amaryllis-sagitta

[amaryllis-sagitta]

everyone wake up, new gender just dropped

[amaryllis-sagitta]

“Who’s Mythal?” Lavellan asks Morrigan, as she traces the Mythal vallaslin on her forehead with her middle finger

[amaryllis-sagitta]

replaying dragon age!! let morrigan look like a backwoods bitch!! a sweater ! for my girl…

click for full res<3

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Thinking about the cold as thematically related to the Void, mainly through demons and the Devouring Storm in the DA lore:

how the Circle Tower feels cold to Owain, and how other characters make similar remarks as the party approaches Sloth

how Connor mentions it's cold in the Fade where the demon is keeping his spirit

unnatural cold mentioned when activating each of The Black Vials scattered across Ferelden -- phylacteries that bind cursed revenants

how far spread out glacial areas are in the map of Thedas, especially the one by Francesca Baerald -- isles east of Ferelden and the bay by the Sundered Sea, with the Arbor Wilds in the middle supposedly remaining evergreen (thanks to the magic of the Temple of Mythal?)

how after losing Haven, the Inquisitor's march for survival happens through a snow storm in blistering cold -- a moment that's also the allegorical darkness before the new dawn of finding Skyhold,

how Emprise du Lion, marked both by the presence of Imshael and a massive red lyrium farm, is also overtaken by relentless cold

glacial areas somewhere across Par Vollen -- which is supposed to lie in the tropical climate -- in Matt Rhodes' concept art

how the Mysterious Substance, related to the Devouring Storm, subsequently makes physical objects around it cold, aside from seemingly annihilating magical effects. Like there's an endothermic process going on.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Thoughts on the Devouring Storm

What led me to this idea was a simple question: why are the dwarves so afraid of falling into the sky? It was always present as sort of a joke in the games, but what if it isn’t? What if that fear is rooted in something real?

This then led me to thinking about how this relates to the Devouring Storm, but first, I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture. I believe the death of the Titans created a fundamental shift in the balance of the world—one that moved it from harmony into disharmony. The Titans may have served as powerful protectors, shielding the world from the Void itself.

I imagine three distinct domains:

The Earth – the realm of the Titans.

The Fade – the realm of Spirits.

The Void – the domain of the Executors, and the likely source of the Devouring Storm.

I also think the Devouring Storm could be exactly that: something that consumes magic itself. This ties back to the Void, a realm of what appears to be nothingness. 

If we break down the world into its core aspects, we see a pattern emerge. The Titans embody the physical, the solid foundations of the earth itself. Spirits occupy a more fluid, semi-permeable state, existing between the Fade and the physical world. By contrast, the Executors and by extension, the Devouring Storm, seem to be formless.

This makes sense with what limited information we have including the comment made by Karash, who described what the different types of clouds mean, as well as what appears to be a tornado in the secrete ending.

A gaseous or vapor-like state would explain how the Executors have managed to spy, observe, and influence events across Thedas for centuries without ever being truly seen. They can move freely, slip through cracks, and leave little trace behind, hence why so little is known about them.

Maybe the dwarves’ fear of the sky isn’t just superstition or a joke—it’s a memory. What if “falling into the sky” was once a very real danger? That tornado image we see at the end of Veilguard might not be a metaphor at all. Imagine being caught in that tornado-like force and lifted away, not by wind, but by something formless, intelligent, and ancient.

If the Executors truly exist in a gaseous state, then “falling into the sky” could have been a literal fate and one the dwarves learned to fear because it meant being taken by the “sky” itself.

It would also make sense why fire and by extension, the return of the dragon and the role of the Adaari would be so important in defeating them. How do you fight something that is formless? You can’t strike it with a sword or trap it in stone. But fire, in myth and reality, has always been the great purifier. It consumes air, disperses fog, and burns away the intangible.

If the Executors truly exist in a vaporous state, then fire may be one of the few forces capable of driving them back—or destroying them entirely.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Some philosophical rambling thoughts about the Fade

The problem with the Fade is that it seems to be a child of Platonic idealism, but a crucial part is subverted. By and large, Platonic idealism assumes that entities of the "clearest" (self-evident?), most unquestionable and most universal comprehensibility, such as mathematical laws or concepts that guide morality,

1) can be known a priori regardless of the vessel's individual cognitive capacities, culture, time period, personal experience etc., and a true, complete act of comprehension always has the same essential components,

2) they are impervious to any modification of defining characteristics through false belief or cognitive distortion, and impervious to the passage of time - in relation to these entities, comprehension is a passive state,

3) they are posited as ontologically opposite to the physical bodies - singular, indivisible, unchangeable, entirely homogenic-within-themselves; finally

4) depending on the period or school of thought, but mostly in Hermeticism, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, this dimension of pure thought is all there was originally, and the physical reality occurred as some kind of a disturbance, described by the analogy of descent or downfall, and it might or might not be linked to some metaphysical concept of evil.

In Thedas, the realm of pure spirit and idea is introduced as the "First Children" - first chronologically and in terms of the Maker's favor, at least until they start envying what isn't their rightful place in existence. As we learn more about ancient Arlathan, this assumed primacy of the spirit/ the mental comes with an asterisk that probably, at some point, in the pre-Veil reality, the "sheer force of will" could directly affect physical reality in a way that resembles the New Age concept of mental manifestation. The Fade contents are considered to be atemporal (coming from memories of all periods of history), it has its own wicked topography that isn't supposed to be translatable to the Waking world's physics.

The concept of the Fade mostly keeps premise (4) of Platonic idealism - that the spirit realm is, in some sense, the source of the physical, since The Maker in the Canticle of Threnodies only had themself and the Void to draw from when they created the world (therefore, even if we remove the personalized Maker, the beginning could only occur from the spirit and/or the Void).

Premise (3) is taken to the extreme when it comes to the Fade's ontological status: it's a different layer of the world with distinct metaphysical qualities, the Great Betrayal somehow regionalized it in a really weird way, and the idea of the Vir Dirthara and library spirits bears dangerous resemblance to the post-Blavatsky concept of Akashic Records - a purely mental plane where all the collective knowledge is recorded and preserved eternally.

HOWEVER, there is one important aspect of the ancient Platonic concept of Forms that Fade Spirits aren't compatible with: to Plato, there is only one perfectly homogenous Idea for each universal concept. Fade Spirits are consistently referred to as Plurals Of A Type, which is a can of worms in terms of universals theory which I don't want to open here (or ever, really xD).

Premise (1) is kept halfway, because you need Special Classified Access To The Fade, which isn't much elaborated on. The elves are privvy to it because they Used To Be Spirits, humans are privvy to it because That's What the Chant of Light Said, and dwarves kind of originally were privvy to it but in a roundabout way - Titans are opposed to the Skies in the myths but also they serve as a purely material stand-in for the Fade (?), they had dreams but In Their Own Way, at least in my understanding (I explored it a bit in Metaphysics of Thedas pt. 3). There are degrees to the mental Fade access, from an ancient elf/ Dreamer being able to shape the spirit realm consciously, through a mage being able to "draw mana from beyond the Veil", through a non-magical human, to a modern day dwarf (not even dream visions in sleep).

Premise (2) is turned on its head even in the pre-Veil reality - spirits, by definition, need a different kind of mental content, preferably one coming from a mortal mind, to emulate and reflect. They are impressionable through beliefs of mortals, you can actually kill a spirit by coercing it to emulate the logical opposite of their core universal idea. Before DATV, the process of demonization was thought to be irreversible, Solas's tortured friend could return only for a moment. But in DATV, everyone affirms Spite's Good(tm) nature as if that could affect them, a demon can be redeemed in a side quest, and some spirits show shifts in meaning based on semantic narrowing or synonymity. Universal ideas themselves are forgettable/ erasable, Elgar'nan could somehow wipe out entire concepts and murder spirits - not just through previously recognized epistemological means but through, like, brutal warfare?

So, somehow the DA worldbuilding managed to keep the veneer of some post-Platonic mythology but make it... relativist in a way that would make Plato froth at the mouth? Because with the premise (2) being completely broken, the Evanuris era spirit realm could have actually been a market of ideas, to put it mildly, where spirits were simply casualties of a power play, swayed to replicate whatever appealed to them most at the moment. Like, so much could be potentially done with spirits being used for disinformation. In that light, Solas's own perception of the spirits' role in the world as presented in DAI sounds... idealized, in a sense of refusing to present the darker implications in order to glorify the broader structure based on Each Thing Having Its Place And Purpose (and the implicit purpose of spirits is to reflect and preserve value, secondarily to be the Tangible Trace of Makerliness That Everyone Overlooks). And it's totally possible that he felt obliged to protect spirits from the Evanuris too (though Veilgard shows him as having no qualms about using disruptive spirits as a distraction).

Anyway, it's such a messssssss and I'll need to unfuck it somehow for my AU.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

okay tumblr’s exclusion from the twitter social media ban list is hilarious but genuinely we do not belong on there. if a real human person asks “where can i find you on social media” and your choice is a swift death or revealing your tumblr, most of us would simply expire. half of y’all change urls every week like you’re in witness protection. just imagine for one second attaching your wholeass government name to your latest two am clownposting and tell me that didn’t send a cold chill down your spine. the only place i ever want to see the words “connect with me on tumblr!” is on the ao3 profile of an author i’m actively stalking. anyone in the world can follow me except anyone i personally know. antisocial media.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

draws Cassandra as one of your shoujo princes

[amaryllis-sagitta]

A Dream of Teeth

gouache, 3.5"x5.5"

a little painting, for a little fic

She holds him trammelled with one small hand. Her other arm is insubstantial below the elbow, not quite gone here in the Fade but still not whole. She always was stronger than he assumed, and her trials and his manipulations have honed her to a killing edge. He was a fool to approach her. He cannot retreat.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Lost in thought

[amaryllis-sagitta]

i literally feel this could be a canon banter between them

[amaryllis-sagitta]

what do you mean you havent used mindfulness techniques to accept the state of the torture labyrinth as is yet. its like youre not even trying

[amaryllis-sagitta]

I never uploaded my favourite egg man (I crave him spiritually)

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Soooo I'm supposed to be doing marketing for our game in production

My new nemesis: "mobile first" design on TikTok & Insta that deprives me of MOST creator options on desktop

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Nobody has made me feel safer or more respected than the filthy perverted freaks I was warned about.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

Has anyone figured out what’s so viscerally wrong with this woman yet