Snowflake Challenge #4

Okay, this one is also weirdly, well, challenging!

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

It feels like I do that all the time, lol, but (even though I'm not posting in the community's comments—lingering shyness, I guess) I guess it can be handy to have in one place. Okay. I think I'll do this one as a bulleted list for convenience. Stuff about me:

• My name is Elizabeth (most people know me as Anghraine and a few know my family nickname, but any of these are fine).
• I'm in my 30s. (Still. Somehow.)
• I'm a PhD student in English literature, hopefully in my final semester. I complain about my dissertation pretty regularly.
• Like many people in fandom, I'm very opinionated, frequently about things that seem trivial to other people.
• I'm US American and politically a progressive Democrat.
• My home is the Pacific Northwest and love it dearly.
• I don't like most of my appearance, but I do have dark hair and grey eyes, which give me a bit of joy as a Tolkien fan.
• I'm a grey-ace lesbian & she/her or they/their pronouns are both fine. My sense of gender is both very clear (no intrinsic gender) and very muddy (AFAB and in the habit of alignment with women for various reasons, but it's complicated), so I tend to veer between "eh, whatever" and "????????" as far as gender goes.
• I have three parents—my mother, my (adoptive) father, my (biological) father, and since I have ties to all of them (though much stronger to the first two), it's not always clear which father I'm talking about. My adoptive father is Mexican-American and my bio father is Greek/Irish-American, both of which come up sometimes for family reasons.
• I don't talk about it a whole lot, but I was raised Mormon (by my mother and adoptive father), while my bio father is Catholic, and this has definitely impacted my particular experience of US Christianity. I'm personally agnostic.
• I'm bipolar and autistic, and relatedly, tend to veer between not doing much and super-intense posting.
• I've been active in fandom since about 2003, when I delurked at the Faramir/Éowyn Emyn Arnen forums (I also stealth shipped Faramir/Aragorn, but didn't admit it then :P). My main OTP is Elizabeth/Darcy (book versions). I also love the Star Wars OT (with the prequels and, some days, TFA+TLJ along for the ride) and Rogue One a lot (I've had various SW ships over the years, but nothing really compares to the greatness of Jyn/Cassian; my other SW faves are Luke, Anakin, and Leia). I only intermittently still talk about Legend of Korra, but it's never left my heart (Korra, Noatak/Amon, Tarrlok, and Kuvira <33333).
• It's not the only thing I do, but I especially love genderbending my favorite male characters to women.
• Dreamwidth is not the place I post most often, but it is my favorite place to post (icons, f-lock, normalizing long-form conversations...).

BG3: Astarion update

I'm slightly warming up to Astarion, even though his constant disapproval for acts of basic decency still annoys me. It was nice, at least, that Ilzara scraped back some approval (still negative though) by assuring him that she has zero intentions of selling the party out to a devil, to his very evident relief. And sometimes his assholishness is funny (not often for me, because my sense of humor doesn't tend to run that way, but ... sometimes!).

Mostly, though, he is just so incredibly good at what he does, particularly in our wizard-cleric-rogue-paladin team. Just watching the bonuses pile up every time he tries to open something or pull a DEX check is really satisfying, and his two bonus actions (from the subclass I gave him) are super useful. I'm still not super clicking with him, but I'm drifting more towards "oh, Astarion up to hijinks again" and less towards "shut up good lord."