rocky41_7

I really hate to give up on a book, but sometimes, there are too many other tempting things on the horizon to keep ploughing through an active read in the hopes it gets better. Today I put aside Luck in the Shadows by Lynn Flewelling. While I would have liked to have gone all the way to the end before making a judgement, there just over 9 hours still to go on the audiobook and the book has simply not given me enough to power through that.

At nearly 9 hours in (about halfway) my overall feeling towards this book is indifference. Towards the plot, towards the characters, towards the setting. It's very generic fantasy and just doesn't give much to bite onto outside of that. The first half of the plot has some fun adventure elements, but when the mentor-figure, Seregil, becomes incapacitated partway through, the youthful protagonist Alec is simply not enough to carry the story. The second half of the story is more political intrigue, and I can't help but compare it to The Traitor Baru Cormorant which I'm also currently reading, and that comparison does Luck in the Shadows no favors.

Seregil and Alec's escapades are fun, and it's interesting to see the creative ways they go about their tasks, but for me it's not enough to make up for the lackluster plot and detailed but unremarkable worldbuilding.

There's a disappointing dearth of women in the story, although one of the fantasy kingdoms in which the second half of the story takes place has been ruled by a succession of queens for centuries. There is some casual queerness in the story which I liked, but when I looked for more reviews on this to help me decide if it was worth pressing on, I learned (SPOILER) that Alec and Seregil become a couple later on. Given that Alec is barely sixteen at the start of this book, and Seregil is a middle-aged man, I'm just not here for it.

This is the first book of a series (the Nightrunner series), but my general feeling on series is that it's a cop-out to rely on later books to make up for weaknesses in earlier books. Particularly here, where each book gets longer, the author is asking for me to take a lot on trust that this story will get better with time.

I really wanted to like this book, as I really want to like all fantasy novels, but it's just not worth the amount of time investment needed. Also, in general, not looking for stories about adults falling in love with teenagers. Disappointing, but there are other things to move on to.

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Current Mood: disappointed

Last night I finished The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, book #9 from the "Women in Translation" rec list. This book was translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.

The Twilight Zone is a nonfiction book, part memoir, part investigative journalism piece by Fernandez, first published in 2016. It concerns Fernandez's study of and memories of growing up under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The author is haunted by the traumas of the regime, both those she experienced firsthand and those she heard about from others, and the book in some ways feels like an exercise in simply trying to reconcile those feelings.

Fernandez's book is of course very specific to the Chilean experience, and yet core parts of her incisive commentary about both the absurdity and the cruelty of autocracies rings true around the world. The exercises the regime goes through in its constant quest for self-preservation are both ridiculous and brutal, feelings Fernandez captures in her title. The surrealist sci-fi hit show of the 70s fits very well as a metaphor for the often-flailing yet eminently dangerous police state.

Fernandez does an excellent job of using her prose to say things not neatly spelled out in words. I was reminded of reading The Things They Carried in high school, and how revelatory it seemed to me at the time how the author could use the style of prose to suggest a character's mental disarrangement without simply saying he was deranged. Fernandez's prose stood out to me in a similar way—how she uses the structure of her words to capture the feelings at play.

Equally compelling is the obviously copious amounts of research Fernandez put into her work. She portrays herself as a woman consumed by a quest to find answers about this regime, and it comes across in her work. Names, dates, places, timelines — Fernandez has clearly put in the leg work to piece together the final days of the highlighted victims of the regime as much as can be done.

However, the book never comes across like a textbook. Fernandez ably weaves her research into a compelling narrative. Neither does she ever seek to blur the line between the facts and her imagination—she keeps a clean line between what she knows and what she wonders, or imagines. Nevertheless, the questions and suppositions that populate Fernandez's mind feel regrettably natural for anyone in the aggravating circumstances of a mendacious autocracy. She does an excellent job of showing how crazy-making it is to live under such a government, where you are constantly being lied to in direct contradiction of visible facts, and yet there seems to be nothing you can do but either accept the truth or taste the knuckles of the regime.

I really enjoyed this read. It breezed by and I can absolutely see what a national treasure Fernandez is as a writer! I would love to see if more of her work has been translated into English; she has a wonderful voice.

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books

Hesitant to post this on tumblr because I don't want to kick off Discourse but "friendship ended with Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate 3 is my new best friend" is so the mood. BG3 has just been so much more FUN that Veilguard, and I say that as someone who was deeply invested in DA for years. Maybe part of that is just that I don't know enough about BG to know if this latest game has fucked its lore and screwed over returning characters (I know at least one person very unhappy with Viconia Devir's cameo) but I do think it's more than that. BG3 lets you roleplay in a way that Veilguard never does. All of the things you control about Rook in Veilguard--species, appearance, class, background--are essentially superficial. There are some unique dialogue options, but at the end of the day, you're playing Bioware's character Rook, who really cannot deviate from their canon attitude and personality. My first Tav, a tiefling monk who was kind-hearted but ultimately non-interventionist about a lot of things, could not be more different from my other two--a githyanki fighter who preferred to talk her way out of fights, and a dragonborn barbarian Durge who doesn't seek cruelty but nevertheless has left a trail of blood behind her. And all of these are things expressed in game separate and apart from any headcanons I have about them.

Your companions REACT to things! My first Tav had a pretty supportive friendship with Gale; my second barely knew his name; Durge was actually close to him before the Grove slaughter, after which he really wanted nothing to do with her. My first Tav and Wyll almost got together; in the current playthrough, he left the party entirely. Your companions in BG3 have views and beliefs of their own that seriously impact how they view Tav's actions and behavior and that makes the game so much more interesting!

There are things to explore! I let Shadowheart kill Aylin my first run, so meeting her in the second run was a surprise and a delight--and impacted several more quests than just Shadowheart's! I played Veilguard twice, and it really is one and done. If you've played it once, you've seen what it has to offer. Your choices are superficial, your companions are with you no matter what, and for Rook, all endings but one (the one where they themselves go into the Fade) pretty much have the same impact. Despite the amazing graphics and killer character creator and smooth combat, the game is ultimately boring, because it's a roleplaying game that doesn't let you roleplay.

Let's be real Kagha is not materially worse than at least half of the companions. "She threatened a child" Lae'zel and Shadowheart both explicitly approve of not intervening on Arabella's behalf; Lae'zel and Astarion both approve of siding with the goblins which involves slaughtering every child in the Grove; Astarion will kill a dozen or more Gur children to ascend unless Tav convinces him not to; Gale is trying to become a god almost expressly to get back at his ex-lover; Shadowheart kills an aasimar in chains unless Tav convinces her not to and may also kill her own parents in pursuit of Shar's will; Minthara encourages Tav both to embrace their heritage as Bhaal's chosen and to assume control of the Elder Brain...let's not start throwing stones from glass houses

I went into her tumblr tag and should have been expecting the vitriol in there (* ￣︿￣) I get it, she's not likeable, but to act like she's uniquely awful in the game is kind of laughable, even when you're comparing her only to Tav's friends/companions.

In other news, this fanfic has turned me onto the idea of Kagha/Minthara and now I can't let it go.

Below will be fanfic recs for BALDUR'S GATE 3, DRAGON AGE, MASS EFFECT, TOLKIEN, and a few miscellaneous.

Crossposted from tumblr and Pillowfort.

Past fanfic rec lists

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Current Music: Jump Into the Fire; Harry Nilsson

I'm looking for more fantasy and sci-fi, so if there are any titles that pop into mind, new or old, feel free to drop names below!

This week I finished The Dawnhounds, the first book of the The Endsong series by Sascha Stronach.

This book has been compared to Gideon the Ninth, which I think does it a disservice, because while there are enjoyable things about it, if you go into it expecting The Locked Tomb, I think you're going to be disappointed. They are not on the same level.

Protagonist Yat's homeland—the port city of Hainak—is implied to have been colonized and fought a revolution to escape that, but while some of the changes have been welcome—the embrace of "biotech," freedom of determination—her home is in the throes of sliding from one abusive regime to another. They have thrown off the yoke of colonization, but as Yat comes to slowly realize over the course of the novel, what they replaced it with isn't much better.

Yat is in a prime position to realize this. A former street rat turned cop who joined the police in hopes of making a positive change for people like herself, she's been slowly worn down over the years into someone who simply closes her eyes to the worse abuses by the government and partakes herself in the lesser offenses. The kick-off for the story isn't any of that though—it's that Yat is demoted after her coworkers learn she's patronized a queer bar. She's blundering through the fallout of that—continuing to patronize that same bar, and using drugs to cope—when the fantasy plot hits her in the head.

Unfortunately, here is where the novel began to lose me. I think the comparisons with The Locked Tomb arise from the way The Dawnhounds throws the reader into the plot with the promise of revealing more information later. Except that where TLT is a masterclass in subterfuge and gradual reveals that make perfect sense in retrospect, and in some cases reframed entire characters and story arcs, The Dawnhounds just...never really reveals the information.

By the end of the book I could not describe anything about the antagonists—who they were, what their goals were, how Yat defeated them. And although the city of Hainak is omnipresent—it's almost a character in itself, and much of Yat and Sen's motivation surrounds wanting to do right by the city—I could not tell you anything about how its government functions or why there are problems with it (or what those problems are at the core, besides wealth disparity and abuses by the criminal justice system). It's suggested at one point that the specious specter of violence or re-invasion by their former colonizer is being wielded to allow some to gain power within the city...but we never learn who those people are, what they want, or how they're able to do this. Given how much lip service is paid to politics in the book, this feels particularly jarring since it's precisely the kind of thing Yat and her pal Sen should be really invested in.

Early in the book, the confusion about the magic system and the import of various characters and objects is forgivable, because Yat herself doesn't know any of this. I have no problem with an author who wants the reader to feel the protagonist's confusion and sense of being overwhelmed. But the book never gets around to explaining anything.

As mentioned, this is the first book of a series, which may mean that more information about who the antagonists are and what they actually want is revealed later on, but I can't say I'll bother with the next book. This one just did not give me enough to care about and I'm not willing to dive into a whole new book on the hope that it might explain things the first book failed to explain.

And for a truly nitpicky complaint: the title has no relevance to the book. The term "Dawnhound/s" never comes up.

That said, if you set aside the obtuse nature of the plot, the book is still fun. I liked Yat as a protagonist. She's certainly a flawed person whose general attitude at the start can be summed up as "careless," but it's a kind of self-enforced carelessness, because she is too afraid to really open her eyes and see what Hainak has become, and what she's assisted them in doing as a cop. Her transformation from someone largely passive into someone with the courage to take real action is nice to see.

Stronach has the bones of something interesting in Hainak, but I wish we had gotten more time to explore it. Stronach is trying to fit a great deal into a midsized novel, which makes the boat detour to some random island we never really find out much about and thin hints towards Captain Sibbi's past feel a little frustrating in retrospect, and I think the book would have benefited from more room for all of these things to breathe. Sometimes it feels like Stronach was trying to cram everything she personally thinks is cool into the book, and that does not benefit it.

I don't feel that I wasted my time with The Dawnhounds, but I also don't feel compelled to pick up the next book in the series. I think I've seen enough of Hainak.

Crossposted to

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"But it wasn't enough for you. You were distracted by your own desires: bloodlust, murder, chaos, and most damning of all, an unexpected weakness, and longing for acceptance and affection from a mortal."

I can't post the gifset from tumblr because the images are too large, but I am going insane over this dialogue from Minthara's torturers at Moonrise Towers if you romance her in Act I. First of all, knowing how Minthara prizes the sanctity of her mind, this kind of mental torment and digging through her most private thoughts to torment her with them must rank among her worst-case scenarios. Second, that it's not her violence that's being used to most condemn her, but her desire for affection, her yearning to belong. That is what's being called out as her greatest failure--and that probably tracks perfectly with what she was taught in Menzoberranzan. That when she finally tries to reach out anyway, in spite of knowing this would be considered weakness among both the drow and the Absolutists ("I wanted this, for myself" she says to you after your night together), it's used to punish her. It's no wonder you can't just pick your romance up with her where it left off when she's just been so brutally reminded that love or even a semblance of it is a weakness that can and will be used to hurt her.

There's also the fact that if you kill her in Act I and then speak with her corpse, you can ask her what her "ambitions" were before she died, and she tells you "To find a home." Minthara is LONELY and I will stand by that.

Rambling about my newest Tav (Durge flavor)

Haranatavna's a berserker subclass of barbarian, so rage is part of it all, but hers is a very cold kind of rage. She's not the kind of person you can work up into a temper to get her to make mistakes. She gave her eye up to Aunt Ethel trying to solve the parasite problem, but her decision to kill Ethel--although strongly motivated by anger that she had paid a price and gotten nothing for it--was by all outward appearances made very calmly.

Part of that is her indifference to killing. It's a coin toss for her on whether or not to kill any given person, so while it doesn't take much to talk her into it, it also doesn't take much to talk her out of it. For her, it's an option like any other, not one that requires a given amount of anger for her to exercise.

( Read more... )

Dark Urge run here we gooooo

This is Haranatavna ("Tav") and much of her backstory is on hold until I've played more and understand more about Durge's background. I've only just made it to the Emerald Grove but I'm already enjoying this origin.

She's a barbarian class but on the whole pretty chill. She's willing to help people as long as it doesn't conflict with or endanger her core goal: never to be under the control of anyone else. She's very curious and loves to learn, and is pleased to engage in philosophical discussions about death with Withers. She can be a pretty solid traveling companion. Unfortunately, she also spends large portions of her time in a dissociative state trying to convince herself that it does actually matter if she hurts other people. She's not always successful.

She will be romancing Minthara, for which I will recruit Minthara the "right" way so...sorry tiefling refugees and druids. But the Grove slaughter will be a turning point for Tav to become a true resist!Durge and she and Minthara can work on being better people who overcome their worst instincts together <3

Go and live in angsty rock and roll

! Dragon Age Veilguard Spoilers Below !

Varric: Me, take down the Dread Wolf? I'm flattered.
Varric: No, I just came to ask you a question. So, you rebelled against the other gods, and it was a disaster.
Varric: Then you imprisoned them and created the Veil, and that was a disaster.
Varric: So how is this time gonna work out any better? Can you tell me that?
Solas: I understand your hesitance, but what I do now must be done, despite it being past your comprehension.
Varric: I'm not saying you're evil. But if you really believed in what you were doing, you'd be able to give me a straight answer.
Solas: You would rather cast aspersions than admit that this is mine to solve.
Varric: No mistake is worth killing innocent people over.
Solas: The question is what lives, and how. My ritual will heal the world, and restore what was driven out of balance.
Varric: C'mon, Chuckles. Who are you trying to convince here? Me, or yourself?
Solas: Varric…
Varric: You're not the first good man I've seen talk himself into a bad decision. The question is whether you can admit it.

This dialogue makes me so crazy and I mean that in a deeply pejorative way. This exchange between Solas and Varric at the start of Veilguard (which you can't actually really hear in-game) goes right to the heart of my biggest problems with the game, which is that it refuses to honestly engage with Solas and his motivations.

Varric, the terminal centrist, seems to suggest that Solas was in the wrong to rebel against the Evanuris for being tyrannical slavers. Which, given Varric's general attitude towards injustice in Kirkwall, isn't totally out of character. Except that Veilguard posits him as the moral heart of the game, so...not sure where we go with that. Is Varric suggesting they'd be better off if the Evanuris had been allowed to continue ruling until the present day?

Then, Solas refuses to give an actual reasons for why he's doing what he's doing. At least in Trespasser, he hinted at why he needed to bring down the Veil. Here, where the writers are given a chance to actually, clearly lay out Solas' motivations, they just...don't. Veilguard won't honestly interrogate either side of the debate, which results in incredibly circular dialogue throughout the game to the effect of:

Solas: I must do this. It's my mistake to fix.

Varric: You're going to drown the world in demons!

Repeat ad nauseum.

No reasons from Solas on why he needs to bring down the Veil--nothing like his Trespasser comments or even his Inquisition dialogue hinting at what the world was before the Veil. Nothing about how spirits suffer being confined exclusively to the Fade. Nothing about how the elves have suffered and been degraded since the Veil went up. Nothing at all about the uthenerai, who may have just been entirely reconned. Just "I made a mistake. I have to fix it." And then later we mix in his grief for Mythal and that's meant to explain it all.

Varric can't argue with Solas because Solas gives Varric nothing to argue against, and therefore nothing for the player to agree or disagree with. We can't have an opinion on what Solas is doing because we're never given concrete reasons why he wants to do this, except that apparently Mythal wanted this (which she never gives any indication of in any of the material we have about her)? (Demonstrably Flemythal disagrees, so this sentiment is at best out of date and at worst completely baseless.) And I've already talked about how making Solas' desire to remove the Veil stem from his personal grief for an individual rather than his desire to do justice for his people weakens his character.

Varric says that if Solas believed in what he was doing he'd give a straight answer, but that would require the game to give us a straight answer, so that can't happen. Veilguard suffers from being a game with a significant moral quandary at the center which determinedly refuses to ever interrogate that quandary.

Crossposted from tumblr

This hasn't made it on here yet but I've recruited Minthara for the first time this playthrough and I'm in LOVE she's horrible and I'm in LOVE her puppy dog eyes and desire for bloody vengeance are extremely compelling. She wants to know about githyanki poetry 😍

I said this in the tags of a tumblr post but I'll share it here too: One of the things that took me by surprise with Minthara's character is how openly she talks about her fear. When she talks about being taken captive by Orin, she doesn't try to make it sound like nbd and doesn't even omit how Orin laughed at her apparent fear. It's not something I would have expected from her initially and it's very intriguing.

Turning Minthara down after she was "disappointed" to realize Tav only thought of her as a friend is hands down the hardest thing I've had to do in this game ;A;

But also - the vulnerability!! "Without Lolth, without the Absolute, without my home, I do not know who I am" "show me who I am through your eyes, let me see myself" !!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW CAN I BE NORMAL ABOUT HER

I'm just losing my mind about Minthara practically begging to share minds with Tav so she can see herself through someone else's eyes because her sense of self is so tenuous and poorly-understood by her that she needs someone else's view of her to try to understand herself. If Tav says she'd rather just say what she thinks of Minthara aloud, Minthara (gently) pushes back, insisting that the only way for her to get the real truth is to see it in Tav's mind. This woman is so lost and desperate to understand herself, but even now with someone she trusts enough to admit this to, she cannot bring herself to trust Tav's word on the matter.

This woman will say things that make Lae'zel look like a bleeding heart empath and then look at you like this

In a grim finale to yesterday evening, Tav helped Astarion complete the ascendance ritual only to hear his unhinged monologue afterwards and then side with the Gur to off him.

Really fascinating to see the cycles at play here: knowing how Cazador abused and tortured Astarion, hearing the memories of how Vellioth abused and tortured Cazador...seeing the horror that Cazador wrought on his spawn, seeing Astarion bend Cazador over and carve the ritual symbols into his back (and they do not skimp on that scene, it goes on a while with Cazador screaming as Astarion does to him what he did to Astarion - I wonder if Cazador's screams sound sweet to Astarion?) I can only assume how this moment with Astarion throws Cazador back to being helpless at Vellioth's hands, and it's easy to imagine even at his age how his pursuit of power felt like a pursuit of control over his own life, of freedom from fear...so to hear Astarion claim as soon as the ritual is over that he'll never have to fear anyone again...boy the cycles do cycle.

Interestingly, Lae'zel opposes this course enough to interrupt the cut scene pleading with Astarion not to do it, and after she seems genuinely sad that he succumbed to desire for personal power (which she contrasts with power for the collective). Minthara, predictably, supports Astsrion's ascension, although she has nothing to say afterwards. After killing him with the Gur, she's frustrated we offed a powerful ally. Lae'zel continues to be disappointed, but seems to believe we had to do it. From a monster-hunter perspective, we aced the day by ending with zero vampires.

I heard murmurs online that ascendant Astarion is just as bad if not worse than Cazador and even the brief glimpse I got of him does resonate with that. Makes me wonder who Cazador was before Vellioth got to him. Someday I'll do a Durge playthrough and let Astarion live out his ascendant vampire dreams.

Astarion was inspired by our betrayal.

Encouraging Shadowheart to defy Shar as a githyanki Tav who defied Vlaakith feels particularly powerful. Shadowheart insists this is her duty, her life's purpose to follow Shar's orders, and Tavarezzyn is like "Like it was my purpose, Lae'zel's purpose, to follow Vlaakith?"

Initially when I started this run I expected Tavarezzyn to support or at least not oppose Shadowheart's goal of becoming a justiciar, just because Tav was so focused on her own goal she wasn't overly concerned with everyone else's, and because morally she's less opposed to the idea of killing than other companions and Tavs, but her experience with her own god-queen radically altered her views on Shadowheart being effectively bound to Shar's will without the chance to really consider what that means. She sees in Shadowheart herself and Lae'zel, giving their loyalty, even their lives, to a ruler who could not care less about them except as they serve her purpose, and she can't support putting Shadowheart in that position.

Tavarezzyn begins Act II with more stable footing in Faerun, in no small part because she's now spent several weeks traveling with locals. Furthermore, as Lae'zel initially derisively points out, she's starting to get into playing the hero. Their successful defeat of the goblins and rescue of the tiefling refugees netted them a fair deal of praise, and this is the first time for Tav that people have ever been glad to see her, as opposed to groaning and cursing and asking if she can be reassigned somewhere else. It's never before been the case that people looked to her for anything or trusted her to solve a problem and if she's honest yes, she is getting into it, enough that she's willing to cooperate with Jaheira and the Harpers even if it doesn't totally serve her own goal of destroying her parasite.

However, it's also a little terrifying to have people whose opinions of her are not baseline in the dirt, because they can actually be let down.

Book #8 from the Women in Translation rec list: The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim. This book is about a 65-year-old assassin approaching the end of her career who faces one last unexpected challenge.

This book hooked me immediately with its premise. While 65 may not seem old enough in today's graying society to be considered truly "elderly," a hard life can take its toll much sooner than might be expected, and protagonist Hornclaw (her work alias; we never learn her real name) has definitely had a tough road. Letting a woman—and an old woman at that—be the sole protagonist of an action novel like this was fun to read.

This isn't a book about Hornclaw reflecting on her life and career, though her recollections of what led her into this work are sprinkled throughout the story. Rather, Hornclaw is focused on the future. Despite a lifetime of being physically active, Hornclaw's punishing work has taken its toll, and every day she is evaluating herself to judge if she can reasonably continue with her work, or if its time to take her payout and retire. At various times, she fantasizes about owning a small beer and fried chicken restaurant, being a lady who gets her nails done regularly, and having the time and safety to walk her dog more often. It's these small goals which drive home how much of Hornclaw's life has been controlled by the nature of her work, although she never pities herself for the road her life has taken.

Neither is she wringing her hands with regret over a life spent killing for money. Hornclaw is nothing if not practical, and it made her perspective interesting to sink into. Her job is just a job for her; she does what she needs to to complete her assignments, and she moves on. When a relative of one of her old victims comes calling, she has no recollection of them and no particular pity for the role she played in their life. I enjoyed this aspect; it felt like Hornclaw was allowed to inhabit a role I've only ever really seen filled by male characters: the grizzled old veteran assassin.

And of course, even at her age, even recognizing she can no longer pull some of the moves she used to, Hornclaw is still a stone-cold badass.

The story itself was a little less gripping for me, it felt like it meandered a little and didn't have as much time to build up as I might have liked, particularly Hornclaw's relationship with Dr. Kang. Hornclaw is definitely the most compelling part of the book, and I enjoyed it for her narration and her actions. Naturally, the book also has commentary on ageism, as Hornclaw is constantly aware of how she's viewed as she gets old (the quickest way to make her snap is trying to refer to her as "ma'am"), which she uses to her advantage when it comes to her targets, and which she fights against when it comes to her coworkers and clients.

On the whole, this book goes by quickly, and it's fun. It's not the sort of book I'll spend a lot of time thinking about now that I'm done with it, but I enjoyed reading it and it was fun to see such a different protagonist for this kind of story.

Crossposted to

books

Tavarezzyn's personal journey starts with running away from her platoon. This began as an incredibly half-hearted attempt at suicide, which was over without any real effort when she realized she didn't want to die, just to not be constantly surrounded by people who thought she was worthless. So she high-tails it to Faerun, essentially at random.

She spends a few weeks in Baldur's Gate utterly wracked with guilt, eventually deciding she must return, and it's on this trip to rejoin the other githyanki that she's picked up by the nautiloid. Nevertheless, those few weeks in Faerun is the first time she's ever really experienced foreign cultures. Certainly she offended a couple hundred people in her brief time there, but she was also exposed to ideas and perspectives shed never considered before, and those things are percolating in her mind even before the nautiloid.

This makes her more prone to shifting values throughout the journey of the game and gives her a primer to be a little more tolerant when it comes to picking up her various non-gith companions.

Lae'el is a bitch and a half to Tavarezzyn once she realizes how low on the feeding chain Tav really is among the githyanki (which doesn't take long; the scars her crechemates left her were supposed to show she's a loser who can't hold her own in a fight). Some of the other companions--Wyll, Gale, Karlach--take some issue with this. Unfortunately, faced with the double humiliation of being rejected by her own kind and being pitied (as she sees it) by outsiders, her response is generally "FUCK OFF ISTIK" or perhaps challenging them to a fight, thanks to a heady cocktail of continual rejection by her own society and a lifetime of bullying combined with feverish commitment to the same values and norms over which she was rejected.

loading up a cargo ship for her issues, bad enough to be disdained by the only other gith around, but being comforted by ISTIK?, intolerable, her brief sojourn into Baldur's Gate began to shift her views, but in Act 1 she still has a ways to go

Behold: Tav, short for Tavarezzyn, a pathetic excuse for a githyanki.

Tav is, by githyanki standards, a coward and a dogshit warrior. She managed to survive multiple attempts by crechemates to put her down mainly through a combination of dumb luck and pitying intervention by adults, but she has (not pictured here) about a half a dozen notches in her ears to prove her lost fights and make sure other githyanki know what a loser she is on sight.

Unfortunately this had the impact of making her a perpetual defeatist, convinced at the start of any task that she's definitely going to fuck it up, which inevitably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, further convincing her of her own uselessness.

Despite utterly failing to achieve any measure of success by githyanki standards, she continues to zealously laud those same values, worshipping Vlaakith and dreaming of ascension, something laughably beyond the realm of possibility for her. However, early in the adventure after escaping the nautiloid, she does consider that actually, removing herself from githyanki society might be best for everyone. (And in fact, she was caught by the nautiloid in the throes of regret over deserting her platoon, trying to make her way back to them.)

Lae'zel begins their acquaintance from a point of total contempt. She is aware very quickly that Tav is a black sheep among their people and has no respect for her. But Tav's quick and surprisingly successful flash of leadership on the nautiloid, allowing both her and Lae'zel to survive, gives her a desperately needed confidence boost, and as the weeks on the road progress, she discovers she is actually, good at maybe a couple of things, or at least she can improve at some things. Maybe.

For her part, Tav is smitten with Lae'zel immediately, but of course aware of Lae'zel's disdain for her (which does nothing to temper her growing loyalty to and affection for Lae'zel) and assumes there is no chance that will ever happen.

Much to Lae'zel's annoyance, she finds her attitude towards Tav shifting as they travel together, until she's surprised to find she cares about this loser. Together, they weather the shock and anger of Vlaakith's betrayal of the githyanki people and vow to carve their own path and take their queen out of power, the keystone cementing their now inseparable bond.

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