LINK: Tinyurl.com/oldgaySF

sos

SHOUT OUT TO EVERYONE WHO STILL TRIES TO GET BACK INTO THE SWING OF THINGS AFTER DEPRESSION HIT THEM HARD. THERE ISN’T ENOUGH RECOGNITION FOR THOSE PEOPLE WHO KNOW THAT THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE INTEREST AND MOTIVATION AGAIN BUT PUSH THEMSELVES TO DO STUFF ANYWAYS. YOU ARE FIGHTING A DAILY BATTLE WITH YOUR OWN THOUGHTS AND YOU’RE STILL COMING OUT ON TOP, YOU’RE ALL BRAVE AS FUCK 

I have successfully completed all my house chores AND food prepped for the week. Jaheira would be proud of me and I think that’s an accurate measure of success.

notes and thoughts on the Nine-Fingers Keene tag dive

First, the unpretty Sheets chart:

For a deeper explanation of how I break down the roles, you can see this post here; and here is a comparison of NF's tag accuracy (percentage of main + side works) vs the rest I've done:

Raphael: 75% | Nocturne: 71% | Nine-Fingers Keene: 62% | Aylin/Isobel: 56% | Minthara: 54% | Alfira: 44% | Jaheira: 36% | Araj: ~27%

Please note that at this point, Minthara's is ~9 months out of date, the rest between then and now. Take these as a general baseline versus a hard truth.

Similarly to Nocturne, Act 3 easy-ish-to-miss Nine-Fingers Keene steps neatly out of the broader fandom spotlight and into the hands of people who actually like her.

Actually - I believe a lot of people genuinely like the women of BG3. But I also believe people do not care about them, which becomes really obvious with the amount of reverse-thought-criming in some characters' tags (Jaheiraaaa). AO3 users writing about Astele Keene, especially in her more recent works, like her and they care about her.

The minor role tags were in large part due to: a character, usually Tav, has a connection to the seedy underbelly of the city, and they need to call in a favor from NF. They will meet with her and/or discuss her and/or think about her for a few paragraphs.

Nine-Fingers' main ship was, predictably, with Jaheira. Her second largest fic-status was no tagged ship at all. The other ship-fics were individual one-shots with various characters (no repeat ships).

Regardless of relationship status, she's a girl's girl for sure:

This is subdivided, so works tagged both 'gen' and 'f/f' for example are counted as one of each; 76% of her works are not only ff, 76% of her works include the ff category.

And if we change this to only include works that actively ship Nine-Fingers:

Something else interesting is that Nine-Finger's tag is small enough that I could screenshot the entirety of my Roles column:

(rotated so it's oldest -> newest by post date. main, side, minor, mistag)

We can see her early tags were all side, background, a few mistags; the most recent works being on the other end of the spectrum, almost entirely fics truly about Nine-Fingers; and a pretty smooth gradient in the middle.

I am not going to lie, at first I was like yay looks like people are finally learning to tag :-) but, what this more likely indicates is just the fading popularity of a two-year-old game -- especially with newer shinier fandoms pulling audience from the bg3 pool. Users posting more recent BG3 fanfic are primarily those still standing in the now-settled dust, writing about favorite characters/settings/lore, with a drop in the general kind of 'this is my Tav's epic love story from beginning to end (with every NPC mentioned tagged as well)!' written and posted on a new-fandom high. I imagine that brand of enthusiastic-cum-careless writers are probably posting the same but with Rook now? Sympathy to my Veilguard mutuals.

Like I mentioned above, it's been almost a year since I posted my first Minthara infographic. It will be interesting to go back this summer and see what's changed for her as well, and if the above holds up for an unavoidable Act 1 character like her versus a more missable, late-game char like Nine-Fingers.

thank you Canada 🇨🇦

💙🩶

It's been two days and I can't get over what an incredible delight it has been watching the AO3 character and ship tags for Aylin and Isobel fill up with works that are actually about them. A dream, truly. It feels so strange but so wonderful. Everyone who has had or will have any hand in this, from writing and drawing to hyping up others to participate, I hope you're basking in this joy with me.

Anyway, here's a cute little cheek kiss or something.

“match my freak” how about you match my poetic misery instead

The moon is shy - digital painting, 2025

Created in procreate

Inspired by a beautiful photo of the moon by @raethanbhanneth!