Alex the Chemist

Idea and texts by @asianshep !! Link to the orig. post here -> https://asianshep.tumblr.com/post/640993103476654080/kasumi-crawling-through-the-vents-of-the

on survival

this fucking Thing in Gutter left such a vivid impression on me from the moment it was introduced that i had to draw this scene. started at the end of ep 3 and finished while i caught up today.

If you listen to me talking about 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, especially when I talk about building characters and Owlbear Traps, to come away with the impression that the game was reasonably balanced and presents players with an even grouping of choices that mean it’s hard for a character to make a character that doesn’t work.

This is not fair; after all, for all that 4e is a lot more even and more balanced than 3e was, for all that you can in fact grab any class, any heritage, and any basic combination of the components the rulebook tells you to use — like, if you make a wizard it tells you to grab a staff, orb, or wand, and get a good intelligence — that higher floor does not change the fact that the game is full of some absolutely pants choices made for weird reasons that bely a strange thought underneath them.

Huey Lewis & The News - The Power Of Love (Official Music Video)

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For example, there’s the Power of Love:

When you use a power associated with this feat (Radiant Vengeance, Recovery Strike, Sun Strike, Virtuous Strike) and hit one or more enemies with it, you grant 5 temporary hit points to one or two allies within 5 squares of you. The temporary hit points increase to 10 at 11th level and 15 at 21st level.

I’ve spoken in the past about the way that Dungeons & Dragons tries to regard ‘love’ in a sort of soppy way. Largely, gods of love in conventional settings are afterthoughts, and the love domain back when it got its own identity in 3rd edition was just a healer’s toolkit. There’s a ton of stuff wrapped up in that, which is either so obvious as to be boring to you, or really needs a ton of bedrock explanation to help you understand it, and therefore, I will provide a bulleted list:

Traditionally, fantasy narratives gender power and agency, with typically, masculine roles, including the most valorised role being the most masculine one (a prince, a king, some variety of what you might call a sigma male or whatever).

This led to a void of women in these stories, and that presented a problem for the storytellers who wanted to fulfill the wholeness of the masculine gender fantasy of putting their penis in something high value.

Therefore, women were added to fantasy genre media.

Since these women needed things to do, there were two options; you make her do the thing the man does but worse (because like, she couldn’t be better) or you find something unrelated she can do that makes her desireable and useful but not like, inconvenient for the man.

The solution was to present her with the task of healing, which served double duty, because now she was important and worth protecting, she should be present in the battle to do her job, but also, she couldn’t do her thing until he does his thing and that means that she’s literally there to serve him,

And all this just coincidentally and for no actual reason at all, aligns with pre-existing assumptions about things women are for and therefore must like to do?

Fastforward through this a few thousand times as people continually assert that they’d know if they had any societally induced biases in their relationships to the media they enjoy, and you wind up here, where we are and have been for a few centuries, because it turns out that dudes have been really good at setting up and propogating a system that asserts their job is to be the main characters and it’s just the natural order, after all, look at all this long history of dudes telling them exactly the same thing. There’s all this other feminine stuff (as said by dudes) gets lumped together.

I’m joking, but not much.

This means that Love is one of those things that girls are allowed to do, and therefore, Love is essentially, healer shit. It’s not about helping people forge bonds, it’s not about being better at learning about people long term. Bear in mind that this is a pretty sucky bag of deals for the prospective Paladin of Love (or Avenger of Love, which sounds sick as fuck, shame the game doesn’t back it up) but it’s actually better than previous iterations on the idea that sometimes thought that it was even better to put ‘mind control’ effects under love.

You know, remember what we said about love potions?

The feat isn’t just bad because it’s timid about what you can do with love, though, no no no. It’s also really weak. Because, hey, guess what, I lied to you. You see up there? Where I said what the Power of Love feat did?

When you use a power associated with this feat (Radiant Vengeance, Recovery Strike, Sun Strike, Virtuous Strike) and hit one or more enemies with it, you can choose to deal no damage and instead grant 5 temporary hit points to one or two allies within 5 squares of you. The temporary hit points increase to 10 at 11th level and 15 at 21st level.

That’s right, you don’t get to do this as part of your attacking. You get to do this instead of attacking. At that point you have to measure the math of whether taking an enemy out with the attack prevents more damage than these temporary hit points represent. There are places this works! There are absolutely places where that math is easy to do!

But god what a miserable choice! Hey, Paladin of Love, you can give up doing the thing everyone is doing, and instead turn yourself into a hit point dispenser for other people. It’s proactive damage prevention, rather than healing, so we circumvent part of that awful paradigm of Girls Do Heals, but it’s still fundamentally rubbish because, remember, you spent a feat and a god choice on this!

Here’s the thing, the punchline such as it is. Power of Love is a terrible feat. It’s a feat that you shouldn’t bother taking. But, for whatever reason, this feat is capable of extending its protection not to one person, not to your love, but to two people. And lords knows I love when I can take an existing game feature and draw a connection from that to something else, something that was probably never intended but also obvious if you’re aware of it.

See, if the feat let you give someone temporary hit points, that’s easy. That’s you protecting someone you love. Easy. But seemingly to address the way this feat isn’t good enough for what it’s asking of you, it let you split, and boost two people.

… So…

You’re extending your love to two people.

Polyamry win! This Paladin has a girlfriend and a boyfriend!

We are heartbroken to share the tragic news of the death of Jonathan Joss—beloved actor, artist, and gay icon—who was fatally shot on June 1, 2025, in San Antonio, Texas. He was 59 years old. Authorities are investigating the possibility of a hate crime.

Jonathan, of Comanche and White Mountain Apache heritage, rose to fame as the voice of John Redcorn on King of the Hill and appeared in acclaimed films such as The Magnificent Seven and True Grit. Beyond his screen work, he was a tireless advocate for Native sovereignty, queer visibility, and authentic representation.

In recent years, Jonathan came out publicly as a gay man and remained fiercely proud of both his Indigenous and queer identities. He is survived by his husband, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, with whom he shared a life rooted in love, art, and community.

Jonathan’s legacy is one of courage, truth, and unapologetic presence. His impact on two-spirit and LGBTQ+ Indigenous youth—and on all of us who saw ourselves in his work—cannot be overstated.