they/she. writer and shitposter supreme. AO3:
bravelikealady / halfdreamtnomad.
i am 30 or 40 years old & i don't need this.
a side blog - i promise i like & stalk ur lil posts.
Some folks expressed interest in me organizing my Gale meta/headcanons/spirals/menty bs/etc and so here it is. I'll try to update it periodically & at the end I'll leave the tags I tend to use for Gale. Note that my ask is open & my AO3 is here. You can also find me on TikTok, Twitch, and Ko-fi. Post established 14 Nov 2023. Broken links fixed 15 Jan 2024.
Feb 2024 Update in Progress. Mystra related meta now purple for easier time to following that thread.
Big Meta
Gale, Mystra, & Abuse as Mentorship - an examination of Gale's connection to the Weave and the inherent lack of agency he experiences via his education, with Elminster, and of course Mystra (casual information/timeline chat about those two)
Failure to see Gale/Mystra as abusive & how we identify abuse - references the above & a piece on Shadowheart, as well as a talk on ACEs & how we're socialized to qualify abuse
Mystra + Systemic Abuse + Real World Parallels
Elminster the Enabler - a reply to a reply of the first meta, clarifying Elminster's role in indoctrination, religious trauma, & grooming
The Gale of Waterdeep Deserves A Bl*w J** Meta - Gale the Man vs the Wizard of Waterdeep, S*x as Characterization, defining Gale's relationship to intimacy and control
Tav's "I Want You to Kiss Me" & Gale's Soft Laugh - a summary of Gale's inclination to service, anticipating needs, and people pleasing & how the dialogue choices present Tav as a good change
Unpacking Act I Weave Scene - romance & Mystra's resonance
Honeypotting Gale's Musical Theme - analysis of the piece of music for Gale's intro, pulling other music that builds similarly to imagine finished themes and motifs, and a comparison to the musical language and narrative build of Battlestar Galactica's Gaius Baltar, via Bear McCreary's four years of music for the character
Mystra, the Weave, and complicity - honeypotting & Mystra lore re: how much power she does or doesn't have in the Orb sitch
Gale and the Drow Twins - insecurity, monogamy, and how the narrative leaves room for both healing through monogamy OR a healing that opens up s*xually
Accidental meta, replies, thinky thoughts, & more organized beneath the cut!
Meanders, Responses, Lesser Meta
the issue of "Counter Meta" - a bit of a PSA on internalized or latent victim blaming, particularly that I've seen growing for Gale and Astarion
Gale's Folly - what motivates his power/ambition, let's cry about it
Introductory thoughts on Mystra as Abuser
Gale and Yenna - some parallels, a nowhere-near-enough examination of Gale's relationship to children
Gale as Curator & Creative - thoughts on what drives Gale
Sleepover Talk - Why Gale's Folly lowkey makes him very sexy
Recognizing this glimmer to be magical in nature - What did Gale think the "glimmer" was? Some thinky thoughts.
Fanon Gale & Elminster interpretations
Fanon whitewashing of Mystra
Gale's Seeing the Crown of Karsus - aaaaah aaaaah aaaaaaaaaah
Is Gale's Seed Necrotic - listen...
Smaller replies/add ons
Gale's Duality - a wizard in the streets, but a freak in the bed, and WHY that hits us hard
Thoughts on Tav, Tara, Morena, & clashes in Waterdeep
"Not the kind of excitement I usually enjoy being woken up for" - a pretty indulgent discussion of Gale's preferred ways of being woken up
Gale the Camp Cook - how trauma and neurodivergence might influence Gale's command of the cooking and his own relationship to food and hunger
Gale's Focus - what is this wizards focus and how can I make it ouch?
Greek Coded Gale - others brought vibes and lore, I brought George Michael. I'm the least cool part of this discussion but yes.
Possible Roles of Archmages/ArchWizards, from loose DnD guidelines
Reactions, Live Blogging, That Kinda Thing
Do You Need to Kneel For This? - the Gale's Folly reveal
Gale & the Ghost of Video Game Male Wife Past - i cried
Trying NOT to romance Gale
Moody, Sad, & Pathetic - but also : my wife?
Becoming A Gale Girlie at 100 MPH
The Elminster Scene, live reaction/discussion
(to be expanded)
Galegate (THAT Larian interview)
Initial response/context of "annoying"
Gale as Red Herring (+ media literacy)
Gale as Comic Relief (in structure + as coping mechanism)
The Orb Choice as "good" storytelling explained + qualified (Tav's role, Astarion foil, & where death makes sense)
The line between story criticism + personal triggers re: Gale
Gale & Childhood/Children
(to be expanded)
Playlists, Songs, etc
Modern AU Playlist for Maudlin Wizard Sensuality - someone asked what was on Gale's s*x playlist & I establish that Gale is set the stage/vibes over tempo/during & threw this playlist together
(to be expanded)
Silly, Goofy Mood Gale stuff
Are You Mad I Ascended energy
Swayze-esque Gale thoughts
Thinking about hands
Hoe into a housewife
Gale getting high pt 1
Gale getting high pt 2
Gale Dekarios Catdad Core
God Gale Core Test Post
Common Gale Related Tags
Bg3 headcanons
Bg3 shitposts (i do not have a tag just for gale shitposting)
Bg3 meta
Bg3 art
Galeposting
Galeposting srs (i forget this one regularly)
A gale sized hole / gale sized hole
Wolfling photomode / wolfling photo mode
Gale Dekarios
Gale of Waterdeep
Gale Dekarios Music Hour / wolfling playlists (I only put BIGGER playlists posts here, but there are many one off song recs and such if you explore the tag)
we need to bring back old school tumblr communication and im so serious. sending an ask to a mutual just to say hello. seeing three different asks in your inbox all asking how your dentist appointment went. seeing a post you think one of your mutuals would enjoy and tagging them/sending it to them in the dms. nowadays its just silently liking a post or (if youre feeling extreme) replying under posts. WHAT HAPPENED TO US!! we used to be a proper community!!!! #LetsBringWhimsyBack
So far AMC's take on The Vampire Lestat feels like it's making fun of the source material. Every moment that should've had weight instead is twisted into empty, hollow camp. The little Claudias at his door blending with everything else. The documentary aspect isn't doing anything for the story. I'd rather we not do Baby Jenks at all than whatever this is, like... genuinely disgusting I think to make her a sex toy punchline. But of course his mother sexually abusing him is a punchline, too. Smacks of fucking misogyny honestly.
I cannot fathom sitting in a room and thinking, "you know what Anne Rice missed? Piss. Just so much talk about piss and a piss scene." Which also ties into my frustration that where a difference in blood and mess and sex in s1 and 2 was a great visual medium for subtext, emotion, intimacy, here it's just... fucking mess. A comfortable old queen's tacky attempt at splatter.
If the point is that his music is derivitive on purpose, okay, but I'm not interested in massacreing Lestat's relationship to art and music, on top of making him a Rockstar curmudgeon, when even in the pain and self harm of it all he is genuinely moved by young mortal's attempts at counter culture and self expression (which is completely lost because the band members are so fucking irremarkable).
They have completely erased the gothic romance out of The Vampire Chronicles in one episode and I'm just... either there's a pivot that really works or this is a betrayal of all the trust any dual book/show fans gave them.
If you are writing about Lestat du Lioncourt, perhaps for television, and you find yourself confused about what the violence he experienced and the violence he commits mean to him, I would like to recommend a helpful guide.
I do not have caveats. I do not have to qualify anything. I hated this season from moment one to the last. Red flag, after red flag, became cruelty after cruelty. Adapting Baby Jenks that way, the stupid fucking TikTok filters on everyone, the AI slop looking credits sequence, making the band 40 year olds Lestat hates, the idiocy of children in Halloween costumes for an adult book that had just been released, little Claudias at his door and it meaning nothing to Lestat, the music sucking violently dated ass, the "bi/pan means hypersexual" of it all and that is NOT what drinking blood is or requires WHAT, Daniel being an incurious and apathetic version of himself, blood no longer expressive of emotion but empty splatter, vagina vagina vagina, it SUCKED ASS THE WHOLE TIME. There is no credit due. I saw it for what it was immediately and I was right. It just got worse and more hateful all the way to the bottom, into fucking oblivion. Gene Wilder "You Get NOTHING" unto infinitum, fuck you, Rolin Jones, and fuck Hannah's we more or less adapted The Vampire Lestat. Lestat wasn't here. Lestat never stepped foot on that set.
Also, regarding Rolin's words sourced from this post by @usaginoir ( thank you so much for watching After Dark 🙏) :
"Rolin says basically that maybe it felt nothing happened but that’s only because Lestat has such a strong “armor” and doesn’t want to look inside himself and that they need another season to actually explore him as a character"
Part of developing a character is figuring things like this out before you commit to writing the story, asking yourself questions like "she's tough but what would make her crack?", "he never cries but what could push hime to that point?" And if he couldn't figure that out in roughly 7 hours of television then he's not going to figure it out next season, that's not happening, and I'm not waiting two years for that shit.
Really and truly, everything about their relationship to press this go round, particularly After Dark and how often their actors are babysat while Rolin says some of the dumbest shit of all time, points to AMC and Co KNOWING this season was ass.
I wonder if they gave Rolin Jones too much freedom, thinking that the success of IWTV plus it finally being Lestat O Clock was guaranteed success. And they were already in production by the time anyone realized there was no story so they pivoted to heavy PR and pre-emptive damage control. Which is not to say that execs aren't in on the nuke everybody else for Lestat train, just that they thought he'd still be adapting Anne Rice to do that.
From the Men's Health feature, "The Vampire Lestat Star Sam Reid Breaks Down His Workout."
And the thing about it is, Sam's instincts were RIGHT. The idea of what some French noble (in name only) Adonis would be built like is miles from the new millennium's eating disorders - now for men! builds. Lestat in s1 and s2 was perfectly believable as a kind of beautiful that would charm many and also work for Lestat's personal facade/coping mechanism persona.
I genuinely feel that so much of AMC's The Vampire Lestat was written and filmed the way that it was to sell both Lestat and Sam Reid as sex objects. Which is different even from selling them as sex symbols. This being the press they chased, rather than something about fx makeup or bringing Anne Rice's world to life (lmao, i laugh so i do not scream) or even a more meaningful post show interview, like the Alien: Earth podcast, is VERY telling to me.
Fuck AMC. I think they'll burn this to the ground to try and justify it to themselves unfortunately, but I pray this show is cancelled somehow. I pray these actors get out of their contracts and find consistent enough theatre or film work to be okay and creatively fulfilled.
AMC wants Anne Rice's vampires to be a Marvel movie for them so fucking bad. This is ridiculous, especially paired with how often I found the camera less immersive and more leering at Lestat in the early episode of TVL. This is GOTHIC HORROR. No wonder Sam Reid went back home and did some theatre STAT.
"Get A Babadook Body." "How Doug Jones Keeps It Tight." "Get Ethan Hawke's Grabber Grip."
like... what are we doing? Lestat, and by extension Sam Reid, is little more than an OBJECT to AMC and Rolin Jones. It's really, deeply bizarre. It's less overt (obv) then the way the ensemble's POC are being flattened and tormented, but Lestat is very empty and hypersexualized. I don't like it, especially hand in hand with how they chose to treat his symbolic and literal experiences of SA.
HELLO! Despite flossing more than any human being I know, my oral health has degraded rapidly, and will continue to do so without constant intervention. A broken retainer was cemented in my mouth for 10 years before my father's death (yay!) gave me the money to get it removed in 2022.
I didn't see a dentist again until this week because I've been transient/homeless the whole time & freelance writing is continuously degrading to pay functionally less than minimum wage with huge gaps without work because of algorithmic, AI corporate bullshit. It's BAD.
If you can help, my venmo is MirandaBrave. Here is my ko-fi (but it takes a fee). If we're mutuals, I'll give you my PayPal email. My friends helped me get my current low income apartment & thought I'd survive the year, but these costs mean I won't without help. I'm happy to beta or edit fic, be a sage of smut if you struggle with that in your writing, or any other thing you can think of if you give $50+.
Below is proof of my cost estimate for the work I need this month (about $5k), but I have to have laser treatments at least every three months essentially forever, but especially this first year of treatment, or I will lose most of my bottom teeth where the retainer was cemented. They're also concerned that the infection has caused damage to my health in other ways. I have no signs of oral cancer, but I do have several signs that it hit my bloodstream and was damaging my immune system and potentially my heart.
One thing that is bothering me about some of the changes in The Vampire Lestat is that they remove Lestat's agency and recklessness.
In the books he doesn't pretend he's a human playing a vampire, he says he's a vampire and spills vampire secrets in his songs. Most people just believe he's a human cosplaying a vampire from a somewhat popular book.
He seeks out Marius for years, leaving various messages for him before Nicki's death and Gabriella's abandonment lead him to going underground. Marius doesn't dig him up because Akasha told him to.
And in the books Lestat goes to play his violin for Those Who Must Be Kept behind Marius' back, he knows it's a bad idea but does it anyway, he can't help himself. In the show Marius shoves the violin in his hands and tells him to play and Lestat says "I don't know how".
He does the concert because he wants to and because he wants the vampires to redirect their anger from Louis to him. In the show he's doing it for Gabriella. Even the hunting of the wolves in the show is pushed by Gabriella.
Book Lestat rarely thinks before he does anything and if he does the thought is "this is probably a bad idea" before doing it anyway. It's an aspect of his character that I really love and I miss.
