(no subject)

I kind of love whoever it is on f_fa who keeps periodically bringing up Kormir and how gamer bro assholes whined about her ascension (and still do), but actually she's really cool. The anon isn't me, but I a) agree and b) appreciate that there's some random GW1 player out there going out of their way to bring up Kormir on f_fa and defend her in 2023, even though I'm pretty sure most of meme has no idea who they're talking about.

I was thinking about this because I'm kind of annoyed with all the "surprise! the revered gods are actually sketchy af" twists in fantasy media (despite really enjoying my oblivious cleric of Mystra in BG3). GW2 definitely threw several of the GW1 human gods under the bus as part of its handling of humanity, IMO (most notably Balthazar) but I doubt it'll ever fully happen with Kormir in particular, given how much effort was put into her heroic ascension to godhood back in Guild Wars: Nightfall. And I'd just checked meme for the first time in months and seen someone bringing up Kormir again, so ... <3

Gaming and gender???

I feel an unexpected solidarity with straight men and other men attracted to women who play games as hot women, because I also do this!

I mean, I feel my, uh, tastes in hot women are rather better than many of theirs (to go by their character creation choices, lol), but I was thinking about how I make characters I find attractive and interesting more than characters I want to be, even if Who I Am As a Person bleeds through (I feel so bad about taking people's stuff, even if it's not marked as theft...). They're not really idealized Elizabeths.

At the same time, I was thinking about it some more, because I was talking with a (cishet male!) friend of mine about how he doesn't really get the link a lot of other men have between their sense of gender as men and their attraction to women—for him, these things feel completely separate. But that's not the case for me. Insofar as I have a sense of alignment with womanhood, it's tightly bound up in my attraction to women. I'm most comfortable presenting as wholly female when I can present as the kind of woman I find attractive. My "womannness" does feel pretty purely like an artifact of socialization and convenience, to be sure. But while being ... female-adjacent rather than female per se can feel a bit uncomfortable at times (I definitely don't feel like I have an internal, intrinsic gender, just a sort of affiliation by force of habit), I'm most comfortable with it in a specifically lesbian context.

IDK where this is going, just something I've been thinking about, mostly via BG3 and my disinterest in playing as someone with my own wobbly sense of gender.

BG3: I gained the power of ... more convenient screenshots!

The reason it was a pain to take them before is boring, but I figured it out, so a celebratory Larissa:



All glory to Mystra!

(Um.)