#d&db

Alright, so you guys know I don’t make personal posts, but this is something I need people to see. 

So I recently started playing D&D, using D&D Beyond and Discord to play with a group online. There were four party members including myself and the DM, who goes by Arbiter_Devour on D&DB. Now, I’m not subtle about being asexual, and even less subtle about being romantically attracted to girls, so by the end of the first session it was pretty common knowledge that I’m the Local Gay.

A few days after the first session, I get this message from the DM:

(edited to remove my name and profile pic)

For clarity, he did NOT send a d*ck pic. I can’t tell if he would have had I not responded immediately, but I did not want to run the risk.

As you can see, it’s deeply inappropriate, and he wouldn’t take my initial reaction seriously. 

I didn’t want to start any unnecessary drama, and I liked playing with the rest of the group, so I settled for setting strict boundaries and letting it slide this once.

He also tried to mansplain and downplay the message he sent me. In hindsight, I can tell he didn’t take me seriously at all, but at the time I was willing to let that go.

After a few hours I still felt weird about it, and realised that if I kept this quiet I would be in a vulnerable position, so I sent these screenshots to a close friend of mine. His response was to tell me to share it with the group immediately, but again, I didn’t want to cause unnecessary trouble, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be taken seriously. My friend and I did agree that I should let the DM know that a repeat of this wouldn’t be accepted, just to make my stance on this behaviour unquestionable. If this happened again, I would post the screenshots in the Discord server we were using. This is what happened:

Once again, I tried to be as civil as possible while asserting my stance. You can see that he got defensive, again trying to downplay his own actions and taking no responsibility. He also initially misread my message, thinking I had already put them in the group chat, and tried to convince me I was overreacting.

For extra fun, also notice that I reminded him that I am asexual, and that he put the word in quotation marks. I love it when people refuse to take my sexual orientation seriously. 

I also explained that I have been harassed before, which he also put in quotation marks. What a great dude *heavy sarcasm*. I love that for me.

Another course of action my friend and I agreed on was to contact the other female member of the group (who I’ll call Katya here), to see if he had sent this to her as well. To be honest, if he had I would have published the screenshots there and then.

Thankfully, Katya hadn’t received anything from him, but she agreed that it was creepy. She made sure I was ok, asked me if I was still good to play the next session, and asked me if she could tell her friend, who was also in the group (I said ok). The second session went through without any problems, thankfully.

A couple of days ago, I was chatting to one of the other members of the group (who I’ll refer to as Alex), when we realised that the server was gone. Alex messaged the DM, but he was vague and neither of us trusted him to be honest, so I reached out to some people in the group who had just left. I won’t go into detail, as this isn’t for me to share, but suffice it to say that the DM and his friends were being disrespectful and refusing to take accountability. Sounds very familiar. Obviously, he had lied to Alex about the situation as well.

At this point, I also decided to message the last member of our group (I’ll call him Kent), to inform him of the whole situation. He was pissed about what had happened, and was more than ready to kick the DM out and just find a new one, which we all agreed to. 

So yeah, that’s the situation. I told my sister about it as well and she was just about ready to kill the guy. So the moral is: If you use D&D Beyond, look out for Arbiter_Devour. Do not play with him. He’s a horrible person who has managed to lose all of his campaigns within two weeks, and if you’re a woman he is a threat to you. He lives in the CST zone in the US, but the group I’m in us UK based.

To close out, just a quick safety reminder: Be careful who you talk to online. Trust your instincts; if they tell you something is off, run. If you get a message like I did from anyone in your group, put your foot down, make it public. Leave if you don’t feel safe. Don’t give them your real name if you can help it (I gave the people in my group a nickname that sounds nothing like my real one). 

In the show, she once loved Robert. Tried to love him loyally but his hang up on Lyanna made her bitter and quit trying. In the show Cersei talks about losing a child conceived between her and Robert regretfully more than once. She didn’t kill it, it just died. In the show Cersei’s biggest characteristic is her love for her children. They are everything to her. This only gives us that much more sympathy for her when they all die. The trope of the angry, protective Momma Bear. In the books, Cersei and Jaime have sex next to Joffreys corpse, but it is not unconsensual. Cersei is pretty much begging for Jaime and enjoying him. In the show, they changed it to a much more obvious rape scene. This blackens Jaimes character and lightens Cersei’s. Further painting her into a sympathetic character.

You could say D&D have done a lot of changes to the female characters. Probably to make them more sympathetic, more full, to even out the plot time spent between the genders. Really most likely to give the female actors more to do. Of course, sometimes it feels like Sansa is their personal favorite punching bag. Giving Sansa’s fArya/Jeyne storyline is a lot like what they’ve done with Cersei. They wanted Sansa to be more sympathetic and even less gray. Put her through unspeakable horrors so she has a reason to be the way she is. D&D have tried really hard to make the female characters more sympathetic.

Honestly, if you think about what the script looked like, with just the dialogue, what do you think it resembled?

Jon kisses Sansa's forehead, lingering for a moment before turning away.

Sansa watches him leave before suddenly speaking.

Sansa: Jon!

Jon turns back around.

Sansa pauses, then finally says

Sansa: A raven came. A white Raven. Winter is here.

Jon smiles.

Jon: Father always promised, didnt he?

What does that sound like to you? Yes. Thats right. The Cannot Spit it Out Trope. One of the most common romantic tropes, where one of the romantic interests calls out to the other in sudden determination, seemingly in a moment to finally admit "I love you!", only to chicken out at the last moment and pretend they meant to say something else.

HBO released the script for Episode 9, Battle of the Bastards, in their Emmy bid. I wish I could get my hands on Episode 10s script, to see how this scene was actually written down, but alas, I can not. All of this is just conjecture.

I would love to assume, that on paper, this scene and trope probably would be more obvious. And I also have a ridiculous feeling (no proof besides Kits acting) that Kit was told in Season 6 that Jon is starting to harbor secret, conflicted feelings for his half-sister, but that Sophie was kept out of the loop.

I mean, just look at that anguished face. Sad about something, Jon?

So, imagine for a moment, if Sophie had known that there was a romantic subplot planned, would she had done that scene and dialogue differently? Used a different inflection? Would it have been more obvious? Would it have been over the top? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knows.

I also noticed that Jon's reaction after she finally says "winter is here", is spliced together from two different takes. Let me dream and imagine they had to cut out a little bit of the "disappointment" out of his face. 😂

BONUS: more "good heart" staring.

LOOK AT HIS EYELINE.