really can't stop thinking about the moment of bolaire snapping tyranny's bra strap, and I'm curious about your feelings on it- obviously there's the time period anachronism, but it also didn't make sense to me as a character moment. were you able to parse what taliesin was going for there? was there something else he could've done/said to express the same... sentiment?
So I'm going to be very honest about a couple of things:
First: I do not care about the anachronism. like I joked about it in some tags but that's not the important part of it. Pizza is also possibly anachronistic. I feel that it being anachronistic is getting a lot of focus in part because it's such an egregiously out-of-place moment in every respect, but like, that's not important to me.
Second: I think that a lot of people who have mentioned it, myself included, would probably have rolled our eyes and given it a pass if it weren't part of weird pattern. Like, the bra strap moment in isolation is an eh, I don't like it but whatever thing for me. It's when you take it in context with the weird "a moment on the lips forever on the hips" line, calling Tyranny pure chaos for having a very reasonable and measured response last episode that just didn't give Bolaire the answer he wanted, and the "clingy ex-girlfriend" and "personality disorder" lines about Termina on Tale Gate that it becomes item number four or five in an ongoing pattern of 1990s-2000s-era casual misogyny. I think it was the tipping point for a number of people whereas again, on its own, it's just a "huh?" moment.
Anyway: I don't know what he's going for with this moment, because I straight up do not know what he's going for with the character overall, and that's what I find frustrating. I can point to every other character and tell you what's being set up for them plot-wise and some degree of their motivations, and why they do what they do. I even can tell you what I'd make Bolaire about if this were a TV show being written and someone had come to me saying "hey, people are not liking this Bolaire character! how do we course-correct?" But in terms of what Taliesin was trying to achieve in that moment, or with Bolaire overall? literally no idea.
I know people specifically got upset when a number of people mentioned the focus on one-liners but unlike the anachronism, that actually does feel relevant to me, because with every scene Bolaire is in, it feels like his only motivation is trying to be the wittiest guy in the room. Which again, would be fine in isolation, but it becomes deeply frustrating when he is consistently failing to follow the obvious plot threads that are actually for him and about him. Like, it feels wild that after Olgud popped open the Coffin of Olbalad and Lady Cormoray didn't emerge and Knife & Palette was incredibly vital to determining the next steps of the story and Murray and Hal were otherwise occupied, Bolaire was like the most important thing for me to do is clearly to inspect Occtis and the Stone of Nightsong, right now.
I suppose generously I could say that perhaps Taliesin is having difficulty with the structure of the campaign; a lot of this kind of feels like FOMO and he is at the table where a lot of what you do is very much on your own separate from everyone else. But even if it's a case of difficulty adjusting, that still doesn't make me feel like anything is going on with the character narratively nor in terms of building an arc, and the growing list of misogynistic non-sequiturs are really not helping.
Also. Since I just posted about Travis and have this sort of criticism of fandom at the forefront of my mind, I may as well just say this outright: Just as I think Travis has often gotten the short end of the fandom stick on Tumblr because of backlash about the chuds liking him, I think Taliesin has been granted degrees of generosity none of the rest of the cast get from the fandom, in that he escapes the misogyny directed at the women, but isn't held to the same standards as the other men. Or put it bluntly, I think if one of the other men in the cast did a single item off that list of weird misogynistic moments? A number of the people currently up in arms about how mean we're being Bolaire right now would be calling for their head. Hell, I'm confident they would, because they've done so to Liam and Travis and Sam, repeatedly.
If you like the character, great, but at this time, he's not working on like, literally any level for me. He's fine scene to scene, and I'm certainly not skipping past or fast forwarding the scenes he's in - I've even liked a bunch of them, like the moment in his apartment with Demodus. It's fine when he's onscreen. But really, until there's some notable movement towards a clear arc or plot hook, I have just granted myself permission to stop trying to come up with a reason as to why he'd do something like snap Tyranny's bra and just be like well I think the character isn't well-realized.
