Members Of The Ifan Ben-Mezd Fan Club For Fabulously Dressed White Haired Sourcerers. Meetings Every

Members of the Ifan Ben-Mezd Fan Club for Fabulously Dressed White Haired Sourcerers. Meetings every Friday at the Driftwood Tavern*

*we fixed the cannibalism issue (elves still welcome)

Art for the art fight!

On the left is Remus belonging to @phantasmicdream and on the right is Runa who belongs to me :)

Dunny is always my favourite. Like, come on BrandySandy. Not only is he going to die, but you're also going to name him after an Outhouse????

(Dunny is slang for an outside/long drop toilet in oceania)

Ah yes, the experience of rereading the Way of Kings and not recognizing a bridgeman's name and realizing that they're not gonna survive the book.

Young!Ixchel in DA4. Her colors are red, her stone is coral, and she bears the marks of her dragonling encounter across her face along with her vallaslin... and the mark of her near-death experience is reflected in her eyes. i want her head to be covered as if she'd just been smuggled in incognito and is removing her disguise.

still a wip. it's a struggle to get her face as scarred and mauled as i want it to be, and I never expect other artists to get it either, so I gotta learn myself.

Y'all got to stop me from making more ocs whose names start with 'r's...like we've got Rian, Rue, Runa, Redfeather....

Listening to the latest OSPod and your discussion about being ace and wanting to be prioritized, it resonated a lot with me. I also go through those sorts of yearning periods and it was nice to hear that verbalized.

It's a tough feeling! Loneliness is a universal consideration, but for anyone who doesn't want a single life partner it takes on a new, difficult shape. Finding "the one" won't fix it, because you don't want "one", and you also don't want to give all of yourself to just "one." So everything we learn from the social and cultural zeitgeist tells us that this life will make us, forever, a third wheel - deprioritized, unnecessary, nobody's first choice.

I think some of the fear is rooted in a fallacy, though. Broken down, it's basically just "will people like me if I can't offer them something?"

Relationships aren't really transactional. I do things for the people I love because I like it when they're happy, and I can only assume the inverse is also true. But if you're a person for whom the supposed "highest tier of relationship closeness" is inaccessible, if your friends have Most Important People in their lives who aren't you, this insidious feeling can creep in. "Those people are closer because they could offer something you couldn't. They get to be cared about because they have something you lack."

It's not true, obviously. Relationships aren't a linear hierarchy; every relationship is completely unique. Everyone I'm friends with, I'm friends with in a completely different way. I don't have a ranking or tier list defining how close we are, and I can only assume my friends don't either.

And the logic breaks down further the more you look at it. There's this idea that friendships are more fragile and disposable than romantic relationships, leaving people whose only relationships are friendships in a more supposedly unstable position. But romances and life-partnerships break down all the time. Not to go morbid to prove a point, but I've lost several elderly relatives at this point, and the one whose passing was mourned the most, the longest, and the most impactfully was the maiden aunt who never married, never had any kids, but was still so deeply loved by her nieces and nephews and their spouses and children. I've seen it proved that marriage, kids and grandkids doesn't save someone from isolation, and that a single life doesn't doom them to isolation either. None of us are automatically destined for loneliness.

A fear of abandonment is a powerful thing, and while my perspective on it is intrinsically tied to my ace identity, it's definitely not just us feeling it. For a social species like us, there's really nothing more unifying than a fear of being alone.

Gale: Would you like a snack?

Mic: Yes.