#most if not all dark romance is problematic anyway but! it's FICTION and people forget that

[fantasticalleigh]

seeing so many videos on YT lately that are like “I read this dark romance book and i’m calling the police” or some condescending put-down derivative

babe if it’s not for you then put it down and find something new to read nobody wants an hour-long video of you yucking someone’s yum

[kpophubb]

Hii love

do u mind telling me ur thoughts about sooha, if you've read dark moon?

I know the #sooha_OUT community are going to come for me for this, but i personally think that she's a neat and pretty girl ( LIKE I WOULD KILL TO HAVE HER HAIR AND BODY EVEN THOUGH SHES FICTIONAL) and maybe it's the fact that heli and solon are her potential love interests that has everybody buzzing like bees. And maybe her role is irrelevant in the lore, but i guess they seem to forget that she played an important role in the mvs of drunk-dazed and fever. I just can't wrap my head around the fact that people are hating on A FICTIONAL CHARACTER because she's a princess, has the most gorgeous guys in the webtoon pining for her, and has super strength.

Also, I believe i might change my bias to Sunghoon :)

Hi hi my baby bini!!🤍🥰 how are you today and tell me what you’ve been upto recently? I felt like I’ve missed u so much and haven’t heard from you in a while..

now coming to sooha..I did talk about this with you before in another ask you sent that sadly I don’t know her enough to judge her babe😭 I only read the free ch 1 of the webtoon series and trust me if I could read the entire thing, I’d be doing it RN to come and talk to you about it in detail ( BUT idk how to purchase these things bc I don’t have a credit card ¿ )

anyways, at first I felt like fans were raging about sooha bc she was getting unnecessary attention and the series was becoming ABOUT HER and not the BOYS like it was originally planned to be. It was supposed to be their story and how they grow, get over their fears and get accepted in the outside world. That’s why, some fans hated sooha when she stole the spotlight and the guys LITERALLY STARTED FIGHTING EACHOTHER for her 💔 secondly, I thought reading the funny attacking tweets were just an inner joke between engenes and Enha. The whole “#sooha_out” thing was just for fun and not serious at all, that’s why engenes were even taunting enha on their vlives and asking them “sooha vs. engene”. It all felt like a funny light hearted joke and engenes being jealous and cute for enhypen, so the matter totally slid from my brain.

HOWEVER, if some people are obsessively throwing hate on this character mainly because of jealousy…then uhm isn’t that very immature? Like come on, this was a teen romance genre series in the first place so it was obvious someone was gonna be her lover (most probably heli bc it was sorta foreshadowed in the first chapter I think by their meeting). And the bite oh god…🙄 it’s just HELI, another fictional character not even OUR REAL HEESEUNG. If sooha was an irl girl, living in the enha dorm with them physically as some sort of 8th member in the group then maybe the jealousy would’ve been (a little justified ¿ ) but this is just very childish…

at the end I still think people are just doing it as an inner joke trend and nth too seriously..Ik some people are making a REAL big and serious big deal outta it but some obsessed problematic fans exist everywhere ESPECIALLY Twitter! 🤦🏻‍♀️ or else why do you think jay would have had to apologise recently and made felt like that for something..so simple that they all misunderstood. It was clear he had good intentions but NAH some people just had to be like that..

AND WOW THIS CALLS FOR CELEBRATION🤩🥳🎊🎉🍻 I’m clearly assuming it’s bc ethan lee always seems to threaten your sanity, hmm? 😉

[amaryllis-sagitta]

My first impression was very ambiguous, I remember going into the romance scene in EA and saying to myself "boooy that's like 3 red flags in one, k bye" and wanting to never try with him again. I was worried they would try to write him as very dark, egotistical and manipulative by default, and I was fully ready not to vibe with that character at all. Thankfully, my short-term & autobiographic memory dysfunction made me completely forget that impression, and on release I was already pre-warned that this is going somewhere else than I assumed, so I could stay open minded.

But these red flags of him being very calculating in his approach, pretty mean despite an ostensibly flirtatious/ friendly intention, telling many honeyed words without a trace of passion behind them, and making the entire process sound like it's about his satisfaction and safety, are still there on release, and the Ascension amps them up.

This is why the Act 2 moments pack such a punch in terms of Astarion showing vulnerability and sincere intentions (even if he kinda hates them about himself at the time), which re-contextualizes all the buffoonery and malice he has shown before. If you were distrustful of him in Act 1, then from your perspective this is a choice to be fair and principled instead of using him as a tool (there are no disapproving reactions if you give your own blood to Araj), or just unwittingly, reactively returning the snide, malicious treatment that he's giving everyone. But if you've already woobified him, you'll end up woobifying him even more after that, because now he seems to be the poor little meow meow who needs the MC to stand up for him etc.

Even to this day, I say to myself: thank goodness this is fictional guy, because in real life I wouldn't have had the the skill to protect myself emotionally, or the patience to put up with a person like that on a daily basis. He would be kinda entertaining to me for exactly 30 minutes and then rapidly go into the "Don't Touch With a 10 Foot Pole, Only Speak When Absolutely Necessary" territory. I've had coworkers like that and in my experience, having someone Like That around when you have your own CPTSD is exhausting because they're fake, they're unsafe, their sass gets abrasive pretty quickly because of how obvious the posturing is, so they activate all the hypervigilance and people reading instincts that are very unnecessary in most circumstances. News flash, challenging people is hard if you were constantly judged and intimidated. Thankfully, I can challenge characters in games and save scum if I feel I've been too mean. Anyway.

Feels like the worst parts of the Astarion discourse are constantly at tension between infantilizing woobification and absolutely unhinged femme thirst that rides on the train of the initial marketing scheme for Astarion (like hello, Onlyfangs was fully intended as a lie to crumble in your face, and yet so many people haven't gotten past that phase in Astarion's reception). It a) hasn't been properly problematized for what it is and b) has proven to breach the boundaries of Astarion's fictitious reality just like the hate commonly addressed at creators tends to in the Internet spaces.

Both these attitudes are a result of cherry picking and a sort of confirmation bias (not in a scientific sense but in a sense of already having a complete "correct" reading of a narrative before you're finished and not allowing any textual evidence to change it), one is dangerously out of touch with the parasocial nature of gaming fandoms and the sheer force of impact that an Internet mob's opinion can have on someone's mental health if they have to face a barrage of a certain kind of takes. It is about some specific misconceptions about trauma survivors that only serve the healthy people to feel very helpful and very good about themselves, but also a part of a wider tendency where people treat the interpretation of any text of culture like a singular act of consumption that gives you the Correct Key Answer to use in a potential debate, not a proper circular methodology where you constantly agree to acquire new information, have your mind changed, your expectations subverted, where you agree to learn something and make self-discoveries through the classic esthetic shock. This wider tendency leads to all sorts of internet wank, not just in this specific case. Long story short, the fandom needs to get over their ick over fucking Aristotle and read about the parts of the process that necessarily precede catharsis.

NGL, looking at the state of the fandom it looks like Larian aimed a little too high with the kind of esthetic shock wave they wanted to send to Astarion's target audience. Whoever understands, understands it too well, and the collective of these inquisitive, understanding fans is likely to read into more layers of meaning and identification than the authors intended, and that's valid. But most people who need to be taught the lesson will not allow themselves to be shocked and challenged by a deeper literary take like that, because the openness to a classic esthetic experience isn't there.

the weirdest thing about the general astarion discourse in the bg3 fandom is that he does actually suck. and astarion fans seem to forget this all the time but he sucks ass. he’s a shitty guy. he’s lame and a loser and rude and kind of stupid and a bad person if you let him get away with it. that’s why i like him.

maybe it’s the blorbo glasses that make people forget about it or maybe it’s the infantilization of grown adults who’ve been traumatized but i see so much fighting about him that boils down to “he’s a shitty person!”/“no he isn’t, he was tortured for 200 years!”. and the answer is that he was a shitty person, got beaten half to death, and then got tortured for 200 years. he sucks and is also a victim. can we fight about something more interesting please.