Just some Halsin quotes that make me lie on the floor facedown

Chip Butty

Pairing: Gale x f!Tav, Karlach & f!Tav Characters: Gale Dekarios, Female/Tiefling/Druid Tav Fandom: Baldur's Gate 3 Rating: General Other Tags: Named Tav, Unresolved Sexual/Romantic Tension, Developing Relationship, Not Beta Read Summary: The morning after the party with her Tiefling kin, Ophelia wakes up with two headaches. One, from wine. Two, everyone expects she bedded Gale the night before.

Ophelia greets the day with bleary eyes and a head thick as soup. Last night’s indulgence has risen from her stomach to her head, a dull pain throbbing between her ears as reminder of the evening’s festivities. Before she dares unlace her lashes, she shields her face with her hand. The morning sun on the river’s current acts as a hundred blinking mirrors, each slanted to pour the light directly into her eyes.

Gods, that last glass of wine had been a mistake.

She sits up, squinting through the slats of her fingers, to find the camp emptier than the night before. The bulk of the Tiefling refugees had apparently left to prepare for the road, though a few still mill about camp. Some collect their belongings, lost in twilight and revealed by dawn, while others remain to help clean the mess they helped create. Her own travelling companions are thrown into the mix, their usual morning routines displaced by the visitors.

“Hey, soldier, you’re up!” Her waking doesn’t go unnoticed long. Karlach’s voice chimes out from nearby, ringing like a bell in Ophelia’s ear. It’s a struggle not to wince— though when her eyes and ears adjust to the light, it becomes difficult not to smile.

Zariel’s rogue soldier appears at home in the company of their kin. Together with Bex, it seems they had devised a unique method for washing the dishes. Her arms steep in a tub of water, steam rising from her biceps and billowing up like a second fire. When the water is warm, she passes a basin of it to Bex, who works over the dishes with a soapy rag. The fruits of their labours lie out in the sun, the same rays that torment Ophelia’s vision gently drying their supplies.

(Read the rest on AO3!)

WIPBB Mini-Bang 2024 - Fic Master List  

Below is the master list of all the fics that were posted to the AO3 collection, organized alphabetically by fandom. Please go show these people some love for all the hard work they did!

Baldur's Gate

【安博】如飢似渴: AO3 (Ansur/Balduran)

Our Life: Beginnings & Always

My perfect amnesia: AO3 (Cove Holden/OFC)

Supernatural

Two Lonely Souls (a New Beginning): AO3 (Gabriel/Dean Winchester)

The Magnus Archives

for better, for worse: AO3 (Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims)

Buncha doodles. Mostly DND stuff, but also a Nor and Rhonda in there.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Baldur's Gate (Video Games), Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Astarion/Tav (Baldur's Gate)/Original Female Character(s)/Themberchaud (Dungeons & Dragons) Characters: Astarion (Baldur's Gate), Tav (Baldur's Gate), Original Female Character(s), Themberchaud (Dungeons & Dragons) Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Smut, Headcanon, Walking In On Someone, Cunnilingus, Humiliation, Voyeurism, Masturbation, Threesome - M/M/M, Spitroasting, Oral Sex, Vaginal Sex, Large Cock, Blow Jobs, Polyamory, Living Together, Bard Tav (Baldur's Gate), Trans Male Tav (Baldur's Gate), High Elf Astarion (Baldur's Gate), Dragonborn Themberchaud (Dungeons & Dragons) Series: Part 1 of Faerûnian February Summary:

Astarion comes home to find Tav and Kantei rather busy.

On how a video game about fucking a bear interrupted furry discourse

People don’t realize the absolute comedy that just went through Furry social media.

See, feral smut (i.e. smut of four-legged characters who otherwise satisfy the Harkness test) has always been a contentious subject in the furry fandom, due to how easily it leads to unwarranted real-life accusations of zoophilia. It’s an annoying bit of discourse that has been rearing its head every other year since the modern fandom began four decades ago.

Which, you know, pretty rich, coming from the fandom where a pretty large percentage readily admit to having had some form of sexual awakening over the Lion King and My Little Pony franchises.

And anyway, that discourse was exactly what was going on last week. People getting harassed on Twitter, as an extension of the whole “groomer” moral panic. A lot of fandom relative newcomers parroting arguments right out of the Burned Furs movement (a late 1990s/early 2000s movement dedicated to “purifying” the furry fandom of “perversion” and “degeneracy”).

And then, just as the discourse was at its most heated, Baldur’s Gate 3 entered the chat.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about the game that will let you fuck a bear. Yes, a bear, as in Ursus arctos. A Druid shapeshifted into a bear, to be fair (again: the Harkness test), but a bear nonetheless.

And mainstream media erupted with reports that the game’s sales skyrocketed based on that scene alone.

And the discourse suddenly screeched to a hilariously embarrassed halt.

10/10 comedic timing, no notes.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Baldur's Gate (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Karlach/Wyll (Baldur's Gate) Characters: Karlach (Baldur's Gate), Wyll (Baldur's Gate) Additional Tags: Fluff, Some Alcohol Use, A budding romance, Drunk Confession Summary:

Wyll gets a bit drunk during the celebrations for saving the druid grove. He sees Karlach standing alone in a corner and decides to speak to her.

@tropetember

For a Five-Fingered Discount, Trope #1 (Enemies/Friends/Strangers to Lovers), Astarion(Baldur's Gate)/Tav(Baldur's Gate)

Here's a link to my work! https://archiveofourown.org/works/49873045

Anyways while racism in the writer's room is definitely a thing and does affect how black characters are written and portrayed, to say "well this character wasn't written well (because of racism) so THAT'S why I find them boring!" is just disingenuous and trying to shove blame elsewhere.

Wyll may have been shafted in terms of writing, but he still clearly had more effort and time put into him than Halsin. And yet out of those two characters, which one is more popular in the fandom?

Dragon Age: Inquisition may bend over backwards to make Vivienne seem like a villain at times, and her opinion on the Circles is a bit complex, but that game also has Cullen in it - who was an antagonist for two previous games, and also has even stricter views on mages and the Circles. And out of the two of them, who's the one people are more forgiving to?

Preston Garvey might have a bugged radiant quest that means he says the same thing over and over and over again, but why is it annoying when he does it and endearing when it's characters in other games? (Brynjolf's "Sorry lass, I've got important things to do" comes to mind)

While yes, we should hold writers and developers accountable for the racism they bake into their games, this does not change that fandom is a transformative space. Fandoms will regularly take characters who were underwritten, who were treated poorly by their source material, or who were overlooked, and create beautiful works of art and fiction surrounding them.

So it's quite telling when they refuse to do this with the black characters.

it is, i think, symptomatic of the way larian has built this brand: bg3 was always marketed as being mature (read: sexual), and that was one of the big draws for players - myself included! especially as media pulls more towards extremes, with mainstream video games starting to get increasingly graphically sexual, graphically violent, and the vogue for 'grey morality' becomes the norm, those boundaries get pushed, and it becomes more and more of a selling point.

larian obviously focused on this, along with the How Do You Do, Fellow Kids brand, the increased accessibility of game devs on twitter, and adopted it heavily into their marketing strategy, and are now pretty reliant on the horny gamer crowd for a lot of their audience, and more importantly, they're doing this on purpose.

which is how you end up in situations like this.

characters (white men) the players want to fuck get centred: they get updates, they get more content, they get favoured. halsin's gone from a side character in EA to a half-fledged romance option, to a full romance option: he shows up in the promotional material, is larian's poster boy for the sex scenes, he gets more content with every update.

now gortash gets more heavily implied situationship lines with the dark urge, because players are horny for him. nevermind that some people aren't playing that way, or that he was originally set up to be a lower-level antagonist; nevermind that if the durge's storyline needed expansion, it should've been with orin and sarevok and bhaal, or that it muddies the writing for the rest of gortash's arc + characterisation: people want to fuck him, so it gets put in the game. it's not even to do with karlach, whose quest so desperately needs expansion! it's specifically catering to the people who want their character to have a Relationship with the slaver, because they're either not interested in or not able to focus on strengthening the weak spots in the narrative: they're just doing things that will net the 'my favourite dating sim' people lmfao.

meanwhile, literal main character wyll gets his quest demoted to a subquest, doesn't get bugfixes, doesn't get a single unique romance greeting after 6 patches and months of requests. he's not a Horny character, so he doesn't get the focus: he's not a player favourite, so he gets nothing. it's just... so unbelievably, indisputably racist, and it's incredibly grim and disappointing to watch it happen in real-time.

"wyll's too nice i'd like him more if he were a little meaner and angrier" you guys couldn't handle vivienne de fer having a complicated relationship with the oppressive system she was raised in. you couldn't handle liam costa making a minor but well-intentioned mistake. you couldn't handle preston garvey having a recurring fetch quest.

you couldn't even handle early access wyll who was angrier and grappled with moral quandaries more. and you can't handle wyll as he is now when he playfully teases astarion.

they're kinda my favorite

A Study of Hands

Chapter Five: By the pricking of my thumbs

Pairing: f!TavxGale Dekarios Characters: Female/Tiefling/Druid Tav, Gale Fandom: Baldur's Gate 3 Other Tags: Canon Dialogue, Gale POV, Named Tav Summary: Gale had bid farewell to his beloved Waterdeep. For what he thought was the last time, he watched its splendid walls dip below the horizon, and dried his eyes of their tears. Yet before he could find the quiet death he sought in some remote corner of Faerûn, the mindflayers find him. And then Ophelia does.

A thick blanket of regret permeates the air, fit to choke on. The atmosphere of the hag’s lair bears down upon Gale from all sides as they descend into its depths. Around them, a grisly display of doomed petitioners are arranged like animal heads in a hunter’s lodge. No two are alike, save for their shared misfortune. Ethel has purged them of their joy, their grief, their hope, leaving only their regret as her gruesome trophy.

“It seems the hag has no shortage of fools eager to fall victim to her promises,” Lae’zel says with her typical level of hostility. “A pity we arrived too late to save them.”

“Those who are too far gone to help, we will deliver them a headsman’s justice,” Wyll assures her, despite undoubtedly parsing her true meaning. “And I disagree: I see the desperate, not the foolish. We do not know what drove them to Ethel’s poisonous hospitality.”

Lae’zel scoffs. “Spoken like a true warlock. If you did not wear the mantle of those horns, you might see them as I do.”

“Stop it, Lae’zel,” Ophelia chides. She had been gazing mournfully at one of Ethel’s victims until the githyanki’s commentary shook her from her stupor. “It is not becoming of a warrior to mock people who cannot even defend their honour.”

“Chk.”

Well, that seems to be the end of that.

(Read the rest here on AO3!)

Shadowzel | Credit: Migaloo1939 on Twitter

not to be That Person but y’all have got to learn to be more normal about bisexual and pansexual characters. this isn’t 2012. women romancing astarion is not the problem, nor is karlach “lesbian coded”. the real problem is y’all’s bi/panphobia stemming largely from homophobic stereotypes

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Baldur's Gate (Video Games) Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Tav (Baldur's Gate)/Original Character(s) Characters: Tav (Baldur's Gate), Original Character(s) - Character Additional Tags: Smut, Exhibitionism, Orgy, Public Humiliation, Public Masturbation, In Public, Bondage, BDSM, Public Nudity, Vaginal Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Anal Sex, Orgasm Denial, Tentacle Sex, Sex Magic, Trans Male Tav (Baldur's Gate), Trans Male Character, non-binary characters, Pre-Canon Series: Part 5 of Faerûnian February Summary:

Tav gives a special kind of performance.