VAX-SamWilson/CaptainAmerica By Batmankm On DeviantArt

Work has been absolute hell the last few days. I am utterly exhausted

In other news, I have been reading through the 3 hour (!!!) gaylor powerpoint, and it is beautifully unhinged and ridiculous. It's perfect. No notes. Delusional masterpiece

Baldur's Gate 3 has me in its unrelenting grip. I am obsessed.

Especially with the problematic king himself, Enver Gortash.

I love him. I want him as a romance option for both Durge and Tav. I want my Durge to reunite with the lover she can't remember. I want Tav to drag that man kicking and screaming through his redemption arc.

Tavtash is definitely my preference out of the two. Because god forbid I just have a normal ship with an abundance of fic. No, of course not. My dumbass has to go running for a rare pair.

And on that note, I really need fic writers to remember that Durge is not Tav!! They are not the same. Durge can be evil or good. Tav can also be evil or good. But they are fundamentally different characters regardless of how you play or write them.

So, please, please please please stop using Tavtash tags for Durgetash. I keep getting so excited that there's finally another piece of Tavtash content, only to find that it's actually Durge.

I like Durge, and I like Durgetash, and I will still enjoy Durgetash content. But y'all are getting my hopes up and then crushing them. So please stop using Tavtash tags for Durgetash content.

Astarion's ascension is extremely popular, despite it clearly being the designed bad ending for him.

So many fans of this version want to argue that it's a "valid" path to choose if you enjoy his character, or that it's equally good as his Spawn ending. The "it's what he wants" argument is the hegemonic justification in question.

But is wanting something better than needing another thing? Yes, he talks about ascension ever since he finds out about the ritual.

Yes, when push comes to shove he's still committed to ascend. But is this enough? Should we support his choice, even when everything but his words tell us not to? Should we trust the judgment of a deeply traumatized man about the best way for him to feel better?

This may sound harsh, but the answer is no.

Because in many circumstances, we see Astarion behaving unhealthily as a result of his trauma: he's hypersexual at the beginning of the game, using sex as a survival mechanism. He's yet to learn what his boundaries should be, what it means not to be an object, to see himself as a person that deserves respect and has so much more to offer than just his body. His trauma is still fresh. And he's so scared of losing his freedom, being trapped under slavery again.

We can't blame him being so desperate to feel safe that he will trade everything he is for it.

Because that's what the ritual means, Cazador says so himself: despite gaining the ritual's power, Astarion is still part of the bargain for said power. He still loses his soul in the process, and that is clear once we see how he acts post-ascension.

Of course, someone that is still suffering from the consequences of 200 years of abuse wouldn't care if he became less of himself, in the process of becoming untouchable ever again. Astarion's behaviour towards himself highlights that he doesn't care for the person he is because that person is, sadly, the product of those centuries of abuse.

He doesn't want to be that person anymore: even better, he doesn't want to be a person anymore: people suffer, people get taken advantage of, people are submitted by more powerful beings. He is willing to give this up not despite losing everything he is, but because of it. And that's what happens after his ascension: he retains his body, which becomes an empty shell of who he once was, with someone else inside of it to fill the void left by his soul.

This situation is a perfect, brutal metaphor of an abused person that later in life becomes the abuser himself, a thing that often happens to male victims of SA.

This is what is fundamentally wrong with Astarion's ascension: he's choosing power, his abuser's tool, over healing. Instead of learning to feel like a person again, to deal with his trauma to life after having endured it, he chooses to not feel anymore, while letting thousands of spawns (like he was) be consumed to get what he wants.

This terribly selfish act is the first instance of Astarion behaving like Cazador, considering the spawns as lesser beings, as nothing but his tools, like all vampire lords do. In this process he also sees himself, the person he gives up being, as a tool. He isn't healing. He's losing all of himself entirely.

Why would someone see this sacrifice as not only necessary to leave his trauma behind, but also preferable to healing from it?

The fan-favourite characteristic of Ascended Astarion is his behaviour towards Tav: in this version of "himself", he clearly is even more sexual than he was in his first days with the tadpole. And this expression of his sexuality is drastically different from the one we got to know prior to this point.

He is dominant, prevaricating, demanding in his avances: he enjoys being in a position of power even in his relationship.

This isn't the Astarion that slowly learns to trust his partner, to build a real loving relationship with someone who sees him as equal and truly cares for him.

Everything that he learns during his romance and his plot gets nullified by his ascension; and yet, this gets overlooked in favour of this more sexually appealing version of him. For people that claim to love his character because of his complexity, Ascended Astarion fans seem to only truly love him when he's less of himself than ever.

When all that's left of him is his body, and he behaves more like the toxic love interest from a young adult romance book, a great number of his fans get wild. Is this all that they want from him? The husk of the funny, sarcastic, dramatic and complex character, filled with this more traditionally masculine attitude, replacing what he used to be? An Astarion that never heals from his trauma, choosing to leave behind everything he was instead? Who resembles his abuser more than ever?

Do his fans who like his ascended version so much to genuinely think this is the best outcome for him, or do they just enjoy being able to project this "macho" fantasy on a physically attractive male character, that otherwise isn't anything like this prototype of man?

We can't help but think that appreciating Ascended Astarion is the same as believing in, if not loving, his hypersexual facade: it's overlooking his humanity in favour of sexualising him.

Which is the biggest disservice one could ever do to his character.

Just started watching Loki and I already kind of hate the entire premise of it.

Anything that suggests the idea of a deterministic universe already annoys the crap out of me. And that fucking awful line about how Loki just exists to bring suffering and death to people just so that the Avengers can be good guys made me want to punch my screen.

Sunrise. Instagram: AngryFluffy Twitter: @Angry_Fluffy DeviantArt: AngryFluffy

I am once again calling for book rants. It was so much fun the last time, and I crave more.

Do you have a long standing grudge against a book you read in middle school? Have you gotten swept up by hype only to find that everyone lied to you and the book is trash? Do you burn with rage over the way an author portrayed your favorite mythology or folklore? Is there a book or series that you once loved, but now makes you cringe every time you think about it?

Do you want to vent all of it out to someone who won't judge you, or argue with you, but will simply accept all your feelings as their own?

Hi, that person is me. Send me an ask, anonymous or not, and tell me everything you've wanted to say. Offer me your anger, your frustration, your hatred. I will hold it for you. I will take it into my heart and make it my own.

It can be any genre you want, any demographic. I will accept it all. Even if James Patterson gets involved again. (I'm not scared of you, James!!)

Remember how I said the game was acting like it was going to crash and I ended the stream early because of it?

I was right. It crashed almost the second I stopped streaming.

Fucking great.

Saw your post and who am I to deny an opportunity to rant about terrible terrible twilight knock offs?

Okay so ever since twilight came out in 2005, there's been a load of knock offs inspired by the "vampire=hot and sexy/mysterious" and while some of them are, this author P.C cast and Kristen Cast saw the idea and cranked it up more than was necessary because what the hell.

The book is called House of Night and there are lots of books. And the idea of being a vampire was that you had to be marked/chosen in order to undergo it's transformation which. If you were chosen, you had to be with a fully fledged vampire until you were fully fledged yourself which is a long process (around four years) and what is a better place than being with a bunch of fully grown vampires than a academy with other chosen with the fledglings as the teachers?

I'm not gonna lie, it's a great concept but it's terrible what the authors done with it. Transformations don't always work and the chosen sometimes die, but in order to prevent this- you had to be pretty and not fat. Shockingly this isn't the worst thing on the list of how many messed up things this book had done

Then the authors worsen the book more by having the characters be problematic. (They sl#t shame a lot and this doesn't make sense since it's common knowledge that drinking human blood /blood in general is sexual in the story)

Examples include saying the r word, fetishizing queer characters, making a white character "twins" with a black character because they're just so alike like using aave as an example (and the black character she's twinning with is terribly written as well so it just ends up more terrible)

And absolutely terribly horrendous relationships!!

The main character is the "not like other girls tm" and so she gets the bad boy, some sort of thousand year old grandpa boyfriend, a TEACHER boyfriend, and a human boyfriend 😭 (for the amount of shaming this book has, the main character is getting busy with every boy she meets)

AND WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK MORE WORSE is that they thought it was cool to use Indigenous culture but strip everything about said culture so they can fit use what they thought was cool to use in the story. Im happy for any type of indigenous reputation as an indigenous person myself but WHY

They just made the main character (who was named Zoey redbird btw, cool last name tbh but absolutely shitty character) have op powers and call her a "Cherokee princess" with no respectful mention of Cherokee culture at all. They just made their own thing and slapped the word Cherokee on it and shipped it as representation.

For a character that's supposed to be non-white, she was acting the opposite despite being close with her grandma who was Indigenous (+ being stereotypical) and inheriting op powers that were meant to be from her "culture"

PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH

I don't even know how I saw past the red flags as a kid reading this book but now that I have, I'm just so angry just thinking about it 😭

I hope this rant of mine was entertaining

I was just on the right side of too old to hear about this series back when it came out. So let me tell you, it was an absolute trip to see what was in these books when my friends started raving about them a few years later.

Like, this? This is what they were so hyped about? I'd rather them tell me how much they love 50 Shades - well, okay, that's a little too far, but still.

I truly don't understand how any woman survived the absolute peak of fatphobia that we hit in the 2000s. And I'm including myself in that. No idea how I lived through it. These were the days when people were calling Britney Spears fat for being a size 4 instead of a 0. How did women not just collectively die off? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that we made it through, but holy hell it was by the skin of our teeth.

So someone really needs to tell me what the actual hell was going on in the 2000s that made every piece of teen media present teacher/student relationships like a totally cool and not abusive and traumatizing thing. Remember how grossed out everyone was by the Archie/Grundy relationship in Riverdale? In the 2000s, no one would have batted an eye at that. It would have fit right in with every other teen show at the time. I can't watch hardly any of my favorite high school shows anymore because of that. Ugh, so gross.

And holy shit I forgot she was indigenous! Well, in heavy quotes at least. That Cherokee Princess nonsense is such a White People move and I just can't. I don't know what's worse regarding indigenous rep, House of Night or Twilight. My man Charles de Lint isn't perfect and he's fucked it up a few times, but at least he actually tries and shows respect (um, hey, if he's actually far worse than I think, please let me know).

But, hey, in maybe possibly good news, apparently the writers are trying to convince the publishers to let them rewrite the series so they can do something about all the problematic stuff. That at least has the potential of growth for them

I finally fixed the issues I was facing last night, so please come join me on twitch for Far Cry 5