#please please please interact

[fates-calling]

I caved and made this silly side-blog! Mostly: because I want a place to scream about my Tavs and the game itself.

So! Meet my three guys!

The only player characters I have made. So far...

Romance: Gale | Playthrough Status: Complete! | Alignment: Chaotic Good

Romance: Astarion | Playthrough Status: Complete! | Alignment: Neutral Evil

Romance: Undecided | Playthrough Status: Act 1 | Alignment: Lawful Good

Some more detailed facts about them under the cut!

Soren

He was taken in by a thieves' guild (which I named the 'Silver Tongues') in Baldur's Gate when he was young after running away from home - who posed or were also bards as a cover-up

He is a raging kleptomaniac, and genuinely can't seem to help himself sometimes

In-game every single romanceable companion in the tadpole gang, tried to sleep with him: except for Karlach. Even the Emporer tried. He only slept with two of his party members, Gale (ofx) and Astarion in Act 2: twice.

His musical instrument of choice is the lute!

His choice of weapon is a longbow & longsword! He actually uses Phalar Aluve.

He and Astarion have a bit of a messy relationship. It's queer platonic, honestly at best. But also, they are kind of in love with each other. However, Soren chose Gale and also believed that the vampire needed a friend, more than a lover. As well as, as much as he adores Astarion - he respects Gale's desire to be monogamous.

He grew up never in one place, being dragged from one city or town to another by his ever-drinking & abusive mother. They were cast out of their eleven town because Soren, was the result of an affair: and with his father being a rich lord and his mother not his wife, well - they were tossed to the streets. He learned how to swindle and steal to survive.

Durge

At first, I named my Durge run well, "The Dark Urge" because I thought it would be funny. And I couldn't think of a fitting name but then it just stuck. Now, the lore reason, is that he really doesn't have a name. So - when meeting Lae'zel and realizing that calling himself the 'dark urge' might cause mistrust, or make him seem pretentious: he simply combined the two words. Durge.

He is a dual wielder! Currently using two shortswords (Knife of the Undermountian King & just a gith blade)

While I am doing a completely evil run with Durge - he is going to reject Bhaal. Because he wants to be free, and as an aasimar, all he has known is submission and orders. He isn't going to become a good person - no, he just wants freedom. To kill who he wants. When he wants, be in complete control of himself and his deeds. Kill in his name.

He had a one-night stand with Lae'zel unable to resist her demanding allure. He regretted it the day after, realizing that he should have thought about it more. But! It did help him discover that sex makes him feel the same way giving into his urges does. It's a stress relief! It also made him remember how many people he has slept with a lot. Almost as many as he has killed. Apparently - casual sex is a habit of his.

He is obsessive. About everyone who comes into his vicinity, and who allows themselves to be under his wings & gain his respect/trust. Whether they be a friend or lover. Durge holds the people he cares for too tight and leaves bruises upon their bodies because all he has known is darkness and blood. How does he deal with these other feelings? That he wasn't built for. So, instead of casting light like most aasimar - he drags people into his swirling shadows and bloodied wings. And he won't let them go. Not without a fight.

Ouroborus

Ouroboros was a part of the Blood War before escaping Avernus

Every time he uses divine magic, it essentially hurts him as well due to his fiendish blood (half-devil)

If it were mechanically available he would totally be an Oath of Redemption

While playing, I have him in his full cambion form, he hides his devil linage and presents himself as a teifling to the party until Act 2 ish (just take away the wings pft)

I plan for him not to use any of his illithid powers, or give into any of them! Something Durge & Soren both did.

Currently using the Everburn Blade!

He has the least developed personality & backstory of my three Tavs, obviously because I haven't played with him for long. I am very excited though.

[icarus-showmethemoon]

inspired by boop day, reblog this post if its ok for people to send you random asks and interact on your posts with no judgement. i want to talk to people.

[oncorhynchus-nerka]

VERY IMPORTANT a dam in the Netherlands, the weerdsluis lock, is directly on a migratory path for spawning fish. They have a worker stationed there to open the door for the fish, but they can take a while to open it. So to keep the fish from getting preyed on by birds they installed a doorbell. Only, the fish don't have hands to ring the doorbell. If you go to their website, they have a LIVE CAMERA AND A DOORBELL that YOU RING FOR THE FISH when they're waiting, and then the dam worker opens the door for them! I can't express how obsessed I am with this. look at this shit. oh my god.

Please check on the fish doorbell once in a while :)

[pro-sipper]

"i want more media with zero drama, no tension, and zero problematic characters and i am not joking"

Great! Here are my recommendations:

[proshipwanderer]

i feel like. being anti-harassment should be the default. i think its REALLY strange to go out of your way to bully strangers online. i don’t think. harassing people online and in fandom spaces should be the norm. that’s just me tho

[theoldkyokodied]

Really quick doodles of a few scenes from the stream yesterday. Including combat flirting taunting, gale’s magnificently distracting shoes and.. whatever you wanna call gale agreeing to give 15 gold to astarion 😐😑😐😑😐 (that’s me blinking)

[pissed-whizard]

my blog is a gateway drug to cooler and better blogs (my mutuals)

[dumplingprincessextraordinaire]

Toxic yuri

Art by @/AmiThompsonh

[tadfools]

You guys are commenting on the fics you read right? You’re at least leaving kudos on the Astarion smut and the pairs that have less than 20 fics for them too? You’re bookmarking stories you really like that are still being updated and ones that haven’t been touched in over a year right?

You know that even the smallest interactions are like cocaine to fic writers right? You understand how important a string of emoji hearts left behind on a chapter at three am is right?? Right????

You’re treating AO3 like a community and not a content factory….right?

[zekuto]

i was obsessed the first time i saw someone post leon on that stupid panda rocker but i was never able to find raw footage of it lol, so i decided to compile leon with all the playground interactions because i love him <3

[spoopyium]

I don't know why but when he said he sampled the water of Qiaoying Village I just imagined him lapping it up on all fours when no one was looking so I doodled this up 💀💀

[magnusbae]

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

A post in 2014:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

[tinkaqueer]

Things antis need to actually get acquainted with

The block button

The AO3 tagging system

The block button

Blocking keywords on twitter and other social platforms

Not clicking on fanfics that have blatant warnings on them for triggering topics

Dear God the block button

[autistichalsin]

In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.

Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?

Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.

More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.

But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.

A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.

Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.

So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.

Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.

It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.

There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:

The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”

A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.

It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.

And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.

Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.

Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.

So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.

Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.

So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.

And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.

And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.

And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.

Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.

Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).

It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.

[pro-sipper]

the post: everything has a right to exist in fiction, even if it's fucked up

the comments: i was going to reblog this until i realized op likes fucked up stuff in fiction. this is a common dogwhistle phrase for people who like fucked up stuff in fiction. they have to talk in code to trick people into agreeing with them. stay safe out there!

[proshipwanderer]

you are not a disgusting person for exploring and enjoying dark themes in fiction. you do not have to defend yourself or justify the content you consume. have fun with it, get freaky and weird with it. you can do whatever you want forever