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Amuletspore on AO3 | MA18+, MDNI

Sweetness | Astarion/F!OC ✦ longfic ✦ canon divergent ✦ angst/hurt/comfort ✦ explicit

Chapter previews with snippets HERE

Sweetness Stills | in-game photos from the fic

Strange Bedfellows | Gortash/F!OC ✦one-shot ✦ explicit ✦ canon to Sweetness

Cherry on Top | HeWhoWas/F!OC ✦ gift fic ✦ modern au ✦ sexual tension

Sweetness/Fic Update:

The Good News: I've picked up a new personal work-adjacent project that is a huge deal for me and my career. It's everything I feel like I've been lacking for myself and my personal growth, and it feels good to be creative again irl. I can't say much more without doxxing myself... but this could be the one, y'all!

The Bad News: This project is going to seriously limit my free time to work on Sweetness or any other fics in the upcoming months. While I'm not ditching it or even going on full hiatus, my already slow release schedule will probably become a little slower.

For everyone keeping up with my work, thank you so much. It began as a story for me, but now it's for you.

Love you lots,

Amspo

Sleepyhead 😌

That smile 🫠

Okay, just yesterday I finished writing one of my usual ridiculously long Astarion essays: THIS. This time I’ll keep it short. Maybe. Hopefully. Lol.

Anyway, in that post I made a brief aside about a scene from Astarion’s origin run, when he interacts with the nymph Naoise Nallinto and reveals what he desires above all else: be safe.

That scene immediately reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I remember it was one of the topics I studied for my General Psychology exam back in my long-gone youth.

Very briefly: Maslow’s theory is one of the most influential theories in humanistic psychology, although today it’s generally regarded more as a conceptual framework than as a rigorously validated scientific model. What makes Maslow interesting is that he wasn’t just asking, “Why do people suffer?” He was also asking, “What do human beings need in order to thrive and grow?”

Essentially, Maslow proposed that human needs tend to follow a certain order of priority. Today, the theory has some well-known limitations. For example, the hierarchy isn’t always that rigid, and priorities can vary across cultures. The reason it continues to be cited in psychology, education, management, and even coaching isn’t because it perfectly explains how the human mind works, but because it offers a simple and intuitive way to think about human needs and how they can change throughout life.

I’ll leave the hierarchy below so I don’t have to write an even longer explanation about it.

What I really wanted to say is that seeing Astarion’s choice among Naoise Nallinto’s options made my heart ache all over again. If we use Maslow’s hierarchy as a simple frame of reference, it really highlights just how much our beloved vampire spawn still has to heal before he can truly experience relationships to their fullest, fully develop genuine self-esteem, find lasting inner peace, and ultimately become fully self-actualized.

That said, if we look at the Radiant Hopeful path, I think we can already see the different levels proposed by Maslow beginning to emerge and intertwine:

Safety: killing Cazador and no longer living under his control.

Belonging: finding a family within the group and a partner who truly loves him.

Esteem: learning to see himself as something other than a tool or a monster.

Self-actualization: deciding who he wants to be, rather than who Cazador made him to be.

And that’s it, really. Just a random little thought that popped into my head because, apparently, my brain simply can’t resist chiming in. As promised, I actually kept it short. That’s an achievement I’m quite proud of! xD