can be found in fiction. That said, we are also firmly pro-consent and favour community safety, and therefore support tagging as a mechanism to assist readers in navigating the content with which they choose to engage. We share the views expressed by BG3 fanfic author Tavyliasin in this post she has written on the matter here. In this post, Tavyliasin has also included a great deal of incredibly useful information regarding what authors should consider tagging and how to tag effectively on different platforms. Tags also help us to mind our own personal boundaries as individuals when we review fic submitted to us, and the individual members of the team are then able to choose fics that align with our area of interest or avoid those fics that we know won't resonate with a particular member of the team. For example, person A may enjoy reading angst, while person B prefers fluff and smut. We choose fic in our queue accordingly so that no author is negatively affected because they happen to cross the metaphorical desk of someone who does not enjoy that particular trope/kink/what have you. No fic is ever assigned to a reviewer for this reason - as individuals, we choose them ourselves from the team's queue.

Please follow us for more updates and as always, should you have any questions please don't hesitate to send an ask and we will respond as soon as is possible.

[bg3ficreviews]

Quick question to our followers! We're thinking of adding different kinds of content to the blog, beyond just our reviews themselves. What kind of content would you be interested in seeing? These are some of the things we've been considering:

writing tips

writing prompts (BG3 or more general)

Encouragement for Writers

AO3 tips/tricks (for writers and readers alike)

If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to send an ask or reply below. Thank you, and happy writing! Aivu 🐉💜 Mod/Editor, BG3 Fic Reviews @aivuthedragon

[bg3ficreviews]

A wee update!

Hi everyone, I wanted to let you know we are full steam ahead with our reviews, but with only two reviewers on the team at present, we are going to be a bit slow in posting. We are currently working on review guidelines so that we can open up a call for more reviewers, and will share more information on that as soon as we are ready. Since we started the blog on 16 March, so far we have reviewed twelve individual AO3 works (including two series) across three reviews. And we have many more to go through, with our current queue having over 50 works/series bookmarked for reviewing. 👀 You can see what's in our current queue on AO3 here. We are truly so thrilled that you share our enthusiasm for this project and for BG3 fanfiction, and are very grateful for your support. Please do follow us to see more of our reviews in future! I have included a list of the reviews we've published so far below the fold. Much love, Aivu 🐉💜 Editor/Mod, BG3 Fic Reviews @aivuthedragon

The Wilted Dreams of Baldur's Gate series (Review published 3 April 2024)

A seven-part collection examining Astarion and Tav’s relationship across the game and post-canon. There’s something for everyone in this series with some fluffy slice of life here, a little angst there, and a generous portion of smut. Tags include: NSFW

Thunder Reforged: Rolan x Dammon works by velocitross (Review published 27 March 2024)

What's hotter than a tiefling wizard with a knack for a well-timed thunderwave? Said tiefling wizard having a rendezvous with his tiefling blacksmith paramour, of course. Tags include: NSFW

The Loving Master series (Review published 18 March 2024)

A series based on the worst possible version of Ascended Astarion as he masters the art of creating his own vampire spawn cohort and inflicts pain and anguish on them in what he has deluded himself into believing is 'kindness'. Tags include: NSFW; dead dove; sexual trauma

[bg3ficreviews]

Thank you for your enthusiasm, BG3 fanfic writers!

Hello everyone, We just wanted to again express our sincere gratitude and joy for your enthusiastic response to our little project. We have had 25 asks in our inbox since we first posted that we are looking for submissions less than 48 hours ago and we're honestly quite stunned and delighted by the response. To give you all an idea of what our review queue looks like at the moment, here is a screenshot from the collection on AO3:

All we can say right now is 👀. Considering the scale of the response and the task ahead of us, we are taking a moment to plan how to do this right so that none of you have to wait too long before your work is reviewed. We do have some actual reviews lurking in our drafts already, and we hope to publish them asap. Please follow to keep an eye out for them, or alternatively we will be using the #bg3ficreviews tag if you would prefer to skip our admin posts and get straight to the good stuff. Thank you again and happy writing, The BG3 Fic Reviews team

[bg3ficreviews]

Meet the BG3 Fic Reviews team!

Hello everyone!

We thought it was time we properly introduce the core members of the team here at the BG3 Fic Reviews blog. We're all fanfic writers and suffer from extensive BG3 brainrot, and got together to start this blog to support our fellow writers and our community.

We hope you enjoy our reviews, and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to send through an ask!

@aivuthedragon Editor; Reviewer; & Moderator Founding member

Aivu suffers from Stage 4 BG3 brainrot. Her favourite characters include Gale and Halsin, but she was a soft spot for god's favourite princess and the fandom's favourite vampire, too. When she's not nerding out about writing and fan fiction... well, actually, that's pretty much all she does, honestly.

Some of her past reviews:

Thunder reforged: Rolan x Dammon

@apollo-stories Reviewer Founding member

Apollo was dragged by his ankles into the BG3 chokehold, but now happily rummages through all content like the resourceful little hedgehog they are. You can find him writing, drawing, or trying to befriend the local wildlife with varying results. He's usually the one fighting for the Karlach or the Astarion fics, but we promise he doesn't bite. Much.

Some of his past reviews:

The Loving Master series The Wilted Dreams of Baldur's Gate series

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

Honourary team members

@jellymellydraws Founding member

Mel has been in a BG3 chokehold due to Astarion. Since then, she's fallen in love with all the companions and even more in love with the community. She's a bit of a menace, though (/affectionate). If you ever saw unhinged or horny reblogs on this blog, no you didn't it was probably definitely Mel. She's sorry for allowing those posts to leave containment. Rest assured, it will happen again.

[bg3ficreviews]

A wee update!

Hi everyone, AO3 has been a bit glitchy for the last few days, but it looks like the team there has resolved it now. It has set us back a little for reviews, but now that it's stable again we're back to reading and loving your work! Please remember if you have any questions you are more than welcome to drop us an ask and either Mel or I will respond asap. Also, if you've submitted work, you'll know we've received it when you spot it in the BG3 Fic Reviews Queue collection over on AO3. Happy writing and much love, Aivu 🐉💜

[bg3ficreviews]

Hi! Can you explain how you are going to review fics? I have a few I would like to recommend, but what criteria are you basing your review/critiques on? Like what are you looking for in order to share fics recommended to you?

How true to character it is? If it's canon to events in game? Writing style or techniques?

I think something like your page can be good, it's just vague what you mean by review and I would love some clarity before I recommend anything.

Hello Cerudinae! Apologies for the delay in getting back to you - we have had many asks in our inbox over the last few days, and we are trying our best to keep up with them all and catch up.

As we have mentioned in some other posts, we are currently compiling a general FAQ document to answer questions readers and fanfic authors may have around what our plans are. It is a work in progress, as we are adding questions (and answers) over time as we consult with the writing community. You can read them here, and they should answer some of your questions already. In terms of your questions regarding how "true to character" or in line with canon a given fic is - we absolutely do not look at these as defining criteria in reviews. We respect and value the freedom that writing fan fiction gives authors, and we respect everyone's headcanons. If anything, our primary interest centres around just how creative and interestingly diverse fan fiction can be - we do not want to put anyone in a box of conformity. That has never been and will never be our goal. Our primary goal is to support fanfic authors and celebrate their work and creativity - not to break anyone down or to dissuade them from writing and creating what they love. Doing so would be the very antithesis of our motivations and what we hope to achieve. We hope this response eases your mind somewhat, but if you do have further questions please don't hesitate to ask. Please do keep in mind that we are fanfic authors and hobbyists ourselves, and only started this endeavour a few days ago. We are learning as we go, but we are doing and will do our utmost to support our fellow authors as best we can.

All the best, The BG3 Fic Reviews team

[bg3ficreviews]

Hi there! I'm not sure if my fic was successfully submitted as I don't see it in the AO3 queue, could you let me know if it was sent? I'm so sorry for the trouble, I imagine you must have a lot to go through!

Hi Memai! Sincerest apologies, we couldn't figure out how to respond privately (we may not be able to do so as a secondary blog), so just answering to say that we did add your fic to our queue now. We were a little bit behind with adding them earlier when you sent this ask, but it should be in there now. Our inbox has been flooded with asks (23 as of a moment ago), and since we only began the blog about three days ago we're a little bit overwhelmed - but in the best possible way! To the broader community, new followers and all others who have sent in requests: thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing your work and your enthusiasm with us. It's been... mindblowing, honestly. We are so thrilled, and actually considering bringing on more people to review so that there isn't an unnecessarily long gap between reviews as we also try to ensure we don't ignore any pressing questions and admin-related matters.

Thank you for trusting us with your work, and we can't wait to dig in as soon as we possibly can. All the best, The BG3 Fic Review team