customrook

[customrook]

🌟 My babies - Inquisitor and Rook (brother and sister, one of the troublemakers of Thedas)

[customrook]

I’m going to be honest I do respect publicly saying your horrible horrible headcanons about a beloved/controversial character you wrote for a company that fired you. Every time an ex DA dev crashes out about a character they wrote I consider it a workers rights issue

[customrook]

“70-80 hours is short for Dragon Age game” incorrect in fact a statistical error. An average Dragon Age game has a runtime of around 80 hours with most quests touched upon. Inquisition, which is bloated with arguably irrelevant side quests and rounds up to hundreds hours of gameplay, is an outlier and should not be counted.

[customrook]

HummingbirdPerching.png

[customrook]

To see Tranquility compared to autism is insulting to me. It's a common take that has popped up over the years, and as someone who is autistic and has many people in my life who I hold dear that have varying levels of personal autonomy and severity in autism, it is infuriating.

The Tranquil are the example of what a corrupt system will do in order to maintain order and uphold oppression. Compare them to those wronged in prison systems, who have no voice, who are reduced to less-than human and used as labor, if you must have an allegory. Yes, some Tranquil will choose it themselves, but even that is a product of the system they are raised in, to see themselves as a danger to be sedated.

To think that my cousin, who cannot speak or express his feelings in an easily understandable way, is being compared to a fantasy group of victims who are punished as an example to others is upsetting. Is autism some divine punishment? Are we examples to others: "this is what happens when you step out of line, this is what happens when you can't keep up with your peers level of learning and are seen as threat by lack of natural ability"? Of course not.

And the emotional aspect: the Tranquil have no capacity to feel. They can't love, they can't grieve, they can't feel joy or satisfaction or curiosity. They have experienced the Perfect emotional lobotomy that can only exist in fantasy (real-life lobotomy is truly horrific and does not result in whatever the hell Tranquility does).

My cousin has feelings. He can get excited, he can become overwhelmed, he can love!! I may not understand empathy very well or feel very strongly most of the time, but I can still experience joy and sorrow and love and depression and fulfillment and I have high and low days. Real disabled people have feelings, the Tranquil do not. Real-life people will always feel, and there is no way to cut that out of someone.

You can still use your disability as a way to inform how you write the Tranquil. I rely heavily on my experiences with dissociation and depersonalization to write Tranquil characters. But Tranquility is not an allegory for those things. It is a statement on corrupt systems that use the threat of taking away what its victims hold dear to keep them in line at best, and a practice in "what would a player think is a horrible fate to suffer" at worst.

[customrook]

i love the dragon age fandom bc someone will just make shit up and everyone will just run with it and no one fact checks anything and then half of fandom discussions are built on shit that is just patently untrue and somehow you're the asshole for asking for a source

[customrook]

plagued by visions of rook anders today. something so beautiful about him crawling back to varric, trying to convince him that he can trust him to unite in common cause against solas. no tricks this time. no more lies. i know it’s been too many years to count but can we go back to when you loved me please.

[customrook]

actually (thinking) you know my biggest problem with the connor/isolde/circle option in redcliffe is that like. the mages just felt like too much of a clear cut "good guy" choice. which i always felt was a little out of place in a game where one of the biggest central themes is how being a leader is all about making difficult decisions and every choice you make involves a sacrifice. also its just kind of insane to me that in the very same questline where if you leave too early at the beginning the entire fucking village gets butchered because YOU DECIDED TO FUCK OFF ON A FIELD TRIP IN THE MIDDLE OF A ZOMBIE ATTACK, you're explicitly told time is of the essence and the situation with connor will only ever get worse if left unaddressed but you can just be like ok but what if i take a quick detour all the way across that damn ass lake and back. and then nothing happens. man teagan and jowan even all but beg you not to waste time like that because they dont know if they can keep the situation stable until then and NOTHING HAPPENSSSS

but you know what if something actually did happen. like if you decided to take that third option instead of making the hard call right then and there, then the situation Did get worse and when you came back to redcliffe the castle was massacred. isolde and connor survived but the guards, whats left of the servants, teagan, maybe even jowan got picked off one by one by connor's demon while you were gone. i think it works as both a relatively still altruistic option that saves the kid and doesnt sacrifice your personal ethics while also giving some consequences to your actions. its also just much more in line with how the game keeps beating you over the head with the "You Are Loghain. the only thing you can decide is how much of a bastard youre gonna be" energy of origins

[customrook]

imagine being loved by me.

talk - hozier

[customrook]

Do you think anything you did mattered, Hawke?

[customrook]

Hawke family fleeing the Blight

I have some thoughts on my Hawke having to deal with another Blight and keeping her family safe again. But that's too long for this post, so I'm just gonna add it to my list of Dragon Age fics that I still need to finish...

[customrook]

i have Thoughts on why mr. zevran "never takes another lover" arainai isn't in veilguard.

[customrook]

- This earring suits you.

- Is that so? Better keep your eyes on it then.

by @azarya-s

[customrook]

Anders/Merrill propaganda

[customrook]

neve suggesting recruiting lucanis is so wild. there’s an audacity to it. especially if you’re not playing a de riva so there’s no prior connection to the crows. she said, “listen to me. we’re fighting gods. and to fight gods we need this one guy who used to kill venatori who hasn’t been heard of for a year and i never found out who he is and i really really want to know before i die. but we should hire him. for the magekilling reasons. in fact we MUST hire him. trust me.” she rlly said you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take

[customrook]

feels like some of you don't get that ea didn't decide to do this to bioware after or because veilguard failed. it failed because they had already decided, and had been making decisions accordingly for years.

they were set up to fail. barring divine intervention, there was no way veilguard was going to satisfy ea's demands. ea just needed the dev cycle to finish (and check that there was in fact no divine intervention) before tearing it down.

be mad, but understand the chain of events isn't "veilguard bad -> ea nukes bioware". it's the other way around.

[customrook]

sucks so bad when a character you love is heavily infantilized. that is a grown man he knows what a cigarette is. intimately