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invinciblerodent · 5 months

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About the altered animations in Astarion's first romance scene

I already knew that there's something of a precedent for large updates to change camera angles and facial animations around a little bit, so, on a lark, I loaded in my save from before the first romance scene in my current, Astarionmance playthrough, just to see and compare it to my recorded version, see if there's been any changes since then.

Well... honestly? My feeling is that the two scenes are pretty much only roughly comparable to each other at this point. Like not to be dramatic, but it's kind of almost a case study in how much body language can alter the perception and interpretation of the same dialogue.

In the version of this that I got originally in my game (on october 21st so in patch 3, through high approval, quite a bit before the party), the short conversation before leaving the main campsite has him wearing sort of a... heavy, darkly suggestive, almost predatory expression. He looks, overall, very serious: head pitched strategically forward so he's both leaning towards- and looking at the PC through his lashes (maybe crowding them a little bit, stepping into their space), his eyes are more narrow and provocative, and he's not wearing even a hint of a smile. I think it makes it very clear what the intent here is: to present Desire™, and show a façade that suggests his impending performance of the "ooh, the sexy vampire is now going to steal you away to have his wicked way with you" fantasy.

Comparing this to the latest version (as of the 4th of december, so shortly after patch 5, which from the patch notes I'm guessing is likely what brought these alterations on), it's... very strangely different.

I had not altered my settings, or the shots in any way (beyond cropping and resizing), the lighting just... seems to have been brightened. But, the most obvious change is that his entire body language is sort of... tipped more back and away from the PC now. His brows and eyes are a lot softer and more open, rounded, more like they appear later on in the confession scene, and he's smiling this.... kind of cordial, unsettlingly friendly smile, that seems (at least in retrospect) very obviously fake and plastered on. I think he's selling the illusion of the rakish debaucher, the dashing scoundrel about to rock your world, a lot less convincingly this time around.

Even though the voicelines have not been altered in a way I can detect, his face is saying something completely different, and it recontextualizes a lot of things for me.

[Also in addition, him breaking character momentarily ("I do mean sex, to be clear") now does also lose a bit of its humor for me. Just because this new way, there isn't as large a gap between the capital letter Performance, and the little side note he gives himself in the middle of it. Now it's somehow... less theatrical overall, and so the aside is less like he knows he sounds unnatural and his real self is peeking out from behind the lines, and veers a twinge more towards "in case you're dense and didn't actually notice that I'm seducing you, I'll dumb it down for you".]

Even as he's waiting for the response in that silly "ta-dah!" pose, his face is very different: instead of that sort of blank, "haughtily and hauntingly sexy", determined kind of look, he's now gazing at the PC with what (in motion at least) looks to me like it's kinda... going rapidly back and forth between almost a pained/unsure look, and... a thinly veiled disgust, maybe?

Like, that's... that's straight-up a grimace, man, I don't want anyone I'm considering sleeping with to be looking at me like that.

Within the scene itself that follows, the animation appears unchanged (or at least not changed significantly enough for me to notice without playing them literally side by side), but the following conversation in the morning is... also a bit odd, and has been edited heavily?

In my original recording, he seems to be making sure to look at the PC more, though only over his shoulder, and his features are harder, more severe again, as it is in line with the conversation before. The whole little exchange, before the arcana check and before it'd segue into talking about Cazador more directily, ends on a bit of an eyeroll and a hidden smile that can be construed as conspiratory, or just a bit sly and self-satisfied.

This kinda straddles the line between "hehe, you're caught in my web now" and "hehe, I'm SO good at sex"- the former being closer to what he's likely thinking, and the latter being one of the more obvious ways the PC can interpret that look. A+ on that, no notes.

But now, (first of all the lighting is overall much less warm, the whole scene looks cool and less afterglow-y) he doesn't really turn to face the PC, not even over his shoulder. This keeps his expressions concealed from them, but open to the player, which is an interesting choice, and his expressions are, again, a lot more in line with those from later scenes, when the relationship is well underway: it's less openly performative, and more just a... a sad, unguarded, almost forlorn, private look. My guy looks like he is speedrunning through all his emotions over the span of like 10 seconds here-

-and lands notably on this kind of unsettling shot, of this expression that's, while somewhat similar to the old one for the line "I didn't want to go too far" (that the PC can halfway see), is both more exaggerated, and kept entirely to himself:

I for one find this one a little.... creepy and cartoonish, tbh???? Which, I guess while it's in line with the whole "I'm such an evil mastermind, they've fallen right into my honeypot" way of thinking he is supposed to have in this precise moment, it, uh.

Listen, it just conjures in my mind a violently clear image of Robbie Rotten from Lazytown. Because it's just such an "I'm clearly being a villainous villain with a nefarious scheme and agendas aplenty" expression, he's all but twirling his mustache, and the fact that it's turned right to the player's face rather than being only hinted at for both person and character, makes it look... pretty heavy-handed. Which I guess is more indicative of this man having a charisma score of a whopping 10, but it takes away from the subtlety of the entire exchange, and kind of creates a rift between what the player, and what the PC can know/suspect.

Overall, these new animations look... very different, bit more like they're trying to drive the point all the way home? Now there seems to be a big neon sign that says "HE IS NOT DOING THIS FOR PLEASURE" over his head, rather than letting your figure things out for yourself later on.

Needless to say, I.... personally prefer the old version of this scene over this new one, lol.

(...... One final, mildly notable change I noticed is that they seem to have taken out the little moan they had my character make as he bit into her neck? In my old recording, there was a tiny, barely audible little "a-aah!", and that's just.... not there now. I'm not sure what that's about, if it's a bug or a feature, and I don't know if they had it for other player voices or not, but prior to now, they did go pretty hard into how getting bitten is, to many, quite pleasurable, so downplaying that now comes off as a tiny bit odd to me.)

(I do like how her tits look less squashed though. They perked my girl's girls up a little bit, which is kinda nice lol.)

Editing to say this: it seems like these animations are the same as the goblin party ones, only... in the daylight? Which, it could be a bug of some sorts. I reloaded it once and it was the same once more, but... it could be that my save is kinda weird there for some reason. Idk. Turning reblogs off because it could just be a bug.

#baldur's gate 3 #astarion #astarion ancunin #bg3 meta #bg3 animation #astarion romance #bg3 patch 5 #uh what else #i can't think of anything else #i'll add more tags if i think of any #squirrel plays bg3

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sneezinbird-new · 7 months

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a very lazy sketch of my favorite silly boys

hermittober day 3: fortune

#hermitcraft #tango tek #tangotek #double life #rancher duo #team rancher #jimmy solidarity #solidaritek #<- bc i can #fanart :p #hermitober #hermittober #hermittober23 #uh what else #that’s it ig #:D #sneeze draws

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trungles · 1 year

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Sweet-tooth fairy

#fairy #dessert #food #uh what else #sparkles?#sure

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rajie · 1 year

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mmmm delicious screams

#total drama #fanart #total drama fanart #total drama reboot #tdi 2023 #td damien #td scary girl #td lauren #scary damien #scary girl x damien #damgirl #uh what else #laurien #dauren

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yonpote · 5 months

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idc what these bozos say i WILL squee and fangirl over dnp touching every single time! who doesn't love some good boy-on-boy skinship!!!! the fuck are yall gonna even do about it!!!!

#yaoi sponsorship ass motherfuckers #phan #phan bl #phan yaoi #phan slash #uh what else #phan is real #there we go never used that tag before

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chairhahaha · 9 days

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We will be okay. I’ll make sure of it.

CAN YOU JUST BE NORMAL😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

@hectorthedoggo bc u said u want tags in enyu stuff. oh yeah quote from their fanfic “nothing more, nothing less, nothing more, nothing less”

don’t mind the shoe. or the hands. or the fact that enyu’s sockless. and es is shoeless. just. also i wasn’t gonna draw es’ gloves please

based off this:

poor mafuyu

#milgram #es milgram #milgram es #milgram project #The Warden #enyu #project sekai #?????????#its based off a pjsk card #so makes sense #uh what else #NOW WATCH ME WHIP🗣️🗣️🗣️#art #ignore the anatomy

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davebrubott · 2 months

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eeee drawing i did a few days ago we're watching cartoon planet

alt version!! less saturated

#ttcc #toontown corporate clash #prethinker #ttcc brian #self ship #uh what else #self x canon #sona art #sona x canon #idk man

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n0tnostxlgia · 3 months

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my honest reaction to there being a thunderstorm and my power going out for a few hours :3

#dialtown #dialtown fanart #dialtown jerry #ticket jerry #me when #uh #like #idk help #animation #uh what else #silly lil man #jumpscare #idk what else to tag LMAAOO

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hamofjustice · 10 months

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I don't want to just painstakingly copypaste my triple-layered self-QRT thread about it on Twitter and any other ones floating around but

I am very emotionally invested in seeing Penny, Arven, and (personally) especially Nemona again in the Scarlet/Violet DLC, after GF followed up the best 3 hours of Pokemon game story ever by having to abruptly cut it off the second these lonely kids finish opening up to you and say you can hang out with them anytime. Which you never do. It was some pretty painful whiplash, and I was sure the main point of the DLC was to relieve that, especially when their arcs don't seem quite complete yet. Very clever, evil marketing! But uh... well... about that...

It is very worrying that aside from a little "the story so far" montage, they have not been seen or mentioned in promotional material/footage whatsoever. Y'know, DLC for the game that's about how the real treasure was the friends you found along the way (literally, in Nemona's case), and even if your family and support systems fail you, you still have each other? Written from the heart by someone who said Arven's story is inspired by their own life? With the sappy Ed Sheeran song about reaching out for connection with others, that also seems to be named after Team Star? The game where one of the features the devs seemed most proud of was going on adventures and into boss fights with 3 of your friends? The game that ended with a fully functional and quite immersive bonding adventure with these characters you'd gotten to know and care about, that basically everyone thought was the best part of the game by a mile, and were left wishing the whole game was like that?

Yeah, I (and everyone else) have been driving around alone in that game for 8 months ever since finishing that story. 8 months of minor updates with a ton of the beloved characters functionally or literally gone, while we go around doing online stuff with nothing else to do in the world, with a single player postgame more barren than we had on Game Boy Color (thank god for mints and bottle caps though). I'm left just... wanting to go back to the way things were before I beat the game. Not to be overly dramatic, but this world I supposedly saved feels like one I failed to save. And I'm getting really frustrated. (The framerate hasn't gotten any better, either, but this isn't about that.)

It's like Game Freak (or whoever forced this thing out a year early, or both) never expected you to boot the game up again once you got bored of the Ace Academy Tournament, which the game acts like is the entire total of what you could want from being friends and "rivals for life" with your squad (I mean I'm the sicko that loves Tera Raids, so I'm not that bored, but still). It makes a bunch of implications that your adventure is just beginning, and then it totally just... isn't. Why is the E4 building closed? Why do you only rematch the gyms once? And most of all, for me personally: Why did we get access to our friends' rooms if there's nothing to do or talk about there? (Besides look for character study clues, which they have lots of)

All they could come up with when asked to write a newsletter email about what you can still do in S/V and why you should still be playing it was Raids. That was it. Remember when you had an endless challenge in the Tower/Maison that you could optionally take on with a bunch of story characters as your partners instead of alone, that motivated you to keep getting stronger bit by bit? Remember rematching gym leaders multiple times and watching their teams grow and evolve each time? Yeah, there's none of that here, because that would take more than a week to implement. If you want friends and you want battles, you'll have to do it yourself online now. They're not allocating any budget for that.

Your rival for life, who's so excited you're on her level now, who seems to have the passion and skill to be the your Battle Tower gameplay loop by herself if she wanted to, who battles you for hours offscreen with multiple teams, whose whole character arc is that she finally has someone she can do this with... is fully static, with one kinda mediocre team that never grows or changes. She can't keep up with you and doesn't know what items or EVs are. You have to get lucky to even see her at all. She is no more your rival than your Home Ec teacher is (no offense Saguaro, you're cool too). I think it's really, really sad.

I'm left nostalgic and pining to go back, having to cope through fanfic because my character can't spend the day with - or even so much as take a new trainer card photo with - the girl who said they might be her greatest treasure, without resetting my save, because she and the others are standing somewhere that the camera and internet features are both disabled.

Like, legitimately, I want to keep being friends with these kids the way we were before, and have the ability to do post-game stuff with them, like being able to go out and adventure together whenever in some basic, non-story capacity, or just, I don't know, maybe give them more than one line of dialogue in their rooms? I don't want a new region or new characters. Not yet, anyway.

I thought I was preordering the continuation of their story and rewarding the company for making me care about Pokemon so much again.

But, uh... I'm really worried that the people who own these characters do not care. And as I said on the trailer's comments before they turned them off (lol), I'll be pissed enough to not buy any more games if I'm right, and we're forced to abandon these poor kids. At the very least, it's some pretty garbage marketing to leave the possibility of that up in the air. If nothing else, that is a frustration that I'm going to keep talking about for a while, even if it ends up being fine.

I thought it was impossible, and I was being silly. Why not have our friends in cute new outfits as promo art when the DLC was first announced, and all they had was promo art? Seems like an easy slam dunk. Oh, they didn't yet? Well, I'm sure it'll happen eventually.

And then they weren't in the trailer either, months later. Are they trying to sell us on it or not?

The whole reason I want the DLCs. Still not a single word acknowledging them, just that little opening montage. Still no hints of how the DLCs have anything to do with Area Zero's ongoing story, either. How is a sea turtle linked with a landlocked crater?

So like... At this point I have to assume both DLCs start with you making your friends cry as they're left alone again, arbitrarily excluded from events they're more than qualified to be invited to, to make room for some new dweebs we don't need, who won't be given nearly enough time to be as compelling as Nemona, Arven, and Penny were, because that makes the trailer look more like a new game, and that's the only way they know how to advertise. More. New. Buy. Consume. Throw away. Buy. Consume. Throw away. I should assume this so that whatever we get can't be worse.

But they're probably not (self-aware enough / allowed / both) to write that. Your lonely / orphaned / anime-binging friends might just cheer you on for getting to go do something cool like being forced to train a new legendary because the story said so, then go back to being statues with as much relevance to your life as an NPC in a third story apartment that tells you what a hold item is.

Can't I just live in Paldea with my friends, in the version of the game we would have gotten if it was finished, instead of being pulled into these adventures for the sake of looking good in a trailer? (which it doesn't btw lol) It's not an unrealistic thing to want when that's what it briefly was, and I was so excited that it would keep being that I've been thinking about it this entire time.

...

I hope I'm wrong about all this, and next year I can look back on this post, happy that the DLC did actually allow us to continue to take care of these characters, conclude Area Zero's mysteries in a satisfying way, fix up some technical issues, let us relive some things that are currently once-only (including letting us see that photo album our character made but we had to screenshot ourselves), and make it fun to keep playing for years afterward, and let that be the model for games going forward, but uh...

They really are not showing me anything I care about in the game I desperately want to care about, that I saw - and wanted to defend - the heart in, despite the circumstances it was produced under, and that really worries and frustrates me. The surprisingly many great things about this game got my hopes up for an awesome postgame full of warm fuzzy feelings and cool things to do 8 months ago that just didn't deliver, and now, I'm not sure if they'll even let me pay for one, at this rate, because they're not advertising one.

Just throw us a scrap. If whoever's in charge here stops caring about this story, I won't care about the next one.

Anyone else feeling this?

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threewishgoldfish · 8 months

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A sketch of Vin Venture!

(or, just Vin - before she was a Venture. Vin the Mistborn!! i might use this sketch in a painting later on)

#vin venture #mistborn #mistborn era 1 #brandon sanderson #uh what else #cosmere #cosmere fanart #mistborn fanart

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eliias-bouchard · 2 years

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shoutout to all my michael distortion with cat-like behaviours truthers he deserves to knock glasses off of tables

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invinciblerodent · 7 months

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just scrolling, i've found quite a few fics that have Astarion incapacitated by not being able to breathe in some way, or needing to "come up for air" and such in a setting, and guys.....

we do know that he doesn't... need to breathe, right?

this tends to be true for most universes' vampire lore (I still remember that scene in fkin Twilight when they had this whole coaching thing about how to fake breathing in a way that looks natural), and there's not much to be found about specifically vampire spawn (as they're usually used as cannon fodder, simple minions), but the Monster Manual, like, explicitly says that their "Undead Nature" means "neither a vampire nor a vampire spawn requires air".

they likely do intake air in general because otherwise they couldn't talk or use their sense of smell (and they'd look wrong at a glance), but... they don't strictly need to. Like, you can't strangle, or drown, or suffocate any vampiric being (dhampirs included iirc), they'd just look at you funny and kill you anyway.

i'm sure they can feel like they're suffocating, they can be overwhelmed and feel like they're drowning, but... they probably don't really gasp for air, and their lungs don't strain to draw breath out of... much more than habit.

of course if you want to write it that way that's great too, or use the tadpole's powers as explanation as to why Astarion finds himself needing breath, but... isn't it kind of a better source of character angst to acknowledge that even this simple expression of emotion and humanity is denied a character by their very nature, or that a sigh/yawn/whatever doesn't actually bring relief? or that the gesture is, on their part, wholly artificial and either part of their elaborate manipulation, or entirely for the other party's benefit, to put them at ease? or, heck, that the only benefit to breathing is to get to feel the other character's scent?

idk, something to maybe think about?

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3 astarion #astarion #vampire lore #uh what else #idk #dnd lore #astarion ancunin

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partentts · 1 year

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Oh look it's mori's emotional support teenagers

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human-souls-buy-dopamine · 4 months

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CRAWLS OUT HERE.

the pinned post. post pinned. whatever. it's HERE woooooooo!! *ahem*

Hi! You can call us Theo, Jack, or Atrix. We use it/thon pronouns, and are a system of 35-ish?

Carrd currently a WIP.,,., again,..,.,,

We like to make things. Loooots of things. Currently, we have quite a few wips going. Our fandoms at the moment are:

- CCCC & general Chonny Jash stuff

- Dreamswap/Fatal Flaws

- FNaF (games & movie)

- DSaF

- (kindof) ULTRAKILL

- Vocaloid

- Minecraft (we are trying to get into SMPs that don't have a ton of lore to catch up on atm, so if anyone has suggestions, hit us up !!)

- Yansim, to an extent (NO we do nOT support Yandev that's fuckin gross, we just like the concept okay..)

We run 3 sideblogs right now: @thissys-editz, @fnaf-lesser-tragedies, and @trying-to-clean-our-echochamber.

We also run Theatrical Freaks, a music channel on YouTube.

Tags beneath the cut.

1. For generally talking, announcements, etc

2. Things we're passionate about, essays/rants/rambles, etc

3. Self-explanatory.

4. Like 2, but not really coherent. Lots of typos, vague/nonsensical, etcetera

5. When we get asks, regardless of if they're actual questions or not.

6. Reblog tag. Most used tag on this blog..

7. Our art.

8. Our writing.

9. Our memes.

Tags that have since been added:

#theatrical freaks: on stage — for music from our music channel or that will go to that channel.

#theatrical freaks--opening night — for posts about songs/covers on our album Opening Night.

#playing tag on stage! — for tag games

Also, the format "the voice of [name]" is used in tags to show who posted/wrote the post. This one will be tagged 'the voice of eiren' because I, Eiren, wrote it!

Further edit: another tag format is "[name] fren". These are tags for friends/mutuals we interact with. For example, Xero is 'xero fren', Fen is 'fen fren', etc etc..

#theo says some things #pinned post #the voice of eiren #actually adhd #actually autistic #actually plural #actually osdd #autism #adhd #osdd #uh what else #fuvk uh #gay #trans #transmasc #xenogender #system #plural #woohoo

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