As a victim, he would have used the bolt cutters ethically.

Ship Tournament, Round 2 — Match 1 / 15

Gale/Lae'zel

"Two people raised by gods who taught them love is obedience. like. Gale with Mystra, Lae’zel with Vlaakith. Both of them are incredibly competent and incredibly proud and also so deeply shaped by someone powerful deciding what they were worth. I think they would recognise that in each other before they had the words for it, and because neither of them is good at being normal about vulnerability it would come out as arguing about tactics and magic theory for three hours."

"lae’zel would bully gale into having better self esteem and i mean this lovingly. like gale starts monologuing about how he is a danger to everyone and maybe the best use of him is as a bomb and lae’zel is like. pathetic. you are a wizard of waterdeep. stand up. sharpen your mind. eat this protein. and somehow that is the most romantic thing anyone has said to him in ten years"

"I just think there is something VERY funny and sweet about Gale being the most verbose man alive and Lae’zel having negative patience for unnecessary words, but still clearly respecting skill and intelligence. He would infodump about the Weave and she would interrupt him every five seconds, except she is actually listening because she wants to know where the weak points are. He thinks she’s being rude. She thinks this is a perfectly normal conversation.And then Gale would ask about gith culture with genuine curiosity rather than fear or fetishizing it, which I think would get under her skin in a good way. He’d want to know the structure, the history, the logic of it. Lae’zel values competence and seriousness so much, and Gale has both when he gets past the flirting and theatrics."

vs. Elminster/Withers

"imagine Gale finding out. IMAGINE. his mentor/legendary wizard situationship and the camp skeleton death accountant. he would never recover."

Ship Tournament, Round 2 — Match 5 / 15

Astarion/Wyll

"Much has been said about how Wyll's romance better fits what Astarion seems to truly want in a relationship, that Wyll is happy with a more chaste relationship, etc etc. But what's often missed is that Astarion is actually a fantastic match for Wyll! Wyll is self-sacrificing to an unhealthy degree, and often minimizes the abuse and trauma he's been through. Astarion, meanwhile, is much more open-eyed to what he's experienced. He's happy to choose himself when needed and pushes those he cares about to do the same. And if you play as Astarion, you're given unique dialogue options to compare Mizora and Cazador and urge Wyll away from being passive in response of how she abuses him. Astarion needs someone to teach him how to empathize with others, and Wyll needs someone to teach him to fight for himself as much as he does for others. They complete each other!"

vs. Ansur/Emperor

"THE doomed exes ship. ansur loved balduran enough to search for him, shelter him, try to save him, and then couldn’t accept what he’d become. the emperor loved him enough that killing him is still framed as this huge buried wound centuries later, even through all the mind flayer emotional repression and manipulation. it’s horrible because neither of them is uncomplicatedly “wrong” in the emotional sense? ansur sees the person he loves transformed into something he believes is a monster. the emperor sees the person he trusts most deciding that mercy means killing him. they loved each other and it still ended under the city with a dragon’s corpse and a sword in the dark. what the fuck man."

"sometimes romance is a dragon looking at the illithid wearing your lover’s memories and going “i can’t live with this” and the illithid going “i am alive, why is that not enough”"

"Is the Emperor still Balduran? Is Ansur loving him, mourning him, or rejecting him? Is the Emperor’s anger betrayal trauma or the cold self-preservation of a mind flayer? It’s messy and awful and romantic in the gothic “this ends with both of us ruined” way. Exactly what I want from a dragon and his fucked up squid ex."

bc specifically the line that keeps getting brought up is when she says:

but she's not just calmly discussing her opinion on human/xenos relationships. the lines before it are:

She's at the end of her rope, isolated in an unfamiliar and dangerous environment, coming to a person with power over her (the Lord Captain) to report that along with being regular harassed, someone has now sexually harassed her, with very little idea how the Lord Captain will receive this. and then you can harass her! or you can tell her shut up and deal with it. or you can say Thank you for trusting me with this, I'll make sure it doesn't happen again, and she's surprised by this response. Yrliet's only defender is Yrliet. She's backed into a corner. Of course she's coming out swinging.

So I think that pointing to this line in particular as evidence of her not liking sex with humans versus being really upset by harassment, including sexual harassment is a weird one.

Honestly I feel that if this scene were to happen to Cassia, it could go beat for beat but with her comparing a commoner/worker to a beast and it wouldn't undermine her allosexuality. And similarly, I think this scene could be cut from Yrliet's storyline, and she would still read as asexual to me.

And like, allo-for-aeldari Yrliet is a not uncanon interpretation. I don't think she ever comes out and says 'I do not enjoy having sex with other aeldari'.

But I think it is uncharitable + flattens her character to say 'well, Yrliet just views humans as animals so that's why she won't fuck my Lord Captain!' -- because she also spirit bonds with you, and trusts you, and will romance you; and on the flip side doesn't enjoy even chaste touch, and continues to not want physical intimacy even when you're in a monogamous romantic relationship. To strip it down to well it's just bc you're human, Yrliet would be totally down to fuck an eldar, ignores the larger context of that line in particular + the whole rest of her romance or friendship.