Ever since I played SDV for the first time just a little over a year ago (why it took me that long, i do not know), I have been itching to write fanfic for farmer/Sebastian. All I have right now is a lot of scattered headcanon and maybe a few scenes here and there because I don't know what time is anymore. Where did 2024 go?
Sebastian finding comfort and quiet joy sitting by the window in the farmer's house is just <3 <3 <3. What are your thoughts on the whole mess in his family and the reasons why he feels ignored? (as for me, my mind tends to go for the darkest ideas b/c DRAMA)
The other thing I really like about Sebastian being very quietly happier is that he doesn't change either, like, he's still got insomnia, he still needs days away from people (even you), but he explicitly tells you when he's got days like that so you know that's why he's not there, or whatever.
IT'S JUST SO GOOD
But anyways. Rambling!
The first fic thing with Sebastian is obviously you're meeting him when he's feeling exactly like you did at your terrible corporate job (and he also hates terrible corporate jobs, go us) in that he doesn't know where he wants to go but he needs to not be here
so there's this connection in that you get it, but then also this immediate disconnection, because how can you get involved with someone and make it harder for him to get out when he so desperately needs it?
As to why he needs out?
There are a lot of possibles there. I find it interesting that it's pretty clear no one (even his friends) respect his boundaries: everyone feels free to just walk into his room, they interrupt him when he's actually working, which means it's gotta be even worse when he just needs solitude to help balance himself (no wonder he hides away so often, he's just trying to carve out any space at all)
There's a recurring theme with the LI characters who grew up in Pelican Town regarding still living at home with their parents, and respect that may or may not be owed in both directions in that situation, but it's also really clear that, in this specific time and place, none of them have anywhere else to go, and I'm not sure any of their parents take that at all seriously.
Sebastian is the only one of that group who seems to be trying to work and save up enough to change that! And yet his mother doesn't treat him any more like an adult than any of the rest of them get.
Also, for all that the game is very hand-wavey in regards time and ages and etc. it's clear he's not supposed to be all that much older than Maru, which means he and Demetrius have known each other for most of his life.
And yet, Demetrius never once mentions Sebastian in dialogue but talks about Maru quite a bit. (There's even a note on the wiki to that effect in his trivia section.) They clearly have no connection, which is unfortunate enough as adults and pretty close to tragic for whatever age Sebastian was when Robin and Demetrius got married.
As part and parcel of the same thing, he and Maru never hang out together in any of either of their schedules, and only stand near each other at holidays when it's clearly a family holiday, and they're with Robin & Demetrius too. They both have a line or two referencing each other, and they do specify half-sister/half-brother, which as someone with only half siblings that is uh, not how that normally works for most of us.
Maru's got a line about wishing they were closer and that she wanted to have a brother but Sebastian never acted like one.
If you get married, Sebastian's got a line where he assumes she's happy he's gone, and if you have kids he's got one hoping they get along better than he and Maru did.
They have very different views of their relationship, is what I'm saying here.
And for all Sebastian is willing to assume he was the difficult one, they were both children, it's not up to them to treat each other equally, it's up to their parents to treat them equally, and it seems really obvious they didn't.
(Was there something there with Sebastian's father, beyond just a simple previous relationship that didn't work out? Tragic or abusive or just low-grade general shittiness? Because it seems like everyone swung too hard in the other direction, avoiding thinking about or mentioning him For Reasons™️ that are now completely opaque and just help Sebastian clearly be othered.)
Which gets me to my next question, which is: how long has he lived in the basement without windows which he clearly hates? Why didn't his carpenter mother just build another room above ground? She expands your house in ludicrous directions, and even if we ignore that as video game mechanics, she's clearly capable of full sized construction not just furniture or repair or whatever.
And yet.
He's still in the basement without windows while Demetrius gets a lab (does a lab really need to be above ground with windows more than a bedroom? do you know legally most places you can't list a basement room as a spare bedroom unless it has windows?)
And Maru gets a room with its own little yard for her experiments so she's got both more fresh air and potential privacy than anyone else in the family.
And all I can really come to as a conclusion there is that Demetrius has never seen Sebastian as his step-son, and that influenced how he and Maru grew up, and Robin didn't do anything about it; whether she ever tried or not, she's not even trying anymore by the time we meet them.
So Sebastian legit needed to get out of there, and I feel bad when I'm playing different farmers that I don't get to help him do that, more so than I do with the rest of them when they're not romanced. (Probably why I keep coming back to his? Also the frogs and general fondness for odd little critters is SO ADORABLE I am eternally smitten.)
1. What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?I mentioned two here. On the less visceral end of things, I could never really get into Fenris x Hawke. I can see the appeal (Gideon Emery’s voice alone is swoon-worthy), but it just never really clicked for me. Fenris in general just always felt kind of out of place to me in DA2, and I think that probably influences some of it.
2. Are there any popular fandom OTPs you only BroTP?I don’t know if it’s that popular, but I do see Cass x Cullen every now and then, and they are 100000% BROTP for life, my dudes. I can’t see them in a romantic relationship at all.
4. Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?In the same vein as my issues with Alistair x Cousland and the whole Cullenite fiasco, Cullen x F!Inquisitor, especially Trevelyans, was kind of on my shitlist for a while. I still had my own ships and supported friends’ shipping, but I realllllly pulled back from a lot of fanworks for a while.
21. What are your thoughts on crack ships? I think they can be a lot of fun, especially from a creative pursuit–Trying to figure out how to make two characters who have little to no feasible canon reason to be together come (huehuehue) together can be a blast. But it’s usually not something I actively seek or browse for.
sarasa-cat replied to your post: my dash is full of tasty-looking whedon hate now i...
I have taken flack since Buffy, which was never feminist.
i never watched that one. i think part of my dislike toward him was just that people gushed about his stuff and what i’d seen was incredibly mediocre. and people would get kind of aggressive about it and question my taste overall.
there was something i wanted to post about this a few days ago but decided not to because ppl in fandom always become angry whenever someone says the energy for creativity needs to come from “because i fucking want THIS’ and cannot rely other people validating your work with kudos/etc because that is not how the thankless work occurs.
obtaining validation is too much extra work
we must validate ourselves through the purchase of Fine Luxury items and consumer electronics like everyone else this is the third time did i get it rite
Fandom asks meme - 30 & 31 for Dragon Age and also for The Witcher.
30. 3 reasons the series brings you comfort
31. 3 things you would change about the series
Sorry for the delayed reply, I’ve been away for a few days outside of data range. :) Thanks for these questions, they’re a great choice. They could be an ask meme all by itself. :)
Ask meme here
Answers under the cut....
Dragon Age:
Comfort:
1. Hawke <3. She is just so damned ordinary, trying to do her best in a sucky situation. The fact that you can play her in different ways, and all seem like totally feasible responses to said sucky situation. That she cares about her family and tries to protect it. That this can lead to immoral choices. Just. Hawke.
2. Kirkwall. I love that you spend an entire game in one city. At first, I had been disappointed by that. But getting to know a city over the course of years, its people, its problems, really grew on me. It makes Hawke feel like she actually belongs in this place, see the ordinariness above.
3. The found family. I really can’t separate them out. I love the rag tag bunch of DA2. While I really enjoyed DA:O, and did like the companions, the motley crew of DA2 and the extended period of time spent in a relatively small environment meant that those relationships are intense and important. Which leads me into the changes...
Change:
1. I hate that the found family mostly went their separate ways at the end of DA2. I understand why they said that, especially if Hawke goes the mage route and ends up a fugitive, but I hate it.
2. DA:I. I don’t like the look of the game (the graphics are a little too uncanny valley for me), the use of Frostbite, the endless fetch quests in a vast but underpopulated map (I ended up skipping to the end because I got bored), and how the companions felt more like colleagues than friends or family. It was basically the opposite of everything I liked about DA2.
3. I just wish that the games had dealt better with the elves overall. I feel like they really bit off more than they could chew without even really realising it, and only dug themselves deeper and deeper into that hole over the three games. The lack of integration of the elven protagonist in DA3 really just capped that right off, especially because its absolute tone-deafness inadvertently epitomised the tricky relationship that the game series has had to race all along (and is, like a few things in this series, unintentionally brilliant as a result).
The Witcher:
Comfort:
1.Geralt’s ability to distinguish monsters despite appearances and his strong regard for his own moral compass;
One of the core themes of The Witcher is that humans often turn out to be the monsters, while the monsters that Geralt is paid to slay are basically just supernatural animals doing their thing. Geralt’s ability to distinguish between the two is a large part of what makes him who he is.
2. Women + literal, actual power
I love the witches in The Witcher, and the idea that women who are most often poor and powerless can grow up to have control over themselves and their environment. Yennefer is the stand-out here, and I love her for being such a complicated character.
3. The father-daughter relationship of Geralt and Ciri
This is a touching relationship in TW3 in particular, showing Geralt’s depth of heart and character, while also acknowledging Ciri’s strong bonds to her found family in the other Witchers. Plus Ciri! Ciri <3. She unites the two previous points. A woman with literal, actual power and the discernment and moral compass of Geralt. <3 (Yennefer and Ciri also adds another interesting layer to Yennefer’s character)
4. Bonus: Dandelion (Jaskier)
Just because he’s so daft and the buddy comedy thing he has going on with Geralt is great. Especially in the TV series. Great casting choice.
Change:
1. Women aren’t treated very comprehensively in the books (especially) or the games, and are occasionally brutalised for shock value. One example that sticks out was in TW3. There’s a side character, Priscilla, who is a singer and a rival/love interest for Dandelion. She is randomly and brutally attacked, and although she apparently recovers (told not shown), it was unnecessary and poorly dealt with. Having said that, there is a good deal of depth to work with in the source material, and the TV series does a lot better with Yennefer in particular - in large part because we actually get to see her POV. There are lots of interesting minor characters that more could be done with (and hopefully we get to see a lot more of in the TV series!).
2. In the games, combat is boring, poorly scaled, and awkward in mechanics (rolling, rolling, rolling). That could be better. First and second games in particular.
3. A lot of people dismissed The Witcher as sexist years ago because of the women card collecting mechanic in TW1. It’s a really silly thing to have included, but the encounters that precede the card collecting are actually all about women’s agency and sex positivity in the face of the no-strings-attached (sterile, disease free, drifter) sex-on-legs that is Geralt. I wish that the games hadn’t included it so they didn’t get written off immediately, because it doesn’t do justice to the actual circumstances in which the encounters took place.
Using the "Random trope" button on tvtropes rapidly struck gold! Rate these tropes: Pirates who don't do anything; Court Mage; Buddy Cop show; Mystical White Hair; Politically Active Princess; Autopsy Snack Time; Large Ham; Anti-Villain; Retcon.
Hmmmmm. I’m not familiar with many of these tropes - had to look them up!
Pirates who don’t do anything
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
I actually like the mundane details of people’s jobs, and enjoy the realism that this can bring to fanfiction. If the jobs are unsavoury, showing the detail can avoid the romanticism.
Court Mage
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
I’m a sucker for any and all adviser-type relations. Court mage is an interesting one.
Buddy Cop show
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
Eh.
Mystical White Hair
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
Politically Active Princess
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
Absolutely, love this. Anora is a great candidate for fanfiction along these lines given how much must have been happening behind the scenes in DA:O. Very big fan of this trope.
Autopsy Snack Time
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
Large Ham
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
Anti-Villain
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
Ahem. Yes absolutely, and this was one of the biggest drawcards of DA2 for me.
Retcon.
No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |
I know why it happens, but I prefer if it can be avoided!
