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dw_maintenanceGood morning, afternoon, and evening!
We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)
I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.
Ta for now!
The Poison Drips
Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rocky41_7Turning over in my mind how Astarion and Cazador are mirrors of each other and it's sooo interesting. Like, Astarion when the PC meets him is on a kind of precipice. The PC can either encourage him to continue on the path he's on, resentful that other people might get help when he didn't and willing to do anything to make himself feel safe (might makes right, etc.), or can push him back in the direction of being "good," caring about others and keeping his worse instincts under control.
Astarion spends large chunks of the game castigating Cazador for his senseless cruelty, for his selfishness, for his derangement. Astarion also frets about being or becoming a monster. If the PC tells him during their first meeting that the parasites will turn them into mindflayers, his response is a dejected "Of course it'll turn me into a monster."
And yet, the moment Astarion grasps that he might seize control of Cazador's ritual of ascension, that he might sacrifice his vampiric "siblings" to obtain the power Cazador sought, he is immediately sorely tempted, even eager. When it becomes clear the ritual necessitates the sacrifice not only of Astarion's six spawn siblings, but also the seven thousand victims Cazador has been collecting in the basement for centuries, many of whom Astarion himself delivered unknowingly to their fate, Astarion hesitates only slightly in his desire to complete the ritual himself.
If Astarion is ascended via Cazador's ritual, he almost immediately follows in his master's footsteps. Some of his first dialogue after ascending is about feeling that every other living thing wants to serve and be controlled by him, the vampire ascendant. If he follows Cazador's path, he becomes Cazador.
Astarion was tortured for centuries into the person he is in the game. He admits to the PC that he barely remembers his life before being a vampire. The person he was before Cazador entered his life is almost entirely lost to him. After centuries of being on Cazador's leash, Astarion barely has a thought that doesn't revolve around Cazador. Minthara correctly points out that as long as Cazador lives, Astarion will never truly be free, because so much of his mindset continues to center his old master. Whomever Astarion might have been if Cazador had never touched him is a mystery, even to Astarion himself. He is now what Cazador made him, but the PC can encourage him to grow beyond that.
By choosing to ascend, by following in Cazador's wake, Astarion essentially rejects the chance to become something else--he accepts that he is what Cazador created and he will become what Cazador wanted to be. If an ascended Astarion is permitted to leave the Szarr mansion alive (ie. the PC doesn't turn on him with the Gur), he revels in his power and in the Reunion Party scene brags about being the "puppet master" of Baldur's Gate. If the PC is in a romance with him, he may agree to turn them into a vampire spawn, but refuses to make them a full vampire, for vague reasons that almost certainly amount to not wanting to have someone around who might even possibly compete with his power.
Astarion thus shows that he has the capacity to be just like Cazador.
By extrapolation, then, Cazador may have once been like Astarion.
The team learns by exploring the Szarr mansion that Cazador was turned by a vampire named Vellioth, who treated him horrifically. Simply by interrogating Vellioth's skull--which Cazador keeps in his bedroom as a gruesome memento--you can hear about how Vellioth murdered Cazador's friends in front of him when he reached out to them, made him spend eleven years impaled as punishment for a failed attempt to kill Vellioth, and how they both laughed when Cazador finally succeeded in killing his master. Clearly, Cazador is what Vellioth made him, down to the scroll of rules he recieved and then imposed on Astarion and the others, and compared to his old master, he may even view himself as lenient with his own spawn. (Astarion can remark that "even his precious rules" weren't something of Cazador's own invention, which shows how much of Cazador and particularly of his presentation as a vampire is made up of Vellioth. And yet--if romancing an ascended Astarion, he almost inarguably delivers the same set of rules, albeit phrased a little gentler, to the PC. Thank you to corgiteatime for the link!)
Who was Cazador before Vellioth? We don't know, and Astarion doesn't either, but the hints we gather in the Szarr mansion suggest Cazador's journey to his present monstrous state was not very different from Astarion's own path to the climax of his personal quest.
(Pure speculation, but Astarion suggests Cazador took special pleasure in tormenting him among the other spawn, and if Cazador saw something of his own pre-vampiric self in Astarion, I think it tracks that he might then in turn feel particularly hostile towards Astarion, perhaps resenting this reminder that he used to be something else, before Vellioth.)
Astarion lives in perpetual fear. Fear of Cazador, fear of being controlled, fear of being hated and despised by those around him, fear of having to face up to his own actions. His desire to seize on the ritual of ascesion is out of a desire for safety--one of his lines about wanting it is about how no one will ever control him again. Is Cazador's desire for it dissimilar? Rifling through his corresondence in the Szarr mansion shows he is eager to control Baldur's Gate and grow his own power, but of course he wouldn't admit to rival vampires that there is buried in there any desire for his own safety. It is not unbelievable that even centuries after Vellioth's death, even as a true vampire now himself, Cazador is still chasing some sense of safety. It is also a preview, I think, of an ascended Astarion's life: the fear that will never leave him as long as he continues to walk in his master's shadow. Astarion believes that ascending will excise that fear--but I'm sure Cazador believed that becoming a full-fledged vampire would make him feel secure, and here he is chasing the ritual of ascension.
Astarion and Cazador are two sides of the same coin, two stones in the same path begun by Vellioth (although, truthfully, probably even before him, by Vellioth's master and that vampire's master, and so on). Astarion can continue down that same road, chaneling the abuse he recieved from Cazador into his own cruelties, or he can end that terrible lineage by refusing the ritual, by refusing to become what Cazador wanted to be. Cazador represents the monster Astarion can truly become, the worst of Astarion's impulses and instincts, but when the PC meets him, Astarion is not yet too far gone--he can be turned away from this. For Cazador, it's much too late.
Recent Reading: Private Rites
Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:27 amrocky41_7Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.
What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.
The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.
However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.
The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.
I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable.
Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that.
On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying.
AWS outage
Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 amalierak in dw_maintenanceEdit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.
Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
Mae's Fall Fanfic (Book) Rec List 2025
Oct. 18th, 2025 07:10 pmrocky41_7Twice a year I usually do a post recommending fanfiction I've read, but truthfully I have barely read any since my last rec post. Instead of not doing one this fall, I thought I'd do a rec post for original fiction I've read lately. Below are recs from the books I've read in the last two or so years since I got big back into reading!
Crossposted from: tumblr | Pillowfort
- F - Fantasy
- Fic - General fiction
- Mem - Memoir/biographical
- NF - Non-fiction
- Q - Queer lit
- SF - Sci-fi/speculative fiction
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter - NF - Depressingly, although this book is over sixty years old, it remains relevant. Despite its age, I think it's still very useful in examining the thread of anti-intellectualism which has been woven through American society since the very beginning, and which I think we are all feeling quite prominently right now. (Full review)
To be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers - SF - While I've had complaints about Chambers' other works, this one satisfies me in how it captures the vastness and the mystery of space. The main characters of this sci-fi are not soldiers or smugglers but scientists, and their wonder and fascination with the world around them is catching and felt like it went to the core of humanity and our curiosity. Definitely one I will reread. (Full review)
Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora - NF - This book takes a strong stomach to read, but Springora's account of her grooming and sexual abuse as a young teenager by a famous writer is a necessary call-out of the ways that powerful adults manipulate children and teenagers, and get away with it. (Full review)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin - SF - One of Le Guin's most well-known books, and in my view, it is most deserved. Le Guin captures the core of any qualify sci-fi which is, to me, asking questions about what our world is and what it could be. She is always asking questions, and the questions posed in this one are still relevant today. (Full review)
Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu - Fic, Q - As I said in my longer review: this is not a happy book. It is a painful portrait of queer girls on the cusp of adolescence in a small, poor town starting to understand that they are different. Abreu does not back away from the more awkward or grosser parts of childhood and adolescence, which has the incongruous impact of making the story hurt more. (Full review)
A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson - F, Q - As is suggested by the title, there's a level of vampiric melodrama you must enjoy to like this book. If you can take pleasure vampiric tropes played straight and and some over-the-top wailing and sulking by our vamps then you might find this one as enjoyable as I did. (Full review)
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition by Ursula K. Le Guin and Charles Vess - F - What can I say about Earthsea that hasn't been said already? These classics of fantasy are heartfelt, touching, and do a wonderful job centering fantasy conflicts other than war. This edition includes new forwards and afterwards by Le Guin herself, from shortly before her death.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - F - Addison's debut into the fantasy world is memorable. She goes hard on fantasy linguistics and paints rich portrait of her imagined world, centering characters truly trying their best in the midst of some very bad situations. A hopeful, ultimately kind-hearted tale. (Full review)
How I Survived a Chinese Re-Education Camp by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat - NF - The Uighur genocide ongoing in China demands a wider audience, and Haitiwaji's first-person account of the imprisonment and persecution she and her family suffered in her homeland because of their culture and religion is chilling. (Full review)
Idol, Burning by Rin Usami - Fic - A short, punchy novel about a teenage girl's destructive obsession with a boy band and what happens when her favorite member is accused of assaulting a fan. Setting the book in the first person, Usami does a wonderful job getting the reader into her protagonist's foggy head, where little seems clear but the need to support her favorite band. (Full review)]
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin - SF, Q - This book is so riveting that hand to my heart as soon as I finished it the first time, I flipped back to the first page to start it again. Fantastic philosophy, world-building, character and relationship development...this is now one of my all-time favorite books. (Full review)
Loveless by Alice Oseman - Fic, Q - I will fully admit this one is probably here because it hits so close to home for me. Loveless is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman realizing she is aromantic and asexual, despite an adolescence full of steamy romantic daydreams and fanfic obsession. Georgia doesn't really know what to do with that, and it is both painful and touching to watch her discover herself in real time. It's a little cringey at times, but it's from the perspective of an 18-year-old, so how could it be otherwise? (Full review)
The Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson - F, Q - Presently 3 of 4 books in this series are published so this is a great time to dive in before the next one. Dickinson is a master of spinning fantasy politics and intrigue, and his protagonist Baru is simply fascinating to watch. I truly can't wait to see where this one goes in the end! (Full review of book 1, The Traitor Baru Cormorant)
On a Woman's Madness by Astrid H. Roemer - Fic, Q - A cerebral 80s novel about a woman divorcing her husband in Surinam and eventually falling for another woman. Roemer's prose is beautiful but often unclear--is what we're reading really happening? Is it a dream? Is it a memory? For me, that added to its beauty. (Full review)
The Originalism Trap by Madiba K. Dennie - NF - This look at constitutional interpretation in the US is a fantastic read for anyone looking for a better understanding of where the US is at politically, particularly with regards to the Supreme Court. This book is relatively short and understandable even if you don't have a legal background, and provides some hopeful alternative thoughts to the current shitshow. (Full review)
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield - F, Q - This book is a beautiful meditation on grief and loss, threaded through with a poignant fantasy metaphor. It is difficult for me to summarize this one succinctly, except to say that it touched me very deeply. (Full review)
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez - F, Q - Jimenez's creative writing style is not going to land for everyone, but I found it gorgeous and captivating. He does a fantastic job painting us a picture of his world, and the emotional journeys of his two protagonists felt believable and I was rooting for them the whole time. (Full review)
The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez - NF, Mem - This book is part memoir, part investigative journalism piece by Fernandez as she looks back at the horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Fernandez so neatly illustrates both the terror of the regime as well as the absurdity almost inherent in any totalitarian government. Her writing is engaging and well-researched. (Full review)
The West Passage by Jared Pechacek - F, Q - This darkly whimsical fantasy adventure tale makes ample and effective use of a medieval European-inspired setting combined with a surreal magic world. I loved questing with Pell and Kew and this book is very interested in interrogating the cost of traditions for tradition's sake. (Full review)
The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison - F, Q - A sister novel to The Goblin Emperor, this book sets aside the machinations of the Elflands' government to focus on the trials and tribulations of one weary prelate, Thara Celehar. Witness for the Dead continues to enmesh us in Addison's richly tangible world and I found this book, despite its often dark subject matter, a joy to inhabit. (Full review)