#this isn't a criticism btw

[vspin]

I've been playing RPGs my entire life, and I find it very interesting that for BG3 specifically, I see a lot of people say that Tav/Durge is always a self-insert/representation of you.

Of course, we've all played a self-insert character before (and it is a valid way to play) but half of the fun for me personally is RPing a character. Coming up with a backstory and personality. These traits will be the driving factor behind the decisions they make in the game, not my IRL views.

That's not to say my personal experiences aren't influencing my characters, because they are. But I'm not playing me in the game.

I wonder if that is why in the BG3 fandom I've seen so much discourse around certain choices?

No wonder people are fighting about Ascending vs Spawn Astarion because they believe that if you Ascend him you are making that decision based on your real-life views. After all, your character is a representation of you! (Btw, I'm not saying all outcomes are good for the in-game characters, I believe there are bad vs good endings)

I find it very fascinating. It's like the concept of role-playing in an RPG doesn't even cross their mind.

I have also never seen so many self-insert/second POV fics before!! Even in Elder Scrolls fandom where I've read so many fics and the character is also a blank slate like Tav.

[very-uncorrect]

Is it just me who feels like A Matter of Loaf and Death was meant to be a full-length movie, and that Wallace's little thing with Piella would've been better paced if stretched out longer, and that the whole thing could've been over twice the length it ended up being? It does not feel like it's only 30 minutes long when you sit down to watch it

[unpopularly-opinionated]

Started rewatching ATLA for the hundredth time and something that, for some reason, just struck me that I find kind of odd is just how easily everyone is so easily convinced that this 10-year old kid is going to save the world, and like nobody questions it. Like in Book 2, Ep. 1, this general is just super ready to send Aang to go fight Ozai posthaste with like zero combat or strategic training, let alone mastering the other three elements.

I mean for starters, has no one in the entire world stopped to think about why the Fire Lord is such a stupidly overpowered bender? It seems like common knowledge that bending is shared through lineage, and the Fire Lord’s family are the absolute pros when it comes to Punnett square genetic engineering to produce only the best offspring, so why has no one else tried it? Especially the Earth Kingdom, like they’re the ones who have noble families left and right, surely they must have some OP Earth Benders lying around somewhere. And mind you, I’m not just talking about present day, I mean at any point in the last 100 years why is it that not a single other nation has figured this out.

And then there’s just the fact that Aang is a kid. I’m not talking about the whole “woe is the child who wears the crown” or whatever, that’s been thoroughly talked to death at this point about just how fucked it is that the whole world rests in a 10-year old kid’s hands. I’m talking about how everyone just accepts that. No question at all. Oh, that 10-year old is the Avatar? Cool, ship him off to the front first thing tomorrow. And I get that it’s because they’ve been fighting this war for 100 years now so they’re well and truly ready for this shit to be over with, but it’s mind-blowing that in the entire Earth Kingdom, none of their generals seem to have any idea of how to properly utilize the Hail Mary that is the Avatar.

I guess what I’m saying is, why has the Earth Kingdom been dumb as rocks for over 100 years?

[fox-guardian]

starting to feel like part of the reason that Sam and Celia's romance thing feels a little off rn is cuz like. what do you mean they're actually dating. he asked her on a date and she said yes. and it's working out so far. it's chill and fine. what do you mean they're not pining for 4 seasons, not communicating, and then getting together only after one of them walked through hell to drag the other out and make sure they know they're loved and wanted. they haven't even patched each other's wounds yet hello. aren't y'all moving a little fast.

[solitairedeere]

i was never as optimistic about the ending of bnha as some villain stans were, but i never thought it'd end so badly it left me wondering why horikoshi ever bothered to humanize the villains or make them complex characters at all.

like-- i expected that at least 1-2 of the 3 villains who were heavily foreshadowed and outlined by the narrative as people to be saved would be, you know, actually saved. i didn't think that was a high bar. i've been let down before in fandoms where everyone was certain a character would live and then they didn't, so i tried to keep my hopes low. AND YET.

what happened to tomura was upsetting, but i wasn't that shocked after how disinterested the manga has seemed to be in him for like, the past 100 or so chapters. a bit surprised, because you'd think if anyone would succeed in the 'saving' mission it would be the MC, but whatever. dabi, well, they've spent a lot of time showing the way his quirk destroys his body even before this arc, so that also sucked but at least it didn't feel completely out of left field.

........but they're not even letting toga live???

i just-- what have we even been doing here? when zero out of the 3 characters that were marked out for saving were actually saved, you have to acknowledge that something has gone seriously fucking wrong with the storytelling. not even just from the perspective of a villain fan but from the perspective of someone who likes stories to be thematically consistent or satisfying in any way.

you can set up an expectation of these characters being saved and then subvert that and turn it into a tragedy- if done well that could even be worthwhile and interesting. but you can't turn it into a tragedy and then just... keep trucking along with the happy ending messaging and act like anything in the manga has been resolved and that the characters have somehow successfully completed their heroic origin stories.

like, maybe i shouldn't have expected this much from a shounen- at the end of the day it is still a shounen so i didn't expect to feel that it truly satisfactorily wrapped up all the themes it brought up around societal ills. but i expected it to at least resolve those things in a shounen-y way where they punch the problems and help these specific people and then you can feel good assuming that the state of things will continue to improve in the post-canon world of the manga.

instead we got... uh, none of that. the story refused to answer a single one of the larger questions it's been outlining for the past 400+ chapters. in the end, it was all flash and no substance, which again could've been fine, if it weren't for the way the story seemed to spend significant chunks of time trying to delude you into thinking it had substance.

truly makes me wonder what horikoshi thought he was doing the entire time. can it really all be blamed on burnout? the most that can be said for this ending is that it is, well, an ending. fuck dude, it is that.

and that's just... such a sad way to end a project that took up 10 years of your life.

[viktortittiforov]

breaks my heart how often i see people posting yoi fanart/fanfic after a long time of not engaging w the fandom say that they "know the fandom is pretty much dead". like babes i get why you'd think that but we are very much still here alive and kickin!! sure there's less of us now but i see new fanfics being posted on AO3 almost every day. not even just oneshots either, there's super elaborate multichapter fics too! people are still writing meta and drawing amazing fanart and translating interviews and doing art collabs etc etc. there's even an active discord server (maybe even more than one but i don't know about the others). that's not what a dead fandom looks like. we're LOYAL

[flashhwing]

I know why the writers chose to prioritize Isabela over Aveline and Merrill over Fenris when it comes to the temptations in Night Terrors, but I understand the characters better and I think it should be the opposite. Aveline gets tempted over Isabela and Merrill stays her ground against a demon longer than Fenris

[jonsnowunemploymentera]

And remember kids, the next time someone tells you, "George R. R. Martin wouldn't make Jon Snow the typical fantasy hero because that's cliche".....

Oh yes he would!

One viewer wants to know what character would you play (on the show)? GRRM: If I could magically clap my hands and become a different person, it would be cool to play Jon Snow who's much more of the classic hero. Everybody wants to be the classic hero! ABC Interview, 2014

GRRM: And the character I’d want to be? Well who wouldn’t want to be Jon Snow — the brooding, Byronic, romantic hero whom all the girls love. Meduza Interview, 2017

In fact he already has ☺️

[circle-of-the-spores]

Genuinely how fucking dare Larian pat themselves on the back for their portrayal of male victims of abuse in BG3 when Wyll's fuckass storyline exists. When they sexualise his abusive relationship with a woman who publicly treats him like a dog. When they allow players to sleep with her and write her as some kinda sexy domme. When they include her in so much of his official content that she's literally on the cover art for the game and Karlach isn't.

Astarion gets to kill Cazador and has a poignant animation where he screams and weeps with sorrow over his body because he's confronting everything that happened to him and accepting that it's finally, truly over. What does Wyll get upon breaking his pact with Mizora? She literally fucking stays at camp right next to his tent and WILL NOT LEAVE. You can't even harm her. Where's Wyll's scene of getting his vengeance for the torment he's endured, for the hell she's put him through since she took advantage of him at 17?

Because who cares about male abuse victims if the abuser is a """hot""" woman? Because who cares about male abuse victims when they're black men in a historically white genre?

Why doesn't Wyll's abuse matter?

[harukamitsuki]

man. spinner and shoji were two characters that i really enjoyed and wanted to see more of... until i did get to see more of them and horikoshi stomped on my dreams...

spinner goes from being one of the best characters to being ridiculously one-dimensional. the heroes don't do jack shit, until it's revealed at the last second that they did, meaning that everything the 'bad guys' did was ultimately useless. kurogiri being in a hospital made no sense; the guy is a high-ranking villain who is far too useful to the villains to give up, he should be in a highly secure location like tartarus. shoji goes from being someone who i really enjoyed to being someone with ignorant beliefs, despite him accusing his friends of being such people.

seriously, shoji's rant on how the 'people from the city' wouldn't understand because they 'had it easy'. NEWSFLASH: discrimination happens everywhere. yes, it's a lot more rampant outside of cities, but it still exists within a city. heck, i had someone scream racial slurs at me while i was walking home, and i live in a big city. to say that someone had it easy just because you had it worse is a horrible thing to say, especially when it's coming from someone who is supposed to be empathetic.

this is not shoji's beliefs. this is horikoshi's beliefs. he could have easily had shoji say something like 'you have had it hard. that being said, people are more willing to turn to extremes outside of the city'.

also, shoji's whole 'violence to get what you want never works out!!' is wrong. i'm not saying from a moral standpoint - that's perfectly fine. but it's historically wrong. yes, there are such a thing as peaceful protests, but they have never worked out as well as those that fight violence with violence. blm riots, for example, were the thing to force the government to take a closer look at why people were rioting and do things to prevent more property damage.

another thing i found troubling was how the mutants became enraged at a person of colour, specifically black, for trying to intervene and empathise with them, screaming that he could not understand. it's supposed to imply that racism wasn't a concern after quirks emerged, as people found other things to discriminate.

which is... very idealistic. if that were something people would really do, then racism wouldn't be a thing after sexism came to light. and neither of them would exist after the lgbt or the neurodivergent. but that's not what happened.

if someone else arises that people could discriminate upon, people would just add that to the list of things to discriminate on.

horikoshi could have drawn anyone for the mutants to yell at. he chose to use a person of colour. it comes off as very tone-deaf and it was just another sign that the mini-arc would screw up.

spinner losing his mind was bad. as in bad-bad. as in, there were so many ways to write this fight, and he chose this? instead of being a battle of ideaologies, it's shoji convincing the rest to step down, then trying to beat a mind-less spinner.

it could have been one of the best fights, with shoji's belief that using violence to solve your issues will only make it worse, and spinner arguing that using violence is the only way to do it with the state of their society.

no matter who won, in that case, it would be ultimately up to the readers to decide who truly won. who had the stronger argument, who made the more sense, all that jazz...

instead, shoji yells at a bunch of people about how 'destroying property isn't good' and 'violence is never the answer', all the while using violence to subdue him.

that could have been could, if it was commented on. if there were some sort of self-awareness.

but it's not and there is none. it went from being an arc i was really looking forward to reading, to something i can no longer stand.

shoji. spinner. you were both done so dirty

[skrunksthatwunk]

actually i'm still thinking about the moral orel finale.

he has a cross on his wall. do you know how much i think about that bc it's a lot.

a lot of stories ((auto)biographical or fictional) centering escape from abusive/fundamentalist christianity result in the lead characters leaving behind christianity entirely. and that makes complete sense! people often grow disillusioned with the associated systems and beliefs, and when it was something used to hurt them or something so inseparable from their abuse that they can't engage with it without hurting, it makes total sense that they would disengage entirely. and sometimes they just figure out that they don't really believe in god/a christian god/etc. a healthy deconstruction process can sometimes look like becoming an atheist or converting to another religion. it's all case by case. (note: i'm sure this happens with other religions as well, i'm just most familiar with christian versions of this phenomenon).

but in orel's case, his faith was one of the few things that actually brought him comfort and joy. he loved god, y'know? genuinely. and he felt loved by god and supported by him when he had no one else. and the abuses he faced were in how the people in his life twisted religion to control others, to run away from themselves, to shield them from others, etc. and often, orel's conflicts with how they acted out christianity come as a direct result of his purer understanding of god/jesus/whatever ("aren't we supposed to be like this/do that?" met with an adult's excuse for their own behavior or the fastest way they could think of to get orel to leave them alone (i.e. orel saying i thought we weren't supposed to lie? and clay saying uhhh it doesn't count if you're lying to yourself)). the little guy played catch with god instead of his dad, like.. his faith was real, and his love was real. and i think it's a good choice to have orel maintain something that was so important to him and such a grounding, comforting force in the midst of. All That Stuff Moralton Was Up To/Put Him Through. being all about jesus was not the problem, in orel's case.

and i know i'm mostly assuming that orel ended up in a healthier, less rigid version of christianity, but i feel like that's something that was hinted at a lot through the series, that that's the direction he'd go. when he meditates during the prayer bee and accepts stephanie's different way to communicate, incorporating elements of buddhism into his faith; when he has his I AM A CHURCH breakdown (removing himself from the institution and realizing he can be like,, the center of his own faith? taking a more individualistic approach? but Truly Going Through It at the same time), his acceptance (...sometimes) of those who are different from him and condemned by the adults of moralton (stephanie (lesbian icon stephanie my beloved), christina (who's like. just a slightly different form of fundie protestant from him), dr chosenberg (the jewish doctor from otherton in holy visage)). his track record on this isn't perfect, but it gets better as orel starts maturing and picking up on what an absolute shitfest moralton is. it's all ways of questioning the things he's been taught, and it makes sense that it would lead to a bigger questioning as he puts those pieces together more. anyway i think part of his growth is weeding out all the lost commandments of his upbringing and focusing on what faith means to him, and what he thinks it should mean. how he wants to see the world and how he wants to treat people and what he thinks is okay and right, and looking to religion for guidance in that, not as like. a way to justify hurting those he's afraid or resentful of, as his role models did.

he's coming to his own conclusions rather than obediently, unquestioningly taking in what others say. but he's still listening to pick out the parts that make sense to him. (edit/note: and it's his compassion and his faith that are the primary motivations for this questioning and revisal process, both of individual cases and, eventually, the final boss that is christianity.) it makes perfect sense as the conclusion to his character arc and it fits the overall approach of the show far better. it's good is what i'm saying.

and i think it's important to show that kind of ending, because that's a pretty common and equally valid result of deconstruction. and i think it cements the show's treatment of christianity as something that's often (and maybe even easily) exploited, but not something inherently bad. something that can be very positive, even. guys he even has a dog he's not afraid of loving anymore. he's not afraid of loving anyone more than jesus and i don't think it's because he loves this dog less than bartholomew (though he was probably far more desperate for healthy affection and companionship when he was younger). i think it's because he figures god would want him to love that dog. he's choosing to believe that god would want him to love and to be happy and to be kind. he's not afraid of loving in the wrong way do you know how cool that is he's taking back control he's taking back something he loves from his abusers im so normal

[utilitycaster]

I think it's gotten better as of late but I must admit. unbelievably validating to, after months of being like "I feel so much discussion of TTRPGs and actual play rests on the idea of novelty rather than skillful execution and I disagree" to turn on the Sam Reich episode of Adventuring Academy and for Sam and Brennan to say "I would watch any well-executed premise the creators were passionate about, no matter how many times I've seen the same concept."

[flying-cat]

Preparing myself to read a Persona 5 fic because it sounds super interesting but Maruki is a tagged character which means there's like a 70% chance that he's being mischaracterized

[nicosaysnope]

it's so funny to me that the book specifically mentions jean not knowing certain words in english, not because it's particularly weird but because in aftg everyone's being sooooo verbose in german & french. using the most out there terms and phrases. from like. 2 years of high school classes, no less

[beanghostprincess]

i know i did not just lose a mutual over lawlu bc they said it was problematic. as if luffy, a 19 y/o, didn't have enough critical thinking to do whatever the fuck he wants.

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

mermista, after seeing her entire kingdom being destroyed and conquered by the horde: angsty teenager moping around in a bathtub eating ice cream as if she just got stood up by her date

micah after losing his wife and daughter, and being forced to survive in isolation for literal YEARS in a deadly island: awkward goofy dad who just wants to reconnect with his daughter, no trauma whatsoever

catra after facing one (1) small inconvenience: 17 mental breakdowns, 30 different outfit changes, nukes a city because she deserves it as a little treat