iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 7m

...to really do them justice, it probably needed to be the sort of 1990s Doorstopper Fantasy that you could use to kill medium-sized mammals, and IDK that either the author or the publisher were up for that endeavor.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 7m

As a novel, I think it could have been interwoven better--but TBH, the novel was trying to do about five things in not even 300 pages, and I saw why,* but... *OK, I don't know that we absolutely needed the childhood stuff, but it contains one of my favorite characters and great lines, so.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 15m

...you go out on mods/missions, you meet interesting people and kill them/fall for them and have them turn evil because your GM is a magnificent bastard/take their stuff/etc, and then you go back and deal with all of that.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 15m

Similarly, I was thinking it fit very well with my LARPing experience: you have your consistent besieged town/postapocalyptic outpost/weird hell dimension, which has its own "townie" people and internal politics and so forth, and then...

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 1h

Yeah. I get it, especially given the time, but also...IDK, the age thing makes it weird, but the human-elf thing makes the age thing weird anyhow...

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

No trauma, just complete and utter embarrassment. I have burned the photos (especially the ones with The Perm) and am now seeking out powerful mind-wiping drugs for any witnesses to my adolescence.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

Oooh, yes! I have Complex feelings about the Catti-Brie relationship, which are mostly positive but tinged with my own projection: I absolutely could not hook up with anyone who remembered me when I was a teenager.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

Yay! I need to re-read the Drizzt stuff. (I also like the--I think--Starless Night take that, if you act like a jealous alphahole, everyone will yell at you and then you'll be killed fighting a blob demon. And I know everyone was then sad about Wulfgar, but still, that's a moral I can get behind.)

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

Says so much about Malice, Vierna, drow society, or all of the above.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

Right? Fucking Vierna: so very messed up, even by drow standards, which also meant being nicer than the average drow for a bit. That scene at the very start where Vierna looks at Baby!Drizzt and admires his lavender eyes and Malice is all HE IS YOUR BROTHER DO NOT FUCK HIM.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

Aww, yay! And I know the feeling. So many things Young Me mocked, only to try them and, wait a second, this...is actually awesome?

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

But "seeing your sister fuck a glaabrezu" is probably going to put you off the whole business for a bit.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

(One of my first fictional crushes, that guy. Probably very formative.)

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 2h

Ooh, good point! Dude managed to come of age in Menzo while remaining a virgin, AFAIK, which is...quite something.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

I kind of want to write fanfic where she and Drizzt hook up now and DAMMIT IZZY NO YOU HAVE A SCHEDULE.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

...for implying sexual misconduct on the part of trans people and allies, which Gaiman publicly was at the time. Once more came out, she deleted that post and was like nah, he's a shithead.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

* tl;dr: When Transphobic Magazine was publishing the first accusations without reliable sources, she pointed out that we had no idea whether anyone they named even existed. Like, God forbid we not start the second Satanic Panic on the word of TERFs, a population known...

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

I think there's a contingent of people primed to think the worst of TK because a) at least one person is Very Upset that she doesn't treat EAP stories with the right amount of overblown reverence, and b) the false "she defended Gaiman" rumors*, which I will instantly block for.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

Same! I mentioned it elsewhere, but I was eh on this one originally because I'm a big wuss about sad prequels. And then I mentioned in a Reddit discussion that canon is malleable and got a five-paragraph NO HOW DARE YOU from someone I was not even responding to, and was like fuck it, we ball.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

But doubly so for a video game. Your Astarion May Vary.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

Same! Part of this may be being an English major--Is Hamlet gay? Is Satan tormented? Whither the fuck David Copperfield? If any of these questions was really settled, a lot of grad students would be out of work--or a comics reader--Who killed Batman's parents, exactly? How much Dark Phoenix is Jean?

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

(I would read a whole novel about Nym, also.)

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

Excellent point! Like, there's general repulsion, there's discomfort with a specific act--q.v. the "don't tell me what to do" bit in the Nym encounter--or under specific circumstances, there's "it depends on where my head is at," all sorts of stuff.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

You cannot open the box on this one; the cat remains alive, dead, and maybe or maybe not horny.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

So yeah: my stance remains that, within established Issues Of Some Sort Around or Adjacent to Sex and known backstory trauma, any statement about Astarion's comfort with the act itself is like stating whether or not Jack Bioshock kills the Little Sisters.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

@zhinxy.bsky.social linked to the OriginStarion video where you spend a night with Nym, and the range of choices always goes from "everything is awesome, let's party" to "actually let's just chill," at multiple points, all of which are apparently equally sincere.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

It's much more like asking whether Commander Shepherd is a Paragon or Renegade, or how hung up James Sunderland still is on his wife: there, to paraphrase the SCP Foundation motto, *is* no canon, because your choices determine so much.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

Headcanon about, oh just for example, Astarion's deal with sex, Shadowheart's Shar-versus-Selune conflict, or Wyll's relationship with his dad isn't *just* open to interpretation in the same way as Alasdair's attitude toward Anora or Edelgard's...entire Thing.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

One of the things I realized in the Ongoing BG3 Conversation is that canon about how the companions act/feel/blah is even more necessarily ambiguous than in normal video games because you can also play them as origin characters, which puts them in a weird position that's not quite NPC or PC.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

I had to look that up out of curiosity, and it is *lovely*! And also gave me some thoughts about origins and canon and stuff that I'll take to a new thread.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

Yes! What even is time at that point? "A year?" Weird human season bullshit, is what that is.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

(In one of my own D&D games in college, one of my PCs was like, wait, if this country is X miles wide and we're traveling at Z, why are we still in it? And I was like BECAUSE YOU STOPPED TO FUCK YOUR MOM, DAVE, SHUT UP.)

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 3h

It's really giving that Star Trek SNL sketch vibes.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 4h

Same! Honestly, my contempt toward anyone who cares about math in fiction is entirely out of proportion to their sins, but: dude, if I wanted to give a shit about numbers, I wouldn't have majored in English.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

We all have our discontinuities, no matter what the fandom.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

Basically agreed--I do think it's true to the character, having read it, but basically the existence of every university English department comes down to people disagreeing about the nature of characters. (And something about Joyce.) Fundamentally, yeah, if you're not into it, don't read it.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

Also, there's...IDK, some amount of time, I Do Not Math...between this and the game, during which his attitude toward sex could well have shifted more toward the repulsion end if that's how you want to play it.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

Exactly! Kingfisher really wrote it as interpretable in a lot of ways.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

(Based on Drow Twins stuff, I'd say he's functionally demi for at least the time period of the game: whether that's because of the sex itself or because he's not sure how to handle the aftermath with non-Tav people who don't get drained...eh, Your Vampire May Vary.)

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

I am an extremely mature voting adult over here. :P

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

So yeah: no shame in playing/headcanoning the sex-repulsed take any more than in the hypersexual one. It's just a matter of not insisting that your headcanon is The Truth and anything else is exploitation or inconsistency or whatever, and I don't think you've done that at all.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

(There is, even now, a thousand-odd reply post on the BG3 subreddit about how evil the Emperor is or is not, and what he actually feels for TavDurge, and it's like the tenth one this month.)

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

I really think his sexuality is different on every playthrough, just like Lae'zel's Vlaakith loyalty or Gale's ambition or whatnot, because the game leaves so much of the characters shapeable via player choices.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

...doing it with people he really doesn't want to get killed given that's been most of the consequences for his unlife, into it but only with people he trusts, and any number of other points on the spectrum.

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

That's the great thing about headcanon, though, and especially how much of it BG3/possibly Larian in general allows--there's *absolutely* grounds to read him as sex repulsed, just like there's grounds to read him as into sex but conflicted about...

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

...other read of it existing, and especially being official. tl;dr: I'm Very Not T. Kingfisher, alas, but I don't think you have anything at all to feel bad about!

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

And I think there's nothing wrong with getting attached to characters who speak to you for whatever reason. My issue with the ZOMG LITERARY SEX CRIMES brigade is the insistence that the interpretation where he's sex-repulsed is the One True Version and then the Off-Broadway Drama about any...

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Isabel Cooper @isabelcooper.bsky.social · 14h

I don't feel like you were someone who got particularly het up one way or another, though? At least not going by social media posts--yours seem eminently reasonable, and you haven't posted about the author having Inappropriate Footnotes or whatever.

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