Warm Up Drawing!! Exams Nearly Killed Me But Its Over

Warm up drawing!! Exams nearly killed me but its over

Yah they're toxic for each other 😩

This stance makes me feel unholy things

Pro Tip: You are not better than someone because of your choices in a VIDEO GAME with an evil-coded character, especially when you're on the same level of hyper-fixation for pixels. You will get the same weird looks from others when they see how far you'll go for it and how much you want to fight over a fictional character. You're still just as weird as the people you complain about. Stop making jabs or you're going to sink the boat we're all in.

It's FANTASY. It's ESCAPISM. Treat it as such. The people you're trying to look down on are having the time of their lives because they're doing so. Why aren't you? Why are you so fixated on different interpretations of an RPG when you should be fixated on your own?

Want to pretend you can fix Astarion? Want Ascended Astarion to love you? Want to go looking for a cure for him? Want to be a power couple with AA or be his victim? GO FOR IT. In fact, the way I see it, if you're not pursuing multiple stories for your Tav for all of the endings with Astarion that make you happy and comfortable, what are you even doing with yourself?

I'm an escapist by nature but fuck, I want your life if all you have to worry about is what video game options you choose define you and focus on what other people are doing with their escapism. It's definitely not healthy but sounds better than the bullshit I have to deal with in everyday life. Then again, I'd rather focus on my own stuff than what everyone else is doing.

Because Astarion is a white guy with a sad backstory that's why some people are hysterically overprotective of him

I love Shadowheart. She was my bae throughout my first (unfinished) Tav run. I abandoned that run because Astarion convinced me I needed to restart as Durge for him, but Shadowheart forever holds a very special place in my… well, heart.

I’ve been thinking about the contrast between them and their arcs and the way fandom interacts with them.

They both start off as characters that by D&D standards are “evil.” Shar is an evil aligned goddess, and vampires are evil aligned creatures.

However, Shadowheart isn’t evil. She disapproves of actively evil decisions and approves of kindness to animals and the helpless. She just doesn’t like it if you seem to be putting do-goodery above your search for a cure to the tadpoles. She is fine with killing the grove, but the contrast between her at the tiefling party and the goblin party shows pretty starkly how she really feels.

Astarion starts off the game evil. I will fucking fight anyone on this. He has very very good reasons to be evil, but so does Shadowheart… and she’s not. Astarion enjoys chaos, he likes murder, he likes hurting people. He thinks being “good” is weak and stupid and that might be a trauma response, but it is how he genuinely feels at that point in his story.

And yet. AND YET. For some reason, I have never seen anyone complain about making Shadowheart a Dark Justiciar. If she likes you, you actually have to encourage her to kill Nightsong. Even on my evil run, she spared Aylin if I didn’t tell her not to. You have to either not care about her or intervene to make her evil, and right up to the end where she kills her parents and Shar wipes her memory again, she is just so miserable and resigned to what she’s been influenced to be.

But people do it to get the hotter sex scene or whatever and that’s fine.

But Astarion? The man who spends the whole fucking game begging you to help him take over an evil cult and murder his “family” so he can become a living vampire as soon as he realises it might be an option? The guy who will throw a fit and leave you if you don’t either succeed in a persuasion check or help him eternally damn 7007 people— no matter how close you’ve gotten to him?

Apparently you’re an evil piece of shit if you find his “bad” ending compelling or, dare I say it, hot.

I don’t really care which ending you prefer for either character— I think the game does a great job on its own telling you what you should think and it’s fairly nuanced for both characters. I just don’t understand why Astarion has to be so woobified and his “bad” ending fans vilified as if they’re naive morons with no media literacy.

Shadowheart, the character, hates her “bad” ending way more than Astarion, the character, hates his. And fandom can’t reflect this because I don’t know…

Oh god. It’s sexism isn’t it?

Giving the white people going to Bali and telling the locals "You dont need money! You only need spirituality and fulfilment!"

Telling Astarion that Power wont make him happy. Is like telling a poor person that money won't make them happy. In this essay I will.....

i love the idea of a vampire tav who, by virtue of being turned as a bride/groom and not a typical spawn, and also being gifted with astarion's ascended immunity from most vampire restrictions, has no real idea of what being a vampire is like for literally every other vampire in existence.

like, astarion and tav host a party and invite the vampires they've been in correspondence with in other cities, and tav finally meets a vampire other than astarion and is like, well damn sucks to be all of you.

like, finding out they can't just stay in any inn because they have to be invited in. they couldn't get to baldur's gate faster because they had to go the long way to avoid routes crossing over running water. the precautions they have to take to block out the sun and make sure not even a sliver touches skin. tav had no idea about any of this because none of it has ever affected them.

infuriating for every other vampire to hear about how they've never needed to worry about any of that, but hilarious for astarion.