#but they are supportive to the point that they suggested i make a bg3 character named gnancy drew

[chaoticunicornsworld]

about Neil Newbon fandom

My native language is not English so if you find grammar error please forgive me.

So here is the thing about Neil Newbon. He is a real person in a real world with a real life. And he works as an actor/artist. For money. Also, I can imagine he is working for fun, but first, for money. His work contains impersonations of fictional character's voices and movements. And also it contains keeping touch with fans. When he streams he is not your friend or boyfriend and he is not an object, he is working. You don’t know shit about him, you just collect the crumbs of his public persona. And as somebody who works in customer service i can tell, it can be different from the real person. I can be flirtatious if it serves the cause, even if I don’t exactly like the people in front of me. I can smile, I can be kind and helpful, I can listen, I can make them seen. And the next moment I can do the same with the next customer. And It's not a lie it’s not manipulating, I just use my customer service persona. And sometimes the stories what i hear can touch me. It is a tiring mental work, it can be overwhelming sometimes as well. So when you buy his prints or cameos, you don’t buy him, or his friendship. You just buy a piece of art, and you can think you buy to be seen for a moment. But if you have to buy to be seen by someone, better find a counselor or a therapist as he always suggests in those videos. If you play BG3, and romance Astarion, there is a scene where he tells you his favorite lines, and at some point he tells you „I love you”. And if you choose „it is to soon” he tells you it can be true if only for this night. That’s what you get from Neil, his attention for that moment. If you watch his streams you can notice people pay to write messages that can be mentioned by him. That’s working for money. Even, if he enjoy it. And I’m not against supporting his work, but please don’t use him as a therapist, or sex object. 

Also about the thirst. I’m a fully functioning woman, so I’m not denying that he is attractive and sexy, and the edits on tiktok about him can be really dirty. I feel ashamed when I see them even if they can affect me. Again, those pictures and videos are not him, those are his roles. Even if they are from interviews, or from public events. Those are the characters played by Neil. (And yes, there can be a character for Neil Newbon as a public person.) Not him. Please try to contain yourself, don’t embarrass yourself and don't objectify him, or anyone else. It’s humiliating. You can bring back the energy to your real life with your real partner, it could make your relationship better. Be aware, what you see isn't Neil, it is his art. How would you feel if somebody used a piece of art from you to look at you as a sex object? How would your partner feel about it? What do you think, how his wife feels about it? Or how will his daughter feel when she sees them?

And last. If you claim you “Love him” and then feel happy about that made up scenario as he is single, you don’t know about love at all. First of all, how could you love somebody you don’t know? What do you love about him? I can tell you, you love your imaginations about him. And it’s a form of avoiding real relationships when you love fictional and/or unavailable persons. You don’t have to face real emotions, if you chose that path. But it is not real. It’s a maladaptive coping mechanism. But If we accept theoretically that you “Love him”, and you tell you are happy because his marriage ended and he is single, that also isn’t love. It’s more like possessing. (And I can’t even tell if it’s true or just made up by some twisted mind.) Do you really think love means being happy for someone being unhappy? Do you really think if he is single then a person like you, with your mindset can be a real pair for him? Keep your dignity please, and let the real person keep his boundaries.

[dreamingofthewild]

Hi there! I was just reading your post on Mystra grooming and I thought it was very well articulated I just had one question on it. You mentioned that Elminster reached out to Gale when Gale was 8 years old and I haven't seen that mentioned in the game or in other lore for the game. Would you mind letting me know where that was sourced? Mostly because I'm interested on reading on that more, thank you

Hello there kingtycoon13

SPOILER ALERT: EPILOUGE

The reference to Elminster reaching out to Gale comes from a letter that Elminster writes to Gale when he ascends to Godhood. The letter can be found in a basket full of letters the player can read in the epilogue.

More under the cut

In the Forgotten Realms Wiki, it does say that Elminster took on apprentices from time-to-time. Sometimes they were by Mystra's request.

https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Elminster#Apprentices

We do not know why Elminster appeared on Gale's doorstop when he was eight years old. We do know that Gale was a child prodigy who could summon rabbits when since he was toddler (I cannot find the dialogue for this on the web). If magic was unstable at the time this makes his power an even more impressive feat.

So Elminster had connection with the Blackstaff and was prominent in Waterdeep.

There is every potential that he heard about a boy prodigy who was living with non-magically inclined parents and rocked up to their doorstep to offer help. He might have been thinking about how Mystra will need more chosen when she returns, or he might have just decided that it was time for another apprentice.

On the forgotten realms Wiki it says that Elminster spoke to Mystra who possessed the body of a bear and asked him to find new candidate's to become her chosen. Gale would have been 22 at the time if we go with his cannon age of 35.

https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Mystra_(Midnight)

I think that Elminster may have suggested Gale as a candidate when Gale was 22. Elminster has helped train her chosen before, such as Sammaster.

There is also a very interesting tidbit I found upon looking him up where he says he left the encounter feeling as though he and Mystra were in love;

https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Sammaster

I do not know to what extent Mystra's presence could be felt whilst she was gone. But Midnight was said to have felt a 'presence' and her spells which might've failed succeeded and she felt like she was being groomed, before becoming the next Mystra. I cannot find any evidence to support a theory that Mystra was behind Gale's ability to cast magic at such a young age. But it is an interesting theory nonetheless.

Anyway, back to my original point. When I said that Elminster had a part to play, I meant that he is a renowned wizard and former chosen of Mystra. And he inserted himself into Gale's life when he was 8. It is implied that he did help him, and potentially recommended him if she did not already have her eyes on him herself.

Elminster does mention making a mistake in his letter, so could that be the mistake he refers to?

We don't know if Mystra sought Gale out as her chosen because of Elminster or vice versa. She may have set her eyes on him regardless but perhaps at a later stage. Either way, Elminster had a part to play in Gale being selected as her chosen.

My idea also stemmed from a post a read a while back where someone wrote Meta's on each BG3 character;

The final point I wanted to make was that grooming does not always involve one person. It can be an organisation or an entire industry which is set up to suck the souls out of people who have talent. Be it academia, sports, the film and music industries or the fictional industry of Wizardry.

But in general the process of becoming a chosen is exploitative and manipulative. We witness that in game with Shadowheart and Lae'zel. They were all groomed in different ways.

[daftpatience]

hi! i sent an anon ask like months and month ago about pens for disco elysium characters and seeing that you got into bg3 i thought i would share my astarion pen ideas! the main one i can think of is a monteverde invincia in stealth black with a omniflex nib, filled with noodler's antietam ink. my super pricey option is one of the pilot vanishing points in matte black or burgundy

ouuu nice pen ideas!!! i definitely think astarion would go for a really pricey pen. the vanishing point really works for him! since he was a magistrate - it's the perfect "oh ive got a fancy job that involves a lot of writing" pen. (if it wasn't the case that he'd probably actually care how a pen writes considering his old job, i bet he'd even have one thats got shit quality control but is a pricey rich person brand... like a visconti. well known for being ~beautiful paperweights~ here are the visconti divina and visconti homo sapiens inferno)

while i can't support noodler's with any confidence, i can make some other ink suggestions! i can totally see him using some super extra fancy blood colour ink - i think diamine has good options in that direction like dragon's blood and writer's blood >:) plus the bottles are pretty and very much suit him. the dragon one has SHIMMER!

[casmourde]

long rant about bg3 and people's weird behavior towards larian

Larian's continued support of their game and their community has given some people genuine brain rot. We were lucky to even get bug fixes post-release (I'm a cyberpunk 2077 fan), and they were both kind and creative enough to give us a FREE epilogue and add FREE content, but the community at large has taken this kindness and changed it into something entirely different and really unhealthy. Every time Larian updates us on patches and bug fixes, there are hundreds of comments demanding Larian "add" new content, "fix" characters, "fix" relationships, and I'm just baffled by how entitled this is. Do you guys know how video games work? You know you used to just get a video game once and that was it. If you bought a video game you bought a finished product. With more and more patch-based games becoming popular (stuff like Fortnite, Overwatch, Stardew, Genshin, etc), we're starting to see this design model bleed into triple a titles, which is fine (I'm not a big fan personally but I enjoy a lot of these types of games anyway), but it's giving people a really weird, backwards attitude about BG3. At this point I question whether those people actually enjoy the game they played or not. They demand so many changes and edits to characters that I find it hard to believe they even like those characters at all, and would much rather live in their world of headcanon and fanfiction (which, again, is fine) -- but at some point we have to acknowledge that BG3 was made BY Larian. The things you see as flaws in character's stories are canonical, put there by Larian for a specific reason. If you go under every post and demand they "fix" Wyll, I think there's a good chance you need to sit back and wonder if maybe Wyll is just like that. Because he is. That is who he is in the game's text. That is his story. If you don't like it, then by all means discuss what you would change, but it's unfair to belittle Larian for the story that THEY GAVE YOU. This is not to say there isn't a conversation to be had about Black characters in gaming being given really boring, lackluster stories, because that is 100% a noticeable trend (Preston Garvey from Fallout 4 comes to mind). This attitude also unfortunately extends to Gortash fans, and I know I'm kind of shooting myself in the foot here, but I want to discuss it lmao. I liked Gortash "before it was cool" you could say, back when the game dropped and it was gross to think he was attractive, et cetera (this is not something to be bragging about i know), and now that it's been kind of normalized to like him, Gortash fans are getting really invasive and, to put it bluntly, annoying. They whine like children in Larian's comments sections and on their own accounts about how Larian is so "unfair" to Gortash/Durgetash, how they are purposely removing Gortash content from the game to mess with us, etc. Once again, Larian cannot physically be "unfair" about a character THAT THEY LITERALLY MADE THEMSELVES. THEY choose what content to put in THEIR game. The Gortash that is in the game is the Gortash that they decided to put there. Nobody is hiding anything from you, nobody is hurting you, you're not special or different, there is no anti-Gortash agenda. If you can't engage with the canon content that Larian gives us, then I suggest that, for your own health, you move on. Gortash is my favorite character in BG3 because of what Larian did with him, not because of what he could potentially be if Larian bowed down to all of us and gave us everything we wanted. "Gortash romance when" NEVER!!!! And that's the fun bit!!!! We can all go crazy imagining what it would be like and we can make fan communities and fanfictions and art and it's awesome! Speculation and headcanon are awesome! Just stop expecting developers to cater to your every whim! It's unfair and will end up with you being sorely disappointed! Enjoy what they gave us and change it to fit your fantasy! If you like a thing, engage with it, play it, thank the people who gave it to us. Don't pester it to change.

[hismercytomyjustice]

He. Hehe. HehEHE. HEHEHEHE.

I managed to convince my friend to watch Hazbin by subtly she said I was not at all subtle but shhh let me pretend exploiting my 17 years of knowledge of her particular brand of favorite character.

I am so excited because this fucking show has consumed the last week of my life. All because Spotify was like “hey, you love soundtracks, you should listen to this soundtrack.” And by god they were so right. They’re the one algorithm that really gets me. T_T

But I am so fucking excited to talk her ear off about the show. I am trying very hard to not be obnoxious about it but I know I am being VERY obnoxious about it. orz

Also there is so much amazing fanfic and fanart out there for it. I am a major radioapple fan and god what an endless bounty there is.

Alastor is my particular brand of favorite character, so she and I are suffering together. T_T

And now I have a renewed interest to finish this BG3 fic *gently covers my au poto wip’s ears* so I can write Hazbin fic.

I have already been brainstorming a stupid entirely self-indulgent crack fic. I have so many notes. orz

I haven’t lost interest in my BG3 fic. I just hit a major burnout wall in general due to work, so I haven’t spent as much time on it the past week or so which can be dangerous with ADHD and my ability to finish things. The struggle has been so real.

It’s kinda funny. I’ve spent the past few weeks wondering if I was dipping into depression again or something because I have just constantly felt exhausted and have been struggling for even a shred of executive function in literally every single area of my life. My sleep schedule has gone to hell, everyday tasks like tidying the house, feeding myself, showering, etc feel Sisyphean. My OCD has been particularly bad (stress tends to make it flare up). And yet it wasn’t until like last week when my husband said “do you think you might be burnt out from all the work stuff you’ve been dealing with since February” that it even clicked for me.

Like, huh, this all came crashing down on me almost immediately after I massively overworked myself to prove my worth because my prior manager was fucking awful at her job and made my life hell.

cOiNcIdEnCe?!

I have another extra therapy session scheduled for next week because of the burnout at my therapist’s suggestion.

It’s definitely a good thing. The better I get at recognizing the warning signs of impending mental health dips and burnout, the better I can become at mitigating them. I also could use the extra support in crawling my way out of the burnout hole.

It’s still fucking wild to me how completely unaware I was about how OCD is omnipresent in my life even when I’m not in the midst of a full blown catastrophic OCD crisis. I guess this is the point of seeing a specialist for it, lol. It’s just fucking wild the daily spirals I’ve been getting into that didn’t even register.

Stuff like “I need to take a shower. But I can’t take a shower because I need to do xyz. But I can’t do xyz because of abc. Why can’t I just make myself shower? What the fuck is wrong with me? Why am I like this? It’s never going to get any better. I’m a fucking failure. Why can’t I just do this one fucking thing?!”

I mean, ADHD/executive function definitely also play a role but the OCD is just constantly creeping under the surface.

I didn’t realize until recently that it impacted my writing too. I was constantly working myself into OCD spirals over not being good enough, not working hard enough, not having anything worthwhile to contribute, being a bad writer, being inconsistent, etc.

Just spiraling myself into self-loathing and avoidance and all that fun stuff instead of doing something I so greatly enjoy.

And I do this in literally every area of my life. Constantly. Finding out I have ADHD was also extremely helpful in understanding why I struggle with a lot of day-to-day stuff but the OCD is the sneaky bastard pulling all the strings in the background and making everything 10x harder than it needs to be.

I have lost so many years of happiness to undiagnosed OCD and ADHD. I can’t help but wonder how different my life might be if I’d known sooner and started learning how to navigate it all years ago. But at the same time, hitting a wall for both is what got me diagnosed in the first place so… *shrugs*

I guess at least we finally got there even if we wound up taking the scenic route.

[spacemonkeysalsa]

Raidne I love you

I caved and downloaded a bunch of mods, basically because I have this D&D character I want to RP, but my current campaign is still on-going so it's going to have to wait. So, in the meantime, I will RP her in BG3.

Here is my modded-to-the-hells tav. Name: Raidne

Class: Artificer / Guild Artisan

Age: 30

Race: Cambion I swear my intentions are pure, I am not one of those D&D players trying to break the game.

Backstory: Typical half-fiend sob story, her mother was a Gondian and her father is an Incubus named Harleep who she met exactly once when he took her from Toril to go serve in the hells like a good little cambion.

Below the cut is where I dumped my notes, in case I take a break from this game and have to come back to it later and try to remember what the deal was. Generally, the base game narrative doesn't break immersion much, even with the mods, and when that does happen, I'm rewriting those scenes to make it make sense for my RP madness, because it's a game and I can do what I want:

Raidne grew up in about as supportive a mortal household as you can expect, meaning they didn't immediately cast her into the hells or just leave her in the wilderness to die, but raised her in a cautious household. Big family, a mixture of gnomes and humans, and then this one cambion. Like most cambions raised in Toril, she was naturally disposed to mischief growing up, and disciplined pretty harshly as a result. She was also largely ostracized by her peers, and had nobody apart from her incredibly stubborn family, who did love her, but also were kind of out to prove that she wasn't destined to become a evil bastard just because she was a half-fiend bastard, and her relationship with them was always strained because of the pressure they put on her to basically be perfect in order to make up for their own prejudices. She did like to get into trouble, especially when she was young, and she was not blind to the fact that she always received harsher punishments than anyone else for similar offences. Eventually, around the same time that Harleep did whatever it was that got him into enough trouble to become the personal Incubus to a cambion, her existence was discovered in the hells and she was inducted into service at Harleep's suggestion. When it came time for him to perform a very secret favor to an archdevil who is not within the hierarchy he's current under, the fact that he had a secret half-fiend Artificer daughter to offer up, was pretty convenient for him. To keep her people safe, Raidne went quietly and, similar to Karlach began service in the hells against her will, and more like Dammon, was employed not as a soldier, but as an Artificer. Her seven years in the hells was mostly monotonous and lonely, rather than tortuous and harrowing. She did good work, kept to herself, and made zero attempts to escape until she saw the nautiloid, at which point, she made the admittedly impulsive decision to make a run for it. And she absolutely did not think this through, and if she had, might never have escaped hell at the risk of being infected with a mind flayer parasite.

It was bad in hell, and she's glad she's not there any longer, but her prospects in Toril aren't great either. She doesn't want to return to her family, as she believes they are better off mourning her than knowing her again. Some part of her is actually grateful for the infection and this unexpected quest to find a cure, because it gives her something to do while in the back of her mind, she tries to figure out where she should go from here. Where can she go? She's legitimately never thought about it before, even to dream. She's always just taken it for granted that she has no real home.

She doesn't belong anywhere, and that's not going to change just because she saves the swordcoast.

Her state of mind at the beginning of Act One is a mixed-bag. She's excited and elation at (really for the first time in her life) being free to do as she likes, and honestly finds everyone she meets to be utterly delightful. She has a lot of internalised hatred for herself as a cambion, and is especially mistrustful of other cambions, so just the fact that she's in the company of people who she deems as automatically less evil and more trustworthy means she has a somewhat warped view of all her companions as these sweet innocent people who are all at least initially totally worthy of her unconditional trust. She's also not at all feeling all her feelings right now though, somewhat on purpose. If she didn't have something to do, she'd probably be sinking into despair, and when things get very quiet, that's exactly what happens. In order of recruitment - Lae'zel: Her first impression of Lae'zel is that this is the coolest person she's ever met. And she's so nice. She's always saying exactly what she means and she's never trying to trick you (which is what Raidne considers nice) unlike a lot of soldiers, Lae'zel just relies on her pure might, and she's so strong, and dramatic and smart. Raidne is baffled when other people describe Lae'zel as unlikable, or harsh, or rude. She views Lae'zel as honest and objectively correct most of the time. Genuinely wants to go straight to the creche, but gets very distracted by the tiefling refugees for reasons discussed below.

Shadowheart: Immediately picks up on the vibe of her being a worshipper of some dark god and then just as immediately forgets about it, because nothing could possibly matter less to Raidne than the gods. Shadowheart is only marginally less cool than Lae'zel, by virtue of not liking Lae'zel. She would describe Shadowheart as "sweet" and "sensitive" and is genuinely shocked when Shadowheart starts to elaborate on her extensive knowledge of psychological torture. Rather than these new revelations changing her view of Shadowheart, she actually just comes to respect her more as someone who is shrewd, knowledgeable and dangerous, while still being capable of deep empathy. Astarion: Meeting Astarion is really uncomfortable for Raidne because she finds him relatable in all the sad ways. And the fact that he's on his guard and assumes that they are mind flayer thralls causes her to realizes that this is actually a really rational thought to have and she should have had it herself before she just up and joined with the first people she met. It causes her to reflect on the fact that she might be a little too eager to form a crew, and maybe her isolation for the past seven years (read, her whole life, actually) has made her ill-equipped to judge people. She spirals a bit as a direct result of this first encounter and doesn't really start to know Astarion as a person for a couple of days, which is also why she doesn't pick up on the fact that he's the platonic ideal of a vampire and not at all subtle about any of it. Also, she absolutely noticed he had no reflection, but didn't think about it much, because she's very used to people just sometimes not having a reflection, due to hell lore. She feels incredibly stupid when Astarion tries to bite her and she finally, FINALLY figures it out. She's actually not even a little bit mad at that point, because she's too preoccupied being disappointed in herself to really feel any actual betrayal.

Gale: Gale is the first person she meets who makes a cure seem like a truly viable outcome, and she takes a lot of strength from his confidence and expertise. Unfortunately, this first impression of him is a high point in their Act One relationship. She quickly starts to distrust him and his judgement because a) she picks up on the fact that he implicitly trusts her, which she thinks he should not do because she in no way knows what she's doing, and is a half-fiend, who trusts a half-fiend? and b) she can tell he's hiding something, and guesses that it's big enough to threaten the people around him. She's torn between wanting him to come clean about it, and also not wanting to know, in case it's bad enough that they "can't be friends anymore."

Karlach: Raidne has a weird relationship with tieflings, almost infantilizing. She recognizes that there's a lot of similarities not just visually, but in how the stigma of cambion bad behaviour has affected them, though they are much closer to mortals than a half-fiend like herself. She experiences a similar uncomfortable moment of self-reflection when she meets Karlach, but because she just went through this with Astarion, she's a little quicker to shrug it off and see Karlach, and then she immediately bonds with her, much, much more quickly than with any of the other companions. She's very protective of her, and determined to see her succeed, and she does actually have just enough self-awareness to realize that she might be vicariously working through some stuff when it comes to her new bff Karlach. She also feels some type of way about the fact that she can't personally help Karlach with her engine, and makes getting Dammon's help priority number one.

Wyll: Because she's so protective of Karlach, Raidne's impression of Wyll is pretty bad, but she takes a moment, and takes a deep breath and sees how Karlach understands him, so she makes an effort to understand him too, and really means it when she tells Karlach that he's the best of them. His transformation almost serves as a second first impression for her, as she completely forgets her initial anger and disgust and instead embraces him as a devil, much more like herself now, and wishes he see himself the way she does. She's also completely blown away by the idea of this young person going off on his own, being left to his own devices and making the choice to be his own person and live up to his own ideals, even with a Mizora shaped anchor making it difficult for him. She finds him genuinely inspiring and decides as a direct result of their conversations, that no matter what, she'll never serve the hells or anyone working for that system again.

This will be challenged later.