bastionkeeper

[bastionkeeper]

Dragon Age: Inquisition | Skyhold

random scenery ~ part one (insp. 💞)

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a gift !!

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something i genuinely love about making kink art for people is there's an honesty about them. like someone contacting me to say "can you draw my fursona being pampered and fattened by toriel from undertale" and i say "yeah gimmie like a week to get a wip ready." like its so mundane. but think for a moment that person is confiding with me a deep fantasy they have. something they might not tell a lot of other people about. definitely not family or coworkers or non-furry friends. but they're coming to me, fully exposed. their soul laid bare. naked. about something they feel deep within. and for me it is tuesday. i dunno i feel like i live in a world where a lot of creative works have to focus more and more on keeping up appearances. Marketing themselves, being advertiser friendly, obeying whatever trend or algorithm demands it. A lot of it feels disconnected from people. So having someone come to me personally and request: "draw the avatar of myself being loved exactly the way i want to be loved" or "draw this person who represents my ideal partner" or "draw me loving my body" or hell even "draw me being a nasty bitch" it's honest. it's brave. it's intimate and trusting. i think its beautiful. Hell yeah i'll draw it. Your dream deserves to be given life and i really hope i succeed.

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waking up feeling like i slept “weird” and a quick inspection reveals a freshly grown boar tusks and a thirs for blood

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the no.1 princess in the world 🍰🍮♥︎₊˚⊹｡୨୧˚⋆

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𝙵𝚎𝚋𝚛𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝟷, 𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟸 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

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Diana Wynne Jones wins big once again for understanding that the funniest way to write an isekai/portal fantasy is from the point of view of the people living in the fantasy world who look at the character who got isekai’d from our world and are like ‘WHAT is that guy’s deal???’

Howl/Howell stumbling back into his moving castle drunk after a night with his rugby bros is like the second funniest scene in that book, closely followed by poor Sophie getting reverse isekai’d and taking a day trip to Wales and suffering the terrible ordeal of a ride in a car.

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[remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health] YOU should kill yourself

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I still think this is a acceptable way to do it

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coping with the horrors by making an evil oc everyone say hi to Oakley 🐑

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Learning languages is SO FUN right up until you need to learn conjugation and then suddenly it turns sour real fucking fast

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da2 isn't the best dragon age game *because* it's openly a tragedy, but being a tragedy forces a level of narrative coherence that the other games in the series don't have, and *that's* what makes it a better game.

okay, so. dragon age 2 runs on nested foreshadowing and a limited set of themes that almost every character and plot beat fall into: love is not enough, wealth is not enough, power is not enough, good intent is not enough. the problems you run into are structural, rather than individual, and your ability to resolve them as one person is strictly limited. the arishok is a central figure for this, because he prefigures every other tragedy and makes the game's thesis statement as clear as possible. he doesn't want to be in kirkwall, but he is compelled to remain until he gets back what was stolen. he doesn't want to lead a coup attempt, but he is compelled by qunari codes of justice to act. he does not want to die and fail his duty, but but he is compelled to by the other two impossible demands. every tragedy in kirkwall is the result of too many people with wildly different definitions of justice crammed into one place specifically designed to maximize human misery and suffering, and so you get a wonderfully nested narrative onion where each quest reinforces that idea, where there are no good options, just positions you can take — even the affinity system plays into that, where constantly gassing up your friends or constantly pushing them to change are equally correct ways to go, but ones that won't ultimately make a huge difference in their lives or characters, because no matter how much they like you, they're not under your control.

this coherence is even justified by the framing device. of *course* the moral of the game is "insisting on a dogmatic, narrow idea of justice destroys individuals and societies," it's a yarn being spun by varric the con artist to a chantry cop!

neither origins or inquisition play with that sort of narrative complexity. origins is a jaundiced hero's quest, certainly, but it's still basically a hero's quest; inquisition has a number of characters who question what you're doing and why, but the multitude of voices pulls the game in too many potential directions. DA2 was so constrained in its production that it pulled on decidedly ancient theatrical traditions, and it worked so, so well

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totally not suspicious at all

from febraury 4th, 2023

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cc! bad, on tr!bad's immortality and his relationship to tr!foolish:

"imagine you're in a forest and individual trees fall down every day. the forest changes, the individual tree changes, but you're still there. if some day, you're like, oh, i have to cut down a tree to build something, are you going to bat an eye? you will feel almost nothing. but imagine there's someone in that forest with you. would you feel the same way cutting them down? no. that's the mindset."

and on his relationship with mortals:

"imagine there's a tree somehow different from the others. maybe it's one you planted. maybe it's an orange tree that happens to be close to you, and when you lose it, you don't know the next time you'll see another."