#kvira

[bogunicorn]

also this show is giving me a new auto-block criteria: acting like the tv show beat them up in an alleyway, pissed on their childhood/adolescence, fucked their dad, and set their house on fire. or getting angry at it that it's not more accurate to the book, which... why are you even still watching if that's the thing under your skin lmao

"they MANGLED the characters and are CHOOSING to do them WRONG" again if you got to season 3 and this is still your hangup, why are you still here. s1 was super super different, so was s2, why would anyone think that season 3 would magically be faithful to the book? book!louis is a passive and depressed person who just sort of lets the world happen to him, but show!louis is an active agent in his own life. his rage and selfishness and self-hatred drive the plot forward. as soon as louis became a more active character (nevermind the, you know, entire setting -- which again was not a mystery why are you watching at all if that was your dealbreaker), the show storylines were always going to go in a totally different direction

a good adaptation isn't about aesthetic fidelity. it's about making a piece of art that's complementary to the original book and can stand on its own as a story with its own motivations, internal logic, etc. the books are books and make incredibly good use of their medium... which makes an aesthetically faithful adaptation is literally impossible. an adaptation committing to its own altered premise (like say Interview with the Vampire but set in New Orleans in the 19th century and Louis is black) is usually a much better story, instead of a nostalgic slideshow that can't hold up without prior knowledge of the source material

e.g. show!Lestat has a stutter, but he's not illiterate. both are about having the power to control self-expression and language. illiteracy is difficult to portray on-screen and get the proper impact, it's too internal unless you give it a lot of attention. with a stutter, you just need to hear him do it in conversation a few times. the impact is the same, and it's easier in a tv show to see his maturity and his regression when the difference is "stuttering" and "talking quickly and articulately"

people can like or not like whatever they want. it's just a pet peeve of mine when people want or imagine something that will pretty obviously not happen or not happen the way they want it to, and then they get mad when their preferences are contradicted as if it was done to them personally. why are you stressing yourself out like that for no reason. eat a snack or something, jesus, you'd think no one around here remembers that weird queen of the damned movie and how it being dogshit doesn't actually affect anything about the books...

[autspoon]

Mi estas ambaŭseksema

[bogunicorn]

also ngl sometimes i'm still a little bit in awe of the ascended!astarion fans who insist that a reading where astarion ascends and keeps his soul/is a good partner/will learn from cazador's mistakes and not get That Bad is plausible, like, at all. obviously do whatever you want, there are no actual fandom police, but that's just... not at all canon compliant or on-theme. at all.

fighting cazador involves exploring the mansion and finding a bunch of lore about cazador and his maker. the evil skull might as well have shouted, "IF ASTARION ASCENDS HE'LL BE WORSE THAN CAZADOR ON ACCOUNT OF THE ASCENSION THING MWAHAHA." he STARTS that journey by callously murdering thousands of people, many of which he hunted and tricked into being there at all.

for christ's sake even before the epilogue came out, if you were romancing him and become a vampire, he becomes openly controlling and will threaten you if you say you want to break up. and the epilogue makes it pretty clear that he's a controlling, arrogant dickhead. gale will also act like a douche if he's ~ascended~ and you don't go along with literally everything he wants.

like, i think fandom got really caught up in the idea of "good" and "bad" endings, with the idea that if there's a "bad" ending, it's because the player played the game wrong. and it's not. it's about continuing cycles vs breaking cycles -- but also yeah, the one where the cycle continues is the tragic ending and the character ends on a sour note. very fun bg3 is, but it pronounces the B in subtle pretty loudly. a!a, god!gale, dj shadowheart, loyal-to-vlaakith!lae'zel, versions of wyll where he gives his soul to save his father or lets his father die and becomes duke in a desperate bid for power, they're all, in-universe, diagetically, a worse version of themselves than they were when they began the story. if you don't convince karlach to survive in the hells until she can be saved, then she also becomes a tragic tale of someone too crushed under despair caused by people like zariel and gortash to keep trying and she dies of it. if you're playing the dark urge, you can make choices like that for yourself, too, and embracing bhaal is clearly the "negative" or tragic or bad ending

but nobody is playing the game wrong for preferring the tragic or cyclical versions of the narrative. they're just as "valid" a choice as the "good" ones, if you're even applying those words to begin with. insisting that ascending astarion is his good ending, actually, it's the positive one, here's why, is like... we can just like things, right? we can just like stuff? not everything has to be about morals or proving you're the smartest fan by having the correctest opinions (and not testing other people's morals or good-fan-ness based on what pixels interest them the most)

[bogunicorn]

i love a lot of interview but by far my favorite part is when armand and louis get into a fight and immediately start hatecriming each other

[bogunicorn]

also i think it would be funny (since lestat's recollections of louis these days make him look battier than he already does lmao) if we got flashbacks of antoinette in s3... and she's played by an entirely different actress who's plainer but much more charismatic and charming

not to make fun of her or anything, but antoinette was pretty obviously supposed to be obnoxious and kind of dim. she also just has "knows what a cell phone is" face and has had (in my opinion, obvious) work done---not that there's ever anything wrong with that! but it does make her clash aesthetically with everyone else. you also barely hear her singing, and it's difficult to imagine lestat carrying on a long affair with someone he seemed to have real disdain for? and louis is, uh

louis is kind of an asshole. like, generally. the first interview was him just ranting about how he thought lestat was a dumb stupid idiot insufferable bastard who ruins everything. louis never liked antoinette and wanted lestat to kill her just to make a point, there's no way he remembers this woman as anything other than a tacky bitch that was supposed to be dead the whole time lol. and of course you barely hear her sing because louis doesn't like her and probably doesn't really remember (or care to remember) what she sounded like

[bogunicorn]

also: new tag for gay stuff, finally! i didn't just want to tag stuff "queer" because it's a little boring, and also stands out if i tag stuff as queer that isn't obviously queer (like fenhawke art with f!hawke, which i would still tag for queer stuff because fenris is bisexual)

so the new tag for gay stuff is kvira, which is just... it's just "queer" in esperanto because i'm learning a bit of it for dnd right now and it's a conlang, so it's easy to find translations for. i'm slapping it onto posts with ANY queer characters as long as they're kind of in focus, and also obviously queer stuff

[bogunicorn]

oh no

i'm starting to Get the astarion thing

[bogunicorn]

Is anyone else getting the sound bug that makes the companions and PC sound like they're in a echoy cave, and have you found a way to fix it?