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why did he do this, was he just aura farming?

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I like them a lot.

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Shrios sketch commission for @/evansketchbook on Twitter 💚💚

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If Wyll Ravengard has a million fans I am one of them. If Wyll has fifty fans I am one of them. If Wyll has one fan, I am dead and it's Theo Solomon left holding down the fort.

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Sweet dreams and elven lullabies

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everyone delete your posts calling taash cringe right now their dialogue is what's keeping this game bearable for me

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i s2g i thought lucanis and rook were gonna fuck nasty after i went into his brain and fixed his trauma (sarcasm) because they kept looking at each other afterward but i guess not, bioware just doesn't understand my vision

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"The Dalish gifted an Eluvian to the Grey Wardens so we can get in Weisshaupt" is just so emblematic of my problems with the game, because you can tell--it feels to me--that the thought process was "We need to have an Eluvian in Weisshaupt, Eluvians are an Elven(TM) thing, the Dalish are the Elven(TM) faction, so let's just say they were the ones who gave one to the Grey Wardens".

The Dalish have been established over all three games as a people who have spent the last thousands of years desperately scrounging for whatever scraps of their culture they can find, a struggle that has cost them dearly as typified by Merrill's plight trying to restore a single Eluvian which had previously Blighted two of her clan mates (an Eluvian that she can't open or use, and doesn't actually know what it's for by the end of her quest line). Multiple Dalish in Inquisition are killed trying to regain their history ("The Knight's Tomb") or trying to prove themselves by regaining even a talisman related to their culture ("Someone to Lose"). They are an insular and guarded people because outsider interactions frequently invoke a heavy toll in Dalish lives, up to and including entire clans. And yet, we are supposed to believe in a single throwaway piece of dialogue that in the 10 years between Inquisition and Veilguard, the Dalish have (offscreen) gained enough access to Eluvians as a piece of technology that they can afford to just "gift" one to the Grey Wardens without explanation.

There are constant revelations of this kind where pre-established parts of the lore are just thrown out the window. Things that had great emotional weight or impact in previous installments of the series are used for cheap thrills or plot-hole fills without explanation, justification, or even gravitas from the game. You have a moment in one of Emmrich's quests where you stumble through a portal directly into the Fade that Hezenkoss opened in Blackthorne manor, and you're tasked with closing it again. All of this is done entirely without the Anchor or even an implied blood sacrificial ritual, and it is never commented as anything particularly groundbreaking (when going into the Fade physically through tearing a hole in it was a Big Fucking Deal in Inquisition). You encounter a Compassion spirit in a side quest investigating the deaths of citizens in Tevinter who were murdered by a demon of Despair, and it is strong enough to not only retain itself through sensing the (unanswered!) suffering that these people experienced, but it also resolves to protect others to keep them from the same fate (when Cole was so traumatized by a single person's death that he completely reshaped his entire being around them). So on and so forth. Don't even get me started on Bellara's comment that the ancient elves "made most of their buildings in the Fade".

I'm not asking for someone to hold my hand and spoonfeed me information. I frankly don't care if an obscure codex entry, a reddit AMA question, bluesky tweet, or headcanon exists somewhere to patch in or bandaid over all of the jarring details like this, because it doesn't change the fact that the game itself should be doing this. The game itself should be taking the time to explain this in a way that is not missable, the game itself should be taking these things seriously, it should recognize when it is doing contradictory things and rush to justify itself accordingly, because these are things the emotional beats of previous stories hinged on. Like, when the game has Taash say a line like "The Qun isn't a prison, you can leave if you want", it's the responsibility of the writers to show that this is Taash being misinformed, not because I'm too stupid to headcanon that this is the case, but because this line is a symptom of how the entire game's writing seems to have forgotten about the Ben-Hassrath as a thing that exists in this setting.

Previous Dragon Age games are no stranger to "We quietly removed Solas' network of agents and spies offscreen"-style writing, but it usually didn't feel like a constant deluge periodically uprooting my emotional investment and immersion. There's only so much I can take in good faith before I realize that this game was just not written with any care towards ensuring that the worldbuilding made sense and felt right to the player, leading to awkward backpedaling in reddit threads like "no the Crows haven't changed as an organization, these are just the unique Good Crows and we forgot to mention it".

I just can't look past this shit anymore.

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super obvious lucanis/rook song btw

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*boop*

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op turned off reblogs for understandable reasons but i viscerally needed to repost this because it summarizes everything ive been saying so concisely

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Endless List of Favorite Characters: Knight-Commander Meredith (Dragon Age II)

“What I have done is protect the people of this city, time and again. What I have done is protect you mages from your curse and your own stupidity. And I will not stop doing it. I will not lower our guard, I dare not!”

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wow da:tv really said "what if so many of these important facets of the previously established canon didn't matter at all"

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the lore inconsistencies with the blight in this game are actually exhausting. 'the rules have changed the blight has changed' okay but make it make sense within the changes please like

the blight is the titans dreams gone mad with rage okay. red lyrium is lyrium infected with the blight. except that section of red lyrium in harding's quest which is... angry... but somehow not infected with the blight... even though we know what red lyrium is from inquisition

the calling eventually kills you but there's a bunch of super blighted wardens who've been alive for ages underground. isseya has been alive since the 4th blight. these wardens aren't even proper darkspawn they're just Really Corrupted

there's that ominous 'theres something in the blight' quest you do in the wetlands that just turns out to be a giant blight growth. darkspawn appear from blight pools now. also apparently in the wetlands there's just a bunch of flowers happily thriving beneath the blight that are fine once the blight is removed. did we forget the western approach. that the land is barren after it's infected with the blight.

it's super easy to become infected with the blight, except if you're rook and co apparently because that blighted status sure doesn't really have any consequences. spEAKING OF which neve/bellara become super duper infected by the blight to the point they can control it and yet afterwards... they're fine?? they're fine!! there's no cure for the blight except apparently you can just shake it off. the hero of fereldan has been searching for a cure for decades but could've just shrugged it off apparently!

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Not enough fantasy and scifi says "you are enough, just as you are" to physically disabled people. We always gotta have some kinda magic hi tech enhancements instead of like... a regular wheelchair or sight cane or whatever. Let us just Be, you know? Quit trying to make us "better" and say "disabled people can have adventures too" instead.