duriens

[duriens]

Dude Ghilan’nain is the goofiest villain ever, it’s kinda hilarious.

Like fantastic visual design - at Weisshaupt she looks genuinely spooky and creepy and it’s very effective, but then she does some of the most Looney Tunes-esque emotional reactions I have ever seen. Honestly it’s camp gold, but it’s such a shame because she could have been so intimidating and disturbing.

Doesn’t help that she talks like a Power Rangers villain.

[duriens]

after veilguard, the briala and solas parallels are making me rattle the bars of my cage

briala being in the service of celene, a ruler who used her as a weapon to further her power, like solas with mythal

briala primarily using her wits and sneakiness to overcome the power imbalance with her enemies

gaspard being genuinely scared of her because of her wits, calling her dangerous, the way evanuris are scared of solas

briala discovering that her blind loyalty to her empress is a weakness and recommits herself to the elves above all else, as solas did with his rebellion against mythal and evanuris

felassan accompanying briala as he did solas and giving advice. felassan encouraging her to think more like fen’harel !!

briala listening to him and gaining control of the eluvian network through trickery and turning two sides of the war against each other just like solas with the crossroads

felassan refusing to give briala’s eluvian network back to solas because her cause is so similar that he, an ancient elf, sympathizes !!

felassan saying “she reminds me of you” before solas kills him!!!

solas later gaining respect for briala after getting the eluvians back from her control!!!!

WOULD SHE HAVE BEEN AN AGENT OF FEN’HAREL?? WOULD SOLAS HAVE MADE HER HIS SECOND IN COMMAND IN PLACE OF FELASSAN, REALIZING HE WAS RIGHT !? they would’ve been unstoppable GOD I NEED IT

[duriens]

... - But in a good way? ... - Promise? ... - Just don't leave ...

[duriens]

another antivan crow that sneaked into my heart

[duriens]

"why aren't rook and the companions getting blighted when they're fighting all these darkspawn??" same reason leliana, zevran, morrigan, sten, wynne, and oghren weren't getting blighted ????

[duriens]

Dellamorte The Lesser

[duriens]

[duriens]

love a man dripping in blood

[duriens]

I was watching Secret Level and i was shocked to see THE tamsyn Muir wrote an episode of it??? the spelunky one?????

wild

[duriens]

something i don't think gets talked about NEARLY ENOUGH regarding Dragon Age: Veilguard: If you pick certain options and let enough banters play out, MULTIPLE companions will for all intents and purpose signal their plan to change factions post-game.

Taash can become an honorary Antivan Crow and seems to be legit into the idea by game's end (also Harding like the cape). Like, if they were a returning companion in DA5 I could EASILY see them having joined up (or at least become associated).

Bellara can flat out ask Neve to join the Shadow Dragons. (edit: OR apparently can ask to join the Mourn Watch?!?!)

Davrin can signal he's planning to spend a LOT of time with the Veil Jumpers and the griffons once this is all over (and a big part of his banter sequence with Bellara AND his tertiary content with Rook involve his realizing that the Veil Jumpers' aims are different than the Dalish he grew up with).

Like, that's FANTASTIC. No one is ever permanently any one thing, and I love the idea of some of the companions realizing "hey, actually, this works better" and they've built those connections and networks and so hey, Antivan Crow Taash? Sure, Teia will make them a cape. Shadow Dragon Bellara? Hey, they took the ex-templar Rana, they'll easily take her. Etc.

[duriens]

Fave character of each class from every game, go:

Warrior

Rogue

Mage

[duriens]

anders the man that you are

[duriens]

i think the real reason Lucanis has a coffee addiction is so the animators had an excuse to show just how good they are at making characters hold cups now.

like look at that. its not floating 6 inches away from his palms. it goes up and down with his hands. he's even got one hand on the handle itself! we've come so far since the hilarious joining chalice animation in Origins and Solas's cup of misery tea that floats 4 seconds behind his arm movements

[duriens]

It wasn’t going well, yes, Anders?

[duriens]

'the end of dragon age' here, 'the end of dragon age' there... no bitch dragon age is the cockroach you can't kill that lives in the walls of your house for fucking forever. watch her come back again in 9-15 years and it's lather rinse and repeat

[duriens]

One day this fandom will be ready to discuss how TLT is a commentary on gender and patriarchal violence. And not just "look at the tower princes and harrow and pyrrha and many more, tazmuir has fun with gender!" (although i love these takes), but also "the actions that set this story in motion are the culmination of patriarchal violence."

John kills the earth and feminizes it to control it. Under the patriarchy, control and domination are feminization. John killing the earth and stuffing its soul in the body of a human woman is the ultimate act of control and possession. It is not a coincidence that John imprisons the earth (the only resurrection beast John is able to imprison) in the body of a woman.

The body of a hyper-feminized, westernized human woman. That is the prison the holds the soul of a planet. That is the locked tomb. For tamsyn, thatis the ultimate prison. That's her commentary on the patriarchy. That a hyper-feminized, westernized, built-by-a-man, barbie doll body, is a fucking prison.

I also have more thoughts on John and his role in perpetuating patriarchal violence and being a narcissist but i need to stave off the tlt brainrot until i finish finals lol.

[duriens]

I think there is no better illustration of the more intimate, internal angle veilguard chooses to approach its characters and themes with than the fact that like... listen in this game we get to follow so much pain back to its source, and we find it really does permeate everything in thedas today on a level that evokes a kind of cosmic horror. the bones of the earth itself are broken open and drenched in trauma; the world is mired in suffering down to the core and the marrow. as above, so below. as outside, so inside. on the big scale, and the small. all of creation is a throat gone to bloody shreds from screaming in agony, when you allow yourself to listen. (maybe that's why we usually don't, or can't, bring ourselves to listen.)

...and yet the thing that makes me personally so desperately gnaw-my-own-arm-off sad that it feels like I could die from it is that in a run where you save minrathous, lucanis never gets out from the ossuary in his mind. what's worse, no one even knows he's in there. he's still in there. and there is no rescue on the way, because he's locked down so deep inside himself this time that there's no way for anyone to even understand there's a need for it. would he be able to welcome one, if someone did realize it and tried to reach him? You know him -- you can open the door, but he won't walk through. He won't move. There's nowhere to go. the way he says 'it doesn't matter what I want' with such utter, leaden, final resignation in the wrecked treviso cutscene is going to haunt me forever. it makes perfect sense to me you can't romance him after that, I'm not sure he's ever really here completely in that version of events, at least within the timeline the game takes place. he's just standing in the shitty awful ossuary torture room all alone, and no one's coming to find him.

and what is that, next to the millennia of suffering screaming through all of history and creation? well. nothing, of course, not really. a single plucked string in an endless deafening symphony of despair. one singular trapped and broken soul among the untold millions that have gone before and the untold more that will surely come after, that are being made as we speak in the conflicts and tragedies unfolding through the game. but more importantly it's also everything. to me. and to the game too. the game says this also matters. just as much as anything else, this pain matters and deserves to be loved and comforted. even in the face of all the suffering in the world, beneath the systems perpetuating all the banalities of evil, for good or for ill sometimes, we matter to each other. and what would be the point of anything, if we didn't? that's where hope lives. as long as you're alive, the right key might still arrive to gently open the locks of your mind, the right hand might reach out one day and you will bring yourself to take it. you don't know what tomorrow's going to be. if in the meantime the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other -- isn't that enough? isn't that everything? why does this one guy saved mean the world saved to me, a little bit? hello. hello. hello. there's stuff going on in the deep here.

when I say that the deep thematic spine of this game is so good and solid that the occasional clumsiness and false tones of the writing on top of it simply cannot hurt me... I think this is part of what I mean. works for every single one of the characters of course! lucanis' is the predicament that speaks to me most viscerally. for. uh. personal reasons there simply is no time to get into at this juncture lol. but just as much the idea that davrin can die before he could see the world freed from the blight and the need for wardens, or that harding can get cut down right at the beginning of a great revelation that could change everything and heal things no one had even dreamed could be healed. all of them are like this. each and every one of us has a world and so many stories inside that matter, and it's not to dismiss the larger systemic forces and evils that create so much of the suffering in the world to focus in on that for one installment of the series -- only to view it from a different angle that brings other things to light than what we're looking for normally in this series. it's worth looking at what's actually here.

(have you ever heard the poem 'good light' by andrea gibson? it's very good. you should check it out if you haven't, you can find it on youtube. it has these lines:

Come make it count Our finding each other like we found God Come root for the salt Come believing we can heal it all, even everything Even everything that has ever been done I know how much the pain of this world weighs But I can still tip the scales in light's direction Whenever I have your name on my tongue

and yeah. I think that's basically what I'm trying to say here.)