faneposting-my-beloved

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Reposting this art of Exsan done by DragonsAria, because I think about it a lot... Vermil's long lost brother, now in the claws of undeath

[faneposting-my-beloved]

i wanna hear more about the rampent orientalism and paper thin story please! (dos2 is my babygirl and beloved but i also have pages of corrections that i want for the story bc i'm just *confusion*)

Aww man i have thoughts on this that have been broiling for years. pandora's box etc etc.

the very short version is this. 1) re: orientalism, i take issue with the design cues attached to the lizards AND with the game's treatment of ifan. 2) re: the paper-thin story, i've turned this over in my mind and i don't think the issue is that no thought has been put into the plot; i think the game is just kind of bad at conveying that iceberg of lore to the player.

that's the tl;dr. as for the full version:

let's take these points in the same order again.

1) the ancient empire/the lizards. Here is a snippet from the dos2 artbook:

"oriental/arabian" kind of says it all: every visual we get of the ancient empire draws on this unspecific, fetishized mishmash of what the western imagination categorizes as eastern imagery. ie: sadha who is veiled and bejeweled; the fringed sedans and carriages of her entourage; the presence of elephants in drapes and gold. sadha's encampment inside the dreamscape is this dialed up to eleven: golden desert sands, rich drapes and carpeting, an ornate tent, carry on, carry on. the "forbidden city", the seat of the red prince, takes its name and concept from imperial china. elephants from india. curved weapons from moorish north africa. sedans from persia. the veil has a long and complex history: here it is used, with no further thought, to imply sex and mystery.

here's another bit from the artbook, a piece of alternate concept art for the lizards

here "Aboriginal" is treated the same way as "oriental", to wit: "this is the word we're using to describe all this completely unresearched visual spaghetti we're throwing at the lizards".

the "curved weapons" and "Arabian/oriental designs" of the ancient empire are directly contrasted with the "more recognizable" visual style of the humans.

that leaves us with an ancient empire whose design consists of a load of half-remembered "eastern" imagery, thrown together with no rhyme or reason except to evoke strangeness and otherness. i couldn't give you a better definition for "orientalism" if I tried.

there's more to be said here, ie about the textual orientalism (the ancient empire is isolationist and exceptionally depraved; they keep slaves; the house of war is renowned for its ruthlessness. The empire itself threatens the rest of rivellon by its existence. tropes on tropes on tropes about the terror of the alien east.) but I'll leave it at that for now

2) ifan. poor ifan ben-mezd.

the name "ben-mezd" itself is taken directly from the hebrew naming convention, "ben-x" meaning "son of x". (compare with the arabic "ibn".) there's also an in-game letter from one "acquillah bat-mezd", leaving no doubt about where the writers looked for inspiration ("bat", to my limited knowledge, is the female equivalent in hebrew of "ben", so: "ifan, son of Mezd" and "acquillah, daughter of Mezd").

remember how my last point was all about the writers mashing various middle eastern, south and east asian iconography together?

ifan's soul wolf is named afrit. an afrit is a mythological figure dating back to pre-islamic arabia. so is it hebrew or arabic we're supposed to look to for ifan?

reading up on Mezd itself is no help either. when it's described at all, it's in the same vague terms as the eastern empire. it's fucking... it's desert. it's sand. And it's in the east. It's the desert of the east. we're to infer it's inhabited mostly by humans—and maybe that it borders on the ancient empire?

here, from the graphic novel:

the red prince is exiled and taken just across the border to this generic eastern bazaar populated by humans, where he proceeds to harass this little aladdin-looking guy. this is my best guess for Mezd, although the city is not named in the comic.

and tying all this overwhelming use of mixed-up "oriental" imagery back to ifan, here's another bit from the artbook.

his "exotic origins". if it was possible to be vaguer than "oriental/arabic designs", then congratulations, they've done it!

here's my point. through the haze of smushed-together imagery and intentionally vague language, will you agree with me that ifan ben-mezd is coded as a brown arab man? (or, conservatively, a brown man of color?)

if so, then does it leave a sour taste in your mouth to see him compared to an animal (usually a wolf; a predator) almost constantly during his companion dialogue and romance scenes? does it feel a little off that one of his quest updates (after he learns the truth about his deathfog mission) describes him as a "suicide bomber"?

3) the thin plot. I don't have as much to say on this point, because i haven't played the other divinity games. maybe, all of them taken together, it's an intricate and masterful web without so much as a dropped stitch (tho I doubt it).

but as I see it:

the intro to the graphic novel mentions that the writers have gotten incredibly intimate with their world and characters during the process of building the game, to the point that they have countless "stories that will never be told".

that's all well and good, but i'm not convinced they knew how to lay all that out for the reader/player. for example, the comic hints at ifan's complex relationships with roost anlon, lucian and alexandar. but in-game when he interacts with these characters, we see next to none of that context, only lines that imply a shared history and leave the player foaming at the mouth for a scrap, just a scrap of lore please. the same goes for the other companions—except maybe the red prince, whose section in the graphic novel was word for word a rehash of his in-game dialogue and who may just be as shallow as he appears, lol.

but sebille, for instance: the shadow prince's greater network of handlers. the names and identities of sebille's kills. all things the comic hints at, and which the devs seem to know in detail, but they're so reluctant to share their insight with the player. ;_;

it also bothers me that there's no codified map of all the locations (at least in dos2, but maybe even across the series) and where they are relative to each other. once again, the devs know; we don't.

same thing for the calendar. we get sembten (ostensibly the equivalent to our september) and one other month (a january?), but nothing otherwise. we don't know how the timekeeping system works, by hours or seconds or minutes, how many months in a year, days in a week, etc etc.

those r my gripes. my bad for the messy post, i'm typing this up on my phone in a berlin hotel room lmao. thank you for asking <3

[faneposting-my-beloved]

I've only been doing stupid art recently sorry

[faneposting-my-beloved]

POV: You can touch your love for the first time. But it's only a memory. WIP of my Photostudy with my absolute Fav 🥵

[faneposting-my-beloved]

DOS2 conclusion: the game bugged and thought I had been romancing sebille the whole time and it ruined the whole thing for me,,,

It's a feature at this point, everyone I've talked with including myself got this. I think it might be tied to the chopped companion ascension endings? Like her flags are set up wrong. I knew a person who figured out a fix but I don't know if it was ever published unfortunately.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Fane has 3 sets of mental foramen (that I can see) on his jaw, Humans have 1 set, what does he need all those jaw nerves for??

Drinking Source probably

[faneposting-my-beloved]

a very specific headcanon : calendars in DOS:2

currently researching some things about calendars for my own worldbuilding, and I decided to do the same for the races of Rivellon. might do some pt.2 about weeks, days, or hours if inspired.

HUMANS : Diversity of human calendars faded away when humanity met another races. Most of them were solar, but a single calendar starts to emerge when kingdoms started to rise. Today, they adopted the lunisolar calendar, but some populations still resist to this : people from Mezd are still using a solar calendar to this day.

DWARVES : in the time when Duna walked among them, dwarven calendars were lunar. it was a way for them to not lose track of time when they were too much deep into the mountains. Afterwards, when dwarves encounter humans and their culture start to blend in, both cultures opted for a lunisolar calendar - this same calendar used in Lucian's times.

ELVES : no such things as calendars. as there is no past nor future in their conception of time, they don't record any of it. After the Deathfog event, city elves have adapted to the human calendar. Despite that, some elven scholar had created a new elven calendar, based on moon cycle, in order to recreate some kind of identity for the elven race.

LIZARDS : a solar calender. what to expect more from the children of the blazing Zorl-Stissa ? they're the unique case of having one, single, calendar, for a whole race. moreover, this calender is said to have been inspired by old draconic calendars. thus, lizards often claim that they record time the way dragons used to do.

WIZARDS : most of them are using calendars from other races, depending their upbringing. Yet, they also use a unique calendar, called the Amadian calendar. It's one of the oldest, last remaining lunar calendars, used to better observe magical events or to perform rituals. It's said that during certain moons, Source appears to be more present.

ORCS : i headcanon orcs as great seafarers, bear that in mind. thus, their knowledge of stars is one of the greatest among races of Rivellon, almost rivalling wizards' knowledge. Indeed, they use position of the stars to measure the passage of time. Most of their calendars are solar - the sun is a star, after all.

IMPS : you wish. even the smartest of wizards could not even fathom how imps record time. they have thousands of calendars for each plane of existence, one of those being senseless for non-imps. Once, a mischievous imp, willing to have a good laugh, scattered multiple different calendars throughout Rivellon, only to see scholars fighting each other over theories about time-recording among imps. None has even came close.

note : those ideas were inspired by the Lunar Gate Puzzle in The Nameless Isle quest - calendars are solar when it's a sun deity, and the other way around - and by some canon lore we can collect from the game - such as conjugation in elven language. Bear in mind that it's headcanon and definitively pointless.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Finished another one(?

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Fane color study because I miss my snarky skeleton boy

[faneposting-my-beloved]

First playthrough update: curious how the hell Fane had a wife and kid when he's such a loser (affectionate)

Maybe I'll find out eventually 👍 trying to not rush

I've studied the game inside and out and I still don't know lmao!!

[faneposting-my-beloved]

On another token, Poles say 'hen, hen' when describing something being far away but like, affectionately??

there's this word in Serbian 'vukojebina' which literally means 'the place where wolves go to fuck' but they use it to mean 'in the middle of nowhere'. it sure does the job well, but the visual stayed with me longer than I would have liked it to.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

I could never really get into bg3 but now I'm playing dos2 and I really like it :)))

Good luck on your journey, Godwoken!

[faneposting-my-beloved]

do you know if the endings are still broken?

As far as I'm aware yeah, but admittedly I haven't checked whether dos2 got any silent fixes in the meantime. I honestly doubt it.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

It's my yearly duty to remind you about the existence of Child of the Chaos and Prophecy novellas that you can find on this blog and Divinity wiki

Sometimes, I think about Lucian, and I think he once realized, with sheer horror, that he's not human anymore. Divinity nibbled on him, little by little, like gnawing insects, and he's now a husk of what he was, as a mortal. And he can't escape that fate anymore - he's doomed to feel indifferent to individual lives, always seeing the bigger scheme. Lucian is gone. He's only the Divine. And it's his tragedy, his personal tragedy - because there is no human god, and ascension is slowy eating away your humanity.

Maybe he watched Ifan ben-Mezd with envious wonder and told himself "I was that man once."

[faneposting-my-beloved]

I really REALLY want to finish this piece😩 i'll come back later..

[faneposting-my-beloved]

This is definitely my kink