This Should Be A Tweet But I Don’t Want To Deal With People On Twitter. Everyone Stop Having Every

okay i wanna do one of these. PLEASE interact: fraternal twins, people who were blonde as children, geminis, scorpios, roleplayers (ttrpg or larp version), roleplayers (tumblr blog or discord or omegle edition), gif makers who are terrified of the death of tumblr bc they will have nowhere to post, people with septum rings, non supernatural fans who nonetheless have opinions on the characters by osmosis, ace attorney investigations enjoyers, people with old laptops, people who do not own airpods, flautists, people with ocd who are very messy, collectors of weird objects, drinkers of iced coffee only, and winter haters

Come join me on twitch for more talk of mage rights with Dragon Age: Origins

Ever since the latest Dune adaptation came out it's been like the thing for booktubers, booktokkers, etc., to talk about how much they hate the book.

Now, Dune is literally my favorite book. I've read it so many times. I am in love with it. Not so in love with the son's additions to series, but that's a whole vitriolic rant that I don't want to get into right now.

Anyway, despite how much I love it, I absolutely do not fault people for not liking it. I can see why people would dislike the characters, would find the plot boring, think the political structure is confusing. I don't agree with those criticisms, but whatever. You don't have to like what I like. It's fine.

What isn't fine is the amount of people talking about how they hate it when they clearly didn't try to engage with it in good faith. I mean, they are really people out there saying that it lacks depth, that there's very little worldbuilding, that the characters are one-dimensional.... Honey, I don't know what you read, but it sure as hell wasn't Dune

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Not even going to bother with my hair today. It does what it wants without regards to anyone else

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.

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everybody 21 and under rn is like “omg y2k!!! early 2000s fashion!!” but will not TOUCH a pair of low-rise coochie jeans…………….cowards im telling u right now if u were caught dead wearing high waisted ANYTHING in 2002 u would be shoved into a LOCKER and called slurs by a bitch named Hannah with a belly button ring and a whale-tail thong. commit or sit

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Juliette x Roma @ these violent delights by Chloe Gong