[OLD COMIC] Keeping things fresh with old habits.

Again, posting the finals of this one here for the sake of archiving it. Originally posted to tumblr in 2024!

I would also like to include a response to an ask I got about this comic a little while back, since I do realize that the narrative in this might be a little vague -

The ask:
"With reference to the comic you did, where drow and astarion rlessentially role-play meeting for the first time at the tavern, astarion was a little gloomy before they started. Does he not like the taverns? If not, what would he rather be doing?"

My response:
"To be honest, I had really hoped that my intent behind this comic based on both the events and the title would be pretty obvious… But nobody is a mind reader, and I’m definitely not the best writer, so here’s the explicit intention laid out:

Astarion enjoys taverns, pubs and inns, but he also has negative associations to those places because of his past, and I’m sure occasionally gets into his own head about it. Like everything else (sex, love, relationships), it is something he works very hard to enjoy.

Noticing Astarion is having a tough time with something, DU drow decides to get him involved. Bars tend to be a place where courtship takes place; Astarion has done a lot of courting in them himself, most of it probably from the role of the pursuer. DU drow decides to do exactly that, but reversing the roles - and putting in the amount of insistence and thinly-veiled desperation he imagines Astarion used to employ himself.

Realizing what he’s doing, Astarion plays along, explicitly from the role of a naive, romantically inexperient victim.

It’s objectively really insensitive, kind of disrespectful, and a little weird. Even the dialogue is, in a vacuum, a little uncomfortable to read (or some people have told me) but for them it’s helpful somehow 🤷 make of that what you will, I just found the situation interesting.

So, Astarion does like taverns! At some point in his life, he most definitely had a lot of fun in taverns, even, now he’s just trying to get that back."