Therobishow - The Robi Show

Playing Far Cry 5 on twitch RIGHT NOW

chess is improved by picking two pieces to be star-crossed lovers who cannot bring themselves to kill the other

Reading The Cloisters and can't help but wonder if Katy Hays has ever actually dealt with the kind of man who constantly invades your personal space and is always touching you in some way.

Leo isn't coming across as hot and flirty. He's activating my fight or flight every time he shows up.

He's the kind of guy I wouldn't want to be alone with

I fucking hate true crime so fucking much

Scrolling reddit and this bullshit showed up in my feed.

If I had a penny for every time I saw a true crime fan act like these real events, real actual tragedies, are just some fun little story....I'd be one of the richest fuckers in the world.

I don't know if there's an actual term for this. An actual term for when people become incapable of processing reality as anything other than media to be consumed. The only thing I can think to call it is media poisoning.

JonBenet Ramsey isn't a real person anymore, her family aren't real people, the victims of Oakland County aren't real people and neither are their families. They're just characters. What happened to them isn't real, the tragedy, the pain, the death, the soul-shattering grief....it's not real, it's just a story.

If they were real, you couldn't make posts like that. You couldn't have a podcast called My Favorite Murder. You couldn't have people dressing themselves or their kids up as serial killers for Halloween. You couldn't have a wildly successful youtube series casually discussing murders while putting on makeup or doing mukbangs.

So they can't be real. They have to be media that you consume. And that's all they get to be. A product.

Astarion's ascension is extremely popular, despite it clearly being the designed bad ending for him.

So many fans of this version want to argue that it's a "valid" path to choose if you enjoy his character, or that it's equally good as his Spawn ending. The "it's what he wants" argument is the hegemonic justification in question.

But is wanting something better than needing another thing? Yes, he talks about ascension ever since he finds out about the ritual.

Yes, when push comes to shove he's still committed to ascend. But is this enough? Should we support his choice, even when everything but his words tell us not to? Should we trust the judgment of a deeply traumatized man about the best way for him to feel better?

This may sound harsh, but the answer is no.

Because in many circumstances, we see Astarion behaving unhealthily as a result of his trauma: he's hypersexual at the beginning of the game, using sex as a survival mechanism. He's yet to learn what his boundaries should be, what it means not to be an object, to see himself as a person that deserves respect and has so much more to offer than just his body. His trauma is still fresh. And he's so scared of losing his freedom, being trapped under slavery again.

We can't blame him being so desperate to feel safe that he will trade everything he is for it.

Because that's what the ritual means, Cazador says so himself: despite gaining the ritual's power, Astarion is still part of the bargain for said power. He still loses his soul in the process, and that is clear once we see how he acts post-ascension.

Of course, someone that is still suffering from the consequences of 200 years of abuse wouldn't care if he became less of himself, in the process of becoming untouchable ever again. Astarion's behaviour towards himself highlights that he doesn't care for the person he is because that person is, sadly, the product of those centuries of abuse.

He doesn't want to be that person anymore: even better, he doesn't want to be a person anymore: people suffer, people get taken advantage of, people are submitted by more powerful beings. He is willing to give this up not despite losing everything he is, but because of it. And that's what happens after his ascension: he retains his body, which becomes an empty shell of who he once was, with someone else inside of it to fill the void left by his soul.

This situation is a perfect, brutal metaphor of an abused person that later in life becomes the abuser himself, a thing that often happens to male victims of SA.

This is what is fundamentally wrong with Astarion's ascension: he's choosing power, his abuser's tool, over healing. Instead of learning to feel like a person again, to deal with his trauma to life after having endured it, he chooses to not feel anymore, while letting thousands of spawns (like he was) be consumed to get what he wants.

This terribly selfish act is the first instance of Astarion behaving like Cazador, considering the spawns as lesser beings, as nothing but his tools, like all vampire lords do. In this process he also sees himself, the person he gives up being, as a tool. He isn't healing. He's losing all of himself entirely.

Why would someone see this sacrifice as not only necessary to leave his trauma behind, but also preferable to healing from it?

The fan-favourite characteristic of Ascended Astarion is his behaviour towards Tav: in this version of "himself", he clearly is even more sexual than he was in his first days with the tadpole. And this expression of his sexuality is drastically different from the one we got to know prior to this point.

He is dominant, prevaricating, demanding in his avances: he enjoys being in a position of power even in his relationship.

This isn't the Astarion that slowly learns to trust his partner, to build a real loving relationship with someone who sees him as equal and truly cares for him.

Everything that he learns during his romance and his plot gets nullified by his ascension; and yet, this gets overlooked in favour of this more sexually appealing version of him. For people that claim to love his character because of his complexity, Ascended Astarion fans seem to only truly love him when he's less of himself than ever.

When all that's left of him is his body, and he behaves more like the toxic love interest from a young adult romance book, a great number of his fans get wild. Is this all that they want from him? The husk of the funny, sarcastic, dramatic and complex character, filled with this more traditionally masculine attitude, replacing what he used to be? An Astarion that never heals from his trauma, choosing to leave behind everything he was instead? Who resembles his abuser more than ever?

Do his fans who like his ascended version so much to genuinely think this is the best outcome for him, or do they just enjoy being able to project this "macho" fantasy on a physically attractive male character, that otherwise isn't anything like this prototype of man?

We can't help but think that appreciating Ascended Astarion is the same as believing in, if not loving, his hypersexual facade: it's overlooking his humanity in favour of sexualising him.

Which is the biggest disservice one could ever do to his character.

Sometimes my love for Warehouse 13 makes it hard for me to remember that H.G. Wells wasn’t actually a kickass female author who was unashamedly bisexual.

But reality would certainly be a lot cooler if that were true.

Today was.....terrible. I got screamed at repeatedly, coworkers would not stop bitching about every little thing, and I got covered with rotten meat juice. Please let me die

For the book rant- Fahrenheit 451

ITS SO UNDERRATED and listen I don't know if there's controversy about the book or the author, probably, but HOLY CRAP THAT ENDING BLEW ME AWAY

I literally had to put the book down and cry because I was just so taken aback by how devastating and totally world ending that is for the characters. I mean come on, the whole city? A WHOLE CITY? The way it's described is beautiful and I read it over a year ago, that scene is permanently engrained in my brain. It's just so...real. I just felt so bad for them. I can't help how frustrated I get over the lack of love for it.

Its appreciated as a work of "classic" fiction but not for how emotional it is

Well this was entirely unexpected.

Let's all take a moment to bask in some positivity

Also, have you watched the movie? The one from the 60s, not the newer one. It's very good, and has a much nicer ending

I am in Control.

Join me at 5 PM EST

Just started watching Loki and I already kind of hate the entire premise of it.

Anything that suggests the idea of a deterministic universe already annoys the crap out of me. And that fucking awful line about how Loki just exists to bring suffering and death to people just so that the Avengers can be good guys made me want to punch my screen.